In this previsioning of architecture after the war, the author must not be understood to mean that these things will be realized directly after. Architecture, from its very nature, is the most sluggish of all the arts to respond to the natural magic of the quick-moving mind—it is Caliban, not Ariel. Following the war the nation will be for a time depleted of man-power, burdened with debt, prostrate, exhausted. But in that time of reckoning will come reflection, penitence.
"And I'll be wise hereafter,
And seek for grace. What a thrice-double ass
Was I, to take this drunkard for a god,
And worship this dull fool."
With some such epilogue the curtain will descend on the great drama now approaching a close. It will be for the younger generations, the reincarnate souls of those who fell in battle, to inaugurate the work of giving expression, in deathless forms of art, to the vision of that "fairer world" glimpsed now only as by lightning, in a dream.
[Illustration]
ESSAYS
ORNAMENT FROM MATHEMATICS
I
THE WORLD ORDER
No fact is better established than that we live in an orderly universe. The truth of this the world-war may for the moment, and to the near and narrow view appear to contradict, but the sweep of human history, and the stars in their courses, show an orderliness which cannot be gainsaid.
Now of that order, number—that is, mathematics—is the more than symbol, it is the very thing itself. Whence this weltering tide of life arose, and whither it flows, we know not; but that it is governed by mathematical law all of our knowledge in every field confirms. Were it not so, knowledge itself would be impossible. It is because man is a counting animal that he is master over all the beasts of the earth.