at Washington) still lives. And to-day it lives most transparently in the art of painting. Those who find not in either of those twin shrunk Caesars, Calvin C. Coolidge and William T. Manning, that perfect peace after which the heart hankereth, will do well to look in at The Dial Collection. The ritualist, too, will there find occasion to exercise his natural activity. For upon a table, in the midst of those pictures therein reproduced, will be exposed—in a recumbent posture—the intransigeantly sized folio denominated (to paraphrase the well-known poet, Stevenson) "in the days of the little dead" LIVING ART. To the ritualist, to him who is concerned most adamantinely in the technique itself of worship, will be given opportunity to remove from the altared folio each and every picture therein exposed. He will be permitted to hold (in either or indeed in both hands: here at least no precedent will sift grim Fundamentalist from bright Modernist) above, beside, or below the original picture upon the environing wall the consecrate facsimile. His eyes will thereupon be opened. He will perceive and apperceive that one is two and two is one. He will furthermore constate that Mechanical Development, which came down upon humanity like "the Assyrian" and "like the wolf," may be turned to finer uses, may be employed as a potent prism wherethrough to multiply, and in the original colours, "the glance of the Lord."
Stained glass may or may not be a lost art: upon this matter it is possible to be of two minds. The wise man will anyhow not break his head over a question which is not to-day culturally central. He will rather go to that picture gallery where from January twenty-sixth to February fourteenth the spiritual head of our epoch, what I have—remembering a happier and a less dismantled period—called by the somewhat mortared, by the somewhat architectural name, "Rome," will be—as is the fashion of our uprooted and mortarless civilization—briefly tenting. There he will find an art which—howsoever adrift—yet sprouts stoutly. Standing amid the singular masterpieces of his own generation, he will be aware—not without humility and not without pride—that not the Sainte Chapelle herself has lightened and has burned more variously, or has gleamed with a more subtle and a more intricate charm, or has prevailed with a more true inward poignance. Gothic blazonries collapse, but also to-day
"Life, like a dome of many-coloured glass,
Stains the white radiance of eternity."
