in a pantomime.
But here again I shall differ from them, though perhaps less strongly.
It may be that the pleasure is childish rather than childlike;
but I can imagine a child clapping his hands at the mere sight
of those great domes like bubbles of gold against the blue sky.
It is a little like Aladdin's Palace, but it has a place in art
as Aladdin has a place in literature; especially since it is
oriental literature. Those wise missionaries in China who were not
afraid to depict the Twelve Apostles in the costume of Chinamen
might have built such a church in a land of glittering mosques.
And as it is said that the Russian has in him something of the child
and something of the oriental, such a style may be quite sincere,
and have even a certain simplicity in its splendour.
It is genuine of its kind; it was built for those who like it;
and those who do not like it can look at something else. This sort
of thing may be called tawdry, but it is not what I call meretricious.
What I call really meretricious can be found yet higher on the hill;
towering to the sky and dominating all the valleys.

The nature of the difference, I think, is worth noting.
The German Hospice, which served as a sort of palace for the
German Emperor, is a very big building with a very high tower,
planned I believe with great efficiency, solidity and comfort,
and fitted with a thousand things that mark its modernity
compared with the things around, with the quaint garden
of the Franciscans or the fantastic temple of the Russians.
It is what I can only describe as a handsome building; rather as
the more vulgar of the Victorian wits used to talk about a fine woman.
By calling it a handsome building I mean that from the top of its dizzy
tower to the bottom of its deepest foundations there is not one line
or one tint of beauty. This negative fact, however, would be nothing;
it might be honestly ugly and utilitarian like a factory or a prison;
but it is not. It is as pretentious as the gilded dome below it;
and it is pretentious in a wicked way where the other is pretentious
in a good and innocent way. What annoys me about it is that it
was not built by children, or even by savages, but by professors;
and the professors could profess the art and could not practise it.
The architects knew everything about a Romanesque building except
how to build it. We feel that they accumulated on that spot
all the learning and organisation and information and we