It is not until the Renaissance that the cult of deception comes in, and mutton masquerades as lamb, while silly columns and pediments are pasted on where there is no need and brick is plastered over to magnify the apparent opulence of the owner. It is at this same time that a mean individualism appears, and each builder tries to outface his neighbor. The Grande Place in Brussels is a good example of this new selfishness, and for chaotic originality compares almost favourably with a city street of the nineteenth century. It is all very amusing, these rows of serrated slices, bedecked with mishandled “orders” and crested with miscellaneous gorgeousness on the lines of the sterns of the proud owner’s still prouder galleons, and the result is engagingly theatrical and fantastic, but it is a grave commentary on a new civilisation that has lost in culture just in proportion as it has increased in efficiency. It is dangerous to think too much about architecture--or any art for that matter. The thirteenth century was supreme in its achievement because it thought so much about religion and character and getting the really good things out of life that for reward it was actually inspired, and so probably thought as little about its art as it did about eugenics; being quite content to do the things it was impelled to do by an impulse for which it was not consciously responsible and which it made little effort to control. The Renaissance thought so much about art, as well as about its own thoughts (which didn’t matter anyway), that even in its best work there is an opulent self-consciousness that defeats its own ends and has issue at last in a self-conscious opulence that is the nadir of culture. These builders of Flanders and Brabant and Artois and Luxembourg and the Rhineland thought as little about art as their very different followers of the Middle Ages, and they certainly lacked the divine inspiration that made Reims superhuman, as St. Thomas Aquinas and Leonardo da Vinci and Shakespeare were superhuman, but the old instinct for beauty had not been burned and hammered out of them by coal and iron, or reversed into an unintelligible jargon (like the Lord’s Prayer said backward) by an insolent intellectualism and a mordant secularism; and so, even when they used pseudo-Renaissance forms in their cheerful and humorous fashion, they managed to produce work that has a certain quality that the best-educated architect of this century of efficient training cannot contrive to obtain in spite of all his labours.