ARCHITECTURE AND DEMOCRACY BY CLAUDE BRAGDONF. A. I. A. 1918 [Illustration: PLATE I. THE WOOLWORTH BUILDING, NEW YORK] PREFACE This book can lay no claim to unity of theme, since its subjects rangefrom skyscrapers to symbols and soul states; but the author claims forit nevertheless a unity of point of view, and one (correct or not) socomprehensive as to include in one synthesis every subject dealtwith. For according to that point of view, a skyscraper is only asymbol--and of what? A condition of consciousness, that is, a state ofthe soul. Democracy even, we are beginning to discover, is a conditionof consciousness too. Our only hope of understanding the welter of life in which we areimmersed, as in a swift and muddy river, is in ascending as nearto its pure source as we can. That source is in consciousness andconsciousness is in ourselves. This is the point of view from whicheach problem dealt with has been attacked; but lest the author be atonce set down as an impracticable dreamer, dwelling aloof in an ivorytower, the reader should know that his book has been written inthe scant intervals afforded by the practice of the profession ofarchitecture, so broadened as to include the study of abstract form, the creation of ornament, experiments with color and light, and suchoccasional educational activities as from time to time he has beencalled upon to perform at one or another architectural school. The three essays included under the general heading of "Democracyand Architecture" were prepared at the request of the editor of _TheArchitectural Record_, and were published in that journal. The twofollowing, on "Ornament from Mathematics, " represent a recasting anda rewriting of articles which have appeared in _The ArchitecturalReview, The Architectural Forum_, and _The American Architect_. "Harnessing the Rainbow" is an address delivered before the Ad. Clubof Cleveland, and the Rochester Rotary Club, and afterwards made intoan essay and published in _The American Architect_ under a differenttitle. The appreciation of Louis Sullivan as a writer appears here forthe first time, the author having previously paid his respects to Mr. Sullivan's strictly architectural genius in an essay in _House andGarden_. "Color and Ceramics" was delivered on the occasion of thededication of the Ceramic Building of the University of Illinois, and afterwards published in _The Architectural Forum_. "Symbols andSacraments" was printed in the English Quarterly _Orpheus_. "SelfEducation" was delivered before the Boston Architectural Club, andafterwards published in a number of architectural journals. Acknowledgment is hereby tendered by the author to the editors ofthese various magazines for their consent to republication, togetherwith thanks, however belated, for their unfailing hospitality to thechildren of his brain. CLAUDE BRAGDON. _August 1, 1918_. CONTENTS ARCHITECTURE AND DEMOCRACY I. Before the War II. During the War III. After the War ORNAMENT FROM MATHEMATICS I. The World Order II. The Fourth Dimension HARNESSING THE RAINBOW LOUIS SULLIVAN, PROPHET OF DEMOCRACY COLOR AND CERAMICS SYMBOLS AND SACRAMENTS SELF-EDUCATION LIST OF FULL PAGE ILLUSTRATIONS Plate I. The Woolworth Building, New York Plate II. The New York Public Library Plate III. The Prudential Building, Buffalo, N. Y. Plate IV. The Erie County Savings Bank, Buffalo, N. Y. Plate V. The New York Central Terminal Plate VI. Plan of the Red Cross Community Club House, Camp Sherman, Ohio Plate VII. Interior View of the Camp Sherman Community House Plate VIII. Imaginative Sketch by Henry P. Kirby Plate IX. Architectural Sketch by Otto Rieth Plate X. 200 West 57th Street, New York Plate XI. Imaginary Composition: The Portal Plate XII. Imaginary Composition: The Balcony Plate XIII. Imaginary Composition: The Audience Chamber Plate XIV. Song and Light: An Approach toward "Color Music" Plate XV. Symbol of Resurrection Every form of government, every social institution, everyundertaking, however great, however small, every symbol ofenlightenment or degradation, each and all have sprung and are stillspringing from the life of the people, and have ever formed and arenow as surely forming images of their thought. Slowly by centuries, generations, years, days, hours, the thought of the people haschanged; so with precision have their acts responsively changed; thusthoughts and acts have flowed and are flowing ever onward, unceasinglyonward, involved within the impelling power of Life. Throughout thisstream of human life, and thought, and activity, men have ever feltthe need to build; and from the need arose the power to build. So, as they thought, they built; for, strange as it may seem, they couldbuild in no other way. As they built, they made, used, and left behindthem records of their thinking. Then, as through the years new mencame with changed thoughts, so arose new buildings in consonancewith the change of thought--the building always the expression ofthe thinking. Whatever the character of the thinking, just so was thecharacter of the building. What is Architecture? A Study in the American People of Today, byLOUIS SULLIVAN. Architecture and Democracy I BEFORE THE WAR The world war represents not the triumph, but the birth of democracy. The true ideal of democracy--the rule of a people by the _demos_, orgroup soul--is a thing unrealized. How then is it possible to consideror discuss an architecture of democracy--the shadow of a shade? It isnot possible to do so with any degree of finality, but by an intentionof consciousness upon this juxtaposition of ideas--architecture anddemocracy--signs of the times may yield new meanings, relations mayemerge between things apparently unrelated, and the future, alwaysexistent in every present moment, may be evoked by that strange magicwhich resides in the human mind. Architecture, at its worst as at its best, reflects always a trueimage of the thing that produced it; a building is revealing eventhough it is false, just as the face of a liar tells the thinghis words endeavor to conceal. This being so, let us make sucharchitecture as is ours declare to us our true estate. The architecture of the United States, from the period of the CivilWar, up to the beginning of the present crisis, everywhere reflects astruggle to be free of a vicious and depraved form of feudalism, grown strong under the very ægis of democracy. The qualities that madefeudalism endeared and enduring; qualities written in beauty onthe cathedral cities of mediaeval Europe--faith, worship, loyalty, magnanimity--were either vanished or banished from thispseudo-democratic, aridly scientific feudalism, leaving an inheritanceof strife and tyranny--a strife grown mean, a tyranny grown prudent, but full of sinister power the weight of which we have by no meansceased to feel. Power, strangely mingled with timidity; ingenuity, frequentlymisdirected; ugliness, the result of a false ideal of beauty--thesein general characterize the architecture of our immediate past; anarchitecture "without ancestry or hope of posterity, " an architecturedevoid of coherence or conviction; willing to lie, willing to steal. What impression such a city as Chicago or Pittsburgh might have madeupon some denizen of those cathedral-crowned feudal cities of thepast we do not know. He would certainly have been amazed at its giantenergy, and probably revolted at its grimy dreariness. We are wontto pity the mediaeval man for the dirt he lived in, even while smokegreys our sky and dirt permeates the very air we breathe: we think ofcastles as grim and cathedrals as dim, but they were beautiful and gaywith color compared with the grim, dim canyons of our city streets. Lafcadio Hearn, in _A Conservative_, has sketched for us, with asympathy truly clairvoyant, the impression made by the cities of theWest upon the consciousness of a young Japanese samurai educated undera feudalism not unlike that of the Middle Ages, wherein was worship, reverence, poetry, loyalty--however strangely compounded with the moresinister products of the feudal state. Larger than all anticipation the West appeared to him, --a world of giants; and that which depresses even the boldest Occidental who finds himself, without means or friends, alone in a great city, must often have depressed the Oriental exile: that vague uneasiness aroused by the sense of being invisible to hurrying millions; by the ceaseless roar of traffic drowning voices; by monstrosities of architecture without a soul; by the dynamic display of wealth forcing mind and hand, as mere cheap machinery, to the uttermost limits of the possible. Perhaps he saw such cities as Doré saw London: sullen majesty of arched glooms, and granite deeps opening into granite deeps beyond range of vision, and mountains of masonry with seas of labor in turmoil at their base, and monumental spaces displaying the grimness of ordered power slow-gathering through centuries. Of beauty there was nothing to make appeal to him between those endless cliffs of stone which walled out the sunrise and the sunset, the sky and the wind. The view of our pre-war architecture thus sketchily presented is sureto be sharply challenged in certain quarters, but unfortunately forus all this is no mere matter of opinion, it is a matter of fact. Thebuildings are there, open to observation; rooted to the spot, theycannot run away. Like criminals "caught with the goods" they stand, self-convicted, dirty with the soot of a thousand chimneys, heavy withthe spoils of vanished civilizations; graft and greed stare at us outof their glazed windows--eyes behind which no soul can be discerned. There are doubtless extenuating circumstances; they want to be clean, they want to be honest, these "monsters of the mere market, " but theyare nevertheless the unconscious victims of evils inherent in ourtransitional social state. Let us examine these strange creatures, doomed, it is hoped, toextinction in favor of more intelligent and gracious forms oflife. They are big, powerful, "necessitous, " and have therefore animpressiveness, even an æsthetic appeal, not to be denied. So subtleand sensitive an old-world consciousness as that of M. Paul Bourgetwas set vibrating by them like a violin to the concussion of atrip-hammer, and to the following tune: The portals of the basements, usually arched as if crushed beneath the weight of the mountains which they support, look like dens of a primitive race, continually receiving and pouring forth a stream of people. You lift your eyes, and you feel that up there behind the perpendicular wall, with its innumerable windows, is a multitude coming and going, --crowding the offices that perforate these cliffs of brick and iron, dizzied with the speed of the elevators. You divine, you feel the hot breath of speculation quivering behind these windows. This it is which has fecundated these thousands of square feet of earth, in order that from them may spring up this appalling growth of business palaces, that hide the sun from you and almost shut out the light of day. "The simple power of necessity is to a certain degree a principle ofbeauty, " says M. Bourget, and to these structures this order of beautycannot be denied, but even this is vitiated by a failure to press theadvantage home: the ornate façades are notably less impressivethan those whose grim and stark geometry is unmitigated by thegrave-clothes of dead styles. Instances there are of strivings towarda beauty that is fresh and living, but they are so unsuccessful andinfrequent as to be negligible. However impressive these buildings maybe by reason of their ordered geometry, their weight and magnitude, and as a manifestation of irrepressible power, they have theunloveliness of things ignoble being the product neither of praise, nor joy, nor worship, but enclosures for the transaction of sharpbargains--gold bringing jinn of our modern Aladdins, who love them notbut only use them. That is the reason they are ugly; no one has lovedthem for themselves alone. For beauty is ever the very face of love. From the architecture ofa true democracy, founded on love and mutual service, beauty wouldinevitably shine forth; its absence convicts us of a maladjustment inour social and economic life. A skyscraper shouldering itself aloft atthe expense of its more humble neighbors, stealing their air andtheir sunlight, is a symbol, written large against the sky, ofthe will-to-power of a man or a group of men--of that ruthless andtireless aggression on the part of the cunning and the strong socharacteristic of the period which produced the skyscraper. One ofour streets made up of buildings of diverse styles and shapes andsizes--like a jaw with some teeth whole, some broken, some rotten, and some gone--is a symbol of our unkempt individualism, now happilybecoming curbed and chastened by a common danger, a common devotion. Some people hold the view that our insensitiveness to formal beauty isno disgrace. Such argue that our accomplishments and our interests arein other fields, where we more than match the accomplishments of oldercivilizations. They forget that every achievement not registered interms of beauty has failed of its final and enduring transmutation. Itis because the achievements of older civilizations attained to theirapotheoses in art that they interest us, and unless we are ableto effect a corresponding transmutation we are destined to perishunhonoured on our rubbish heap. That we shall effect it, throughknowledge and suffering, is certain, but before attempting themore genial and rewarding task of tracing, in our life and in ourarchitecture, those forces and powers which make for righteousness, for beauty, let us look our failures squarely in the face, anddiscover if we can why they are failures. Confining this examination to the particular matter under discussion, the neo-feudal architecture of our city streets, we find it to lackunity, and the reason for this lack of unity dwells in a _dividedconsciousness_. The tall office building is the product of manyforces, or perhaps we should say one force, that of necessity; but itsconcrete embodiment is the result of two different orders of talent, that of the structural engineer and of the architectural designer. These are usually incarnate in two different individuals, workingmore or less at cross purposes. It is the business of the engineerto preoccupy himself solely with ideas of efficiency and economy, and over his efficient and economical structure the designer smearsa frosting of beauty in the form of architectural style, in thearchæological sense. This is a foolish practice, and cannot but resultin failure. In the case of a Greek temple or a mediaeval cathedralstructure and style were not twain, but one; the structure determinedthe style, the style expressed the structure; but with us so divorcedhave the two things become that in a case known to the author, thestructural framework of a great office building was determined andfabricated and then architects were invited to "submit designs"for the exterior. This is of course an extreme example and does notrepresent the usual practice, but it brings sharply to consciousnessthe well known fact that for these buildings we have substantially onemethod of construction--that of the vertical strut, and the horizontal"fill"--while in style they appear as Grecian, Roman, Renaissance, Gothic, Modern French and what not, according to the whim of thedesigner. [Illustration: PLATE II. THE NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY] With the modern tendency toward specialization, the natural outgrowthof necessity, there is no inherent reason why the bones of a buildingshould not be devised by one man and its fleshly clothing by another, so long as they understand one another, and are in ideal agreement, but there is in general all too little understanding, and aconfusion of ideas and aims. To the average structural engineer thearchitectural designer is a mere milliner in stone, informed in thoseprevailing architectural fashions of which he himself knows little andcares less. Preoccupied as he is with the building's strength, safety, economy; solving new and staggeringly difficult problems with addressand daring, he has scant sympathy with such inconsequent matters asthe stylistic purity of a façade, or the profile of a moulding. To thedesigner, on the other hand, the engineer appears in the light of asubordinate to be used for the promotion of his own ends, or an evilto be endured as an interference with those ends. As a result of this lack of sympathy and co-ordination, success crownsonly those efforts in which, on the one hand, the stylist has beencompletely subordinated to engineering necessity, as in the case ofthe East River bridges, where the architect was called upon only toadd a final grace to the strictly structural towers; or on the otherhand, in which the structure is of the old-fashioned masonry sort, andfaced with a familiar problem the architect has found it easy to befrank; as in the case of the Manhattan Storage Warehouse, on 42ndStreet, New York, or in the Bryant Park façade on the New YorkLibrary. The Woolworth building is a notable example of the completeco-ordination between the structural framework and its envelope, andfalls short of ideal success only in the employment of an archaic andalien ornamental language, used, however, let it be said, with a fineunderstanding of the function of ornament. For the most part though, there is a difference of intention betweenthe engineer and the designer; they look two ways, and the result oftheir collaboration is a flat and confused image of the thing thatshould be, not such as is produced by truly binocular vision. Thisdifference of aim is largely the result of a difference of education. Engineering science of the sort which the use of steel has required isa thing unprecedented; the engineer cannot hark back to the past forhelp, even if he would. The case is different with the architecturaldesigner; he is taught that all of the best songs have been sung, allof the true words spoken. The Glory that was Greece, and the Grandeurthat was Rome, the romantic exuberance of Gothic, and the orderedrestraint of Renaissance are so drummed into him during his years oftraining, and exercise so tyrannical a spell over his imagination thathe loses the power of clear and logical thought, and never becomestruly creative. Free of this incubus the engineer has succeeded inbeing straightforward and sensible, to say the least; subject to itthe man with a so-called architectural education is too often tortuousand absurd. The architect without any training in the essentials of designproduces horrors as a matter of course, for the reason that sin is theresult of ignorance; the architect trained in the false manner of thecurrent schools becomes a reconstructive archæologist, handicapped byconditions with which he can deal only imperfectly, and imperfectlycontrol. Once in a blue moon a man arises who, with all the advantagesinherent in education, pierces through the past to the present, andis able to use his brain as the architects of the past used theirs--todeal simply and directly with his immediate problem. Such a man is Louis Sullivan, though it must be admitted that notalways has he achieved success. That success was so marked, however, in his treatment of the problem of the tall building, and exercisedsubconsciously such a spell upon the minds even of his critics anddetractors, that it resulted in the emancipation of this type ofbuilding from an absurd and impossible convention--the practice, common before his time, of piling order upon order, like a houseof cards, or by a succession of strongly marked string coursesemphasizing the horizontal dimension of a vertical edifice, thusvitiating the finest effect of which such a building is capable. The problem of the tall building, with which his predecessors dealtalways with trepidation and equivocation, Mr. Sullivan approachedwith confidence and joy. "What, " he asked himself, "is the chiefcharacteristic of the tall office building? It is lofty. Thisloftiness is to the artist-nature its thrilling aspect. It must betall. The force of altitude must be in it. It must be every inch aproud and soaring thing, rising in sheer exultation that from bottomto top it is a unit without a dissenting line. " The Prudential(Guaranty) building in Buffalo represents the finest concreteembodiment of his idea achieved by Mr. Sullivan. It marks hisemancipation from what he calls his "masonry" period, during whichhe tried, like so many other architects before and since, to make asteel-framed structure look as though it were nothing but a masonrywall perforated with openings--openings too many and too great notto endanger its stability. The keen blade of Mr. Sullivan's mind cutthrough this contradiction, and in the Prudential building he carriedout the idea of a _protective casing_ so successfully that MontgomerySchuyler said of it, "I know of no steel framed building in which themetallic construction is more palpably felt through the envelope ofbaked clay. " [Illustration: PLATE III. THE PRUDENTIAL BUILDING, BUFFALO N. Y. ] The present author can speak with all humbleness of the generalfailure, on the part of the architectural profession, to appreciatethe importance of this achievement, for he pleads guilty of day afterday having passed the Prudential building, then fresh in the majestyof its soaring lines, and in the wonder of its fire-wrought casing, with eyes and admiration only for the false romanticism of the ErieCounty Savings Bank, and the empty bombast of the gigantic EllicottSquare. He had not at that period of his life succeeded in living downhis architectural training, and as a result the most ignorant laymanwas in a better position to appraise the relative merits of thesethree so different incarnations of the building impulse than was he. Since the Prudential building there have been other tall officebuildings, by other hands, truthful in the main, less rigid, lessmonotonous, more superficially pleasing, yet they somehow fail toimpart the feeling of utter sincerity and fresh originality inspiredby this building. One feels that here democracy has at last foundutterance in beauty; the American spirit speaks, the spirit of theLong Denied. This rude, rectangular bulk is uncompromisingly practicaland utilitarian; these rows on rows of windows, regularly spaced, andall of the same size, suggest the equality and monotony of obscure, laborious lives; the upspringing shafts of the vertical piers standfor their hopes and aspirations, and the unobtrusive, delicateornament which covers the whole with a garment of fresh beauty is likethe very texture of their dreams. The building is able to speakthus powerfully to the imagination because its creator is a poetand prophet of democracy. In his own chosen language he declares, asWhitman did in verse, his faith in the people of "these states"--"ANation announcing itself. " Others will doubtless follow who will makea richer music, commensurate with the future's richer life, but suchdemocracy as is ours stands here proclaimed, just as such feudalismas is still ours stands proclaimed in the Erie County Bank just acrossthe way. The massive rough stone walls of this building, its pointedtowers and many dormered chateau-like roof unconsciously symbolize theattempt to impose upon the living present a moribund and alienorder. Democracy is thus afflicted, and the fact must needs findarchitectural expression. In the field of domestic architecture these dramatic contrasts areless evident, less sharply marked. Domestic life varies little fromage to age; a cottage is a cottage the world over, and some manorialmansion on the James River, built in Colonial days, remains a fittinghabitation (assuming the addition of electric lights and sanitaryplumbing) for one of our Captains of Industry, however little anancient tobacco warehouse would serve him as a place of business. This fact is so well recognized that the finest type of modern countryhouse follows, in general, this or some other equally admirable model, though it is amusing to note the millionaire's preference for a feudalcastle, a French chateau, or an Italian villa of the decadence. The "man of moderate means, " so called, provides himself withno difficulty with a comfortable house, undistinguished butunpretentious, which fits him like a glove. There is a piazza towardsthe street, a bay-window in the living room, a sleeping-porch for thechildren, and a box of a garage for the flivver in the bit of a backyard. For the wage earner the housing problem is not so easily norso successfully solved. He is usually between the devil of thespeculative builder and the deep sea of the predatory landlord, eachintent upon taking from him the limit that the law allows and givinghim as little as possible for his money. Going down the scale ofindigence we find an itinerancy amounting almost to homelessness, orhouses so abject that they are an insult to the very name of home. [Illustration: PLATE IV: THE ERIE COUNTY SAVINGS BANK, BUFFALO, N. Y. ] It is an eloquent commentary upon our national attitude toward a mostvital matter that in this feverish hustle to produce ships, airplanes, clothing and munitions on a vast scale, the housing of the workers waseither overlooked entirely, or received eleventh-hour consideration, and only now, after a year of participation in the war, is itbeginning to be adequately and officially dealt with--how efficientlyand intelligently remains to be seen. The housing of the soldiers wasanother matter: that necessity was plain and urgent, and the miraclehas been accomplished, but except by indirection it has contributednothing to the permanent housing problem. Other aspects of our life which have found architectural expressionfall neither in the commercial nor in the domestic category--the greathotels, for example, which partake of the nature of both, and ourpassenger railway terminals, which partake of the nature of neither. These latter deserve especial consideration in this connection, byreason of their important function. The railway is of the very essenceof the modern, even though (with what sublime unreason) Imperial Romeis written large over New York's most magnificent portal. Think not that in an age of unfaith mankind gives up the buildingof temples. Temples inevitably arise where the tide of life flowsstrongest; for there God manifests, in however strange a guise. Thattide is nowhere stronger than in the railroad, which is the arterialsystem of our civilization. All arteries lead to and from the heart, and thus the railroad terminus becomes the beating heart at the centerof modern life. It is a true instinct therefore which prompts tothe making of the terminal building a very temple, a monument tothe conquest of space through the harnessing of the giant horses ofelectricity and steam. This conquest must be celebrated on a scalecommensurate with its importance, and in obedience to this necessitythe Pennsylvania station raised its proud head amid the push-cartarchitecture of that portion of New York in which it stands. It is nottherefore open to the criticism often passed upon it, that it is toogrand, but it is the wrong kind of grandeur. If there be truth in thecontention that the living needs of today cannot be grafted upon thedead stump of any ancient grandeur, the futility of every attempt toaccomplish this impossible will somehow, somewhere, reveal itself tothe discerning eye. Let us seek out, in this building, the place ofthis betrayal. It is not necessarily in the main façade, though this is not a face, but a mask--and a mask can, after its kind, always be made beautiful;it is not in the nobly vaulted corridor, lined with shops--for all weknow the arcades of Imperial Rome were similarly lined; nor is it inthe splendid vestibule, leading into the magnificent waiting room, inwhich a subject of the Cæsars would have felt more perfectly at home, perhaps, than do we. But beyond this passenger concourse, where theelevators and stairways descend to the tracks, necessity demanded theconstruction of a great enclosure, supported only on slender columnsand far-flung trusses roofed with glass. Now latticed columns, steeltrusses, and wire glass are inventions of the modern world too usefulto be dispensed with. Rome could not help the architect here. The modeto which he was inexorably self-committed in the rest of the buildingdemanded massive masonry, cornices, mouldings; a tribute to Cæsarwhich could be paid everywhere but in this place. The architect'sproblem then became to reconcile two diametrically different systems. But between the west wall of the ancient Roman baths and the modernskeleton construction of the roof of the human greenhouse there isno attempt at fusion. The slender latticed columns cut unpleasantlythrough the granite cornices and mouldings; the first century A. D. Andthe twentieth are here in incongruous juxtaposition--a little thing, easily overlooked, yet how revealing! How reassuring of the fact "Godis not mocked!" The New York Central terminal speaks to the eye in a modern tongue, with however French an accent. Its façade suggests a portal, remindingthe beholder that a railway station is in a very literal sense a citygate placed just as appropriately in the center of the municipality asin ancient times it was placed in the circuit of the outer walls. Neither edifice will stand the acid test of Mr. Sullivan's formula, that a building is an organism and should follow the law of organisms, which decrees that the form must everywhere follow and express thefunction, the function determining and creating its appropriate form. Here are two eminent examples of "arranged" architecture. Beforeorganic architecture can come into being our inchoate national lifemust itself become organic. Arranged architecture, of the sort wesee everywhere, despite its falsity, is a true expression of theconditions which gave it birth. [Illustration: PLATE V. THE NEW YORK CENTRAL TERMINAL] The grandeur of Rome, the splendour of Paris--what just and adequateexpression do they give of modern American life? Then shall we find inour great hotels, say, such expression? Truly they represent, in thephrase of Henry James, "a realized ideal" and a study of them shouldreveal that ideal. From such a study we can only conclude that itis life without effort or responsibility, with every physical needluxuriously gratified. But these hotels nevertheless representdemocracy, it may be urged, for the reason that every one may therebuy board and lodging and mercenary service if he has the price. Theexceeding greatness of that price, however, makes of it a badgeof nobility which converts these democratic hostelries into feudalcastles, more inaccessible to the Long Denied than as though enteredby a drawbridge and surrounded by a moat. We need not even glance at the churches, for the tides of ourspiritual life flow no longer in full volume through their portals;neither may the colleges long detain us, for architecturallyconsidered they give forth a confusion of tongues which has itsanalogue in the confusion of ideas in the collective academic head. Is our search for some sign of democracy ended, and is it vain? No, democracy exists in the secret heart of the people, all the people, but it is a thing so new, so strange, so secret and sacred--the idealof brotherhood--that it is unmanifest yet in time and space. It isa thing born not with the Declaration of Independence, but onlyyesterday, with the call to a new crusade. The National Army is itscradle, and it is nurtured wherever communities unite to serve thesacred cause. Although menaced by the bloody sword of Imperialism inEurope, it perhaps stands in no less danger from the secret poisonof graft and greed and treachery here at home. But it is a spiritualbirth, and therefore it cannot perish, but will live to write itselfon space in terms of beauty such as the world has never known. II DURING THE WAR The best thing that can be said about our immediate architecturalpast is that it is past, for it has contributed little of value to anarchitecture of democracy. During that neo-feudal period the architectprospered, having his place at the baronial table; but now poor Tom'sa-cold on a war-swept heath, with food only for reflection. Thisis but natural; the architect, in so far as he is an artist, is apurveyor of beauty; and the abnormal conditions inevitable to a stateof war are devastating to so feminine and tender a thing, even thoughwar be the very soil from which new beauty springs. With Mars inmid-heaven how afflicted is the horoscope of all artists! The skilledhand of the musician is put to coarser uses; the eye that learnedits lessons from the sunset must learn the trick of making invisiblewarships and great guns. Let the architect serve the war-god likewise, in any capacity that offers, confident that this troubling of thewaters will bring about a new precipitation; that once the war isover, men will turn from those "old, unhappy, far-off things" topastures beautiful and new. In whatever way the war may complicate the architect's personalproblem, it should simplify and clarify his attitude toward his art. With no matter what seriousness and sincerity he may have undertakenhis personal search for truth and beauty, he will come to question, as never before, both its direction and its results. He is bound toperceive, if he does not perceive already, that the war's arrestmentof architecture (in all but its most utilitarian and ephemeral phases)is no great loss to the world for the reason that our architecture wasuninspired, unoriginal, done without joy, without reverence, withoutconviction: a thing which any wind of a new spirit was bound to makeappear foolish to a generation with sight rendered clairvoyant throughits dedication to great and regenerative ends. He will come to perceive that between the Civil War and the crusadethat is now upon us, we were under the evil spell of materialism. Nowmaterialism is the very negation of democracy, which is a governmentby the _demos_, or over-soul; it is equally the negation of joy, thenegation of reverence, and it is without conviction because it cannotbelieve even in itself. Reflecting thus, he can scarcely fail torealize that materialism, everywhere entrenched, was entrenchedstrongest in the camps of the rich---not the idle rich, formaterialism is so terrible a taskmaster that it makes its votaries itsslaves. These slaves, in turn, made a slave of the artist, a ministerto their pride and pretence. His art thus lacked that "sad sincerity"which alone might have saved it in a crisis. When the storm brokemilitant democracy turned to the engineer, who produced buildings atrecord speed, by the mile, with only such architectural assistance ascould be first and easiest fished up from the dragnet of the draft. In one direction only does there appear to be open water. Toward thegeneral housing problem the architectural profession has been spurredinto activity by reason of the war, and to its credit be it said, itis now thoroughly aroused. The American Institute of Architects sent acommissioner to England to study housing in its latest manifestations, and some of the ablest and most influential members of thatorganization have placed their services at the disposal of thegovernment. Moreover, there is a manifest disposition, on the part ofarchitects everywhere, to help in this matter all they can. The dangerdwells in the possibility that their advice will not be heeded, theirservices not be fully utilized, but through chicanery, ignorance, or inanition, we will relapse into the tentative, "expensivelyprovisional" methods which have governed the housing of workershitherto. Even so, architects will doubtless recapture, and morethan recapture, their imperiled prestige, but under what changedconditions, and with what an altered attitude toward their art andtheir craft! They will find that they must unlearn certain things the schools hadtaught them: preoccupation with the relative merits of Gothic andClassic--tweedledum and tweedledee. Furthermore, they must learncertain neglected lessons from the engineer, lessons that they willbe able immeasurably to better, for although the engineer is a verymonster of competence and efficiency within his limits, these aresharply marked, and to any detailed knowledge of that "beautifulnecessity" which determines spatial rhythm and counterpoint he is astranger. The ideal relation between architect and engineer is that ofa happily wedded pair--strength married to beauty; in the period justpassed or passing they have been as disgruntled divorcés. [Illustration: PLATE VI. PLAN OF THE RED CROSS COMMUNITY CLUB HOUSE, CAMP SHERMAN, OHIO] The author has in mind one child of such a happy union brought aboutby the war; the building is the Red Cross Community Club House at CampSherman, which, in the pursuit of his destiny, and for the furtheranceof his education, he inhabited for two memorable weeks. He learnedthere more lessons than a few, and encountered more tangled skeins ofdestiny than he is ever likely to unravel. The matter has so direct abearing, both on the subject of architecture and of democracy, that itis worth discussing at some length. This club house stands, surrounded by its tributary dormitories, on agovernment reservation, immediately adjacent to the camp itself, the whole constituting what is known as the Community Center. By thepayment of a dollar any soldier is free to entertain his relativesand friends there, and it is open to all the soldiers at all times. Because the iron discipline of the army is relaxed as soon as thelimits of the camp are overpassed, the atmosphere is favourable tosocial life. The building occupies its acre of ground invitingly, though exteriorlyof no particular distinction. It is the interior that entitles it toconsideration as a contribution to an architecture of that new-borndemocracy of which our army camps have been the cradle. The plan ofthis interior is cruciform, two hundred feet in each dimension. Builtby the Red Cross of the state of Ohio, and dedicated to the largeruses of that organization, the symbolic appropriateness of thisparticular geometrical figure should not pass unremarked. The crossis divided into side aisles, nave, and crossing, with galleries andmezzanines so arranged as to shorten the arms of the cross in itsupper stages, leaving the clear-story surrounding the crossingunimpeded and well defined. The light comes for the most part fromhigh windows, filtering down, in tempered brightness to the floor. Thebones of the structure are everywhere in evidence, and an element ofits beauty, by reason of the admirably direct and logicalarrangement of posts and trusses. The vertical walls are covered withplaster-board of a light buff color, converted into good sizedpanels by means of wooden strips finished with a thin grey stain. Thestructural wood work is stained in similar fashion, the iron rods, straps, and bolts being painted black. This color scheme iscompleted and a little enlivened by red stripes and crosses placed atappropriate intervals in the general design. The building attained its final synthesis through the collaboration ofa Cleveland architect and a National Army captain of engineers. It isso single in its appeal that one does not care to inquire too closelyinto the part of each in the performance; both are in evidence, foran architect seldom succeeds in being so direct and simple, while anengineer seldom succeeds in being so gracious and altogether suave. Entirely aside from its æsthetic interest--based as this is on beautyof organism almost alone--the building is notable for the success withwhich it fulfils and co-ordinates its manifold functions: those of adormitory, a restaurant, a ballroom, a theatre, and a lounge. Thearm of the cross containing the principal entrance accommodates theoffice, coat room, telephones, news and cigar stand, while leavingthe central nave unimpeded, so that from the door one gets the unusualeffect of an interior vista two hundred feet long. The restaurantoccupies the entire left transept, with a great brick fireplace at thefar end. There is another fireplace in the centre of the side ofthe arm beyond the crossing; that part which would correspond in acathedral to the choir and apse being given over to the uses of areading and writing room. The right transept forms a theatre, onoccasion, terminating as it does with a stage. The central floorspaces are kept everywhere free except in the restaurant, the sidesand angles being filled in with leather-covered sofas, wicker andwooden chairs and tables, arranged in groups favourable to comfort andconversation. Two stairways, at the right and left of the restaurant, give access to the ample balcony and to the bedrooms, which occupythree of the four ends of the arms of the cross at this level. The appearance and atmosphere of this great interior is inspiring;particularly of an evening, when it is thronged with soldiers, andcivilian guests. The strains of music, the hum of many voices, therhythmic shuffle on the waxed floor of the feet of the dancers--theseeminently social sounds mingle and lose themselves in the spaces ofthe roof, like the voice of many waters. Tobacco smoke ascends likeincense, blue above the prevailing green-brown of the crowd, shot hereand there with brighter colors from the women's hats and dresses, inthe kaleidoscopic shifting of the dance. Long parallel rows of orangelights, grouped low down on the lofty pillars, reflect themselveson the polished floor, and like the patina of time on painted canvasimpart to the entire animated picture an incomparable tone. For thelighting, either by accident or by inspiration, is an achievementof the happiest, an example of the friendliness of fate to him whoattempts a free solution of his problem. The brackets consist merelyof a cruciform arrangement of planed pine boards about each column, with the end grain painted red. On the under side of each arm of thecross is a single electric bulb enclosed within an orange-colouredshade to kill the glare. The light makes the bare wood of the fixtureappear incandescent, defining its geometry in rose colour with themost beautiful effect. The club house is the centre of the social and ceremonial life of thecamp, for balls, dinners, receptions, conferences, concerts withoutnumber; and it has been the scene of a military wedding--the daughterof a major-general to the grandson of an ex-president. To these eventsthe unassuming, but pervasive beauty of the place lends a dignity newto our social life. In our army camps social life is truly democratic, as any one who has experienced it does not need to be told. Not alonehave the conditions of conscription conspired to make it so, but thereis a manifest _will-to-democracy_--the growing of a new flower ofthe spirit, sown in a community of sacrifice, to reach its maturity, perhaps, only in a community of suffering. The author may seem to have over-praised this Community Club House;with the whole country to draw from for examples it may well appearfatuous to concentrate the reader's attention, for so long, on abuilding in a remote part of the Middle West: cheap, temporary, and requiring only twenty-one days for its erection. But of thetransvaluation of values brought about by the war, this building isan eminent example: it stands in symbolic relation to the times; itrepresents what may be called the architecture of Service; it is amongthe first of the new temples of the new democracy, dedicated to theuses of simple, rational social life. Notwithstanding that it fills afelt need, common to every community, there is nothing like it inany of our towns and cities; there are only such poor and partialsubstitutes as the hotel, the saloon, the dance hall, the lodge roomand the club. It is scarcely conceivable that the men and women whohave experienced its benefits and its beauty should not demand andhave similar buildings in their own home towns. [Illustration: PLATE VII. INTERIOR OF THE CAMP SHERMAN COMMUNITYHOUSE] Beyond the oasis of the Community Club House at Camp Sherman stretchthe cantonments--a Euclidian nightmare of bare boards, black roofsand ditches, making grim vistas of straight lines. This is thearchitecture of Need in contradistinction to the architecture ofGreed, symbolized in the shop-window prettiness of those sanitarysuburbs of our cities created by the real estate agent and thespeculative builder. Neither contain any enduring element of beauty. But the love of beauty in one form or another exists in every humanheart, and if too long or too rigorously denied it finds its ownchannels of fulfilment. This desire for self-expression through beautyis an important, though little remarked phenomenon of these mid-wartimes. At the camps it shows itself in the efforts of men ofspecialized tastes and talents to get together and form dramaticorganizations, glee clubs, and orchestras; and more generally by thedisposition of the soldiers to sing together at work and play and onthe march. The renascence of poetry can be interpreted as a revulsionagainst the prevailing prosiness; the amateur theatre is equally aprotest against the inanity and conventionality of the commercialstage; while the Community Chorus movement is an evidence of a desireto escape a narrow professionalism in music. A similar situationhas arisen in the field of domestic architecture, in the form ofan unorganized, but wide-spread reaction against the cheap and uglycommercialism which has dominated house construction and decoration ofthe more unpretentious class. This became articulate a few years agoin the large number of books and magazines devoted to house-planning, construction, decoration, furnishing, and garden-craft. The successwhich has attended these publications, and their marked influence, give some measure of the magnitude of this revolt. But now attention must be called to a significant, and somewhatsinister fact. The professional in these various fields of æstheticendeavour, has shown either indifference or active hostility towardall manner of amateur efforts at self-expression. Free verse arousedthe ridicule of the professors of metrics; the Little Theatre movementwas solemnly banned by such pundits as Belasco and Mrs. Fiske; theCommunity Chorus movement has invariably met with opposition andmisunderstanding from professional musicians; and with few exceptionsthe more influential architects have remained aloof from the effortto give skilled architectural assistance to those who cannot afford topay them ten per cent. Thus everywhere do we discover a deadening hand laid upon theself-expression of the democratic spirit through beauty. Its enemiesare of its own household; those who by nature and training shouldbe its helpers hinder it instead. Why do they do this? Because theirfastidious, æsthetic natures are outraged by a crudeness which theythemselves could easily refine away if they chose; because also theyrecoil at a lack of conformity to existing conventions--conventionsso hampering to the inner spirit of the Newness, that in order toincarnate at all it must of necessity sweep them aside. But in every field of æsthetic endeavour appears here and there aman or a woman with unclouded vision, who is able to see in theflounderings of untrained amateurs the stirrings of _demos_ from hisage-long sleep. These, often forsaking paths more profitable, lendtheir skilled assistance, not seeking to impose the ancient outwornforms upon the Newness, but by a transfusion of consciousnesspermitting it to create forms of its own. Such a one, in architecture, Louis Sullivan has proved himself; in music Harry Barnhart, who evokesthe very spirit of song from any random crowd. The _demos_ found voicefirst in the poetry of Walt Whitman who has a successor in VachelLindsay, the man who walked through Kansas, trading poetry for foodand lodging, teaching the farmers' sons and daughters to intonehis stirring odes to Pocahontas, General Booth, and Old John Brown. Isadora Duncan, Gordon Craig, Maeterlinck, Scriabine are perhapstoo remote from the spirit of democracy, too tinged with old-worldæstheticism, to be included in this particular category, but allare image-breakers, liberators, and have played their part in thepreparation of the field for an art of democracy. To the architect falls the task, in the new dispensation, of providingthe appropriate material environment for its new life. If he holds theold ideas and cherishes the old convictions current before the warhe can do nothing but reproduce their forms and fashions; forarchitecture, in the last analysis, is only the handwriting ofconsciousness on space, and materialism has written there already allthat it has to tell of its failure to satisfy the mind and heart ofman. However beautiful old forms may seem to him they will declaretheir inadequacy to generations free of that mist of familiarity whichnow makes life obscure. If, on the other hand, submitting himselfto the inspiration of the _demos_ he experiences a change ofconsciousness, he will become truly and newly creative. His problem, in other words, is not to interpret democracy in termsof existing idioms, be they classic or romantic, but to experiencedemocracy in his heart and let it create and determine its new formsthrough him. It is not for him to _impose_, it is for him to be_imposed upon_. "The passive Master lent his hand To the vast soul that o'er him planned" says Emerson in _The Problem_, a poem, which seems particularlyaddressed to architects, and which every one of them would do well tolearn by heart. If he is at a loss to know where to go and what to do in order to beplayed upon by these great forces let him direct his attention tothe army and the army camps. Here the spirit of democracy isalready incarnate. These soldiers, violently shaken free from theirenvironment, stripped of all but the elemental necessities of life;facing a sinister destiny beyond a human-shark-infested ocean, are today the fortunate of earth by reason of their realization ofbrotherhood, not as a beautiful theory, but as a blessed fact ofexperience. They will come back with ideas that they cannot utter, with memories that they cannot describe; they will have dreamed dreamsand seen visions, and their hearts will stir to potencies for whichmaterialism has not even a name. The future of the country will be in their young hands. Will theyre-create, from its ruins, the faithless and loveless feudalismfrom which the war set them free? No, they will seek only forself-expression, the expression of that aroused and indwelling spiritwhich shall create the new, the true democracy. And because it is aspiritual thing it will come clothed in beauty; that is, it will findits supreme expression through the forms of art. The architect whoassists in the emprise of weaving this garment will be supremelyblessed, but only he who has kept the vigil with prayer and fastingwill be supremely qualified. III AFTER THE WAR "When the old world is sterile And the ages are effete, He will from wrecks and sediment The fairer world complete. " _The World Soul_. Emerson. He whom the World Soul "forbids to despair" cannot but hope; and hewho hopes tries ever to imagine that "fairer world" yearning for birthbeyond this interval of blood and tears. Prophecy, to all but theanointed, is dangerous and uncertain, but even so, the author cannotforbear attempting to prevision the architecture likely to arise fromthe wrecks and sediment left by the war. As a basis for this forecastit is necessary first of all briefly to classify the expression of thebuilding impulse from what may be called the psychological point ofview. Broadly speaking, there are not five orders of architecture--norfifty--but only two: _Arranged_ and _Organic_. These correspond to thetwo terms of that "inevitable duality" which bisects life. Talent andgenius, reason and intuition, bromide and sulphite are some of thenames we know them by. Arranged architecture is reasoned and artificial; produced by talent, governed by taste. Organic architecture, on the other hand, is theproduct of some obscure inner necessity for self-expression whichis sub-conscious. It is as though Nature herself, through some humanorgan of her activity, had addressed herself to the service of thesons and daughters of men. Arranged architecture in its finest manifestations is the product ofa pride, a knowledge, a competence, a confidence staggering to behold. It seems to say of the works of Nature, "I'll show you a trick worthtwo of that. " For the subtlety of Nature's geometry, and for herinfinite variety and unexpectedness, Arranged architecture substitutesa Euclidian system of straight lines and (for the most part) circularcurves, assembled and arranged according to a definite logic ofits own. It is created but not creative; it is imagined but notimaginative. Organic architecture is both creative and imaginative. Itis non-Euclidian in the sense that it is higher-dimensional--that is, it suggests extension in directions and into regions where the spiritfinds itself at home, but of which the senses give no report to thebrain. [Illustration: PLATE VIII. IMAGINATIVE SKETCH BY HENRY P. KIRBY] To make the whole thing clearer it may be said that Arranged andOrganic architecture bear much the same relation to one another thata piano bears to a violin. A piano is an instrument that does not giveforth discords if one follows the rules. A violin requires absolutelyan ear--an inner rectitude. It has a way of betraying the man oftalent and glorifying the genius, becoming one with his body and hissoul. Of course it stands to reason that there is not always a hard and fastdifferentiation between these two orders of architecture, but thereis one sure way by which each may be recognized and known. If thefunction appears to have created the form, and if everywhere theform follows the function, changing as that changes, the building isOrganic; if on the contrary, "the house confines the spirit, " if thebuilding presents not a face but however beautiful a mask, it is anexample of Arranged architecture. The Gothic cathedrals of the "Heart of Europe"--now the place ofArmageddon--represent the most perfect and powerful incarnation ofthe Organic spirit in architecture. After the decadence of mediaevalfeudalism--synchronous with that of monasticism--the Arrangedarchitecture of the Renaissance acquired the ascendant; this wascoincident with the rise of humanism, when life became increasinglysecular. During the post-Renaissance, or scientific period, of whichthe war probably marks the close, there has been a confusion oftongues; architecture has spoken only alien or dead languages, learnedby rote. But in so far as it is anything at all, æsthetically, our architectureis Arranged, so if only by the operation of the law of opposites, oralternation, we might reasonably expect the next manifestation tobe Organic. There are other and better reasons, however, for suchexpectancy. Organic architecture is ever a flower of the religious spirit. Whenthe soul draws near to the surface of life, as it did in the twomystic centuries of the Middle Ages, it _organizes_ life; andarchitecture, along, with the other arts becomes truly creative. Theinforming force comes not so much _from_ man as _through_ him. Afterthe war that spirit of brotherhood, born in the camps--as Christ wasborn in a manger--and bred on the battlefields and in the trenches ofEurope, is likely to take on all the attributes of a new religion ofhumanity, prompting men to such heroisms and renunciations, excitingin them such psychic sublimations, as have characterized the greatreligious renewals of time past. If this happens it is bound to write itself on space in anarchitecture beautiful and new; one which "takes its shape andsun-color" not from the niggardly mind, but from the opulent heart. This architecture will of necessity be organic, the product not ofself-assertive personalities, but the work of the "Patient Daemon"organizing the nation into a spiritual democracy. The author is aware that in this point of view there is little ofthe "scientific spirit"; but science fails to reckon with the soul. Science advances facing backward, so what prevision can it have of amiraculous and divinely inspired future--or for the matter of that, of any future at all? The old methods and categories will no longeranswer; the orderly course of evolution has been violently interruptedby the earthquake of the war; igneous action has superseded aqueousaction. The casements of the human mind look out no longer uponfamiliar hills and valleys, but on a stark, strange, devastatedlandscape, the ploughed land of some future harvest of the years. It is the end of the Age, the _Kali Yuga_--the completion of a majorcycle; but all cycles follow the same sequence: after winter, Spring;and after the Iron Age, the Golden. The specific features of this organic, divinely inspired architectureof the Golden Age cannot of course be discerned by any one, any morethan the manner in which the Great Mystery will present itself anew toconsciousness. The most imaginative artist can imagine only interms of the already-existent; he can speak only the language he haslearned. If that language has been derived from mediaevalism, hewill let his fancy soar after the manner of Henry Kirby, in his_Imaginative Sketches_; if on the contrary he has learned to think interms of the classic vernacular, Otto Rieth's _Architectur-Skizzen_will suggest the sort of thing that he is likely to produce. Bothresults will be as remote as possible from future reality, for thereason that they are so near to present reality. And yet some germs ofthe future must be enfolded even in the present moment. The courseof wisdom is to seek them neither in the old romance nor in the newrationalism, but in the subtle and ever-changing spirit of the times. [Illustration: PLATE IX. ARCHITECTURAL SKETCH BY OTTO RIETH] The most modern note yet sounded in business, in diplomacy, in sociallife, is expressed by the phrase, "Live openly!" From every quarter, in regard to every manner of human activity, has come the cry, "Letin the light!" By a physical correspondence not the result ofcoincidence, but of the operation of an occult law, we have, in a veryreal sense, let in the light. In buildings of the latest type devotedto large uses, there has been a general abandonment of that "cellularsystem" of many partitions which produced the pepper-box exterior, infavour of great rooms serving diverse functions lit by vast areas ofglass. Although an increase of efficiency has dictated and determinedthese changes, this breaking down of barriers between human beingsand their common sharing of the light of day in fuller measure, is asymbol of the growth of brotherhood, and the search, by the soul, forspiritual light. Now if this fellowship and this quest gain volume and intensity, itsphysical symbols are bound to multiply and find ever more perfectforms of manifestation. So both as a practical necessity and as asymbol the most pregnant and profound, we are likely to witness inarchitecture the development of the House of Light, particularly ashuman ingenuity has made this increasingly practicable. Glass is a product still undergoing development, as are also thosedevices of metal for holding it in position and making the jointsweather tight. The accident and fire hazard has been largely overcomeby protecting the structural parts, by the use of wire glass, andby other ingenious devices. The author has been informed on goodauthority that shortly before the outbreak of the war a glass had beeninvented abroad, and made commercially practicable, which shut outthe heat rays, but admitted the light. The use of this glass wouldovercome the last difficulty--the equalization of temperatures--andmight easily result in buildings of an entirely novel type, theapproach to which is seen in the "pier and grill" style of exterior. This is being adopted not only for commercial buildings, but forothers of widely different function, on account of its manifestadvantages. Cass Gilbert's admirable studio apartment at 200 WestFifty-Seventh Street, New York, is a building of this type. In this seeking for sunlight in our cities, we will come to live onthe roofs more and more--in summer in the free air, in winter undervariformed shelters of glass. This tendency is already manifestingitself in those newest hotels whose roofs are gardens, convertibleinto skating ponds, with glazed belvideres for eating in all weathers. Nothing but ignorance and inanition stand in the way of utilization ofwaste roof spaces. People have lived on the roofs in the past, oftenenough, and will again. [Illustration: PLATE X. RODIN STUDIOS, 200 WEST 57TH STREET, NEW YORK] By shouldering ever upward for air and light, we have too oftenmade of the "downtown" districts cliff-bound canyons--"granite deepsopening into granite deeps. " This has been the result of no inherentnecessity, but of that competitive greed whose nemesis is ever tomiss the very thing it seeks. By intelligent co-operation, backedby legislation, the roads and sidewalks might be made to share thesunlight with the roofs. This could be achieved in two ways: by stepping back the façadesin successive stages--giving top lighting, terraces, and wonderfulincidental effects of light and shade--or by adjusting the height ofthe buildings to the width of their interspaces, making rows of tallbuildings alternate with rows of low ones, with occasional fullyisolated "skyscrapers" giving variety to the sky-line. These and similar problems of city planning have been worked outtheoretically with much minuteness of detail, and are known to everystudent of the science of cities, but very little of it all has beenrealized in a practical way--certainly not on this side of the water, where individual rights are held so sacred that a property owner maycommit any kind of an architectural nuisance so long as he confinesit to his own front yard. The strength of IS, the weakness of _shouldbe_, conflicting interests and legislative cowardice are responsiblefor the highly irrational manner in which our cities have grown great. The search for spiritual light in the midst of materialism findsunconscious symbolization in a way other than this seeking for thesun. It is in the amazing development of artificial illumination. Froma purely utilitarian standpoint there is almost nothing that cannotnow be accomplished with light, short of making the ether itselfluminiferous. The æsthetic development of this field, however, can besaid to have scarcely begun. The so recent San Francisco Expositionwitnessed the first successful effort of any importance to enhance theeffect of architecture by artificial illumination, and to use coloredlight with a view to its purely pictorial value. Though certainbuildings have since been illuminated with excellent effect, itremains true that the corset, chewing-gum, beer and automobilesky signs of our Great White Ways indicate the height to which ourimagination has risen in utilizing this Promethean gift in any butnecessary ways. Interior lighting, except negatively, has not beendealt with from the standpoint of beauty, but of efficiency; theengineer has preempted this field to the exclusion of the artist. All this is the result of the atrophy of that faculty to worship andwonder which alone induces the mood from which the creation of beautysprings. Light we regard only as a convenience "to see things by"instead of as the power and glory that it inherently is. Its intenseand potent vibrations and the rainbow glory of its colour beat at thedoor of consciousness in vain. When we awaken to these things we shallorganize light into a language of spontaneous emotion, just as fromsound music was organized. It is beside the purpose of this essay to attempt to trace theevolution of this new art form, made possible by modern invention, toindicate what phases it is likely to pass through on the way to whatperfections, but that it is bound to add a new glory to architectureis sure. This will come about in two ways: directly, by giving color, quality, subtlety to outdoor and indoor lighting, and indirectly byeducating the eye to color values, as the ear has been educated bymusic; thus creating a need for more color everywhere. As light is the visible symbol of an inner radiance, so is color thesign manual of happiness, of joy. Our cities are so dun and drab intheir outward aspects, by reason of the weight of care that burdensus down. We decry the happy irresponsibility of the savage, and thepatient contentment of the Oriental with his lot, but both are ableto achieve marvels of color in their environment beyond the compassof civilized man. The glory of mediaeval cathedral windows is a stillliving confutation of the belief that in those far-off times the humanheart was sad. Architecture is the index of the inner life of thosewho produced it, and whenever it is colorful that inner life containsan inner joy. In the coming Golden Age life will be joyous, and if it is joyous, colour will come into architecture again. Our psychological state evennow, alone prevents it, for we are rich in materials and methods tomake such polychromy possible. In an article in a recent numberof _The Architectural Record_, Mr. Leon V. Solon, writing from anentirely different point of view, divines this tendency, and expressesthe opinion that color is again renascent. This tendency is so marked, and this opinion is so shared that we may look with confidence towarda color-evolution in architectural art. The question of the character of what may be called the ornamentalmode of the architecture of the New Age is of all questions the mostobscure. Evolution along the lines of the already existent does nothelp us here, for we are utterly without any ornamental mode fromwhich a new and better might conceivably evolve. Nothing so betraysthe spiritual bankruptcy of the end of the Iron Age as this. The only light on this problem which we shall find, dwells in therealm of metaphysics rather than in the world of material reality. Ornament, more than any other element of architecture, is deeplypsychological, it is an externalization of an inner life. This isso true that any time-worn fragment out of the past when art wasa language can usually be assigned to its place and its period, soeloquent is it of a particular people and a particular time. Could wetherefore detect and understand the obscure movement of consciousnessin the modern world, we might gain some clue to the language it wouldlater find. It is clear that consciousness is moving away from its absorption inmateriality because it is losing faith in materialism. Clairvoyance, psychism, the recrudescence of mysticism, of occultism--these signsof the times are straws which show which way the wind now sets, andindicate that the modern mind is beginning to find itself at home inwhat is called _the fourth dimension_. The phrase is used here ina different sense from that in which the mathematician uses it, butoddly enough four-dimensional geometry provides the symbols bywhich some of these occult and mystical ideas may be realized by therational mind. One of the most engaging and inspiring of theseideas is that the personal self is a _projection_ on the plane ofmateriality of a metaphysical self, or soul, to which the personalself is related as is the shadow of an object to the objectitself. Now this coincides remarkably with the idea implicit in allhigher-space speculation, that the figures of solid geometryare projections on a space of three dimensions, of correspondingfour-dimensional forms. All ornament is in its last analysis geometrical--sometimes directlyso, as in the system developed by the Moors. Will the psychologyof the new dispensation find expression through some adaptation offour-dimensional geometry? The idea is far from absurd, by reason ofthe decorative quality inherent in many of the regular hypersolids offour-dimensional space when projected upon solid and plane space. If this suggestion seems too fanciful, there is still recourse to thelaw of analogy in finding the thing we seek. Every fresh religiousimpulse has always developed a symbology through which its truths areexpressed and handed down. These symbols, woven into the very textureof the life of the people, are embodied by them in their ornamentalmode. The sculpture of a Greek temple is a picture-book of Greekreligion; the ornamentation of a Gothic cathedral is a veritable bibleof the Christian faith. Almost all of the most beautiful and enduringornaments have first been sacred symbols; the swastika, the "Eye ofBuddha, " the "Shield of David, " the wheel, the lotus, and the cross. Now that "twilight of the world" following the war perhaps willwitness an _Avatara_--the coming of a World-Teacher who will rebuildon the one broad and ancient foundation that temple of Truth whichthe folly and ignorance of man is ever tearing down. A materialcounterpart of that temple will in that case afterward arise. Thuswill be born the architecture of the future; and the ornament of thatarchitecture will tell, in a new set of symbols, the story of therejuvenation of the world. In this previsioning of architecture after the war, the authormust not be understood to mean that these things will be realized_directly_ after. Architecture, from its very nature, is the mostsluggish of all the arts to respond to the natural magic of thequick-moving mind--it is Caliban, not Ariel. Following the war thenation will be for a time depleted of man-power, burdened withdebt, prostrate, exhausted. But in that time of reckoning will comereflection, penitence. "And I'll be wise hereafter, And seek for grace. What a thrice-double ass Was I, to take this drunkard for a god, And worship this dull fool. " With some such epilogue the curtain will descend on the great dramanow approaching a close. It will be for the younger generations, thereincarnate souls of those who fell in battle, to inaugurate the workof giving expression, in deathless forms of art, to the vision of that"fairer world" glimpsed now only as by lightning, in a dream. [Illustration] ESSAYS ORNAMENT FROM MATHEMATICS I THE WORLD ORDER No fact is better established than that we live in an _orderly_universe. The truth of this the world-war may for the moment, and tothe near and narrow view appear to contradict, but the sweep of humanhistory, and the stars in their courses, show an orderliness whichcannot be gainsaid. Now of that order, _number_--that is, mathematics--is the more thansymbol, it is the very thing itself. Whence this weltering tide oflife arose, and whither it flows, we know not; but that it is governedby mathematical law all of our knowledge in every field confirms. Wereit not so, knowledge itself would be impossible. It is because man isa counting animal that he is master over all the beasts of the earth. Number is the tune to which all things move, and as it were makemusic; it is in the pulses of the blood no less than in the starredcurtain of the sky. It is a necessary concomitant alike of the sharpbargain, the chemical experiment, and the fine frenzy of the poet. Music is number made audible; architecture is number made visible;nature geometrizes not alone in her crystals, but in her mostintricate arabesques. If number be indeed the universal solvent of all forms, sounds, motions, may we not make of it the basis of a new æsthetic--a loom onwhich to weave patterns the like of which the world has never seen? Toattempt such a thing--to base art on mathematics--argues (some oneis sure to say) an entire misconception of the nature and function ofart. "Art is a fountain of spontaneous emotion"--what, therefore, can it have in common with the proverbially driest, least spontaneouspreoccupation of the human mind? But the above definition concludeswith the assertion that this emotion reaches the soul "through variouschannels. " The transit can be effected only through some sensuouselement, some language (in the largest sense), and into this theelement of number and form must inevitably enter--mathematics is"there" and cannot be thought or argued away. [Illustration: PLATE XI. IMAGINARY COMPOSITION: THE PORTAL] But to make mathematics, and not the emotion which it expresses, theimportant thing, is not this to fall into the time-worn heresy ofart for art's sake, that is, art for form's sake--art for the sake ofmathematics? To this objection there is an answer, and as this answercontains the crux of the whole matter, embraces the proposition bywhich this thesis must stand or fall, it must be full and clear. What is it, in the last analysis, that all art which is notpurely personal and episodical strives to express? Is it not the_world-order_?--the very thing that religion, philosophy, science, strive according to their different natures and methods to express?The perception of the world-order by the artist arouses an emotion towhich he can give vent only in terms of number; but number is itselfthe most abstract expression of the world order. The form and contentof art are therefore not different, but the same. A deep sense of thisprobably inspired Pater's famous saying that all art aspires towardthe condition of music; for music, from its very nature, is theworld-order uttered in terms of number, in a sense and to a degree notattained by any other art. This is not mere verbal juggling. We have suffered so long from anart-phase which exalts the personal, as opposed to the cosmic, thatwe have lost sight of the fact that the great arts of antiquity, preceding the Renaissance, insisted on the cosmic, or impersonalaspect, and on this alone, just as does Oriental art, even today. The secret essence, the archetypal idea of the subject is thepreoccupation of the Oriental artist, as it was of the Egyptian, and of the Greek. We of the West today seek as eagerly to fix theaccidental and ephemeral aspect--the shadow of a particular cloud upona particular landscape; the smile on the face of a specific person, ina recognizable room, at a particular moment of time. Of symbolic art, of universal emotion expressing itself in terms which are universal, we have very little to show. The reason for this is first, our love for, and understanding of, the concrete and personal: it is the _world-aspect_ and not the_world-order_ which interests us; and second, the inadequacies ofcurrent forms of art expression to render our sense of the eternalsecret heart of things as it presents itself to our young eyes. Confronted with this difficulty, we have shirked it, and our ambitionhas shrunk to the portrayal of those aspects which shuffle our povertyout of sight. It is not a poverty of technique--we are dexterousenough; nor is it a poverty of invention--we are clever enough; it isthe poverty of the spiritual bankrupt trying to divert attention by aprodigal display of the smallest of small change. Reference is made here only to the arts of space; the arts oftime--music, poetry, and the (written) drama--employing vehicles moreflexible, have been more fortunate, though they too suffer in somedegree from worshipping, instead of the god of order, the god ofchance. The corrective of this is a return to first principles: principles sofundamental that they suffer no change, however new and various theirillustrations. These principles are embodied in number, and one mightalmost say nowhere else in such perfection. Mathematics is not thedry and deadly thing that our teaching of it and the uses we put itto have made it seem. Mathematics is the handwriting on the humanconsciousness of the very Spirit of Life itself. Others beforePythagoras discovered this, and it is the discovery which awaits ustoo. To indicate the way in which mathematics might be made to yield theelements of a new æsthetic is beyond the province of this essay, beingbeyond the compass of its author, but he makes bold to take a singlephase: ornament, and to deal with it from this point of view. The ornament now in common use has been gathered from the dust-binof the ages. What ornamental _motif_ of any universality, worth, orimportance is less than a hundred years old? We continue to use thehoneysuckle, the acanthus, the fret, the egg and dart, not becausethey are appropriate to any use we put them to, but because they arebeautiful _per se_. Why are they beautiful? It is not because theyare highly conventionalized representations of natural forms whichare themselves beautiful, but because they express cosmic truths. Thehoneysuckle and the acanthus leaf, for example, express the ideaof successive impulses, mounting, attaining a maximum, anddescending--expanding from some focus of force in the manner universalthroughout nature. Science recognizes in the spiral an archetypalform, whether found in a whirlpool or in a nebula. A fret is a seriesof highly conventionalized spirals: translate it from angular tocurved and we have the wave-band; isolate it and we have the volute. Egg and dart are phallic emblems, female and male; or, if you prefer, as ellipse and straight line, they are symbols of finite existencecontrasted with infinity. [Figure 1. ] [Illustration: Figure 1. ] Suppose that we determine to divest ourselves of these and otherprecious inheritances, not because they have lost their beauty andmeaning, but rather on account of their manifold associations with apast which the war makes suddenly more remote than slow centuries havedone; suppose that we determine to supplant these symbols with othersno less charged with beauty and meaning, but more directly drawn fromthe inexhaustible well of mathematical truth--how shall we set towork? We need not _set_ to work, because we have done that already, we arealways doing it, unknowingly, and without knowing the reason why. Allornamentalists are subjective mathematicians--an amazing statement, perhaps, but one susceptible of confirmation in countless amusingways, of which two will be shown. [Illustration: Figure 2. ] Consider first your calendar--your calendar whose commonplace face, having yielded you information as to pay day, due day, and holiday, you obliterate at the end of each month without a qualm, oblivious tothe fact that were your interests less sordid and personal it wouldspeak to you of that order which pervades the universe; would make yourealize something of the music of the spheres. For on that familiarcheckerboard of the days are numerical arrangements which aremysterious, "magical"; each separate number is as a spider at thecenter of an amazing mathematical web. That is to say, every numberis discovered to be half of the sum of the pairs of numbers whichsurround it, vertically, horizontally, and diagonally: all of thepairs add to the same sum, and the central number divides this sum bytwo. A graphic indication of this fact on the calendar face by meansof a system of intersecting lines yields that form of classic grilledear to the heart of every tyro draughtsman. [Figure 2. ] Here isan evident relation between mathematical fact and ornamental mode, whether the result of accident, or by reason of some subconsciousconnection between the creative and the reasoning part of the mind. To show, by means of an example other than this acrostic of the days, how the pattern-making instinct follows unconsciously in the groovetraced out for it by mathematics, the attention of the reader isdirected to the design of the old Colonial bed-spread shown in Figure3. Adjacent to this, in the upper right hand corner, is a magicsquare of four. That is, all of the columns of figures of which it iscomposed: vertical, horizontal and diagonal add to the same sum: 34. An analysis of this square reveals the fact that it is made up ofthe figures of two different orders of counting: the ordinary order, beginning at the left hand upper corner and reading across and down inthe usual way, and the reverse-ordinary, beginning at the lower righthand corner and reading across and up. The figures in the four centralcells and in the four outside corner cells are discovered to belongin the first category, and the remaining figures in the second. Nowif the ordinary order cells be represented by white, and the reverseordinary by black, just such a pattern has been created as forms thedecorative motif of the quilt. It may be claimed that these two examples of a relation betweenornament and mathematics are accidental and therefore prove nothing, but they at least furnish a clue which the artist would be foolish notto follow up. Let him attack his problem this time directly, andsee if number may not be made to yield the thing he seeks: namely, space-rhythms which are beautiful and new. We know that there is a beauty inherent in _order_, that necessity ofone sort or another is the parent of beauty. Beauty in architectureis largely the result of structural necessity; beauty in ornamentmay spring from a necessity which is numerical. It is clear that thearrangement of numbers in a magic square is necessitous--they must beplaced in a certain way in order that the summation of every columnshall be the same. The problem then becomes to make that necessityreveal itself to the eye. Now most magic squares contain a _magicpath_, discovered by following the numbers from cell to cell intheir natural order. Because this is a necessitous line it should notsurprise us that it is frequently beautiful as well. [Illustration: Figure 3. ] The left hand drawing in Figure 4 represents the smallest aggregationof numbers that is capable of magic square arrangement. Each vertical, horizontal, and corner diagonal column adds up to 15, and the sum ofany two opposite numbers is 10, which is twice the center number. Themagic path is the endless line developed by following, free hand, thenumbers in their natural order, from 1 to 9 and back to 1 again. Thedrawing at the right of Figure 4 is this same line translated intoornament by making an interlace of it, and filling in the largerinterstices with simple floral forms. This has been executed in whiteplaster and made to perform the function of a ventilating grille. Now the number of magic squares is practically limitless, and whileall of them do not yield magic lines of the beauty of this one, somecontain even richer decorative possibilities. But there are also otherways of deriving ornament from magic squares, already hinted at in thediscussion of the Colonial quilt. [Illustration: Figure 4. ] [Illustration: Figure 5. ] Magic squares of an even number of cells are found sometimes toconsist of numbers arranged not only in combinations of the ordinaryand the reverse ordinary orders of counting, but involving two othersas well: the reverse of the ordinary (beginning at the upper righthand, across, and down) and the reversed inverse, (beginning at thelower left hand, across, and up). If, in such a magic square, a simplegraphic symbol be substituted for the numbers belonging to each order, pattern spontaneously springs to life. Figures 5 and 6 exemplify themethod, and Figures 7 and 8 the translation of some of these squaresinto richer patterns by elaborating the symbols while respecting theirarrangement. By only a slight stretch of the imagination the beautifulpierced stone screen from Ravenna shown in Figure 9 might be conceivedof as having been developed according to this method, although ofcourse it was not so in fact. Some of the arrangements shown in Figure6 are closely paralleled in the acoustic figures made by means ofmusical tones with sand, on a sheet of metal or glass. [Illustration: Figure 6. ] [Illustration: Figure 7. ] The celebrated Franklin square of 16 cells can be made to yield abeautiful pattern by designating some of the lines which give thesummation of 2056 by different symbols, as shown in Figure 10. A freetranslation of this design into pattern brickwork is indicated inFigure 11. If these processes seem unduly involved and elaborate for theachievement of a simple result--like burning the house down inorder to get roast pig--there are other more simple ways of derivingornament from mathematics, for the truths of number find direct andperfect expression in the figures of geometry. The squaring ofa number--the raising of it to its second power--finds graphicexpression in the plane figure of the square; and the cubing of anumber--the raising of it to its third power--in the solid figureof the cube. Now squares and cubes have been recognized from timeimmemorial as useful ornamental motifs. Other elementary geometricalfigures, making concrete to the eye the truths of abstract number, maybe dealt with by the designer in such a manner as to produce ornamentthe most varied and profuse. Moorish ceilings, Gothic window tracery, Grolier bindings, all indicate the richness of the field. [Illustration: Figure 8. ] [Illustration: PLATE XII. IMAGINARY COMPOSITION. THE BALCONY] [Illustration: Figure 9. ] Suppose, for example, that we attempt to deal decoratively which suchsimple figures as the three lowest Platonic solids--the tetrahedron, the hexahedron, and the octahedron. [Figure 12. ] Their projection on aplane yields a rhythmical division of space, because of their inherentsymmetry. These projections would correspond to the network of linesseen in looking through a glass paperweight of the given shape, thelines being formed by the joining of the several faces. Figure 13represents ornamental bands developed in this manner. The dodecahedronand icosahedron, having more faces, yield more intricate patterns, andthere is no limit to the variety of interesting designs obtainable bythese direct and simple means. [Illustration: Figure 10. ] If the author has been successful thus far in his exposition, itshould be sufficiently plain that from the inexhaustible well ofmathematics fresh beauty may be drawn. But what of its significance?Ornament must _mean something_; it must have some relation to thedominant ideation of the day; it must express the psychological mood. What is the psychological mood? Ours is an age of transition; we livein a changing world. On the one hand we witness the breaking up ofmany an old thought crystal, on the other we feel the pressure ofthose forces which shall create the new. What is nature's firstvisible creative act? The formation of a geometrical crystal. Theartist should take this hint, and organize geometry into a newornamental mode; by so doing he will prove himself to be in relationto the _anima mundi_. It is only by the establishment of such arelation that new beauty comes to birth in the world. [Illustration: Figure 11. ] Ornament in its primitive manifestations is geometrical rather thannaturalistic. This is in a manner strange, that the abstract andmetaphysical thing should precede the concrete and sensuous. It wouldbe natural to suppose that man would first imitate the things whichsurround him, but the most cursory acquaintance with primitive artshows that he is much more apt to crudely geometrize. Now it isnot necessary to assume that we are to revert to the conditions ofsavagery in order to believe that in this matter of a sound æstheticwe must begin where art has always begun--with number and geometry. Nevertheless there is a subtly ironic view which one is justified inholding in regard to quite obvious aspects of American life, in thelight of which that life appears to have rather more in common withsavagery than with culture. [Illustration: Figure 12. ] [Illustration: Figure 13. ] The submersion of scholarship by athletics in our colleges is a casein point, the contest of muscles exciting much more interest andenthusiasm than any contest of wits. We persist in the savage habit ofdevouring the corpses of slain animals long after the necessity for itis past, and some even murder innocent wild creatures, giving to theirferocity the name of sport. Our women bedeck themselves with furs andfeathers, the fruit of mercenary and systematic slaughter; we performorgiastic dances to the music of horns and drums and cymbals--inshort, we have the savage psychology without its vital religiousinstinct and its sure decorative sense for color and form. But this is of course true only of the surface and sunlit shadows ofthe great democratic tide. Its depths conceal every kind of subtletyand sophistication, high endeavour, and a response to beauty andwisdom of a sort far removed from the amoeba stage of developmentabove sketched. Of this latter stage the simple figures of Euclidianplane and solid geometry--figures which any child can understand--arethe appropriate symbols, but for that other more developed state ofconsciousness--less apparent but more important--these will not do. Something more sophisticated and recondite must be sought for if weare to have an ornamental mode capable of expressing not only thesimplicity but the complexity of present-day psychology. This need notbe sought for outside the field of geometry, but within it, and byan extension of the methods already described. There is an altogethermodern development of the science of mathematics: the geometry offour dimensions. This represents the emancipation of the mind fromthe tyranny of mere appearances; the turning of consciousness in anew direction. It has therefore a high symbolical significance astypifying that movement away from materialism which is so marked aphenomenon of the times. Of course to those whose notion of the fourth dimension is akin tothat of a friend of the author who described it as "a wagon-loadof bung-holes, " the idea of getting from it any practical advantagecannot seem anything but absurd. There is something about this formof words "the fourth dimension" which seems to produce a sort ofmental-phobia in certain minds, rendering them incapable of perceptionor reason. Such people, because they cannot stick their cane into itcontend that the fourth dimension has no mathematical or philosophicalvalidity. As ignorance on this subject is very general, the followingessay will be devoted to a consideration of the fourth dimension andits relation to a new ornamental mode. [Illustration] II THE FOURTH DIMENSION The subject of the fourth dimension is not an easy one to understand. Fortunately the artist in design does not need to penetrate far intothese fascinating halls of thought in order to reap the advantagewhich he seeks. Nevertheless an intention of mind upon this"fairy-tale of mathematics" cannot fail to enlarge his intellectualand spiritual horizons, and develop his imagination--that finestinstrument in all his chest of tools. By way of introduction to the subject Prof. James Byrnie Shaw, in anarticle in the _Scientific Monthly_, has this to say: Up to the period of the Reformation algebraic equations of more than the third degree were frowned upon as having no real meaning, since there is no fourth power or dimension. But about one hundred years ago this chimera became an actual existence, and today it is furnishing a new world to physics, in which mechanics may become geometry, time be co-ordinated with space, and every geometric theorem in the world is a physical theorem in the experimental world in study in the laboratory. Startling indeed it is to the scientist to be told that an artificial dream-world of the mathematician is more real than that he sees with his galvanometers, ultra-microscopes, and spectroscopes. It matters little that he replies, "Your four-dimensional world is only an analytic explanation of my phenomena, " for the fact remains a fact, that in the mathematician's four-dimensional space there is a space not derived in any sense of the term as a residue of experience, however powerful a distillation of sensations or perceptions be resorted to, for it is not contained at all in the fluid that experience furnishes. It is a product of the creative power of the mathematical mind, and its objects are real in exactly the same way that the cube, the square, the circle, the sphere or the straight line. We are enabled to see with the penetrating vision of the mathematical insight that no less real and no more real are these fantastic forms of the world of relativity than those supposed to be uncreatable or indestructible in the play of the forces of nature. These "fantastic forms" alone need concern the artist. If by somepotent magic he can precipitate them into the world of sensuous imagesso that they make music to the eye, he need not even enter into thequestion of their reality, but in order to achieve this transmutationhe should know something, at least, of the strange laws of theirbeing, should lend ear to a fairy-tale in which each theorem is aparadox, and each paradox a mathematical fact. He must conceive of a space of four mutually independent directions; aspace, that is, having a direction at right angles to every directionthat we know. We cannot point to this, we cannot picture it, but wecan reason about it with a precision that is all but absolute. In sucha space it would of course be possible to establish four axial lines, all intersecting at a point, and all mutually at right angles with oneanother. Every hyper-solid of four-dimensional space has these fouraxes. The regular hyper-solids (analogous to the Platonic solids ofthree-dimensional space) are the "fantastic forms" which will proveuseful to the artist. He should learn to lure them forth along themaxis lines. That is, let him build up his figures, space by space, developing them from lower spaces to higher. But since he cannot enterthe fourth dimension, and build them there, nor even the third--if heconfines himself to a sheet of paper--he must seek out some form of_representation_ of the higher in the lower. This is a process withwhich he is already acquainted, for he employs it every time he makesa perspective drawing, which is the representation of a solid ona plane. All that is required is an extension of the method: ahyper-solid can be represented in a figure of three dimensions, andthis in turn can be projected on a plane. The achieved result willconstitute a perspective of a perspective--the representation of arepresentation. This may sound obscure to the uninitiated, and it is true that theplane projection of some of the regular hyper-solids are staggeringlyintricate affairs, but the author is so sure that this matter lies sowell within the compass of the average non-mathematical mind that heis willing to put his confidence to a practical test. It is proposed to develop a representation of the tesseract orhyper-cube on the paper of this page, that is, on a space of twodimensions. Let us start as far back as we can: with a point. This point, a, [Figure 14] is conceived to move in a direction w, developing the line a b. This line next moves in a direction at rightangles to w, namely, x, a distance equal to its length, formingthe square a b c d. Now for the square to develop into a cube by amovement into the third dimension it would have to move in a directionat right angles to both w and x, that is, out of the plane of thepaper--away from it altogether, either up or down. This is notpossible, of course, but the third direction can be _represented_ onthe plane of the paper. [Illustration: Figure 14. TWO PROJECTIONS OF THE HYPERCUBE ORTESSERACT, AND THEIR TRANSLATION INTO ORNAMENT. ] Let us represent it as diagonally downward toward the right, namely, y. In the y direction, then, and at a distance equal to the lengthof one of the sides of the square, another square is drawn, a'b'c'd', representing the original square at the end of its movement into thethird dimension; and because in that movement the bounding points ofthe square have traced out lines (edges), it is necessary to connectthe corresponding corners of the two squares by means of lines. Thiscompletes the figure and achieves the representation of a cube on aplane by a perfectly simple and familiar process. Its six facesare easily identified by the eye, though only two of them appear assquares owing to the exigencies of representation. Now for a leap into the abyss, which won't be so terrifying, sinceit involves no change of method. The cube must move into the fourthdimension, developing there a hyper-cube. This is impossible, forthe reason the cube would have to move out of our spacealtogether--three-dimensional space will not contain a hyper-cube. Butneither is the cube itself contained within the plane of the paper;it is only there _represented_. The y direction had to be imagined andthen arbitrarily established; we can arbitrarily establish the fourthdirection in the same way. As this is at right angles to y, itsindication may be diagonally downward and to the left--the directionz. As y is known to be at right angles both to w and to x, z is atright angles to all three, and we have thus established the fourmutually perpendicular axes necessary to complete the figure. The cube must now move in the z direction (the fourth dimension)a distance equal to the length of one of its sides. Just as we didpreviously in the case of the square, we draw the cube in its newposition (ABB'D'C'C) and also as before we connect each apex of thefirst cube with the corresponding apex of the other, because each ofthese points generates a line (an edge), each line a plane, andeach plane a solid. This is the tesseract or hyper-cube in planeprojection. It has the 16 points, 32 lines, and 8 cubes known tocompose the figure. These cubes occur in pairs, and may be readilyidentified. [1] The tesseract as portrayed in A, Figure 14, is shown according to theconventions of oblique, or two-point perspective; it can equally berepresented in a manner correspondent to parallel perspective. Theparallel perspective of a cube appears as a square inside anothersquare, with lines connecting the four vertices of the one with thoseof the other. The third dimension (the one beyond the plane of thepaper) is here conceived of as being not beyond the boundaries of thefirst square, but _within_ them. We may with equal propriety conceiveof the fourth dimension as a "beyond which is within. " In that casewe would have a rendering of the tesseract as shown in B, Figure 14:a cube within a cube, the space between the two being occupied by sixtruncated pyramids, each representing a cube. The large outside cuberepresents the original generating cube at the beginning of its motioninto the fourth dimension, and the small inside cube represents it atthe end of that motion. [Illustration: PLATE XIII. IMAGINARY COMPOSITION: THE AUDIENCECHAMBER] These two projections of the tesseract upon plane space are not theonly ones possible, but they are typical. Some idea of the variety ofaspects may be gained by imagining how a nest of inter-related cubes(made of wire, so as to interpenetrate), combined into a singlesymmetrical figure of three-dimensional space, would appearfrom several different directions. Each view would yield newspace-subdivisions, and all would be rhythmical--susceptible, therefore, of translation into ornament. C and D represent suchtranslations of A and B. In order to fix these unfamiliar ideas more firmly in the reader'smind, let him submit himself to one more exercise of the creativeimagination, and construct, by a slightly different method, arepresentation of a hexadecahedroid, or 16-hedroid, on a plane. Thisregular solid of four-dimensional space consists of sixteen cells, each a regular tetrahedron, thirty-two triangular faces, twenty-fouredges and eight vertices. It is the correlative of the octahedron ofthree-dimensional space. First it is necessary to establish our four axes, all mutuallyat right angles. If we draw three lines intersecting at a point, subtending angles of 60 degrees each, it is not difficult toconceive of these lines as being at right angles with one anotherin three-dimensional space. The fourth axis we will assume to passvertically through the point of intersection of the three lines, so that we see it only in cross-section, that is, as a point. It isimportant to remember that all of the angles made by the four axesare right angles--a thing possible only in a space of four dimensions. Because the 16-hedroid is a symmetrical hyper-solid all of itseight apexes will be equidistant from the centre of a containinghyper-sphere, whose "surface" these will intersect at symmetricallydisposed points. These apexes are established in our representation bydescribing a circle--the plane projection of the hyper-sphere--aboutthe central point of intersection of the axes. (Figure 15, left. )Where each of these intersects the circle an apex of the 16-hedroidwill be established. From each apex it is now necessary to drawstraight lines to every other, each line representing one edge of thesixteen tetrahedral cells. But because the two ends of the fourth axisare directly opposite one another, and opposite the point of sight, all of these lines fail to appear in the left hand diagram. Ittherefore becomes necessary to _tilt_ the figure slightly, bringinginto view the fourth axis, much foreshortened, and with it, all of thelines which make up the figure. The result is that projection of the16-hedroid shown at the right of Figure 15. [2] Here is no fortuitousarrangement of lines and areas, but the "shadow" cast by anarchetypal, figure of higher space upon the plane of our materiality. It is a wonder, a mystery, staggering to the imagination, contradictory to experience, but as well entitled to a place at thehigh court of reason as are any of the more familiar figures withwhich geometry deals. Translated into ornament it produces such anall-over pattern as is shown in Figure 16 and the design which adornsthe curtains at right and left of pl. XIII. There are also otherinteresting projections of the 16-hedroid which need not be gone intohere. [Illustration: Figure 15. DIRECT VIEW AXES SHOWN BY HEAVY LINES TILTEDVIEW APEXES SHOWN BY CIRCLES THE 16-HEDROID IN PLANE PROJECTION] For if the author has been successful in his exposition up tothis point, it should be sufficiently plain that the geometryof four-dimensions is capable of yielding fresh and interestingornamental motifs. In carrying his demonstration farther, and inmultiplying illustrations, he would only be going over ground alreadycovered in his book _Projective Ornament_ and in his second Scammonlecture. Of course this elaborate mechanism for producing quite obvious andeven ordinary decorative motifs may appear to some readers likeGoldberg's nightmare mechanics, wherein the most absurd and intricatedevices are made to accomplish the most simple ends. The author isundisturbed by such criticisms. If the designs dealt with in thischapter are "obvious and even ordinary" they are so for the reasonthat they were chosen less with an eye to their interest and beautythan as lending themselves to development and demonstration by anorderly process which should not put too great a tax upon the patienceand intelligence of the reader. Four-dimensional geometry yieldsnumberless other patterns whose beauty and interest could not possiblybe impeached--patterns beyond the compass of the cleverest designerunacquainted with projective geometry. [Illustration: Figure 16. ] The great need of the ornamentalist is this or some other solidfoundation. Lacking it, he has been forced to build either on theshifting sands of his own fancy, or on the wrecks and sediment of thepast. Geometry provides this sure foundation. We may have to work hardand dig deep, but the results will be worth the effort, for only onsuch a foundation can arise a temple which is beautiful and strong. In confirmation of his general contention that the basis of alleffective decoration is geometry and number, the author, in closing, desires to direct the reader's attention to Figure 17 a slightlymodified rendering of the famous zodiacal ceiling of the Temple ofDenderah, in Egypt. A sun and its corona have been substituted for thezodiacal signs and symbols which fill the centre of the original, forexcept to an Egyptologist these are meaningless. In all essentials thedrawing faithfully follows the original--was traced, indeed, from ameasured drawing. [Illustration: Figure 17. CEILING DECORATION FROM THE TEMPLE OFDENDERAH] Here is one of the most magnificent decorative schemes in the wholeworld, arranged with a feeling for balance and rhythm exceeding thepower of the modern artist, and executed with a mastery beyond thecompass of a modern craftsman. The fact that first forces itself uponthe beholder is that the thing is so obviously mathematical in itsrhythms, that to reduce it to terms of geometry and number is a matterof small difficulty. Compare the frozen music of these rhymed andlinked figures with the herded, confused, and cluttered compositionsof even our best decorative artists, and argument becomesunnecessary--the fact stands forth that we have lost somethingprecious and vital out of art of which the ancients possessed thesecret. It is for the restoration of these ancient verities and the discoveryof new spatial rhythms--made possible by the advance of mathematicalscience--that the author pleads. Artists, architects, designers, instead of chewing the cud of current fashion, come into thesepastures new! [Illustration] [Footnote 1: The eight cubes in A, Figure 14, are as follows:abb'd'c'c; ABB'D'C'C; abdDCA; a'b'd'D'C'A'; abb'B'A'A; cdd'D'C'C;bb'd'D'DB; aa'c'C'CA. ] [Footnote 2: The sixteen cells of the hexadehahedroid are as follows:ABCD: A'B'C'D': AB'C'D': A'BCD: AB'CD: A'BC'D: ABC'D: A'B'CD': ABCD':A'B'C'D: ABC'D': A'B'CD: A'BC'D: AB'CD': A'BCD': AB'C'D. ] HARNESSING THE RAINBOW Reference was made in an antecedent essay to an art of light--ofmobile color--an abstract language of thought and emotion which shouldspeak to consciousness through the eye, as music speaks through theear. This is an art unborn, though quickening in the womb of thefuture. The things that reflect light have been organized æstheticallyinto the arts of architecture, painting, and sculpture, but lightitself has never been thus organized. And yet the scientific development and control of light has reached astage which makes this new art possible. It awaits only the advent ofthe creative artist. The manipulation of light is now in the handsof the illuminating engineers and its exploitation (in other thannecessary ways) in the hands of the advertisers. Some results of their collaboration are seen in the sky signs of upperBroadway, in New York, and of the lake front, in Chicago. A carnivalof contending vulgarities, showing no artistry other than the mostpuerile, these displays nevertheless yield an effect of amazingbeauty. This is on account of an occult property inherent in thenature of light--_it cannot be vulgarized_. If the manipulation oflight were delivered into the hands of the artist, and dedicatedto noble ends, it is impossible to overestimate the augmentation ofbeauty that would ensue. For light is a far more potent medium than sound. The sphere of soundis the earth-sphere; the little limits of our atmosphere mark theuttermost boundaries to which sound, even the most strident canpossibly prevail. But the medium of light is the ether, which linksus with the most distant stars. May not this serve as a symbol of thepotency of light to usher the human spirit into realms of being at thedoors of which music itself shall beat in vain? Or if we compare theuniverse accessible to sight with that accessible to sound--theplight of the blind in contrast to that of the deaf--there is the samediscrepancy; the field of the eye is immensely richer, more variousand more interesting than that of the ear. The difficulty appears to consist in the inferior impressionabilityof the eye to its particular order of beauty. To the average mancolor--as color--has nothing significant to say: to him grass isgreen, snow is white, the sky blue; and to have his attention drawn tothe fact that sometimes grass is yellow, snow blue, and the sky green, is disconcerting rather than illuminating. It is only when his retinais assaulted by some splendid sunset or sky-encircling rainbow thathe is able to disassociate the idea of color from that of form andsubstance. Even the artist is at a disadvantage in this respect, whencompared with the musician. Nothing in color knowledge and analysisanalogous to the established laws of musical harmony is part of theequipment of the average artist; he plays, as it were, by ear. Thescientist, on the other hand, though he may know the spectrum fromend to end, and its innumerable modifications, values this "rainbowpromise of the Lord" not for its own beautiful sake but as a meansto other ends than those of beauty. But just as the art of musichas developed the ear into a fine and sensitive instrument ofappreciation, so an analogous art of light would educate the eye tonuances of color to which it is now blind. [Illustration: PLATE XIV. SONG AND LIGHT: AN APPROACH TOWARD "COLORMUSIC"] It is interesting to speculate as to the particular form in which thisnew art will manifest itself. The question is perhaps already answeredin the "color organ, " the earliest of which was Bambridge Bishop's, exhibited at the old Barnum's Museum--before the days of electriclight--and the latest A. W. Rimington's. Both of these instruments werebuilt upon a supposed correspondence between a given scale of colors, and the musical chromatic scale; they were played from a musical scoreupon an organ keyboard. This is sufficiently easy and sufficientlyobvious, and has been done, with varying success in one way oranother, time and again, but its very ease and obviousness should giveus pause. It may well be questioned whether any arbitrary and literaltranslation, even though practicable, of a highly complex, intenselymobile art, unfolding in time, as does music, into a correspondentlight and color expression, is the best approach to a new art ofmobile color. There is a deep and abiding conviction, justified by thehistory of æsthetics, that each art-form must progress from itsown beginnings and unfold in its own unique and characteristic way. Correspondences between the arts--such a correspondence, forexample, as inspired the famous saying that architecture is frozenmusic--reveal themselves usually only after the sister arts haveattained an independent maturity. They owe their origin to thatunderlying unity upon which our various modes of sensuous perceptionact as a refracting medium, and must therefore be taken for granted. Each art, like each individual, is unique and singular; in thissingularity dwells its most thrilling appeal. We are likely to misslight's crowning glory, and the rainbow's most moving message to thesoul if we preoccupy ourselves too exclusively with the identitiesexisting between music and color; it is rather their points ofdifference which should first be dwelt upon. Let us accordingly consider the characteristic differences betweenthe two sense-categories to which sound and light--music andcolor--respectively belong. This resolves itself into a comparisonbetween time and space. The characteristic thing about time issuccession--hence the very idea of music, which is in time, involvesperpetual change. The characteristic of space, on the other hand, issimultaneousness--in space alone perpetual immobility would reign. That is why architecture, which is pre-eminently the art of space, isof all the arts the most static. Light and color are essentiallyof space, and therefore an art of mobile colour should never lack acertain serenity and repose. A "tune" played on a color organ is onlydistressing. If there is a workable correspondence between the musicalart and an art of mobile color, it will be found in the domain ofharmony which involves the idea of simultaneity, rather than inmelody, which is pure succession. This fundamental difference betweentime and space cannot be over-emphasized. A musical note prolonged, becomes at last scarcely tolerable; while a beautiful color, like theblue of the sky, we can enjoy all day and every day. The changing huesof a sunset, are _andante_ if referred to a musical standard, but tothe eye they are _allegretto_--we would have them pass less swiftlythan they do. The winking, chasing, changing lights of illuminatedsky-signs are only annoying, and for the same reason. The eye longsfor repose in some serene radiance or stately sequence, while the eardelights in contrast and continual change. It may be that as the eyebecomes more educated it will demand more movement and complexity, buta certain stillness and serenity are of the very nature of light, as movement and passion are of the very nature of sound. Music is aseeking--"love in search of a word"; light is a finding--a "divinecovenant. " With attention still focussed on the differences rather than thesimilarities between the musical art and a new art of mobile color, we come next to the consideration of the matter of form. Now formis essentially of space: we speak about the "form" of a musicalcomposition, but it is in a more or less figurative and metaphysicalsense, not as a thing concrete and palpable, like the forms of space. It would be foolish to forego the advantage of linking up form withcolour, as there is opportunity to do. Here is another golden ball tojuggle with, one which no art purely in time affords. Of course it isknown that musical sounds weave invisible patterns in the air, and torender these patterns perceptible to the eye may be one of the moreremote and recondite achievements of our uncreated art. Meantime, though we have the whole treasury of natural forms to draw from, ofthese we can only properly employ such as are _abstract_. The reasonfor this is clear to any one who conceives of an art of mobile color, not as a moving picture show--a thing of quick-passing concreteimages, to shock, to startle, or to charm--but as a rich and variouslanguage in which light, proverbially the symbol of the spirit, ismade to speak, through the senses, some healing message to the soul. For such a consummation, "devoutly to be wished, " natural forms--formsabounding in every kind of association with that world of materialityfrom which we would escape--are out of place; recourse must be hadrather to abstract forms, that is, geometrical figures. And becausethe more remote these are from the things of sense, from knowledge andexperience, the projected figures of four-dimensional geometry wouldlend themselves to these uses with an especial grace. Color withoutform is as a soul without a body; yet the body of light must bewithout any taint of materiality. Four-dimensional forms are asimmaterial as anything that could be imagined and they could be madeto serve the useful purpose of separating colors one from another, as lead lines do in old cathedral windows, than which nothing morebeautiful has ever been devised. Coming now to the consideration, not of differences, but similarities, it is clear that a correspondence can be established between thecolors of the spectrum and the notes of a musical scale. That is, the spectrum, considered as the analogue of a musical octave canbe subdivided into twelve colors which may be representative ofthe musical chromatic scale of twelve semi-tones: the very word, _chromatic_, being suggestive of such a correspondence between soundand light. The red end of the spectrum would naturally relate to thelow notes of the musical scale, and the violet end to the high, byreason of the relative rapidity of vibration in each case; for theoctave of a musical note sets the air vibrating twice as rapidly asdoes the note itself, and roughly speaking, the same is true of theend colors of the spectrum with relation to the ether. But assuming that a color scale can be established which would yielda color correlative to any musical note or chord, there still remainsthe matter of _values_ to be dealt with. In the musical scale there isa practical equality of values: one note is as potent as another. Ina color scale, on the other hand, each note (taken at its greatestintensity) has a positive value of its own, and they are alldifferent. These values have no musical correlatives, they belong tocolor _per se_. Every colorist knows that the whole secret of beautyand brilliance dwells in a proper understanding and adjustment ofvalues, and music is powerless to help him here. Let us thereforedefer the discussion of this musical parallel, which is full ofpitfalls, until we have made some examination into such simpleemotional reactions as color can be discovered to yield. The musicalart began from the emotional response to certain simple tones andcombinations, and the delight of the ear in their repetition andvariation. On account of our undeveloped sensitivity, the emotional reactionsto color are found to be largely personal and whimsical: one person"loves" pink, another purple, or green. Color therapeutics is toonew a thing to be relied upon for data, for even though colorsare susceptible of classification as sedative, recuperative andstimulating, no two classifications arrived at independently would belikely to correspond. Most people appear to prefer bright, purecolors when presented to them in small areas, red and blue beingthe favourites. Certain data have been accumulated regarding thephysiological effect and psychological value of different colors, butthis order of research is in its infancy, and we shall have recourse, therefore, to theory, in the absence of any safer guide. One of the theories which may be said to have justified itself inpractice in a different field is that upon which is based Delsarte'sfamous art of expression. It has schooled some of the finest actorsin the world, and raised others from mediocrity to distinction. TheDelsarte system is founded upon the idea that man is a triplicity ofphysical, emotional, and intellectual qualities or attributes, andthat the entire body and every part thereof conforms to, and expressesthis triplicity. The generative and digestive region corresponds withthe physical nature, the breast with the emotional, and the headwith the intellectual; "below" represents the nadir of ignorance anddejection, "above" the zenith of wisdom and spiritual power. This seems a natural, and not an arbitrary classification, havinginteresting confirmations and correspondencies, both in the outerworld of form, and in the inner world of consciousness. Moreover, itis in accord with that theosophic scheme derived from the ancient andaugust wisdom of the East, which longer and better than any otherhas withstood the obliterating action of slow time, and is even nowrenascent. Let us therefore attempt to classify the colors of thespectrum according to this theory, and discover if we can how nearlysuch a classification is conformable to reason and experience. The red end of the spectrum, being lowest in vibratory rate, wouldcorrespond to the physical nature, proverbially more sluggish than theemotional and mental. The phrase "like a red rag to a bull, " suggestsa relation between the color red and the animal consciousnessestablished by observation. The "low-brow" is the dear lover of thered necktie; the "high-brow" is he who sees violet shadows on thesnow. We "see red" when we are dominated by ignoble passion. Thoughthe color green is associated with the idea of jealousy, it isassociated also with the idea of sympathy, and jealousy in the lastanalysis is the fear of the loss of sympathy; it belongs, at allevents to the mediant, or emotional group of colors; while blue andviolet are proverbially intellectual and spiritual colors, andtheir place in the spectrum therefore conforms to the demands of ourtheoretical division. Here, then, is something reasonably certain, certainly reasonable, and may serve as an hypothesis to be confirmedor confuted by subsequent research. Coming now finally to theconsideration of the musical parallel, let us divide a color scale oftwelve steps or semi-tones into three groups; each group, graphicallyportrayed, subtending one-third of the arc of a circle. The first orred group will be related to the physical nature, and will consist ofpurple-red, red, red-orange, and orange. The second, or green groupwill be related to the emotional nature, and will consist of yellow, yellow-green, green, and green-blue. The third, or blue group will berelated to the intellectual and spiritual nature, and will consistof blue, blue-violet, violet and purple. The merging of purple intopurple-red will then correspond to the meeting place of thehighest with the lowest, "spirit" and "matter. " We conceive of thismeeting-place symbolically as the "heart"--the vital centre. Now"sanguine" is the appropriate name associated with the color ofthe blood--a color between purple and purple-red. It is logical, therefore, to regard this point in our color-scale as itstonic--"middle C"--though each color, just as in music each note, isitself the tonic of a scale of its own. Mr. Louis Wilson--the author of the above "ophthalmic color scale"makes the same affiliation between sanguine, or blood color, andmiddle C, led thereto by scientific reasons entirely unassociated withsymbolism. He has omitted orange-yellow and violet-purple; thismakes the scale conform more exactly with the diatonic scale oftwo tetra-chords; it also gives a greater range of purples, a colorindispensable to the artist. Moreover, in the scale as it stands, eachcolor is exactly opposite its true spectral complementary. The color scale being thus established and broadly divided, the nextstep is to find how well it justifies itself in practice. The mostdirect way would be to translate the musical chords recognized anddealt with in the science of harmony into their corresponding colorcombinations. For the benefit of such readers as have no knowledge of musicalharmony it should be said that the entire science of harmony is basedupon the _triad_, or chord of three notes, and that there are variouskinds of triads: the major, the minor, the augmented, the diminished, and the altered. The major triad consists of the first note of thediatonic scale, or tonic; its third, and its fifth. The minor triaddiffers from the major only in that the second member is lowered asemi-tone. The augmented triad differs from the major only in that thethird member is raised a semi-tone. The diminished triad differs fromthe minor only in that the third member is lowered a semi-tone. Thealtered triad is a chord different by a semi-tone from any of theabove. The major triad in color is formed by taking any one of the twelvecolor-centers of the ophthalmic color scale as the first member ofthe triad; and, reading up the scale, the fifth step (each steprepresenting a semi-tone) determines the second member, while thethird member is found in the eighth step. The minor triad in color isformed by lowering the second member of the major triad one step; theaugmented triad by raising the third member of the major triad onestep, and the diminished triad by lowering the third member of theminor triad one step. [Illustration: Figure 18. MAJOR TRIAD, MINOR TRIAD, AUGMENTED TRIAD, DIMINISHED TRIAD] These various triads are shown graphically in Figure 18 astriangles within a circle divided into twelve equal parts, each partrepresenting a semi-tone of the chromatic scale. It is seen at aglance that in every case each triad has one of its notes (an apex) inor immediately adjacent to a different one of the grand divisions ofthe colour scale hereinbefore established and described, and that thesame thing would be true in any "key": that is, by any variation ofthe point of departure. This certainly satisfies the mind in that it suggests variety inunity, balance, completeness, and in the actual portrayal, in color, of these chords in any "key" this judgment is confirmed by the eye, provided that the colors have been thrown into proper _harmonicsuppression_. By this is meant such an adjustment of relative values, or such an establishment of relative proportions as will produce themaximum of beauty of which any given combination is capable. Thismatter imperatively demands an æsthetic sense the most sensitive. So this "musical parallel, " interesting and reasonable as it is, willnot carry the color harmonist very far, and if followed too literallyit is even likely to hamper him in the higher reaches of his art, for some of the musical dissonances are of great beauty in colortranslation. All that can safely be said in regard to the musicalparallel in its present stage of development is that it simplifies andsystematizes color knowledge and experiment and to a beginner it ishighly educational. If we are to have color symphonies, the best are not likely to bethose based on a literal translation of some musical masterpiece intocolor according to this or any theory, but those created by personswho are emotionally reactive to this medium, able to imagine in color, and to treat it imaginatively. The most beautiful mobile color effectsyet witnessed by the author were produced on a field only five inchessquare, by an eminent painter quite ignorant of music; while some ofthe most unimpressive have been the result of a rigid adherence to themusical parallel by persons intent on cutting, with this sword, thisGordian knot. Into the subject of means and methods it is not proposed to enter, norto attempt to answer such questions as to whether the light shall bedirect or projected; whether the spectator, wrapped in darkness, shallwatch the music unfold at the end of some mysterious vista, orwhether his whole organism shall be played upon by powerful wavesof multi-coloured light. These coupled alternatives are not mutuallyexclusive, any more than the idea of an orchestra is exclusive of thatof a single human voice. In imagining an art of mobile color unconditioned by considerationsof mechanical difficulty or of expense, ideas multiply in trulybewildering profusion. Sunsets, solar coronas, star spectra, aurorassuch as were never seen on sea or land; rainbows, bubbles, ripplingwater; flaming volcanoes, lava streams of living light--these and ahundred other enthralling and perfectly realizable effects suggestthemselves. What Israfil of the future will pour on mortals this new"music of the spheres"? LOUIS SULLIVAN PROPHET OF DEMOCRACY Due tribute has been paid to Mr. Louis Sullivan as an architect inthe first essay of this volume. That aspect of his genius has beencritically dealt with by many, but as an author he is scarcelyknown. Yet there are Sibylline leaves of his, still let us hope incirculation, which have wielded a potent influence on the minds of ageneration of men now passing to maturity. It is in the hope that hismessage may not be lost to the youth of today and of tomorrow that thepresent author now undertakes to summarize and interpret that messageto a public to which Mr. Sullivan is indeed a name, but not a voice. That he is not a voice can be attributed neither to his lack ofeloquence--for he is eloquent--nor to the indifference of the youngergeneration of architects which has grown up since he has ceased, in any public way, to speak. It is due rather to a curious fatalitywhereby his memorabilia have been confined to sheets which thewinds of time have scattered--pamphlets, ephemeral magazines, tradejournals--never the bound volume which alone guards the sacred flamefrom the gusts of evil chance. And Mr. Sullivan's is a "sacred flame, " because it was kindled solelywith the idea of service--a beacon to keep young men fromshipwreck traversing those straits made dangerous by the Scylla ofConventionality, and the Charybdis of License. The labour his writingcost him was enormous. "I shall never again make so great a sacrificefor the younger generation, " he says in a letter, "I am amazed tonote how insignificant, how almost nil is the effect produced, incomparison to the cost, in vitality to me. Or perhaps it is I whoam in error. Perhaps one must have reached middle age, or the IndianSummer of life, must have seen much, heard much, felt and producedmuch and been much in solitude to receive in reading what I gave inwriting 'with hands overfull. '" This was written with reference to _Kindergarten Chats. A sketchAnalysis of Contemporaneous American Architecture_, which constitutesMr. Sullivan's most extended and characteristic preachment to theyoung men of his day. It appeared in 1901, in fifty-two consecutivenumbers of _The Interstate Architect and Builder_, a magazine nowno longer published. In it the author, as mentor, leads an imaginarydisciple up and down the land, pointing out to him the "bold, upholsterrific blunders" to be found in the architecture of the day, and commenting on them in a caustic, colloquial style--large, loose, discursive--a blend of Ruskin, Carlyle and Whitman, yet all Mr. Sullivan's own. He descends, at times, almost to ribaldry, at othershe rises to poetic and prophetic heights. This is all a part of hismethod alternately to shame and inspire his pupil to some sort ofcreative activity. The syllabus of Mr. Sullivan's scheme, as itexisted in his mind during the writing of _Kindergarten Chats_, and outlined by him in a letter to the author is such a torch ofillumination that it is quoted here entire. A young man who has "finished his education" at the architectural schools comes to me for a post-graduate course--hence a free form of dialogue. I proceed with his education rather by indirection and suggestion than by direct precept. I subject him to certain experiences and allow the impressions they make on him to infiltrate, and, as I note the effect, I gradually use a guiding hand. I supply the yeast, so to speak, and allow the ferment to work in him. This is the gist of the whole scheme. It remains then to determine, carefully, the kind of experiences to which I shall subject the lad, and in what order, or logical (and especially psychological) sequence. I begin, then, with aspects that are literal, objective, more or less cynical, and brutal, and philistine. A little at a time I introduce the subjective, the refined, the altruistic; and, by a to-and-fro increasingly intense rhythm of these two opposing themes, worked so to speak in counterpoint, I reach a preliminary climax: of brutality tempered by a longing for nobler, purer things. Hence arise a purblind revulsion and yearning in the lad's soul; the psychological moment has arrived, and I take him at once into the _country_--(Summer: The Storm). This is the first of the four out-of-door scenes, and the lad's first real experience with nature. It impresses him crudely but violently; and in the tense excitement of the tempest he is inspired to temporary eloquence; and at the close is much softened. He feels in a way but does not know that he has been a participant in one of Nature's superb dramas. (Thus do I insidiously prepare the way for the notion that creative architecture is in essence a dramatic art, and an art of eloquence; of subtle rhythmic beauty, power, and tenderness). Left alone in the country the lad becomes maudlin--a callow lover of nature--and makes feeble attempts at verse. Returning to the city he melts and unbosoms--the tender shaft of the unknowable Eros has penetrated to his heart--Nature's subtle spell is on him, to disappear and reappear. Then follow discussions, more or less didactic, leading to the second out-of-door scene (Autumn Glory). Here the lad does most of the talking and shows a certain lucidity and calm of mind. The discussion of Responsibility, Democracy, Education, etc. , has inevitably detached the lurking spirit of pessimism. It has to be:--Into the depths and darkness we descend, and the work reaches the tragic climax in the third out-of-door scene--Winter. Now that the forces have been gathered and marshalled the true, sane movement of the work is entered upon and pushed at high tension, and with swift, copious modulations to its foreordained climax and optimistic peroration in the fourth and last out-of-door scene as portrayed in the Spring Song. The _locale_ of this closing number is the beautiful spot in the woods, on the shore of Biloxi Bay:--where I am writing this. I would suggest in passing that a considerable part of the K. C. Is in rhythmic prose--some of it declamatory. I have endeavoured throughout this work to represent, or reproduce to the mind and heart of the reader the spoken word and intonation--not written language. It really should be read aloud, especially the descriptive and exalted passages. There was a movement once on the part of Mr. Sullivan's admirers toissue _Kindergarten Chats_ in book form, but he was asked to tone itdown and expurgate it, a thing which he very naturally refused to do. Mr. Sullivan has always been completely alive to our cowardice whenit comes to hearing the truth about ourselves, and alive to the dangerwhich this cowardice entails, for to his imaginary pupil he says, If you wish to read the current architecture of your country, you must go at it courageously, and not pick out merely the little bits that please you. I am going to soak you with it until you are absolutely nauseated, and your faculties turn in rebellion. I may be a hard taskmaster, but I strive to be a good one. When I am through with you, you will know architecture from the ground up. You will know its virtuous reality and you will know the fake and the fraud and the humbug. I will spare nothing--for your sake. I will stir up the cesspool to its utmost depths of stench, and also the pious, hypocritical virtues of our so-called architecture--the nice, good, mealy-mouthed, suave, dexterous, diplomatic architecture, I will show you also the kind of architecture our "cultured" people believe in. And why do they believe in it? Because they do not believe in themselves. _Kindergarten Chats_ is even more pertinent and pointed today than itwas some twenty years ago, when it was written. Speech that is full oftruth is timeless, and therefore prophetic. Mr. Sullivan forecast someof the very evils by which we have been overtaken. He was able to dothis on account of the fundamental soundness of his point of view, which finds expression in the following words: "Once you learn to lookupon architecture not merely as an art more or less well, or more orless badly done, but as a _social manifestation_, the critical eyebecomes clairvoyant, and obscure, unnoted phenomena become illumined. " Looking, from this point of view, at the office buildings that thethen newly-realized possibilities of steel construction were sendingskyward along lower Broadway, in New York, Mr. Sullivan reads in thema denial of democracy. To him they signify much more than they seemto, or mean to; they are more than the betrayal of architecturalignorance and mendacity, they are symptomatic of forces underminingAmerican life. These buildings, as they increase in number, make this city poorer, morally and spiritually; they drag it down and down into the mire. This is not American civilization; it is the rottenness of Gomorrah. This is not Democracy--it is savagery. It shows the glutton hunt for the Dollar with no thought for aught else under the sun or over the earth. It is decadence of the spirit in its most revolting form; it is rottenness of the heart and corruption of the mind. So truly does this architecture reflect the causes which have brought it into being. Such structures are _profoundly anti-social_, and as such, they must be reckoned with. These buildings are not architecture, but outlawry, and their authors criminals in the true sense of the word. And such is the architecture of lower New York--hopeless, degraded, and putrid in its pessimistic denial of our art, and of our growing civilization--its cynical contempt for all those qualities that real humans value. We have always been very glib about democracy; we have assumed thatthis country was a democracy because we named it so. But now thatwe are called upon to die for the idea, we find that we have neverrealized it anywhere except perhaps in our secret hearts. In the lifeof Abraham Lincoln, in the poetry of Walt Whitman, in the architectureof Louis Sullivan, the spirit of democracy found utterance, and tothe extent that we ourselves partake of that spirit, it will findutterance also in us. Mr. Sullivan is a "prophet of democracy" notalone in his buildings but in his writings, and the prophetic note issounded even more clearly in his _What is Architecture? A Study in theAmerican People of Today_, than in _Kindergarten Chats_. This essay was first printed in _The American Contractor_ of January6, 1906, and afterwards issued in brochure form. The author startsby tracing architecture to its root in the human mind: this physicalthing is the manifestation of a psychological state. As a man thinks, so he is; he acts according to his thought, and if that act takes theform of a building it is an emanation of his inmost life, and revealsit. Everything is there for us to read, to interpret; and this we may do at our leisure. The building has not means of locomotion, it cannot hide itself, it cannot get away. There it is, and there it will stay--telling more truths about him who made it, than he in his fatuity imagines; revealing his mind and his heart exactly for what they are worth, not a whit more, not a whit less; telling plainly the lies he thinks; telling with almost cruel truthfulness his bad faith, his feeble, wabbly mind, his impudence, his selfish egoism, his mental irresponsibility, his apathy, his disdain for real things--until at last the building says to us: "I am no more a real building than the thing that made me is a real man!" Language like this stings and burns, but it is just such as isneedful to shame us out of our comfortable apathy, to arouse us tonew responsibilities, new opportunities. Mr. Sullivan, awake amongthe sleepers, drenches us with bucketfuls of cold, tonic, energizingtruth. The poppy and mandragora of the past, of Europe, poisons us, but in this, our hour of battle, we must not be permitted to dream on. He saw, from far back, that "we, as a people, not only have betrayedeach other, but have failed in that trust which the world spirit ofdemocracy placed in our hands, as we, a new people, emerged to filla new and spacious land. " It has taken a world war to make us see thesituation as he saw it, and it is to us, a militant nation, and notto the slothful civilians a decade ago, that Mr. Sullivan's stirringmessage seems to be addressed. The following quotation is his first crack of the whip at thearchitectural schools. The problem of education is to him of allthings the most vital; in this essay he returns to it again and again, while of _Kindergarten Chats_ it is the very _raison d'être_. I trust that a long disquisition is not necessary in order to show that the attempt at imitation, by us, of this day, of the by-gone forms of building, is a procedure unworthy of a free people; and that the dictum of the schools, that Architecture is finished and done, is a suggestion humiliating to every active brain, and therefore, in fact, a puerility and a falsehood when weighed in the scales of truly democratic thought. Such dictum gives the lie in arrogant fashion, to healthful human experience. It says, in a word: the American people are not fit for democracy. He finds the schools saturated with superstitions which are thesurvivals of the scholasticism of past centuries--feudal institutions, in effect, inimical to his idea of the true spirit of democraticeducation. This he conceives of as a searching-out, liberating, anddeveloping the splendid but obscured powers of the average man, andparticularly those of children. "It is disquieting to note, " he says, "that the system of education on which we lavish funds with suchgenerous, even prodigal, hand, falls short of fulfilling its truedemocratic function; and that particularly in the so-called higherbranches its tendency appears daily more reactionary, more feudal. It is not an agreeable reflection that so many of our universitygraduates lack the trained ability to see clearly, and to thinkclearly, concisely, constructively; that there is perhaps more showingof cynicism than good faith, seemingly more distrust of men thanconfidence in them, and, withal, no consummate ability to interpretthings. " In contrast to the schoolman he sketches the psychology of theactive-minded but "uneducated" man, with sympathy and understanding, the man who is courageously seeking a way with little to guide andhelp him. Is it not the part of wisdom to cheer, to encourage such a mind, rather than dishearten it with ridicule? To say to it: Learn that the mind works best when allowed to work naturally; learn to do what your problem suggests when you have reduced it to its simplest terms; you will thus find that all problems, however complex, take on a simplicity you had not dreamed of; accept this simplicity boldly, and with confidence, do not lose your nerve and run away from it, or you are lost, for you are here at the point men so heedlessly call genius--as though it were necessarily rare; for you are here at the point no living brain can surpass in essence, the point all truly great minds seek--the point of vital simplicity--the point of view which so illuminates the mind that the art of expression becomes spontaneous, powerful, and unerring, and achievement a certainty. So, if you seek and express the best that is in yourself, you must search out the best that is in your people; for they are your problem, and you are indissolubly a part of them. It is for you to affirm that which they really wish to affirm, namely, the best that is in them, and they as truly wish you to express the best that is in yourself. If the people seem to have but little faith it is because they have been tricked so long; they are weary of dishonesty, more weary than they know, much more weary than you know, and in their hearts they seek honest and fearless men, men simple and clear in mind, loyal to their own manhood and to the people. The American people are now in a stupor; be on hand at the awakening. Next he pays his respects to current architectural criticism--astraining at gnats and a swallowing of camels, by minds "benumbedby culture, " and hearts made faint by the tyranny of precedent. Hecomplains that they make no distinction between _was_ and _is_, too readily assuming that all that is left us moderns is the humbleprivilege to select, copy and adapt. The current mannerisms of Architectural criticism must often seem trivial. For of what avail is it to say that this is too small, that too large, this too thick, and that too thin, or to quote this, that, or the other precedent, when the real question may be: Is not the entire design a mean evasion? Why magnify this, that, or the other little thing, if the entire scheme of thinking that the building stands for is false, and puts a mask upon the people, who want true buildings, but do not know how to get them so long as Architects betray them with Architectural phrases? And so he goes on with his Jeremiad: a prophet of despair, do yousay? No, he seeks to destroy only that falsity which would confinethe living spirit. Earlier and more clearly than we, he discerned themenace to our civilization of the unrestricted play of the masculineforces--powerful, ruthless, disintegrating--the head dominating theheart. It has taken the surgery of war to open our eyes, and beholdthe spectacle of the entire German nation which by an intellectualprocess appears to have killed out compassion, enthroning_Schrecklichkeit_. In the heart alone dwells hope of salvation. "Forhe who knows even a genuinely little of Mankind knows this truth: theheart is greater than the head. For in the heart is Desire; and fromit come forth Courage and Magnanimity. " You have not thought deeply enough to know that the heart in you is the woman in man. You have derided your femininity, where you have suspected it; whereas, you should have known its power, cherished and utilized it, for it is the hidden well-spring of Intuition and Imagination. What can the brain accomplish without these two? They are the man's two inner eyes; without them he is stone blind. For the mind sets forth their powers both together. One carries the light, the other searches; and between them they find treasures. These they bring to the brain, which first elaborates them, then says to the will, "Do"--and Action follows. Poetically considered, as far as the huge, disordered resultant mass of your Architecture is concerned, Intuition and Imagination have not gone forth to illuminate and search the hearts of the people. Thus are its works stone blind. It is the absence of poetry and beauty which makes our architectureso depressing to the spirits. "Poetry as a living thing, " says Mr. Sullivan, "stands for the most telling quality that a man can impartto his thoughts. Judged by this test your buildings are dreary, emptyplaces. " Artists in words, like Lafcadio Hearn and Henry James, areable to make articulate the sadness which our cities inspire, butit is a blight which lies heavy on us all. Theodore Dreiser says, in_Sister Carrie_--a book with so much bitter truth in it that it wassuppressed by the original publishers: Once the bright days of summer pass by, a city takes on the sombre garb of grey, wrapped in which it goes about its labors during the long winter. Its endless buildings look grey, its sky and its streets assume a sombre hue; the scattered, leafless trees and wind-blown dust and paper but add to the general solemnity of color. There seems to be something in the chill breezes which scurry through the long, narrow thoroughfares productive of rueful thoughts. Not poets alone, nor artists, nor that superior order of mind which arrogates to itself all refinement, feel this, but dogs and all men. The excuse that we are too young a people to have developed anarchitecture instinct with that natural poetry which so charms us inthe art of other countries and other times, Mr. Sullivan disposesof in characteristic fashion. To the plea that "We are too young toconsider these accomplishments. We have been so busy with our materialdevelopment that we have not found time to consider them, " he makesanswer as follows: Know, then, to begin with, they are not accomplishments but necessaries. And, to end with, you are old enough, and have found the time to succeed in nearly making a fine art of--Betrayal, and a science of--Graft. Know that you are as old as the race. That each man among you had in him the accumulated power of the race, ready at hand for use, in the right way, when he shall conclude it better to think straight and hence act straight rather than, as now, to act crooked and pretend to be straight. Know that the test, plain, simple _honesty_ (and you all know, every man of you knows, exactly what that means) is always at your hand. Know that as all complex manifestations have a simple basis of origin, so the vast complexity of your national unrest, ill health, inability to think clearly and accurately concerning simple things, really vital things, is easily traceable to the single, actual, active cause--Dishonesty; and that this points with unescapable logic and in just measure to each individual man! The remedy;--_individual honesty_. To the objection that this is too simple a solution, Mr. Sullivanretorts that all great solutions are simple, that the basic things ofthe universe are those which the heart of a child might comprehend. "Honesty stands in the universe of Human Thought and Action, as itsvery Centre of Gravity, and is our human mask-word behind which abidesall the power of Nature's Integrity, the profoundest _fact_ whichmodern thinking has persuaded Life to reveal. " If, on the other hand, the reader complains, "All this is above ourheads, " Mr. Sullivan is equally ready with an answer: No, it is not. _It is close beside your hand!_ and therein lies its power. Again you say, "How can honesty be enforced?" It cannot be enforced! "Then how will the remedy go into effect?" It cannot _go_ into effect. It can only come into effect. "Then how can it come?" Ask Nature. "And what will Nature say?" Nature is always saying: "I centre at each man, woman and child. I knock at the door of each heart, and I wait. I wait in patience--ready to enter with my gifts. " "And is that all that Nature says?" That is all. "Then how shall we receive Nature?" By opening wide your minds! For your greatest crime against yourselves is that you have locked the door and thrown away the key! Thus, by a long detour, Mr. Sullivan returns to his initialproposition, that the falsity of our architecture can be correctedonly by integrity of thought. "Thought is the fine and powerfulinstrument. Therefore, _have thought for the integrity of your ownthought_. " Naturally, then, as your thoughts thus change, your growing architecture will change. Its falsity will depart; its reality will gradually appear. For the integrity of your thought as a People, will then have penetrated the minds of your architects. Then, too, _as your basic thought changes, will emerge a philosophy, a poetry, and an art of expression in all things; for you will have learned that a characteristic philosophy, poetry and art of expression are vital to the healthful growth and development of a democratic people_. Some readers may complain that these are after all only glitteringgeneralities, of no practical use in solving the specific problemswith which every architect is confronted. On the contrary they arefundamental verities of incalculable benefit to every sincere artist. Shallowness is the great vice of democracy; it is surface withoutdepth, a welter of concrete detail in which the mind easily losesthose great, underlying abstractions from which alone great art canspring. These, in this essay, Mr. Sullivan helps us to recapture, andinspires us to employ. He would win us from our insincerities, ourtrivialities, and awaken our enormous latent, unused power. He says: Awaken it. Use it. Use it for the common good. Begin now! For it is as true today as when one of your wise men said it:-- "The way to resume is to resume!" COLOR AND CERAMICS The production of ceramics--perhaps the oldest of all the usefularts practised by man; an art with a magnificent history--seems to beentering upon a new era of development. It is more alive today, moregenerally, more skilfully, though not more _artfully_ practised thanever before. It should therefore be of interest to all lovers ofarchitecture, in view of the increasing importance of ceramics inbuilding, to consider the ways in which these materials may best beused. Looking at the matter in the broadest possible way, it may be saidthat the building impulse throughout the ages has expressed itselfin two fundamentally different types of structure: that in which thearchitecture--and even the ornament--is one with the engineering; andthat in which the two elements are separable, not in thought alone, but in fact. For brevity let us name that manner of building in whichthe architecture is the construction, _Inherent_ architecture, andthat manner in which the two are separable _Incrusted_ architecture. To the first class belong the architectures of Egypt, Greece, andGothic architecture as practised in the north of Europe; to thesecond belong Roman architecture of the splendid period, Moorisharchitecture, and Italian Gothic, so called. In the first class thebones of the building were also its flesh; in the second bones andflesh were in a manner separable, as is proven by the fact that theywere separately considered, separately fashioned. Ruined Karnak, theruined Parthenon, wrecked Rheims, show ornament so integral a partof the fabric--etched so deep--that what has survived of the one hassurvived also of the other; while the ruined Baths of Caracalla theuncompleted church of S. Petronio in Bologna, and many a stark mosqueon many a sandy desert show only bare skeletons of whose completedglory we can only guess. In them the fabric was a framework for thedisplay of the lapidary or the ceramic art--a garment destroyed, rent, or tattered by time and chance, leaving the bones still strong, butbare. This classification of architecture into Inherent and Incrusted is notto be confused with the discrimination between architecture that is_Arranged_, and architecture that is _Organic_, a classification whichis based on psychology--like the difference between the business manand the poet: talent and genius--whereas the classification whichthe reader is asked now to consider is based rather on the matterof expediency in the use of materials. Let us draw no invidiouscomparisons between Inherent and Incrusted architecture, but regardeach as the adequate expression of an ideal type of beauty; the onemasculine, since in the male figure the osseous framework is moreeasily discernible; the other feminine, because more concealed andoverlaid with a cellular tissue of shining, precious materials, onwhich the disruptive forces in man and nature are more free to act. It is scarcely necessary to state that it is with Incrustedarchitecture that we are alone concerned in this discussion, for tothis class almost all modern buildings perforce belong. This is byreason of a necessity dictated by the materials that we employ, and byour methods of construction. All modern buildings follow practicallyone method of construction: a bony framework of steel--or of concretereinforced by steel--filled in and subdivided by concrete, brick, hollow fire-clay, or some of its substitutes. To a construction ofthis kind some sort of an outer encasement is not only æstheticallydesirable, but practically necessary. It usually takes the form ofstone, face-brick, terra-cotta, tile, stucco, or some combination oftwo or more of these materials. Of the two types of architecture theIncrusted type is therefore imposed by structural necessity. The enormous importance of ceramics in its relation to architecturethus becomes apparent. They minister to an architectural need insteadof gratifying an architectural whim. Ours is a period of Incrustedarchitecture--one which demands the encasement, rather than theexposure of structure, and therefore logically admits of theenrichment of surfaces by means of "veneers" of materials moreprecious and beautiful than those employed in the structure, whichbecomes, as it were, the canvas of the picture, and not the pictureitself. For these purposes there are no materials more apt, moreadaptable, more enduring, richer in potentialities of beauty than theproducts of ceramic art. They are easily and inexpensively produced ofany desired shape, color, texture; their hard, dense surface resiststhe action of the elements, is not easily soiled, and is readilycleaned; being fashioned by fire they are fire resistant. So much then for the practical demands, in modern architecture, met bythe products of ceramic art. The æsthetic demand is not less admirablymet--or rather _might_ be. When, in the sixteenth century, the Renaissance spread from southto north, color was practically eliminated from architecture. TheEgyptians had had it, hot and bright as the sun on the desert; weknow that the Greeks made their Parian marble glow in rainbow tints;Moorish architecture was nothing if not colorful, and the VeniceRuskin loved was fairly iridescent--a thing of fire-opal and pearl. In Italian Renaissance architecture up to its latest phase, the colorelement was always present; but it was snuffed out under the leadencolored northern skies. Paris is grey, London is brown, New York iswhite, and Chicago the color of cinders. We have only to compare themto yellow Rome, red Siena, and pearl-tinted Venice, to realize howmuch we have lost in the elimination of color from architecture. We are coming to realize it. Color played an important part in thePan-American Exposition, and again in the San Francisco Exposition, where, wedded to light, it became the dominant note of the wholearchitectural concert. Now these great expositions in which thearchitects and artists are given a free hand, are in the nature ofpreliminary studies in which these functionaries sketch in transitoryform the things they desire to do in more permanent form. They areforecasts of the future, a future which in certain quarters isalready beginning to realize itself. It is therefore probable thatarchitectural art will become increasingly colorful. The author remembers the day and the hour when this became hispersonal conviction--his personal desire. It happened years ago inthe Albright Gallery in Buffalo--a building then newly completed, of aseverely classic type. In the central hall was a single doorway, whose white marble architrave had been stained with different coloredpigments by Francis Bacon; after the manner of the Greeks. The effectwas so charming, and made the rest of the place seem by contrast socold and dun, that the author came then and there to the conclusionthat architecture without polychromy was architecture incomplete. Mr. Bacon spent three years in Asia Minor, and elsewhere, studyingthe remains of Greek architecture, and he found and brought home afragment of an antefix from the temple of Assos, in which the appliedcolor was still pure and strong. The Greeks were a joyous people. Whenjoy comes back into life, color will come back into architecture. Ceramic products are ideal as a means to this end. The Greeksthemselves recognized their value for they used them widely andwisely: it has been discovered that they even attached bands ofcolored terra-cotta to the marble mouldings of their temples. Howdifferent must have been such a temple's real appearance fromthat imagined by the Classical Revivalists, whose tradition of theinviolable cold Parian purity of Greek architecture has persisted, even against archæological evidence to the contrary, up to the presentday. In one way we have an advantage over the Greek, if we only had the witto profit by it. His palette, like his musical scale, was more limitedthan ours. Nearly the whole gamut of the spectrum is now available tothe architect who wishes to employ ceramics. The colors do notchange or fade, and possess a beautiful quality. Our craftsmen andmanufacturers of face-brick, terra-cotta, and colored tile, after muchcostly experimentation, have succeeded in producing ceramics of ahigh order of excellence and intrinsic beauty; they can do practicallyanything demanded of them; but from that quarter where theyshould reap the greatest commercial advantage--the field ofarchitecture--there is all too little demand. The architect who shouldlead, teach and dictate in this field, is often through ignoranceobliged to learn and follow instead. This has led to an ignominioussituation--ignominious, that is, to the architect. He has cometo require of the manufacturer--when he requires anything atall--assistance in the very matter in which he should assist: thedetermination of color design. It is no wonder that the results areoften bad, and therefore discouraging. The manufacturers of ceramicswelcome co-operation and assistance on the part of the architect withan eagerness which is almost pathetic, on those rare occasions whenassistance is offered. But the architect is not really to blame: the reason for his failurelies deep in his general predicament of having to know a little ofeverything, and do a great deal more than he can possibly do well. Tocope with this, if his practice warrants the expenditure, he surroundshimself with specialists in various fields, and assigns variousdepartments of his work to them. He cannot be expected to have onhis staff a specialist in ceramics, nor can he, with all his manifoldactivities, be expected to become such a specialist himself. As aresult, he is usually content to let color problems alone, for theyare just another complication of his already too complicated life;or he refers them to some one whom he thinks ought to know--amanufacturer's designer--and approves almost anything submitted. Ofcourse the ideal architect would have time for every problem, andsolve it supremely well; but the real architect is all too human:there are depressions on his cranium where bumps ought to be;moreover, he wants a little time left to energize in otherdirections than in the practice of his craft. One of the functionsof architecture is to reveal the inherent qualities and beauties ofdifferent materials, by their appropriate use and tasteful display. An onyx staircase on the one hand, and a portland cement high altaron the other, alike violate this function of architecture; theytransgress that beautiful necessity which decrees that preciousmaterials should serve precious uses and common materials shouldserve utilitarian ends. Now color is a precious thing, and its highestbeauties can be brought out only by contrast with broad neutral tintedspaces. The interior walls of a mediaeval cathedral never competedwith its windows, and by the same token, a riot of polychromy allover the side of a building is not as effective, even from a chromaticpoint of view, as though it were confined, say, to an entrance and afrieze. Gilbert's witty phrase is applicable here: "Where everybody's somebody, nobody's anybody. " Let us build our walls, then, of stone, or brick, or stucco, --fortheir flat surfaces and neutral tints conduce to that repose soessential to good architectural effect: but let us not rest contentwith this, but grant to the eye the delight and contentment which itcraves, by color and pattern placed at those points to which it isdesirable to attract attention, for they serve the same æstheticpurpose as a tiara on the brow of beauty, or a ring on a delicatewhite hand. But just as jewelry is best when it is most individual, so the ornament of a building should be in keeping with its generalcharacter and complexion. A color scheme should not be chosen atrandom, but dictated by the prevailing tone and texture of the wallsurfaces, with which it should harmonize as inevitably as the blossomof a bush with its prevailing tone of stems and foliage. In a buildingthis prevailing tone will inevitably be either cold or warm, and thecolor scheme just as inevitably should be either cold or warm; thatis, there should be a preponderance of cold colors over warm, or viceversa. Otherwise the eye will suffer just that order of uneasinesswhich comes from the contemplation of two equal masses, whereas itexperiences satisfaction in proportionate unequals. Nothing will take the place of an instinctive colour-sense, but eventhat needs the training of experience, if the field be new, and a fewgeneral principles of all but universal application will not be amiss. First of all it should be remembered that the intensity of colorshould be carefully adjusted to its area. It is dangerous to try touse high, pure colors, unrelieved and uncontrasted, in large masses, but the brightest, strongest colors may be used with safety in unitsof sufficiently restricted size. For harmony, as well as for richness, the law of complementaries, in its most general application, isthe safest of all guides, but it must be followed with finediscrimination. Complementary colors are like married pairs, if theyfind the right adjustment with one another they are happy--that is, there is an effect of beauty--but lacking such adjustment they areworse off together than apart. Every artist who experiments in colorsoon finds out for himself that instead of using two colors directlycomplementary, it is better to "split" one of them, that is, useinstead of one of them two others, which combined will yield thecolor in question. For example, the color complementary to red isgreen-blue. Now green-blue is equidistant between yellow-green andblue-violet, so if for red and blue-green; red, yellow-green andblue-violet be substituted the combination loses its obviousness anda certain harshness without losing anything of its brilliance, orwithout departing from the optical law involved. Such a combinationcorresponds to a diminished triad in music. Another important consideration with regard to color as employed bythe architect dwells in those optical changes effected by distance andposition: the relative visibility of different colors and combinationsof colors as the spectator recedes from them, and the environmentalchanges which colors undergo--in bright sunlight, in shadow, againstthe sky, and with relation to backgrounds of different sorts. The effect of distance is to make colors merge into one another, tolower the values, but not all equally. Yellow loses itself first, tending toward white. The effect of distance, in general, is todisintegrate and decompose, thus giving "vibration" as it is called. Aknowledge of these and kindred facts will save the architect from manydisappointments and enable him to obtain wonderful chromatic effectsby simple means. Many architects unused to color problems design their ornament withvery little thought about the colors which they propose to employ, making it an after-consideration; but the two things should beconsidered synchronously for the best final effect. There is a crypticsaying that "color is at right angles to form, " that is, color iscapable of making surfaces advance toward or recede from the eye, justas modelling does; and for this reason, if color is used, a great dealof modelling may be dispensed with. If a receding color is used on arecessed plane, it deepens that plane unduly; while on the other handif a color which refuses to recede--like yellow for example--is usedwhere depth is wanted, the receding plane and the approaching colorneutralize one another, resulting in an effect of flatness notintended. The tyro should not complicate his problem by combiningcolor with high relief modelling, bringing inevitably in the elementof light and shade. He should leave that for older hands and concernhimself rather with flat or nearly flat surfaces, using his modellingmuch as the worker in cloisonné uses his little rims of brass--toconfine and define each color within its own allotted area. Then, as he gains experience, he may gradually enrich his pattern by theaddition of the element of light and shade, should he so decide. Now as to certain general considerations in relation to theappropriate and logical use of ceramics in the construction andadornment of buildings, exterior and interior. In our northernlatitudes care should be taken that ceramics are not used in placesand in ways where the accumulation of snow and ice render the jointssubject to alternate freezing and thawing, for in such case, unlessthe joints are protected with metal, the units will work loose intime. On vertical surfaces such protection is not necessary; the useof ceramics should therefore be confined for the most part to suchsurfaces: for friezes, panels, door and window architraves, and thelike. When it is desirable for æsthetic reasons to tie a series ofwindows together vertically by means of some "fill" of a materialdifferent from that of the body of the wall, ceramics lend themselvesadmirably to the purpose--better than wood, which rots; than iron, which rusts; than bronze, which turns black; and than marble, whichsoon loses its color and texture in exposed situations of this sort. On the interior of buildings, the most universal use of ceramics is, of course, for floors, and with the non-slip devices of various sortswhich have come into the market, they are no less good for stairs. There is nothing better for wainscoting, and in fact for any surfacewhatsoever subject to soil and wear. These materials combine permanentprotection and permanent decoration. But fired by the zeal of theconvert the use of ceramics may be overdone. One easily recallsentire rooms of this material, floors, walls, ceilings, which are lesssuccessful than as though a variety of materials had been employed. Itis just such variety--each material treated in a characteristic, andtherefore different way--that gives charm to so many foreign churchesand cathedrals: walls of stone, floors of marble, choir-stalls ofcarved wood, and rood-screen of metal: it is the difference betweenan orchestra of various instruments and a mandolin orchestra or asaxaphone sextette. Ceramics should never invade the domain of theplasterer, the mural painter, the cabinet maker. Do not let us, inour zeal for ceramics, be like Bottom the weaver, eager to play everypart. Ceramics have, as regards architecture, a distinct and honorablefunction. This function should be recognized, taken advantage of, butnever overpassed. They offer opportunities large but not limitless. They constitute one instrument of the orchestra of which the architectis the conductor, an instrument beautiful in the hands of a master, and doubly beautiful in concert and contrast with those othermaterials whose harmonious ensemble makes that music in threedimensions: architectural art. SYMBOLS AND SACRAMENTS Architecture is the concrete presentment in space of the soul of apeople. If that soul be petty and sordid--"stirred like a childby little things"--no great architecture is possible because greatarchitecture can image only greatness. Before any worthy architecturecan arise in the modern world the soul must be aroused. The cannonsof Europe are bringing about this awakening. The world--the world ofthought and emotion from whence flow acts and events--is no longerdecrepit, but like Swedenborg's angels it is advancing toward thespringtide of its youth: down the ringing grooves of change "we sweepinto the younger day. " After the war we are likely to witness an art evolution which willnot be restricted to statues and pictures and insincere essays indry-as-dust architectural styles, but one which will permeate thewhole social fabric, and make it palpitate with the rhythm of ayounger, a more abundant life. Beauty and mystery will again maketheir dwelling among men; the Voiceless will speak in music, and theFormless will spin rhythmic patterns on the loom of space. We shallseek and find a new language of symbols to express the joy of thesoul, freed from the thrall of an iron age of materialism, andfronting the unimaginable splendors of the spiritual life. [Illustration: PLATE XV. SYMBOL OF RESURRECTION] For every æsthetic awakening is the result of a spiritual awakeningof some sort. Every great religious movement found an art expressioneloquent of it. When religion languished, such things as Versaillesand the Paris Opera House were possible, but not such things as theParthenon, or Notre Dame. The temples of Egypt were built for thecelebration of the rites of the religion of Egypt; so also in thecase of Greece. Roman architecture was more widely secular, but Rome'snoblest monument, the Pantheon, was a religious edifice. The Moors, inflamed with religious ardor, swept across Europe, blazing theirtrail with mosques and palaces conceived seemingly in some ecstaticstate of dream. The Renaissance, tainted though it was by worldliness, found still its inspiration in sacred themes, and recordedits beginning and its end in two mighty religious monuments:Brunelleschi's and Michael Angelo's domical churches, "wrought in asad sincerity" by deeply religious men. Gothic art is a synonym formediaeval Christianity; while in the Orient art is scarcely secular atall, but a symbolical language framed and employed for the expressionof spiritual ideas. This law, that spirituality and not materialism distils the preciousattar of great art, is permanently true and perennially applicable, for laws of this order do not change from age to age, however varioustheir manifestation. The inference is plain: until we become areligious people great architecture is far from us. We are becomingreligious in that broad sense in which churches and creeds, formsand ceremonies, play little part. Ours is the search of the heartfor something greater than itself which is still itself; it is thereligion of brotherhood, whose creed is love, whose ritual is service. This transformed and transforming religion of the West, the tardyfruit of the teachings of Christ, now secretly active in the heartsof men, will receive enrichment from many sources. Science will revealthe manner in which the spirit weaves its seven-fold veil of illusion;nature, freshly sensed, will yield new symbols which art will organizeinto a language; out of the experience of the soul will grow newrituals and observances. But one precious tincture of this newreligion our civilization and our past cannot supply; it is theheritage of Asia, cherished in her brooding bosom for uncountedcenturies, until, by the operation of the law of cycles, the timeshould come for the giving of it to the West. This secret is Yoga, the method of self-development whereby the seekerfor union is enabled to perceive the shining of the Inward Light. Thisis achieved by daily discipline in stilling the mind and directing theconsciousness inward instead of outward. The Self is within, andthe mind, which is normally centrifugal, must first be arrested, controlled, and then turned back upon itself, and held with perfectsteadiness. All this is naively expressed in the Upanishads in thepassage, "The Self-existent pierced the openings of the senses so thatthey turn forward, not backward into himself. Some wise man, however, with eyes closed and wishing for immortality, saw the Self behind. "This stilling of the mind, its subjugation and control whereby it maybe concentrated on anything at will, is particularly hard for personsof our race and training, a race the natural direction of whoseconsciousness is strongly outward, a training in which the practice ofintrospective meditation finds no place. Yoga--that "union" which brings inward vision, the contribution of theEast to the spiritual life of the West--will bring profound changesinto the art of the West, since art springs from consciousness. Theconsciousness of the West now concerns itself with the visible worldalmost exclusively, and Western art is therefore characterized by analmost slavish fidelity to the ephemeral appearances of things--therecord of particular moods and moments. The consciousness of the Easton the other hand, is subjective, introspective. Its art accordinglyconcerns itself with eternal aspects, with a world of archetypalideas in which things exist not for their own sake, but as symbols ofsupernal things. The Oriental artist avoids as far as possible trivialand individual rhythms, seeking always the fundamental rhythm of thelarger, deeper life. Now this quality so earnestly sought and so highly prized in Orientalart, is the very thing which our art and our architecture mostconspicuously lack. To the eye sensitive to rhythm, our essays inthese fields appear awkward and unconvincing, lacking a certain_inevitability_. We must restore to art that first great canon ofChinese æsthetics, "_Rhythmic vitality, _ or the life movement of thespirit through the rhythm of things. " It cannot be interjected fromthe outside, but must be inwardly realized by the "stilling" of themind above described. Art cannot dispense with symbolism; as the letters on this page conveythoughts to the mind, so do the things of this world, organized intoa language of symbols, speak to the soul through art. But in thebuilding of our towers of Babel, again mankind is stricken with aconfusion of tongues. Art has no _common language;_ its symbols areno longer valid, or are no longer understood. This is a condition forwhich materialism has no remedy, for the reason that materialism seesalways the pattern but never that which the pattern represents. Wemust become _spiritually illumined_ before we can read nature truly, and re-create, from such a reading, fresh and universal symbols forart. This is a task beyond the power of our sad generation, enchainedby negative thinking, overshadowed by war, but we can at least glimpsethe nature of the reaction between the mystic consciousness and thethings of this world which will produce a new language of symbols. Themystic consciousness looks upon nature as an arras embroidered overwith symbols of the things it conceals from view. We are ourselvessymbols, dwelling in a world of symbols--a world many times removedfrom that ultimate reality to which all things bear figurativewitness; the commonest thing has yet some mystic meaning, and uglinessand vulgarity exist only in the unillumined mind. What mystic meaning, it may be asked, is contained in such things asa brick, a house, a hat, a pair of shoes? A brick is the ultimateatom of a building; a house is the larger body which man makes for hisuses, just as the Self has built its habitation of flesh and bones;hat and shoes are felt and leather insulators with which we seek tocut ourselves off from the currents which flow through earth and airfrom God. It may be objected that these answers only substitutefor the lesser symbol a greater, but this is inevitable: if for thegreater symbol were named one still more abstract and inclusive, theultimate verity would be as far from affirmation as before. There isnothing of which the human mind can conceive that is not a symbol ofsomething greater and higher than itself. The dictionary defines a symbol as "something that stands forsomething else and serves to represent it, or to bring to mind one ormore of its qualities. " Now this world is a _reflection_ of a higherworld, and that of a higher world still, and so on. Accordingly, everything is a symbol of something higher, since by reflecting, it"stands for, and serves to represent it, " and the thing symbolized, being itself a reflection, is, by the same token, itself a symbol. By reiterated repetitions of this reflecting process throughout thenumberless planes and sub-planes of nature, each thing becomes asymbol, not of one thing only, but of many things, all intimatelycorrelated, and this gives rise to those underlying analogies, those"secret subterranean passages between matter and soul" which have everbeen the especial preoccupation of the poet and the mystic, but whichmay one day become the subject of serious examination by scientificmen. Let us briefly pass in review the various terms of such an ascendingseries of symbols: members of one family, they might be called, sincethey follow a single line of descent. Take gold: as a thing in itself, without any symbolical significance, it is a metallic element, having a characteristic yellow color, veryheavy, very soft, the most ductile, malleable, and indestructible ofmetals. In its minted form it is the life force of the body economic, since on its abundance and free circulation the well-being of thatbody depends; it is that for which all men strive and contend, becausewithout it they cannot comfortably live. This, then, is gold in itsfirst and lowest symbolical aspect: a life principle, a motive forcein human affairs. But it is not gold which has gained for man hislordship over nature; it is fire, the yellow gold, not of the earth, but of the air, --cities and civilizations, arts and industries, haveever followed the camp fire of the pioneer. Sunlight comes next insequence--sunlight, which focussed in a burning glass, spontaneouslyproduces flame. The world subsists on sunlight; all animate creationgrows by it, and languishes without it, as the prosperity of citieswaxes or wanes with the presence or absence of a supply of gold. Themagnetic force of the sun, specialized as _prana_ (which is not thebreath which goes up and the breath which goes down, but that other, in which the two repose), fulfils the same function in the human bodyas does gold in civilization, sunlight in nature: its abundance makesfor health, its meagreness for enervation. Higher than _prana_ is themind, that golden sceptre of man's dominion, the Promethean gift offire with which he menaces the empire of the gods. Higher still, inthe soul, love is the motive force, the conqueror: a "heart of gold"is one warmed and lighted by love. Still other is the desire of thespirit, which no human affection satisfies, but truth only, the GoldenPerson, the Light of the World, the very Godhead itself. Thus there isearthy, airy, etheric gold; gold as intellect, gold as love, gold astruth; from the curse of the world, the cause of a thousand crimes, there ascends a Jacob's Ladder of symbols to divinity itself, wherebymen may learn that God works by sacrifice: that His universe is itselfHis broken body. As gold in the purse, fire on the forge, sunlightfor the eyes, breath in the body, knowledge in the mind, love in theheart, and wisdom in the understanding, He draws all men unto Him, teaching them the wise use of wealth, the mastery over nature, thecare of the body, the cultivation of the mind, the love of wife andchild and neighbour, and, last lesson of all, He teaches them that inindustry, in science, in art, in sympathy and understanding, He it isthey are all the while knowing, loving, becoming; and that even whenthey flee Him, His are the wings-- "When me they fly, I am the wings. " This attempt to define gold as a symbol ends with the indication of anubiquitous and immanent divinity in everything. Thus it is always: inattempting to dislodge a single voussoir from the arch of truth, thetemple itself is shaken, so cunningly are the stones fitted together. All roads lead to Rome, and every symbol is a key to the GreatMystery: for example, read in the light of these correspondences, thealchemist's transmutation of base metals into gold, is seen to be thesublimation of man's lower nature into "that highest golden sheath, which is Brahman. " Keeping the first sequence clearly in mind, let us now attempt totrace another, parallel to it: the feminine of which the first maybe considered the corresponding masculine. Silver is a white, ductilemetallic element. In coinage it is the synonym for ready cash, --goldin the bank is silver in the pocket; hence, in a sense, silver isthe _reflection_, or the second power of gold. Just as ruddy gold iscorrelated with fire, so is pale silver with water; and as fire isaffiliated with the sun, so do the waters of the earth follow themoon in her courses. The golden sun, the silver moon: these commonlyemployed descriptive adjectives themselves supply the correlation weare seeking; another indication of its validity lies in the fact thatone of the characteristics of water is its power of reflecting; thatmoonlight is reflected sunlight. If gold is the mind, silver is thebody, in which the mind is imaged, objectified; if gold is flamelikelove, silver is brooding affection; and in the highest regions ofconsciousness, beauty is the feminine or form side of truth--itssilver mirror. There are two forces in the world, one of projection, the otherof recall; two states, activity and rest. Nature, with tirelessingenuity, everywhere publishes this fact: in bursting bud and fallingseed, in the updrawn waters and the descending rain; throw a stoneinto the air, and when the impulse is exhausted, gravity brings it toearth again. In civilized society these centrifugal and centripetalforces find expression in the anarchic and radical spirit which breaksdown and re-forms existing institutions, and in the conservativespirit which preserves and upbuilds by gradual accretion; they areanalogous to igneous and to aqueous action in the formation andupbuilding of the earth itself, and find their prototype again in manand woman: man, the warrior, who prevails by the active exerciseof his powers, and woman, "the treasury of the continued race, "who conquers by continual quietness. Man and woman symbolize forcescentrifugal and centripetal not alone in their inner nature, andin the social and economic functions peculiar to each, but in theirphysical aspects and peculiarities as well, for man is small of flankand broad of shoulder, with relatively large extremities, _i. E. , centrifugal_: while woman is formed with broad hips, narrow shoulders, and small feet and hands, _i. E. , centripetal_. Woman's instinctiveand unconscious gestures are _towards_ herself, man's are _away from_himself. The physiologist might hold that the anatomical differencesbetween the sexes result from their difference in function in thereproduction and conservation of the race, and this is a true view, but the lesser truth need not necessarily exclude the greater. AsChesterton says, "Something in the evil spirit of our time forcespeople always to pretend to have found some material and mechanicalexplanation. " Such would have us believe, with Schopenhauer andBernard Shaw, that the lover's delight in the beauty of his mistressdwells solely in his instinctive perception of her fitness to be themother of his child. This is undoubtedly a factor in the glamourwoman casts on man, but there are other factors too, higher as well aslower, corresponding to different departments of our manifold nature. First of all, there is mere physical attraction: to the man physical, woman is a cup of delight; next, there is emotional love, wherebywoman appeals through her need of protection, her power of tenderness;on the mental plane she is man's intellectual companion, his masculinereason would supplement itself with her feminine intuition; herecognizes in her an objectification, in some sort, of his own soul, his spirit's bride, predestined throughout the ages; while the godwithin him perceives her to be that portion of himself which he putforth before the world was, to be the mother, not alone of humanchildren, but of all those myriad forms, within which entering, "as ina sheath, a knife, " he becomes the Enjoyer, and realizes, vividly andconcretely, his bliss, his wisdom, and his power. Adam and Eve, and the tree in the midst of the garden! After man andwoman, a tree is perhaps the most significant symbol in theworld: every tree is the Tree of Life in the sense that it is arepresentation of universal becoming. To say that all things have fortheir mother _prakriti_, undifferentiated substance, and for theirfather _purusha_, the creative fire, is vague and metaphysical, andconveys little meaning to our image-bred, image-fed minds; on thephysical plane we can only learn these transcendental truths by meansof symbols, and so to each of us is given a human father and a humanmother from whose relation to one another and to oneself may belearned our relation to nature, the universal mother, and to thatimmortal spirit which is the father of us all. We are given, moreover, the symbol of the tree, which, rooted in the earth, its mother, andnourished by her juices, strives ever upward towards its father, thesun. The mathematician may be able to demonstrate, as a result of alifetime of hard thinking, that unity and infinity are but two aspectsof one thing; this is not clear to ordinary minds, but made concretein the tree--unity in the trunk, infinity in the foliage--any oneis able to understand it. We perceive that all things grow as a treegrows, from unity to multiplicity, from simplicity and strength tobeauty and fineness. The generation of the line from the point, theplane from the line, and from the plane, the solid, is a matter, again, which chiefly interests the geometrician, but the inevitablesequence stands revealed in seed, stem, leaf, and fruit: a point, aline, a surface, and a sphere. There is another order of truths, also, which a tree teaches: the renewal of its life each year is a symbolof the reincarnation of the soul, teaching that life is never-endingclimax, and that what appears to be cessation is merely a changeof state. A tree grows great by being firmly rooted; we too, thoughchildren of the air, need the earth, and grow by good deeds, hidden, like the roots of the tree, out of sight; for the tree, rain andsunshine: for the soul, tears and laughter thrill the imprisonedspirit into conscious life. We love and understand the trees because we have ourselves passedthrough their evolution, and they survive in us still, for thearterial and nervous systems are trees, the roots of one in the heart, of the other in the brain. Has not our body its trunk, bearing aloftthe head, like a flower: a cup to hold the precious juices of thebrain? Has not that trunk its tapering limbs which ramify into handsand feet, and these into fingers and toes, after the manner of thetwigs and branches of a tree? Closely related to symbolism is sacramentalism; the man who seesnature as a book of symbols is likely to regard life as a sacrament. Because this is a point of view vitalizing to art let us glance atthe sacramental life, divorced from the forms and observances of anyspecific religion. This life consists in the habitual perception of an ulterior meaning, a hidden beauty and significance in the objects, acts, and eventsof every day. Though binding us to a sensuous existence, thesenevertheless contain within themselves the power of emancipating usfrom it: over and above their immediate use, their pleasure or theirprofit, they have a hidden meaning which contains some healing messagefor the soul. A classic example of a sacrament, not alone in the ordinary meaningof the term, but in the special sense above defined, is the HolyCommunion of the Christian Church. Its origin is a matter of commonknowledge. On the evening of the night in which He was betrayed, Jesus and His disciples were gathered together for the feast of thePassover. Aware of His impending betrayal, and desirous of impressingpowerfully upon His chosen followers the nature and purpose of Hissacrifice, Jesus ordained a sacrament out of the simple materials ofthe repast. He took bread and broke it, and gave to each a piece asthe symbol of His broken body; and to each He passed a cup of wine, as a symbol of His poured-out blood. In this act, as in the washing ofthe disciples' feet on the same occasion, He made His ministrations tothe needs of men's bodies an allegory of His greater ministration tothe needs of their souls. The sacrament of the Lord's Supper is of such beauty and power that ithas persisted even to the present day. It lacks, however, the elementof universality--at least by other than Christians its universalitywould be denied. Let us seek, therefore some all-embracing symbol toillustrate the sacramental view of life. Perhaps marriage is such a symbol. The public avowal of love betweena man and woman, their mutual assumption of the attendant privileges, duties and responsibilities are matters so pregnant with consequencesto them and to the race that by all right-thinking people marriage isregarded as a high and holy thing; its sacramental character is feltand acknowledged even by those who would be puzzled to tell the reasonwhy. The reason is involved in the answer to the question, "Of what ismarriage a symbol?" The most obvious answer, and doubtless the bestone, is found in the well known and much abused doctrine, common toevery religion, of the spiritual marriage between God and the soul. What Christians call _the Mystic Way, _ and Buddhists _the Path_comprises those changes in consciousness through which every soulpasses on its way to perfection. When the personal life is conceivedof as an allegory of this inner, intense, super-mundane life, itassumes a sacramental character. With strange unanimity, followersof the Mystic Way have given the name of marriage to that memorableexperience in "the flight of the Alone to the Alone, " when the soul, after trials and purgations, enters into indissoluble union with thespirit, that divine, creative principle whereby it is made fruitfulfor this world. Marriage, then, however dear and close the union, isthe symbol of a union dearer and closer, for it is the fair prophecythat on some higher arc of the evolutionary spiral, the soul will meetits immortal lover and be initiated into divine mysteries. As an example of the power of symbols to induce those changes ofconsciousness whereby the soul is prepared for this union, it isrecorded that an eminent scientist was moved to alter his entire modeof life on reflecting, while in his bath one morning, that though eachday he was at such pains to make clean his body, he made no similarpurgation of his mind and heart. The idea appealed to him soprofoundly that he began to practise the higher cleanliness from thatday forth. If it be true, as has been said, that ordinary life in the world is atraining school for a life more real and more sublime, then everythingpertaining to life in the world must possess a sacramental character, and possess it inherently, and not merely by imputation. Let usdiscover, then, if we can, some of the larger meanings latent inlittle things. When at the end of a cloudy day the sun bursts forth in splendor andsets red in the west, it is a sign to the weather-wise that the nextday will be fair. To the devotee of the sacramental life it holds aricher promise. To him the sun is a symbol of the love of God; theclouds, those worldly preoccupations of his own which hide its facefrom him. This purely physical phenomenon, therefore, which bringsto most men a scarcely noticed augmentation of heat and light, andan indication of fair weather on the morrow, induces in the mystic anineffable sense of divine immanence and beneficence, and an assuranceof their continuance beyond the dark night of the death of the body. When the sacramentalist goes swimming in the sea he enjoys to the fullthe attendant physical exhilaration, but a greater joy flows fromthe thought that he is back with his great Sea-Mother--that feminineprinciple of which the sea is the perfect symbol, since water bringsall things to birth and nurtures them. When at the end of a dayhe lays aside his clothes--that two-dimensional sheath of thethree-dimensional body--it is in full assurance that his body in turnwill be abandoned by the inwardly retreating consciousness, and thathe will range wherever he wills during the hours of sleep, clothed inhis subtle four-dimensional body, related to the physical body as thatis related to the clothes it wears. To every sincere seeker nature reveals her secrets, but since mendiffer in their curiosities she reveals different things to differentmen. All are rewarded for their devotion in accordance with theirinterests and desires, but woman-like, nature reveals herself mostfully to him who worships not the fair form of her, but her soul. Thisfavored lover is the mystic; for ever seeking instruction in thingsspiritual, he perceives in nature an allegory of the soul, andinterprets her symbols in terms of the sacramental life. The brook, pursuing its tortuous and stony pathway in untiring effortto reach its gravitational centre, is a symbol of the Pilgrim'sprogress, impelled by love to seek God within his heart. The modestdaisy by the roadside, and the wanton sunflower in the garden alikeseek to image the sun, the god of their worship, a core of seeds andfringe of petals representing their best effort to mimic the flamingdisc and far-flung corona of the sun. Man seeks less ardently, and somore ineffectively in his will and imagination to image God. In thereverent study of insect and animal life we gain some hint of what wehave been and what we may become--something corresponding to the grub, a burrowing thing; to the caterpillar, a crawling thing; and finallyto the butterfly, a radiant winged creature. After this fashion then does he who has embraced the sacramental lifecome to perceive in the "sensuous manifold" of nature, that one divineReality which ever seeks to instruct him in supermundane wisdom, andto woo him to superhuman blessedness and peace. In time, this readingof earth in terms of heaven, becomes a settled habit. Then, inEmerson's phrase, he has hitched his wagon to a star, and changed hisgrocer's cart into a chariot of the sun. The reader may perhaps fail to perceive the bearing of this longdiscussion of symbols and sacraments upon the subject of art andarchitecture, but in the mind of the author the correlation isplain. There can be no great art without religion: religion begins inconsciousness as a mystic experience, it flows thence into symbolsand sacraments, and these in turn are precipitated by the artist intoponderable forms of beauty. Unless the artist himself participates inthis mystic experience, life's deeper meanings will escape him, andthe work of his hands will have no special significance. Until it canbe said of every artist "Himself from God he could not free, " there will be no art worthy of the name. SELF-EDUCATION[1] I take great pleasure in availing myself of this opportunity to speakto you on certain aspects of the art which we practise. I cannotforget, and I hope that you sufficiently remember, that thearchitectural future of this country lies in the hands of just suchmen as you. Let me dwell then for a moment on your unique opportunity. Perhaps some of you have taken up architecture as you might have goneinto trade, or manufacturing, or any of the useful professions; inthat case you have probably already learned discrimination, and nowrealize that in the cutting of the cake of human occupations youhave drawn the piece which contains the ring of gold. The cake isthe business and utilitarian side of life, the ring of gold is theæsthetic, the creative side: treasure it, for it is a precious andenduring thing. Think what your work is: to reassemble materials insuch fashion that they become instinct with a beauty and eloquent witha meaning which may carry inspiration and delight to generations stillunborn. Immortality haunts your threshold, even though your hand maynot be strong enough to open to the heavenly visitor. Though the profession of architecture is a noble one in any countryand in any age, it is particularly rich in inspiration and inopportunity here and now, for who can doubt that we are about to enterupon a great building period? We have what Mr. Sullivan calls "theneed and the power to build, " the spirit of great art alone islacking, and that is already stirring in the secret hearts of men, andwill sooner or later find expression in objective and ponderableforms of new beauty. These it is your privilege to create. May theopportunity find you ready! There is a saying, "To be young, to be inlove, to be in Italy!" I would paraphrase it thus: To be young, to bein architecture, to be in America. It is my purpose tonight to outline a scheme of self-education, whichif consistently followed out I am sure will help you, though I amaware that to a certain order of mind it will seem highly mystical andimpractical. If it commends itself to your favor I shall be glad. Many of you will have had the advantage of a thorough technicaltraining in your chosen profession: be grateful for it. Others, likeTopsy, "just growed"--or have just failed to grow. For the solace ofall such, without wishing to be understood to disparage architecturalschooling, I would say that there is a kind of education which isworse than none, for by filling his mind with ready-made ideas itprevents a man from ever learning to think for himself; and there isanother kind which teaches him to think, indeed, but according to somearbitrary method, so that his mind becomes a canal instead of a river, flowing in a predetermined and artificial channel, and unreplenishedby the hidden springs of the spirit. The best education can do no morethan to bring into manifestation that which is inherent; it does thisby means of some stimulus from without--from books and masters--butthe stimulus may equally come from within: each can develop his ownmind, and in the following manner. The alternation between a state of activity and a state of passivity, which is a law of our physical being, as it is a law of all nature, is characteristic of the action of the mind as well: observation andmeditation are the two poles of thought. The tendency of modern lifeand of our active American temperament is towards a too exclusivefunctioning of the mind in its outgoing state, and this results ina great cleverness and a great shallowness. It is only in moments ofquiet meditation that the great synthetic, fundamental truths revealthemselves. Observe ceaselessly, weigh, judge, criticize--this orderof intellectual activity is important and valuable--but the mind mustbe steadied and strengthened by another and a different process. Thepower of attention, the ability to concentrate, is the measure ofmental efficiency; and this power may be developed by a trainingexactly analogous to that by which a muscle is developed, for mindand muscle are alike the instruments of the Silent Thinker who sitsbehind. The mind an instrument of something higher than the mind: hereis a truth so fertile that in the language of Oriental imagery, "Ifyou were to tell this to a dry stick, branches would grow, and leavessprout from it. " There is nothing original in the method of mental development hereindicated; it has been known and practised for centuries in the East, where life is less strenuous than it is with us. The method consistsin silent meditation every day at stated periods, during which theattempt is made to hold the mind to the contemplation of a singleimage or idea, bringing the attention back whenever it wanders, killing each irrelevant thought as it arises, as one might kill arat coming out of a hole. This turning of the mind back on itself isdifficult, but I know of nothing that "pays" so well, and I have neverfound any one who conscientiously practised it who did not confirmthis view. The point is, that if a man acquires the ability toconcentrate on one thing, he can concentrate on anything; he increaseshis competence on the mental plane in the same manner that pullingchest-weights increases his competence on the physical. The practiceof meditation has moreover an ulterior as well as an immediateadvantage, and that is the reason it is practised by the Yogis ofIndia. They believe that by stilling the mind, which is like a lakereflecting the sky, the Higher Self communicates a knowledge of Itselfto the lower consciousness. Without the working of this Oversoul inand through us we can never hope to produce an architecture whichshall rank with the great architectures of the past, for in Egypt, inGreece, in mediaeval France, as in India, China, and Japan, mysticismmade for itself a language more eloquent than any in which the purelyrational consciousness of man has ever spoken. We are apt to overestimate the importance of books and book learning. Think how small a part books have played in the development ofarchitecture; indeed, Palladio and Vignola, with their hard and fastformulæ have done the art more harm than good. It is a fallacy thatreading strengthens the mind--it enervates it; reading sometimesstimulates the mind to original thinking, and _this_ develops it, but reading itself is a passive exercise, because the thought of thereader is for the time being in abeyance in order that the thoughtof the writer may enter. Much reading impairs the power to thinkoriginally and consecutively. Few of the great creators of the worldhave had use for books, and if you aspire to be in their class youwill avoid the "spawn of the press. " The best plan is to read onlygreat books, and having read for five minutes, think about what youhave read for ten. These exercises, faithfully followed out, will make your mind a fitvehicle for the expression of your idea, but the advice I havegiven is as pertinent to any one who uses his mind as it is to thearchitect. To what, specifically, should the architectural studentdevote his attention in order to improve the quality of his work?My own answer would be that he should devote himself to the study ofmusic, of the human figure, and to the study of Nature--"first, last, midst, and without end. " The correlation between music and architecture is no new thought; itis implied in the famous saying that architecture is frozen music. Vitruvius considered a knowledge of music to be a qualification of thearchitect of his day, and if it was desirable then it is no less sonow. There is both a metaphysical reason and a practical one whythis is so. Walter Pater, in a famous phrase, declared that all artconstantly aspires to the condition of music, by which he meant toimply that there is a certain rhythm and harmony at the root of everyart, of which music is the perfect and pure expression; that inmusic the means and the end are one and the same. This coincides withSchopenhauer's theory about music, that it is the most perfectand unconditioned sensuous presentment known to us of that undying_will-to-live_ which constitutes life and the world. Metaphysicsaside, the architect ought to hear as much good music as he can, andlearn the rudiments of harmony, at least to the extent of knowing thesimple numerical ratios which govern the principal consonant intervalswithin the octave, so that, translating these ratios into intervals ofspace expressed in terms of length and breadth, height, and width, hiswork will "aspire to the condition of music. " There is a metaphysical reason, too, as well as a practical one, whyan architect should know the human figure. Carlyle says, "There is butone temple in the world, and that is the body of man. " If the bodyis, as he declares, a temple, it is no less true that a temple, or anywork of architectural art is in the nature of an ampler body whichman has created for his uses, and which he inhabits, just as theindividual consciousness builds and inhabits its fleshly stronghold. This may seem a highly mystical idea, but the correlation betweenthe house and its inhabitant, and the body and its consciousness iseverywhere close, and is susceptible of infinite elaboration. Architectural beauty, like human beauty, depends upon a propersubordination of parts to the whole, a harmonious interrelationbetween these parts, the expressiveness of each of its functions, andwhen these are many and diverse, their reconcilement one with another. This being so, a study of the human figure with a view to analyzingthe sources of its beauty cannot fail to be profitable to thearchitectural designer. Pursued intelligently, such study willstimulate the mind to a perception of those simple yet subtle lawsaccording to which nature everywhere works, and it will educatethe eye in the finest known school of proportion, training it todistinguish minute differences, in the same way that the hearing ofgood music cultivates the ear. It is neither necessary nor desirable to make elaborate and carefullyshaded drawings from a posed model; an equal number of hours spent incopying and analyzing the plates of a good art anatomy, supplementedwith a certain amount of life drawing, done merely with a view tocatch the pose, will be found to be a more profitable exercise, for itwill make you familiar with the principal and subsidiary proportionsof the bodily temple, and give you sufficient data to enable you toindicate a figure in any position with fair accuracy. I recommend the study of Nature because I believe that such studywill assist you to recover that direct and instant perception ofbeauty, our natural birthright, of which over-sophistication hasso bereft us that we no longer know it to be ours by right ofinheritance--inheritance from that cosmic matter endowed withmotion out of which we are fashioned, proceeding ever rationally andrhythmically to its appointed ends. We are all of us participators ina world of concrete music, geometry and number--a world, that is, somathematically constituted and co-ordinated that our pigmy bodies, equally with the farthest star, throb to the music of the spheres. Theblood flows rhythmically, the heart its metronome; the moving limbsweave patterns; the voice stirs into radiating sound-waves that poolof silence which we call the air. "Thou canst not wave thy staff in air, Or dip thy paddle in the lake, But it carves the bow of beauty there, And ripples in rhyme the oar forsake. " The whole of animate creation labours under the beautiful necessity ofbeing beautiful. Everywhere it exhibits a perfect utility subservientto harmonious laws. Nature is the workshop in which are built_beautiful organisms_. This is exactly the aim of the architect--tofashion beautiful organisms; what better school, therefore, could hehave in which to learn his trade? To study Nature it is not necessary to go out into the fields andbotanize, nor to attempt to make water colours of picturesque scenery. These things are very well, but not so profitable to your particularpurpose as observation directed toward the discovery of the laws whichunderlie and determine form and structure, such as the tracing of thespiral line, not alone where it is obvious, as in the snail's shelland in the ram's horn, but where it appears obscurely, as in thedisposition of leaves or twigs upon a parent stem. Such laws of natureare equally laws of art, for art _is_ nature carried to a higher powerby reason of its passage through a human consciousness. Thought andemotion tend to crystallize into forms of beauty as inevitably, andaccording to the same laws, as does the frost on the window pane. Art, in one of its aspects, is the weaving of a pattern, the communicationof an order and a method to lines, forms, colors, sounds. All verypoetical, and possibly true, you may be saying to yourselves, butwhat has it to do with architecture, which nowadays, at least, ispre-eminently a practical and utilitarian art whose highest missionis to fulfil definite conditions in an economical and admirable way;whose supreme excellence is fitness, appropriateness, the perfectadaptation of means to ends, and the apt expression of both meansand ends? Yes, architecture is all of this, but this is not all ofarchitecture; else the most efficient engineer would be the mostadmirable architect, which does not happen to be the case. Along withthe expression of the concrete and individual must go the expressionof the abstract and universal; the two can be combined in a singlebuilding in the same way that in every human countenance arecombined a racial or temperamental _type_, which is universal, and a_character_, which is individual. The expression of any sort of cosmictruth, of universal harmony and rhythm, is the quality which ourarchitecture most conspicuously lacks. Failing to find the cosmictruth within ourselves, failing to vibrate to the universal harmonyand rhythm, our architecture is--well, what it is, for only that whichis native to our living spirit can we show forth in the work of ourhands. Your work will be, in the last analysis, what you yourselves are. Letno sophistry blind you to the truth of that. There are rhythms in theworld of space which we find only in the architecture of the past, andenamoured of their beauty we repeat them over and over (off the keyfor the most part), on the principle that all the songs have beensung; or we just make a noise, on the principle that noise is allthere is to architecture anyway. It is not so. Those systems ofspatial rhythms which we call Egyptian, Classic, Gothic, Renaissancearchitecture and the rest, are records all of the living human spiritenergizing in the stubborn matter of the physical plane with joy, withconviction, with mastery. When that undying spirit awakes again inyou, stirred into consciousness by meditation, which is its prayer;by music, which is its praise; by the contemplation of that fairform which is its temple; and by communion with nature, which is itslooking-glass; you will experience again that ancient joy, hold againthat firm conviction, and exercise again that mastery to transfuse thegranite and iron heart of the hills into patterns unlike any that thehand of man has made before. [Footnote 1: An address delivered before the Boston Architectural Clubin April, 1909. ]