What mockery, then, to persist in attempting the indestructible when dissolution or disintegration is the inevitable doom of the material! Time has demonstrated that the more ponderous the instrument of expression, the less easy of perpetuation the art. The obliterated manuscript can be forced to reappear, but no chemistry can reproduce the vanished temple. The greatest forces of the universe are precisely those which are subtlest and least substantial. Steam and electricity are well-nigh impalpable and invisible. It is the spirit, not the body, save as purged and spiritualized by decay, that exists for ever. Away, then, with the unattainable! Away with a miscalled _real!_ If it, too, is a cheat, may it not be counterfeited with impunity? Away with column of stone, with lacework of fretted marble, with blazonry in oak and walnut! Away with all stubborn, difficult truth, and welcome brick and mortar, lath and plaster, paint and whitewash, gilt and varnish. If the cheap will look as well or nearly as well as the dear, why not use it? It is no falser, only _sooner_ falser. When it wears out or burns up or tumbles down, try it again. Be done with the tower of Babel: its curse clings faster to architecture than to speech. And as for the gigantic, drop it! {199} It is always a disappointment--a disappointment in nature and art, in minster, mountain, stream--a disappointment in all things save the broad dome of the empyrean with its floor of emerald, its ceiling of unfathomed blue or studded bronze, its draperies of shifting, winged, ethereal cloudland. Yes, art, like the artist, must encounter death. But shall we embrace the mean because sooner or later we must relinquish the great? Shall we forsake the permanent for the transient because the enduring falls short of the everlasting? Shall we inaugurate a reign of sham because the real is not always the perpetual? "Il pessimo nemico del bene é l'amator del ottimo."