However, St. Paul’s is neither Greek, Gothic, nor anything else very much--a staggering attempt on the part of Sir Christopher Wren to achieve something new which is to me not very successful. The dome is pleasing and the interior space is fairly impressive, but the general effect is botchy, and I think I said as much. Naturally this was solid ground for an argument and the battle raged to and fro,--through Greece, Rome, the Byzantine East and the Gothic realms of Europe and England. We finally came down to the skyscrapers of New York and Chicago and the railway terminals of various American cities, but I shall not go into that. What was more important was that it raised a question concerning the proletariate of England,--the common people from whom, or because of whom, all things are made to rise, and this was based on the final conclusion that all architecture is, or should be, an expression of national temperament, and this as a fact was partly questioned and partly denied, I think. It began by my asking whether the little low cottages we had been seeing that afternoon--the quaint windows, varying gables, pointless but delicious angles, and the battered, time-worn state of houses generally--was an expression of the English temperament. Mind you, I love what these things stand for. I love the simpleness of soul which somehow is conveyed by Burns and Wordsworth and Hardy, and I would have none of change if life could be ordered so sweetly--if it could really stay. Alas, I know it can not. Compared to the speed and skill which is required to manipulate the modern railway trains, the express companies, the hotels, the newspapers, all this is helpless, pathetic. Sir Scorp’s answer was yes, that they were an expression, but that, nevertheless, the English mass was a beast of muddy brain. It did not--could not--quite understand what was being done. Above it were superimposed intellectual classes, each smaller and more enthusiastic and aware as you reach the top. At least, it has been so, he said, but now democracy and the newspapers are beginning to break up this lovely solidarity of simplicity and ignorance into something that is not so nice. “People want to get on now,” he declared. “They want each to be greater than the other. They must have baths and telephones and railways and they want to undo this simplicity. The greatness of England has been due to the fact that the intellectual superior classes with higher artistic impulses and lovelier tendencies generally could direct the masses and like sheep they would follow. Hence all the lovely qualities of England; its ordered households, its beautiful cathedrals, its charming castles and estates, its good roads, its delicate homes, and order and precedences. The magnificent princes of the realm have been able to do so much for art and science because their great impulses need not be referred back to the mass--the ignorant, non-understanding mass--for sanction.”