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.