Louis Henri Sullivan ( 1856-192 > . ,.
Chicago's founder of modem archi-
tecture, flourished for 15 years as
an acknowledged master builder
and suffered for another 25 as a
prophet ignored by his fellow citi-
zens. As an architect he developed
his fruitful insight concerning form
and function, applied it brilliantly
to buildings, but spent his later life
exploring its relevance to wide as-
pects of human and natural life.
He fed his mind with the works of
many thinkers ranging from Nietz-
sche through Spencer to William
James, as well as with the popu-
larizations of the science and soci-
ology of his period.

The Testament of Stone was selected
to illustrate, not Sullivan the archi-
tect or the precursor of modern
architecture, but Sullivan as Jere-
miah. Architecture, the starting
point, is stressed less as an art than
as an index and expression of social
health or disease. The Chicago
Tribune competition to design the
most beautiful office building in the
world provided Sullivan an oppor-
tunity to inject his philosophy,, as
did the survival of the Imperial

(Continued on bach flap)

3 tt48=9Q332- 0405

720*973 S94

Sullivan

Hie testament of stone

THE TESTAMENT OF STONE

THEMES OF

IDEALISM AND INDIGNATION

FROM THE WRITINGS OF

LOUIS SULLIVAN

THE TESTAMENT OF STONE

Edited, with an Introduction, by MAURICE ENGLISH

NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY PRESS 1963

Copyright 1963 by Maurice English

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 63-15297

Manufactured in the United States of America

the Editor's share in this volume is dedicated to
Fanita, Brian, and Deirdre

'the opening of the eyelids of the world is what democracy is about 9

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

My thanks are due to Miss Ruth Schoneman and the staff of the
Burnham Library of the Art Institute of Chicago, for making avail-
able the mass of writings by and about Sullivan there collected,,
from which this selection has been made. Particular thanks are
due for permission to present in book form for the first time: "The
Modern Phase in Architecture"; "An Unaffected School of Modern
Architecture Will It Come?"; "The Chicago Tribune Competi-
tion"; "Reflections on the Tokyo Disaster"; and selections from
"Natural Thinking." The original form in which these pieces have
been published, if at all. Is specified In the headnotes.

Thanks are due also to Wayne State University Press, and to
Miss Elaine Hedges, for permission to reprint passages from the
volume edited by her, Democracy: A Man-Search by Sullivan.

The ornamental drawings in the book were ably done by Miss
Elizabeth G. Stout, who adapted her designs from details of the
Chicago Stock Exchange elevator grillwork, the Getty Tomb in
Chicago, and the Wainwright Building in St. Louis. The University
of Minnesota Press, publisher of John Szarkowski's The Idea of
Louis Sullivan (copyright 1956 by the University of Minnesota),
and the Northwestern University Department of Art were helpful
in providing source material for the drawings.

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION: by the Editor xl

PRELUDE: On the Head of a Pin I

PART ONE: ARCHITECTURE AND DEMOCRACY

Characteristics and Tendencies of
American Architecture 5

Emotional Architecture as Compared
with Intellectual 11

The Modern Phase in Architecture 25

An Unaffected School of Modern
Architecture Will It Come? 29

The Young Man in Architecture 31

What Is Architecture: A Study in the
American People of Today 43

The Chicago Tribune Competition 63
Reflections on the Tokyo Disaster 71
The World's Fair and After 79

PART TWO : THE PIVOTAL THEMES

Function and Form 91
The Creative Impulse 97

CONTENTS

PART THREE: DEMOCRACY AND THE SPIRIT OF MAN
Selections from Natural Thinking 105
Selections from Democracy: A Man-Search 125
A Selection from The Autobiography of an Idea 209

POSTLUDE: Invocation to the Winter God 225

INTRODUCTION

Therefore the art of developing Democracy into a complete, complex yet
simple working civilization is the one great art of expression confronting
men today. It is the one art including all arts, all activities, individual and
collective. It is in the development of the technique of such art that modern
man is to concentrate his thought, hend his faculties, and exercise his
superh powers as creator.

Louis Henri Sullivan (1856-1924), the Chicago architect who is
generally regarded as the main source of modern architecture,
composed during his lifetime a number of books, magazine articles,
lectures, and poems in prose. Some of these are intimately related
to his career as an architect; others are the expression of his al-
ternative career, also abortive, as a philosopher and prophet of
democracy.

These writings range from book-length manuscripts to brief talks
and letters-to-the-editor, a thousand words or so in length. Some have
never been printed, but remain in manuscript in the Burnham Li-
brary of the Art Institute of Chicago ; others have not been put into
book form, but can be found in old issues of architectural and build-
ing-trade magazines.

The reasons for now publishing a selection of these neglected
works are several. There is a revival of interest in Sullivan's work
and thinking, and this revival is likely to continue. But among his
writings, some of the most detailed in expounding his thoughts on
democracy, education, and other social and philosophical subjects,
are the hardest to come by. For example, the highly characteristic
"Natural Thinking: A Study In Democracy" remains except for
sections included in this volume in manuscript. His comments

Xll INTRODUCTION

on the Imperial Hotel, built in Tokyo by his former chief draftsman
Frank Lloyd Wright, and on the Chicago Tribune architectural
competition, are in 1923 and 1924 issues of an architectural journal.

These writings are of varying importance to Sullivan's career
and convictions as an architect; they all, however, have much to
say on the larger issues of democracy, education, man's destiny
in America and in the Cosmos. This volume of selections is expli-
citly focussed on Sullivan the social thinker and prophet. So true
is this that his finest single piece of writing, "The Tall Office
Building Artistically Considered," is not included in these pages ;
it says little on the great themes he considered when he was not
dealing with the art of building. One can read this architect as
an American process philosopher, although he scorned "mere
philosophers."

In assessing the value of a Sullivan anthology, it is important to
bear in mind his own attitude toward his writings.

Sullivan regarded himself, and was regarded by his associates,
as "essentially a poet" (in his attitude toward life, and his general
style of personality, as well as in architecture) ; and he considered
himself as having a vocation not only as an architect, but also as
bard, seer, and prophet. Thus, while his first known piece of writ-
ing deals with "Characteristics and Tendencies of American Archi-
tecture" (1885) , he followed it only a year later with a prose poem,
a celebration of nature and an anticipation of a great American
flowering of art, which relates to his view of the universe, and to
the role of the individual in society, as much as it does to
architecture.

Seeing himself as another Whitman, Sullivan recognized that a
later counterpart of that poet needed some systematization of ideas
about how democracy was to develop in the raging noondays of in-
dustrial capitalism. He tried to work out such a system from Ms
one fruitful insight concerning form and function, applied it bril-
liantly to architecture, and then spent many of his years as an out-

INTRODUCTION xiil

of-work architect, In passionately exploring its relevance to wide
aspects of human and natural life. He fed his mind for this purpose
with the works of many seminal thinkers ranging from Nietzsche
through Spencer to William James, as well as with popularizations
of the science and sociology of his period.

His writings on democracy hold our interest because of his ability
to grasp its social and aesthetic values, and to relate these to one
another; because of the intensity with which he was able to feel and
express certain philosophical and Messianic convictions; because
of his insistence on the value of the individual, Indeed of the poet,
rather than the mass, as the bearer and creator of culture in a
democracy.

Sullivan's literary style ranges from the sentimentally poetic
through the forcefully expository (most of all when he focuses on
architecture) to the jarringly crude and gauche. He has consider-
able power of invective, but it often degenerates into sheer nagging
and scolding. In his middle and later years rage at his own frustra-
tions, and a sense of the degeneration of American democracy, had
an obsessive effect on Sullivan; page after waste page of jeering
or snarling rhetoric benumb or alienate the most sympathetic of
readers.

But at their purest and most disinterested, his indignation and
idealism are valuable, never more so than today. It is necessary to
rescue Sullivan from himself, in order to appreciate him as a writer
and thinker. Once this is done, a very specific, though incomplete,
portrait of a man emerges from his pages; the poignant figure of
the American artist at death-grips with the society in which he lived.

The fate of the artist in this country was never more dramatically
illustrated than in Sullivan's career. Unlike others who led lives of
equal or greater pathos Poe or Hart Crane for instance his
tragedy was the result not of sheer alienation, but of a head-on con-
frontation with industrial capitalism in its most rampant and
voracious form. This confrontation, in which his success and failure

XW INTRODUCTION

were both almost total, is a live issue in almost all of Sullivan's writ-
ings, and gives them all an extra dimension and meaning.

A man of fixed conviction, Sullivan did not yield to the hostility
and indifference of his environment, to its wastage of his genius as
a builder, without trying to take its measure as a searching social
critic, and without opposing its murk and violence with his vision
of an ideal democracy to come. He rejected both the materialism of
his day and the bleak prospects for man summarized in the doctrine
of the survival of the fittest: he wrote as someone fighting for a more
humane future for the race.

This Reader has been selected, then, not to illustrate Sullivan
the architect, or the prophet of modern architecture, but Sullivan
as Jeremiah, and also as the herald of a time when New York and
Chicago might be rebuilt in the image of the City of Man. In this
latter role, he attempted as a writer (no less than he had as an
architect) to be the catalyst from which the Western traditions of
the classic and the romantic would be merged into a new "organic"
synthesis : the art and social order of democracy.

II

The word "romantic" occurs frequently in the writings of Sulli-
van, always with the conventional implications of rich and exalted
feeling, exotic beauty, magic, and mystery. Taking the word with
these connotations, Sullivan used it purposefully, and not in a loose,
sentimental way. "Romantic" was a value for Sullivan, and fit-
ted into a hierarchy of values, in architecture and in his general
philosophy.

He was perhaps unaware of another way of using the word "ro-
mantic," which can shed light on his life and work, and his unful-
filled careers as architect and thinker and also on the environment
in which he worked and from which he struggled to draw and dem-
onstrate an order, both aesthetic and social.

The textbooks tell us that classicism involves ideals of propor-

INTRODUCTION XV

lion, control, objectivity. Scholars who have examined the concept
with a sense of history, are able to add something to our under-
standing by locating it in a social context. The classic work of art,
they tell us, is the product of a culture with a high degree of unity:
a culture where state and religion are identified with each other in
a way which expresses, and does not suffocate, the aspirations of
the individual; where the individual feels himself a citizen not in
any abstract or partial way, but intimately, unselfconsciously,
daily: being a citizen involves his attitude toward his gods, his eco-
nomic role as a guildsman or merchant or priest, his performance
as an athlete in the sacred festivals, his going to the theater, all his
actions, in fact, throughout his life. Assume such a community to
have the wealth and security, plus the stimulus from outside and
in, which foster curiosity and an ardent approach toward the under-
standing and celebration of life, and you have we are told
Athens and Florence and lesser metropolises whose art has briefly
approximated that equilibrium called the classic.

This equilibrium is not only brief, but imperfect, because life is
imperfect, and because, too, art is equally a repudiation of the sta-
tic, the balanced, the temperate in life as well as an attempt to
recreate these elements on some ideal level of being. It is a plaus-
ible guess that the classic has never been able to achieve expression
without an impulse of revolt, of hostility toward archon, syndic
and priest, of flight and quest: without the romantic impulse.

Until modern times, men have had no choice except to maintain
social equilibrium as best they could, and when it broke down, to re-
constitute it, over laborious centuries if need was, with brutal speed
whenever possible. Men fled to cities from nature as from an enemy,
from their own instincts as from other enemies: until a few cen-
turies ago, some sources of the "romantic" were too disturbing,
too suspect, to be distinguished and identified much less juxta-
posed against the concept "classic" as implying a different but
defensible set of values.

OCVl INTRODUCTION

It is an accepted aspect of the uniqueness of our society, that the
past order of civilization broke down, and in considerable measure
disappeared, so irrecoverably that no one now can seriously expect to
achieve the "classic" in art or in social order, as that term has been
understood in past centuries. "Whirl is king, having driven out
Zeus" and the task is to replace the old, external orders of society
with a new one drawn from man's knowledge of the external uni-
verse, and of himself.

Where this knowledge exists only partially or not at all in the
realm of art the romantic attitude is an almost necessary one for
the individual beginner as well as for the community which is set-
ting out that common task in our time to fashion its culture
anew. Assume a society in which consensus, dogma, and unwritten
constitutions not only guided men in all their acts, but did so in a
way that gave meaning and order to their lives (or at a minimum,
provided a point of departure for the revision of accepted mean-
ings and values) : in such a society, that intense expression of human
aspiration which we call classic art could recur at favored intervals.
Assume a world from which these are banished, and artist and
thinker alike must undertake not a struggle but a hunt, or rather a
quest. The student of physical sciences may be exempted from this
rule, but not up to this point in the modern centuries the stu-
dent of human behavior, the artist, the poet, and that significant
figure of recent epochs, the speculative prophet, the unaffiliated
Messiah.

From this point of view, Goethe's statement: "classicism is health,
romanticism is disease" is not necessarily wrong, but it is not illu-
minating. Dante in his time could control the romantic impulse which
animated his travels through the afterlife, by subordinating it to
the dominant myth of his age; Shakespeare could perform the feat
of combining the classic confrontation the duel, the face-to-face
combat with the romantic theme of the chase or search, each ex-
pressed with a maximum of intensity, yet neither overwhelming

INTRODUCTION OCVU

the other; but with Milton the balance is already upset: a romantic
hero pursues God in that quest for power which is the poem's secret
obsession. It had become increasingly difficult for the classic not
to emerge as frigid or artificial, a mask; or not to break into roman-
tic or realistic modes of seeing life.

The fate of the man who persists in seeing life romantically, as
Shaw said, is despair. The artist who necessarily starts from his
position as an isolate in the city, the state, the universe therefore,
from the recognition of his isolation from himself must attempt
to reconcile his position with some possibility of order in society
and in the universe. He cannot really change his position as an iso-
late, given the nature of our society and what we think we know of
our universe; therefore he cannot fully mature into any parallel to
a "classic" artist. But unless he is willing to settle down in the half-
way house of realism, or in that polishing of techniques and frag-
ments called aestheticism, he can live and die trying.

Ill

Although Louis Sullivan said he valued only universal truths
"generalizations so broad as to admit of no exception whatever"
we may defiantly suspect that the spirit is often most alive in
those crucial exceptions that invariably rise to demolish even the
broadest generalizations, and thereby goad us on toward some more
complex grasp of reality. It has been fruitful to consider here the
dichotomy scholars have established between the classic and roman-
tic; but one cannot do so for very long, without being struck by the
massive exception that architecture offers.

To an extent unique among the arts, architecture is married to
its social functions, and cannot come into being apart from them.
A poem, a play, a piece of music, can be created in solitude and left
to find an audience or not: but buildings are built exclusively in
relation to people and in order to fulfill functions which society, and
not the artist, stipulates. And these functions are utilitarian.

XVlii INTRODUCTION

Architecture is the fine art which is firmly grounded in the rou-
tines of daily life; which depends, to exist, on needs which have
nothing to do with aesthetic or spiritual values in the first instance.
For this reason, the architect is the only artist who is not in control
of the materials of his art. He creates not with paper and pencil, or
in just space enough to dance or declaim, or with a fistful of clay or
metal, but with substantial quantities of expensive materials, for
which he is beholden to others.

The extent to which a romantic architect like Gaudi is an isolate
in his own art is illuminating. Not more revolutionary or original
than Whitman or Gauguin, he yet stands companionless and with-
out progeny in the history of architecture, as they do not in the
history of poetry and painting. Society's demands are strong enough
to make the romantic architect a rarity because they make him
almost a contradiction in terms.

Taken in reverse, this thesis is a pregnant one: architecture is
permanently allied to those aspects of culture which are most so-
cial and most susceptible of objective measure and control. It is,
therefore, the closest of the arts to the conditions which, in the past,
have proved to be essential to the creation of "the classic." In mod-
ern times, its wedding to science and technology has proven, on the
whole, easy and intimate after a hesistant courtship. For decades,
architecture has been able to live without the clumsy seductions and
quarrelsome concubinage through which music, painting, and po-
etry have sought to come to terms with the primary forces of mod-
ern culture.

In principle, therefore, architecture would seem to have been in
possession of those prerequisites needed to lead the other arts, in
this century, toward a new articulation of human experience, a new
celebration of our common humanity. The movement from romantic
quest toward some organic form which would be the contemporary
re-creation of the classic seemed an almost inevitable one for ar-
chitecture to take, even before this century began.

INTRODUCTION XIX

It was with superb endowments to demonstrate this, and with
full consciousness of his inaugural role in American culture, that
Sullivan lived out his life in Chicago for fifteen years an acknowl-
edged master-builder; for another twenty-five, still acknowledged
but rarely employed, he survived as an impoverished scold, a
flawed Messiah whom his fellow-citizens maddeningly ignored. His
life, in its success and failure, was a test of the basic premises of
American democracy in this century; his writings, an attempt to
state where that democracy had failed, but also to see beyond that
failure and assert the conditions under which its potential might
yet be realized.

It is fashionable to emphasize the crudity of Chicago when Sulli-
van first came to the city. Since that crudity, while taking new
forms, has only slightly abated, the theme can easily be rephrased,
with new and old illustrations. But the poignancy of Sullivan's des-
tiny in Chicago is most keenly felt if one sees not only the mud, the
slaughterhouses, the plutocracy, the brutality and graft, but the fact
that concurrently with all these, the city for a brief decade or two
offered some of its choicest spirits a superb illusion, that of having
established the conditions needed to revive the civic unity of belief
and enterprise from which a classic symmetry had formerly come.

Does this seem too preposterous a fantasy? It did at the time,
to many intellectuals in the city, as its does today. Nevertheless, it
is impossible to read the writings of Sullivan's youth, and those of
some of his contemporaries, without being struck by their common
expectation not only of the emergence of a new style of building,
but of a style which would be a reflection of a new country, of a new
democratic spirit, and which would meet the utilitarian needs of the
community in a way which would somehow celebrate also its ideals
and triumphs.

Sullivan's own writings begin with a confident, lyrical assertion
that this would surely happen: a prediction of that organic archi-
tecture which would be, literally, one expressive organ of a happy

XX INTRODUCTION

and fecund democracy. These writings go on then to brilliant dem-
onstrations of how, and in what forms, that architecture would
manifest itself. They continue with an urgent demand that the new
buildings, now long overdue, should in fact arise. But the tone
darkens and becomes exasperated; the awaited birth becomes the
occasion first of a search, then of an autopsy; stridently, insistently,
the writings pass into a decades-long examination of why the birth
was aborted, why the phoenix never rose in flame from the shore of
Lake Michigan.

Wliat, Sullivan went on asking, would be needed to make the
metamorphosis possible? and the question led him, following his
inspired original intuition about form and function, to locate archi-
tecture and all the arts in the center of a religious view of democ-
racy: (That religious view of democracy, in turn, Sullivan set in a
holistic view of the universe, a universe which he felt as alive, and
as a unity "the Universe and all therein may be expressed by the
word Ego" ). Few men have felt and expressed that religious
sense of democracy with Sullivan's naked directness and fewer
yet have had the courage and passion to test the daily comings and
goings of all of us, by the standards of that faith. Sullivan does
this, in his writings, with an urgency and insistence that is immeas-
urably presumptuous and admirable.

These convictions of Sullivan's in fact have roots in an intellec-
tual event of long duration and momentous importance in the his-
tory of Western man. To understand the nature of that event, it is
necessary to take an even bolder view of the concept "romantic"
than that expressed earlier in these pages: to see it, in fact, first as
part of the animating spirit in Christianity, the hope which inspired
the marvellous quest of the Christian centuries for an ideal life in
a supernatural city, and to see it, thereafter, as the impulse which
in modern times has worked toward the secularization of that quest,
its transformation into the conviction that the ideal city could be
built here and now, in Chicago, where the onion swamp had been,

INTRODUCTION X%1

and the cattle-runs were crowded. Sullivan was explicit about this;
"If these elements are to be robbed of their divinity/' he wrote, "let
them at least become truly human." But he was rashly Insistent that
this must happen soon.

IV

Unhappily for this Intransigent man, the role which history as-
signed the United States in the development of democracy, during
the last century and so far in this one, has proved not to be the role
which he (in the tradition of Jefferson, Emerson, and Whitman)
assumed it was in his youth and Insisted it ought to be in his later
years: that of creating an ideal community, the democracy of the
highest common denominator, a forcing-house where the unique-
ness of the individual happily responsive to his fellows might
be refined into such a burst of creativity as Athens and Florence
never knew.

How immeasurably naive this dream appears, especially as
dreamed in the murk of that Chicago of half a century ago, now
that we see it in the decades which shape a pause between the Sec-
ond World War and Its sequels. But this, in itself, is reason enough
for reading Sullivan: his world-view, unquenchably optimistic in
the teeth of his personal failure and his society's betrayal of itself,
Is eager, fresh, and bracing. No one speaks like him today.

The function of American democracy, we know now, has been to
demonstrate that a large segment of the human race could, in the
new world born out of the Renaissance and the Age of Reason,
achieve material well-being and, however imperfectly, govern itself:
a feat never accomplished in the past by any nation at all, for all its
citizens, and still being imperfectly achieved on this continent.

And if one large segment of the human race, then why not?
all of it.

But this demonstration has meant the sacrifice, on what a stupen-
dous scale!, of every form of excellence to any form of abundance:

INTRODUCTION

It has not been essential, during the run of the experiment, that the
cloth be of the finest weave or cut, the buildings very commodious
or durable; it has been enough that the son of the peasant, the
grandson of the serf, the immigrants from the Rain Forest and the
Stone Age, should have some prospect of possessing, themselves,
clothes and homes of their own. More than a prospect: the immedi-
ate function of America has been to glut us, the multitude, with
material goods. In the first place, to assuage an immemorial hunger;/
in the second, to let us discover the limits of appetite.

Experiments of this sort change their own conditions and the
nature of all the participants: those most removed from the hungers
of the multitudes in America have been affected by their participa-
tion in the assuaging of those hungers. The bleak fascination of Chi-
cago as a city, for anyone who feels it at all, is partly the fact that
it was a major laboratory of this experiment, the democracy of the
lowest common denominator. By the time of the Chicago fire, (Sulli-
van moved to the city a year later), of its 334,270 inhabitants,
more than 249,536 were immigrants, 62 % of whom spoke a foreign
language. While a few men like Sullivan envisaged a future Ameri-
can society in terms of Pericles' speech to the Athenians, the dis-
possessed of all Europe, newly enfranchised, bankrupt, hungry, and
unlettered, were arrived by the hundreds of thousands. They were
uttering those cries for bread and circuses which have been one
voice of democracy in our time, while Sullivan was conceiving of
architecture as an expression of the religious aspect of democracy,
and insisting: "I call It a senseless social crime that out of our na-
tural fecundities we produce so few great men." ("Natural Think-
ing," p. 89.)

Taking their history through Sullivan's lifetime to our own, cities
like Chicago might well be seen simply as the belly's answer to
Jefferson. But the experiment of introducing mankind to self-mas-
tery by first glutting his elementary appetites will come to an end,
a wasteful success, not long after our decades. Its success in this

INTRODUCTION XXlll

country has convinced Europe, and will ultimately convince Russia
and Asia. Before or after the firestorms, a new phase of the demo-
cratic experience will begin: a competition for excellence. Sullivan,
then, will emerge even more as a prophet and a portent.

But those who turn toward his writings will encounter swamps
and deserts. This man, who set out to discern and describe the con-
ditions under which an organic ait might flourish in the new age of
humanity, was one of the most ambitious and self-confident of writ-
ers. He was also one of the most uneven, with frequent jarring lapses
of taste and tone. Torrents of bad prose flowed from Sullivan's pen,
interrupted occasionally by even worse poetry. It is all too easy
to become discouraged, even repelled, before finding any nuggets
in these turgid waters. But the nuggets are there, even in abundance.

Sullivan's faults as a writer are of a peculiar kind: his talent
was certainly that of a poet, but a poet who was not really at ease
using words. Time and again, he attempts passages of deeply felt
logic, the equivalent of w r hich, in stone and steel, he could bring off
superbly; in his writings, these passages offer occasional felicities,
but disastrous ultimate effects. And while he had advanced as an
architect from the romanticism so marked in his earliest buildings,
like the Troescher, and even the Ryerson tomb with its pyramid
top, to a full sense of the necessary "organic" character of modern
architecture, he was incapable of a comparable advance as a writer.
As a subject, his own art of building sometimes steadied him: his
best writing is that devoted to the exposition of its themes. But even
his attacks on the crudity, confusion, and hifalutin in American
building are often couched in language which is crude, confused,
and hifalutin.

There is another, more disturbing defect in Sullivan's writing.
The frustration of his genius, the bitterness engendered by address-
ing passionate exhorations to ears that were not listening these
corroded his spirit, and his habits of writing. The architect, we have
remarked, has to accomplish his tasks, unlike other artists, strictly

XXW INTRODUCTION

on society's own terms. When Gauguin went to Tahiti, and James
to London, each found some reward for alientation and deracina-
tion. But Sullivan, with a sensibility as vulnerable as theirs, had to
stand and fight on Prairie Avenue, on Michigan Boulevard, and in
the Loop; otherwise his defeat would have been decisive, and his
name would now be forgotten.

The price of all this is recorded in passages where we are some-
times startled to hear the deep voice of Lear raging at the spoiling
of his kingdom; but more often, in shrill gusts of recrimination.
These are often directed at us, and naturally enough, they often
seem boring, presumptuous, and alienating. They provide the edi-
tor's major justification for his counter-presumption in offering se-
lections from his author, instead of the integral text. In the case of
some writings, most notably Democracy: A Man-Search, the integral
text is all but unreadable: embarrassment as much as fatigued
resentment arrest the attention.

Even here, however, before giving up, the reader may grow
aware of one source of his embarrassment: he is being made the
witness of an amazing marriage. A part of Sullivan's achievement
came from his coupling of Nietzsche and Whitman; it is not surpris-
ing that the bedding together of two such androgynous spirits should
have resulted in strange births. But the audacious attempt to state
Nietzschean themes in terms of the New World vistas of the Ameri-
can poet is by no means unsuccessful. It is the pernicious in those
themes which is moderated and humanized in Sullivan's vision,
while the windily expansive rhetoric of the poet is sobered by a
sense of history and of society. The best of Sullivan's pages prompt
us to consider again the basic premisses of our lives as inhabitants
of this nation (and this universe). They offer a vision of the whole
as a living organism, transcendent and imminent in our lives. Yes,
that vision deserves a more coherent expression than this ravaged
visionary was able to give: but such expression as he could find,
deserves to find its readers.

INTRODUCTION XXV

Finally, Sullivan in all his writings outside the field of his art,
grossly oversimplified the insights which his intuition and native
generosity of spirit offered for the riddles of life. Man, he kept
naively insisting, was "at bottom, simply unselfish," and nature
was ultimately benignant. The ability to perceive that these state-
ments and their opposites are both true, was beyond Sullivan. It is
not only that he was intellectually blind to certain intransigent
realities: he refused to face the evidence of his OWTI life. His very
refusal makes many of his pages read like a scream.

At this point, the reader will ask: What is the justification for
commending to me such a writer, some of whose more ambitious
works lay in the files of a museum, almost untouched, for fifty
years, and at whom such drastic criticisms can be levelled?

Sullivan realized early that history had brought man to a point
where he was in principle able to take his further development into
his own hands; and therefore could only avoid doing so at peril;
that man had become, in some sense, his own creator. This fact, he
was sure, gave enormous urgency to the inner meaning of democ-
racy. Sullivan's insistence on this fact, and all its implications, is
what gives his writings a measure of prophetic value.

He indicts man for ignorance and waste. Not ignorance of facts
or theories or systems, but ignorance of his own nature, and of the
beneficent power latent in what he variously calls "instinct 9 * and
"imagination" and "ego." This power makes it possible for his
puny possessor, if he does not waste it, to remake himself, his world,
who knows? perhaps his universe.

But conscious imagination, true ego, is rare. Sullivan feels that
man has put himself at the mercy of rulers, creeds, and systems
because he is unaware of the power of imagination, of its existence
in himself; he feels that all forms of society have been shaped by
unconscious projections of the mass imagination. Few who read it

XXVI INTRODUCTION

will be unimpressed by his description of the birth of all human
phenomena gods and demons, good and evil, the vilest massacres
and the smallest meanness, the omnipotence of kings, the flamboy-
ance of wealth, art and science and learning, prostitution, suffering
and heroism from the fecund abnegation of the poor.

As man becomes more conscious of his imagination, and as con-
scious intelligence comes under its sway, man will acquire greater
control over himself and his environment. If not Sullivan had a
true sense of the bleak alternatives "The day of the fanatic is
approaching," he wrote early in this century, " it is in the air ...
We are approaching in these many ways an hour of gross passion."

In his writings, Sullivan believed, he was giving us fundamental
answers. What he really gives is testimony: "I was the man, I suf-
fered, I was there," testimony to the ultimate poignancy of each
life, the aimlessness of modern man, the waste of talent in a dollar
democracy. He was a visionary, and sometimes a clairvoyant, not
a wise man; a seer, not a sage. He does not, as he thinks, supply us
with a philosophy, but he makes the search for one more urgent,
and more a matter of everyone's responsibility.

He does this by a naked directness, plus his few but enduring
insights. Though he concealed much from himself as well as from
his readers, in another sense he is touchingly frank his outrage,
grief and hope are as fresh as a child's. This frankness reaches
down to something fundamental in the reader, too, if he is willing
to listen, and not be put off when the rhapsody turns for a while
to rant.

It is common to say, of some good writer: "You feel his presence
in what he writes." In Sullivan's case, even at his worst, you feel
his breath on your neck, his finger plucking at your sleeve. He
hooks and baits and stabs the reader with questions, reproaches,
taunts. Everything is in the present, everything is drama. At times
you can hear him weep, see him bleed.

We are not accustomed to the passion which makes the urgent

INTRODUCTION XXVll

speaker, who however has nothing to sell but a vision of the New
Jerusalem, grasp us by the arm all us consumers and employees
as we move up the escalator in a State Street department store,
or purchase a pack of cigarettes in Times Square, to demand with
exasperating irrelevance and pertinacity: "Do you remember when
you were also a citizen? When you lived in a community? Do you
know what Democracy means? Is Chicago, multiplied from Odessa
to Calcutta, what Democracy means? Do you know that we could
tear it down and rebuild it in a generation? What of the City of
Man?"

Today, this insistent, scolding eccentric is still jabbing his
tobacco-stained finger at us, against a dust-filled background in
which Chicago is rebuilding itself indeed and his Garrick build-
ing, that jet of elegance fountaining out of the boorish Loop, has
gone down under the wreckers' ball to make room for a parking
garage. The Auditorium continues to moulder, and Sullivan's own
home remains a fire-gutted slum-house, while the promoters erect
more and more warehouses and filing cabinets for people-as-
functions. And he has not even the relevance that comes from
offering the really right answers.

But he goes on asking, tauntingly, the right questions. And if the
story of his country is to be read, eventually, as the poem Emerson
envisaged and not as a mountain of computer tapes, those questions
have to be asked until answers are found.

PRELUDE

On the Head of a Pin

The following passage Is from The Autobiography Of An Idea., an
account of his work and thought which Sullivan wrote in 1922 and
1923, for publication in the Journal of the American Institute of
Architects. (He died in a cheap hotel room, on the South Side of
Chicago, in 1924.) In five or six hundred words, these two para-
graphs remarkably encapsulate the basic idea that animated Sulli-
van as an artist and thinker, and with equal felicity capture the
emotional tone of his life in these two modes. It is placed here as
a kind of keystone to his work, and an illustration of his prose at
its finest.

Throughout all the activities of professional life, Louis never ceased in
steady contemplation of tike nature of man and Ms powers, of the mystery
of that great life which enfolds and permeates us all; the marvel of
nature's processes which the scientists call laws; and the imperturbable
enigma of good and evil. He was too young to grasp the truth that the
fair-appearing civilization within which he lived was but a huge invisible
man-trap, man-made. Of politics he knew nothing and suspected nothing,
all seemed fair on the surface. Of man's betrayal by man on a colossal
scale he knew nothing and suspected nothing. He had heard of the State
and bad read something about the State, but bad not a glimmering of the
meaning of the State. He had dutifully read some books on political
economy because be thought be bad to, and had accepted their statements
as fact. He had also heard vaguely something about finance and what a
mystery it was. In other words, Louis was absurdly, grotesquely credulous.
How could it be otherwise with him? He believed that most people were
honest and intelligent. How could he suspect the eminent? So Louis saw

PRELUDE

the real world upside down. He was grossly Ignorant. He prospered, so the
world was fair. Later he sent forth his soul into the world and by and by
his soul returned to him with an appalling message.

For long Louis had lived in a fool's paradise; it was well he so lived in
illusion. For had the hideous truth come to him of a sudden, it would
have "dashed him to pieces like a potter's vessel," So he kept on with his
innocent studies, becoming more and more enamoured of the sciences,
particularly those dealing with forms of life and the aspects of life's
urging, called functions. And amid the immense number and variety of
living forms, he noted that invariably the form expressed the function, as,
for instance, the oak tree expressed the function oak, the pine tree the
function pine, and so on through the amazing series. And, inquiring more
deeply, he discovered that in truth it was not simply a matter of form
expressing function, but the vital idea was this: That the function created
or organized its form. Discernment of this idea threw a vast light upon
all things within the universe, and condensed with astounding impres-
siveness upon mankind, upon all civilizations, all institutions, every
form and aspect of society, every mass-thought and mass-result, every
individual thought and individual result. Hence, Louis began to regard
all functions in nature as powers, manifestations of the all-power of Life,
and thus man's power came into direct relationship with all other powers.
The application of the idea to the Architectural art was manifest enough,
namely, that the function of a building must predetermine and organize
its form. But it was the application to man's thought and deeds; to his in-
herent powers and the results of the application of these powers, mental,
moral, physical, that thrilled Louis to the depths as he realized that, as
one stumbling upon a treasure, he has found, that of which he had
dreamed in Paris, and had promised himself to discover a universal law
adbnaitting of no exception in any phase or application whatsoever.

PART ONE

ARCHITECTURE AND DEMOCRACY

CHARACTERISTICS AND TENDENCIES OF
AMERICAN ARCHITECTURE

In 1885, Sullivan was 29 years old; lie had behind him a New
England boyhood; brief periods of study for the career of archi-
tect in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Paris ; brief apprenticeships
in Philadelphia and New York. Having also worked as a draughts-
man in various architectural firms in Chicago, he was now a full
partner in the firm of Adler and Sullivan, and was consciously ex-
ploring the preconditions, social and esthetic, of an American art
of building. The task of designing the Auditorium Building (now
Roosevelt University) , which first made him nationally prominent,
was two years in the future, when he delivered the following talk,
in St. Louis, to the Western Association of Architects.

Many who have commented upon the practice of architecture in this
country have regarded the absence of a style, distinctively American, as
both strange and deplorable; and with a view to betterment they have
advanced theories as to the nature, and immediate realization, of such a
style that evidence a lack of insight equally strange and deplorable. These
theories have been for the greater part suggested by the feelings awakened
in contemplating the matured Beauty of Old World art, and imply a graft-
ing or transplanting process. They have been proved empirical by the suffi-
cient logic of time; their advocates having ignored the complex fact, that,
like a new species of any class, a national style must be a growth, that slow
and gradual assimilation of nutriment and a struggle against obstacles are
necessary adjuncts to the purblind processes of growth, and that the re-
sultant structure can bear only a chemical or metaphysical resemblance
to the materials on which it has been nurtured.

We will, therefore, for the purposes of this paper disregard these
dreams of a Minerva-like architectural splendor springing full-formed
into being, and look rather for the early signs of a spontaneous architec-
tural feeling arising in sympathy with the emotions latent or conspicuous
in our people.
* It is reasonable to believe than an unconquered country, peopled by

6 THE TESTAMENT OF STONE

colonization and natural increase, may bear in its younger and its
coming generations a race whose birthright, implying freedom to receive
and assimilate impressions, shall nurture emotions of rare quality and of
a fraitfulness commensurate with the energy in an unexhausted soil.

It would be erroneous to assume that there will be no evidence of the
activity of such emotions until as a large accumulation they break all
bonds asunder. The individual is from day to day seeking expedients by
means of which to shape his immediate surroundings into a realization
of his desires, and we may assume it to be quite probable that the initial
impelling force, operating through the individual, has already in many
cases produced significant and valuable results. These results, if not
thoroughly typical, must have in them much that is eminently characteris-
tic, and that bear the stamp of internal origin.

To test this hypothesis we have therefore but to look into the daily life
of our architecture, and, in the complexion of its many fleeting phases,
seek here and there for instances, some perhaps almost trivial, in which
the existence of spontaneous and characteristic emotional feeling may be
detected. Sometimes we shall find this impulse appearing as an element
of warmth tingeing scholastic formalism; sometimes as a seemingly para-
doxical inspiration in the works of the uncultivated. We may certainly
expect to meet with it in the efforts of those upon whose imagination the
chromatic eloquence of words and of music have taken strong holds ; and
above all, we are to look for it in the creations of the gifted ones whose
souk are finely attuned to the touching beauty of nature and of humanity.
To an apprehension of this subtle element, we may be happily guided by
the suggestions of analogy. Our recent American literature comes aptly to
this use. Glancing through its focusing substance, as through the lens of
a camera, we may perceive an image of the abstraction we seek, and, by
an extension of the process, we may fix an impression of its form and
texture, to be developed at will.

Our literature is the only phase of our national art that has been
accorded serious recognition, at home and abroad. The noticeable qualities
of its present phases seem to be: excessive regard for minute detail, painful
self-consciousness of finish, timidity and embarrassment in the delinea-
tion of all but the well-behaved and docile emotions, and a tacit fiction
as to the passions: all beautifully executed with much patient, earnest
labor, and diplomatically tempered to the understanding.

Exquisite, but not virile, our latter-day literature illustrates quite em-

Characteristics and Tendencies of American Architecture 7

phatically the quality of our tentative and provisional culture, which must
ere long throw off these seedling leaves, when a higher temperature shall
infuse glowing vitality into root and stem, and exuberant foliation give
more certain assurance of the coming flower of our soil. Our literature,
and in fact all that which we Americans complacently call our art, is too
much a matter of heart and fingers, and too little an offspring of brain and
soul. One must indeed have faith in the processes of nature to prophesy
order eventuating upon so strange a chaos of luxuries. But to this end,
transmitted knowledge must gradually be supplemented by the fresh
impressions of the senses and the sensibilities, the fund so accumulated
yielding richly of its own increase. This supplemental acquisition must
of necessity be of slow growth, for we have all been educated to a depen-
dence upon our artistic inheritance.

Our art is for the day, is suited to the day, and will also change as the
day changes. The law of variation is an ever present force, and coordina-
tion is its goal. The first step toward a new order of things is accomplished
when there appear minds receiving and assimilating fresh impressions,
reaching new conclusions, and acting upon them. By this sign, we may
know that such a movement is already upon us, and by the aid of the
indicated literary analogy we may follow its erratic tendencies, and note
its increase in strength and individuality: we may see the germ of poetry
which each man has within him, slowly awakening into life, and may feel
the presence of an American romanticism.

This romanticism is, in the main, also exquisite but not virile. It seeks
to touch all things with softened hand. Under the influence of its warmth
of feeling, hard lines flow into graceful curves, angularities disappear in
a mystical blending of surfaces.

One by one the completed styles of foreign climes are passing under
this hand, each in turn being quietly divested of its local charm, and
clothed in a sentiment and mannerism unmistakably our own. Power
laments, meanwhile, at the feet of a modern Omphale, his voice attuned
to the domestic hum of the times.

Appreciation of the beauties of this romanticism is to some extent de-
pendent upon the verbal explanation and comment of its exponents. A
knowledge of their vocabulary is often of assistance in disclosing softness
and refinement in many primitive expedients, and revealing beauty in
barren places. Familiarity with the current phraseology of the allied arts
is also useful in assisting the student to a comprehension of many things

8 THE TESTAMENT OF STONE

apparently incomprehensible. Metaphor and simile are rampant in this
connection, a well-chosen word often serving to justify an architectural

absurdity.

But overloaded as is this fabric of impulse with florid and complicated
intertwinings of affection, when we examine the material thereof, we
find it excellent and valuable.

* Searching critically among the works executed in this feeling, we note
in the varying examples, and indeed in parts of the same structure, a
curious melange of super-sentimentalisms. Conspicuous at first glance, in
some an offensive simplicity, in others a highly wrought charlatanism;
further, we perceive ingenuity in device, or superb flow of spirits all
more or less leavened with stubborn common sense. After such an in-
vestigation, we may gladly become convinced that behind a somewhat
uncertain vision resides a marvelous instinct.

National sensitiveness and pride, conjoined with fertility of resource,
will aid as active stimuli in the development of this instinct toward a more
rational and organic mode of expression, leading through many reactions
to a higher sphere of artistic development.

We are now in the primary department, vaguely endeavoring to form
a plastic alphabet by means of which to identify our beliefs. Progress in
this respect has been very slow and results meagre: for our beliefs have
still within them too much of uncertainty and diffidence to take rank as
convictions. Without these latter a sufficient creating power is lacking.
The formation of an alphabet, and the simplest combinations of its terms,
are matters of much importance; and easy progress in this respect is
seriously impeded by complications of thought. To look at things simply
and clearly is quite easy, until counter influences are set at work; then
comes a struggle for survival, which now and then is successful the
result being an addition, however small, to our stock of elementary forms.

The ability to develop elementary ideas organically is not conspicuous
in our profession. In this respect, the architect is inferior to the business
man and financier, whose capacity to expand a simple congenial idea,
once fixed, into subtle, manifold, and consistent ramifications is admirable,
and a shining example which we have often ignored, creating thereby an
undesirable impression.

This view leads us on to a consideration of the element of power. Until
this element is widely introduced into our work, giving it the impress of
brilliancy, intuition, and great depth of feeling, that work, exhaustively
considered, will remain but little more than a temporary expedient.

Characteristics and Tendencies of American Architecture

The presence o power, as a mental characteristic in one class of our
people, augurs well for the belief thai It may pervade our ranks. The
beginnings of power are usually so crude and harsh as to be revolting to
a refined taste, and hence It Is Instinctively shunned: but once subtilized,
flushed with emotion and guided by clear insight. It Is a worker of
miracles; responsive to its ardent wooings. nature yields up her poetic
secrets.

We surely have in us the germ of artistic greatness no people on
earth possessing more of innate poetic feeling, more of ideality, greater
capacity to adore the beautiful, than our own people; but architects as
a professional class have held It more expedient to maintain the traditions
of their culture than to promulgate vitalizing thought. Here then we are
weak, and should sentiment gain a pronounced ascendency, we may remain
weak.

On us rests partially the responsibility, and partially on the public. We
have at times individually sought to lead the public, when we more wisely
should have followed it; and have, as a body, often followed, when, with
beneficent results we could have led. While we may compromise for a
time, through a process of local adaptation, no architectural style can
become a finality, that runs counter to popular feeling. |The desire at once
to follow and to lead the public should be the initial attitude of our pro-
fession toward the formation of a national style.iFor while we conduct the
technical operations, the shaping and controlling process is mainly in the
hands of the public who are constantly keeping us within bounds. We
cannot wholly escape this control, while we are without a national archi-
tecture fully representing the wishes of the public, and ministering to its
conceptions of the beautiful and the useful This can evidently not come
to pass forthwith, for the public Itself can only partially and imperfectly
state its wants. Responding readily, however, to the intuition of those
who anticipate its desires. It accepts provisionally year by year all the
satisfaction it can get; so that while one recognized style after another
shall pass through our hands to be tried and finally rejected in the search
for permanent satisfaction, a modified residuum from each will doubtless
be added to a fund representing our growth in emotional and spiritual
wealth. The progress of this growth toward consummation in a national
style, involves the lives of many generations, and need be of but little
practical concern to us of today. We work at short range and for immedi-
ate results. Perhaps, however, there would be infused into our profession
an abiding esprit de corps, should consideration of this subject and its

10 THE TESTAMENT OF STONE

associated themes lead to a substantial agreement upon our status, our
tendencies, and our policy.

If the conclusions set forth in this paper be accepted as correct, it
becomes clearly evident, however, that the formative beginnings of this
national style, now in progress, are of the utmost immediate interest to us,
in part through feelings of patriotism, in part because of a surmise that
those who approach most nearly in the substance of their work and ad-
ministration to the qualities inherent to our race and potential to a nation-
al style, will come nearest to the hearts of our people.

Harassed though the architect may be, by the cares and responsibilities
of his daily life, there exists nevertheless within him, in the midst of this
turmoil, an insuppressible yearning toward ideals. These delicate promp-
tings should be both protected and nourished, that, like the flowering
plants springing by the sun's gentle persuasion from little seeds buried in
the coarser elements of the soil, they also, because of the warmth of human
feeling, may bloom at times by the wayside, yielding refreshing odors
and the joy of color to the plodding wayfarer.

The soft beams of the full-orbed moon fall with pathetic caress upon
the slumbering life of the world; paling with the dawn, her tender vigil
ended, she melts into the infinite depths when the ruddy herald of day
proudly summons the workers. So does the soul watch over its greater
ideals until the thrilling radiance of power shall awaken them to action.
, t Ideal thought and effective action should so compose the vital substance
of our works that they may live, with us and after us, as a record of our
fitness, and a memorial of the good we may have done. Then, in the
affluence of time, when a rich burden of aspiring verdure may flourish
in the undulating fields of thought, wrought into fertility through the
bounty of nature and the energy of the race, the mellowed spontaneity
of a national style reaching its ful and perfect fruition shall have come
from out the very treasury of nature.

EMOTIONAL ARCHITECTURE AS COMPARED
WITH INTELLECTUAL

The architect's next basic statement of his themes was made almost
a decade later, in an address to the annual convention of the
American Institute of Architects, New York City, 1894. Nothing
Sullivan ever wrote is more characteristic of him than this ambi-
tious discourse, with its urgent concern for the role of education,
its insistence on seeing architecture not only in a social role but in
grandiose philosophical and historical perspective, and its rhetori-
cal marriage of esthetic and messianic passions. In it are expressed
or suggested all the recurrent themes he developed in later writings.
The masterful tone in which they are stated here reflects the mood
of a man who had, in the four or five years prior to this date, set
modern architecture on its course by designing many of his master
works, among them the Wainwright Building in St. Louis and the
Guaranty Building (now the Prudential) in Buffalo, the first sky-
scrapers conceived and executed in terms of the new esthetic princi-
ples he was enunciating. There is no premonition, here, that his
long years of nearly total inactivity as an architect were drawing
near, with the dissolution, in 1895, of his partnership with Dankmar
Adler.

How strange it seems that education, in practice, so often means sup-
pression; that instead of leading the mind outward to the light of day it
crowds things in upon it that darken and weary it. Yet evidently the true
object of education, now as ever, is to develop the capabilities of the head
and of the heart. He therefore who possesses a sound head and a respon-
sive heart is worthy of enlightened guidance, is amenable to educational
influence.

Let us now imagine a simple youth so equipped, so gifted, I am almost
forced to say, an inborn poet, untaught, unschooled, and living an outdoor
life. So familiarly has he fared with sunshine and air, and the living

12 THE TESTAMENT OF STONE

things, that they seem, as indeed they are, everyday and common to him.
Yet the mere community of their lives, the similarity in the experiences
of the boy, the plants and the animals in that native, simple, naif, unsullied
state that we who are perhaps unduly artificial call by contrast natural
this state has drawn him very near to them all.

Breathing the same air as they, maturing in the same glowing sunshine,
sustained by the same satisfying moisture, he and they expand side by
side, defining themselves intimately to each other; and the boy, growing
always, after a while feels himself to be not only with them but of them.
His is a brotherhood with the trees ; a wistful eye he softens to the flowers ;
he has a comely friendship for them all.

He knows that the young leaves love the dew; that the tendril reaches
quietly for the twig it may cling to. He has seen the fern unfolding its
brown spiral to become anon green and regular. He has splashed knee-
deep in the marsh; he knows the dank fragrance very well; he parts his
friends the rushes to make a way for his eyes that seek what they may
devour his eyes with a keen and endless appetite. His hands touch the
warmish water sniffing the active air, he lives as only a boy can live
his lively sensibilities always in physical touch with his surroundings, in
the full and irrepressible enjoyment of his five senses.

These five senses, and they only, stand between him and nature. It is
they that interpret her affection; and the ready language that they deal
in keeps him in such a natural sympathy, so well in touch, so intimately at
ease, that he does not for a moment realize that he is then and there doing
that which education, so-called, once having made inoperative in him, he
will in after years, poet though he be, reacquire only with the utmost
difficulty the power to do.

This something that he is doing, and the physical and psychic state
that it implies we call Touch: Meaning not the touch of the painter, not
the touch of the sculptor, not the mechanical and technical touch of the
fingers only, nor quite their negligent contact with things, but the ex-
quisite touch of the sensibilities, the warm physical touch of the body, the
touch of a sound head and a responsive heart, the touch of the native
one, the poet, out of doors, in spontaneous communion with nature.

So has our youngster started easily and naturally, all alone without
premeditation or guidance, upon the road to knowledge, to leadership
and power. For this sensibility, this healthfulness, this touch, that is his
is the first essential prerequisite in the early analytical strivings of the

Emotional Architeclure as Compared with Intellectual 13

mind: It is that perfect concrete analysis by the senses and the sympathies
which serves as a basis for the abstract analysis of the intellect.

Let us not forget our little man, for he is to companion me in spirit
through this discourse, I believe he exists somewhere, has in his breast
the true architectural afflatus, and will some day come forth the Messiah
of our art. For he has that early and sure understanding by the eyes that
will survive the future uncertainties of the brain. He has that exalted
animal sense which alone can discern the pathway to hidden knowledge,
that acute and instant scent in matters objective leading to matters sub-
jective that we call Intuition.

This physical endowment, this sense of touch is, decidedly, wherever
found, a generous gift of nature; but it is potent for results in so far
only as it is urged into sustained and decisive action by a certain appetite
or desire.

This desire, this insistence, this urgency which will not be denied; this
uncomfortable hunger, this uneasy searching, this profound discontent,
oh! so deep; this cry for more, this appetite, this yearning, ever un-
satisfied, is not of the body alone but of the soul, and, always and every-
where, in all times and in all places, high or low, wherever found, it is
the dominant characteristic of man's eminence in nature it is the justi-
fication of the eminence of a few men among their fellows.

For appetite, in a state of nature, implies not only a keen desire and
a search for the food wanted, but, as well, a rejection of all else, thus
insuring a wonderful singleness of purpose, a concentration of action,
a definiteness of end in the selection of that nourishment of the faculties
which, when assimilated, is to become in turn thought and expression
through the agency of a second desire equally great, equally intense,
equally insistent, namely, the desire to act. This desire to act we call
Imagination.

These two great desires, which are in essence the desire to absorb and
the desire to emit, the desire to know and the desire to test, the desire
to hear and the desire to utter, are the basis not only of a true and effective
education, not only are they the wholesome body and the enchanting voice
of art, but they are greater than these, for they are the animating quality
of that higher purpose and significance of art that we call poetry.

Now, the desire to act that in due time follows upon nutrition can assert
itself tangibly and fully only by means of three agencies, the which, by
virtue of its life-giving qualities, this nutritive power has called into

14 THE TESTAMENT OF STONE

being. All three of them must cooperate In turn in order to produce a
fully rounded result. They are first, the Imagination, which is the very
beginning of action because it is a sympathy that lives both in our senses
and our intellect the flash between the past and the future, the middle
link in that living chain or sequence leading from nature unto art, and
that lies deep down in the emotions and the will. It is this divine faculty
which, in an illumined instant, in that supreme moment when ideas are
born, reveals the end with the beginning, and liberates, as an offspring
of man, that which before had rested, perhaps for untold centuries, dor-
mant but potential in the inmost heart of nature. This is the supreme
crisis. This is the summit of the soul, the fertile touch of the spirit, the
smile of nature's bounty the moment of Inspiration! All else is from
this moment on, a foregone conclusion, an absolute certainty to the master-
mind: a task surely but not a doubt.

Second in this trinity comes Thought, the faculty that doubts and in-
quires, that recognizes time and space and the material limitations, that
slowly systemizes, that works by small increments and cumulations, that
formulates, that concentrates, works, reworks and reviews; that goes
slowly, deliberately; that makes very firm and sure, and that eventually
arrives at a science of logical statement that shall shape and define the
scheme and structure that is to underlie, penetrate and support the form
of an art work. It is the hard, the bony structure, it is the tough, tendi-
nous fiber; it may be at times, perhaps, as limber as the lips that move,
yet it is never the need of smiling never the smile.

Third, last, and the winsome one, exuberant in life and movement,
copious in speech comes Expression, open-armed and free, supple, active,
dramatic, changeable, beautifully pensive, persuasive and wonderful. Hers
it is to clothe the structure of art with a form of beauty; for she is
the perfection of the physical, she is the physical itself, and the uttermost
attainment of emotionality. Hers is an infinite tenderness, an adorable
and sweet fascination. In her companionship imaginative Thought, long
searching, has found its own, and lives anew, immortal, filled with sen-
sibility graciousness and the warm blood of a fully rounded maturity.

Thus Art comes into Life! Thus Life comes into Art!

And thus, by reason of a process of elaboration and growth, through
the natural storage and upbuilding of the products of nutrition, lifting
themselves higher and higher into organization, the physical and spiritual
experiences of our lives, seeking reproduction, shall find imaginative

Emotional Architecture as Compared with Intellectual 15

utterance, in their own image, in a harmonious system of thinking and an
equally harmonious method of expressing the thought.

And so it shall come that when our nourishment shall be natural, our
imagination therefore fervid. Intense and vision-like; when our thinking
and our speech shall have become as processes of nature; when, in con-
sequence, from its mysterious abode in visible things, the invisible and
infinitely fluent spirit of the universe passing to us shall have made our
tongues eloquent, our utterance serene, then, and not till then, shall we
posses, individually and as a people, the necessary elements of a great
Style.

For otherwise and without this unitary impulse our expression, though
delicate as a flower, our thinking as abstract as the winds that blow, our
imagination as luminous as the dawn, are useless and unavailing to
create; they may set forth, they cannot create.

Man, by means of his physical power, his mechanical resources, his
mental ingenuity, may set things side by side. A composition, literally
so called, will result but not a great art work, not at all an art work, in
fact, but merely a more or less refined exhibition of brute force exercised
upon helpless materials. It may be as a noise in lessening degrees of offen-
siveness, it can never become a musical tone. Though it shall have ceased
to be vulgar in becoming sophistical, it will remain to the end what it
was in the beginning: impotent to inspire, dead, absolutely dead.

It cannot for a moment be doubted that an art work to be alive, to
awaken us to its life, to inspire us sooner or later with its purpose, must
indeed be animate with a soul, must have been breathed upon by the
spirit and must breathe in turn that spirit It must stand for the actual,
vital first-hand experiences of the one who made it and must represent his
deep-down impression not only of physical nature but more especially
and necessarily his understanding of the out-working of that Great Spirit
which makes nature so intelligible to us that it ceases to be a phantasm
and becomes a sweet, a superb, a convincing Reality.

It absolutely must be the determination and the capacity of the artist
that his work shall be as real and convincing as is his own life; as sug-
gestive as his own eyesight makes all things to him; and yet as unreal, as
fugitive, as inscrutable, as subjective, as the why and wherefore of the
simplest flower that blows.

It is the presence of this unreality that makes the art work real: it is
by virtue of this silent- subjectivity that the objective voice of an art song
becomes sonorous and thrilling.

16 THE TESTAMENT OF STONE

Unless, therefore, subjectivity permeate an art work, that work cannot
aspire to greatness; for whatever of imagination, of thought and of ex-
pression it may possess, these as such will remain three separate things
not three phases of one thing.

An artist must necessarily, therefore, remain a more or less educated
handworker, a more or less clever sophisticator, a more or less successful
framer of compromises, unless, when he was horn, there was born with
him a hunger for the spiritual; for all other craving avails as naught.
Unless, as a child, with that marvelous instinct given only to children he
has heard the voice of Nature murmuring in the woodland or afield or
seaward, no after hearing can avail to catch this revelation.

And thus it is that subjectivity and objectivity, not as two separate ele-
ments but as two complementary and harmonious phases of one impulse,
have always constituted and will always constitute the embodied spirit of
art.

No phase of human nature can contain greater interest for the student
of psychology than the history natural, political, religious and artistic
of the successive phases for good and for ill of Objectivity and Subjec-
tivity. They are the two controlling elements in human endeavor. They
have caused in their internecine warfare misery and perturbation. They
are ordinarily known and spoken of as the intellectual and the emotional,
but they lie deeper, much deeper, than these: they lie in the very heart of
nature. Coming into man's being they have been antagonistic because of
the fanaticism and one-sidedness of human nature, because of its im-
mobility. Because from the beginning man has been beset by beautiful, by
despicable illusions. Because one set of men have believed in what they
could not see. Because it has too often happened that the man who could
see with the outer eye could not see with the inner eye; because the other
man, rhapsodizing with the clear insight of faith, had no thought for the
things of this world. Neither has believed in the virtue of the other.
Neither has inferred from the presence of the other, the necessary existence
of a balancing but hidden power. Now and then through the ages they
have come twin-born in the bosom of an individual man, upon whose
brow the generations have placed the wreath of immortality.

So vast, so overwhelming is the power of a great, a properly balanced
subjectivity, so enormously does it draw on the spiritual nutrition and
stored up vitality of the world, that, soon sapping this up, and still
craving, the man possessed of it, urged by it, goes straight to the unfailing
bounty of nature, and there, by virtue of his passionate adoration, passing

Emotional Architecture as Compared with Intellectual 17

the portals of the objective, lie enters that extraordinary communion that
the sacred writers called to "walk with God. ;!

There can be doubt that the most profound desire that fills the human
soul, the most heartfelt hope, is the wish to be at peace with Nature and
the Inscrutable Spirit; nor can there be a doubt that the greatest Art
Work is that which most nearly typifies a realization of this ardent, patient
longing. All efforts of the body, all undertakings of the mind, tend, con-
sciously or unconsciously, toward this consummation, tend toward this
final peace: the peace of perfect equilibrium, the repose of absolute unity,
the serenity of a complete identification.

When, therefore, turning from this our contemplation we compare the
outworking of the vital processes of nature with the so-called creative
activity of the average man of education and culture, we wonder at the
disparity, we seek its cause.

When, after having with joy observed the quality of identity and single-
ness that nature imparts to her offspring, when with aroused expectancy,
with a glowing sense of the richness, fullness and variety that might and
should come from the man's brain with the impulse of nature's fecundity
flowing through it, we seek we are amazed to find in this man's work
no such thing.

When we, in place of a fertile unity which we had hoped for, come
suddenly upon miscellany and barrenness, we are deeply mortified, we
are rudely shocked.

We are dismayed at this: That man, nature's highest product, should
alone have gone awry, that with remarkable perversity he should have
strayed; that for the simple and obvious he should substitute the factitious,
the artificial.

The cause needs not a long searching, it is near at hand. It lies precisely
in that much-glorified, much-abused word, "education."

To my view no word in the entire vocabulary of the English language
contains so much of pathos, so much of tragedy, as this one pitiful word,
"education, 9 ' for it typifies a fundamental perversity of the human soul,
a willful blindness of the mind, a poverty of the heart.

For one brain that education has stimulated and strengthened, it has
malformed, stupefied and discouraged thousands. Only the strongest, only
the masterful can dominate it, and return to the ownership of their souls.

For It is education's crime that it has removed us from nature. As
tender children it took us harshly away with stern words, and the sweet
face of our natural mother has faded in the unspeakable past, whence it re-

18 THE TESTAMENT OF STONE

gards us at times, dimly and fittingly, causing in us uneasy and disturbing
emotion.

And thus it is through a brutish and mean system of guidance, through
the density of atmosphere that we have breathed that we are not what our
successors may easily become, a race filled with spiritual riches in addition
to the vast material wealth.

That in place of a happy people, open-eyed children of nature teeming
with beautiful impulses, we are a people lost in darkness, groping under
a sooty and lurid sky sinister with clouds that shut out the sunshine and
the clear blue heavens.

Yet the murky materialism the fierce objectivity, the fanatical selfish-
ness of this dark age of ours, in this sense the darkest of all dark ages,
is so prodigious, so grotesque, so monstrous, that in its very self it con-
tains the elements of change; from its own intensity, its own excess, its
complex striving, it predetermines the golden age of the world.

The human mind in all countries having gone to the uttermost limit
of its own capacity, flushed with its conquests, haughty after its self-
assertion upon emerging from the prior dark age, is now nearing a new
phase, a phase inherent in the nature and destiny of things.

The human mind, like the silk-worm oppressed with the fullness of its
own accumulation, has spun about itself gradually and slowly a cocoon
that at last has shut out the light of the world from which it drew the
substance of its thread. But this darkness has produced the chrysalis, and
we within the darkness feel the beginning of our throes. The inevitable
change, after centuries of preparation, is about to begin.

Human development, through a series of vast attractions and perturba-
tions, has now arrived at a materialism so profound, so exalted, as to
prove the fittest basis for a coming era of spiritual splendor.

To foresee this necessity, consider but a moment the richness of our
heritage from the past, its orderly sequence, its uplifting wave of power,
its conservation of force.

Think of the Hindoo, with folded hands, soaring in contemplation,
thousands of years ago think of what he has left to us. Think of the
Hebrew man coming out of Ur, of the Chaldees, to find for us the One
Great Spirit. Think of the somber Egyptians, those giants who struggled
so grimly with fate think of the stability they have given to us. Think
of the stars of Israel singing in the morning's dawn. Think of the lonely
man of Nazareth breathing a spirit of gentleness of which the world had
never heard before. Think of the delicately objective Greeks, lovers of the

Emotional Architecture as Compared with Intellectual 19

physical, accurate thinkers, the worshippers of beauty. Think that in them
the Orient, sleeping, was born anew. Think of the Goth, and with him the
birth of emotion as we know it. Think of modern Music, arising in glory
as the heart took wings a new thing under the sun. Think deeply of the
French Revolution and Democracy the utterance of freedom, the be-
ginning of the Individual Man. Think now of our own age with its ma-
chinery, its steam power, its means of communication, its annihilation of
distance. Think of the humanitarianism of our day. Think, as we stand
here, now, in a new land, a Promised Land that at last is ours, think how
passionately latent, how marvelous to contemplate is America, our country.
Think that here destiny has decreed there shall be enacted the final part
in the drama of man's emancipation: the redemption of his soul!

Think of these things, think of what they signify, of what they promise
for us, and think then that as architects it peculiarly behooves us to re-
view our own special past, to forecast our future, to realize somewhat our
present status.

Summoned to answer before an enlightened judgement seat, how shall
we now give other, alas, than a wretched accounting of our stewardship?
How shall we excuse our sterility? We surely need to inquire, for we
must need explain the emaciation of our art in the midst of plenty; its
weakness in the midst of strength, its beggarly poverty in the midst of
abundance.

By what glamour or speciousness of words shall we persuade a wrath-
ful judgment toward kindness? How can our vapid record be made to
plead for us?

Shall we summon the clear-eyed intellectual Greek or the emotional
and introspective Goth to bear witness that we stand as ambassadors in
their names we would surely be repudiated.

Shall we call to the fateful Egyptian or the dashing, polished Assyrian
one would scorn us, the other would flout us.

Who are we then, and how shall we explain our sinister condition, our
mere existence?

Shall we claim we are second cousins to Europe, or must we, before we
can ourselves behold the truth, so far abase our heads in the ashes as to
acknowledge that we of the great and glorious ending of the nineteenth
century are the direct lineal descendants of the original bastards and in-
discretions of architecture?

Or, still seeking excuses in our fin-de-siecle pocket, shall we plead in the
language of myth that our art, like Briinhilde, lies sleeping; that she awaits

20 THE TESTAMENT OF STONE

a son of nature, one without fear, to penetrate the wall of flame, to lift
her helmet's visor?

Dreading the storm, shall we seek shelter under the spreading plea that
poets are born, not made; that, if Nature for all these centuries has not
brought forth a great master spirit in the architectural art, it must be for
very good reasons of her own for reasons definitely interwrought with
the beneficence of her own rhythmical movements. That, with her endless
fecundity, there must be a profoundly significant reason for this barren-
ness.

Or, perhaps, shall we simply say that men have now turned to other
gods, that they have forgotten the ancient deities?

That there has arisen in our land a new king who knows not Joseph;
that he has set o'er us taskmasters to afflict us with burthens?

All these pleadings may be true, yet after all they do not explain why
we make easy things very difficult, why we employ artificial instead of
natural processes, why we walk backward instead of forward, why we see
cross-eyed instead of straight-eyed, why we turn our minds inside out in-
stead of letting them alone; they do not explain why we are so vulgarly
self-conscious, so pitifully bashful, so awkward in our art, so explanatory,
so uncertain that we know anything at all or are anybody in particular,
so characterless, so insipid, so utterly without savor. They do not explain
why the intellectual and emotional phases of the architectural rnind do
precisely the wrong thing when the right thing is quite attainable.

No ! I pretend to advocate the real, the true cause of my generation, of
my art. I do not wish to abase them except in so far as he who loveth
chasteneth. I know that the secret of our weakness lies not only in our
plethoric dyspepsia, in our lack of desire, in our deficiency in gumption
and moral courage, but that it lies primarily in the utterly purposeless
education we have received.

I know that the architectural schools teach a certain art or method of
study in which one is made partly familiar with the objective aspects and
forms of architecture. I know that this, as far as it goes, is conscientiously
and thoroughly done. But I also know that it is doubtful, in my mind, if
one student in a thousand emerges from his school possessed of a fine con-
ception of what architecture really is, in form, in spirit, and hi truth; and
I say this is not primarily the student's fault. I know that before enter-
ing his architectural school he has passed through other schools, and that
they began the mischief; that they had told him grammar was a book,
algebra was a book, geometry another book, geography, chemistry,

Emotional Architecture as Compared with Intellectual 21

physics, still others; they never told him, never permitted him to guess for
himself, how these things were actualy intense symbols, complex ratios,
representing man's relation to nature and his fellow man; they never told
him that his mathematics, etc., etc., came into being in response to a
desire in the human breast to come nearer to nature; that the full moon
looked round to the human eye ages before the circle was dreamed of.

Our student knows, to be sure, as a result of his teaching, that the
Greeks built certain-shaped buildings, that the Goths built certain-shaped
buildings, and that other peoples built other buildings of still other shapes.
He knows, moreover, if he has been a conscientious hewer of wood and
drawer of w r ater, a thousand and one specific facts concerning the shapes
and measurements and ratios of the whole and the parts of said buildings,
and can neatly and deftly draw and color them to scale. He moreover has
read in the philosophies, or heard at lectures, that the architecture of a
given time gives one an excellent idea of the civilization of that time.

This, roughly speaking, is the sum total of his education; and he takes
his architectural instruction literally, just as he has taken every other
form of instruction literally from the time he was a child; because he
has been told to do so, because he has been told that architecture is a
fixed, a real, a specific, a definite thing; that it's all done, that it's all
known, arranged, tabulated and put away neatly in handy packages called
books. He is allowed to believe, though perhaps not distinctly so taught,
that, to all intents and purposes, when his turn comes, if he wishes to
make some architecture for Americans, or for this generation at large, he
can dip it out of his books with the same facility that dubs a grocer dip-
ping beans out of a bin. He is taught by the logic of events that architec-
ture in practice is a commercial article, like a patent medicine, unknown
in its mixture, and sold to the public exclusively on the brand.
~ He has seriously been told at the school, and has been encouraged in
this belief by the indorsement of people of culture, that he can learn all
about architecture if he but possess the attributes of scholarship and in-
dustry. That architecture is the name of a system of accredited, historical
facts as useful, as available and as susceptible to inspection as the books
of a mercantile house.

Everything literal, formal and smart in his nature has been encouraged,
the early and plastic glow of emotion and sensibility has been ignored.

He has been taught many cold and dead things, but the one warm living
thing that he has not been taught and apparently never will be taught is
the stately and all-comprehending truth that architecture, wherever it has

22 THE TESTAMENT OF STONE

appeared and reached a spontaneous culmination is not at all what we so
stupidly call a reality, but, on the contrary, it is a most complex, a glow-
ing and gloriously wrought metaphor, embodying as no other form of
language under the sun can do, the pure, clean and deep inspiration of
the race flowing as a stream of living water from its well-spring to the
sea.

He has not been taught that an architect, to be a true exponent of his
time, must possess first, last and always the sympathy, the intuition of a
poet; that this is the one real, vital principle that survives through all
places and all times.

This seeking for a natural expression of our lives, of our thoughts, our
meditations, our feelings, is the architectural art as I understand it; and
it is because I so understand it, that ignoring the viciousness of the past,
I gladly make an appeal to the good that is in human nature; that good-
ness of heart and soundness of head, that ready and natural response of
the soul in which I have always trusted and shall always trust. It is to
this sane and wholesome quality that I plead for the abiding sincerity and
nobility of our art. It is to this manliness that I call to come before the
judgment seat and make an answer for us.

I know very well that our country will in due time possess a most inter-
esting, varied, characteristic and beautiful architecture; that the time will
begin whenever we take as our point of the departure the few and simple
elements of architecture and not its complex forms. That this time will
come just so soon as the young are relieved of the depressing weight of a
factitious education, the benumbing influence of an instruction that in-
sulates them from the vitalizing currents of nature. Just so soon as those
having them in charge, coming to the full sense of the fact, realizing how
truly dangerous a thing is a little knowledge, a partial knowledge, dread-
ing to assume the responsibility for stunted, for imperfectly developed
natures, feeling how deeply necessary it is that a technical or intellectual
training be supplemented by a full, a rich, a chaste development of the
emotions, shall say to the young that they are free, that from the musty
school they may fly to the open air, to the sunshine, to the birds, the
flowers, and wanton and joyous in their own fancies, face to face with the
integrity of nature, they shall substitute for the arbitrary discipline of
the school the natural, the easy self-control of a dignified manhood, to the
end that not books but personal feeling, personal character and personal
responsibility shall form the true foundation of their art.

It has, alas, for centuries been taught that the intellect and the emotions

Emotional Architecture as Compared with Intellectual 23

were two separate and antagonistic things. This teaching has been firmly
believed, cruelly lived up to.

How depressing it is to realize dial it might have been taught that they
are two beautifully congenial and harmonious phases of that single and
integral essence that we call the soul. That no nature in which the develop-
ment of either is wanting can be called a completely rounded nature.

That, therefore, classical architecture, so called (meaning the Greek),
was one-sided and incomplete because it was almost exclusively intellectual.
That the emotional architecture (meaning especially the Gothic) was like-
wise one-sided and incomplete, however great and beautiful its develop-
ment of feeling, because of the almost total absence of mentality. That no
complete architecture has yet appeared in the history of the world because
men, in this form of art alone, have obstinately sought to express them-
selves solely in terms either of the head or of the heart.

I hold that architectural art, thus far, has failed to reach its highest
development, its fullest capability of imagination, of thought and expres-
sion because it has not yet found a way to become truly plastic; it does
not yet respond to the poet's touch. That it is today the only art for which
the multitudinous rhythms of outward nature, the manifold fluctuations
of man's inner being have no significance, no place.

That the Greek architecture, unerring as far as it went and it went
very far indeed in one direction was but one radius within the field of a
possible circle of expression. That, though perfect in its eyesight, definite
in its desires, clear in its purpose, it was not resourceful in forms; that it
lacked the flexibility and the humanity to respond to the varied and con-
stantly shifting desires of the heart.

It was a pure, it was a noble art, wherefore we call it classic ; but after
all it was an apologetic art, for while possessing serenity it lacked the di-
vinely human element of mobility. The Greek never caught the secret of
the changing of the seasons, the orderly and complete sequence of their
rhythm within the calmly moving year. Nor did this self -same Greek know
what we now know of nature's bounty, for music in those days had not
been born; this lovely friend, approaching man to man, had not yet begun
to bloom as a rose, to exhale its wondrous perfume.

That the Gothic architecture, with somber, ecstatic eye, with its thought
far above with Christ in the heavens, seeing but little here below, feverish
and overwrought, taking comfort in gardening and plant life, sympathizing
deeply with nature's visible forms, evolved a copious and rich variety of
incidental expressions, but lacked the unitary comprehension, the absolute

24 THE TESTAMENT OF STONE

consciousness and mastery of pure form that can come alone of unclouded
and serene contemplation, of perfect repose and peace of mind.

I believe, in other words, that the Greek knew the statics, the Goth the
dynamics of the art, but that neither of them suspected the mobile equili-
brium of it neither of them divined the movement and stability of nature.
Failing in this, both have forever fallen short, and must pass away when
the true, the Poetic Architecture shall arise; that architecture which shall
speak with clearness, with eloquence and with warmth of the fullness, the
completeness of man's intercourse with nature and with his fellow men.

Moreover, we know, or should by this time know, that human nature
has now become too rich in possessions, too well equipped, too mag-
nificently endowed that any hitherto architecture can be said to have
hinted at its resources, much less to have exhausted them by anticipation.

It is this consciousness, his pride, that shall be our motive, our friend,
philosopher and guide in the beautiful country that stretches so invitingly
before us.

In that land, the schools, having found the object of their long, blind
searching, shall teach directness, simplicity, naturalness ; they shall protect
the young against palpable illusion. They shall teach that, while man once
invented a process called composition, nature has forever brought forth
organisms. They shall encourage the love of nature that wells up in every
childish heart, and shall not suppress, shall not stifle the teeming imagina-
tion of the young.

They shall teach, as the result of their own bitter experience, that con-
scious mental effort, that conscious emotionality, are poor mates to breed
from, and that true parturition comes of a deep, instinctive, subconscious
desire. That true art, springing fresh from nature, must have in it, to live,
much of the glance of an eye, much of the sound of a voice, much of the
life of a life.

That nature is strong, generous, comprehensive, fecund, subtile; that
in growth and decadence she continually sets forth the drama of man's
life.

That, thro' the rotaing seasons, thro' the procession of the years, thro'
the march of the centuries, permeating all, sustaining all, there murmurs
the still, small voice of a power that holds us in the hollow of its hand.

THE MODERN PHASE L\ ARCHITECTURE

In practice as head of his own office, Sullivan waited for commis-
sions which came less frequently, although among them was his last
major one; what is now the Carson, Pirie, Scott & Co. department
store on State Street, Chicago. Meanwhile his sense of the urgency
of his mission remained constant; and so did his need to express
It to the young practitioners of his art. Both are clear in the follow-
ing letter, dated May 30, 1899 and addressed to Max Dunning,
secretary of the Chicago Architectural Club at the time it was writ-
ten. Presumably read by Dunning to a convention of architects in
Cleveland in 1899, it was published in the Inland Architect and
News-Record in June of that year.

The Cleveland meeting of the Architectural Clubs of the country will
mark, I believe, the auspicious opening of a new era in the growth of
architectural thought.

It should, in the nature of things, be of serious import to us, of the
present and active generation, to know what the generation to follow
thinks and feels.

Its thoughts may be immature, its feelings vague and formless; yet,
nevertheless, in them the future life of our art is surely working out its
destiny : and the sincerity of them is not to be denied.

Youth is the most ambitious, the most beautiful, but the most helpless
stage of life.

It has that immediate and charming idealism which leads in the end
toward greatness.

Youth is ineffable.

I have said good bye to mine with solicitude I welcome yours.

Perceiving, as I do, the momentous sway and drift of modern life,
knowing as I do that the curtain has arisen on a drama the most intense
and passionate in all history, I urge that you cast away as worthless the
shopworn and empirical notion that an architect is an artist whatever
that funny word may mean, and accept my assurance that he is and

26 THE TESTAMENT OF STONE

imperatively shall be a poet and an interpreter of the national life of
his time.

Do you fully realize how despicable a man is who betrays a trust?

Do you know, or can you foresee, or instinctively judge how acutely
delicate will become, in your time, the element of confidence and depend-
ence between man and man and between society and the individual?

If you realize this s you will realize at once and forever, that you, by
birth, and by the beneficence of the form of government under which
you live that you are called upon, not to betray, but to express the life
of your own day and generation. That society will have just cause to
hold you to account for your uses of the liberty that it has given to you,
and the confidence it has reposed in you.

You will realize, in due time, as your lives develop and expand, and
you become richer in experience, that a fraudulent and surreptitious use
of historical documents, however suavely presented, however cleverly
plagiarized, however neatly re-packaged, however shrewdly intrigued, will
constitute and will be held to be a betrayal of a trust.

You know very well what I mean. You know in your own hearts that
you are to be fakirs or you are to be honest men.

It is futile to quibble, or to protest, or to plead ignorance or innocence,
or to asseverate and urge the force of circumstance.

Society is, in the main, honest for why should it not be and it will
not ask and will not expect you to be liars. It will give to you every reason-
able and every legitimate backing, if you can prove to it, by your acts,
that artistic pretention is not a synonym for moral irresponsibility.

If you take the pains truly to understand your country, your people,
your day, your generation; the time, the place in which you live if you
seek to understand, absorb and sympathize with the life around you, you
will be understood and sympathetically received in return. Have no fear
as to this.

Society soon will have no use for people who have no use for it. The
clairvoyance of the age is steadily unfolding and it will result therefrom,
that the greatest poet will be he who shall grasp and deify the common-
places of our life: those simple, normal feelings which the people of his
day will be helpless, otherwise, to express And here you have the key,
with which, individually, you may unlock, in time, the portal of your art.

I truly believe that your coming together will result in great things. You
have my sympathy.

I am with you in spirit for, in you, resides the only hope, the only

The Modern Phase of Architecture 27

sign of dawn that I can see making for a day that shall regenerate an
art that should be, may be and must be the noblest, the most intimate, the
most expressive, the most eloquent of all.

Your youth is your most precious heritage from the past I am with
you.

AN UNAFFECTED SCHOOL OF MODERN
ARCHITECTURE WILL IT COME?

Also In 1899, a magazine called The Artist reprinted the following
essay, from the catalog of an exhibition of the T Square Club of
Philadelphia, where It had been published as one of various replies
to the title-question, solicited from leading architects and professors
of architecture. The editor noted that Sullivan had re-phrased the
question before answering it.

Sir In reply to your inquiry, 4 Do you as yet see any sings tending to

indicate the development of an indigenous architecture in America? 9 I
say that in my judgment there are such signs and indications, but they are
not as clearly defined as I should wish to see them. The opportunities for
developing an Indigenous art are so abundant, so vital, so convincing,
that I must confess to a sincere surprise that progress toward that end
has not been more spontaneous and more significant.

It Is not, for my mind, a thinkable proposition that from a people demo-
cratic and free, self-reliant, resourceful, possessed of their own bodies,
possessed of their own souls, self -centered, deep of aspiration, there shall
not some day suspire as an exhalation an architectural art germane to
those gifts, responsive to that throb, eloquently voicing every form, every
aspect of what is genuine in our national life.

On the other band, it Is clear to me that architecture, as now generally
practiced, is feudal or monarchical; an architecture of the governed for
the governing. Against this set tiie thought that self-government is the
highest form of government; and Is It not toward this that we aspire as a
nation and as individuals?

Is it, therefore, reasonable to suppose that the art forms of a not free
people can really express the life of a free people? Yet that is the
popular supposition.

American architects as a class must become American in thought and
sympathy before we can have any widespread manifestation of an
indigenous art. That this will come about In due time I have not a doubt,
for we certainly have an abundance of talent, and there is certainly an

30 THE TESTAMENT OF STONE

undercurrent of dissatisfaction with prevailing methods. Restlessness and
discontent are always the heralds of great movements.

To emphasize the thought: Before we can have an indigenous architec-
ture, the American architect must himself become indigenous. How this
is to be done is very easy to explain, but rather difficult of performance;
for it is equivalent to asking him to become a poet, in the sense that he
must absorb into his heart and brain his own country and his own people.

The rest is difficult also, but certain as the rising of tomorrow's sun is
certain; for the power of imagination and the science of expression be-
come limitless when we open our hearts to nature and to our people as
the source of inspiration. It is practically in this active, vital faculty of
reciprocity that we are now paralytics.

THE YOUNG MAN IN ARCHITECTURE

The turn of the century brought with It a note of strain and rancor
In Sullivan's writing: he had for some years previous endured a
series of personal and professional humiliations and defeats; and
meanwhile he considered that the forces blighting American democ-
racy and its culture were growing, not weakening, in their virulence.
It was characteristic of Sullivan's temper that in the face of this,
his own conviction and Insistence grew, instead of weakening. But
for the first time we encounter passages of arrogant hectoring; the
exasperation of the prophet in the wilderness hegins to be heard
in this paper, read before the Architectural League of America,
June, 1900.

It is my premise that the Architectural League of America has its being
in a sense of discontent with conditions now prevailing in the American
malpractice of the architectural art; in a deep and wide sense of conviction
that no aid is to be expected from the generation now representing that
malpractice; and in the instinctive feeling that, through banding together,
force, discretion and coherence may be given to the output of these feel-
Ings which are, in themselves, for the time being, vague and miscellaneous,
however intensely they may be felt.

Did I not believe that this statement substantially represents the facts,
I should be the last to take an interest in your welfare I would be in-
different concerning what you did or what you did not.

That you have abundant reason for discontent needs no proof; let him
read who runs through the streets.

That you have cause for discontent is evident. That you should feel
discontent gives one a delightfully cynical sense of shock, and a new-
born desire to believe in the good, the true, the beautiful and the young.

American architecture is composed, in the hundred, of ninety parts
aberration, eight parts indifference, one part poverty and one part Little
Lord Fauntleroy. You can have the prescription filled at any architectural
department-store, or select architectural millinery establishment.

32 THE TESTAMENT OF STONE

As it is my desire to speak from the viewpoint that architecture should
be practiced as an art and not strictly as a commercial pursuit, and as I
am assuming that you agree with me in this respect, we may now per-
tinently inquire wherein does this American architecture differ from the
architecture of the past.

It differs in little, if in anything, provided we except the few great
epochs. Human nature has changed but little since the time Man was
slaughterer or the slaughtered of the great white bear.

Seldom, in the past, has Man thought of aught but war, which menaced
his life; religion, which menaced his soul; hunger, which menaced
his stomach; or love, which concerned his progeny. From time to time this
tempestuous sky has calmed, for a divine moment, and the glory of man
has shone forth upon a fertile land. Then came the angry elements and
the sun departed. This, in brief, is the recurrent history of man from the
beginning. You change the values in the formula to suit the epoch, the
century or the generation.

Ninety-nine years of the hundred the thoughts of nine hundred and
ninety-nine people of the thousand are sordid. This always has been true.
Why should we expect a change. Of one hundred so-called thoughts that
the average man thinks (and thus he has ever thought) , ninety-nine are
illusions, the remaining one a caprice.

From time to time in the past, these illusions have changed their focus
and become realities, and the one caprice has become an overwhelming
desire.

These changes were epoch making.

And the times were called golden.

In such times came the white-winged angel of sanity.

And the great styles arose in greeting.

Then soon the clear eye dimmed.

The sense of reality was lost.

Then followed architectures, to all intents and purposes quite like this
American architecture of today:

Wherein the blind sought much discourse of color.

The deaf to discuss harmonics.

The dry of heart twaddled about the divinity of man.

The mentally crippled wrought fierce combats in the arena of logic.

And so it has come about that the white-winged angel has been on a far
journey these six hundred years.

The Young Man in Architecture 33

Now, insisting for the moment, in spite of the hierarchy, that this white-
winged absence is of gentle sex, I entreat your close attention:

Let radiant and persuasive Youth lure her back again to earth!

For that she hovers in the visible blue of your firmament I can prove
to you beyond a gossamer of doubt.

That she awaits with eager ear the spring-enthraEing voice of adoles-
cence, the clear, sweet morning-call of a pure heart, the spontaneity and
jocund fervor of a bright and winning mind, the glance of a modest and
adoring eye!

That she awaits.

That she has so long awaited.

That she cannot make herself first known to you.

Alas, 'tis of her enchantment that she is invisible and dumb!

Perhaps this is enough of poesy.

Let us say, enough likewise of the prevailing cacaphony; of

The howling of the vast and general horde of Bedlamites.

The purring of the select company of Ruskinites.

The gasping of the Emersonites.

The rasping of the Spencerites.

The moaning of the Tennysonites.

The whimper of the aesthetes.

The yowling of reformers.

The yapping of strenuous livers.

The rustle of the rustlers.

The hustle of the hustlers.

The howl of the taxpayers.

And the clang of the trolley car:

All, signs, omens and predictions of our civilization.

We are commanded to know that there is much of mystery, much of the
esoteric, in the so-called architectural styles. That there is a holiness in
so-called pure art which the hand of the Modern may not profane.

So be It

Let us be the Cat.

And let the pure art be the King.

We will look at him.

And we will also look at the good king's good children, the great styles.

And at his retinue of bastards, the so-called other styles.

There Is, or at least there is said to be, a certain faculty of the mind,
whereby the mind or the faculty, as you choose, is on the one hand en-

34 THE TESTAMENT OF STONE

abled to dissolve a thing Into its elements, and, on the other hand, to build
up these or similar elements into the same or a similar thing. This process
is, I believe, called Logic; the first operation going by the name, analysis,
and the second, synthesis. Some men possess the half-faculty of separat-
ing; others the half -faculty of upbuilding. When the whole faculty exists
in one man. in a moderate degree, he is said to be gifted. When he has
it in a high degree, he is said to be highly gifted; and when in the highest
degree he is called a genius or a mastermind. When a man has neither the
one half-faculty nor the other half-faculty he is mentally sterile.

I fear lest the modern architect be placed in this category, by reason
of his devious ways.

Let us suppose ourselves nevertheless, moderately gifted and apply our
analysis to the great styles:

Presto, dissolve!

We have as residuum, two uprights, and a horizontal connecting them.

We have two bulky masses and an arch connecting them.

Revolve your arches and you have a dome.

Do the trick a few times more with a few other styles and you have the
Elements of Architecture.

We approach in the same way a master mind, and all speedily disap-
pears leaving insoluble Desire.

The architectural elements, in their baldest form, the desire of the heart
in Its most primitive, animal form, are the foundation of architecture.

They are the dust and the breathing spirit.

AH the splendor is but a gorgeous synthesis of these.

The logic of the books, Is, at best, dry reading; and, moreover, it is
nearly or quite dead, because it comes at second hand.

The human mind, in operation, is the original document.

Try to read it.

If you find this for the moment too difficult and obscure, try to study
a plant as it grows from its tiny seed and expands toward its full fruition.
Here Is a process, a spectacle, a poem, or whatever you may wish to call
it, not only absolutely logical in essence, because exhibiting in its high-
est form the unity and duality of analysis and synthesis, but, which Is of
vastly greater import, vital and inevitable: and it is specifically to this
phenomenon that I wish to draw your earnest attention, if it be true, and
I sincerely hope that such is the fact, that you wish to become real archi-
tects not the imitation brand. For I wish to show to you, or at least to
intimate to you, how naturally and smoothly and inevitably the human

The Young Man in Architecture 35

mind will operate if it be not harassed or thwarted in its normal and
instinctive workings.

Some day, watch the sun as he rises, courses through the sky, and sets.

Note what your part of the earth does meanwhile.

Ponder the complex results of this simple, single cause.

Some year, observe how rhythmically the seasons follow the sun. Note
their unfailing, spontaneous logic ; their exquisite analyses and synthesis
their vital, inevitable balance.

When you have time or opportunity, spare a moment to note a wild
bird, flying; a wave, breaking on the shore. Try to grasp the point that,
while these things are common they are by no means commonplace.

Note any simple thing or act whatsoever provided only, it be natural
not artificial the nearer undisturbed nature the better; if in the wilder-
ness better still, because wholly away from the perverting influence of man.

Whenever you have done these things attentively and without mental
bias or preoccupation, wholly receptive in your humor, there will come to
your intelligence a luminous idea of a resultant organic complexity, which
together, will constitute the first significant step in your architectural ed-
ucation, because they are the basis of rhythm.

There will gently dawn in your mind an awakening of something vital,
something organic, something elemental, that is urging things about you
through their beautiful, characteristic rhythms, and that is holding them
in most exquisite balance.

A little later you will become aware with amazement that this same
impulse is working on your own minds, and that never before had you
suspected it. This will be the second step in your architectural education.

Later you will perceive, with great pleasure, that there is a notable
similarity, an increasing sympathy between the practical workings of your
own minds and the workings of nature about you.

When this perception shall have grown into a definite, clear-cut con-
sciousness, it will constitute the closing of the first chapter and the opening
of all the remaining chapters in your architectural education, for you will
have arrived at the basis of organized thinking.

You will have observed doubtless that, thus far, while endeavoring to
lead you toward a sane and wholesome conception of the basis of the
architectural art, I have said not a word about books, photographs or
plates. I have done this advisedly, for I am convinced beyond the shadow
of a doubt that never can you acquire from books, or the like, alone, even
a remote conception of what constitutes the real, the living architectural

36 THE TESTAMENT OF STONE

art. It has been tried for generations upon generations with one unvarying
result: dreary, miserable failure.

To appreciate a book at its just value, you must first know what words
signify, what men signify and what nature signifies.

Books, taken in their totality, have one ostensible object, one just func-
tion namely, to make a record of Man's relation to his fellowmen and
to Nature, and the relation of both of these to an all-pervading, Inscrutable
Spirit.

To these relations, Mankind, in its prodigious effort to define its own
status, has given thousands upon thousands of names.

These names are called words.

Each word has a natural history.

Each word is not the simple thing it appears, but, on the contrary, it
is a highly complex organism, carrying in its heart more smiles, more
tears, more victories, more downfalls, more bloody sweats, more racial
agonies than you can ever dream of.

Some of these words are very old.

They still cry with the infancy of the race.

Therefore, should I begin by putting into your hands a book, or its
equivalent, I would, according to my philosophy, be guilty of an intellec-
tual crime.

I would be as far from the true path, as I now most heartily regard
most teachers of the architectural art to be.

I would be as reckless and brutal as my predecessors. But I would not
be as unconscious of it as they appear to be. Therefore, I say with em-
phasis, begin by observing.

Seek to saturate your minds by direct personal contact with things
that are natural, not sophisticated.

Strive to form your own judgments, at first in very small things, gradu-
ally in larger and larger things. Do not lean upon the judgment of others
if it is reasonably within your power to form your own.

Thus, though you may often stumble and wander, such experiences
will be valuable because personal; it is far better that they occur in youth
than in maturer years. Gradually, by virtue of this very contact with
things, you will acquire that sure sense of physical reality which is the
necessary first step in a career of independent thinking.

But strive not, I caution you, after what is called originality. If you do
you will be starting in exactly the wrong way. I wish distinctly to impress
upon you, that what I am advocating and what I am in turn striving to

The Youns Man in Architecture 37

point out to you Is the normal development of your minds. That Jf the
mind is properly nurtured, properly trained, and left free to act with
spontaneity, individuality of expression will come to you as naturally as
the flower comes to the plant, for it Is^nature's law.

When you begin to feel the flow and stimulation of mind which are
first fruits of wholesome exercise of the faculties, you may begin to read
the books. Read them carefully and cautiously, not superciliously,

Bear in mind that books, generaly speaking, are composed mainly of
sophistries, assumptions, borrowings, stealings, inadequate representations
or positive perversions of truth. The author, too frequently, Is posing, mas-
querading or ambuscading. His idea is to impress you. He himself well
knows how little he has to say that can, In strictness, be classed as truth
in his possession only. You will soon have no trouble in discerning the
exception, and the exceptions, by their value, will conclusively prove the
rule.

Later you may turn from the documents called books to the documents
called buildings and you will find that what I have said of books applies
with equal force to buildings and to their authors. Soon you will be en-
abled to separate the wheat from the chaff.

Thus, one after the other, you may pass in review the documents called
Music, Painting, Sculpture, Agriculture, Commerce, Manufactures, Gov-
ernment, etc. You will find them, for your purposes, much alike. You will,
ere long, acquire an inkling of the fullness and the emptiness of these docu-
ments, if, as I advise, you keep closely in touch with nature.

When you know something more of the working of the human mind
than you now know (and the day will not be long in coming if you follow
the program I am indicating), you will not be greatly surprised, when
taking a backward glance, that those in high places today seemingly be-
lieve or profess to believe that the fruit need bear no relation to the tree.

You will be no more amused than 1 am at the psychological Irony pre-
sented by the author of a callously Illogical building declaring in solemn
tones that it is the product of a logical mind.

You will smile with wonderment when you recall that it is now taught,
or appears now to be taught, that like does not beget like; whereas you
will know that nature has, for unnumbered ages and at every instant, pro-
claimed that like can beget nothing but Its like:

That logical mind will beget a logical building.

That an illogical mind will beget an illogical building.

That perversity will bring forth perversity.

THE TESTAMENT OF STONE

That the children of the mind will reveal the parent.

You will smile again when you reflect that it was held in your youth
that there was no necessary relationship between function and form. That
function was one thing, form another thing.

True, it might have seemed queer to some if a pine tree had taken on
the form of a rattlesnake, and, standing vertically on its tail, had brought
forth pine cones: or that a rattlesnake, vice versa, should take on the form
of a pine tree and wiggle along the ground biting the heel of the passer-by.

Yet, this suggestion is not a whit queerer than are some of the queer
things now filling the architectural view, as, for instance, a steel frame
function in a masonry form.

Imagine, for instance:

Horse-eagles:

Pumpkin-bearing frogs:

Frog-bearing pea vines;

Tarantula -potatoes ;

Sparrows in the form of whales, picking up crumbs in the streets.

If these combinations seem incongruous and weird, I assure you in all
seriousness that they are not a whit more so than the curiosities encounter-
ed with such frequency by the student of what nowadays passes for
architecture.

With this difference, only, that, inasmuch as the similarity is chiefly
mental, it can produce no adequate impression on those who have never
felt the sensitizing effect of thought.

You will remember that it was held that a national style must be gen- )
erations in forming and that the inference you were to draw from this was
that the individual should take no thought for his own natural develop-
ment because it would be futile so to do, because, as it were, it would be
an impertient presumption.

I tell you exactly the contrary: Give all your thought to individual de-
velopment, which it is entirely within your province and power to control;
and let the nationality come in due time as a consequence of the inevitable
convergence of thought.

If anyone tells you that it is impossible, within a lifetime, to develop and
perfect a complete individuality of expression, a well-ripened and per-
fected personal style, tell him that you know better and that you will prove
it by your lives. Tell him with little ceremony, whoever he may be, that he
is grossly ignorant of first principles, that he lives in the dark.

It is claimed that the great styles of the past are the sources of inspira-

The Young Man in Architecture 39

tion for this architecture of the present. This fact Is the vehement assertion
of those who "worship' them.

Would you believe it? Really would you believe it!
So it appears that like can beget its unlike after all. That a noble style
may beget, through the agency of an ignoble mind, an ignoble building.
It may be true that a blooded male may beget, through a mongrel
female, a cur progeny. But the application of this truth to the above in-
stance wherein occurs the great word Inspiration, implies a brutal per-
version of meaning and a pathetic depravity in those who use that word
for their sinister ends.

For inspiration, as I conceive it is the intermediary between God and
man, the pure fruition of the soul at one with immaculate nature, the
greeting of noble minds.

To use this word in a tricky endeavor to establish a connection legiti-
mizing the architecture of the present as the progeny of the noblest
thought in the past, is, to my mind, a blasphemy, and so it should appear
to yours.

In truth the American architecture of today is the offspring of an illegiti-
mate commerce with the mongrel styles of the past.
Do not deceive yourselves for a moment as to this.
It is a harsh indictment.
But it is warranted by the facts.

Yet, let us not be too severe. Let us remember and make what allowance
we may for the depressing, stultifying, paralyzing influence of an unfor-
tunate education. After all, every American man has had to go to school
And everything that he has been taught over and above the three R's
has been in essence for his mental undoing.

I cannot possibly emphasize this lamentable fact too strongly. And the
reason, alas, is so clear, so forcible, so ever-present, as you will see.

We live under a form of Government called Democracy. And we, the
people of the United States of America, constitute the most colossal in-
stance known in history of a people seeking to verify the fundamental
truth that self-government is Nature's law for Man.

It is of the essence of Democracy that the individual man is free in
his body and free in his soul.

It is a corollary therefrom, that he must govern or restrain himself,
both as to bodily acts and mental acts; that, in short, he must set up a
responsible government within his own individual person.

It implies that highest form of emancipation, of liberty- physical, mental

40 THE TESTAMENT OF STONE

and spiritual by virtue whereof man calls the gods to the judgment,
while he heeds the divinity of his own soul.

It is the Ideal of Democracy that the individual man should stand self-
centered. *elf-overning an individual sovereign, an Individual god.

Now, who will assert, specifically, that our present system of higher
architectural education is in accord with this aspiration? That the form,
Education, bears any essential relation other than that of antagonism to
the function, Democracy?

It Is our misfortune that It does not.

We, as a people, are too youthful. We are too new among the world
forces. We are loo young. We have not yet had time to discover precisly
the trouble, though we feel in our hearts that something Is amiss. We have
been too busy. And so conies about the incongruous spectacle of the in-
fant Democracy taking Its mental nourishment at the withered breast of
despotism.

To understand It from our point of view, examine! These are the es-
sential points:

We are to revere authority.

We are to take everything at second-hand.

We are to believe measurements are superior to thought.

We are advised not to think.

We are cautioned that by no possibility can we think as well as did our
predecessors.

We are not to examine; not to test, not to prove.

We are to regard ourselves as the elect, because, forsooth, we have been
instructed by the elect.

We must conform.

We are not to go behind the scenes.

We are to do as we are told and ask not foolish questions.

We are taught that there Is a royal road to our art.

We are taught hero worship: we are not taught what the hero wor-
shipped.

We are taught that nature is one thing, man another thing.

We are taught that God is one thing, man another thing.

Does this conform to the Ideal of Democracy?

Is this a fitting overture to the world's greatest drama?

Is It not extraordinary that we survive it even in part?

Is it a wonder that our representative architecture is vapid, foolish,
priggish, insolent, and pessimistic?

The Young Man in Architecture 41

Manifestly you cannot become truly educated in the schools.

Ergo, you must educate yourselves.

There Is no other course, no other hope.

For the schools have not changed much In my generation; they will, I
fear, not change much in your generation, and soon it will be too late for
you.

Strive, strive therefore while YOU are young and eager, to apply to
your mental development the rules of physical development! ^"'

Put yourselves in training, so to speak.

Stri\*e to develop in your minds the agility, flexibility, precision, poise,
endurance, and judgment of the athlete.

Seek simple, wholesome, nourishing food for the mind.

You will be surprised and charmed with the results.

The human mind in its natural state, not drowsed and stupefied by a
reactionary education, is the most marvelously active agency in all nature.

You may trust implicitly in the results of this activity if its surround-
ings are wholesome.

The mind will inevitably reproduce what it feeds upon.

If it feeds upon filth, it will reproduce filth.

If it feeds upon nature, it will reproduce nature.

If it feeds upon man, it will reproduce man.

If it feeds upon all of these, it will reproduce aE of these.

It will reproduce infallibly whatever it is fed upon.

It is a wonderful machine; its activity cannot wholly be quenched ex-
cept by death. It may be slowed down or accelerated, it cannot be stopped.

It may be abused in every conceivable way, but it will not stop, even
in Insanity, even in sleep.

So bew r are how you tamper with this marvelous mechanism, for It will
record inevitably, in all its output, whatever you do to it.

The human mind Is the summation of all the ages. It holds in trust the
wisdom and the folly of aE the past

Beware what you do to It, for it wIE give you bad for your bad, good for
your good. It Is a mechanism of such inconceivable delicacy and com-
plexity.

Man through his physical infancy is most carefully nurtured. His deli-
cate and fragile helpless little body is tenderly watched with aE the solici-
tude of parental affection. Indeed, under the law he is still a child until
the age of twenty-one.

But his mind! Who cares for his mind?

42 THE TESTAMENT OF STONE

After lie lias passed from the simple, beautiful ministrations at his
mother's knee, who guards this Ineffably delicate Impressionable
organism?

Oh, the horror of it!

Oh, ye sods, where is justice, where is mercy, where is love!

To think that the so-called science of political economy Is so futile, so
drugged with feudalism that it has not noted this frightful waste, this
illogical Interruption of the happiness of the human family, this stark,
staring incongruity in our education!

That it does not perceive, in Its search for the sources of wealth, the
latent richness of the human mind, its immense wealth of practical pos-
sibilities, the clearly marked indications of enormous productiveness a
productiveness sane and of vital consequence to the public welfare!

So much for a science which regards man as a mechanical unit. It is
typical in a measure, of the learning we have donned as a misfit garment.

You have every reason to congratulate yourselves that you are young,
for you have so much the less to unlearn, and so much the greater fund
of enthusiasm. A great opportunity Is yours. The occasion confronts you.
The future is in your hands will you accept the responsibility or will you
evade it?

That Is the only vital question I have come here to put to you.

I do not ask an answer now.

I ara content with putting the question.

For it is the first time that the question ever has been put squarely to
you.

I ask only that you consider this;

Do you intend, or do you not Intend; do you wish or do you not wish
to become architects in whose care an unfolding Democracy may entrust
the interpretation of its material wants, its psychic aspirations?

In due time doubtless you will answer in your own way.

But I warn you the time left for an answer In the right way is acutely
brief.

For you as you are 5 you are not as young as you were yesterday
And tomorrow?

Tomorrow!

IS ARCHITECTURE: A STUDY /J THE
AMERIC