[MA-218]
A STONE IS MORE OF A STONE THAN FORMERLY
As a general rule we no longer understand architecture, at least by no means in the same way as we understand music. We have outgrown the symbolism of lines and figures, just as we are no longer accustomed to the sound- effects of rhetoric, and have not absorbed this kind of mother's milk of culture since our first moment of life. Everything in a Greek or Chris- tian building originally had a meaning, and re- ferred to a higher order of things; this feeling of inexhaustible meaning enveloped the edifice like a mystic veil. Beauty was only a secondary con- sideration in the system, without in any way materially injuring the fundamental sentiment of the mysteriously-exalted, the divinely and magic- ally consecrated; at the most, beauty tempered horror—but this horror was everywhere presupposed. What is the beauty of a building now? The same thing as the beautiful ' face of a stupid woman, a kind of mask.