Page:Triangles of life, and other stories.djvu/130

118 perishable monument to his own paltriness and the littleness of all his works. And the monument is usually an obstruction to the air, the view, and the traffic—a square with a fountain would be far better there. There's a lot more sense in an ant-hill than in St. Paul's. When man builds a big thing like St. Paul's or St. Peter's, he builds so high that when he wants to put stone josses—I mean statues—on the walls and in the niches, and pictures up round inside, he has to make representations of giants—monsters—else they wouldn't be visible to people on the pavement or floor. And of what use is the result? You've got to study relative distance and heights—say, the size of a man as against the size of the building—in order to get some idea of the "vastness" of the work or structure, and when you have got it of what use is it to you? When a dome swells as big as the dome of St. Paul's it suggests a silly attempt to rival the dome of the sky—and there you are.

Mind I am not writing with the idea of pulling down everything that's up in theory without suggesting anything in its place. Have patience with me for a while. Neither am I going to use the worn-out argument that the millions spent on these buildings would feed and clothe thousands who are starving and in rags. The great majority of mankind would not be content for a month unless they were slaves; and so why abuse the few who will not be slaves, at least not slaves from a worldly point of view—who escape from being slaves to man, either by making money and sticking to it or by blowing out their brain matter.