of graft and greed and treachery here at home. But it is a spiritual
birth, and therefore it cannot perish, but will live to write itself
on space in terms of beauty such as the world has never known.




II

DURING THE WAR


The best thing that can be said about our immediate architectural
past is that it is past, for it has contributed little of value to an
architecture of democracy. During that neo-feudal period the architect
prospered, having his place at the baronial table; but now poor Tom's
a-cold on a war-swept heath, with food only for reflection. This
is but natural; the architect, in so far as he is an artist, is a
purveyor of beauty; and the abnormal conditions inevitable to a state
of war are devastating to so feminine and tender a thing, even though
war be the very soil from which new beauty springs. With Mars in
mid-heaven how afflicted is the horoscope of all artists! The skilled
hand of the musician is put to coarser uses; the eye that learned
its lessons from the sunset must learn the trick of making invisible
warships and great guns. Let the architect serve the war-god likewise,
in any capacity that offers, confident that this troubling of the
waters will bring about a new precipitation; that once the war is
over, men will turn from those "old, unhappy, far-off things" to
pastures beautiful and new.