34 MY AMERICAN FRIENDS

the ear. I am not unseasoned to the street noises
of London and Manchester and even in Oxford,
which has now unhappily become a noisy place,
I advise my American friends to get their first
vision of Magdalen Tower in the early hours,
before the traffic has awakened, or under a late-
risen moon when the voice of the motor-car is
hushed and the airplane roars less frequently from
the sky. But it is in New York that I have
become most acutely conscious of the devastating
effect of noise on one's power to enjoy the beautiful
things presented to the eye. There are in New
York, amid oceans of appalling ugliness in the
back streets and outlying districts, a multitude of
beautiful and majestic buildings, vistas of great
dignity, and skylines hardly matched by those
of any city on earth. But all the time you would
be admiring them New York is yelling and
shrieking with a voice compounded of all the
horrible sounds in the universe, Hootings,
screamings, whistlings, bellowings, wailings,
rattlings, hangings, hammerings, roarings,
crashings, and I know not what else, make up an
infernal tumult, comparable only to that which
stunned the senses of Dante on entering the pre-
cincts of hell, ^ May it not be, I often ask myself,
that this continual outrage on beauty inflicted
through the ear is a sore impediment to those who
would rouse the love of beauty by appealing to the
eye, and that the fine arts have little chance of a
general revival so long as the people, American or