th. Dead things, and dead people." I
reflected. Yes! The _things_ certainly were dead. Look at the Louvre!
Look at the Madeleine! Look at any of the streets! Machine-men had made
it all, not human souls. The men were dead, then, too? "Certainly!" he
insisted. "Their works are a proof. Where there is life there is art.
And there is no art in the modern world--neither in the East nor in the
West." "Then what is this that looks like Life?" I said, looking at the
roaring streets. He shrugged his shoulders and said, "Steam."

With that in my mind, I crossed to England, and forgot criticism and
speculation in the gleam of the white cliffs, in the trim hedgerows and
fields, in the sound of English voices and the sight of English faces.
In London it was the same. The bright-cheeked messenger boys, the
discreetly swaggering chauffeurs, the quiet, competent young men in City
offices who reassured me about my baggage, the autumn sun on the maze of
misty streets, the vast picturesqueness of London, its beauty as of a
mountain or the sea, fairly carried me off my feet. And passing St.
Paul's--"Dead," I muttered, as I looked at its derivative facade,--I
went in to take breath. From the end of the vast, cold space came the
dreary wail I remembered so well. I had heard Church music at Moscow,
and knew what it ought to be. But the tremendous passion of that Eastern
plain-song would have offended these discreet walls. I was in a "sacred
edifice"; and with a pang of regret I recalled the wooden shrines of
Japan under the great trees, the solemn Buddhas, and the crowds of
cheerful worshippers. I walked down the empty nave and came under the
dome. Then something happened--the thing that always happens when one
comes into touch with the work of a genius. And Wren's dome proves that
he was that. I sat down, and the organ began to play; or rather, the
dome began to sing. And down the stream of music floated in fragments
visions of my journey--Indians nude like bronzes, blue-coated Chinese,
white robes and bare limbs from Japan, plains of corn, plains of rice,
plains of scorched grass; snow-peaks under the stars, volcanoes, green
and black; huge rivers, tumbling streams, waterfalls, lakes, the ocean;
hovels and huts of wood or sun-dried bricks, thatched or tiled; marble
palaces and baths; red lacquer, golden tiles; saints, kings, conquerors,
and, enduring or worshipping these, a myriad generations of peasants
through long millenniums, toiling, s