The Giant

I sometimes fancy that every great city must have been built by night.
At least, it is only at night that every part of a great city is great.
All architecture is great architecture after sunset; perhaps
architecture is really a nocturnal art, like the art of fireworks.
At least, I think many people of those nobler trades that work
by night (journalists, policemen, burglars, coffee-stall keepers,
and such mistaken enthusiasts as refuse to go home till morning)
must often have stood admiring some black bulk of building with a crown
of battlements or a crest of spires and then burst into tears at
daybreak to discover that it was only a haberdasher's shop with huge
gold letters across the face of it.

. . . . .

I had a sensation of this sort the other day as I happened to be
wandering in the Temple Gardens towards the end of twilight.
I sat down on a bench with my back to the river, happening to
choose such a place that a huge angle and façade of building
jutting out from the Strand sat above me like an incubus.
I dare say that if I took the same seat to-morrow by daylight I
should find the impression entirely false. In sunlight the thing
might seem almost distant; but in that half-darkness it seemed
as if the walls were almost falling upon me. Never before have I
had so strongly the sense which makes people pessimists in politics,
the sense of the hopeless height of the high places of the earth.
That pile of wealth and power, whatever was its name, went up above
and beyond me like a cliff that no living thing could climb.
I had an irrational sense that this thing had to be fought, that I
had to fight it; and that I could offer nothing to the occasion
but an indolent journalist with a walking-stick.

Almost as I had the thought, two windows were lit in that black,
blind face. It was as if two eyes had opened in the huge
face of a sleeping giant; the eyes were too close together,
and gave it the suggestion of a bestial sneer. And either
by accident of this light or of some other, I could now read
the big letters which spaced themselves across the front;
it was the Babylon Hotel. It was the perfect symbol of everything
that I should like to pull down with my hands if I could.
Reared by a detected robber, it is framed to be the fashionable
and luxurious home of undetected robbers. In the house of man
are many mansions; but there is a class of men who feel normal
nowhere except in the Babylon Hotel or in Dartmoor Gaol.
That big black face, which was staring at me with its flaming
eyes too close together, that was indeed the giant of all epic
and fairy tales. But, alas! I was not the giant-killer;
the hour had come, but not the man. I sat down on the seat again
(I had had