Full text of "Kindergarten Charts Revised 1918 And Other Writings"

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Sullivan

Kindergarten chats

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louis h. suliivan

The Documents of Modern Art : Director, Robert MotherweU

Kindergarten Chats (revised 1918)

and other writings

Louis H. Sullivan

George Wittenborn, Inc., New York 22 ? N.Y.

Acknowledgments

The publishers and editor wish to acknowledge their indebtedness,

for material, assistance and advice, to the following persons:

Mr. George Grant Eimslie, executor of Sullivan's literary estate,

whose -wholehearted cooperation made this publication

possible; Mr. and Mrs. Hugh Morrison, of Hanover, N. H. ; the

staff of the Burnham Library of Architecture, The Art Institute of

Chicago, especially Miss Etheldred Abbot and Mrs. T. M. Hofmeester, Jr.

(particular thanks are due for generous loan of manuscripts) ; the

staff of the Avery Library, Columbia University, especially Mr.

Talbot Hamlin and Mrs. Corinne Spencer; all other persons who

have kindly aided in obtaining documents and illustrative material.

Publishers' Note:

During the last days of the war the publishers determined upon the reprinting

of the complete text of the following works, an undertaking which was warmly

seconded by Mr. Eimslie. Our thoughts then turned to someone capable of handling

all the literary and technical details involved. Our gratitude and

admiration go to Isabella Athey who, in spite of many obstacles, successfully

collated all available material in order that the contemporary reader should

have the benefit of meeting a great American thinker and architect.

Without Miss A they' s unfailing endeavors (as -well as valuable assistance from

other sources) this publication might never have reached the public which we

believe Sullivan's writings deserve.

1018 Madison Ave., New York 21, N. Y.

Manufactured in the United States of America

by The Gallery Press, New York, N. Y.

Offset reprint, 1955 Manufactured by

Halliday Lithograph Corp., West Hanover, Mass.

Cover design and typography by Paul Rand
4.

Editorial Note

The printing of the unpublished revision of Kindergarten Chats in this volume
carries out at last Louis Sullivan's wish that his work be issued in book form his
Foreword., written in July 1918, is our authority. That no publisher was found
during the six remaining years of Ms life., and that a good deal of vagueness and
misunderstanding arose concerning Sullivan's attitude to this work as well as with
regard to the existence and condition of a revised manuscript reflects the com-
monplace that human nature and scholarship are inextricably bound together.

Sullivan believed that a building represented an act,, and that such an act re-
vealed the man behind it, the mind and ethics of the architect, more conclusively
and unerringly than any statement. In this sense, the fifty-two consecutive essays
entitled Kindergarten Chats are an act, requiring no officious introduction or inter-
pretation. Nevertheless, a few general remarks should be made to suggest the nature
and significance of Sullivan's editing of 1918, particularly since the first version
published serially in 1901 is available only in a few obscure files, and that edited by
Claude Bragdon in 1 934 is out of print.

From June to October 1918, Sullivan worked over the manuscript and produced
the text which follows, and which therefore represents its definitive form. The actual
manuscript gives the impression that Sullivan revised in the exact meaning of the
word, that he gave attention to every sentence and paragraph, that his alterations
of word and phrase, his cutting and rewriting, were the product of genuine reconsid-
eration and a desire for greater clarity. The redundant or unprecise adjective was
discarded; the specific term was substituted for the more general or the vague one;
repetitive passages were deleted. Throughout this revision and the text here pub-
lished was prepared directly from the original manuscript it may be said that
the secondary has been sacrificed to the primary. For instance, many words a phrases
and sentences expressing emotion strong enough to convey prejudice (rather than
conviction) have been either cut or modified so as not to deflect the force of ra-
tional and organic exposition. Thus the revision is in no sense a compromise, or a
recantation of criticisms concerning architects or architecture, or a softening of at-
titude because of advancing age; on the contrary, it is sharper, clearer, more logical.
(In length, the text is shorter by about 30,000 words; chapters, or parts of chap-
ters, completely or largely rewritten are so indicated by footnotes.) It should, how-

S 1 O 9 6 7 8

ever,, be pointed out that part of the 1918 Kindergarten Chats stands as written in
1901, especially in the earlier sections; certain passages deleted for the 1934 edi-
tion, as dated or distasteful, appear here unaltered. The extent and nature of Sul-
livan's editing is In itself extremely indicative of the man as well as of the thinker
and writer. r

Seven essays have been added, at the suggestion of Mr. George Grant Elmslie,
and selected by him, so that the reader may study the development of Sullivan's
ideas from early in Ms career the first was written when he was 29 till near
the close of his life. Most of these essays consist of papers read before architects 5 con-
ventions, certain of them having been revised and certain having appeared in pro-
fessional magazines, now defunct; most of them may be assigned to the years of
Sullivan's greatest success and precede Kindergarten Chats. Finally, miscellaneous
material, of biographical and interpretative interest, has been placed in Appendices
which are self-explanatory. It has thus been the intention to make the whole volume
a human as well as an intellectual and artistic document, and a basis for further
study.

The photographs accompanying Kindergarten Chats illustrate buildings uffthich
Sullivan was referring in fact if not by name, or to which he might have been re-
ferring. A few examples of Sullivan's work were chosen to provide a balance and
also to serve as illustrations of his own principles.

In the matter of punctuation, spelling and capitalization, the style of the manu-
scripts has been preserved, except for a few changes ; ; slight modifications, for in-
stance in the use of dashes and colons, have seemed justified by variations that exist
in the sources themselves, the result of copying and of publication, (the holograph
manuscript of Kindergarten Chats differs from the serial text; there are differences
between successive printings of some of the essays). Certain apparent inconsistencies
in capitalization of such words as Democracy, Man, Architecture, etc. have
been retained, in the conviction that Sullivan's literary style is imbued with the
tone and color of the spoken word, which would be distorted by dogmatic theories
of consistency. ISABELLA ATHEY

Biographical Not

1856 Bom, September 3, Boston, Massachusetts.

1860-70 Attended local grammar school; most of his summers were spent with maternal
grandparents upon their farm at South Reading.

1870 Entered the English High School, Boston, where the teaching of Moses Woolson

made a lasting impression. Sullivan's immediate family moved to Chicago.

1872-73 Attended architectural courses at M.I.T.; left without finishing. Obtained draft-
ing work in the offices of Furness and Hewitt, Philadelphia (where an uncle lived).
The "depression" of that time induced Sullivan to move on to Chicago, where he
was employed by William LeBaron Jenney.

1874 To Europe, for study at the Beaux- Arts. Arrived in Paris via Liverpool and Lon-

don, and in 6 weeks prepared for the Ecole entrance examinations. After passing
brilliantly, Sullivan spent approximately two years in the atelier libre of Vaudremer.
He visited Italy, where particularly the works of Michelangelo moved him pro-
foundly. In Paris, Sullivan lived most of the time in rooms at the corner of rue
Monsieur le Prince and rue Racine (building still standing).

1876-79 Return to Chicago and a succession of drafting positions, until put in charge of
Dankmar Adler's office.

1 88 1 Partnership: Adler and Sullivan. During the next 12 years, this was one of the

most active architectural firms in Chicago (for instance, the Auditorium, 1887-89);
between 1880 and 1895 Sullivan designed more than 100 buildings.

1893 Transportation Building, World's Columbian Exposition, Chicago (the only building

to receive foreign recognition, a medal from the French government). Crucial eon-
sequences for architectural development in the U.S.A. and for Sullivan's career.

1895 Dissolution of the partnership.

1895 Practice alone. Very little data can be given for this period; Sullivan's straitened
1924 circumstances are reflected by the auction of his property in 1906. For many years
office space was retained in the Auditorium Tower (No. 1600); most of his
writing was done at the Cliff Dwellers, a club in which Sullivan held life member-
ship. The personal interest of friends and colleagues was responsible for the re-
vision of Kindergarten Chats (1918) with book publication in mind but not
achieved, the writing of the Autobiography and the drawings for A System of
Architectural Ornament.

1924 Died, April 14, in a hotel room, in Chicago.

Bibliography of Writings by Louis H* Sullivan

"Characteristics and Tendencies of American Architecture"

A paper read before the second annual convention of the Western Association of Archi-
tects, St. Louis, 1885; published in Builders' Weekly Reporter (London), some time in
1885; no references available.

"Inspiration"

A prose poem read before the third annual convention of the Western Association of
Architects, Chicago, November 1886; published in brochure by the Inland Architect
Press, Chicago, 1886. (Part i of "Nature and the Poet" series.)

"What is the Just Subordination, in Architectural Design, of Details to Mass?"

A symposium at a meeting of the Illinois Association of Architects, Chicago, April 1887,
with talks by Louis H. Sullivan, L. D. Cleveland, O. J. Pierce and with a summary by
Sullivan; published in Inland Architect & News Record, vol. 9, no. 5, pp. 51-54, April
1887, and in Building Budget, vol. 3, no. 3, pp. 62-63, April 1887.

"Ornamentation of the Auditorium"

A paper quoted in part in Industrial Chicago, vol. 2, pp. 490-491.

"Ornament in Architecture"

Published in Engineering Magazine, August 1892, vol. 3, no. 5, pp. 633-644.

"Emotional Architecture as Compared with Intellectual : A Study in Objective and Subjective"
A paper read before the 28th annual convention of the American Institute of Archi-
tects, New York, October 1894; the title has always been listed with "Classical" in place
of "Intellectual," the result of a misprint overlooked by the author; published in Inland
Architect & News Record, vol. 24, no. 4, pp. 32-34, November 1894. Under a different
title ("Objective and Subjective, A Study in Emotional as Compared with Intellectual")
and with certain textual variations, this essay was published as a brochure by the Inland
Architect Press, Chicago, 1895.

"The Tall Office Building Artistically Considered"

Published in Lippincott's vol. 57, pp. 403-409, March 1896; Inland Architect & News
Record vol. 27, no. 4, pp. 32-34, May 1896; republished, with slight changes, in the
"Architectural Discussion" department of The Craftsman, vol. 8, pp. 453-458, July 1905,
under the title "Form and Function Artistically Considered." In January 1922, West-
ern Architect, vol. 31, no. i, pp. 3-11, republished the essay under the original title with

the notation : "Mr. Sullivan himself states that he has nothing to add nor to subtract from
his early statement."

"An Unaffected School of Modern Architecture: Will It Gome?"

Published in Artist (New York), vol. 24, pp. XXXIII-IV, January 1899.
An address before the Chicago Architectural Club, the Art Institute, CMcago, May 1899,

Unpublished (MS in Bumham Library).
"The Modern Phase of Architecture"

A short address, apparently delivered in Cleveland (n. d.); published in Inland Archi~

tect & News Record, vol. 33, no. 5, June 1899.

"The Master"

Part 2 of "Nature and the Poet" series, begun 1880-90, completed July i, 1899. Un-
published (MS in Bumham Library).

"The Young Man in Architecture"

A paper read before the Architectural League of America, June 1900; published in The
Brickbuilder, vol. 9; no. 6, pp. 115-119, June 1900; Western Architect, vol. 34, no. i,
pp. 4-10, January 1925; Twice a Year, no. 2, Spring-Summer 1939.

"Reality in the Architectural Art"

Published in Interstate Architect & Builder, vol. 2, no. 25, pp. 6-7, August :^oo.

Kindergarten Chats

Published in Interstate Architect & Builder, vol. 2, no. ja-vol. 3, no. 51 (52 issues from
February 16, 1901 -February 8, 1902); in book form, edited by Claude F. Bragdon, by
the Scarab Fraternity Press, Lawrence, Kansas, 1934. See Appendix E for chronology of
manuscripts, revision, etc.

"Education"

A paper read before the annual convention of the Architectural League of America,
Toronto, 1902. First published here (MS in Bumham Library).

"Sympathy a Romanza"

Part 3 of "Nature and the Poet" series. Written about 1904, unpublished (MS in Bum-
ham Library).

"Natural Thinking: A Study in Democracy"

A paper read before the Chicago Architectural Club, February 1905. Unpublished (MS
in Burnham Library) .

"The Possibility of a New Architectural Style"

A reply to an article by Frederick Stymetz Lamb on "Modern Use of the Gothic,"
The Craftsman, vol. 8, pp. 336-338, June 1905.

"What is Architecture: A Study in the American People of Today"

Published in American Contractor, vol. 27, no. i, pp. 48-54, January 1906, and reprinted
in the May, June, July issues of The Craftsman, 1906, vol. 10, no. 2, pp. 145-149; no.
3> PP- 352-358; no. 4, pp. 507-513. The Akademie der Kunste, Berlin, published in
connection with an exhibition, Ausstellung Neuer Amerikanischer Baukunst, January
1926, "Was ist Architektur," with a foreword by Irving K. Pond. Selections of the essay,
"interpreted" by William Gray Purcell, were published in Northwest Architect, vol. 8,
no. i, October-November 1940, and a reprint of this version was published July 1944,
(details unavailable).

Democracy: A Man Search

A book in 44 chapters, of ca. 180,000 words; first draft completed July i, 1907; revision
completed April 18, 1908, Unpublished (holograph pencilled manuscript in the Avery

Library, Columbia University; typed manuscript in the Burnham Library). Excerpts ap-
peared in Twice a Year, no. 5-6, Fall- Winter, 1940 Spring-Summer 1941., pp. 17-28.

"Is Our Art a Betrayal rather than an Expression of American Life?"

Published in The Craftsman, vol. 15, no. 4, pp. 402-404,, January 1909.

Letter replying to an article by Gutzon Borglum, The Craftsman., vol. 17, no. 3, December

1909-
"Suggestions in Artistic Brickwork"

Foreword to a pamphlet entitled Artistic Brick, published by the Hydraulic-Press Brick

Company, St. Louis, undated (ca. 1910) pp. 5-13.

"Wherefore the Poet?"

Published in Poetry, vol. 7, pp. 305-307, March 1916.
"Development of Construction"

A paper read before the Illinois Chapter of the A. I. A.; published in The Economist
(Chicago), vol. 55, no. 26, p. 1252, and vol. 56, no. I, pp. 39-40, June and July, 1916.

The Autobiography of an Idea

Published serially in Journal of the American Institute of Architects, June 1922-August
1923. Published in book form by the Press of the A. I. A., 1924; reprinted by W. W.
Norton & Co. in "White Oak Library Series," 1934.

A System of Architectural Ornament According with a Philosophy of Man's Powers

A series of 19 plates drawn during the period January Z922-May 1922 and published
in folio by the Press of the A. I. A., 1924 (Original drawings in Burnham Library).

"The Chicago Tribune Competition"

Published in Architectural Record, vol. 53, no. 2, pp. 151-157, February 1923.
"Concerning the Imperial Hotel, Tokyo"

Published in Architectural Record, vol. 53, no. 4, pp. 333-352, April 1923; in H. Th.

Wijdeveld: The Life Work of the American Architect, Frank Lloyd Wright, (1925), pp.

124-131.

"Reflections on the Tokyo Disaster"

Published in Architectural Record, vol. 55, no. 2, pp. 113-117, February 1924; ibid, pp.
101-123.

(This list has been based upon the bibliography in Hugh Morrison's Louis Sullivan: Prophet
of Modern Architecture; some additions and slight modifications have been made by the editor.)

A complete general bibliography of books and articles on Sullivan, and a list of Sullivan
buildings, is available in the volume by Hugh Morrison (Museum of Modern Art and W. W.
Norton & Co., 1935), to which very little can be added.

In April 1946 the American Institute of Architects conferred its Gold Medal posthumously
upon Sullivan (see Appendix D); in September 1946, commemorating Sullivan's ninetieth
anniversary, a plaque was placed upon the house where he was born, now 42 Bennet Street,
Boston (see Journal of the American Institute of Architects, vol. 6, no. 5, November 1946).

The first exhibition devoted to Sullivan, "The Genius of Louis Sullivan," was arranged by the
Institute of Modern Art, Boston, Massachusetts; after being shown at that museum. March
4-April 19, 1947, it will have an extensive itinerary.

10.

Contents

page 4: Acknowledgments

5 : Editorial Note

7 : Biographical Note

8 : Bibliography of Writings by Louis H. Sullivan

1 3 : List of Illustrations

1 5 ; Foreword

1 7 : Kindergarten Ghats

Additional Papers: 1885-1906

177: Characteristics and Tendencies of American Architecture

1812 : What is the Just Subordination, in Architectural Design of Details to Mass?

187: Ornament in Architecture

191: Emotional Architecture as Compared with Intellectual: A Study in

Objective and Subjective

202 : The Tall Office Building Artistically Considered
214: The Young Man in Architecture
224: Education
227: What is Architecture: A Study in the American People of Today

Appendices :
243: A
246: B
248: C
249: D
251: E

ii.

List of Illustrations

Louis Henri Sullivan (date unknown). frontispiece

fig. i Montgomery Ward (now Tower) Building, Chicago. 1899-1901. Richard E. Schmidt,

architect, (four stories and tower added by Hoiabird & Roche). page 19

2 Illinois Central Station, Chicago. 1892. Bradford L. Gilbert, architect. 19

3 Marshall Field Store (Old Annex Building), Chicago. 1892. D. H. Burnham & Co
architect. '*

4 Marshall Field Wholesale Store, Chicago. 1885-1887 (now demolished). H. H. Rich-
ardson, architect.

5 Chicago National Bank, Chicago. 1900. Jenney & Mundie, architects. 53

6 Design for a Bicentennial Memorial for Detroit. Designer, date: uncertain. 53

7 Columbia University Library, New York. 1893. McKim, Mead & White, architects. 54

8 Residence of Cornelius Vanderbilt ( 57 th Street and Fifth Avenue), New York. 1882
(later additions; now demolished). George B. Post, architect. 54

9 Stonehenge.

10 Vaulted passage, Tiryns, Greece.

11 Sullivan at Ocean Springs, Mississippi (date unknown). 72

12 Wainwright Building, plans of first and sixth floors, St. Louis. 1890-1891. 204

13 Auditorium Building, from the east, Chicago. 1887-1889. 209

14 Auditorium Theatre, view of proscenium and "Golden Arches." 209

15 Getty Tomb, entrance arch and bronze doors, Graceland Cemetery, Chicago. 1890. 210

1 6 Wainwright Building, exterior. 2II

17 Carson Pirie Scott Store, Chicago. 1899-1904 (last five bays added by Burnham in
1906).

212

Foreword

The following work appeared in serial form in the Interstate Architect 1 of Cleve-
land, Ohio, during the year 1901.

It was originally written for young architects. In its present form it has been suffi-
ciently recast to broaden and extend its appeal to all those who may be interested in
the nature of Architecture as a creative art.

The work is free of technicalities, is couched in easy dialogue form and its doc-
trine should be intelligible to all: for it is based on the realities of every-day life and
is essentially democratic in its 2 of our common natural powers.

The plot, if such it may be called, is very simple, namely, a graduate of one of our
architectural schools comes to the author for a post-graduate course. Interest there-
fore centers in the 2 unfolding in the pupil of those natural, spontaneous powers

which had been submerged and ignored during his academic training.

The central purpose of the work is to liberate the mind from serfdom to tradition,
and to exhibit man's natural powers in their creative capabilities when expanding in
the open-air-of-the-spirit-of-responsible-freedom; in other words, in the true spirit of
democracy. From which it follows that the operation of the historic feudal mind and
the advancing democratic mind are placed in sharp contrast. The appeal therefore
is to the broad intelligence of the public mind seeking not only a knowledge and
understanding of architecture as a plastic art, but, as well, a clear view of its social
basis as an art of expression.

The present world-tragedy will, at its ending, call for a new valuation of human
power, a new and clarified social view and vista, a new illumination of the basic
nature of democracy as contrasted with its merely political aspect.

It is in the hope that this work may contribute its share toward such clarification
that the author has consented to its publication in book form.

The ideas underlying the work are simple and elementary; hence the title "Kin-
dergarten Chats." Louis H. SULLIVAN, The Cliff Dwellers. Chicago, July jo, 1918.

1. The Interstate Architect and Builder; Feb. 16, 1901-Fcb, 8, 1902. Sullivan's letters in Appendix A refer to
the series of articles. 2. Illegible word.

L A Building with a Tower

Now what Is this? What building I mean?

It is a structure that looks out upon the fair spread of Lake Michigan.

Has the Lake then a fare spread?

It has Indeed for the judicious to feast the eyes upon and to delight in; but,
strange to say, like many another choice thing, it is caviare to the general.

To what general?

To the general apathy.

Is it true that Chicago people do not delight in this superb Lake?

No, not strictly true., but truer than it should be. It is a wonderful body of water
changeable as the days, moody and whimsical as a human being, but always
impressive, In its broad stretch of varying, shifting color, its turbulence, its serenity,
its smile and its frown. I have watched It for many a year, and never has it been the
same on any two days.

Yes, but what about the building?

Not very much.

Isn't it high art?

Yes, 390-feet-high art I am told.

Then the tower Is very high art indeed?

You reason logically. By the way, speaking of the tower, it is said there was, origi-
nally, a difference of opinion as between the owner and the architect, that bid fair
to become acute. It seems the owner wished one tower, the architect insisted upon
four of them. [Fig. i]

Indeed^ that is interesting if true.

It may or may not be true, but in any event It is interesting, for, if you will examine
with a little care, you will note how cleverly the architect has contrived to have his
way.

You choose to be facetious at the expense of the architect.

Well, turn about is fair play. Is he not facetious at your expense and mine, at the

17. A Building with a Tower

expense of the owner, and of John Doe and Richard Roe and. Incidentally, of the
Lake?

Yes, it looks a little that way. But is there not some even higher art, up yonder?
What is the gilded thing upon the apex? It is the work of a sculp tor 3 is it not?

An eminent sculptor, they say.

It seems to be a lady. But what is the lady doing up above the earth so high like
a diamond in the sky? Twinkle, twinkle, little star, how I wonder what you are!
What is the lady doing?

Can't you see? She turns this way and that way, round and about, east and west,
south and north seeking ever to espy her features in an invisible mirror which ever
eludes her pursuit

Oh, she is a vain lady then?

No, she is but a lady- vane. You see her at the bath : Behold the water gushing mer-
rily from the fountain in her hand. And in the other hand, with arm outstretched,
she waves a caduceus, a real caduceus, a most real caduceus the kind so well and
f avarobly known in the West.

But what does the figure symbolize anyway?

You mean, perhaps, what does the figure symbolize any old way. I do not precisely
know, but I have heard that it represents Temperance lightening the load of Labor
or something of the sort. Still, you can't always tell what is going on in the mental
depths of these "artistic fellers," sometimes they cannot tell themselves. It may be this
is a case in point.

Then their ways are not our ways?

Tut, tut! Don't be pharisaical. Besides, by ways, you mean or should mean, high-
ways, and his ways are her ways, hence her ways are his ways, and her ways are high
ways, airy ways, fairy ways.

Would she not look more modern clad in some kind of suit? More "Chicagoey," so
to say.

She is already acquiring a soot that is characteristically Chicagoan, and it bespeaks
our civic pride, our refinement, our love of the beautiful, our "awakened public con-
sciousness," as they say. Here we dote on everything that tends to charm, elevate
and inspire. It is our nature, our gift, we cannot help it. But it does seem that we
are verging toward puritanism in our austere insistence; we are, perhaps, going too
far.

Surely you don't mean to imply

Yes, I do. You think the contrary. But what you seem to see is but a mirage that
disquiets your faculties. It is inconceivable that we would tolerate a state of affairs
corresponding to your illusion. We have, here, too much enlightenment, too fine a
sense of ultimate economy, and, in addition, too much self-respect. What you see is,
in reality, but a most gratifying assurance of industry, thrift, public spirit and a high
order of civilization.

Well, it all looks pretty barbarous to me, though I suppose you are right. But what
about the building?

But, strange to say, we have an architecture here that is tending in the same or an
opposite direction, and is evolving from itself evidences of what we may or may not
become. It is very interesting; but when you look at it you must suffer no mirage,

1 8. Kindergarten Chats

1. Montgomery Ward (now Tower) Building, Chicago (Chicago Architectural Photograph. Co.)

2. Illinois Central Station, Chicago (Courtesy, Illinois Central System)

19.

3- Marshall Field Store, Chicago (Chicago Architectural Photograph. Co.)

4. Marshall Field Wholesale Warehouse, Chicago (Chicago Architectural Photograph. Co.)
20.

you must see things just as they are or are not. In this way your thoughts will take
on the clarity of our local atmosphere and you will have a correct start in your
studies. For all depends on starting right 3 as the gunner said to the shell.

That's lucid enough but what about this particular building? That's what I'm
interested in.

Yes, so are the owners and the tax-gatherers. What part of the building do you
mean?

Why, the rest of the building, to be sure.

The architect did not give the building any rest, but as to the remainder of the
structure it seems an ill-compounded salad, with a rather rancid New-Yorky
flavor.

I can't see the connection between a building and a salad.

But I can see the connection between a salad and a building, for I know how
buildings are made as a rule.

Then, if your discourse is a salad, you are not using much oil. What do you think
of the building by and large?

By and large, it cost much money.

That's pure vinegar, isn't it? Your salad is too peppery and too sour. You might
omit the tabasco, use a milder vinegar, and add oil, it seems to me. It would improve
the flavor quite a little, to my thinking.

11. Pathology

Persiflage is very well in its way, but don't you think you were unduly jocose, not
to say severe, in discussing the building we looked at? I have been thinking about it
for the past week and I can hardly agree with your point of view.

Exactly. All of which means, in plain English, that you believe you have been
thinking and that you do not at all know, or even suspect where my viewpoint is
located. Nor does it signify much, at the present moment, whether you do or do not.
The building under observation, or discussion, if you will, is but a mild type of a
weird race of structures that mildew the land; and which we two are to study as a
scientist would study a pest of any kind, that is to say, with a view to a remedy.

The particular building which was under consideration is, perhaps, considered from
one viewpoint, merely a youthful befuddlement: from another, a striking illustration
of the inability of an untrained mind to perceive and grasp a rare opportunity. Again
change the view a little and it becomes an instructive example of that futility which
goes with the misapplication of money. Again a little change in view, and we per-
ceive the impotence of money when not impelled by carefully selected brains. But
enough of this building. The broad question or phenomenon we are about to investi-
gate is pathologic in its immediate aspect and even more deeply so in its spirit. It is

21. Pathology

a sad fact, but a hard fact, that American building is demoralized, and the architect
not only mentally unhinged from his art, but socially and economically out of joint
with his times. It is a curious condition that we see; a tangled skein that it will re-
quire patience and perseverance to unravel. The way is plain to me how to make
it plain to you is quite another matter. Yet the facts are there and we must look
them squarely in the face.

So, willy-nilly, to perceive health, we must look through and beyond disease; to
locate sanity, we must wander through the jungle, the swamps, the marshes and the
arid places of confusion worse confounded. We must hold a steady course guided
by the sun in the daytime and the stars at night. There is no help for it; we are
choking in miasm; we must find the way out to a pure air, or perish. We are rotting
we must purify; we are wasting in a profound torpor; we are growing senile
before our time; we are like unto a wormy windfall. Alas! alack the day! to what
depths have we descended! Into what a putrid mush have our minds deliquesced!
Were we really bom in sorrow? Was our infancy a bane? Is there no health in us?
Or is there a vital and a saving grace, a force, a power that will regenerate? From
the ugly worm shall there come a beauteous creature of the air? From this compost
shall there grow and bloom the rose?

These are grave questions, my young friend, and hourly they become more grave.
Whether we are going to the devil, or the devil is coming to us, I leave to the casuist.
The times are surely pregnant but what the new birth is to be. Heaven only
knows.

So let us wander through the house wherein the mad will vote us mad. The soonest
over, soonest done.

Really you are encouraging. The prospect is delightful, the outlook most attrac-
tive. Worms and bugs, marshes and jungles, madmen and lunatics, miasms and deli-
quescence, and things and lots of other things. Charming. I accept with pleasure. Let
us sally gaily, blithely, forth. Cheer up, my friend, the worst is yet to come.

And so it is. You are precisely the young, "well-educated," self-confident and
unsuspecting hopeful I assumed you to be when you came to me. Cheerfulness such
as yours has been fatal, to others ; but it is a good thing in a way, provided you don't
hang yourself with it. So gird your loins, and strengthen your stomach. You may not
feel so gay later on. You are like a sailor who has never been to sea. A life on the
raging deep is all very well when you are used to it, but in the meanwhile? If you
really believe you can wade into morbid psychology, up to the neck, without getting
squeamish and creaky, and a bit uncertain as to the whereabouts of your own ego
well, try it I'll keep from drowning, anyway.

You are exeeding kind, most gracious master.

And you are a flippant, but not wholly unattractive, young person. Our first build-
ing viewed is simply absent-minded, inarticulate and semi-demi-something-or-other.
Let us draw near to the more vicious cases those which, whether of ferocious or
of milder aspect, are more deeply saturated with the virus that is threatening our
social life, and urging its decay. We will, in so doing, unearth some strange respon-
sibilities, some unsuspected metamorphoses in short, a few plain and much-needed
facts. This done then will we seek to exalt the valleys, make the crooked straight,
and the rough places plane.

22. Kindergarten Chats

HI. A Terminal Station

My son, here "is the place perhaps a unique spot on earth holy In iniquity,
where, to go in you go out. and to go out you go in ; where to go up you go down, and
to go down you go up. All in all it seems to me the choicest fruit yet culled from that
broad branch of the tree of knowledge, known as the public-be-damned style. In this
instance the outward aspect of the style takes on the semblance of architecture, much
as a speaking-tube conducts the voice. Let us regard it curiously. Its lucidity of
thought is like unto the Stygian murk. Still it is characteristically, too character-
istically, an American work ; there can, alas, be no doubt of it. And, the study of our
contemporaneous architecture, its origins, inspirations, animus, growth, trend and
destiny constituting a part of our inquiry, the general and personal responsibilities
and accountabilities resident behind its distorted and mendacious screens of brick
and stone constituting a correlated part, let us pause before this object,, this subject,
this it; let us pause, and wonder. I say, it, because it is neuter. The masculine implies,
in mental terms, that which is virile, forceful, direct, clear and straightforward, that
which grasps and retains in thought; the feminine: intuitive sympathy, tact, suavity
and grace the qualities that soothe, elevate, ennoble and refine. But this it! This
droll and fantastical parody upon logic; this finical mass of difficulties; this web of
contradictions; this blatant fallacy; this repellent and indurated mess; this canker on
the tongue of natural speech [Fig. 2]

Why does not the Lake engulf it? Why does not the fire from Heaven consume it?
Is there no sane tribunal on earth? It must be that the Lake is too busy, and the
Lord of Heaven is too busy; and that the people below are too busy too busy to
think, too patient to care, too nonchalant to trouble, too sordid to see, and too
ignorant to smile. That must be why, in this instance, as in many another, the people
are successfully flouted and damned, and not the building. When the great big Amer-
ican public runs its great big head into a great big noose, and the noose begins to
tighten

Please don't talk politics, Mr. Professor, I am not posted. Tell me, rather, some-
thing about the architecture of the structure, its exterior treatment, its style. I don't
see what all this going in and out has to do with aesthetics.

I have already told you what its style is, and the exterior is merely a half-hearted,
half-witted reflex of a vicious plan. It is but a local symptom of the constitutional
affection.

And what is the affection, if I may ask? I don't seem to grasp your vocabulary.
I don't know what you are driving at; I don't follow your reasoning if there be
any reasoning; I am quite at sea.

Yes, I remember. But don't let these little waves disturb you, for we are far as yet
from the broad swell of the open sea. Disease is a departure, more or less great, from
the normal health ; and the disease, in this case, is implied in the name I have given
to the style. Moreover, I did not start to talk politics to you, but sociology, which is
quite another matter. Having received the conventional college and fine-art edu-
cation of your day, it is a matter of course that you were not taught to observe what
was going on in the great world in which your school was engulfed and sealed up

23. A Terminal Station

tight, and In which school in consequence your own mind In turn was carefully and
hermetically closed by your so-called teachers, after they had put into it whatever
product of the past they thought it should contain. And thus, like any other sample
of canned goods, you remain quietly on the shelf where you were put. Naturally you
did not know, nor do you now know, what a man of unfettered observation and fair
average intelligence might soon have learned to know and fully grasp, namely: that
every building you see is the image of a man whom you do not see. That the man is
the reality, the building its offspring. That the bricks, stones, steel and what-not came
into place in response to an impulse ; and the cause at work behind that impulse was
mental, not physical: That the impulse came from a man. Now if the mind of that
man has departed from the normal and is more or less perverted, more or less degen-
erate, so will the building, which is its image, be more or less pervert or degenerate.

I have told you that we must of necessity seek sanity by observing and noting the
symptoms of insanity; that we must needs study disease, to discern the functions of
health because examples of the normal, healthful working of the corporate mind
in the corporeal body of architecture are specifically so rare, in our so-called art,
degeneracy of function and aspect so widespread, that we must, in self-preservation,
searchingly look through the affected building to the affected mind, its parent; and,
through the affected mind, to the affected social fabric of which it is a minute fibre.

In other words, if we would know why certain things are as they are in our dis-
heartening architecture, we must look to the people; for our buildings, as a whole,
are but a huge screen behind which are our people as a whole even though specifi-
cally the buildings are individual images of those to whom, as a class, the public
has delegated and entrusted its power to build.

Therefore, by this light, the critical study of architecture becomes not merely the
direct study of an art for that is but a minor phase of a great phenomenon
but, in extenso, a study of the social conditions producing it; the study of a newly-
shaping type of civilization. By this light the study of architecture becomes naturally
and logically a branch of social science; and we must bend our facilities to this bow
if we would reach the mark.

Every building tells its story, tells it plainly. With what startling clearness it speaks
to the attentive ear, how palpable its visage to the open eye, it may take you some
little time to perceive. But it is all there, waiting for you; just as every great truth
has waited through the centuries for the man with eyes to see.

But I can never learn to do this. I feel that it requires the eye of a poet.

Never fear. We are all poets. You do not see things now; but a little later on
things will begin to see you and beckon to you; and then you will marvel greatly
but you will understand. So, when I tell you that this wretchedly tormented struc-
ture, this alleged railway station, is in the public-be-damned style, is degenerate and
corrupt, I repeat to you only what the building says to me.

Yes, I understand.

Do you!

Well, perhaps not fully but an inkling.

Bravo! If you possess even so much as an inkling you are richer than some emi-
nent architects I know. And so if perforce we must study disease let us study it
systematically. I cannot indicate to you at once the precise nature of that constitu-

24. Kindergarten Chats

tional social disturbance of which our architecture is symptomatic; but little by little
I will reveal to you the hidden causes and make clear and palpable to you the as-
pects and the nature of the malady.

Don't make it too sudden.

I couldn't if I would. It's an entirely new subject. The exposition will take time.

IV. The Garden

Your suggestion that a building is a screen behind which a man is hiding is de-
cidedly interesting and novel. It is really startling to reflect that every building one
sees implies a definite personal responsibility and accountability on the part of some-
one not seen, probably the architect although you have not said so. It puts archi-
tectural criticism in a decidedly new light; and I am anxious to see what you are
going to do with it. I can feel, in a general way, that you intend to dissolve my old
habits of thought; but just how, is not at all clear; in fact, it looks like an uphill
undertaking. You will probably knock away all my props ; but what in the world are
you going to give me in the place of them? I feel uncomfortably interested, so far,
and that is about all I can say. Still, in this theory of responsibility and accounta-
bility I feel a sense of personal insecurity you might get after my future work,,
some day, and then, where would I be? I wish you would follow it up right away;
so I can get my bearings as quickly as possible. Won't you?

Not now. Besides, personal responsibility and accountability is not a theory, but
a latent fact. You are not prepared or fitted, by prior training, to follow, at once, so
deep, abstruse and devious an investigation. I say deep and abstruse, not because
I believe it, especially; rather the contrary I think it all plain as a pikestaff. But
it is somewhat the fashion, in modern thought, to make simple things complicated,
to artificialize natural things, and to envelop all in a web of words and recherche
reasons; to assume, too much, that man lives in a world apart, and that the little
thing he calls his brain is independent of the universe; and to assume that the thing
he calls liberty is a special sort of license-tag that enables him to go without a muzzle.
Therefore, for a while, we may use the jargon of the day in the manner of the day,
until such time as we may come to a fuller, simpler and more direct understanding
of what simple words and simple things truly signify.

The "good gray poet" 1 says : "Nature neither hastens nor delays." So let us neither
hasten nor delay, but go forward little by little, step by step. I shall not seek to in-
struct you or reconstruct you. I shall seek, only, to persuade the faculties which
nature gave you at birth, and which, now, are partly shriveled, to revivify, to send
out new roots, to grow, to expand, and to bring forth as nature intended.

You are to be, for me, the neglected but fallow field, under the broad sky of

1. A well-worn copy of Whitman was in Sullivan's library.

25. The Garden

humanity: to be plowed., to turn under the weeds and bring up the subsoil; and then,
harrowed for a while, to give it tilth. I will plant therein the seeds of many thoughts;
but they must germinate In the fertile darkness of your own soul, under the beneficent
influence of the compelling sun that shines for all, and sends the rain upon the just
as upon the unjust. But I will also be the good gardener. And, when these tiny seeds
put forth into the light their tender shoots and leaves, each after its kind, I will care
for them, and water them with the water of life, drawn from nature's well-spring.

Thus shall you grow, and put forth branch and bud. The fragrance of your bloom-
ing shall be my reward, the fruit thereof shall be yours.

Is it not Canon Hole 2 who says: "He who would have beautiful roses in his gar-
den, must have beautiful roses in his heart: he must love them well and always"? So,
the flowers of your field, in so far as I am gardener, shall come from my heart where
they reside in much good will; and my eye and hand shall attend merely to the cul-
tivating, the weeding, the fungous blight, the noxious insect of the air, and the
harmful worm below.

And so shall your garden grow; from the rich soil of the humanities it will rise
up and unfold in beauty in the pure air of the spirit.

So shall your thoughts take up the sap of strong and generous impulse, and grow
and branch, and run and climb and spread, blooming and fruiting, each after its
kind, each flowing toward the fulfillment of its normal and complete desire. Some
will so grow as to hug the earth in modest beauty; others will rise, through sunshine
and storm, through drought and winter's snows year after year, to tower in the sky;
and the birds of the air will nest therein and bring forth their young.

Such is the garden of the heart: so oft neglected and despised when fallow.

Verily, there needs a gardener, and many gardens.

And such is youth receptive as a soil of virgin mold : The ever-renewed humus
of untold ages of the past: the wondrous, mysterious and prophetic past filled with
glimpses of smiling sunshine and storms of bitter tears. Into its depths I will look
with you, my friend, as soon as you shall have truly grasped, and held, and owned,
one flitting, vital moment of the present.

So let us go our way, slowly and surely, step after leisurely step.

No strenuous folly shall be ours; no kill- joy haste; no fretful, peevish grasping
after life, that brings the bitter chaff of moral death.

The French have a saying: "Time will not consecrate that in which she has been
ignored." Bear this admonition ever in mind for it is deeply true.

And so, while I say we will neither hasten nor delay, let us not delay. All of which
is summed up in the proverbs :

Haste makes waste.
Delays are dangerous.
He who hesitates is lost.
Be bold yet prudent.

2. Samuel Reynolds Hole (Dean of Rochester Cathedral), author of A Book about Roses, How to Grow and
Show Them: first published 1869, it went into many editions. Sullivan was an enthusiastic rose-grower, and had
nearly a hundred varieties at his place in Ocean Springs, Mississippi.

26. Kindergarten Chats

V. An

I wonder If you know,, Professor, what this particular building Is.

You do well to say particular for it is made of particles. Substantives and ad-
jectives are lacking verbs,, especially, are lacking. It is all thes, ands, ifs, buts: it
is all connectives, that connect nothing; quaiificatives, that qualify nothing; prepo-
sitions, that prepose nothing; conjunctives, that conjoin nothing; exclamations, that
exclaim nothing. It is all inflection, where there is nothing inflected; conjugation
where there is not a verb; declension, without the noun. Then there are thrown in,
for makeweights, bits of grammar, pronunciation, rhetoric, prosody, orthoepy, syl-
labication, etymology, punctuation, etc., but no syntax surely no syntax. It is
"perfectly fine"; "awfully lovely"; it's "just grand" and all about what? Nothing!
It's the young miss in architecture; in short, it is the Imperial Hotel. [Fig. 3]

What an idea! The Imperial Hotel is in New York, and we are in Chicago.

And so we are! How curious! Then it must be the Imperial's long-lost child.

No. I happen to know it's a department store, and not at all a hotel never was
a hotel. So you are on the wrong track.

Not at all. I say it's a hotel. You may think it a department store, if you will.

But I know positively that it is a department store, and so that ends the discussion.

On the contrary, it begins one.

But look at the lower windows. You see the merchandise displayed, do you not?

I look at the building and I see other merchandise displayed, which might, per-
haps, hearken back to an architectural department store. But that, for the moment,
is neither here nor there. I tell you it's a hotel or even an hotel, if you prefer.

You speak in riddles, and in plain contradiction of the facts.

My young friend, you do not speak by the card. Look at the building with your
own eyes. Surely, if it were a department store, all masonry would be reduced to a
minimum, and there would be an expanse of glass for light and display. If yon doubt
it, there are several department store buildings hereabout that will serve to illustrate
my meaning. So, you see, you are proven in error by the testimony of the structure
itself. Therefore, if the building be anything nameable, it is, as I have said, a hotel.

Oh, no! I see where you are misled. It is a department store, surely enough, but
there are offices above.

No, my young friend, there are not offices above, that is an illusion; you are mis-
informed. The structure is a hotel. It is not even a department store with offices,
combined, as you would have me believe. It is a hotel; the lower two stories of which
have, probably, been rented to some merchant.

What nonsense! I tell you, emphatically, that there are offices in the building. I
have been in some of them and so I know. Why do you persist in denying a self-
evident proposition?

On the contrary, I am maintaining a self-evident proposition. Were it an office
building, it would suggest that function. There would be that regular and equable
spacing of windows, that general suggestion of business and business housing, which
would be unmistakable. There are a number of well-arranged office structures here-
about, and not one of them has this somnolent, irresolute disposition of its masses.

27. An Hotel

This, manifestly. Is a building to sleep in, to rest in, perhaps to eat in. It suggests
the drowsy, not the busy, god.

Well

Well?

I begin to see a light. Yes, I begin to see a light not altogether a pleasant light,
either.

My young friend, a sudden light hurts the unaccustomed eyes. But as the light
grows stronger, and the eye, gradually, clearer and steadier, you will see eventually
what I see : A vanishing illusion called a building, and a dawning reality the posi-
tive substance a smirking imposition.

If I have taken the trouble to discuss this structure with you, it is not, be assured,
for its own account, for that is too trivial, but because it stands, for our purpose,
as the type of a large class of structures, fortunately, for us, more rampant in the
East than in the West, which represent what I might denominate the current jargon
of architecture: the incapacity of the insufficiently educated, the unleavened, the
half-baked, to express in simple well-chosen language the casual, current experiences
of life.

This particular building is, to be sure, not characteristic of the West. It lacks,
utterly, western frankness, directness crudity if you will. It is merely a weak-rooted
cutting from the eastern hot house; and it languishes in the open air. An expert
gardener would not have done so foolish a thing.

To be sure, in mere money outlay, it cost dollars enough, and for that very reason,
if for no other, its finality seems cheap- John in motif. For of what use is money
alone without a chastened guiding spirit? It merely serves, uncontrolled, to make
its owner ridiculous and pitiful.

To say, then, that this building is canting and hypocritical, is to couch our defini-
tion in mildest terms.

Against the malice of such structures I would forfend your untrained, untried
judgment, your too-confiding, cocksure nature. For such structures are treacherous
of spirit. They are the Judases : they betray their Lord for pieces of silver.

VI. An Oasis

Let us pause, my son, at this oasis in our desert. Let us rest awhile beneath its
cool and satisfying calm, and drink a little at this wayside spring.

For, when we fret amid the barren wastes of meanness and of littleness of soul,
wherefrom arise strident, harsh and paltry sounds, a rich, sombre chord of manliness,
as this is, comes the more awelcome since we have, as yet, afar to go, 'cross many
weary stretches.

You mean, I suppose, that here is a good piece of architecture for me to look at
and I quite agree with you.

28. Kindergarten Chats

No; I mean, here is a man for you to look at. A man that walks on two legs in-
stead of four, has active muscles, heart, lungs and other viscera; a man that lives
and breathes, that has red blood; a real man, a manly man; a virile force broad,
vigorous and with a whelm of energy an entire male. [Fig. 4]

I mean that stone and mortar, here, spring into life, and are no more material
and sordid things, but, as it were, become the very diapason of a mind rich-stored
with harmony.

I mean that

I see; you mean that it's simple, dignified and massive.

I mean, just now, that you are assive, priggified and a simpleton.

But I see defects in it

And I see your eye has a mote in it. In Heaven's name, what defects are you
justified in seeing in so fine a work? Do you put yourself in the scales with a moun-
tain? Will you estop the wind? Would you hold back a tree from growing?

But, truly, has it not defects?

Forsooth it has. And so has the bark of an ancient tree; and so has the bark of
an ancient dog, if you will: but the faithfulness is there, the breath of life is there,
an elemental urge is there, a benign friendliness is there. Would you peck at the
features of the moon, and ignore her gracious light that makes a path for you in
the forest? Go to, my young friend, go to!

Then I was right in calling it massive, dignified and simple?

You used three big words, and, in so doing, made three empty sounds.

Ah, I see, you are provoked because I interrupted you while you were speaking
to me.

Evidently I was not speaking to you.

To whom then?

I thought aloud. You happened to be present.

Why do you say that?

Because you heard nothing.

Ah, now I begin

You are a wise young man, in your day and generation, and, in token of your
progress, we will resume amiable relations.

But tell me truly, why do you give such high praise to this building when you
have so rebuked others? I must confess that, in my ignorance, viciousness, baseness,
and all that, as you would probably say, I don't see anything so wonderful about
it certainly nothing calling for hysteria. On the other hand, I take it for granted
that you know whereof you speak. But why do you show this partiality? It seems to
me a work that almost anyone with a good head and reasonable taste could have
produced where is the wonder?

The wonder is that it exists in fact, and not in talk. We hear much of greatness,
we see little of it. It is for this little, this little-much that I give thanks. I have meted
justice to the other buildings, in their iniquity; I would give justice to this one, in
its justice. Where I find inhumanities, I scourge where I find humanity, I bless.
Where I find vanity, I prick, and where I find corruption, I will use the knife. As
you say, the structure is massive, dignified and simple. But it is much more, unless

29. An Oasis

you make each word as deep as a well, and as full. It is so much more that I have
called It an oasis.

Four-square and brown, it stands, in physical fact, a monument to trade, to the
organized commercial spirit, to the power and progress of the age, to the strength
and resource of individuality and force of character; spiritually, it stands as the
index of a mind, large enough, courageous enough to cope with these things, master
them, absorb them and give them forth again, impressed with the stamp of large
and forceful personality; artistically, it stands as the oration of one who knows well
how to choose his words, who has somewhat to say and says it and says it as the
outpouring of a copious, direct, large and simple mind.

Therefore have I called it, in a world of barren pettiness, a male; for it sings
the song of procreant power, as the others have squealed of miscegenation. So, here,
with you beside me, "singing in the wilderness," a lonely song, I would place a
modest wreath upon the monument of him who stood alone, an august figure in his
art, and now, across the bridge invisible made vital by these stones, breathes forth
a strain of noble poesy.

My dear sir, pardon me

It is well to feel that way now and then, for it helps to bring the mind again to
its center when it has suffered aberration. Buildings such as this, and there are not
many of them, stand as landmarks, as promontories, to the navigator. They show
when and where architecture has taken on its outburst of form as a grand passion
amid a host of stage-struck-wobbling mockeries. This is "good for the body and
good for the soul"; "it filters and fibres the blood." It refreshes and strengthens, be-
cause it is elemental, bespeaks the largeness and the bounty of nature, the manliness
of man.

But really, in seeking to do justice to buildings, have you not forgotten to do
justice to me? You began to speak of this building in a lofty strain way over my
head. And then, because I could not at once follow, you said unkind things. First
you assume that I know nothing of the architectural art, and then, of a sudden, you
assume that I know everything of it. Now is this not as palpable an injustice as it
is a palpable error?

It is not an injustice because I wish you well, and would do well by you and
because it serves as a means to an end. It is an error, certainly, in a sense, but not
of the kind you suppose. As a matter of fact, I should bear constantly in mind the
slipshod education you have received, the superficiality of it, and how woefully it
handicaps you; I should bear in mind that you know, not merely nothing of the
architectural art, but, worse than that, that your knowledge is an obnoxious minus
quantity; and I should ever bear in mind, also, that this is not your fault, so much
as it is your misfortune.

But can you not teach me the real Art?

I don't know. I will try. Realities are images very difficult to awaken in a mind
nurtured in an atmosphere of unreality and falsehood. Personally, I would rather,
any day, try to teach architecture to a clod-hopper than to the over-cultivated man.
One may have a heart, the other may not. With the one, I can be patient; it is
difficult to be patient with the other his opportunities have been so much the

30. Kindergarten Chats

greater; his vanity is what eats Ms heart out. But you are young; and while there
is youth there is still hope, for there is still heart. So we shall see what we shall see.
Be of good cheer.

VII. The Key

So far, we have dealt, chiefly., with the physiognomy of each building: its external
aspect considered as a revelation of character and taken as a key in our hands
wherewith first to unlock a somewhat rusty door, called architect, and thereafter
to note what lies in the open world beyond him. In other words, to observe, at our
convenience, in how far, if we choose to put it that way, the architect represents
or misrepresents society at large; what his plain duty is, if any; what society has
an equitable right to demand and expect of him, if anything; what is the nature
of that particular trust, if there be such a trust, which society places in his hand
the talent of old and to what extent he takes on definition as faithful or false
to that trust.

In a democracy, and by the light of democratic institutions,, such an inquiry is
bound, if logically conducted, to terminate in one of two conclusions: the one, vital
and optimistic, the other cynical.

The materials for such an investigation are completely at hand. The character
of our architecture has defined itself unmistakably, and the time is ripe to reckon
with it. You have come into your architectural career at a most critical period, a
period in which the forces that make for growth or decay are in strenuous but deli-
cate balance. Whichever way our architecture goes, so will our country go; or, if
you prefer, whichever way our country goes, so will go our architecture; it is the
same proposition stated in different ways. We are at that dramatic moment in our
national life wherein we tremble evenly between decay and evolution, and our
architecture, with strange fidelity, reflects this equipoise. That the forces of decad-
ence predominate in quantity there can be no doubt; that the recreative forces now
balance them by virtue of quality, and may eventually overpower them, is a matter
of conjecture. That the bulk of our architecture is rotten to the core, is a statement
which does not admit of one solitary doubt. That there is in our national life, in
the genius of our people, a fruitful germ, and that there are a handful who per-
ceive this, is likewise beyond question. All this and more, I shall strive to make
clear to you as we go on.

Building materials do not come into their places, in a structure, of their own
initiative, or by accident. The tree does not quit the forest of its own accord, nor
does the stone split itself from the mother-ledge, and leave the place of its quarry
to go to number so and so, such a street. At the moment the tree in its forest starts
and quivers at the first stroke of the axe, at the moment the first blow is struck on
the rock that has slumbered through the ages, at that moment the human element

31. The Key

makes its entrance into that absorbing drama we call architecture, and the denoue-
ment is ever as various, as strange, as involved, as is human character.

I might go on for hours, tracing step by step, breath by breath, span by span, the
simple elements of earth touched by many hands, and by the power of steam, slowly
converging and shaping In orderly sequence, in time and place, toward so and so
street there to make a beginning and an ending of a beautiful or an untoward
building. And you might say: How curious, how dramatic, how pictorial, how full
of human interest: And you would end in an entertaining but inadequate view.
For such a statement would be akin to that of the novelist, the romancer, the play-
wright dealing with picturesque externals, parading surface causes, ignoring
hidden ones. For the true cause of a building is not external, but internal. It lies,
proximately, in the mind of one man, and that man the architect. If that mind is
normal, the building will be normal; if the mind is awry, the building will be awry.
Indeed, whatever the mind is, the building will be its image, regardless of materials,
regardless of labor, regardless of cost.

But my aim is not that of romancer, or rosewater critic. I wish to show you reali-
ties in all their ugliness, and then to show you other realities, in all their beauty.
Or, if you prefer, first I would dissolve for you this wretched illusion called Ameri-
can architecture, and then cause to awaken in your mind the reality of a beautiful,
a sane, a logical, a human, living art of your day; an art of and for democracy, an
art of and for the American people of your own time.

This may not prove an easy task; but the charm of your youth, the brightness of
a possible f uttire, will stimulate me throughout its undertaking.

So, while I must go slowly, carefully, methodically, you must be all eyes and ears,
quick to observe, absorb and retain.

Try never to forget, from now on, that everything, each thing, you see and hear,
has a double meaning: first, its objective or outward meaning or aspect; second, its
subjective or inner meaning and significance. Remember the word, significance, it
stands for that which we seek.

Nature, in its visible, objective forms, impinges on the eyes its aspects of beauty of
form and color: Here are the elements of earth and air shaped by the delicate hand
of time; but the subtle charm of these externals would be incomplete did they not
further signify, and suggest, an internal, a subjective, a creative impulse of origin
divine.

So the materials of a building are but the elements of earth removed from the
matrix of nature, and reorganized and reshaped by force ; by force mechanical, mus-
cular, mental, emotional, moral and spiritual. If these elements are to be robbed of
divinity, let them at least become truly human.

All the varied elements of human nature and its surroundings concur in a special
fashion in the individual, and form what we call character. Character is that in
the technical language of mechanics which we would style the resultant of all the
forces at work in an individual man, and it predetermines the amount and the direc-
tion of his energy.

This resultant is by no means a straight line, but rather it varies with the indi-
vidual, from the extremes of crookedness and sinuosity toward the mean of a rela-
tively simple curve.

32. Kindergarten Chats

The simpler the sweep of this Imaginary curve, the greater the simplicity and
strength of character the more nearly do they parallel the elemental forces and
movements of nature.

Still, however wandering may be its course, this resultant eventually., like a great
river, debouches at some definite spot and there it delivers its output.

To explore a river and know it thoroughly, we may begin at the thousands of
widely separated well-springs which flow away in rivulets that conjoin to make its
branches., and follow these as they conjoin to make its trunk, and this trunk,, on, to
its delta; or, we may begin at the delta or estuary, and follow up the trunk, the
branches, the branchlets, until we shall have sought out the minutest headwaters.

Character is a large word, full of significance; no metaphoric river can more than
hint at its meaning. Character is not confined to the individual, it defines, also, the
municipality, the state, the nation; and, inversely, it trends toward the minutest
qualities and quantities that we can ponder.

When we would search out its ever-subdividing, ramifying branches, we become
lost at last in a maze of attenuated complexities. When we follow the branches toward
the main stream, we float agreeably toward simplification.

And so shall our course lie: up-stream, against the current, down-stream with it
We will broadly trace physical appearances to their moral causes, and moral or social
impulses to their manifestations in brick and stone.

We will seek and find the architect through the meaning of his executed work, not
through his words, gestures, or suavities.

Likewise we shall search out an architecture based upon a normal, a real archi-
tect even if he be a figure of speech.

In so doing, we shall confine ourselves to the simple, the natural, the reasonable,
the very practical and human.

You shall see and judge for yourself, which comes the nearer to your heart and
mind, the decadent lie that is now abroad a rampant anarchy and social evil
or the wholesome truth toward the threshold of whose abode I will guide you the
threshold of that hidden, modest temple that we call the heart, that heart whose
pulse is human but whose impulse is divine.

!!!. Values

How will you contrive to make your subjective my objective? How will you shape
up something tangible for me? How will I get a footing in the fog?

In many ways. For the present let us take a single illustration that of values.

Everbody knows, or thinks he does, what value means. Crudely it is expressed in
Dollars and Cents: we say, such a thing is worth so many Dollars; and there,
usually, the matter rests. Also, we regard other things as of value, and these values we
recognize in medals, diplomas^ eulogiurns or monuments. To an heroic fireman we

33. Values

give a medal, and thus we express the value, to the community, of his act of devo-
tion. To the memory of a great poet we set up a monument; to this man, we give
fame; to that one, reverence; to the other, love. And so It goes, through the range of
values and compensations. Theoretically it Is fine. In practice it Is not always so fine,,
for some men have been crucified, others burned at the stake, for wishing well to
their fellows.

Still, taking it all in all, there is a general sense in the community that there are
certain values which money cannot and does not measure; certain services rendered,
of which money Is not the impelling cause, or the mechanism of exchange, or the
standard of estimate. And it is tacitly felt and recognized that such services are of
great and positive value to the community: that they add to Its wealth, if wealth be
taken in its broad, comprehensive sense.

In its scantest sense, the value of a great painting might be computed on the cost
of the canvas, the paint, and a reasonable every-day allowance for the manual labor
of applying the paints to the canvas. Yet everybody knows that this Is not so. Every-
body knows and feels that the great painter has imparted to the paints a value that
they did not before possess. That he has transferred to them something of himself,
and something of the world. That he has made subjective what was before objective.

This subjectivity is his art. By virtue of It he has sublimated the material.

This added value we call genius, talent, skill, as the case may be.

Eventually this added subjective value comes under the measure of the standard of
all current values money but, too often, only when the author of it, the giver of
it, the would-be benefactor of his race, has passed under the scrutiny of that final
measurer and equalizer of all mankind the sod.

So with the poet and his poems made of printers' ink and paper.

So the musician and his score.

So with the sculptor and his marble block.

So with the soul-inspiring orator, who breathes in the common, physical air and
gives it forth, a new, an awakening message to Man.

And so all real values are subjective: all objective values are unreal; they dissolve,
under analysis, Into subjective value after subjective value, and the residuum, if ever
we reach it, is not what man made but what nature gave: and what nature gives Is
never objective it resolves itself step by step, remove after remove, into the infinite
creative mind.

Now, shall a building be held to differ from these other things, rny list of which Is
meagre, to be sure? Shall this manifest rule hold for other things, and not hold for
buildings? By virtue of what wrinkle in the popular mind are buildings to be held
exempt? To say the least, Is it not strange? There certainly is no doubt concerning
the physical fact of such exemption: witness the buildings, witness the people.

Any good builder can tell you the value of a building in Dollars and Cents. He
will figure up the cost of materials and the cost of labor, and the salary and inci-
dental account and give you the total. He has done his duty, you accept his state-
ment and take it for granted that the matter is closed: and why not? you have it
in Dollars !

Now comes the critic and says : "Here, let me see those Dollar marks and let me
see the building: let me take your figures, and confront the building with them. Yes,

34. Kindergarten Chats

very good: this is the value of material of every kind, and labor of every kind, but
where is the architect? I see no entry, except his fee. I put your cost in one scale of
my balance, and the building in the other, but see the beam is not level some-
thing is lacking either in your accounting or in the building. Who is straddling the
scales who is pressing with his foot? It is a man. I find no man in your account,
I find only a name; but I feel the man, I know he is there. Your accounts do not
balance the building. Your values must be revalued your method is crude; it is
unwisely selfish. You see no further than the end of your nose. If your nose were
longer, you would see that much further away from yourself. Have you paid your
architect for destroying? Has he added, and you do not know it? Do you balance
architecture with a sneer, on your accounting? What is your own value? How much
are you worth a pound avoirdupois? Oh, you have a value, have you? The question is
impertinent, is it? What is your value outside of your bank account? Who values
you, and why? What are you good for, when you are sifted down, and your externals
removed? What is your worth? What have you ever done? What can you do? Who
are you? What are you? Why are you on earth? Do you think if you were an archi-
tect you would be more, or less, valuable than you are? If so, why? What are you?
What is an architect? What is a building? What is a Dollar? Answer me these things
and let me weigh your answer in the scale I hold in my hand a scale in which I
ask only that you balance one little milligram of humanity."

Are these questions fair, or are they not? Are they in order, or are they not? Are
they practical, or are they not? Are they economical, or are they not? Are they social,
or are they not? Are they democratic, or are they not?

You may think about these things at your leisure. The buildings are there, for good
or for ill they cannot run away; they cannot conveniently avoid investigation.
And, if the building is there, the architect is there with it; he cannot escape either.
Little by little we will ferret him out. There is no hurry.

Very good. But tell me: When you say; The value of a building, do you really lay
more stress on the subjective value than on the Dollar value?

On both. For human nature determines that subjective value, sooner or later,
becomes money value; and the lack of it, sooner or later, money loss. The subjective
value is far the higher, by far the more permanent; but money value is inseparable
from the affairs of life; to ignore it would be moonshine.

IX. A Roman Temple (i)

Seldom, rny son, is a building gifted with so romantic, so strange a history as is
this one before which we now stand. On this account I have led you here. For, as I
shall presently discover to you, a gem unsuspected has fallen among us, from
the overflowing treasury of our noble art, and rests, all unvalued, here, among the
heedless throng, in the very heart of this great Chicago, so renowned as the center of

35. A Roman Temple ( i )

a vast contiguous territory. Strangely as this statement may jar upon your super-
sensibilities you who have been cradled in the culture of older and wiser parts of
our land, and have brought with you here the very nectar of the sweet flower of
learning it is yet nevertheless so true an utterance that but a little time will fully
prove its verity.

It seems that not so long ago, in fact I might say recently, a group of ancient
Romans by some miracle of cadaverous introspection, became resurrect and incar-
nate as of yore, in the very proper flesh itself.

Following the trend of modern emigration they, in due time, reached our country's
shore, and, westward wending, over mountains, through deep valleys, crossing many
streams and many fertile prairies, made their way to Northern Illinois, where, settling
in the country immediately adjacent to Chicago's western limb and quite close to
the propinquity thereof, they made, of this wanderer's abode, their new, their chosen
home.

To its citizens, in due time, and in consonance with the traditions of their own
sunny land, the cradle of melody, they unwound and unraveled the mysteries of
that organic art, which is theirs by right of birth and by just inheritance.

Speedily they amassed wealth thereby; and soon waxing richer and richer, they
determined, in thankfulness of heart, and in grateful recognition of the providence
of their guardian deity Simia by name who had so generously prospered them.
to give, each, of his hoarded means a part, wherewith, as a people, to erect a temple
to his glory, his honor and his power.

Indeed, in the very heart of this great modern city, amid its strenuous sights and
sounds and odors, they resolved to rear a temple to their pagan god : a fane in whose
silentious hall this solemn austere deity might brood and rule in fateful isolation, and
in the splendor of a f atidic serenity.

Among their number was, it seems, a master-builder of lofty mind and high
resolve; a man full many a cubit high in mental stature: and in his hands they placed
the making of the god's great home, charging him with weighty words and mystic
ceremonies.

Among them, too, were master-craftsmen, hewers of stone and workers of bronze,
and many cunning artisans of divers sorts.

So gathered they together, filled with a certain high resolve.

And so the temple was created by its own people; blood of their blood, flesh of
their flesh, bone of their bone, and gold of their gold; the work of their sturdy
muscles and of their militant spirits, according truly with immutable laws.

So stands it now.

How fortunate, how godsped are we, to be here on this their ceremonial day, and
at the very solemn hour that draws their rite unto its close. We may not enter. Surely
we may not profane. For such holy precinct shall be doubly sacred to us in our
reverence for this unison of old and new. So let us here abide awhile, until such
time their ceremony having reached its ordained ending, and its just and solemn
closure that they come forth, clad in toga, sandals, and their bound-up brows
radiant as of yore.

It is no common boon to see a Roman temple and its Roman throng consent to
make a western holiday.

36. Kindergarten Chats

So be not over-anxious,, but await, with patient eye, and heart attuned responsive
to this harmony of twenty centuries agone

What in the world you are talking about I don't know. 1 have let you go on, think-
ing you were maudlin; or that, perhaps, it was some more subjectivity. But come. Let
me lead you away. You are ill. Your eye wanders. This is no Roman temple built
by a motley crowd of organ-grinders spook- creatures of your fertile brain it's
a bank: just a plain, ordinary, every-day American bank, full of cold hard cash and
other cold things. I know all about it, I read all about it in the papers. I saw it built
and I know the president. And, as to the nectar of some flower or other that you say
I brought here, that's only a little less Greek to me than the bank is Roman. [Fig. 5]

Stay! Young man! If I dream, these money-people dream! How did they get into
the temple? Was their architect a dreamer too? Have I the trance, or has he the
trance, or have they it? Have we a trance, or have they all and we all lost our bear-
ings? Who is sane, and who is walking on the earth, they or I, you or I, they or you?
Methinks the world is topsy-turvy when such eerie things occur. Who is who? And
what is what? Where are the axes of the earth? Which way does it turn? Where
hides the path we seek? Where lurks elusively the tiny spark of sanity?

But the president of the bank is a smart man. He wouldn't have had a bank like
this if it hadn't been the right thing to have. A good business man doesn't do such
things; it wouldn't be plain, hard common sense if he did. You are away off this
time.

How did the hard common-sense man come to think of a Roman temple? How did
common sense manage to get in its deadly work?

Why, easy enough. His architect made a picture of what he thought was a Roman
temple, and showed it to the banker, telling him, on the side, that Roman temples
were rather the go now for banks, and the banker bit. That's plain enough, isn't it?

Yes, but it's queer; singularly queer; very curiously abstruse. Still, it's lucid, and
clear as it is a pert.

It is lucid? Well, if you say it's lucid, after your headache, I'm going home. Per-
haps Fm a bit off.

Yes, it is lucid now; for the banker in selecting, became, in a measure, the archi-
tect. Wise people hold that to select an architect wisely is the next thing to building
wisely. To select unwisely, therefore, is to share in the ultimate folly, as we see, and
goes to show what folly is still shyly hiding here and there.

Well, that may be so, but what are you going to do about it?

I am going to insist that the banker wear a toga, sandals, and conduct his business
in the venerated Latin tongue oral and written.

Then you don't like Roman temples?

With the ancient Romans I should say they were rather apropos. But I do not
relish Roman-temple banks; and the common-sense-Roman- temple bank particularly
disagrees with me.

Well, I suppose they can make just as much money in any old kind of a bank;
although I guess his royal highness thinks this is real style, eh?

My young friend! Truly I deprecate your freedom of speech; yet your activity of
thought has a certain spice, of which, I trust, time may temper the pungency.

37. A Roman Temple ( i )

We!!, It is to laugh, anyway!

Yes, I fear It is. But what a woeful come-down from my dream. What a singular
debacle of a vision, old in story, rich in wonder, of a people proud in conquest, wise
in laws what a deep descent to this frenetic pigeon-house you call a bank.

Yes, but you didn't say so in the beginning.

I was dreaming and you woke me.

X. A Roman Temple (2)

Even after what you have said, I really don't see why, as a matter of common
privilege, a man shouldn't make an imitation Roman temple if he wishes to do so.
Isn't it, after all is said and done, a question of temperamental selection, of scholar-
ship, of individual taste?

I don't either, if he will make it in his own back yard. If it is for his own private
use, gratification or amusement, I see no objection. But, when he puts it on the peo-
ple's highway, and labels it modern American architecture, there are those who will
cry humbug, and, what is worse, will prove it. Furthermore, the true architectural
art, that art toward which I would lead you, rests, not upon scholarship^ but upon
human powers; and, therefore, it is to be tested, not by the fruits of scholarship, but
by the touch-stone of humanity. Taste is one of the weaker words in our language.
It means a little less than something, a little more than nothing; certainly it conveys
no suggestion of potency. It savors of accomplishment, in the fashionable sense, not
of power to accomplish in the creative sense. It expresses a familiarity with what is
au courant among persons of so-called culture, of so-called good form. It is essen-
tially a second-hand word, and can have no place in the working vocabulary of those
who demand thought and action at first hand. To say that a thing is tasty or tasteful
is, practically, to say nothing at all. But, the word humbug is only a little less strong
than the word fraud ; and to say of the imitation Roman temple that it is a specious
imposition is to put the charge mildly. We make a great to-do when a bank officer
diverts some of its funds to his own use we call that misappropriation, defalcation,
abuse of confidence, betrayal of trust, and all sorts of harsh names, and we put him
in the penitentiary if he is not clever enough to keep out of it. But when a man
betrays a trust that the people at large have placed in his hands a specific trust
that is expressed in the word architect, we call his weakness taste, scholarship, tem-
peramental selection, and all sorts of euphemistic names. In reality there is no valid
moral distinction to be made between the men. It is the capacity correctly to weigh
the values at stake that is at fault. What is everybody's business has become nobody's
business; and this incapacity, this indifference, it is the function of the critic to
rectify; otherwise architecture, as a fine art, goes to the bargain counter, and the
people become merely shoppers; and so, through bargain and sale, values must tend
ever downward, and the buyers ever grow more sordid, until, all settle at last into the

38. Kindergarten Chats

mire of democracy gone wrong, and the people learn, at last, to their cost and cha-
grin, what it means to have leaders who betray them. For such is the course of
democracy either downward or upward. The stability and the value of democracy
depend, when the last word is said, upon the fidelity of those to whom the people
delegate their powers.

Well, that begins to sound like business. I thought, at first, that your point of view
was personal, but I begin to understand that it is not; it is broader. So, I take it, you
hold that the modern imitation of a Roman temple is not a good thing under any
circumstances?

Certainly it is not ; especially in America. Scholarship has its uses, its most excellent
uses. But when scholarship becomes a fixed habit of mind, that very habit unques-
tionably enfeebles creative power. It is well that we should know what the Roman
temple was in fact, as nearly as we, through archaeological inquiry, can arrive at it.
But the deepest reach of our scholarship will reveal only this : that the Roman temple
was a part of Roman life not of American life; that it beat with the Roman pulse,
was in touch with Roman activities ; and that it waned with Roman glory it died
a Roman death. The Roman temple can no more exist in fact on Monroe Street,
Chicago, U. S. A., than can Roman civilization exist there. Such a structure must of
necessity be a simulacrum, a ghost.

Of course you and I know well enough that the reason why the bank building is
an imitation Roman temple is because it is easy and cheap to make that sort of thing
but the people at large do not know it. They do not know how easy it is for the
architect to turn to a book of plates, pick out what he wants, and pass it on to a
draughtsman who will chew this particular architectural cud for a stipend. They do
not know that when it is done, and is lauded, by its alleged architect, as in the Roman
style, that, in reality, it is in the hand-me-down style. When done it's cheap, and it is
as slovenly as it is cheap. Such things are false enough when they are done in the
spirit of highest, most careful, most industrious scholarship. But as for this bargain-
Friday performance, this commercial srnear, what is to be said otherwise than in
terms befitting so crumpled and soiled a by-product.

I begin to surmise that you don't quite like the imitation Roman temple. In fact,
you have almost said so, in a roundabout way.

Furthermore, if the pseudo-Roman temple were good for any one thing American,
it must, ipso facto, be good for anything and everything American, because American
means American, and expresses the genius of the people. But Roman does not mean
American, never did mean American, never can mean American, Roman was Roman;
American is, and is to be, American. The architect should know this without our
teaching, and I suspect that he does know it very well in his unmercenary moments.
The public would know it instinctively if they were not continually bamboozled and
wheedled by architects and thus bereft of their sense of fitness; and so could become
free to regard the archtect in any other light than his self-made one of peddler of
fashions.

Now where does the responsibility justly lie? Who is to be censured in this par-
ticular case? Is it to be the banker who pays for the building and feels no further
concern unless it be a pride in his expenditure and a pleasurable blush as he preens his
sense of public spirit? Or is it to be the public who delegate the power and the func-

39. A Roman Temple (2)

tion to build and let it go at that? Or is it to be the architect? Who is creating a false
impression, who is holding up a misguiding standard, who is demoralizing popular
education the banker, the public, or the architect?

Who is wound about with left-handed notions of what the architectural art is In
reality?

Is architecture a plaything, or is it a great force a revelation of human char-
acter and an inspiration? Is it a remnant, or is it a whole cloth from which we are
to make for us new garments? Is it human, now, or is it post-human? Has it a foun-
dation, or has it none? Is it a part of human utterance, is it a phase of universal
speech, or is it dumb? Is the art I advocate to be built upon the sands of books, upon
the shoals of taste and scholarship, or is it to be founded upon the rock of Character?

What I say to you is either witless or significant. To discern which it may be, we
must lock horns with our conditions we must either throw or be thrown. So, open
your eyes that you may see with the clarity of the spirit that which is of the spirit. To
half close your eyes is to belittle the creative power of man. Touch not with feeble
finger the exuberant pulse of democracy. And do not throw a noble art into the
sewer.

But let me tell you now that, to grasp masterfully, you must first feel the surge of
psychic power; to realize your responsibilities you must first truly know them.

To know your art you must broaden your sympathies, not constrict them; you must
nurture your mind, not forsake it.

Strive then, so that, when your time comes, you may not be a misfit in your day
and generation. 1

XI. A Department Store

This time, it is evident, my son, that we are looking at a department store. No one
can mistake it for a hotel, an office building, a railway station, or a bank and yet
it is not trigged out in the guise of a Roman temple. Its purpose is clearly set forth
in its 'general aspect and the form follows the function in a simple, straightforward
way. The structure is a logical, though somewhat bald, statement of its purpose, and
an unmistakable though not wholly gratifying index of the business conducted within
its walls. This is a great deal to say of any building at any time; it is high praise in
these days of architectural distraction. Its directness of statement is its chief virtue.
Its comparative freedom from verbiage causes it in a manner to approach eloquence
of form. Its architect evidently proceeded if he proceeded in any manner approach-
ing consciousness by a process of elimination. He left his favorite "architecture,"

1. A letter to the editor concerning this article was the first, and apparently the only, evidence of public
reaction printed in the periodical. This communication and Sullivan's reply are to be found in Appendix B.

40. Kindergarten Chats

for the time being, in Ms portfolios which Is a clever thing to do. He used the
eraser on his mind Instead of on his paper^ which Is another clever thing to do. He
looked a little before he leaped, which is cleverest of all Such things^ such acts, such
relatively sane mental processes are refreshing and uncommon. If they are accidental,
let us welcome the accident. I make my bow and my compliments.

It seems to me you are piling it on pretty thick. It's a nice plain simple building,
I admit ; but I don't like that ornament up there by the

No matter about that ornament up there by . We are a long way from discussing
ornament if ever we discuss it. Ornament, when creative, spontaneous, Is a per-
fume. It is, to change the figure, the smile of a sentiment, the last line in the sonnet.
But we are not now discussing sentiment, we are considering common sense.

But, granted that, I don't like the proportions of some of the upper stories, do
you?

No matter about the proportions of some of the upper stories. We are not dis-
cussing proportion. But I may say, In passing, proportion is a result not a cause. It
may be Imprisoned for a while in academic ratios, in rules of thumb; It does not
reside In them of Its free will. It has its becoming In much more delicate origins: it is
a thing, not made, but begotten. It Is a creature of the open. It Is shy; it fears the
bookish man. So, no more of proportion for the time. Let us stick to our text, which
is to be : Function and Form.

In its simplest applicable terms this dictum means merely a right start and a right
finish. The architect has here shown sufficient common sense to start right. If he has
not shown the higher common sense to realize that he was on the right track and of
remaining on it until the last word was said, why that is another story, and does not
immediately concern us.

But I do want to know all about it, right now. You say, in effect, he started right
in the main thing, but fizzled out in details and proportions minor matters, as
you call them. Now I don't think they are minor matters at all. I like good detail and
fine proportions; I demand them in a fagade; but you shut me up every time I try to
talk about them.

Steady, boy, steady. Details later on.

I can't bandy words with you; you have too many. But, tell me: How can a man
be right and wrong at the same time? I heard you say, once, that like begets like.
Now, how can a right start beget a wrong or partly wrong finish as in this case?
Can't I just as well argue that a false ending in detail necessarily implies a false
beginning in mass?

You can If you wish, but you will make a mess of it.

Then how does it come?

Very simply. Most men in our profession are small-minded : that is, they lack the
power of generalization, of abstraction. They lack the gift, the power to analyze that
which is fugitive, the living, or to synthesize their common sense with steadiness and
resolution. Indeed they intermittently forego their common sense in yielding to the
exigencies of "art" as you see. Now a small-minded man gets hold, occasionally, on
a partial truth, a fragmentary truth, so to speak; but, because he lacks active sym-
pathy with that partial truth, he lacks thereby the power to abstract from It the germ
of a broader, a general, truth, or to analyze out of it those hundred and one truths

41. A Department Store

which the simplest state of feeling contains. Now most men, and, specifically, most
architects, are of this class; a defective education lies hidden at the root of their fail-
ing power. Hence for them a comprehensive law does not exist; and hence such a
building as this one. It has many relatives of all shades of consanguinity.

Now, when I say, by implication, that the architect of this building Is small-
minded, I do not mean to speak unkindly because of the redeeming presence of so
much common sense. It would, perhaps, be less ungracious to say that he is not suffi-
ciently broad-minded, not as full-minded as he might be, and, as I trust, he may
become. Where there is a leaven of common sense much is to be hoped for.

Moreover, as you used the word start, you partly distorted my original meaning.
If you are to use words, be reasonably sure you understand their values, their form,
texture, color; their literal, their figurative meanings, their inborn tendency to shift.
Words are alive. Drive them carefully as you would herd sheep, or handle spirited
horses; else they will slip away, or run away, or stampede. You do not now know
words well enough to treat them honestly, nor do you know them well enough to
treat them craftily. You are not clever enough as yet to be disingenuous with words;
but I warn you that ultra-shiftiness, super-cunning, is the basis of fallacy. In truth,
it Is the basis of much poetry. A single word may mean a thousand things to a thou-
sand men, according to the context they invariably supply. Once you become partly
familiar with words and their habits, you will not pay much attention to what others
write or say you will listen, rather, to what they are thinking.

Well, that's a good joke : You started to tell me something about architecture, In
which I am concerned, and you made it effective enough, as far as you went; but, In
so doing, you wandered Into a turgid discourse on words with which I am not
concerned. I cite it therefore as a case In point: You started right and you ended
wrong. What under the sun have words to do with architecture?

Your question reveals the uncanny nature of your unknowledge. I hear the owls
hoot In the gloaming.

No! You really mean it?

It would so seem.

Then tell me all about it all, I will listen with both ears.

Sometime.

XII. Function and Form (i)

You were going to tell me more about language, and you
No, I was not. I began to tell you something about function and form, when you
interrupted; and that is what I am to do now.
That is so; we didn't finish^ did we?
We can never finish. We may talk for long, and get only a start; but it will be a

42. Kindergarten Chats

right start, I believe. We may, perhaps, see where the end lies, but It will be and
remain like a star in the sky, unreachable and of unknown distance; or it will be like
life itself, elusive to the last even in death; or it will be like a phantom beacon
on a phantom stormy sea; or as a voice, calling, afar in the woods; or, like the
shadow of a cloud upon a cloud, it will glide, diaphanous and imponderable, float-
ing in the still air of the spirit.

What's that you are talking about?

The interrelation of function and form. It has no beginning, no ending. It is im-
measurably small, immeasurably vast; inscrutably mobile, infinitely serene; intimately
complex yet simple.

But you surely told me to listen, not to the words, but to the thought. How can I
follow, if you are always thinking away ahead of the words? You seem to take delight
in it.

That is true. I will specify: Now, it stands to reason that a thing looks like what
it is, and, vice versa, it is what it looks like. I will stop here, to make exception of
certain little straight, brown canker-worms that I have picked from rose-bushes.
They looked like little brown, dead twigs at first. But speaking generally, outward
appearances resemble inner purposes. For instances: the form, oak-tree, resembles
and expresses the purpose or function, oak; the form, pine-tree, resembles and indi-
cates the function, pine; the form, horse, resembles and is the logical output of the
function, horse; the form, spider, resembles and is the tangible evidence of the func-
tion, spider. So the form, wave, looks like the function, wave; the form, cloud,
speaks to us of the function, cloud; the form, rain, indicates the function, rain; the
form, bird, tells us of the function, bird; the form, eagle, is the function, eagle, made
visible; the form, beak of that eagle, the function, beak of that eagle. And so does
the form, rose-bush, authenticate its function, rose-bush; the form, rose-branch, tells
of the function, rose-branch; the form, rose-bud, speaks for the function, rose-bud;
the form, full-blown rose, recites the poem, full-blown rose. And so does the form,
man, stand for the function, man; the form, John Doe, means the function, John
Doe; the form, smile, makes us aware of the function, smile; so, when I say: a man
named John Doe smiles, we have a little series of functions and forms which are
inseparably related, and yet they seem very casual to us. If I say, John Doe speaks
and stretches out his hand, as he smiles, I add a little to the sum of the functions
and the forms, but I do not affect their validity or their continuity. If I say, he
speaks ungrammatically and with a lisp, I merely modify a little the form your own
impressions are taking as you listen; if I say, that, as he smiled, and stretched out
his hand, and began speaking, with a lisp and ungrammatically, his lip trembled
and a tear formed in his eye, are not function and form moving in their rhythm, are
you not moving in your rhythm while you listen, am I not moving in my rhythm as I
speak? If I add that, as he spoke, he sank into a chair, his hat fell from his relaxing
fingers, his face blanched, his eyelids drooped, his head turned a little, have I done
more than add to your impression and rny sympathy? I have not in reality added or
detached; I have not made or unmade; I speak, you listen John Doe lived. He
did not know anything or care anything about form or function; but he lived them
both; he disbursed them both as he went along through life. He lived and he died,
You and I live and we shall die. But John Doe lived the life of John Doe, not of

43. Function and Form ( i )

John Smith: that was his function and such were his forms. And so the form,
Roman architecture,, means, if it means anything at all, the function Roman; the
form, American architecture, will mean, if it ever succeeds in meaning anything,
American life; the form, John-Doe architecture, should there be such an architec-
ture, must mean nothing, if it means not John Doe. I do not lie when I tell you
John Doe lisped, you do not lie when you listen, he did not lie when he lisped ; then
why all this lying architecture? Why does John-Doe architecture pretend it is John-
Smith architecture? Are we a nation of liars? I think not. That we architects are
a sect, a cult of prevaricators, is another matter. And so, in man-made things, the
form, literature, means nothing more or less than the function, literature; the form,
music, the function, music; the form, knife, the function, knife; the form, axe, the
function, axe; the form, engine, the function, engine. And again, in nature, the
form, water, the function, water; the form, rivulet, the function, rivulet; the form,
river, the function, river; the form, lake, the function, lake; the form, reeds, the
function, reeds; the forms, fly above the water and bass below the water their
related functions; and so the fisherman in the boat; and so on, and on, and on, and
on unceasingly, endlessly, constantly, eternally through the range of the physical
world visual, .microscopic, and telescopic, the world of the senses, the world of
the intellect, the world of the heart, the world of the soul: the physical world of
man we believe we know, and the borderland of that world we know not that
world of the silent, immeasurable, creative spirit, of whose infinite function all these
things are but the varied manifestations in form, in form more or less tangible, more
or less imponderable a borderland delicate as the dawn of life, grim as fate,
human as the smile of a friend a universe wherein all is function, all is form: a
frightful phantasm, driving the mind to despair, or, as we will, a glorious revelation
of that power which holds us in an invisible, a benign, a relentless a wondrous
hand.

My goodness! What a light that throws on the bank!

What bank?

You know.

Bank me no banks that has neither form nor function here but listen : Like
sees and begets its like. That which exists in spirit ever seeks and finds its physical
counterpart in form, its visible image ; an uncouth thought, an uncouth form ; a mon-
strous thought, a monstrous form; a thought in decadence, a form in decadence; a
living thought, a living form. Light means light a shadow means eclipse. How
many shadows do men cast! How many live in sKadows! How many walk in dark-
ness! How many struggle in their night! How many wander, all forlorn, in the verge
of Death's deep valley! How many are mired in the black pit! How many drag
others fhereunto! Great is the light that shines. Profound the shadow that Man
casts upon his own spirit! Opaque and moribund that man who gives forth, not a
light, but a shadow in his daily walk. A dense, material, moving phantom, he, who
stands before the sun and puts his art in obscuration! Stand out of my light! Stand
out of our light! I say! Platoons of dead men! This is the day when strikes the hour
upon high noon, within a cloudless sky! Avast the sun! Avaunt, the clay that doth
eclipse it! Shall the hour sound, and no man answer cheerily its call? Shall the sun
shine and no flower bloom in gladness? Shall the joyous heavens find no answer to

44. Kindergarten Chats

their smile, but sullen turbid stares? It cannot be, it shall not be: for of the wilder-
ness I'll make a song of spring that shall dispel its gloomy wintry skies and icy snows,
and make awake to sweet rejuvenance the lark, the soaring, singing lark that doth
abide within the hearts of all the young!

That's fine! Although it looked pretty dark at one time, especially for the clay-
men. Do you often have these fits? If you do, telephone me so that I can get around
in time to hear the next one. By the way, what has become of function and form in
the shuffle?

I dreamed again. But this time I awake to that of which I dreamed the charm-
ing reality of your own proper person, your wit and your ways. My dream was its
own function ; the words, its audible form.

Is there then form in everything?

Form in everything and anything, everywhere and at every instant. According
to their nature, their function, some forms are definite, some indefinite; some are
nebulous, others concrete and sharp; some symmetrical, others purely rhythmical.
Some are abstract, others material. Some appeal to the eye, some to the ear, some
to the touch, some to the sense of smell, some to any one or all or any combination
of these. But all, without fail, stand for relationships between the immaterial and
the material, between the subjective and the objective between the Infinite Spirit
and the finite mind. Through our sense we know substantially all that we may know.
The imagination, inituition, reason, are but exalted forms of the physical senses, as
we call them. For Man there is nothing but the physical; what he calls his spiritu-
ality is but the most exalted reach of his animalism. Little by little, Man, through
his senses, divines the Infinite. His highest thoughts, his most delicate yearnings
arise, through an imperceptible birth and growth, from the material sense of touch.
From hunger arose the cravings of his soul. From urgent passions have the sweetest
vows of his heart arisen. From savage instincts came the force and powers of his
mind. All is growth, all is decadence. Functions are born of functions, and in turn,
give birth or death to others. Forms emerge from forms, and others arise or descend
from these. All are related, interwoven, intermeshed, interconnected, interblended.
They exosmose and endosmose. They sway and swirl and mix and drift interminably.
They shape, they reform, they dissipate. They respond, correspond, attract, repel,
coalesce, disappear, reappear, merge and emerge: slowly or swiftly, gently or with
cataclysmic force from chaos into chaos, from death into life, from life into death,
from rest into motion, from motion into rest, from darkness into light, from light into
darkness, from sorrow into joy, from joy into sorrow, from purity into foulness, from
foulness into purity, from growth into decadence, from decadence into growth. All
is form, all is function ceaselessly unfolding and infolding and the heart of
Man unfolds and infolds with them: Man, the one spectator before whom this
drama spreads its appalling, its inspiring harmony of drift and splendor, as the
centuries toll and toll the flight of broad-pinioned Time, soaring, from eternity to
eternity: while the mite sucks the juices of the petal, and the ant industriously
wanders here and there and here and there again, the song-bird twitters on the
bough, the violet gives her perfume sweetly forth in innocence. All is function,
all is form, but the fragrance of them is rhythm, the language of them is rhythm:
for rhythm is the very wedding-march and ceremonial that quickens into song the

45. Function and Form ( i )

unison of form and function, or the dirge of their farewell, as they move apart, and
pass into the silent watches of that wondrous night we call the past. So goes the
story on its endless way.

XIII. Function and Form (2)

It seems to me that I could have gotten a clearer idea of your recent harangue on
function and form, if you had used half as many words. Still, I think I catch your
meaning after a fashion. The gist of it is, I take it]^ behind every form we see there
is a vital something or other which we do not see, yet which makes itself visible to
us in that very form. In other words, in a state of nature the form exists because of
the function, >and this something behind the form is neither more nor less than a
manifestation of what you call the infinite creative spirit] and what I call God.
And, allowing for our differences in education, training, and life associations, so
that we may try to see the same thing in the same way, what you want me to under-
stand and hold to is, that, just as every form contains its function, and exists by
virtue of it, so every function finds or is engaged in finding its form. And, further-
more, while this is true of the every-day things we see about us in nature and in the
reflection of nature we call human life, it is just as true, because it is a universal
law, of everything that the mind can take hold of.

You are "arriving," as we say.

Well, I suppose of course there is some application of this to architecture?

Well rather. It applies to everything else, why not to architecture?

But there must be a definite application of the theory. What is the application?

Can't you figure it out?

I suppose if we call every building a form

You strain my nerves but go on.

I suppose if we call a building a form, then there should be a function, a purpose,
a reason for each building, a definite explainable relation between the form, the
development of each building, and the causes that bring it into that particular shape;
and that the building, to be good architecture, must, first of all, clearly correspond
with its function, must be its image, as you would say.

Don't say good architecture, say, merely, architecture; \ will know what you
mean.

And that, if a building is properly designed, one should be able with a little atten-
tion, to read through that building to the reason for that building.

Goon.

Well, that's all right for the logical part of it; but where does the artistic side
come in?

No matter about the artistic side of it. Go on with your story.

But

46. Kindergarten Chats

Never mind the buts.

Well then, I suppose if the law is true of the building as a whole, it must hold
true of its parts.

That's right.

Consequently each part must so clearly express its function that the function can
be read through the part.

Very good. But you might add that if the work is to be organic the function of the
part must have the same quality as the function of the whole; and the parts, of
themselves and by themselves, must have the quality of the mass; must partake of
its identity.

What do you mean by organic?

I will tell you, later on.

Then if I am on the right track, I'm going to try to keep on it. It's rather fun to
do your own thinking, isn't it?

Yes, it is: and rather good for the health and the happiness. Keep on, and some
day you will get the blood to your brain. If the surge is not too sudden, you may
yet become a useful citizen.

I overlook your sneer, because I am interested in what I, myself, am saying. I
would observe in passing, however, that you are not any too considerate. But, to
go on: If it is true of the parts in a larger sense, then it must be equally true of the
details, and in the same sense, isn't it?

In a similar sense, yes.

Why do you say similar?

Because I mean similar. The details are not the same as the parts and the mass ;
they cannot be. But they can be and should be similar to the parts and to the mass.

Isn't that splitting hairs?

If there were more of such hair-splitting it would be well for our architecture.

Why so? I don't understand.

Because its significance reverts to the organic quality which I mentioned to you.
There is no limit to the subdivisibility of organic thinking.

And what is the difference between logical thinking and organic thinking?

A world of difference. But we haven't come to that yet.

Then, I infer, I can go on and consider my detail as of itself a mass, if I will,
and proceed with the regular and systematic subdivision of function with form, as
before, and I will always have a similarity, an organic quality if I can guess what
you mean descending from the mass down to the minutest subdivision of detail.
That's interesting, isn't it? The subdivisions and details will descend from the mass
like children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren, and yet, they will be, all, of
the same family.

That's the first enlivening word I've heard you say.

Well, it's catching, you know. I begin to get an inkling now of what you meant
by the "voice, calling, afar in the woods.** Perhaps, too, some of the little seeds are
coming up and will need watering by and by.

Yes, yes. Very good as far as you go. But I wish to warn you that a man might
follow the program you have laid down, to the very last detail of details, and yet
have, if that were his make-up, a very dry, a very pedantic, a very prosaic result.

47. Function and Form (2)

He might produce a completely logical result, so-called, and yet an utterly repellent
one a cold, a vacuous negation of living architecture a veritable pessimism.

How so?

Simply because logic, scholarship, or taste, or all of them combined, cannot make
organic architecture. They may make logical, scholarly or "tasty" buildings, and that
is all. And such structures are either dry, chilling or futile.

Well then, tell me now, in anticipation, what characterizes a real architect?

First of all a poetic imagination; second, a broad sympathy, humane character,
common sense and a thoroughly disciplined mind; third, a perfected technique;
and, finally, an abundant and gracious gift of expression.

Then you don't value logic.

It has its excellent uses.

But cannot everything be reduced to the syllogism?

So the text books would seem to claim; yet I should not wish to see a rose reduced
to syllogism; I fear the result would be mostly syllogism and that poetry would
"vanish with the rose." Formal logic cannot successfully deal with the creative
process, for the creating function is vital, as its name implies, whereas the syllogism
is an abstraction., fascinating as a form of the function, so-called pure reason; yet,
when subordinate to inspiration, it has a just and high value. I say there is a logic
over and above book-logic, namely, the subconscious energy we call imagination.
Nevertheless, formal logic has its purpose and its place.

Then you do prize logic?

I surely do. It is a power of the Intellect; but it has its limitations. It must not
play the tyrant.

By the way ; you were to explain the word organic.

You have a memory which shows that you are following and, still better, antici-
pating my argument. I had for the moment overlooked the item. But we will take
it up next time, when we may discuss it leisurely.

I think this is great sport.

So do I.

XIV. Growth and Decay

In seeking now a reasonably solid grasp on the value of the word, organic, we
should at the beginning fix in mind the values of the correlated words, organism,
structure, function, growth, development, form. All of these words imply the initiat-
ing pressure of a living force and a resultant structure or mechanism whereby such
invisible force is made manifest and operative. The pressure, we call Function: the
resultant, Form. Hence the law of function and form discernible throughout nature.

I have already cautioned you against the fugacious nature of words, their peculiar
tendency to transformation in meaning while they retain the same outward form.

48. Kindergarten Chats

This is because the form of a word is not, itself , truly organic; it is arbitrary, and has
very little inherent capacity for change in response to a change in significance
especially if the change be a subtle one. Beyond the mechanical changes that the
grammarians call declensions, conjugations, compoundings, affixes, suffixes, etc.,
words, when written, can be modified or developed in significance only, or nearly
so, by association with other words when they are in rhythmical, organized mo-
tion. In speech, the word is rendered more plastic: hence the value of oratory.
Statically words have little significance, as you may assure yourself by consulting
any dictionary; but, when once they are treated dynamically and pictorially, their
power to convey thought increases enormously; still, let it always be understood that
the powers are not in the words so much as in the mind and heart of him who uses
them as his instrument. The thought, the feeling, the beauty is not so much in the
words as in what the words suggest, or are caused to suggest, to the mind of the
reader, the hearer; and this power of suggestion, of evoking responsive imagination,
is the power of the artist, the poet : he who surcharges words.

Some time ago you asked what connection there might be between words and
architecture. There is this immediate and important connection that architecture,
for the past several centuries, has suffered from a growing accretion of words : it is
now in fact so overgrown and stifled with words that the reality has been lost to
view. Words and phrases have usurped the place of function and form. Finally
phrase-making has come to be an accepted substitute for architecture-making.

Now, as we two together are seeking the sense of things, as we are searching out
realities, let us pronounce now, once for all, that the architecture we seek is to be
a reality in function and form and that that reality shall unfold within the progress-
ing clarity of our view.

The architecture that we see today bespeaks lost organic quality. Like a man once
strong but now decrepit, it no longer functions normally. Hence its form has become
abnormal. It no longer speaks in tones of ringing eloquence as of yore it now
cries out to the attentive ear with an appalling, inarticulate cry, now muffled, now
piercing, but ever the wail of disorganization, the sigh of dissolution. Its features
have a pallid leer, a rictus. Its eye is lustreless, its ear is dulled, its vitals atrophied.
So moves it wearily on its crutch of scholarship groping through spectacles of
words.

The architecture we seek shall be as a man active^ alert, supple, strong, sane. A
generative man. A man having five senses all awake; eyes that fully see, ears that
are attuned to every sound; a man living in his present, knowing and feeling the
vibrancy of that ever-moving moment, with heart to draw it in and mind to put it
out: that incessant, that portentous birth, that fertile moment which we call Today!
As a man who knows his day, who loves his day, who knows and loves the exercise
of life, who rightly values strength and kindliness, whose feet are on the earth, whose
brain is keyed to the ceaseless song of his kind: who sees the past with kindly eye,
who sees the future in a kindling vision: as a man who wills to create: So shall
our art be. For to live, wholly to live, is the manifest consummation of existence.

NOTE: This chapter was considerably shortened in revision.

49. Growth and Decay

XV, Thought

I am quite a little impressed by what you say concerning our search for realities
rather than mere words. It sounds straightforward and penetrating in one sense and
illuminating in another. It seems to direct the faculties straight ahead of one, to focus
them on something definite^ something that I feel sure must exist and must be true.
Still, for all that, we must use words, must we not?

Not necessarily. You need words only when you are to communicate with others
by that special method called written or spoken language. Music, painting, sculp-
ture, architecture are manifestly wordless forms of communication; so is gesture,
so is facial expression. Words, however, are sometimes useful in explaining these
and other things ; in fact, explanation is one of the chief est uses of words, if not the
most important. By means of words we try to make clear to others our feelings,
thoughts., intentions, recollections, and a great number of other things in short,
our mental or emotional attitude at any time on any subject, and for these purposes
words are pretty well adapted, especially where purely human relations are con-
cerned. But there is a vast domain lying just beyond the reach of words; and, to
express our impressions of it, our insight into it our contact with that which lies
beyond man the fine arts enter and carry on a form of language, of expression, of
communication, of explanation, that lies beyond words. Now architecture as at
present practised is a crude pretense at art. But, believe me, it is truly a fine art
when its capabilities are once understood, when its true nature is once known ? when
its plasticity, its power for eloquence, its dramatic, its lyric resources, its fluency of
expression are once grasped by the mind and the heart. No form of expression can
excel it in force, beauty, delicacy, subtlety and versatility when in sympathetic hands.
Take my word for it now, my young friend, and I will try to explain it to you later
when you shall have come to understand, through your own inward experiences
and the growth of your moral nature, what real thinking and real feeling mean
that there is no state of feeling that may not find its true image in the real, the
plastic, the poetic architectural art, that art which I am forced to call the New
Architecture.

But in passing I may say that real thinking is better done without words than
with them, and creative thinking must be done without words. When the mind is
actively and vitally at work, for its own creative uses, it has no time for word-build-
ing: words are too clumsy: you have no time to select and group them. Hence you
must think in terms of images^ of pictures, of states of feeling, of rhythm. The well-
trained, well-organized, well-disciplined mind works with remarkable rapidity and
with luminous intensity; it will body forth combinations, in mass, so complex, so
far-reaching that you could not write them down in years. Writing is but the slow,
snail-like creeping of words, climbing, laboriously, over a little structure that
resembles the thought: meanwhile the mind has gone on and on, here and yonder
and back and out and back again. Thought is the most rapid agency in the universe.
It can travel to Sirius and return in an instant. Nothing is too small for it to grasp,
nothing too great. It can go in and out of itself now objective, now subjective.
It can fasten itself most tenaciously on a fact, on an idea; or sublimate and attenuate

50. Kindergarten Chats

itself with etheral space. It will flow like water; it may become as stable as stone.
You must familiarize yourself, my boy, with some of the possibilities of that ex-
traordinary agent we call thought. Learn its uses and how to use it. Your test will
always be results; for real thinking brings real results. Thinking is an art, a science
of magnificent possibilities. It is like an army with banners, where the horses cry
ha! ha! at the sound of the trumpets. After a while you will instinctively learn to
know whether a given man is thinking or mooning. It's a great art, my lad, remem-
ber this, it's an inspiring art. I mean the real, fluent, active thinking, not the dull
stammering and mumbling of the mind : I mean the mind awake.

Words, after all, are but a momentary utterance of thought. They may be, in
that utterance, as beautiful as the song of a bird we hear, but they are not the bird :
for the bird is flown, and sings elsewhere another song In the forest, ere the first
has become a memory with us. Of all the songs sung in the forest how many do we
hear? And the forest sings its own song: how many of us hear it? And the song
is of the forest, it is not the forest. So, let your thoughts be at times like the songs
we hear not, the song of the singer in the solitudes. Therefore I would take your
mind away from words, and bend it to thinking.

Thinking is a philosophy. Many people believe that when they are reading in a
book they are of necessity thinking; that when they listen to someone's discourse
they are thinking; but it does not necessarily follow. The best that reading and lis-
tening can do is to stimulate you to think your own thoughts, but, nine times out of
ten, you are thinking the other man's thought, not your own. What occurs is like an
echo, a reflection; it is not the real thing. Reading is chiefly useful in that it informs
you of what the other man is thinking, it puts you in touch with the currents of
thought among your fellows, or among those of the past. But you must carefully
and watchfully discriminate between pseudo-thinking and real thinking. Pseudo-
thinking is always imitative, real thinking is always creative. It cannot be otherwise.
You cannot create unless you think, and you cannot truly think without creating in
thought. Judge our present architecture by this standard and you will be amazed at
its poverty of thought, its falsity in expression/ its absence of manhood. Moreover,
real thinking is always in the present tense. You cannot think in the past, you can
only think of the past. You cannot think in the future, you can think only of the
future. By great power of imagination you may think of the past and of the future
almost in terms of the present: the one is the function of the historian, the other
that of the prophet. But reality is of, in, by and for the present, and the present
only. Bear this strictly in mind, it is highly important, it must lie at the very root
of your new education, for it is with the present only that you are in physical, vital
contact, and I have told you that real thought, vital thought, is born of the physical
senses. It is in the present, only, that you really live, therefore it is in the present,
only, that you can really think. And in this sense you think organically. Pseudo-
thinking is inorganic. The one is living, the other dead. The present is the organic
moment, the living moment. The past and the future do not exist: the one is dead,
the other unborn. The present is that twinkling of an eye that separates death from
life, as time moves on: but thought is quicker than the twinkling of an eye.

Bear this all closely in mind, my lad. Do not for a moment suppose that it is
hair-splitting. I want you to get at the vital essence of things, and this is vital, it

51. Thought

is momentous, it is profoundly significant, for it is of the search after life that
search on which the mind of the world has been concentrated, with indefatigable
intensity, since the beginning of man as a thinking being. The first thing upon which
you must bend your mind is, to learn to think seriously, accurately, methodically,
persistently, thoroughly and fearlessly. Never doubt the powers of your own mind,
for they are there, waiting for you to discover them, to know them, to use them.
You will not learn in the printed books how to think this way 3 but you will find it
in. the great open book of the life about you. It is all there waiting for you to dis-
cover it, to know it, and to use it. Have no fear, and have no doubt. I tell you it is
so. It is only the conventional teacher of architecture who could tell you that you
are a dullard by birth and an imbecile by predestination. I tell you you were born
all right and that you have powers of which you are not aware: every lad has, and
might develop them if his parents did not ask him every five minutes how much
he is "getting," and if he can't get a "raise 55 next week. Money-grubbing will defeat
any kind of education.

So, first, learn to think, then, learn to act. Learn to think as an architect should
think, then act as an honest architect should act. When you think organically you
will act organically. Just so soon as your thoughts begin to take on an organic
quality, your buildings will begin to take on an organic quality, and thereafter they
will grow and develop together. But they will not do this until you have so begun
no, never until then. But do not be ashamed to begin in a small way. Everything
begins in a small way. Make sure, only, that it is the right way. Seek to learn some-
thing of your own nature your aptitudes, your powers, your limitations. Strive
to increase the powers, to remove the limitations. You cannot hope to know your
own powers until you test them with the force of will and the backing of character
to overcome obstacles. It is almost folly to talk of the limitations of the mind: leave
that to the idlers. I tell you that the limitations of your mind are much farther off
than you suppose. I would not waste a moment on you did I not profoundly believe
it. The so-called average mind has vastly greater powers, immeasurably greater possi-
bilities of development than is generally supposed. But we need teachers we need
teachers of the right sort. The popular notions on this subject are grotesquely un-
toward, woefully inadequate. The main thing is to catch the mind young enough,
start it right, and train it right. The power of the individual mind is great. It is sheer
fiddle-faddle to think otherwise. Those who doubt it are those who have not taken
the trouble and will not take the trouble to inquire of the nearest child of tender
years. Go to, the subject exasperates me, for I have eyes to see. Think for a moment,
think what would be the power and the glory of a people if the individual minds
were properly trained, instead of all this disastrous waste and malpractice. Would it
not reverse some of the cherished notions of the political economists? But enough
of this.

I will start you right, and start you carefully; after that it will be your business
to keep right. I will give you the landmarks and the blazings in that country which
I have explored alone: but it is the land of promise and I return to tell you of
it } and to point the way.

So don't trouble much about words for the present. They will come into useful
play when you shall have thoughts that naturally seek expression in words. But do

52. Kindergarten Chats

5. Chicago National Bank, Chicago (Chicago Architectural Photograph. Co.)

6. Design for a Bicentennial Memorial for Detroit

53-

F!3f

" 1/ k f f^"r

7. Columbia University Library, New York
8. An example of the period

54-

not misunderstand me. I would not for a moment underrate the study of language,
on the contrary, I highly cherish it; I mean only that for the present you are to
turn all your faculties toward realities and let the words go. Think your thoughts
in terms of your own nature, of your own surroundings, of your own art. Seek
toward this end: That architecture, its organic forms, its inorganic materials, may
respond to your will, to your persuasion, and become the plastic medium whereby
you shall express not word-thoughts but building-thoughts, and the function then
will flow to the minutest details of form in orderly sequence, as surely as the sap
flows to the tip of the slenderest tendril of a vine to the tips of the uttermost
leaves of the giant forest tree.

But you cannot do this in a day, in a week, in a year. It must be for you a life-
work, a long, steady, continuous infolding and unfolding just as the tree grows
and expands year after year. For, as I have quoted to you, "Time will not conse-
crate that in which she has been ignored" that so runs the French saying. And
to realize a little of what the saying means, "Nature neither hastens nor delays,"
think on the one hand of the lightning-flash, of the speed of thought, and, on the
other, of the gradual elevation of a continent, of the revolution of the sun about
the earth [sic].

You have set me a terrible task. I feel discouraged from attempting it.

Nothing of the sort. The more you think, the more you will delight in thinking;
the more you contemplate, the more you will delight in contemplation; the more
you act, the more you will delight in action. Little by little I will suggest to you
how to think and how to express your thoughts. Meanwhile bear in mind that you
are not to think merely on occasions, as a sort of ceremonial, but daily, hourly, all
the time it must become your fixed and natural habit of mind. So will your think-
ing steadily grow in power, clearness, flexibility and grace; and you will ever there-
after feel what the spirit of independence and self-control truly means.

XV L Imagination

In our last talk you hinted a little of the power of imagination. What do you
believe imagination to be? I have thought about it, in a vague way, but I don't seem
to get anywhere. It is a word commonly enough used, but no two people seem to use
it alike or understand it alike. It seems to me a something a reality, you would
probably call it that disappears when you reach for it; and the only satisfaction I
can get is in the use of the word itself, which I affect to believe I understand, and yet
I am sure I do not. When I leave this anchorage I am adrift. What is it, anyway?

Really, you make me smile. I don't know what imagination is any more than I
know what electricity is. Imagination is the very soul itself, so intangible is it. And
yet it is near, direct, simple. We don't know what it is, but we do know certain of its
activities. Imagination is a phase of life, and if you will tell me what life is, I will tell

55. Imagination

you what imagination is. You might as well even ask me if life and death are the
same thing, and, if not, which is the real thing. I might hold that life is all; that
death does not exist, that it is a name we give to a change, that it is a word, a symbol.
And, if I were of different temperament, I might urge that life is merely a word, a
mirage, a phantom, an illusion; that the deep-down reality is death immeasurable
quiescence. Or, if I were of still another temperament, I might say that life and
death are both illusions, unreal as ourselves; that there is but one inscrutable reality.

So, with imagination, you may say anything about it that suits your own imagina-
tion; I may say anything about it that suits my imagination; for it is the personal
imagination only that can grasp imagination, as it is the spirit only that can grasp
spirit, only the physical that can grasp the physical only the heart that can reach
the heart. If you are deficient in Imagination you will not understand imagination;
if you are defective in sensibility you cannot know the physical; if you have no heart
you can never know the world of the heart. For, as like begets like, so only like can
understand like. Understanding and words are often far apart, they have but little
in common. Understanding is of the heart, words are man's inventions; understand-
ing is subjective, visible words are objective else why should oral discourse affect
us more intimately than the written page, else why does the spoken word go so
quickly to the heart, and the written word so often lose itself on the way there, as It
wanders through the alleys of the mind?

Now, I can at best tell you only what may be transmitted by the spoken word,
but if your imagination does not grasp and receive what I mean,, I fail. I cannot
convey to you in words the bloom on a fruit you must see it to know it. I cannot
depict to you in words the melody of a bird's song you must hear it to know It.
I may have seen the bloom and heard the song, but I cannot convey their reality
to you. I can only suggest. To know them you must hear and see for yourself. By your
living power you must absorb them.

All we know of imagination is what we, through the power of our own imagina-
tions, may infer from its manifestations. These manifestations, to be sure, are highly
varied and complex. There are in fact as many Imaginations as there are men, women
and children on the face of the earth. It goes without our saying that these individual
imaginations vary in kind and degree and also have marked common resemblances.
But It is the variations that are the more suggestive and instructive, for you will find
that the imagination of each person is that person: It is the key to his character:
It determines what that person will receive and what that person will reject. Inciden-
tally, you cannot put one foot in front of the other unless your imagination has pre-
pared the way much less can you construct a poem.

So, again, when you ask me what is imagination, I might reply, Yankeewise, by
asking you, what is a plant? You say a plant is a vegetable? Well, what Is a vege-
table? You proceed to describe more and more minutely, and I to question more and
more closely. Finally you are at a loss to say whether a plant may or may not be an
animal. Yet we well know that there are hundreds of thousands of plants, each with
its pecularities of structure and form and function; and not only thousands of kinds,
but thousands upon thousands of individuals of each particular kind; and that each
of these individuals has its pecularities, its specific life, Its identity. For such Is the
subdivisibility of nature; and It Is within the power of analysis measurably to follow

56. Kindergarten Chats

this delicate flow of function into specific form. So are there thousands upon thou-
sands of imaginations, each vital and peculiar; yours is one of these,, mine is one, but
they are not wholly alike., they cannot be, for identity prevails throughout nature to
the minutest limits of observation. You may arrange and classify these imaginations
if you wish; but classification is largely an arbitrary process, done for convenience,
for ease of reference and use.

And by all of this I am trying to get you out of your school rut where everything
was classified and tabulated, and tagged for you, and bring you out into a large,
fluent conception of the continuity of nature, the indissoluble continuity of all that
surrounds you, of all that is within you, of all that is without you of the world
of the spirit and the world of the physical. If you grasp this and the relation of your
own faculties to it: that the mind, the heart, the soul have no delimitation, no
boundary, no barrier, you will have a hint of the universal aspect of the imagination,
of its fluency, its quality, its range, its visibility.

So you see, my young friend, by your simple question you have opened up a world.
And when I hinted to you of the possible power of the individual mind, and of the
power and glory of a people whose individual minds were so trained, I was not
speaking in what might be called a flight of fancy, but with a close and practical
sense of realities.

So, while we may say that the imagination, in some of its aspects, seems super-
human, in others it is most beautifully human. If it implies the power to receive,
it also implies the power to give. If it is as simple as a drop of dew, It is also as
complex as a drop of dew. However furtive and shy it may be, still it is domestic of
habit. It is steadied, controlled and made amenable by the other faculties. If It is
a wanderer, so it ever returns. It knows where its home is : it needs you as much as
you need it. It goes where you send it, and returns laden with airy nothings. It is
your other self your best friend when you know it and it knows you. It will go
anywhere after anything; but beware lest it beguile you, for it is a tricky, mischievous
thing when you are not looking. You must train it carefully for Its work as you would
train a retriever, for, whatever else Imagination may be, it is a magnificent retriever.
They say that imagination is a great painter of pictures, and a famous maker of
images, a most skillful and ingenious craftsman. If this be so, then house and feed
him well and lavish gifts upon him. They say, too, that he is a great constructor and
reconstructor. That may be, too, but I tell you that he is also a great destroyer. They
say that children are imaginative. That is truest and most beautiful of all. Let us
remain children as we grow old: For I tell you if you kill the child in man you kill
the man in man. No truer saying was ever said than this: The child is father to the
man. So recall to your heart your childhood, which is looking at you with a wistful
eye and not so far away.

57. Imagination

XVII. A Doric Column

I am absorbed in what you said in your last talk. I feel the reach and force of it.
But can you not give me a specific instance of imagination?

I can perhaps do better in giving you a specific instance of lack of imagination,

It seems that once upon a time the people of the good city of Detroit conceived
a plan to celebrate the two hundredth anniversary of the discovery of the site of that
interesting town, by the erection of a noble and suitable memorial. [Fig. 6]

Forthwith they appointed the usual committee. Forthwith the committee pro-
ceeded to sit and to think or to deliberate, as they might say which same is a
shade more deadly than thinking. They thought of an architect, far in the East like
a morning star. They summoned him. He came he pondered; then the committee
pondered; then they all brooded together in conference, as it is said. They, the
committee, asked him, the architect, to think of a memorial that should be expres-
sive, fitting, appropriate, and "proper": and behold! the morning star dreamed of
a Doric Column (e the largest in the world. 33 The architect states in his published
report that this Doric column is to commemorate the "bicentenary of the discovery
and foundation of the city of Detroit." Save the mark! How can a "city" be "dis-
covered" and "founded" at the same time. You or I in our innocence might think
that two hundred years ago there was discovered a wilderness wherein Detroit sub-
sequently arose. And further on in the report we are told that from the top of the
column is to spring a "great flame of natural gas, so characteristic of the West, and
impossible elsewhere" as though there were not "natural gas" enough in this
Doric column itself, without calling in the facetious aid of natural adjuncts, and as
though there were not "natural gas" in the East. Then the architect modestly closes
his report by saying that his Doric column will "rank with the famous monuments of
all time." Had he added, in parentheses, that it would be famous among the "rank"
monuments of all time, I would cheerfully agree with him. That so large a report
should have accompanied so large a column, as the "idea" was detonated, seems only
natural.

Then the committee figured on cost and ways and means. And when you think ot
dollars and ways and means you have to think in dead earnest.

You may perhaps incline a little to infer from my remarks that I do not approve,
and, indeed, I do not. And why? Because it would seem to a man up a tree that the
architek, here, was not on familiar terms with the rudiments of imagination : a most
distressing form of illiteracy, in an "artist." Indeed, imagination alone is that dis-
tinguishing quality which marks apart an architect from that which vulgar persons
call an architek.

In the beginning, I say, was the architek without form, and void, and darkness
was upon it. And the Inscrutable Creative Spirit moving through the darkness said :
Let there be light and Imagination was that light. And the Great Spirit found it
good, and he separated the light from the darkness.

And thus, in reverse, when an architect parts company with imagination he becomes
at once an architek whether he be originally of low or of high degree matters not
a whit.

58. Kindergarten Chats

So you may infer, indeed I urge It, that an honest imagination is henceforth, in
your philosophy, to be held inseparable, in his province, from the title, architect.

No, I do not like humbug in general, and I particularly abhor wanton, expensive
humbug: where the lavish use of money is relied upon to hide the peccant inanity.
Hence I do not like this particular "Doric" humbug, even if it be not specifically
the largest of its kind in the world.

All of which perhaps seems reasonably clear, but I will make it clearer:

I will hazard a surmise that this particular architek never made his bed of boughs
in the sombre gloom of the primeval forest; never saw the gleam of opalescent eyes
across the waning fire-light; never heard the curdling cry of the screech-owl over-
head: nor the distinct wolfish bark now faint, now louder, always hungry, ever
passionately mournful; now the low, sudden moan of the forest, in night's stillest,
breathless hour, as an aged giant hemlock sank heavily to earth; nor saw the dawn
break, pale and white through the filmy branches, interlaced, of pine and tamarack
and their stately brethren, clustered upright and close in mute communion; nor
heard the belch of a fired musket bellow and roar and roll along the edge of a slum-
bering woodland lake now fainting around its capes and bays, now swelling aloud
and dying again, reaching around and turning back in reverberation upon reverbera-
tion along the upright wall of woods, and breaking and flying to and fro across the
startled waters in a wild harangue of echoes, slowly blending, subsiding and melting
into the air and into the forest slowly away, until, after long and long, stillness reigns
again, and solitude engulfing and resolving the strange, harsh dissonance; nor
climbed through tangle and over fallen trunks, nor cushioned his foot on the mold
of what was once a proud thing of the forest, nor smelled the faint sweet odor, oh,
so faint, so delicate, of the deep woods, standing in sombre array with trunks ever
more serried, ever growing grayer and darker as they close and deepen in obscurity
while the straight long paths ever open and close to the huntsman, he of keen foot
and nimble eye, as he moves like a wraith through the sylvan depths; nor crossed the
black chilling waters of turbulent winding streams, as they foam over boulder and
snag, rushing and tinkling through yellow froth, or gleam in smooth, silent or gently
singing cascades, anon to rush and turn, always cold, always black; nor saw the
furtive deer, startled, vanish like a sprite; nor heard the mournful cry of the loon,
solitary, vigilant, wary, afar on the bosom of the lake; nor heard the storm break,
in terror sweeping through the tossing forest herd, with blue, blinding flash and
ponderous crack and rumble and snapping, and the downpour, and the swash and
and swish and sodden soak; nor saw the bright blue sky over the beaver meadows;
nor crossed great rivers; nor toiled, patient and hungry over hills, through deep
ravines, following when he could the red man's trail; nor paddled, silent and steadily,
up the rivers up and up, deeper and deeper into the far-spread forests; nor came
at times upon a great lake so vast that the eye could not cross it, angry and fierce
in storm, placid and beaming in fair weather, shining and sparkling in the sunshine,
in the crystalline air, blue and lovely under the pellucid vault of blue above, far-
stretching and serene and solitary so deep, so dark, so placid under the young
moon, under the gleaming, glinting stars

But the men who set foot first on the spot where Detroit now stands beside the
narrow strait: they saw these things, heard these things, lived these things, died

59. A Doric Column

these things, and many more. They thought not of Greek columns, they thought
of the wilderness, they thought of hunger, of disease, of death, of foe upon foe, hard-
ship after hardship, misery piled upon misery, conquest wrested after conquest.
Hardily they faced toil and danger. Struggle was theirs. Heroism was theirs. The
solitude of a continent was theirs. The faith of the fanatic was theirs. Heroism, and
devotion, and patience, and fortitude were the stars in their night, the breaking
dawn of whose second century of after-narrative we are to "celebrate" in unblushing
puerility. Verily they might say, in their nameless graves : We ask not even for bread
but ye give us a stone.

What souls have we when such deeds knock and cannot enter. The door is closed,
the keeper of the house is fled. Two hundred years have come and gone upon the
spot where once the forest stood in grandeur.

XVIII. Attention

Do you know, I became so interested in your story of the forest that I forgot all
about the blamed Doric Column. Oh, that was great in the forest, I wish I were
there. You must have lived in the forest or you couldn't describe it so didn't you?
Let me tell you, that awakened the old cave-man in me. And architecture put out
of the door. You were in the forest, weren't you? Don't say no and shatter my
romance.

No matter about that now: Let's get to business.

Yes, but I understand loons are very difficult to hit even with a rifle. You can't
get near them. And they dive like a flash. How do you get near enough to make a
shot?

Never mind. You are loon enough for me for the present. I'm trying to get near
enough to hit you with an idea, but the best I have done, so far, is to raise a few
feathers. Still, you're not going to get away from me for I am a hunter of men.
And the said men are "scarier" than any loon. The wild moose in his native fastness
is a pet poodle in comparison. Man can sniff a new idea afar off, if the breeze blows
toward him, and away he goes through the covert, or under ground, or under the
nearest patch of brush, or up a tree, Man, mentally, is the most farouche, most timid
of animals. I know him well : that is to say, I do not know him at all. He is un-under-
standable, he combines in himself all the characteristics of all the animals, of all the
birds, all the reptiles, all the fishes, all the insects and all the plants.

Yes, yes but

I know; I know. You would rather hunt than study, and I can't blame you over-
much. But the trick is to hunt and study. If you learn to do that you will learn nearly
all of the secret. Now, here have I been talking architecture directly and indirectly
to you for quite a while, and at best you have given a perfunctory grunt or two by
way of response; but the moment I talk of the forest, or of a wild creature, you are

60. Kindergarten Chats

all on fire; which goes to show that you are nearer to nature than I am 3 that the
primitive man and the primitive forces awaken in you at one touch of Nature's wand.
Now I know in my heart that the architectural art I am seeking to reveal to you is
like the loon, like the forest, like all things in unhampered nature; but its pursuit is
of the spirit: not of the rifle, nor of the book. I am puzzled how to make it clear to
you for it is clear in fact. I fancy I have grown sophisticated^ with my generation,
and have lost the art of simple statement.

Oh, don't let that worry you, pa. I'll fall into your pit some day. There are other
ways of catching game besides shooting. And then, you are not so modest as you
would have me assume. You are laying for me, I know it. I can sniff you in the air
which I am pretty sure is right now blowing my way. But I'm not scared, I'm
just a bit curious.

Well, let's see : What were we talking about?

Oh, I don't know. Whatever it was, you would make a sermon of it for the good
of my soul.

And if I tell you about the loon?

Now you're shooting!

And if I tell you about yourself?

Oh, I don't know.

Well, the loon pays attention to what concerns him and you are to do the same,
for attention is of the essence of our powers; 1 it is that which draws other things
toward us, it is that which, if we have lived with it, brings the experiences of our
lives ready to our hand. If things but make impression enough on you, you will not
forget them; and thus, as you go through life, your store of experiences becomes
greater, richer, more and more available. But to this end you must cultivate atten-
tion the art of seeing, the art of listening. You needn't trouble about memory,
that will take care of itself; but you must learn to live in the true sense. To pay
attention is to live, and to live is to pay attention; and, bear in mind most of all,
that your spiritual nature is but a higher faculty of seeing and listening a finer,
nobler way of paying attention. Thus must you learn to live in the fullest sense.

So many people are half-dead. They go their way in a kind of dull somnolence.
Show them a Dollar, they brighten up; talk sense, they yawn. If you make a state-
ment, they half-hear it: if they are garrulous they don't hear at all but wait inertly
for you to end, that they may talk a stream of meaningless speech which turns and
turns in an orbit of etceteras. And so they go, here and there, like rag-pickers, and
poke around among the scraps, fag-ends, and waste-paper. And through the mist
they call life, they wander, formless and dim. This class is sprinkled through all the
social strata from top to bottom it is confined to none. It is the empty class the
pessimists. For them life has no color, it is all grays, and they, like grays

For heaven's sake what has all that to do with architecture?

It has everything to do with the New Architecture, something to do with the old;

1. In this paragraph, and throughout those passages in Kindergarten Chats and other "writings dealing with
education, there is reflected the profound influence on Sullivan of his teacher at the English High School in
Boston, Moses Woolson: see The Autobiography of an Idea, Gh. IX.

61. Attention

so don't Interrupt me with your chatter. For them life has no urge, no current it
is a sluggish stream filled with sewage.

But this isn't precisely what I wished to talk about. I had rather talk of cheerful
things,, of bright and sunny things, tinkling with laughter, and jogging along in inno-
cent mirth. But that isn't just what I wished to talk about either.

Well, what is it then?

Can't you guess?

Well, was it about

Say, why don't you tell me how to get near that loon!

I was intending to take you for an outing in the country, but I shall have to post-
pone it now until you quiet down. You are a youthful wild-man-of-the-woods, I fear.

Oh, come! Let's go to the country.

No. Discipline is part of my program. You must stick to your lessons until they
begin to stick to you.

Oh, I know all you've said. It's in the back of my head somewhere: I'm a good
listener.

It may be so, but you'll have to be a better one before I let go of you.

Why, governor! I can tell you all you've said pretty nearly every word. Listen

I haven't time. I want to talk, myself. Besides this isn't what I wished to say either.
By the way, speaking of loons

Yes?

There is another class of people

Oh, pshaw!

Who are shy, furtive and solitary. They have mental furniture, but wish to sit in it
themselves alone in a certain prim, horse-hair splendor, with the shades carefully
drawn down. If one approaches them, they retire, they dive below the surface of
themselves, they withdraw, definitely, as it were, into the depths of solitary waters.
And yet they are not wild creatures, they are exquisitely tame creatures. The world
concerns them only as a harsh intrusion likewise their fellows : for all with them
is self, withdrawn, timorous, chary, suspicious, miserly of their hoarded store of tidy
bits of mental porcelain put away here and there in carefully remembered secret
drawers.

Well, what about it? They don't interest me.

They do me, for they are all attention to themselves.

And you wish me, I suppose, to be all attention to others?

No. But when you accumulate, accumulate abundantly, absorb totalities, not frag-
ments. Grasp the largeness of things, not the petty isolated aspects. Lay hold upon the
warm significance of realities, not the mere cold currency passing from hand to hand.
Seize upon the drift, the color, the intensity, the what-you-may-call-it of the moving,
teeming life about you, not merely upon its broken facts of definition, and follow,
follow, follow every path, every trail that leads toward emotional and spiritual riches
paths hidden alike to the heedless and the over-sure and then, when you give,
give of your abundance: And this it is to live.

If you receive not, you cannot give. And to receive of life you must be awake to it.
Shut the heart and you close the open door of sympathy upon yourself, and in the
doing exclude the light of the world. It is sympathy that leads, sympathy that draws

62. Kindergarten Chats

us on with an Invisible hand beckoning, persuading, illuminating all things with
her smile. She knows the heart's desire, she divines a simple longing: for she is
that longing, going ever outward through the doors of sense, and she seeks until she
finds, until she fin,ds her mate, then together they return to you and enter and ye
three are one. Of such is sympathy, the liveliest tenant of the heart. So what I call
attention becomes what you call interest; so what you call an impression becomes
what I call an answer. So, living becomes action; seeing and listening, functions of
life: and all by virtue of the gentle force we call sympathy: sympathy the receiver,
the giver sympathy : I you the poet.

XIX. Responsibility: The Public

If now, my son, we pause for a little, to make a survey of our field a bird's-eye
view, a cloud-view if you will, that shall give us some just notion of its length,
breadth and topography the striking, the characteristic element of our human
nature coming nearest and receding farthest in the view is that almost universally
prevalent disregard of the American people for those things, those thoughts, those
feelings, aptitudes and demands that do not immediately concern the immediate
Dollar. To be sure, as in overlooking a forest we might declare it pine, although
hemlocks, spruces, and many an other tree might in fact be found scattered through
it, so, in this instance, the statement is to hold in its sweeping generality of view,
and does not, for the purposes of our rough sketch and broad overlay of color, need
specific qualification.

To one who realizes vividly the immensity of our land, and whose sympathies axe
wide enough, inclusive enough, to comprehend and entertain the vital reality that
we are a people of one-hundred-odd millions held in common weal or woe by the
most elastic tie that ever, In the course of history, has drawn a great people in a
flexible bond: the subtle ideal of self-government, the altruistic conception of a
fundamental right to the pursuit of happiness the very soul and function of free-
dom to such a one it must likewise be apparent that, in a large measure, the sense
of liberty has not drawn even with it the companion sense of responsibility; like an
ill-mated team of horses, one of which pulls while the other balks. This curious spec-
tacle, enlarged in view from my little simile, and broadened over the people In the
length and breadth of the land, cannot do otherwise than fill the thoughtful mind
with deep regret and serious apprehension, and, at times, blot out the sunshine of
our hopes with its heavy cloud-drift of pessimism and foreboding, deepening the
general fair tone of color with sombre shades of gray and darkening gray.

Deeply must such a nature be impressed by a view, continental in its scope, of a
great people unconscious and careless of its actual greatness, and grasping, with
contracted vision and feverish nervosity, for the shadow they believe to be real. For
this shadow they pursue with an idolatrous obsession; and the fair sunlight of their

63. Responsibility: The Public

land and their Institutions, which gives them daily strength and a path so to grope
in, is held commonplace and valueless.

This sun, so much in obscuration nowadays, is the luminous spirit of Democracy.
That orb, whose superb refulgence shall dispel the heavy night of autocracy, is,
indeed, a new sun under the sun; but its day is not cloudless; would that it were!

The fact that we are so really great a potential democracy, is one which, stupen-
dous though it be, seems to impress us chiefly in its aspects of geographical spread,
physical force, and material national power, rather than in its spiritual potency and
glory as the liberating and the vitalizing impulse of the soul of the people and of the
individual man.

Profoundly does the heart cry out in yearning that this light of life might shine
forth in all its splendor upon upturned radiant faces, upon eyes that might see the
clear blue vault of our national sky, and the ample air of health and promise over
them; and that this pig-like rooting and grunting and sniffing for the hidden Dollar
might cease, if for but one clear-cut luminous moment at a time.

There is a far too wide-spread, too general feeling in the mass, and too acute an
accentuation of it in the individual, that this deeply and seemingly surely-founded
social fabric exists solely for personal profit and exploitation ; and that, once his taxes
paid, or evaded, and his voting done or left undone, he, the individual, has rendered
quid pro quo; that his responsibilities to his fellows, to his country, to himself are
at an end and that he may move on in his narrow groove of self-interest without
detriment to his fellows, to himself, or to his country.

But this view is rudely false as a theory and a practice. I can see that you, young
as you are, already have the taint of it in your blood and brain, and the knowledge
of this fills me with a certain heaviness. For in this inverted view lie the beginnings
of decay and the origins of that anaemic diathesis manifest enough in other ways
but peculiarly so in our buildings false, gloomy and pessimistic as a forest of
leafless trees in which the sap no longer freely runs.

It is useless to say that these symptoms are of the signs and sins of youth* It is not
so. They are the warnings of premature maturity; the symptoms, slight, but significant,
of disturbance of function. If these buildings of ours were merely the uncouth expres-
sion of a national rowdyism, I might have said so to you at once and spared myself
the task of analyzing their characteristics. But they are too sophisticated for that.
There is in them hardly a line that does not show on the part of the architect an
overweening desire for approbation, and the vanity of a stricken mind. It would be
laughable and indeed most unscientific to call this architecture naif; for there is in
it nothing of the direct, simple, homely method that speaks of native method. On
the contrary, it is hysterical. It signifies the morbid brain, not the fallow. It is selfish,
cynically expedient, and far adrift from the moorings of sanity. Instead of responding
to the vigor of the best that is in our national life, it reflects the banal, the intem-
perate.

Nothing more clearly reflects the status and the tendencies of a people than the
character of its buildings. They are emanations of the people; they visualize for us
the soul of our people. They are as an open book. And by this sign the tendency
today is disquieting.

Now, a people clearly is accountable, willy-nilly, for all of its acts. It cannot

64. Kindergarten Chats

logically accept responsibility for one class of acts and deny responsibility for others;
for a people is an aggregated individual, to be held in the balance of fate morally
responsible for all of his acts.

It is trite but none-the-less true to say that the national life is but the reflex of
multitudinous individual lives; that Democracy varies in its states of health accord-
ingly and likewise in the rhythm of its growth and development. Individual neglect,
indifference, inattention thus become, in the aggregate, national. If the individual
is not impressible by things, qualities, relations of a certain kind, that unimpressi-
bility becomes by force of numbers a national trait. If the individual denies or ignores
his responsibility, how shall he protest when others do so? Thus, national char-
acteristics accurately reflect the preponderance of individual characteristics; and
thus our national politics, our municipal politics and our architecture are precisely
what we are willing they should be.

Our national adolescence is passed and gone. We are entering manhood and we
must recognize and face its responsibilities, or pay the penalty. A prudent man takes
his bearings carefully. So should a prudent people entering, as are we now, over
the threshold of a new era that is to liberate moral forces of a power and insistence
hitherto unknown though not unsuspected; a century that is destined to bring forth
unique outbursts, explosions, catastrophes and the cataclysms of new birth.

But how is a people to take its bearings unless the individual reckons with himself?
And when I say the individual I mean you! I mean myself! I mean the specific,
localized sense of the individual.

To discuss architecture as a specific art is interesting enough in a way. But to
discuss architecture as the projected life of a people is another story. That is a seri-
ous business. It removes architectural thought from a petty domain the world
of the book- worm and places it where it belongs, an inseparable part of the his-
tory of civilization. Our architecture reflects us, as truly as a mirror, even if we con-
sider it apart from us. But that is not my way. I don't want you to look at it in books
or photographs. I want you to see it in situ with all its intimacy of surroundings,
uses and associations. I want you to see it growing, breathing, living, however mor-
bidly, and with however much of hectic flush, turgid opulence and internal decay.
I want you to see it just as you may see, if you will, your own people and your own
nation function, grow and take on form about you.

Architecture has been made a plaything long enough: I am tired of the farce,
weary of the melodrama, sick unto death of the masquerade.

Let us therefore place the art on an intelligible basis. Let us test it, and reveal it
for gold or dross, by the sure touchstone of healthful human nature. Let us test it by
the solvent of reason, by the crucible of common sense, by the sure test of the spirit
of democracy. Let us ignore the books, the schools, and go forth into the broad open
world where real things are. Let us there study the living organism, the real thing, in
health and illness. Let us do this with minds wide-open.

It is clear that the people, the public as a whole, are responsible for the archi-
tecture we see. Inattention, not indifference, is the root of the trouble we will
consider the trunk and branches in due time. But the responsibility does not end here,
however surely it begins here. This is its general aspect only. We will push the investi-
gation until we begin to see definitions until this word, responsibility, becomes a

65. Responsibility: The Public

living thing; until the word, democracy., becomes a living thing; until we see, beyond
doubt, that our architecture must become a living force.

XX. Responsibility: The Architect; The Schools

It would seem that inattention,, in the many, implies either that the faculties of
the individual have not been aroused and trained, or that a lethargy has supervened.
The attentive mind does not voluntarily become inactive; it is by nature lively; and,
while it may grow accustomed to move more freely in one direction than in all others,
it does not lose its common receptivity unless there be an inhibitive cause.

"Brains," are prevalent; the exercise of far-reaching thought is rare. Capacity to
receive large impressions is notably so.

It might seem as though it were easier to receive than to give on the assump-
tion that it costs nothing. But this is not so. To receive, especially to receive the higher,
finer, broader impressions of life, of nature, of humanity, implies as fine if not finer
powers than giving. One cannot, in any event, give until he has received.

It affects one curiously, therefore, to view a people or an individual so engrossed
as are we in the minute liberties the legal liberties; so cautious and guarded in
legal infraction yet heedless of the larger liberties, the larger powers not to say
the larger obligations.

Intelligence we have, but it is mainly of the kind we enthusiastically call smart,
shrewd, keen, clever, cunning, shifty. It has no background. It has no foundation
whatever, except in a raging materialism. It is useful and dangerous, heedless and
incongruous in its reversion to the primitive.

Time will answer these activities and inactivities in its own way. They concern
us here chiefly in this aspect: that the intelligent people, having delegated to a cer-
tain class called architects their need and power to build, never ask of them there-
after an enlightened accounting; never ask for that which in business affairs they
are so ready to demand, to wit: a balance sheet. Has it ever occurred to you how
such a trial balance would look? Well, it has to me. I am looking at it now; it covers
the length and breadth of the land; it shows some extraordinary entries for
instance :

Docs the intelligent public say to its architects : We have trusted your intelligent
profession: how have you administered the trust? We are an aspiring democracy;
is your aspiring art equally democratic? The intelligent public does nothing of the
kind. It asks for nothing, except in the immediate business of Dollars and Cents.
The larger business, the larger trust, it ignores as inconsequential. Nor, in effect,
does the individual ask more. An assurance that the "style" is Louis XIV, Francis
ist, Italian of this or that period, Greek, Roman, Gothic or what not, balances his
inquiry, and he is satisfied that the transaction is legitimate.

66. Kindergarten Chats

But you and I are not so easily disposed of. We have unwelcome inquiries to make;
searching questions to ask; we insist upon an accounting. For you are I: axe we not
of the intelligent public; are we not also smart, shrewd, keen, clever, cunning, shifty?
And are we not, further, of the body politic, economic, and social? Are we not also
individuals, freemen, free-lances? If democracy is vvorth anything, we want to know
what it is worth; and why we find no such entry in the balanr^ sheet. We are stock-
holders, as it were, in that Great Corporation we call our Country. That is why
we are to look into the books; not the books that you were used to In your school,
and that cultured people cherish because they satisfy the intelligence, but the books
that record modern facts, actual transactions, current phenomena. We will put an
inquiring finger here and there, and ask what this means; and moreover we will
follow back each item through the ledger, the journal, the day book, etc., and
through all the cross accounts until we run it down, until we find out all about it.
For we in our way are expert accountants, careful auditors they cannot fool us
by any double set of books. The open set already suggests a secret set. We mean busi-
ness; not Dollars and Cents business solely, but real, democratic business, and the
true purposes of the art of architecture in this land. We need to know why the
intelligent public, the intelligent individuals, the intelligent architects are jointly
and severally so lacking in intelligence. We wish to know just why and where and
when they need more intelligence. We have been told as stockholders that the most
interesting part of the books is the oustide: and this is as near to the contents as a
small stockholder usually gets; but we will take care of all that. When we are through
we may conclude that a new set of books must be opened, many old accounts written
off, and new ones entered. But sufficient for the day is the bookkeeping thereof we
will bear it all in mind as we go along.

It is perhaps not to be wondered at that architects believe themselves justifiably
unaccountable In the sense I hint at, if, perchance, they give the matter a thought.
Why should they not, you say. That why is precisely what we are going to look into :
There is an answer to the why.

If a certain man is given a certain as-it-were education as a beginning, and a cer-
tain subsequent technical training, we naturally wish to examine their value and to
inquire to what use he puts them. And, if his workmanship prove defective, if he
show weird inclinations, palm off strange substitutes, imitations, and laud these
while rather intelligently deprecating us, we want to know how and why he has come
to prefer this form of evasion. If we give him a gem and he returns us paste, if, in
a larger way, we give him, theoretically, the blessings of national freedom, of geo-
graphic grandeur, of boundless energy, of optimism and of somewhat childlike faith in
our intelligence, trusting to his skill and fidelity to shape them to our uses, and in re-
turn we receive heirlooms ; if, in the improbable case we ask that he create and he
disinters we must know why. Should we say we are Americans and he reply: The
more fools we, and we agree with him; should we, on the other hand, insist that we
are what we are, and he beguiles us we must know the reason.

We ask for style he gives us fashion. We ask for youth he give us old age.
We ask for fitting common sense he gives us inanity. And all these things we are
apt to accept as matters of course.

Now why is the intelligent architect a grave-digger does quasi-culture lead to

67. Responsibility: The Architect; The Schools

this? Why is he a ghoul is this what scholarship means? Why is he a fashion-
monger is this what is meant by taste? Why is he a plagiarist is this what books
lead to? Why is he a denier is this the flower and fruit of optimism? Why is he
constantly quoting is not free speech for use?

Where there is an effect there is as surely a cause we all know that. We see
this effect, this phenomenon, this attitude. The cause may seem obscure, but it is
not. It is a little one, such a little one: He, this architect, went to school. So it were
better if all the architectural schools were at the bottom of the sea. They have no
discernible function on land other than to make mischief.

Any one -who will take the trouble to investigate the architectural schools will
shortly discover that, as institutions of learning, so-called, they are bankrupt, if, by
solvency we assume what makes for the good of the people. Not only are they useless
to our democratic aspirations, they are actively pernicious, and their theory of opera-
tion is a fraud on the commonwealth which supports them. Their teachings are one
long continuous imbecility. They are undemocratic to the core of their dried-up
medievalism, although a democracy pays their bills and houses and feeds them in a
land of freedom. They are essentially parasitic sucking the juices of healthy tissues
and breeding more parasites.

If an institution whatsoever were to receive healthy lads, and after four years of
"care," return them mentally and physically crippled, broken-winded, weak-hearted
and infected, there would be a hue and cry. And why? Because we could easily see,
easily understand. It would speak at once to the heart, to the intelligence. It would
be everybody's business; it would create popular clamor. But, when precisely such
young men are taken in by an institution, so-called of learning, a so-called school
of architecture, and, in four years, are turned out of it mentally dislocated, with
vision obscured, hearts atrophied and perverted sensibilities who cares! And why?
Because it is not so easily seen. The social consequences are not obvious. It is no-
body's business but ours.

These institutions declare with a certain craft of speech that they train the young
to become architects ; and they allow it to be inferred that by this they mean archi-
tects fitted by a proper mental and moral training, a complete equipment of head,
heart, and hand, to deal with the realities of American life, of American democracy,
to grasp and retain its potencies, and to express and sublimate its characteristics in
the building which they will create for it. If this be so, then, certainly, judging by
their practice, their actual, devitalizing methods., architecture and feeblemindedness
are surely synonymous terms in the lexicon of these schools.

But my dear sir, you forget that I am a graduate of one of these very schools.

I have not forgotten it for one moment. Indeed, the fact that under your fair
exterior I saw shriveled faculties^ led me to take up with you and see what could
be done. I have scarcely said a word to you from the beginning of our talks, with
the exception of a few fine-spun philosophizings, that you should not have been
able to say to me, or to anyone else, had you been properly and righteously watched,
warded and trained at your school, instead of being filled with architectural piffle.
And even what little I have said, and it is or should be elementary in any true
theory of the architectural art, you have received in a semi-obscurity of mind. And
this, as I have told you before, is not your fault, for anyone can see that you are

68. Kindergarten Chats

naturally bright and apt; it is your misfortune. I tell you, if ever we are to have
a real architecture, not this infernal make-believe, this stupid scholasticism, we must
have life, not death, in our architectural schools, or else abandon them utterly.
I tell you the cry of the hour, the yearning of the hour is for life! The need of the
hour is for men! The appalling lack of the hour is true education: education that
will make men men to the heart! I am tired of man-shadows, and I detest these
schools as they are now conducted, because they make shadow-men.

Thus does the responsibility for our buildings trace itself, in part, a step farther
but this is not the end of the story.

XXI. The Professor

I think the way you have handled the schools is uncalled for; without warrant,
in my estimation, and seemingly done only to please yourself. Of what use can it
be to you or to me to slaughter in this fashion? I see no sense in it; I don't believe
there is anything to be gained by it. If you wish to show how clever you are, that is
one thing; but I believe the labor, the life-work of all well-meaning people, mis-
guided though they may be, should be treated with consideration. What good does
this perpetual hammering do, except to wound my feelings, and to slur the feelings
of those whom I had learned to love and respect. I don't like it. It's all right to
have the gift of gab, but why use it in a spirit of conscious power? I don't think
it's dignified and I don't think it's humane. You are striking at the very root of what
I have been brought up to revere. Now why is this? I have too much sense to be-
lieve you are talking at random. At the same time, what you say both soothes and
irritates me; it stimulates one moment, and depresses the next. I see no outcome.
I see only a chaos of hope and despair. Why is all this? You have undermined me,
and you will merely make of me, in turn^ a savage, as far as I can see. I don't like
it; I wish to get my bearings again and learn whether I belong to myself or not.
All that you have said thus far is elusive, full of certainty and uncertainty, begin-
ning nowhere and ending nowhere. At one moment I think it luminous and full
of brain, at another mere gush and piffle, as you are so fond of saying of others. I
am in revolt, my stomach is turning, my soul is rebelling; where are you drifting to
anyway?

Doubtless you believe all that now, and your irritation is an excellent symptom;
it shows that a ferment is going on; that your thinking faculties are awakening from
their long torpor. This delights me greatly, for when one is profoundly irritated,
something important is going on; a ferment of some kind, whatever it may be, is
at work. It is Nature's way, and possibly something may come of it in your case,
who knows! I used to have such attacks when I was a youngster. But, my truculent
friend, when you have reached a certain age, have done some sustained thinking,
have taken the glorious art of architecture one whit as deeply to your heart as I

69. The Professor

have, fought for it as you would fight not for yourself but for your "ladie faire,"
have grasped a fraction of its possibilities, have thought with care of your country,
your people, have fathomed the surface of the mind of man, have fluttered near
the surface of that infinite mind in which we can see our own fleeting reflections,
when you have drunk but one quaff from the crystal well-spring of creative, of
divine art, have felt one soft breath of the gently blowing zephyr of reality of
the infinite poesy of nature have caught one strain of the sweet song of the
seasons, you will disdain the fetid schools as I do, if by that time they be not changed
from the lethargy of their indifference, the squalor of their inattention. But who
knows! The shell may crack some day. Do you really suppose that I would speak
to you out of hand? Go to; you are young and over-sure, and over-chivalrous.

Yes, but why so pitiless?

Because the condition is inhuman.

Yes, yes; but you have excused the public in a measure, have excused the archi-
tects in a measure; is there not a word to be said for the schools? I have some affec-
tion for my alma mater. I cherish the recollection of those years, happy enough it
seemed to me, with their associations, their triumphs, failures and companionships.
What you say may be true, for all I know, but it sounds bitter, biting. It's like throw-
ing vitriol in my face. Is there no word to say?

There is. I sympathize with your feelings because I had them at one time, only
mine were rather more involved than yours; for I was left to struggle and fight alone;
to get my bearings in the wilderness as best I could, to go by the sun, the stars, the
mossy side of trees, through dense forests, over deserts, over precipitous hills, across
tangled ravines, across free-running rivers, through rain and fog and fair weather,
through swamp and marsh, through tangle and brush lonely at night, hungering,
solitary, a wanderer, a seeker, a hoper. But you you have a friend to lead you
by the hand! I am that friend! I have gone before! I know what hardship means,
and it means all things that make a man. How can you love if you have not love in
your heart? How can you sacrifice if you have not sacrifice in your heart? How can
you prevail if you have not "I will" In your heart? For the heart is all in all the
beginning and the end of man. Don't talk to me of brain. I tell you heart is all
in all. Heart means devotion, courage, consecration, tenacity, inflexibility, deter-
mination: the heart will make any sacrifice, the brain will make no substantial
sacrifice; the heart is generous, the brain is selfish.

As to your schools, I treat them usually with silence, so weak are they, and let
it go at that. It is when I think of you in such connection that I wax wroth. For
you stand, in my eye, for all the youth of our land. And the youth of a land is the
hope of that land. Woe to a land that cherishes not its youths. That land is doomed.

But you don't mean to say

No, no. That is another matter. Some day, watch the night give birth to dawn
and you may perhaps know how I feel when I look on you. But, as to the schools
a plague upon them this much may be said, and to the point you make : Silly
as they are, empirical as they are, still they are as it were the blind. But who made
them the blind? Their predecessors! The professor had his professor, and that pro-
fessor his, and before him that professor his, and on and on backwards in a thin,
singlefoot line, to the pettifoggers of the Middle Ages, the men who knew nought

70. Kindergarten Chats

g. "When the lintel is placed upon the two piers, architecture springs into being." (Stonehenge)

10. ' ; Some man at some time . . . conceived and carried out the idea of wilfully placing stones
to span over something or other." (Tiryns, Greece)

7*-

1 1 . Sullivan at Ocean Springs, Mississippi

72.

of reality and cared less. These old-timers hated the light, they hated Nature that
makes the light, they hated freedom, they worshipped rule and precept^ they loved
in their cadaverous way the schoolroom and distrusted the world. Yet, in justice,
let me say a word for your professor; To break his bondage is not easy for him;
for scholasticism becomes a habit of mind so fixed as to become an addiction, and
is eventually believed to be a virtue. Moreover, the said professor is 3 by force of
tradition and custom, shut out from the world's activities. They are to him non-
essentials. In other words, he would weigh the world outside of himself in the balance
of his conventions and, finding it wanting, would declare its aspirations nil. He is
steeped in the formularies and the disdains of intellectual aristocracy, and, through
the easy process of denial, Democracy, for him, does not exist.

But, verily, these are times when the old values must all be revalued. When they
must be weighed and judged in the balance with Democracy, and, if found wanting
in that balance, they must go. These are the times when all the old measures must
be remeasured by the standard measure of altruism, and, if found short^ must be
rejected. Such are the times, such is the trend of the age, such the inexorable drift.
So shape your thought accordingly no matter what you may think you see for
the moment, Democracy will prevail as surely as you and I are now talking here
together. It is in the soil, it is in the air, it is in the genius of our people, it is a
primordial world-aspiration; nothing can stay its urge. Don't forget this for a mo-
ment, no matter what you see or think you see to the contrary, for all such signs
are factitious, they do not touch the core of the people. This is a shaping democracy
and it will abide a democracy. Trust your country, my lad no matter about the
schools. Do exactly what they warn you not to do, and you will be apt to come
nearest to your people. I cannot tell you just now how titanic a struggle is going on
in our own land between aspirant Democracy and the inherited obsession of feuda-
lism, but time and energy, and optimism and personality will work this all out. You
may take your hand in it when, the time ripens. Go ahead as though it were settled,
for it will be settled. The forces you now think dominant are not really dominant,
they are symptoms, transitory symptoms that will be shaken off when the time comes.
Therefore, arrange your architecture for Democracy, not for feudalism. Gird up
your heart!

There is a ferment in the soil, rest assured of that. Your professor does not know
what to do with ferments. So is there a leaven in our people, but your professor
knows of no such leaven : he, who should himself leaven, knows of leavens only by
hearsay.

So have I really spared your schools, my son, the outpour of my dissent, and have
let fall but a few drops of wrath from the vial which is over-full. Let them alone:
they have that pride which goeth before destruction, and the haughty spirit which
goeth before a fall.

So goes on our investigation of responsibilities.

73. The Professor

XXS1. The Tulip

My wound is not yet healed. You have condoned the schools after a fashion, but
in a way that does not cheer. You have a thought, a feeling, in reserve. I can sense
it. You have not clinched matters in your usual style. You have a secret rancor
what is it?

Not very much. A little thought, a very little one. You have heard, perhaps,
that in growing tulips to make new varieties, the raiser does not propagate them
from the root, or from cuttings, or from subdivisions of the root, or from buddings,
or from the leaf, or from suckers or off-shoots, for all such methods tend to per-
petuate a variety. So, seeking a new variety, he plants seeds naturally or artifically
fertilized as he wishes. They come up, are pricked out and cared for. When they
are strong enough to bear it, they are set in open beds. Year after year they bloom,
a common grayish blossom showing reversion to the early tulip type. And so they
live along, a dull and stupid brood, without apparent promise, until suddenly, of
a blooming time, one of them "breaks," as they say, into a gorgeous, stately flower,
and lo! a new variety, a tulip of tulips, its gardener's joy and recompense, a new
thing of beauty born of untoward surroundings into a needy world.

And so it chills me when I think of this, as now and then I do, and as especially
I did while talking to you of the schools, that in the beds of the ill-favored whom
we perforce call teachers there is not, here and there, among them, one who bursts
his bonds and adds a glory to the race. How often have I yearned for such a break-
ing-tulip. Why in this putative flower-bed that one watches year by year, does there
come forever the same unwelcome blooming? For are they not men, however poor
in seeming promise? And may not a man perhaps burst his bonds asunder? May
not his spirit, hidden though it be, break forth, and show such form and color of
manliness that we shall say: Here is a new flower, a man-flower, come to us from
the father of flowers. But no; after five, six, seven years if there be no "break," the
seedling tulip never breaks. There is a moment in our lives when we burst our bonds
or fail to burst them.

And have we not all heard of the ugly duckling; and of Cinderella? But those
are fairy tales; and, it seems, are to remain fairy tales. Why is there so little of the
sweetness and the joy and the beauty of the fairy tale in our real life, so little of
its magic? Fairy tales are of the very bloom of the heart. Why does not the heart
bloom every day? Why is this ethereal charm found only in children's tales? Why
the Sleeping Beauty, why Prince Charming? Why do we call these things childish?
Why are we ashamed of the best, the truest, the sweetest, the loftiest in us? Why
do we relegate these things to children? Why are we the reverse of tulips? Why do
we flower so wondrously in childhood , and then, as the years pass, turn dull and
inglorious? Arc men and women less than tulips?

Well, that is beautiful. And if by any chance I acquire tulip seeds, you shall surely
grow them for me. You should have been a gardener of men.

Maybe. But were I "gardener of the skies/* no fairer orb should glow there than
shines the star of youth below. But to return to our muttons I mean our profes-

NOTE: This chapter was considerably shortened in revision.

74. Kindergarten Chats

sors. It may be rather their misfortune than their fault that they seem appointed,
in our bashful social scheme, to transmit the strain and stain of feudalism. Con-
trariwise, Democracy liberates nothing if it liberates not the mind. I hold it against
a man that he prefers not to free his mind ; that he chooses the habitual, rather than
that self-government, that initiative, which is the perpetuating force of a free people.
I know that few men care to face the truth; not because it is the truth, but because
they fear the truth may prove too large. All of which is timid and unlovely. It ill
becomes us: for Democracy is large and true. So must we be. So are we in many
ways.

I am glad to hear you say that last. It heartens me a bit.

XX1S1. An Office Building

Well, say, Papa when we talked of coming to New York did you ever imagine we
would strike anything quite so rich as this? Talking of breaks, and speaking inci-
dentally of responsibilties, this is a wild weird one! What do you call it in the
vernacular, anyway? It has a name, I suppose; everything has a name. Adam started
that. But what is it anyway this lean, long, lanky bawd, this brazen thing turned
loose on the streets? What, in or out the dictionary, do you call it, anyway?

Saint John the Divine 1 , perhaps?

Oh, no! I say, no! I draw the line at sacrilege.

I draw the line at nothing. All values are zero to me.

Bah! You are starting wickedly. To be sure, there isn't anything divine about it;
it seems more like a temple of Mammon.

Well St. John or Mammon; it's all one in New York; and I am not sure that
they are two elsewhere.

Still, there is, I think a "saint" somewhere in the name, if not in the building.

Probably the one who fell dead : it gives me that same tired feeling.

How can you make so ribald a jest? I blame myself; I started you wrong.

Because I have two good precedents: the building itself and the Great Corsican.
If they have made them, of course I can.

That's a villainous jibe, a wobbly effort for my counselor and guide. Your native
wit is on vacation. Still, I admit that the structure has a seeming locomotor ataxia
of its own; five jumps or. jerks or slides of four stories, per jerk, and a hop and a
skip at the top of my thumb; a sort of course-I-can-can, debilitated joke of its own,
and like my own, by way of a finality. It's funny enough, in its way, isn't it?

Worse than that; much worse. While we are punning: what did the Great Cor-
sican say; Scratch a Tartar and you get an emetic? Now if we scratch this Saint

1. First stone laid in 1892; the Romanesque design was later changed to Gothic.

75. An Office Building

Tartar will we find a Saint Emetic; or, if we scratch the saint shall we find an
architek? And if we scratch the architek, what then?

You might find an architecticus emeticus, perhaps, if there be, and I'm sure there
is such a thing, outside of the dictionaries, but you won't find any architecture -
that's dead sure in this case. Still, for all that, 1 find your joke coarse and repulsive.

Admitted. But so is the building. Mine may be a minstrel joke, but the structure,
likewise^ is a rude blatancy in the "minstrelsy" of our art. But there is another phase
of it to which I wish to call your immediate and helpful attention: this copious un-
swallowing and expectoration of undigested architecture makes me, in turn, ill at
the stomach and that is no joke at all.

You choose to be brutal again.

The building is so all the time.

But it is the work of an eminent architect, I am told.

Then they both are "eminently" unsavory.

Have you no regard for a fellow-practitioner?

None. I have regard only for our art. Moreover, this architect, this "eminent"
architect, save the word, has shown no regard for you or for me or for any other
passer-by. Why then should I regard him? Why should I regard other than as brutal
a man who poses openly thus to me while declaiming like a stump orator to others.
That sort of thing won't go with us. It may "work" with the public at large, but
we are not the public at large, we are the public sharpened to a point; and with
this point we will prod until we let some of the wind out of the bag. The time has
come when we must press these matters home. Why should I spare this eminent
man? Has he a license to commit a public nuisance? Does eminence necessarily imply
irresponsibility? Is he to be eminently immune? Am I to say thank you when filth
is thrown in my face? Indecent exposure of person is forbidden both by the social
and the statute law: why then this indecent exposure of a building! Is there no law
wherewith to reach such perversion? If not, let us make at once a lynch law of our
own to fit the case, and dispense justice in a primitive way. If he won't accept re-
sponsibility to society at large of his own accord, why we'll hold him responsible
to us personally whether or no for he outrages me personally. So I pass the law
and we will act on it at once, to wit: Oyez! The greater the eminence the greater
the accountability. The impudence of this building is precisely in proportion to its
size, cost, truculence and pessimism : truly an ugly work : a kind of insolence which
is, sui generis, a part of New York. By what right does this eminent hoodlum,, this
bully, make a building that must stand here for generations a monument to the
unholy passions of our civilization? Shall he escape censure? Shall he hide behind
his eminence? I think not! I am looking into the books. I want you to know the
why and the wherefore. I want you to know why it is that this building and others
of its class there are scores of them make lower New York an architectural
pest-house and a mad-house, I wish to inquire why New York with all its wealth,
and, therefore, its great power to build, has not the best, as it should have, but, on
the exact contrary, the most decadent, the most bumptious architecture in the
country. I wish to ferret out the reason. That there is a fundamental crookedness of
attitude is evident. Indeed it is something worse than that! It is akin to rapine. No
chivalry^ no scruple there!

76. Kindergarten Chats

This barbarian structure serves us as a type: and, that done, we may dismiss
its individual vulgarity and turn to the class it represents. The buildings of this class,
singly and in chorus, proclaim the negation of our art. They seem to strut and glory
in it. They stand for an extraordinary egotism: the low ebb of strength. They flout
manhood and the decencies that manhood must respect for itself in its respect for
others. Sordid folly can go no further; nor can the systematic spurning of ideals
that are worth the living for. They constitute a vast denial These buildings, as they
increase in number and uproar, make this city poorer and emptier, morally and
spiritually; they drag it into the mire of materialism. This is not American civili-
zation, it is Gomorrah. This is not Democracy, it is madness. It is the growl of a
glutton hunt for the Dollar, a yelp with no thought for aught else under the sun or
over the earth. It is decadence in its most convincing form: so truly does this archi-
tecture reflect the causes which have brought it into being. Such structures are
profoundly anti-social; and, as such, they must be reckoned with. An architect who
acknowledges no obligation to society at large, who gives no heed to the just claims
of posterity, is not an architect in my sense of the word he is an outlaw! And
so these buildings are not architecture, but outlawry.

Aren't you laying it on pretty strong?

Not half strong enough. I know the situation. I know what it means. I know how
to translate it into English. It means grandiose and selfish irresponsibility in an ex-
treme sense. It means megalomania delirium.

It means pretty stupid architecture, sure enough.

It means tainted architecture. It means a virus implanted for generations to come,
that is appalling to think of. Some day the future New Yorkers will wish to spend
vast sums to pull down these screaming nightmares of its {sic] morbid early sleep, and
be rid of them; and they will most heartily curse the generation of architects that
made them, and the money-crazy people who not only let them be done but wished
them to be done. The close student knows that these structures signify much more
than they seem to; that their meaning lies much deeper than the mere superficies
of architectural ignorance. They are an outward aspect, revolting enough to be sure,
but merely symptomatic. The truth is that they stand in evidence of forces that are
undermining American life; that are bringing about a decay out of which, if not
checked, some day will sprout a revulsion. You cannot ignore the fundamental
duties, the fundamental rights without at the same time, by such contumely, sowing
the seeds of a bitter harvest. Time brings the reckoning day, and fate strikes, at the
appointed hour. He who has ears to hear notes the first, faint rumbling of distant
thunder, the first darkening of the horizon. Will the storm swell and break in fury?
Who can say? Storms do not always break. The first rumblings may not signify.
Sometimes a change of air absorbs and disperses the gathering tempest, sometimes it
does not; but the warning is here. If this morbid architecture we are now studying
stands for anything really American, stands for forces powerful enough to produce
a result, it will be interesting to speculate on the outcome of the reckoning day. It
will be prudent to consider if in sound education may not lie a counter-force still
greater. One's temperament will enter largely into the conclusion or the prophecy
and the more broadly one knows his country, the more hopeful he must be. But
if one inclines to pessimism, he will see an horizon dark and threatening. Certainly,

77. An Office Building

one most hopeful sign, in its way, is this: that with the American people at large,
over the length and breadth of the land, education has become a passion; a passion
growing more intense, if not better-directed, as the years unfold. And he who studies
true Americanism, in the character of the people of all the people, not a part of

them - becomes thereby saner and more tranquil in his own mind and stouter

of heart. On the one hand, if social forces, broad movements, are to be interpreted
in the lurid light of these momentous structures, the outlook Is gloomy if it be taken
in other than a local sense; on the other hand, if it be considered in its purely local
and restricted sense, then New York is, conclusively, the plague-spot of American
Architecture. Once you learn to look upon architecture not merely as an art more
or less well, more or less badly, done, but as a social manifestation, the critical eye
becomes clairvoyant, and obscure and unnoted phenomena become illumined.
It is a pity that, in our studies, we have to meet and deal with so much that is de-
pressing. Yet we have no choice; we take the conditions as we find them. To know,
we must touch; and it were better not to know our art at all than not to know the
aspects of the length, the breadth, the depths and the heights. It is a curious re-
flection that here, in this city, where we should by seeming virtue of money-power
be led to expect the best, we find the worst; that, where standards should be highest,
we find them lowest; that, where we should find the highest type of responsibility and
honor, we find the grossest exhibition of irresponsibility and dishonor; and that emi-
nence, once an olive crown, is here made a slur and a by-word. Yet there you are
plain as print : the structures give the evidence, you need only bring the eye with
power to see, the intelligence to interpret. If you can read print, you can read this.

But I do not like to read that kind of print.

No more do I. But if you wish to read the current architecture of your country,
you must go at it courageously, and not pick out merely the little bits that please
you. I am going to soak you with it until you are nauseated, and your faculties turn
in rebellion. I may for the moment be a hard task-master but I strive to be a thor-
ough one. When I am through with you, you will know architecture from the ground
up. You will know its virtuous reality and you will know the fake, the fraud, the
humbug, I will spare nothing, I will reveal all for your sake. I will stir the cess-
pool to its depths, and also the pious virtues in their shallows. The suave, dexterous,
diplomatic architecture I will show you also: the kind of architecture our "cultured"
people believe in because they do not believe in themselves. No, my boy, we are in
this investigation seriously, and we will not stop until we have ventilated every
comer. Superficiality Is an every-day trait; but it is not to characterize our way*
When we strike we must strike hard and deep, and search out the evil thoroughly;
then may we turn to pleasanter things; then may we seek out the good. For there
is much good in our people: I have faith in them.

I wish you would show me some of it; for I am thus far merely blue and discon-
certed. What good does it do to turn up all this filth? You have made a bitter text
of my jest. What good does it do you to keep me in a turmoil of "uncertainty to
shift your base at every turn? To keep me harassed and worried, and to fill xne
with a loathing for architecture, instead of a love for it. You stir up nothing but
rottenness and the villainies of indecency and corruption. Oh, for a breath of air!
I yearn for a little touch of sunshine in all this pessimistic gloom; one glimpse of

78. Kindergarten Chats

lovely art, one soothing sight, a pleasant sound. My soul is sick. Is there no turn
in this long, dreary, treeless, flowerless lane? No by-path? No shady nook? Nothing
to refresh and please the eye, to bathe the heart? No sense of purity? Why did ever
I begin, if its consequence leads only and always to negation! If beauty recedes as
we advance! If poetry departs from the earth as we advance, and humans become
in our eyes merely things of dry rot or wet rot! I don't care for all this philosophiz-
ing, this inexorable analysis of morbid things, this intimate observation of ulcers
and running sores. Give me something living and beautiful, something gracious,
if it be but a tree or a flower; or let me look far over the waves on the sea shore 5
into the soft blue sky where I shall know peace of mind, relief from this night-
mare.

That suits me too, my lad. Where do you wish to go?

Anywhere.

XXIV. Summer: The Storm i

I think summer was made for me. I should have been a farmer, or a cowboy,
or a river pilot, or a trapper. I need out- doors. But, best of all, I like to lie on my
back of a summer's day, under a great old shady tree. Eh, governor? This is a
pretty spot, isn't it? See the charming valley, with the cattle and the fields; and the
hills around about. I am so lazy now that Nature restores to me her delights. She's
a good old dame, dear Nature, isn't she? It's so good to live and loaf today I'm
glad I'm alive, I rejoice that I was born. No more architecture for me; no more
of the stuffy city. This will do: Yes, it will do very well. Now I'm going to have a
good snooze, and you may keep the flies away: I hereby, and now, solemnly appoint
you mosquito net in chief to my most royal highness, to my very nibs. This is great.
I like it. And it's hot as Tophet; and I like that too. So let me sleep. If you say one
word of architecture to me, or preach one sermon, I shall smite you in my dreams;
but I shan't listen, now, or then.

Well; shall I make for you a little poem?

On your life not a poem not a poem! You put murder in my heart! I am now
like Siegfried's dragon: "I lie in possession: let me sleep."

Yes; but you know what happened to the dragon.

And I know, also, what happened to Siegfried.

But my back is not turned.

Well, if you will kindly turn your back, you may recite your poem: thus will I
make an end at once of poem and poet.

But listen This is adagio:

1. The purpose of this and the following chapter is clarified in Sullivan's letter in Appendix A.

79. Summer: The Storm

Here lies a valley in the heart of summer.

Kine In shadows

Crops in dazzling light.

Dreamy and still this air:

All songsters hushed;

Leaves stir not.

Sleeping, in her dream yon pool mirrors

a smiling cloudlet.

My, but it is gloriously hot! And I am so drowsy. The air is dreamy, the songsters
are hushed, even the leaves are still. Why are you not hushed and still like them?
I am so sleepy I could sleep the eternal sleep and wake up in a heaven where the
wicked architects cease troubling and weary buildings are at rest. Sleeping I would
dream, and dreaming, I would mirror a pool of loveliness without a sorrow and
without a blight.

Then listen to my song :

Now am I 'neath the heavy, spreading bough.

Now wild flowers and the vine

About me sigh.

In this sweet spot,

Dreaming life's dream anew,

Near ferny bank and this tree's friendly bole

I rest.

There's a mosquito biting my ankle; and you are pricking my ear with your poetic
bill. That gives me a hazy idea : In accordance with the latest findings, if you locked
up a raving poet, and several mosquitoes in the same room, and then put a prosy
man in the room to be bitten In turn, would the virus be transmitted? And so with
the money-man, and the poverty-man, and so on? Still, this is a half-dream. My
eyes are closed, and so is my mind. Your words are rather soothing and soporific.
Give me another verse. The air is heavy and still precious sleep !

Heavy is this air with breath of growing things.

Benumbed they thirst,

Overstrained, they languish:

In sorrow they are near to break and go :

By slender thread Life holds them here.

How still the air in this keen brilliant moment;

Exquisitely like unto a breath

Death sighs in his approach;

Answering, nearby,

A zephyr yearns,

Heart-broken,

And expires;

Murmuring,

The woods sway

In languor they respire.

Was that thunder I heard or am I dreaming? A rumble, it was, in the stillness.
Hear the birds twitter. Feel the little breeze.

80. Kindergarten Chats

Sad dreams flutter in the grove

Chirping dismally o'er hidden nests of young.

Rumbling from beyond the hills

A deep boom

Softly wakens slumbering woodland echoes:

But they turn, and sleep again.

Nerveless, the air quivers;

Quickening, in startled breeze.

Anxiously it sweeps away toward speedy end

Anon impaled upon the weary point of vacancy.

Now falls with double heft

The pall of silence.

Now doth our very heart forget his beat.

But it was thunder! There it is again! We are to have a storm, and I shall be
cheated of my nap ; and all on your account. Still, it might be fun to watch a storm.
I don't care what happens when I'm in the country. Nothing can feaze me
after the poetry after the poetry?

Do you see that bank of cloud away off yonder! Let me try my hand:

Lowering., a dark form overtops the hills.

Gloomily it rises

Muttering, gathers and prepares.

It sweeps in dark array,

Shaping in dense phalanx.

Now you go on. See the lightning! The rain will soon be here. It's going to be a
wild one. There's a shelter, there. Let's get under it, or we'll be soaked. Now you
go on as she comes up fire away with the poem.

Shaping in dense phalanx,

Marching on the sun,

Its flashing armament doth crumble the dry silence

As a twig is broken.

On his blue throne the sun is overturned

And pushed aside.

Well, I should say he was. Here comes the wind. What a flash! and hear that
rattle! It's going to be a nerve- jarrer. See the rain coming! It's right upon us. Get
out your words, and I'll chip in the responses :

'Mid wind and roar the large drops patter,
Darkness with a firm hand grips the land.
Slender grasses bow down.
Trees sway and toss.

In a flash the air is ripped in twain,
And torn in shreds.

Crashing into chaos, strewing the fierce windy

Jolting from cloud to savage cloud

The maddened thunder rushes to the front.

8 1. Summer: The Storm

The ripe rain fails in torrents.
Its downpour strenuously whines,
With eager wail.

Wildly, the Earth, in glutton frenzy, drinks it up:
Rolling in flood and racket,

And delirious gray gloom.

Soaking and reeking in tumult,
Overrunning,

Reckless of plenty, and
Mad from overmuch

While the o'erburdened storm, with wild exultant cry doth stagger to the climax
of his power, and sinks, in ecstasy of death, upon his sumptuous throne.

My, but it's a terror! They say every storrn has two lives. Watch it! Isn't it in-
spiring in its frenzy! Whew! The mist of the rain is blowing in, but let it blow. Did
you ever? What a roar! Are we to finish

Loud groans the heavy Wind,

Shouldering his load

On massive bending frame.

All clouds descend and melt.

White bolts drop and drop in misty din.

The air is full of water and of noise :

Of murmurings and protests,

Whines,

Howls,

Ecstasies,

And blazonings of light.

Now they swirl,

And sway,

Into a grayish sodden monotone.

Now doth strange music rumble,

In the caverns of the deeply leaf -bound temple

Where my soul was gone to pray.

Within the storming silence,

Its harmonies unfold in a sonorous funeral-chord,

O'erwhelmingly triumphant, in gladness and in joy.

Slowly attuning,

Solemnly arranging,

Expanding^

Upbuilding,

It swells in peroration!

Arising,

On my winged spirit,

In pomp of glorious gloom

It doth bear the Dead One,

The Great One,

82. Kindergarten Chats

The Mighty Storm,

'Mid train and muffled thunders

And soft gleams of watery light,,

Solemnly, in pride,

O'er hill and vale,

O'er tree and plain,

Toward a cloudland home,

Where stands the ancient tomb

Of his Fathers.

Bravo! You concluded bravely I Now why doesn't it occur to you to do that in
your architecture?

Oh, bother architecture! This is too interesting.

But it's the same thing.

I don't care. Let's go on with our picture. See the rainbow forming so proudly
in the sky! It reminds me of old Noah and the covenant: "I will set my bow in
the cloud." Let me begin this time:

The pensive widowed rain,
Drying her warm, gray tears,
Furtively, with timorous tread,
Doth follow,

Ragged cloud-streaks swing toward the day's end.

Rain-water driblets putter, here and there, from shuddering trees.

The downcast sun pencils a new world of lengthening mellow shadows.

Tree-tops glisten in crowns of gold.

With arch superb,

Heaven's bow doth span the sky:

A smiling promise o'er the land,

Gracefully beneficent,

Winsome, and fair for the heart to look upon,

Soft arch in softer skies,

Serenely flitting sign of happiness,

All hail to thee!

All hail, thou beauteous bow!

Thou bow of loveliness!

Thou smile of graciousness!

Emblem of purity!

Sign of peace!

See how the light is fading, softer and softer, after the sunset; and the calm of
evening is coming on; how moist, and fresh and sweet the valley looks! I am going
to try my hand again :

Refreshed and satisfied

How peacefully the vale doth smile.

With clear sweet countenance.

And supple limbs

She doth compose herself

To meet Sleep's gentle greeting.

Soft flits the evening swallow.

83. Summer: The Storm

Murmuring, Night's happy insect-music

Doth begin.

While Dusk draws o'er this lovely pair, the tenderest of veils, with

silent, dewy fingers
Moonlight vigils
O'er their dainty dreams.

Now dreams within my dreams arise!

On airy wings,

In silvery, glinting coteries,

Flitting here, and there, amid the fairy throngs of tender, winged

wights that charm my thoughts
With their sweet,
Humming,

Laughing songs of crescent leafy
Moonlit glee!

Now happiness doth steal,

So softly,

To the heart:

Rejuvenating every wearied hope,

Tranfiguring all sorrows into joys

That I would dream,

And dream once more

Within this hallowed rest

Until

Betimes

The Dawn

With mellow flute

Shall shepherd home all wandering

Airy fancies of the night.

And I, my son, were I to take up your beautiful and youthful discourse, your
sweet and pensive mood, your airy fantasy, would turn it thus :

Arising in these dreams

And taking manful shape,

Thou

Quickenest,

Master,

O'er a land more parched than this!

O'er its spent soul, thou pourest,

Master,

In abundance, thy life-lengthening waters :

To reassure

And to make glad

Man's weary heart!

Momentous that great afternoon,

Wherein thou walkest,

In thy gathering mood!

Slowly thou shalt prepare.

Portentous thou shalt rise o'er those great hills that shut out,

84. Kindergarten Chats

From thy people,
Their true horizon!
Thy power
Arisen from thy land.
Shall fall to it again!
Its cry hath gone to thee:
Thou shalt assuage!

Thou soul, pregnant of many souls,

Thou life, sublimed of every living thing,

Thou, sum and substance,

Form and spirit,

Last word, in a long, long tale,

Thou,

Poet!

Thou, Redeemer!

Gome!

That's fine and great, and noble but my feet are soaking wet, and the water
has been trickling down my neck, and it's dark and I'm hungry, and a little heart-
sick and lonesome. I know a little inn in the village not far away. Let us go there
and get dry, and have a good supper. I think a steak would go well, after the airy
nothings we have fed on. Come, let us go on to the village. I want a good sleep
tonight; and then, I'm going to stay here in the country for several days. I want
to be alone. I have a few things I want to find out for myself. And, as you have
business in town tomorrow, that will arrange itself nicely. Perhaps when I see you
again I may tell you a thing or two, but I won't promise.

Here we are! Isn't it a charming affair, bowered in vines, with a quaint garden;
lights twinkling in the windows and all dozing in the soft pure blue of the moon-
light. I think I can have a very pleasant time here all by my lonesome, for a few
days.

XXV. A Letter

Dear Uncle:

Surely the country was made for me. So much so indeed that, instead of return-
ing to the town, I send you this letter as an ambassador, to arrange a modus vivendi,
while I remain here with my new love my true love. When I awoke the next
morning, after the storm, the birds were singing and you were gone: for both of
which happenings I was truly grateful: grateful to the birds, for their morning song
sounded chummy and bright; glad to be rid of you, because you oppress me, weary
me and hold me too strictly to the lines. Now I'm going to roam in the pasture,
fancy free and harness free.

85. A Letter

I doubt not that I shall be glad enough to see you later on, when I shall have
gotten all tangled up in my own half -spun lariat and need unwinding; but not now,
not now. I am suffering just now from mental over-nutrition, or rather non-assimila-
tion: and what I need most especially is not more feeding, but a little rest for my
alleged thinking apparatus. And here I find it to my taste: No hurry, no worry, no
one to curb and interfere. The day after the storm our snug little valley was as fresh
as a morning-glory; full of color and life and pleasantness. I took long walks, on
the roads, up lanes and across country, and sat in the woods, and sat on the hill-tops,
and took it all in.

To say that I have been entirely happy is not quite true, although pretty nearly
so. What has bothered me is that since our interview with the storm I have not felt
quite the same concerning things in general and myself in particular. I can't get
it through my head yet, how you came to inveigle me into taking a hand in your
so-called poem, and how you managed so cleverly to get rne excited about it. You
had some scheme or other, I don't doubt; but I can't quite figure out what it was.
But no matter, you were one too many for me that time, and I'm sure that I haven't
any fault to find; only, I can't straighten it out to my satisfaction; for I want to tell
you, confidentially, that I didn't sleep much that night, but made all sorts of crazy
poems to all sorts of bewildering things till along toward morning, when I fell asleep,
at last, only to make fantastical strings of high-sounding words in my dreams. I
guess, as William said, there isn't much difference between a poet and a madman,
after all; only, one is a little more "regulated" than the other. And that isn't the
worst of it: I've been trying it on since. I made a little one to a weed the other
day. I like weeds: they have so much "style" to them; and when I find them where
they have grown free they seem most interesting and suggestive to me. I think I'm
something of a weed myself: if I felt quite sure of it I wouldn't be altogether un-
complimented. And then there are so many of them, and they differ so much in
shape, color and arrangement; the form follows the function so beautifully, as you
would say. I don't know the names of any of them being city-bred. They wanted
me to study botany when I was a youngster, but I wouldn't have it; and now I'm
sorry. I wish I knew the names of the little rascals; then, it seems to me, I could
talk to them better but that's telling I didn't mean to let you into my secret;
but it slipped away from me, so let it go. And then I made another to a gorgeous
butterfly I saw poised like a fairy on a gorgeous open flower. I was sitting on the
ground close by, when she came fluttering along. It began this way for I felt
small :

You gorgeous y perambulating art-gallery!

Why do you come along.

To make me feel like thirty cents;

With your wings immense

And your color so strong?

*Tis no subject for raillery!

The creature was so beautiful that it almost made me angry; but I soon got over
that. And I went along for six verses and the butter flew, that is the flutter blew,
away, over the fence, into the neighbor's garden. The last verse is rather pretty,
and went something like this, at first:

86. Kindergarten Chats

They call you Psyche, dainty soul;

I call you sweetheart^ honey-seeker.

Superb of hue, this sunny day's delight,

I would not by the faintest move your tiny breast affright.

Sweets to the sweety they say 3 so here's a beaker;

Oh> quaff my song, in turn, and bless the bowl!

But I did not quite Hke it, and so made it go this way:

They name you Psyche, dainty breath;

I call you fair honey-seeker, and my joy.

So airily, so sweetly to alight and sway,

So prettily to fill my heart with pure delights so gay:

It really makes my thoughts grow meeker and more coy,

And wiser as my uncle saith.

I wanted to get in a rap at you, but it seemed, on reflection, rather far-fetched;
and, moreover, neither of the verses said what it was in my heart to say. So I
brooded awhile and tried again this way:

Oh, quaff my song, thou Psyche, fluttering!

The bowl is not a flower 'tis only L

But what is in my heart, oh, quaff, y tis all I have to give:

3 Tis thus I say to you that I, too, Psyche, live.

You will not, 1 am sure, my verse, deny:

For in my soul the storm of yesterday is muttering.

This came nearer what I really wanted to say, but still it isn't quite it. It doesn't
exactly ring the belL If I had you to coach me and give me the pitch and the key,
and the counterpoint, as they say in music, and fill in the orchestration, and beat
time, and do a few other things, it would go better. But I've found out this, by
myself: That it doesn't do merely to have feelings, however fervent they may be.
You must have also a pretty clear idea what it is that you feel, and a still clearer
idea of what you are going to do with the feelings: and this is where I fall down,
and miss you, uncle. It's one thing to feel, and quite another undertaking to create.
And yet you can't create if you don't feel. I might have looked through some books
of verses, but I know perfectly well that I wouldn't have found anything in any
book that would tell just how I felt toward that butterfly; it might tell how the
other fellow felt toward something else, but that wouldn't do me any good. I want
to know how I am going to express, fully and intelligently, what I feel. I remember
what you said about words, and about the imagination, and about function and
form, and I think you said: First catch your function; if you didn't, I say it now.
So you see, I'm considerably up a stump. I wonder if I'm going to have as much
trouble with my architecture as I have had in trying to make a few verses to a
butterfly? For I have a dawning suspicion that making a real building, as you would
call it, and making a real poem, are pretty much one and the same thing. It was
all very well when you got up steam for me, so to speak, and sort of hypnotized
me into oratory. That is to say, you practically suggested everything; but when I
try it alone, it doesn't seem to go so smoothly, by any means. And yet something
tells me that I am on the right track; and that what I need is to persevere and not

87. A Letter

get discouraged, and to pay more attention to what you say. For I am beginning
to suspect that you have a pretty complete system up your sleeve somewhere. I
have a number of rods in pickle for you; but when I try them on I suppose you
will bluff me off as usual. Of course, I didn't send you the verses for themselves,
but merely to show you the particular kind of trouble I'm having. Still, take it all
in all, I'm having an exceedingly fine time here, and am learning something every
day. I can now tell the difference between a cow and a horse, between a pine-tree
and an oak-tree. But when a farmer told me the other day that there were ten
different kinds of oaks, four different kinds of pines, and thirty or forty different
kinds of other trees hereabout, it gave me a shock, a shock of dread lest you might
suddenly bob up and say that each one of these blooming trees has a function and
the form of each follows that function with absolute fidelity, and you would expect
me to observe them and give strict attention to the differences when they all look
alike to me now; and worse than that you would probably tell me there are here
some three or four hundred different kinds of plants, several hundred kinds of in-
sects, and dozens of kinds of birds, and that each has its complete correspondence
of function and form, and, worse than all, you would tell me that the ability to note
such correspondences constitute the ABC of architectural knowledge. All of which
I would be weak enough, I suppose, to believe. Well, I've gabbled along at a great
rate. They've called me twice, for dinner, and still I scribble away without having
any too clear an idea of what I've written. Isn't it Ninon de Lenclos who says: "He
who would write a perfect love letter must begin without knowing what he is to
say and end without knowing what he has said?" Not that this is a love letter I
wouldn't have you get that idea. Nor need you pry into my business and inquire
how I came to know that Ninon said that. That is my affair. So, ta-ta, until we
meet. Then I shall have a long catechism to fright you with if I don't get inter-
ested in something else meanwhile. Look for me soon.

Devotedly yours,
P.S. I wish you were here.

XXVI The Awakening

Well, here I am corne back like a bad penny and a pretty brown penny at
that, don't you think? I made the acquaintance of some interesting lads, up yonder,
farmer-boys all of them, and we had great sport together. They put me on to ever
so many things new to me and as I kept my eyes and ears open, I have come
back with so many new impressions

You have come back quite a chatter-box; that, at least, is evident.

Well, why not? It does me good and does you no harm. Besides I have so many

88. Kindergarten Chats

things to tell you that I hardly know where to begin. My thoughts have become so
lively, and almost robust. But I suppose the country air, the country sights and
sounds, good health and good company have much to do with that.

I should say so there's nothing better for one's mental health. The faculties
always cleanse and brighten and glow in Nature's bath. I am glad you have found
it out for yourself, for what one finds out by and for himself is always impressive
and sure to last. It's the old story: "Experience teaches." But the adage has been
assumed perhaps to mean that it is unpleasant experience which teaches. You will
find out, however, as you go along, that pleasant experiences, the wholesome, the
animating ones, enrich far more abundantly than do the others. It is in our nature
to be happy: the wise understand this and profit by it to the utmost, but wisdom in
this respect, as in many others, often comes too late.

You believe in athletics, don't you? So do I, and \ took plenty of exercise, mostly
walking. I was up with the birds and to bed with the chickens, except when the
moonlight nights were too fascinating, and then I did all sorts of foolish things. "A
healthy mind in a healthy body" is a pretty good maxim. I believe in it. But I want
to tell you, just the same, that I used to get morbid now and then while I was away.
There is something about nature that gets into you pretty deep and stirs you all
up and brings all sorts of strange emotions to the surface. At least it affects me that
way and so I suppose it must others.

You have but little justification for so supposing. That it should be so I don't
deny: but I know a great many people who are simply bored in the country. That
is because they have lost natural spontaneity of feeling, the capacity to enjoy simple
pleasures, and to discern the beautiful when it is before their eyes. To many people
Nature suggests nothing, signifies nothing, is nothing. When the sun sets it means
for them that a light must be struck. When the trees and fields are rich in summer's
verdure, that means nothing one mosquito would outbalance it all; when the
trees are bare in autumn, that means nothing; when the earth is white to the horizon
under winter's coverlet, that means nothing; the awakening of spring with all its
fantasy of joy, of color, of youth, means nothing to them other than colds and wet
feet. They prefer to see the springtime in midwinter in the picture galleries, where,
within the confines of a single frame, can be found pink sheep, pink skies, pink grass
and a pink shepherdess. You pay your money and take your choice: give me the out-
of-doors. It is a metaphor, infinite of interpretation, this out-of-doors.

I know it. You either see nothing, in which case you are satisfied, or, once you
go beneath the mere surface you see so much that you are astonished; and then you
see a little further and you become depressed; a little further and you are be-
wildered; a little further and you are frightened; a little further and you become
passionately enamoured; a little further and you become morbid; after that I don't
know what happens it's as far as I have gone. My natural cheerfulness pulls me
out all right for the time being, but I began to get a pretty vivid idea of what you
mean by realities; it came home to me, as they say in the heart-to-heart talks. What
frightened me most and gave me a creepy sense of what seemed to be my own un-
reality was that after I had looked into it awhile, Nature seemed to be more real
than I. As I followed, it eluded me; and in proportion as it eluded me it became
more and more real. I reached out my hand to grasp and it vanished! I opened

89. The Awakening

my heart, and it advanced; as I softened, it softened; when I wept, it melted in a
blur; when I smiled, it smiled. Oh! If only I were a child! But I am already too
old, young as I am! You have put the virus in my blood and I am to be unhappy
within. I know it! I am in love, in awe-stricken love with Nature's spiritual beauty,
with the wondrous reality of living things, with the sense of being; but it is a hope-
less, hopeless enamourment; a fascination, an infatuation that avails nothing! To
think that I could not make a poem to a butterfly! That so simple and beautiful a
thing escaped me utterly! That the exquisite reality of life and color floating so
daintily through a dainty summer day, alighting like an elfin sprite upon the sump-
tuous flower to think that it would not receive the touch of my coarse hand, of
my coarse mind! That the flower and the butterfly knew each other and seemed to
love each other in that still moment in the balmy ambient air, but they knew not
me, and I knew not them! Oh, the pity of it! Oh, the wretchedness of it for me; the
hopelessness of it! But I am caught, and I shall try, I suppose, and try, and try
again and always fail! And yet something HERE tells me that I shall not wholly
fail; something here, where I put my hand upon my breast. My mind says I shall
fail utterly, my heart says I shall not wholly fail. Which shall I believe, my mind
or my heart? Why did you let me find these things, if I am to go on forever and
forever unavailingly? Why have you caused this well-spring to flow, if its waters
avail not, if they are never to reach the sea, or even to form a lake or a shady pool,
but are to dry up on the sands, to disappear in an arid human waste? Why did you
do this? And yet I would not have it undone. No, not for all the world, for it is a
world, a new world, a new-found land and I am its solitary inhabitant, its Adam.
I am my Adam the first man : but God does not walk with me in the garden.
I do not hear his voice in the grove and say Here am I. So turns my mind upon
itself and feeds upon itself and impoverishes itself and poisons itself in my moments
of introspection, in my hours of solitude, of solitude in a crowded universe, of soli-
tude in the midst of Nature's myriad populations, a stranger in this house of many
mansions, an outcast from my world, a guest unbidden at the feast: unwelcome in
a garden, unwelcome to a flower, unwelcome to a butterfly! With them but not of
them! Friendless and alone! And then I awaken as it were, and I'm the same old
two and sixpence no, not quite the same, only in my moments of bravado, or is
the other bravado, which is the bravado, anyway? I am changed. I shall never be
the same again, and you did the mischief why did you get me into that storm-
business anyway? Why did you slay that other dragon and don the tarnhelm and
by the tasted blood of the dragon know the language of the birds? Is that Siegfried
myth a metaphor, or a fabulous happening? Is it an allegory, or a child's tale? Why
did you cause a storm to arise and break within me, was I a valley in the heart of
summer? Was there a parching valley in my heart? Was I languishing in the
drought? What did the storm mean? Was it, too, a metaphor, an allegory, or was
it like my butterfly, my Psyche, a reality of the spirit?
But I did not make the storm.

To be sure, you didn't, you seized it though and made it your own, and it seemed
easy at the time, but I can't do it with the simplest thing I find,

You are impatient, my dear boy, and a little nervous, and overwrought and ex-
go. Kindergarten Chats

citable. Slightly hysterical, I might say. Wouldn't you like to take a little stroll to
divert your mind?

I wouldn't mind the stroll if I didn't have to see any buildings.

Then you don't wish to look at buildings today?

Indeed I do not. I want to get this tangled skein straightened out a little. I want
to know where I am.

Well, my lad, take it easy. It will gradually straighten out of itself, for the skein
is a living skein. Don't overtax yourself. Nature is benevolent and will help you
along. Her ways are healing ways. Besides, you have probably forty or fifty years
ahead of you. Don't try to do it all in a day. Let time do her share; she is a skillful
worker. A good farmer does not pull up his wheat grains to see if they are growing,
he waits for them to sprout. Time and the sun bring bloom to the clustered grape,
ripeness to the green, hard fruit. Learn to wait. And while you are waiting, let your
inner development go on as Nature meant it should.

But these things, these feelings, are new to me!

They are not new to you! You were born that way. These activities of the mind
and heart have merely been lying dormant. They were what I call suppressed func-
tions. Now they are awakening again into life and they bring a certain pain and
fever with them. Your morbidity is but the shadow of a bird of passage. Be of good
cheer.

XXVII. A College Library Building

My boy, if you wish to come in touch with a building that is a butterfly and yet
not a butterfly, here is an opportunity. Here you have erudition, in all its fluttering
iridescence, sipping the sweets of the past. [Fig. 7]

How do you like it after your sojourn among green fields and breezy trees? You
should cherish this structure. This is a show building. It is precious. It is modish.
It is of the wax-works of our art. It is of the rubbing of hands of our leading man-
milliner.

I don't know whether I care or not.

But you should care. You are too young to be blase. Leave that to your elders
who have ingested the curious sweets of learning and, peradventure, have found
them bitter in result.

I don't know that I care whether they are sweet or bitter.

But you should care. Here is your paternal double your prototype. Here is a
building which, regionally, typifies your state of mind, though from differing causes.
Look into it as into a warped mirror, and there see your unhappy wits reflected,
redistorted and redistributed. Others are as pessimistic as you think you are, but
their pessimism is relatively real, at least it results from genuine exhaustion. Yours
is a bird of passage.

91. A College Library Building

How do you know that?

Do you really suppose the world is now revolving in an opposite direction because
you happen to have passed a few days in the country? You do not know the great
earth, my tender satellite. It turns as serenely now as though you never had been
born; and it will doubtless so continue.

But I'll make it turn the other way.

Bravo! That's the stuff of heroes. Fix the illusion quickly, firmly. Gird up your
heart and you are girded up. Faint heart ne'er won fair lady. Faint heart never won
fair anything. So gird up your heart, for there is girded up the race; for there is
girded up your destiny. Who shall say you nay when your heart is large and bold. Be
not afraid. The world is yours. Gird up the precious beater in your breast your men-
tor, your sure guide. Cast to the wild winds all wild doubt. Embark with a sure foot
on the lustrous foaming sea. Let the wild wind blow and veer, let wild storms come,
and wild clouds loom and drift. What care you, my hardy mariner; storms are storms
and sunny times are sunny times : waves are waves, and spray is spray. Let the good
craft dash and beat, for the sea is the sea and the sailor is the sailor. Gird up your
heart for changing weather. Would you have your craft of porcelain and the little
waves of porcelain on a little porcelain sea? Gird up your heart, for life has every
weather, every water's depth.

I cannot gird up my heart for it is sick and weak.

What! So soon!

I mean

Ah, wait until you are blase of being blase! Wait until the worm, the fatal borer,
shall reach your root; then will your wholesome leafage of a verity turn pallid, and
fall ^ has happened to this man. Look at this mirage! See the Ionic columns, the
entablature, the dome and so forth. Note especially the and-so-forth, for it is the
untold that counts here the discreet silence. Some say it is eloquent; and you may
say in turn that it is indeed eloquent. So are the dumb eloquent of speech; so is the
exile eloquent of his country. As we gaze we pass into the land of expatriation.
This, it seems, is the library building of a great academic institution of learning how
to unlearn: of learning self-forgetfulness, self-denial. Of learning not only how to
forget oneself, to deny oneself, but to forget and to deny one's land. To learn how
to forget, to learn how to deny life cautiously, is somewhat the fashion; and by such
token this is a modish building. Men must be scarce where such neutrality prevails.
Surely we are in the land of expatriation. Surely this is architectural nihilism. Surely
this is a vacant seed-pod : an inversion of human faculty. The saving grace of humor
is not here. The worm is at the root of the rose-tree.

NOTE: The rest of this chapter was cut.

* Kindergarten Chats

XXVIII. Revulsion

I have had my little emotional, and intellectual, and moral and spiritual, and
democratic, and feudal jag, my fidus Achates my friend, philosopher, hocus-pocus
and guide. I have been turned inside out by you, and put back in place by myself.
I, no adept in philosophy, have been philosophized to the death, burdened, dark-
ened, nauseated and made rebellious by your psychology, or perhaps I had better
say, your pseudo-mysticism. For, what use there is in it I can't perceive. To be
sure, I have been on the stormy sea of your verbiage and I have been thereby
made ill; but now I am getting my land legs again and I turn as ever when I am
normal to my first learnings and my first teachings to the classic; to what they told
me at school, and what, in my heart, I believe in spite of all your jugglery with
words, with my emotions and my thoughts; and in spite of the fact that truly you
have turned me out of doors. Yet I come back, I come back! You can't ignore the
classic. It is too firmly fixed, too deeply rooted, too surely sanctioned by the lives and
the thoughts of the best men who have gone before us. It won't do! I can't stomach
it! I tell you I was born a classicist and, country or no country, butterfly or no butter-
fly, you or not you, my heart turns where it will turn. You cannot reason with me
and that's an end of it. I won't subject myself to your domination. I won't be your
plaything. I may be the slave of tradition, for tradition has roots of power holy and
deep, and reaching down and back through the generations, the centuries, the ages.
But I can't stand your transplanting: I am already too old for that too young in my
age, too old in my youth. I am too far gone; my earlier education has sunk too deep.
I can't give it up: I cannot! I cannot!! Don't ask me to go further. Let us drop this
futile investigation which is leading me only further and further into the wilderness,
into the desert, into a wholly new and unexplored Sahara of our own. My heart is
drying up. Of what avail all this journey, all this hardship? I don't want any more
of it. I quit! Do you understand me? I quit!! Let me go back to the fold. I am a
lost sheep. I am hare-brained to have let you lead me astray. I say quit and I mean
quit, a permanent quit to a philosophy which has no bottom and no top, no sides
and no ends. Help, help! Come back to me, my Alma Mater! Put the ground of your
sure strength once more under my feet! What are your scarecrows to the scarecrows
I have seen with this man, this ghost, this phantom! Away, all these fantasies, these
supersensibilities! Away, all these bugaboos, hobgoblins, fairies, brownies, sprites and
elfins of a mind too full! Give me again my dungeon cell, I have too much of liberty!
What can I do with liberty? What can any man do with liberty? Liberty is a curse
for such as I not a boon! Freedom is a curse, not a blessing! Democracy is a
humbug and a wild, disordered dream, a fanatical dream which disturbs, distorts
and distracts all realities for such as I: a nightmare in which plus becomes minus
for me, and minus becomes plus for others. A bos Democracy! It is the refuge of
the common, the average, the vulgar. Democracy eats with its knife. Do you mean
to tell me a man can be a real man in a Democracy? A Dollar-man, yes! A cheap
Dollar-man, cheap among the cheap. Look at them: all cheap, the richer the cheaper.
Look at the faces : see them shudder all sordid, all pig-eyed, all self-centered in
their democratic savagery; all cave-dwellers, troglodytes, men of a modern stone-age,

93. Revulsion

with dirt under their brain-claws, crafty and cruel, selfish, noxious a poisonous
mob! You talk of men! I am looking for men!! But I shall never find men under
this cloud and murk of democracy. I want men who are men men of distinction,
men of quality, men of tone, men of elevation of mind and spirit, men of humanity
and savoir faire and you can't show them to me here. You mean well enough
in your way; but while you are continually prating of realities, you, yourself are ob-
livious to them. Reality is with you a handy phrase, a word-picture, an apparition
which your ego projects into the outer world.

But I tell you that I see realities. I am of the new generation. I have eyes of my
own, and I tell you that there is only one thing that any pair of eyes can see with
absolute certainty nowadays, and that is the DOLLAR! To deny its reality, to refuse to
worship, means ruin.

What a running at the mouth!

I won't let up. You are running counter to your day and generation and to mine.
You seek to impose your will : to substitute your vision to create an apocalypse
for a heedless world. Take my word for it, I am right and you are wrong. You are
of the old generation, I am of the new. It makes me heartsick to see the stubborn
drift of your purpose. Now my youth has come to supplant yours. You have told me
much that has awakened and strengthened me; but it has made me strong only to
oppose you. I will be myself! I shall think what I choose and do what I choose! I
shall gird up my heart, but it will be an up-to-date heart when I gird it. It will be a
rebellious heart. Why should I differ from my day and generation? No one will pay
me any Dollars for being a seer and a prophet. Seers and prophets are not now in
demand; if they were, the department stores would keep them. Go to, my senescent
friend ! I don't want any genius in a garret, in mine. If the dear public wants genius,
it can say so and come up with the wherewithal. I don't propose to anticipate any
demand. I don't propose to put anything on the market that the public doesn't want
and is [not] ready to pay for. My personal comfort is what / am looking for, and
your dear democracy meanwhile doesn't seem to be disturbing itself very much about
geniuses. What on earth do they care about geniuses, anyway? Democracy has
nothing to do with genius, it has to do solely with the commonplace, the average, the
lowest possible average, at that. I don't want to be fined for being a real architect,
I don't want to be fined for being a real thinker, I don't want to be fined for being
a real anything. Democracy is a rough and tumble affair, and I know it. The people
don't know anything and don't want to know anything, and do you think I'm going
to be fool enough to try and tell them anything they don't want to know? Not
much! You know as well as I do that the Nazarene said, "Cast not pearls before
swine lest they turn and rend you." 1 Now anyone not familiar with democracy might
dismiss this statement as a light figure of speech, inasmuch as no one would be likely to
cast pearls before swine; but I tell you the essence of it is that the damned creatures
will rend you not merely that they don't want your pearls, when they expected
swill, but they will ren d you because you disappointed them in their rations of offal ;
and such is your sweet, homespun democracy! Try them once. Try a few pearls
and look out for the teeth! So if my generation is unreal, I am going to be unreal also;
for all the leading men in a democracy understand and cater to the stupidity of the

1. Here, as elsewhere, Sullivan quoted rather freely.

94. Kindergarten Chats

masses. And I have heard enough of your talk to know that my stupid masses will be
the people of culture, and I will fake them to the queen's taste none of their teeth
for me! I shall, on the contrary, receive their most gracious squeaks. Truth is all
right, as a bit of exquisitely delicate personal bric-a-brac; but don't try to sell truth to
a false generation! You hear me! I am no philosopher, but I think I have a grain or
two of American common sense. How in the world did you ever get such highflown
notions about democracy? Don't you know, doesn't your common sense tell you, that
democracy is merely a great herd, of people, getting along as peaceably as they can,
but everyone goring his neighbor, I tell you democracy is a herd of cattle, a herd
without a driver, without a whip. They huddle, and press, and trample in their own
dung. They are a dull-eyed, patient crew; helpless and inert without a leader. Bah,
with your democracy! Democracy means, merely, the liberation of numbers, the wan-
dering and huddling of helpless units. It means disorder, filth, brutal unity, coarse
appetites a stifling crowd! A la port el Your Democracy! Give me an autocrat!
Give me a MAN, a real man! A man big enough and strong enough and willful
enough to guide and to govern. The herd wish to be governed; they need a powerful,
a dominating hand. They don't want to think: they have no vision. Give me the
strong hand, the iron will, the keen intelligence, and that higher sense of humanity
which can care for the herd and protect the herd against the hoof disease of its own
cowardly crowding, and against the insistence of its own proletariat. Talk of your
democracy! Bah, with your democracy! It takes brains to govern and guide and fore-
see! The very disease of which you are talking and have been talking is democracy
itself; for democracy is, in itself, a disease. Men are not born equal! Some are born to
rule, some to serve. It must be so, for only the hearts of the rulers are girded up.
They do not value life. It is only the herd who fear death. He who can gird his heart
up tight and high will thereby become a ruler; for the weak man cannot gird up his
heart he lacks the will, the abandon! Sentiment is a weakness of the heart, tender-
ness is a weakness did I say so : I recall it : Sentiment is a strength of the heart,
the weak know no real sentiment; and tenderness, truly, is a power of the heart
oh, a power so great! You should not have left me alone in the country, for it
has defeated your object, has diverted your purpose, has given me something of
the wisdom of the serpent and nothing of the gentleness of the dove. For I have seen,
for myself, at my good and convenient leisure, how Nature works how she despises
the weak and exalts the strong; and how she

What's that you say?

I say Nature favors the strong.

You are a fool, an ass. Nature favors the apt, not the strong or the weak.

I am not a fool. I tell you

Tell me nothing! You have emptied your bile duct, now go and sleep!

But

There won't be any but, today.

Am I not right in the main?

Yes, after a fashion.

Then everything is as I say?

I have told you : you are an ass.

95. Revulsion

XXIX. Democracy

Here comes your bad penny again!

Any worse than before?

No, I have improved. I have passed through Q for querality, and am safely landed,
now, on R for remorse.

What's it all about this time?

It's all about your infernal democracy. I told you, in the goodness of my heart,
what I thought of it, and you called me an ass, for my trouble.

Well, what's wrong about that?

I have come here to find out what's right about it I must have blown off steam
without sufficient cause : hence the big R I am bringing with me.

Don't worry about a little thing like that. You were moulting: you will be all right
again when your new feathers come.

I'd rather have you call me an ass again than say I am moulting: that's adding
insult to injury.

No, it's adding a second truth to the first. And you perceive that I am raising you
in the scale when I intimate that you are a bird. One good truth surely deserves
another, you'll admit.

I'll admit anything you choose to aver, just now. I tell you I'm penitent. Won't
you take me at my word?

I had rather take you at your word than in your "herd." For your word was
"quit!" "I say quit!" don't you know?

Oh, don't tantalize me, governor!

I'm not your governor, I'm your safety valve; I let you blow off rather than burst
for which you should be duly thankful.

Then "let me not burst in ignorance," and I will thank you to the stars, I will
thank you to the moon of my devotions, to the glorious sun of poesy toward whose
light I aspire, that orb whose radiance you are, the light on high that shall dispel
the heavy gloom of my night, that light of sympathy which illumines the whole world
for such as I who walk in darkness. Let me not sink into the depths of my sea,
but stretch forth your hand, and, in faith, I shall walk upon the waters as with con-
trite heart, my hand in an angel's hand, I might walk upon the waters of repentance,
upon a moving tide from my very eyes, over the fathomless depths of my iniquity.

Stretch forth your hand and your knife for something gnaws at my heart! My
wicked spirit gnaws at the roots of my heart, and soon my leaf shall wither and fall.

Like the cuttle-fish I have murked my waters.

Like a toad I have covered my head with earth.

Like the heathen, I have furiously raged and imagined a vain thing.

Like a fire I go out in ashes. You are the "promethean heat that shall that light
relume." Oh, let not the spark expire! Help me, daddy, I am in trouble. I make
genuflections, obeisances, salaams, oblations; I Hss the hem of your garment. I

You are grotesquely ridiculous.

I know it and I like it. I'd rather be a purp than a bird.

You act the part: only it is your tongue you have been wagging.

96. Kindergarten Chats

You are ail of a successful poodle except the head and the tail these are missing.
What are you driving at, anyway, with these rhetorical toddlings on four aimless legs
in forty and four directions?

Oh, it's my way of getting on your blind side again, A process of getting myself
forgiven that I believe to be new, interesting, and of some utility as I perceive it
works.

Oh, yes : it works, of course. But what do you want?

I want light, more light. I want you to pull me out of my light and Into your light
concerning this matter of democracy.

Well then, come into my light: for small as it is, it Is large enough for two:
though, large as it is, it seems too small for one. For, after all, what do we know of
the broad spectacle of democracy! We live and we learn so little; we have eyes,
and see so little; ears and scarcely hear. Why should we fail to know? Why is the
keenest eye dull? Why is the most active mind as a sluggard? Why do we know and
yet not know? We search, and seek, and probe, and test, and analyze, and surmise,
and hope and fear, and are filled with useless longings, useless regrets; and, after
all these trials, our own people, the people among whom we live and move and have
our being seem as strange to us as. are the Antipodeans the denizens of far-off
forests and isles. But let us garner up our hearts, and come back, little by little, upon
our own land. For that which is sown in affection surely will eventuate In love; and
just so surely shall we come nearer and nearer to our people. If we err, let us hope
that we may err in smallest measure. If we prove right, we shall be so abundantly.
Thus democracy will begin to unfold itself to us as the expression of the individual.
In so far as the individual errs, democracy errs, and in so far as the Individual grows
and develops in the right, democracy gains thereby and grows and flourishes. Democ-
racy is primarily of the individual! It is not a mere political fabric, a form of govern-
ment: that is but one phase of it an incidental phase. Democracy is a moral prin-
ciple, a spiritual law, a perennial subjective reality in the realm of man's spirit. It is
an aspiring power whose roots run deep into those primal forces that have caused
man to arise from the elements of earth and, slowly through the ages, to assume a
rectitude and poise that are of man alone. Democracy is a vast, slowly-urging Impulse
which little by little and more and more broadly is ever exalting man in spirit and
imparting to him a definition of his true image his true powers. Just as man was
ages upon ages in learning to stand upon his feet in the physical sense; and just as
this accomplishment was the work of a force persistently seeking such expression, so
is there an impulse ever at work, ever tending to imbue him with the power to stand
upon his feet, morally, and this force we call democracy. It is of that drift of nature
which tends ever toward perfecting a type and the individuals of the type, until that
impulse shall have attained to consummation. Democracy is not, as you might infer
from superficial observation, merely a modern notion of a government by and for the
people; it is a force, latent, and old as earth; a force for whose fulfillment the ages
have been preparing the way, dissolving the obstructions one by one, and slowly mak-
ing for it a pathway. It is the serene forces of nature that are most powerful; and that
force which we call Democracy, lying inexpressibly deep in the spirit of man, is now
as ever seeking expression. When the spirit of man first discerned One Infinite Spirit,
after ages of groping, the way was opened which leads toward the discovery of man

97. Democracy

by man as a spirit. These adventures of the soul were made by a serenely contem-
plative people, and have become our heritage. The Nazarene in this sense the
first democrat coming into a world crushed under the heel of absolutism, spoke
eloquently to the lowly; he taught that the individual possessed his own soul. He
outlined the need of self-government, the value of kindness; he preached man's unity
with the divine, the immanence of the spirit. For these and other sayings in opposi-
tion to the established order, he was crucified. But Ms gentle, luminous doctrine has
survived, because it is an utterance of nature's urge, which found, through this
compassionate dreamer, a long-sought outlet through the soul.

So came the primitive truth of democracy into the world of men. Silently it has
moved through the centuries, an ethereal presence for the upbuilding of the race.
You may trace its various vicissitudes, obscurations, perversions, decadences and
resurrections, its metamorphoses, disintegrations and reformations, in times and in
lands, as it has moved among the forces, some fostering its growth, others seeking
its destruction. But it is not to be denied! It grows with cumulating power, and, in
our own and other lands, is seeking and will surely find its amplitude of organized
consummation in a new philosophy of man. Primitive democracy, a unitary concep-
tion, impressive in its beauty of divinity in humanity, has subdivided into three sepa-
rate conceptions of government, religion and morals. This is explainable suffi-
ciently by the record of the conflicting interests, political, sacerdotal and ethical, in
the midst of which it sought to express itself or by which such expression was
restrained. Yet, clearly, in our land, today, we may perceive varied currents which
are dissolving these broken thoughts and are bearing them together to form a syn-
thesis which shall define organized democracy as that high estate of man which holds
in a single conception of CONDUCT, as in a spiritual solvent, the great forces of religion,
morals and government. And this is the conception of Democracy that I hold.

By this light, surely, ours is the land of destiny! Here nature had prepared, through
the ages, a slumbering continent, a virgin wilderness, to be the home of free men
free in their bodies, free in their souls; that the silently working calm and the power
of the wilderness, the potency of the soil, of the waters and the air might permeate
them physically, mentally, morally and spiritually, and lift them up to be a great
people animated by a great purpose, a great force, a great beauty the beauty and
the power and the glory of democracy the divine altitude of man's humanity.

Why then pick at little flaws, why point to petty truths, if the doing leads but to
obscuration of a living principle? Rather shall we seek the broad truth, the sure
truth, the basic truth of our destiny, and gauge our thoughts, our conduct and our
art thereunto.

What you say reaches my heart with a convincing touch, and I am more than
ever anxious to see you work out your theory of a democratic art. I am indeed come
into your light, and things at last are shaping for me. But the scheme is too big for
me. I could never work it out alone. You have led me, in your own way, through a
lamentable art to a shaping conception of man's powers; and now, will you flood our
art with its glow?

I will make the attempt.

98. Kindergarten Chats

XXX. Education

In view of what I have said concerning function and form, it must be fairly clear
to you that the spirit of democracy is a function seeking expression in organized social
form. I have stated also that every function is a subdivision or phase of that energy
which we have called the Infinite Creative Spirit and which we may now call the
Function of all functions. In just this sense the metaphysical basis of our philosophy
is gradually establishing its definition, is elaborating its inner structure and outer
form.

We have been apt, and not without cause, to look upon metaphysics as a special
domain of speculation having no touch with solid affairs. Now this is gruesome. For
knowledge, for philosophic inquiry, if it is to have working value, must be applicable
to daily needs. As a matter gf fact, metaphysics and philosophy are valuable and
really practical departments of thought, feeling and imagination, when once we sum-
mon courage to use them as instruments, as working tools.

Everything has a simple basis : the oak has its acorn. Our self-imposed task is thus
to seek out the simple: to find broad explanations, satisfying solutions, reliable
answers to those questions which affect the health and growth of that democracy
under whose banner we live and hope. So we shall use our metaphysics and our phi-
losophy in just this sense. They are to be our tools ; we are to use them, they are not
to burden us. For these processes mean, essentially, that in using the focusing powers
of the mind, the extension of vision, the unseen becomes for us the tangible, the
unusual becomes the obvious, the uncommon becomes the familiar, and the subjec-
tive becomes objective. There is no mystery: it is, all of it, a phase of man's power
of observation and reflection. Not only the subjective by this process becomes objec-
tive, but, equally, the objective becomes subjective. For instance: If I say that such
and such a thing is an outworking of the Infinite Creative Spirit, it may sound mys-
terious and inaccessible to our facilities. But if I say: It's a fine day; you say: "Why
yes, it's a fine day," and take it as a matter of course. Now as a matter of working
fact, this Infinite Creative Spirit of which I speak is as much a matter of course as
your fine day if once you place your mind in a receptive mood, free from the
inhibition of awe or of a factitious veneration. And so with our word, function. It
sounds abstract, profound; in reality it means, only, that need, whatever it may be,
which is seeking or finding fulfillment. If you put an acorn in the ground, that acorn,
containing the function oak, will seek the form oak, and, in process of time, will
become an oak-tree. So, if I say that a certain function, aspirant democracy, is seek-
ing a certain form of expression, democratic architecture, and will surely find it, I
am making a statement that does not differ in essence from what I said concerning
the acorn. It is as simple, as natural, as matter-of-fact. Now I have no patience with
those teachers who are more concerned in impressing their academic wealth upon
the student than are they in exhibiting to him the simple basis of architectural phe-
nomena and in making that basic principle clear and manageable. I am not tolerant
of that aristocratic spirit which misdirects American youth in its search for knowl-
edge and would seek to impose upon it those formulas of learning and attitudes of
mind toward learning which have descended to us from times when education was

99. Education

for the "gentleman" for the few, for a class: that "education" which separates one
from his people by the violence of its badge of alienation and uselessness. Yet this is
what our schools of architecture are doing at this day. They are inculcating the
meretricious in their pseudo-explanations of the architectural art, and, with pedantic
persistency, they ignore the natural, the obvious. To be sure, you may say they teach
as they have been taught. In a limited measure, that is true. Yet evasion cannot
absolve them from performance; and plain performance means to teach in a thor-
ough-going way. If they persist in teaching what is unintelligent, they cannot hope to
escape an eventual accounting. The statements set forth in their school prospectuses
are, many of them, sophistical. If these sophistries are due to mental laziness, because
these schools will not seek the truth, do not want to know the truth, do not wish to
have the truth pointed out to them, then are they doubly reprehensible. Now these doc-
uments are crafty in the use of phrases, specious in argument, plausible in explanation.
But all the plausibilities combined cannot explain away the ineptitude. We need
brains in our architectural schools! We need men of large hearts, luminous minds,
rich sympathies; men who can grasp the significance of youth, the social value of
democracy and of creative art.

Yet there is a larger test by which these schools may be tested : It is a broad fact,
as broad and plain as the land, that, in many other departments of education, teach-
ers have made positive strides in advance. They have been animated in their work
by enthusiasm, by devotion, by love; and their noble and earnest effort is bearing
daily fruit. These teachers look upon teaching as an art to which they willingly
devote their lives. The study of the child, the study of the young has been pursued
by them with intelligence and devotion; and the kindergarten has brought bloom to
the mind of many a child : and all this is the result of a growing philosophy of edu-
cation. But there is, alas! no architectural kindergarten a garden of the heart
wherein the simple, obvious truths, the truths that any child might consent to, are
brought fresh to the faculties and are held to be good because they are true and real.

Not only have the architectural schools failed to keep pace with the general prog-
ress of educational philosophy and the teaching art, they have, as it were, flouted
such progress. Unfamiliar with the immense educational value of metaphysics and
psychology as the groundwork of the teaching art, they lack the ground-plan of a
naturalistic philosophy of architecture in its historical and creative aspects; hence
they fail utterly to illuminate the architectural art past, present, and prospective.

Are you not expecting too much of a four-years* course?

Not a bit. The time is now wasted. It should be utilized. Efficiency is lacking;
the impulse is not there; the know-how is not there.

What should be done about it?

What I am doing to you.

100. Kindergarten Chats

XXXI. Mn'$ Powers

If Feudalism be defined as selfish activity of the Ego and Democracy as altruistic
activity of the Ego, and if the word, ego, now stand as the determining power of all
man's powers let us briefly examine these powers in order to clarify our shaping
conception of Democracy, of democratic art and of democratic education.

Let us assume that elementary educational methods have developed much that is
praiseworthy.

Let us also assume that the higher education Is still tainted with feudal ideas and
academic abstractions.

Let us assume that there coexist two conceptions of the function of education
the one utilitarian and opportunist, the other liberal and essentially philosophic.

Let us assume that man is both flesh and spirit.

Let us assume that man is a moral being.

Let us assume that man is not alone.

Finally, let us assume that all the above assumptions are self-evident and valid.

Now we will posit that all man's powers are subjective in the sense that they
derive from the ego, and are aspects of the ego quiescent or in action.

Let us group these activities, in order that we may begin to form an idea of the
nature of man.

Man's powers mean simply, what man can do.

Therefore let us now see what man can do what are his powers :

As to his physical nature, man has the power of locomotion, of muscular control;
the power to select and manipulate other things, other objects; to surmount obstacles.
Therefore is he by nature a wanderer, a toiler, a worker, an artisan, an artist: for
these things mean the power to do to create.

As to his mental nature, man has the urging power of curiosity. Hence he is again
a wanderer, an explorer, a seeker, an inquirer, a scientist. He wishes to know the
How. Hence is his power to do increased by his knowledge how to do. His art is
strengthened and amplified in its power by his science. Further, man's curiosity
wishes to discern the WHY. Still a wanderer, a seeker, a worker, a thinker, he pushes
his power of inquiry into new paths; he becomes philosopher. His thus acquired
knowledge of the why increases his power over the how, and hence his power to do :
which means a progressive cumulating growth in solidarity: his philosophy, his
science, his art mutually strengthening each other. Thus man the worker, the inquirer,
the thinker, becomes ever more unitary in the exercise of his powers: he becomes
the greater worker. But his results thus far may be purely material, strictly utilitarian,
altogether objective in the ordinary sense. The exhibit of his powers thus far in
action may be purely intellectual and physical: surely a one-sided aspect.

But man has the power of feeling, of emotion: great powers of his inner life:
hence man is The Poet.

And man has the power to vision forth: hence is he dreamer of dreams, spectator
of visions: The Prophet! His emotions and his dreams, his visions and his forecasts,
vitalize his thinking, his speculations and his work. They charge his creations with

1 01. Man's Powers

the current of life: and so man rises in accomplished power. He ever pushes back
the frontiers. He ever intensifies the near and the far.

And man is a spirit: hence his emotion, his intellectual, his physical need to find
union with Spirit. Thus grows he ever in concentrating and diffusing power. (Thus
Is he metaphysician.)

And man is a moral being: a power of enormous momentum: It is THE POWER TO
CHOOSE! (The central power of the Ego.)

And thus is his growth, his unfolding, his self-centralization., MAN THE WORKER
becomes MAN THE CREATOR.

We might go on indefinitely enumerating man's minor powers by a continuous
process of subdivision of his major powers, and exhibit man for what he is : a fecund
marvel of power: and all would seem to be well. But all is not well. There is a fly in
the ointment. For the inquiry immediately emerges: What does man do with these
powers?

Here lies the heart of our inquiry into Democracy. Here arrives the most urgent
of all present human inquiries. Its processes and results we call Sociology; which,
truly, is the art, the science of gregarious man, the dream of the solitary dreamer, the
visionary, the prophet; the world-old inarticulate dream of the ever dreaming multi-
tudes. Thus is the unitary science, poem and drama of Sociology, the precursor of
Democracy its explorer, its evangel.

For, reverting to our definition of Feudalism as the selfish activity of the Ego, is it
not instantly visible that all these wondrous powers of man may, for selfish ends, be
used individually and collectively for harm? That such use may be directly unsocial
as we are coming to understand the term? Hence looms the power of choice before
us as man's mightiest power for good or for ill that, in fact, man's moral power
is his supreme constructive power.

The inverse of Feudalism that it to say, Democracy defined as the altruistic
activity of the Ego, definitely posits the moral power as its foundation, and the
nature of choice as basic to its welfare. It simplifies and clarifies the concept of
moral power and declares that the power of choice shall be exercised for the good
of all. It purposes, in short, a NEW CIVILIZATION founded on CHARACTER.

Indeed, it is the business of democratic sociology to simplify and clarify all things,
to exhibit and elucidate these powers of man which energize his power of choice and
the dramatic consequences of such choice their high visibility through successive
civilizations and in our own. The main and the immediate business of democratic
philosophy is to simplify, to clarify and to know itself. Then will aspiring democracy
discern its power to create and to define its goal.

It would avail but little to discuss the matter further here; for the postulates of
our theorem should be evident.

What we need in our progress is a further unfolding of our widening view of man's
nature and activities ; his actions and reactions as exhibited in what he does the
record he himself makes of himself.

But it should be clear at this point that a system of education, to be democratic,
must be based on the unfolding of these natural powers in the young, and the power
of choice clearly impressed and defined. So doing, the remote things we call art,
science, philosophy, poetry and ethics will come near by the very force of attraction,

102. Kindergarten Chats

as they are now away from us through mutual repulsion. Then will the science of
sociology become the gravitational center of all sciences; and a philosophy or gospel
of democracy, the motive power of the world. Then will our art cease to be a wan-
derer and come into its own.

Where did you get these ideas?

Where anyone with two eyes might have found them.

Why did not the "anyone" find them?

Because he did not know or use his powers. He was too intelligent to discover them
too busy. He probably believed man's powers to be gifts.

Well, aren't they gifts?

Gifts from whom?

Well, then, say endowments.

Endowments by whom or what?

Then faculties?

Faculties are powers; let us get along about business: for if man has the power
to do well, he has also the power to do badly. It rests with his choice. Let us further
see how he exhibits choice: what he accepts, what he rejects. Let us test him, anew,
by the acid test we now have. Or, if you wish to change the figure: we have sur-
rounded him let us find him.

NOTE: This chapter (formerly "Education 2") and the next were entirely rewritten in 1918. The word "Ego"
was introduced into this chapter in revision; to forestall assumptions concerning Sullivan's reading, it should be
pointed out that Freud's Das Ich und das Es did not appear in book form until 1923; however, Sullivan's library
contained many books on psychology.

XXXII. Eminence

And now in our continuing discussion of social values, let us draw nearer to the
Architects: not necessarily the little fellow; not the man who has taken up "archi-
tecture" with all its ins and outs as a trade, a convenient-as~any means of turning a
dollar; not to the manifestly ignorant and sordid; but, specifically, to the leaders,
the men in the forefront, whom fortune has favored, whom circumstance has fostered.

These are the men we are now to examine as a class, in the growing light of man's
powers. The power-values of these men we will subject to the scrutiny of revalua-
tion. We wish to know if their total value is social in the current feudal sense, or
social in the awakening democratic sense.

What can be the social value of eminence if it means not moral altitude: a sum-
mit from which rich, far-spreading areas are seen in air their plenitude of diversifica-
tion vast vistas whose depths are viewed : an abode in the heights of the spirit,
in serenity, power and poise of the Ego: in a locale wherein the soul abides far re-
moved above the currents and counter-currents of our daily life, yet conscious of
them all?

103. Eminence

What can eminence signify without vision, without prophecy, without manifest
fulfillment without convincing works?

Is eminence, as we daily view it, more than a counterfeit? Is it above subterfuge,
above intrigue, above the low, mean tricks of the high and the clever cogent tricks
of the low? Is it far above the cynicisms, pleasant generalizations and practical satis-
factions of those who look on their art as on baled merchandise? By and large we
have seen, and shall see.

I have been at some pains to tell you of thought; I have said something of imagi-
nation, of function and form, of objective and subjective; I have spoken of value; of
growth and decay; I have partly lifted the veil which hitherto has hidden the coun-
tenance of democracy from man; and I have taken you into the out-of-doors of a
summers day that you might there live with one of nature's miracles and inter-
pret as best you might.

I have told of realities. I have told of illusions; and I have spoken of many other
things and thoughts and hopes and aspirations. Finally, I have hinted of man's
powers.

And of what avail shall be all these sayings if we have not now arrived where we
may safely reweigh and revalue the eminent everywhere, in every walk of life, but
specifically in our own art and closely note the response of scales.

Democracy, as you may now infer, is an IDEA. It is a function of such infinite
spiritual fertility, it is so unitary, so concentrate, so diffusive, it is so charged with
power, that it may well seem the latest and most potent of nature's spiritual forces
to arise within the domain of MAN'S DESIRE even though in truth it be of the
primordial and the eternal.

Declaring, as it does, the mission and the joy of the Infinite to the finite; bring-
ing as it does the boon to man of the emancipation of his powers, whereby the spirit
shall become free: is it not indeed that truth which shall make us free!

Why then does it supervene that our eminent are slaves, not free men? Why do
they tell us, in their bondage, of the illusions of bondage? Why do they smile at our
quest for freedom? Why are they unaware of fine values and inexpert at weighing
aught but heavy current values? Why are they unimaginative, unreflective? Why are
they unaware of the all-embracing, all-diffusing law of function and form? Why
unaware of the subjective phases of objective things of the objective possibilities
of subjective impulses? Why do they deny or ignore that which is wholly natural,
wholesome, self-evident to innocent eyes, and aver that which is limited, bald,
desultory, poor? In short, why are they vacant?

To be sure, if you ask them, our specifically eminent will say NO, it is not so!
But, look at the buildings! The buildings say yes, it is so.

Why argue when the buildings are here? If the buildings were not here, we might
argue; but the buildings are here, and they are the court of first inquiry. It is to
them we go it is not to the architect. For a building records with naked candor
what the architect has done to it. It does not equivocate, apologize, explain, cir-
cumlocute, hedge, dicker, divert, or conceal. It simply tells, and it tells with awful
honesty. We quiver with amazement and are at once aghast at the folly. The man
may be a liar, but the building is not; it tells the truth about the liar. For buildings
are our familiars, they are indeed loquacious perhaps too talkative. By the tes-

104. Kindergarten Chats

timony of the buildings our eminent are light-weight. By our measure of height they
are Lilliputian in stature.

What other testimony have we? Assuming a man to be equipped with the most
complete education it has been possible for him to acquire in the schools (what is
called a liberal, a cultural and technical education), assuming that he has added
to such education the usual worldly knowledge, insight and experience: where is
the weak spot? Judged by the feudal estimate there would seem to be no weak spot.

He can talk quickly, learnedly, even eloquently. He is most convincing. We are
sure he is right: he must be right. He gives us all the facts. He is charming, is per-
haps impressively business-like. He may even be sonorous, or very modest. But to us
he is sterile. We know it because the buildings tell us so. We have the inconvenient
habit of listening to what a building says: of scanning the screen of its features: of
looking into its soul. The eminent one says YES! The building says NAY!

To our eyes the eminent one is unproductive in the democratic sense. More than
that: because of hybridity in the democratic sense, and productivity in the feudal
sense, he is reactionary. The output of the mental power he exercises constitutes in
each instance a barricade, a deterrent, to free-flowing thought, a menace to advance,
a drag upon the evolution of the free man. His efforts tend to render our thought
static and his Brahminical. For the effect of such utterances (and a building is an
utterance, is it not? All activities are utterances; all visible things are utterances, are
they not?) is to place before the mind of the casual and even the cultured observer a
simulacrum of what we mean by power a false apparition which the man on the
street is unable to dispel, if he would, because he lacks sufficient knowledge of man's
powers of their use, of their abuse, of their neglect. His vision of democracy is so
obscure that he talks of good and evil in a semi-sentimental way, unaware that they
reside, both, in man's power of choice.

Now, we say these eminent men are blameworthy and we are amply and literally
justified in so saying, because they have allowed their liberal and technical education
to petrify them with culture instead of stimulating them, through strengthened pow-
ers, to sane and wholesome, far-seeing democratic activity and genuine utterance.

Buildings such as I have shown you tend to immobilize minds that regard them
superficially, and drive them into the land of acquiescence. They tend actively,
through their mere presence, to disperse and dissipate the finer ideals of power and
accomplishment.

We see these buildings as they are and for what they are, for truth is indeed
naked. It is the veils, the trappings, the vestments, that so often conceal the forms
and features from the confiding, the unwary. It is our definite business to remove
these decoys of vestiture, these cultural lures and blandishments, from the eminent,
in order, when so shorn, to show the startling resemblance to the man on the street.

You deem this procedure destructive in its insidiousness, iconoclastic in purport
and effect? You ask, who are to replace our eminent?

No, it is not destructive except in the prefatory sense of construction. As to icono-
clasm I have no use for idols with clay feet. Your inquiry as to those who are
destined to replace our eminent is strictly to the point it touches upon the quick
of our thesis. It is the sole reason why I have spent so much time with you and
intend to spend much more. For not only must we see, hear and interpret things

105. Eminence

and thoughts as they are: we must outline that which is courageous, creative and
beneficent.

If we find the body social filled with weaknesses and strength seemingly com-
mingled and inextricable; if we find it a confused composite of evil and good we
must so expose the nature of man's powers, of his manner of using them, of abus-
ing them, of failing to recognize their integral nature, that the IDEA of personal re-
sponsibility and accountability will stand forth, clear and fresh to our vision, as both
a revelation and an inspiration.

Indeed, it is the business of the democratic philosopher to widen the scope of an
inquiry such as ours until all eminence, all activities, shall be included in its pur-
view. In his application of the universal law of function and form to all social mani-
festations, he is to discern the forms of social activities and trace such forms to their
sure origin in men's thoughts. Men cannot conceal their inmost thoughts from such
as I, for thoughts are written in deeds. He must also search out the thoughts, the
dreams of the lowly, and note how institutions, how civilizations, rest upon them as
a foundation however impressive the superstructure. In short, he must search
for MAN. He must find man in the innermost sanctuary of his secret thought, his
elemental powers, and reveal man to himself and to his kind. It has never been done.
It is the great, immediate task. Current ideas concerning democracy are so vague, and
current notions concerning man's powers so shapeless, that the man who shall
clarify and define, who shall interpret, create and proclaim in the image of Democ-
racy's fair self, will be the destined man of the hour: the man of all time. The
world is yearning for such man as for a Messiah the huge world of men, women,
offspring: unstable, drifting, dreaming, dumb; a purblind world, an uneasy, aching
world, suffering in torment of soul for lack of the one, single, shining IDEA toward
which they might look as toward a new, a glorious star rising serenely above the
horizon of their long, feudal night, and toward which their hearts might turn.

Such man must have both vision and sympathy; within his spirit must reside the
powers of worker, inquirer, thinker, dreamer, prophet; of artist, philosopher, meta-
physician which, all, in condensation, shall organize and propel the utterance of
the world's great POET yet to come.

Of such is true eminence.

Of such is the colossal power of passion!

Here are we now, arrived at a parting of the ways. For we now know and see
our way. But we must hold to that road which has been our thesis and is still our
choice: that road which leads to an intermediary goal; even though the spectacle
of Democracy open as an infatuation so marvelously near us.

Our road will still be rough, the terrain forbidding. But we shall push on to the
end.

1 06. Kindergarten Chats

XXXIII. yr City

Don't you think, my prophet and philosopher, that, in this city of the conspicu-
ously eminent, in this swarm of houses, obliterating from view what once was Man-
hattan Island for the Dutch, we have an epitome of the architecture of the country?

We have nothing of the sort; we have an epitome of New York; New York is
not the country. It is in this land physically to be sure, but spiritually it is on the
outskirts. It is sui generis a border town.

How curious are the currents that make up what we call the ocean of life. They
are strange enough elsewhere, but here the name is maelstrom: a whirl that wrecks
and submerges; that draws in and puts not forth; a current, narrowing, ever more
and more madly, toward that vortex which swallows up body and soul the vortex
of golden vanity. Here money is God, and God is money; a god of gold, of standard
fineness; a god circular in shape, diminutive in size; a disk, that any may wear as
a talisman if he but purge his heart of all else and cleave unto this.

In days of old, there came now and then an epoch which we call Golden. But
here is a modern instance, not to be outdone an Age of Gold! An age of fero-
cious concentration, which cries, once more: After us the deluge! An age, a place,
which cries again: I am the State! Small wonder its buildings echo the tumid boast.

This indeed is an architecture well worth the studying; for its like does not exist
elsewhere upon earth. It is a product of the time, of the place and of the men; and
time, place, men and architecture are all alike. At one end of the island, or at the
other, or in between, it is the same thing. "The more it changes, the more it remains
the same." The barbaric variety, the unrest, the ignorance, the vulgarity, the schol-
arship, the culture, the yard-stick architecture, the blind-man's architecture, the
deaf-man's architecture, the lame-man's architecture, each gives out its raucous
individual note, and all together swell and sway and swirl into a huge monotone
of desolation, of heartlessness, and of an incredibly arid banality that roars above
a muffled murmur of incompetence and strangulation. For, here, Art is tortured,
twisted, choked, mangled, beaten, bruised, torn: poor Art! For Art is here swiftly
starved, is dying of thirst. For Art is not a god here. For Art is not in the hearts
of men here. Gold is in the hearts of men here and fills arteries, capillaries, veins,
with its maddening stream.

Here indeed is an architecture to be studied! For the roar of the streets is not
louder than the roar of what lines the streets a quarreling herd, ranged mile after
mile, pressing hard, shoulder to shoulder, tied hands, tied feet, leering and howling
at the passer, or smirking and winking and giggling an uncanny lot, the most
extraordinary aggregation in the world's vast menagerie. Oh, this hocus-pocus, does
it not sicken one in his heart! Does one not blush to the roots that he, too, must
go by the name. Oh, the sadness of it! The wearisome pessimism!

Think of the generations to come, when once they shall realize to the full the
nature of the blight that has thus been laid upon them by a generation which says :
After us the deluge! It will surely be a deluge of tears and bitterness, and a con-
tempt toward this generation of Manhattanites. They will curse the eminent and
the shyster alike, for they will find no rational pretext to discriminate between their

107. Our City

works. Oh, the pity of it! the pity of it! the pity of it! When a noble art is so near
to the hand! Oh, the pity of it; the pity of it all! The boundless pity of it all! The
awful desolation of it all!

But you do not specify, dear Master!

Why should I specify? Are your eyes veiled? Are your ears sealed? Have you for-
gotten your lovely week in the country, companioning among real things, living
things? Have you lost to mind the bounty, fertility, chastity, strength; the beauty,
the mobility, the serenity of nature? Have you forgotten the storm? Have you parted
with the calm? Have you forsaken the yearnings of your heart? Have my outpourings
fallen upon vacancy? Have I in vain led you through a wilderness? Have I all for
naught given you a glimpse of a promised land: of a land I faithfully promised? And
you would have me specify! Have my words been as a puddle of rain-water rather
than the river I thought them; or have you been as gravel, not the fertile garden I
thought! Where is your imagination, my laddie, where are your eyes, where are your
thoughts!

Must I then specify? Must I show you this French chateau, this CMteau de Blois
on this street corner, here, in New York, and still you do not laugh! Must you wait
until you see a modern man come out of its door, before you laugh? Have you no
sense of humor, no sense of pathos? Must I then explain to you that while the man
may live in the house physically, he cannot live in it morally, mentally or spiritually,
that he and his house are a paradox? That he himself is an illusion when he be-
lieves his chateau to be real. Must we go again to our ABC? Is it not self-evident
to all but the man and his kind that the "chateau" is a humor esque and he
another? That chateau and their kind were in place and time only in France?

Must I show you other and similar curios of this period and that period, and
that period, and this and that "style"! Faugh! The word makes me sick! Will not
the one suffice? Are you not a bright youngster? Can you not translate? Can you
not generalize? To satisfy you must I take you to see another maudlin riot, called
office-building, with one barbarism heaped upon another until the incongruous mass
reaches the limit of its idiocy in height, and culminates, perchance, in a Greek
temple? a solecism more extravagant, if possible, than the chateau?

Must I show you another library, or it may be a court-house, or a bank: with
its piddling classic, its awful niceties, its refinements, its everlasting misconceptions,
its kickshaws of culture, its jejune wool-gathering?

Must we really begin our ABC? Must I speak of the power of rational thought
do you find such thought here? Must I tell, once more, of imagination, the wonder-
worker do you find imagination present here? Have I failed to impress you with
a sense of realities: in this city of illusion can you find reality except it be patho-
logical? Have I not told you of values do you find value here, or poverty, in
all this wealth? Have I not dealt with growth and decay in the physical growth
here can you not discern spiritual emaciation? Have I not impressed upon you
that a building is a screen and that behind the screen is a man, and behind that
man, other men, and behind them, others?

Have I not let you see for yourself something of the organic processes of nature?
And what do we find here, the eloquence of organization or the brawl of disorgani-

108. Kindergarten Chats

zation? Have I not talked of ferments and of leavens is there leaven or ferment
here?

So is this populous island, with its huge, ostentatious spread of material wealth,
a thing of poverty and rags to him who can weigh values in the balance of sanity.
It stands for the stertorous negation of democracy; the cancellation of that which
is best, noblest and enduring in the heart, in the mind, in the spirit; and for the
asseveration of that which is paltry and transitory in life's values. So stands this
island. Let not its contagion spread!

Well anyway, the blooming town is quite satisfied with itself; quite complacent:
it isn't moulting that's sure.

Indeed it is not! Its feathers are all there; and they are bright, and clean, and
gaudy. But the voice is the voice of Macaw!

Tell me: Why did you bring me here? I have heard this before.

To show you, in a larger way, what I mean by the perversion of power. To show
you, as a spectacle, a drama, the cumulating power of choice: gigantic energy gone
wrong. To show you how the people of a city portray themselves in mass.

NOTE: Fig. 8 has been chosen as an appropriate, rather than specific, illustration.

XXXIV. Another City

And what, doctor mine, shall we say of this flat smear, this endless drawl of
streets and shanties, large and small, this ocean of smoke? It is a thousand miles
away from New York. Is it then an epitome of American civilization, an index of
our art? Is this a true exponent of democracy? You have told me of thought is
thought here? You have talked to me of imagination is imagination here? Are
filth in the air, and slime under foot, or dust in the nostrils, indices of enlighten-
ment; or is Chicago a sui generis in turn? New York may be revolting to you, but
this Chicago thing is infinitely repulsive to me. There at least was a physical if not
a moral cleanliness, an outward if not an inward cheerfulness. But this foul spot on
the smiling prairie, this blotch on the fair face of Nature! Why have you brought
me here again? What have I done to deserve this? I thought it well understood
that no one stays here who can get away; that it is no place for a civilized human
being to live. What are we here for?

We are here because I wish to show you the pole-opposite of New York; because
I wish to show you extremes, in order that, as such, you may fix them in your mind
indelibly. Because a study of these extremes will fix for us certain definite psycho-
logical boundaries.

Chicago is indeed a sui generis. Seventy years ago it was a mudhole today it
is a human swamp. "^\

It is the City of Indifference. Nobody cares. Its nominal shibboleth^ "I will"

109. Another City

its actuality, "I won't"; with the subscription: "Not how good but how cheap"!
Impoverishment of heart and mind are here conjoined. They seem to glory in con-
junction.

It is the City of Contrasts. Cast your eye over the sumptuous beauty, the color,
the spread, the open-far horizon of Lake Michigan, and then turn to this ugliness
and horror on its shore. On a Sunday, if the wind be from the Lake, there comes
into view as a revelation the pellucid, the delicately beautiful atmosphere with which
Nature canopies man here. On a Monday morning, behold, how he pollutes it with
his mental outpourings, his moral murk!

I have taken you here to show you once more, and in a way just as characteristic,
just as convincing, that a city is but the material reflection of the character of its
inhabitants. That a city, in turn, is but a screen; and behind that screen are the
men, women and children who will it, who suffer it to be, whose thought it is. It
is their image, their materialization. It is an impressive enlargement in bulk of the
notion that behind the screen of each building is a man. The type is subjectively
and objectively fundamental and remains ever true.

If this city is sunk in solitary gloom, it is so for reasons; and these reasons are
clearly and logically related to our central concept of democracy, which, as I have
most insistently cautioned you, implies the immediate responsibility of the individual ;
not response to coercion, but response to that inner prompting, that rectitude and
pride, which make for self-respect and self-control.

If, as you wander dejected but inquiring over this immensity of pollution, you
find civic cleanliness, pride and self-respect, and capacity for creative self-govern-
ment woefully absent, you will find it is specifically because cleanliness, self-respect,
and pride and desire for creative self-government are thus absent in the mind of
the individual the so-called man on the street. If everywhere substantially you
find a physical display of apathy, it indicates a common spiritual apathy. I have
warned you over and over that for every physical effect there is a psychic cause.
You see the effect the cause is just as visible. Can you imagine that Man is here
made in the image of his Almighty, when he pollutes that which the Almighty, as
it is said, has given to him when he pollutes even himself? This is not democracy,
my lad, it is modern American inhumanity. This is not civilization, it is CALIBAN !

There are libraries and universities, and schools and art galleries here, to be
sure; but what are books but folly, and what is an education but an arrant hypocrisy,
and what is art but a curse when they touch not the heart and impel it [not] to
action.

What are the leaders doing here? What are the eminent doing, what are the cul-
tured and the scholarly doing? What are they thinking? What are their standards
if they have any? They are doing just what the mob are doing, just what your
"herd" are doing that is to say, in vital substance, nothing: there is no tangible,
forceful great ideal, physically, broadly, to be seen. And yet the Great Lake and the
Prairie, emblems of pride, fertility and power and graciousness, encircle and enfold
the city as a wistful mother holds a subnormal child. This City of vacant, sullen
materialism, brooding and morose within the splendor, presents a spectacle unpar-
alleled in history: the spectacle of Man's abject spiritual beggary. The Big City
dreams.

no. Kindergarten Chats

There is a leaven here, I WILL! (there are ferments here), but it is, ah, such a
little leaven now still, it may leaven the mass who knows, who knows? There
is a little thought, a very little; a little imagination, a very little a little unsel-
fishness, just a little. These seeds may germinate: who knows? The materialistic
humus may have already made a fertile soil: who knows? The rose springs from
decayed things, and betimes it blooms in a passionate outburst of beauty. But you
will say the rose blooms only in a pure air, and in the sunshine and that is so;
that the soot and murk may suffocate these seedlings, or they may be trampled under
foot heedlessly and that is so too; that is all true! The voice of I WILL is faint

But the case "Chicago" is not any more hopeless, seemingly, to him who can
weigh values, than is that of the architectural art at large; it is not a whit more
impoverished, spiritually, nor inept physically; not at all more apathetic, more dis-
mal, more pitiful; and if we may hope for the latter as we do, why not for the
former as we may? For Chicago at least has youth, and where youth is, there is
always hope and where there is hope let us cling to it. Its sins and sicknesses of
youth have been fierce and debilitating, and almost fatal; but there are a few
sparks remaining in the ashes of its short life. Fate may perchance fan them once
more into a flame of democratic fire. It is a chance a chance only but youth
is here; a tremendous under-strength is here. The critical turn is at hand we shall
see what we shall see and we shall see it soon.

The case "Chicago" is not the case "New York" and is not to be judged by it;
there is no common standard of comparison New York is old its sins are fixed,
the damage is done. Chicago is young, clumsy, foolish, its architectural sins are un-
stable, captious and fleeting; it can pull itself down and rebuild itself in a genera-
tion, if it will: it has done and can do great things when the mood is on. There can
be no new New York, but there may be a new Chicago. As you look out on the
dreary murk, this may seem a fantastical dream; perhaps it is who knows? If
there are to be dreams, there must be dreamers to dream them and there can be
no greatness unless dreamers dream of it! Still, it may be a foolish dream; a dream
born of the incomparable Lake and the strong, silent, lovely prairies who knows?
One must indeed be incurably optimistic even momentarily to dream such a dream.
Yet the Lake is there, awaiting, in all its glory; and the Sky is there above, awaiting,
in its eternal beauty; and the Prairie, the ever-fertile prairie is awaiting. And they,
all three, as a trinity in one, are dreaming some prophetic dream: I am aware:
even as the Big City dreams its sordid introspective dream. And he who looks upon
them, all in one, in pulchritude of his heart, in rejuvenescence of his spirit, may per-
chance in turn dream something of their dream who knows? There may be un-
known dreamers here!

Thus we are rounding out our absorbing study of Democracy. Thus, turning
slowly upon the momentous axis of our theme, are we coming more and more fully
into the light of our sun: the refulgent and resplendent and life-giving sun of our
art _an art of aspirant democracy! Let us then be on our way; for our sun is
climbing ever higher. Let us be adoing; lest it set before we know the glory and the
import of its light, and we sink again into the twilight and the gloom from which
we have come. So much for New York. So much for Chicago.

i ii.

Another City

XXXV. A Survey

And yet, my boy, even if Chicago and New York stand in a certain poiaric oppo-
sition in our civilization or, if strictly speaking they are not poles., but perhaps
nodes, or at the least nodosities the contemplation neither of one nor of both of
them will give us that just notion we are seeking of what America is in reality, or
whither the true drift of its civilization. We can do little more, in studying them,
than arrive at a certain understanding of boundaries, at the furthest limits of the
eccentricities of our civilization. If we wish to locate the true center of gravity we
must seek elsewhere. For while the great cities are great battle-grounds, they are
not great breeding-grounds. The great minds may go to the great cities but they are
not (generally speaking) born and bred in the great cities. In the formation of a
great mind., a simple mind, a master mind, solitude is prerequisite; for such a mind
is nurtured in contemplation, and strengthened in it. In the quiet, in the silence,
alone with itself and Nature., and alone with the subtly interchanging influences and
aspirations of Nature and of Self, it grows: and it grows because it is undisturbed
just as the wheat grain in the soil grows because it is undisturbed. There is no
deeper psychic law than this: that the thoughts which mold and make a civilization
come into being in solitude, and are there nurtured and gestated. All great thought,
all great ideas, all great impulses., are born in the open air, close to Nature, and
are nursed, all unknown, all unsuspected, upon Nature's bosom. The great are the
unknown, the unsuspected, perhaps the despised, during all that formative period
wherein the destinies of the world are taking shape in them. Then in time they
emerge, and come into the battle of life; and by instinct they seek its fiercest battle-
grounds. So are the great cities merely great battle-grounds whereon strong minds
gather together, and clash in the fierce rut of ambition. Or the master mind may
remain, of choice, in the solitudes^ and breed there storms of momentous power
which in time overspread us : or, as a sequestered mountain lake, it rnay reflect the
infinite in a deep calm of the spirit 3 that another, passing by, may behold how serene
in power is a soul at peace and bear that message to his people,

The big cities are breeders of distraction, of noise, of racket, hurly-burly, turmoil
and worry, jostle, wear and tear, by-products of a most intense pitch of mental and
material activity.

The vast open country, the great out-of-doors, breeds its minds, its hearts, as it brings
forth its wheat, its trees, its rains, its rivers and its lakes, its mountains and plains
and forests, its glories of the seasons, its poems of the night and the day, its expanse
of the heavens, and its repose of the earth.

So must we know our values ; for a great impending civilization, a great impend-
ing art hangs upon the justice and the even balance of our view. Our synthesis is
now under way; we begin to build. And, to build well, we must know our founda-
tions, our boundaries and our limitations; we must know what lies without those
boundaries as we must know what is and is to be contained within them. Our foun-
dation must be so deep and so securely laid that those who come after us may build
thereon without fear, and above all, without reproach, as they rear the superstruc-
ture of our dream-edifice into the clear heights of beauty, within the broad light of
day.

112. Kindergarten Chats

Do you mean to say, then, that a very great mind cannot originate in a city?

I do not say so dogmatically, for that would be to deny my own thesis: and, more-
over, to become dogmatic is to become foolish and top-heavy; but I say that the
chances are enormously against such a happening. Still, a great mind will find its
solitudes anywhere, city or country, just as it will find its multitudes anywhere, even
in the desert. Yet I bear in mind the parable of the camel and the needle's eye.

But then why do you lay such an especial stress upon the open country? I like
the country, I might go farther and say I love it but I don't know it very well, in
fact, I scarcely know it at all, except as I have told you in my feeble way. I have
seen it, of course, but I haven't seen it with eyes like yours. And yet I feel, HERE!,
vaguely, and wistfully, what you mean! You mean that the city is a small matter
in comparison with the country. That the city is indoors, so to speak,, and the country
is the mighty out-of-doors. That we go to the city for activity and strife, and to the
country by which I assume you to mean Nature for strength and re-animation.
That the country, the out-of-doors, is the prime source of power; and the city, the
arena in which that power is dissipated for good or ill; or, to broaden the view,
that Nature is the true source of all power of the heart and the spirit, and likewise
the source of the power of the great cities.

You have said that pretty well.

And I have noticed, too, that our people, rather generally, have something of that
feeling for out-of-doors; else why this love of golf and country clubs, this annual
flowing of people to the parks, to the lakes and woods, to the seashore and the
mountains?

That is instinctive and shows that we are not indefinitely to remain a nation of
city-dyspeptics and weary melancholies. It is a part of our semi-conscious need of
racial self-preservation; a slight disturbance of that nightmare wherein we dream
of devouring the unwary and the unfortunate. It might seem that we need a con-
vulsion of Nature to awaken us to a recognition of her solvent, recreating power;
but it is not so : the very quietude, the placidity, the restful, expansive beauty of this
continental spread is a token, an augur, of a power within the race of men who
abide and shall abide with it, such as the world has not known. It may be a pre-
mature prediction, but I will say this to you now: that here, on the soil where we
are, will arise the greatest race of creative artists in history; creative minds in every
walk of life; and I predicate it on the soil, the waters, and the air, and on the spirit
of Democracy which has mated and shall fully mate with them. Democracy, and the
open air of a serene continent, shall bring forth this superb race; and the eminent,
the thinkers, poets, artists of that race, in turn shall bring forth in their works that
which the urge of Democracy and a luxuriantly vital continent have imparted to
them and to their people. But I anticipate, so eager am I to build.

He who in studying American aspects and tendencies confines the range of his
vision to the narrow field of the few cities, is in danger of arriving at conclusions
deepening into a hopeless pessimism. And he who would found an art philosophy
on American latent capacities, instincts, tendencies, and aspirations, must therefore
make doubly sure that partial and local truths do not sway him, but that his view
shall be broad and comprehensive as the land and deeper than the mere super-
ficial aspects of his people. If our view could reach no deeper and no higher than

113. A Survey

present aspects, or if such aspects were to be taken as final and conclusive, the study
would not be worth the while, for it would end in a negation or a nullity. But such
is not my view and never has been my view. I have in my heart a profound rever-
ence for the great self-centered body of the American people, for the inexhaustible
activity and imaginative flexibility of the American mind., for the wealth of sentiment
resident in the American heart 3 and for the inexhaustible energy of the American
continent., which 3 after the subtle manner of Nature's processes, is slowly infiltrating
the American heart, mind and spirit. To take a less broad, less vital view of our land
and people,, would mean inevitably that the art philosophy which I am expounding
to you would rest on a basis less broad and less vital than the land and the people,
I am unfolding to you a philosophy of art simpler and deeper than the world has
hitherto known, because, through my love of my land., of my people, of Democracy,
and of the Infinite Creator, has come the insight and the power so to do. My con-
clusions have been reached not in the racket of cities, nor in the study of garrulous
philosophies, nor in libraries, nor in schools, but in the bounteous open air, within
the infinite peace of Nature, alone in the solitudes, where the soul in contemplation
became peaceful as the dawn, and mirrored the infinite in its own calm. I have com-
muned more with trees than with books, and have exchanged greetings with the
broad sky and the broad sea, with snow-capped mountains and the far-flung plain
and prairie, with river and lake and tiny pool, with the sun in his rising, his high
course and his majestic setting, with the moon in all her infinitely sweet, sad moods,
and I have as a devoted lover followed the seasons through their beauteous rhythm,
and have known, the modulated solitudes of the starry night, and the brilliant ever-
varying glories of the day. And I have been with that hitherto enigmatic creature
we call man, in all his complex attitudes of heart, of mind, of soul. And from the
contemplation of these has slowly emerged into the light of our day and our land,
the conception of a creative art of, for and by the people, which I am now engaged in
imparting to you. Its basis is too simple, too natural, too unaffected and too straight-
forward for a schoolman or a man of "culture" to understand, to grasp, or to sym-
pathize with. For its dissemination I need minds and natures like your own 3 that
have not as yet become wholly sophisticated, artificial and inert.

Such minds exist in abundance among the American people; particularly in the
rising generation. And just so soon as the immense feudal scare-crow of scholarship
and culture and eminence is destroyed for them, the ground cleared, and the ideal
of a personal spiritual freedom conjoined with a personal responsibility and account-
ability is reared for them, they will grow, expand, and bring forth happiness, as the
Great Creator intended, and their land and their people will be the better and the
happier, for at will be in poise and at peace.

So let the orbit of our philosophy shape itself according to the deeply attractive,
the profound, the abiding forces of our land and our people heedless of the petty
aberrations. For destiny is shaping here vast potencies, the which it is the part of
wisdom to note and to heed.

In Nature's infinite simplicity, in her chastely fecund variety, in her silent inex-
haustible power, in her exquisite adjustments, in the depths of her placidity, in her
inscrutable divinity, in her master-work, Man, whom she has brought forth out of
her silent depths that he may utter the yearnings of the abysmal solitudes solitudes

114. Kindergarten Chats

teeming with speechless life in these has a little seed of regenerative sentiment
slowly germinated and pushed itself upward into that atmosphere we call the mind.
So has my philosophy germinated, pushed and grown from regions of the wordless,
into formal speech and so would I have it grow through the expanding seasons of
your mind into a graceful, rugged tree of thought, spreading forth its leaves toward
the midday sun, and abiding placidly through the winters and the nights of your
span of life, and thereafter to remain with men generation after generation.

And thus in our thematic elaboration, Chicago and New York cease for us, as we
progress in our synthesis, to be material cities as such, and become in our view
psychic discords whose disturbing influences we must resolve, through an organic
modulation, into the basic harmony of a gospel broad and inclusive as the people
and the land. For our key-note is that deep, universal aspiration which animates the
land, the people, and the world-force Democracy.

To do this and to expand our thesis in such wise that we are never to be out of
touch with the simple, the natural, the human; ever near on the one hand to man,
and ever as near to the Great Spirit; paralleling that out-of-doors which I so love,
with an out-of-doors of the spirit which I love still better; and keeping ever in mind
the dignity of man, a dignity which can comport with nothing short of self-respon-
sibility, and that self-government which are the seal of complete manhood: Such
is our task. And to fulfill it we have to go no further for documents than to the
commonest weed by the wayside, or to the smile of the nearest child, or to the stars
shining forever and forever through the silent depths of the night.

Accepting, therefore, New York and Chicago as representing certain miscarriages
of democracy, each group so distinctive in its way, that I have called them the oppo-
site poles or nodes, expressible of certain phases of degeneracy afflicting our land and
people, we have but to turn, to regain our balance of view, to the country at large
and the people at large. In passing, let me say that I am not disposed to ignore or
minimize the sane moral and mental and emotional forces, within those cities, which
make for righteousness. Far from it, I gladly recognize them and hope that some day
they may prevail. But I do say that they are not characteristic of those cities, and the
balance of forces at present is heavily against them.

Such regenerative forces as do exist in these cities, I will class therefore with the
upbuilding forces in the land and the people at large, to which they bear a much
closer relationship.

Nor will it assist us materially to study the other cities large and small f or,
strangely enough, they lack definition of character to that degree which makes them
typical from our point of view, and therefore useful to us. The originally vigorous
Puritanism of Boston, the Catholicism of Baltimore, the Quakerism of Philadelphia,
the slave-holding oligarchism of New Orleans and other southern cities, the "river"
epoch of Cincinnati, and other "river" towns, the mining craze of San Francisco
were forces now long ago on the wane, and no definite rehabilitation of aspiring
energies has led, in any of these instances, to a new and marked definition of char-
acter. The transition stage has been singularly protracted. Therefore in view of our
fixed purpose to study contemporaneous, not historical, American architecture and
civilization, they can offer us but little of suggestion, except in a negative or neutral
sense.

115. A Survey

The two cities of aggressively modern individuality, however harsh and discordant,
are unquestionably Chicago and New York. The other cities resemble one or the
other of these two more or less closely or remotely, but in no wise do they differ
actively enough to offer us a third node. The country and the people at large are to
stand, in our view, for the characteristic force against which these two cities must be
balanced and that force is so vastly more powerful than they, although much less
noisy, that our reckoning with it must of necessity take time and care and will be
interwoven with many allied themes, and by renewed unfolding of themes which we
have already partly deployed. But I may say to you now, that such synthetic progress,
as it rises through the various stages of its elaboration, will be based, ever, on my
profound, my abiding faith in the American people.

And so, my young friend,, if I am spared for a few more suns, we shall leave these
crowded tenements of the mind, musty and too long inhabited by squalor, to go
abroad again into the open air, into the out-of-doors of the spirit, under the bright
blue sky.

XXXVI. Autumn Glory

Arise, Fidus Achates!

Unglue slumber!

The sun has bloomed like a great red rose in the garden of albescent rnornl

Awake! I say! For I am Chanticleer, crowing the peak of a new day!

Like Faust, I cry: "Another day and yet another day!" But mine is in a major
key my song.

Awake! Awake the somatic splendor of this wonderous day! For morning is singing
a crisp, cool, cheery song, so full, so full of sweet Autumn's beauty and delight! Oh,
hear its song; and hear my song, dull sleeper!

Have done with slumber's dreams and come along and dream and dream with me
the waking dream of a golden autumn morn!

Arouse, I say! Arouse!! Make answer to my canticle, my cheery little matin roun-
delay! Come on, come on; put your head forth at the window and taEe a good,
awakening look at lusty youth and on the crispy day!

What obsolete and unoiled wheel without that creaks so dismally?

It is my song, dear pater. Do I not sing like a robust bird?

You sing like a capon, if such, indeed, be a bird.

Oh, fie upon you! Such a snarling mood for such a gracious morn! Unsour your-
self, kind friend, and open wide, and open very wide your eyes, and try, and try as
hard as ever you can to smile on me, your boy, and on this bracing and vivacious day.

Come, hurry down! Let us break our fast. Let us a dash it in pieces like a potter's
vessel"! The forest is awake; the hills are awake; would you still wallow in the trough

1 1 6. Kindergarten Chats

of sleep? What are vain and fitful dreams in the balance with the lightness and the
brightness and the sweetness of this autumn's glory of my heart, ensconed within
this autumn morn! Gomel Come!!

You are making a most terrible racket.

Of course! I'm. noisiest when I'm hungriest! If you keep me waiting but a little
longer, I shall climb to the top of yon tall beech-tree, stand on my head, and let
myself fall into the sky and then you'll be sorry oh, but you'll be sorry when
I'm gone.

You are an enfant terrible!

Papa, you said that out-of-doors was good; and it is good. I cannot tell you how
my heart expands and exultates within the opening glory of this autumn day. To
walk into the ample air, to open wide the portals of the soul, ah, that is something
like! When first you told me that the true architectural art was to be sought and
found not in books, but in the out-of-doors, I honestly thought you crazy. It seemed
the most absurd statement I ever had heard; but out of respect for you that is
to say, out of a prudent regard for your sharp-pointed tongue I said nothing: It
seemed to me I could afford to wait. But now, now it's all different. How truly you
said that the power of understanding lies in the imagination and the heart; that
without imagination, without heart, we cannot grasp, we cannot understand ; that to
receive is a greater gift, a greater function, than is to give. When I heard you say
that the heart is greater than the head, I again thought you a little foolish, a little
unbalanced, a little too much of a dreamer; and again I said nothing, preferring to
wait: But now this autumn day comes as a revelation of your meaning, and I find
your doctrine sound to the very core of my own heart. How serene in her loveliness
is Nature here today, in her opulence of gold and red and brown and yellow, with
infinitely varying shades and changes, and the quiet note of evergreen. Last summer,
Nature frightened me with the intensity and depth of her life; the marvel of it all
upset me: for I was alone; but here, in the quiet abatement of her rhythm, in the
solemnly joyous preparations for her long winter-sleep, it all seems easier for me to
understand, or I, perhaps, am more easily reached by her sweet, sane influences, and
more placidly impressed by them. For out of the long, elaborate, and for me vastly
too-rich discourse that you have thus far unfolded to me, certain great and beauti-
fully-connected truths are becoming now apparent to me, and tangible. Slowly they
have arisen within me as it were that I might have moved into a landscape in
the night, without knowing much of it; but now comes the touch of Nature, and
Sympathy begins to illumine these shadowy forms, as the great sun, rising this morn-
ing, has brought light and definition of form and color, to the spacious landscape
about us. So does the heart, I believe it, throw warmth and light upon truths hitherto
obscure and sombre to the mind. How marvelous is the rhythm of Summer's close:
for Autumn, I take it, is but the ending of Summer, as Spring was its beginning:
and Winter is her sleep. And how truly, for me as you said they would, is the sub-
jective becoming the objective, and the objective making itself known to me as the
subjective. For they are twin brother and sister, a beautiful pair, each as real and as
beautiful as the other, each as necessary to an understanding of created things. It
is all so clear, so transparent in the mind here, as we stroll in the nipping, bracing

117. Autumn Glory

air,

Jr, just tinged with the last warmth of Summer's winsomely departing smile, -with
the brown and tie pied leaves just beginning to gather a little under foot, as we
walk through this stately grove, the nigged trunks, and the branches far uplifted,
seeming so stern yet kindly, and wondering, one might almost say, why we have come
here among them. And over all, through the openings, the brilliant, blue and cloud-
less sky, and the view now and then of the valley and the river below, and the
gorgeously crowned opposing range of hills, brilliant here, but moving and undulat-
ing away, until, far off, they pass into a thin delicate haze, which little by little
deepens into purple. And all so still, so silent, under the softening sun, so wonder-
fully calm, so majestic, so content. The spread of it exalts and overpowers me. And
when I think that this is but a little part of it all, takes a new hold upon me, and the
splendor, the beauty, the serenity of Nature's moods and rhythms come to me more
and more, and my thoughts go out as upon wings, far and far and far over the land.
For is this not the gorgeous heralding of winter? Is not this his breath from the far
North, is not this the vast subsidence of Summer's wave of power, its ineffable declen-
sion, its exquisitely balanced modulation from moving into quiescent life? Is this
not*Nature's very utterance of logic: then what can logic possibly mean? If these
are not thrilling illustrations of cause and effect, then cause and effect are two
empty words. If this is not rhythm, why use the word at all? If this be not harmony,
what is harmony? If this be not proportion, why babble idly about proportion? If
this be not a process utterly organic, what does the word organic mean what can
it mean? If this superb spectacle, this third act in Nature's great drama-of-the-sea-
sons, does not stimulate thought, does not awaken imagination, does not soften and
reanimate the heart, what then can work these wonders books? Can books go so
deep as this? Can that which I get at second hand go so deep as that which I receive
at first hand that which I receive copiously, in far-flung abundance, in abundance
under foot, over head, round and about, and near at hand? It is all coming near and
clear to me what you mean by the out-of-doors of the spirit. Hereafter great
Nature's out-of-doors shall be my temple, far, far more beautiful, more holy, than
the temple of the Roman or the Greek; and now and hereafter will I worship
therein; and in the great out-of-doors of the oceans and lands of the world, of my
own land and my own people, shall my spirit freely move, as a breeze through
the forests and through the sky, by the light of the sun and the light of the stars,
over land and sea, over river and plain. Why did not the fools in my school tell
me something like this and work away at me until I understood its significance,
instead of cramming me with pedantic stupidities, for four, long, weary years! I
begin to have a rage against them, myself, the asses! What I knew at the end of
my four years you saw only too well nothing but presumptuous dudishness, and
a veneer of artificiality which concealed a little of the weak ignorance underlying
it all. Well, it's of no use crying over spilt milk; the mischief is done; we must
rectify it, if it be not too late. They made me weary enough, at the time, with their
finical, farcical notions of architectural grammar, which consisted chiefly in an
attempt to bring unrelated things together and force them or cozen them into not
quarreling too roughly; but one good, loving look at a big tree here knocks all that
nonsense out of me there is grammar there,, and syntax too, a-plenty, and logic,
and function and form, and organization, and rhythm, and proportion, and above all

1 1 8. Kindergarten Chats

vitality! LIFE! The harmonious expressions of a Divine Creative Energy! No quarrel
there! You can bet your bottom Dollar this giant oak-tree, here, never has stopped to
inquire, in its oakiey soul, how a pine-tree grew, or beech, or hickory. No sir I It has
been true to its acorn from the time that acorn sprouted among the leaves It fell in;
nor is it now fretting and whining because the leaves of the pine remain green
believing therefore the pine to be a superior tree as some people I know would do
under like circumstances. If I am wrong, correct me, master. Tell me your view.

No, go on, I prefer to listen!

Then, if I grasp the essence of your thesis, it signifies that we, in our art, are to
follow Nature's processes, Nature's rhythms, because those processes, those rhythms,
are vital, organic, coherent, logical above all book-logic, and flow uninterruptedly
from cause to effect. And that we, being greater than trees at least we think we
are and possessed of heart, imagination, mind, and the sympathy of mind, and
above all, gifted with spiritual insight, should use those faculties to give to our art
a power, a vital, a creative beauty, that shall make with Nature a harmony and not
a discord.

Well said.

And that if a man, by accident of birth, or some concurrence of latent forces, be
gifted, in imagination, mind and skill above his fellows, he should use those gifts, in
his peculiar province, for the good, and not for the ill of his people.

They won't offer you a professorship either in a university or in an architectural
school if you talk heresy such as that.

Oh, they be hanged

What, your Alma Mater too?

Y-e-e-s-s See there! a little breeze is blowing! Oh, the music of the forest!
And how gently the big trees sway and turn their boughs, and the golden leaves let
go, two, three, a dozen at a time, and flutter and float downward, and more follow,
and more and more the air is alive with them! What a marvelous shower! Like
a myriad-flock of gaily-colored birds, they wing away on the stiffening breeze, and
nestle in the grass and weeds. And now they come fewer; the wind is slackening;
now they come in tens, sixes and twos again, and now in ones, and the music dies
away, and the fluttering ceases, and all is calm and serene and content once more.

I think we had better turn about; we are quite a few miles from the inn. Ah, that
puff of wind was the first blow to Autumn! See how much thinner the leaves are, on
the trees 3 how much thicker under foot; how they rustle as we plow Nature to pro-
vide such a carpet for us two! Just think of Nature's lavishness of her patience.
I wonder that she tolerates man they so blaspheme and flout her. But that is
another evidence of her bounty that she tolerates men.

That was quite a climb over the hill! How rich the fragrance of the woods and
the earth; how spice-like but cool; everything cool and growing cooler; a sharp frost,
tonight, I should say; and the sun is bending low; and the air is taking on a deeper
chill; let us walk faster!

See yon orchard of apple-trees; how their boughs, heavy-laden, sweep to the
ground; and the heavy layer of windfalls underneath. How faithful is the apple-
tree under its load of fruit; how patiently it has borne them, through the long sum-

119. Autumn Glory

mer while they slowly grew and ripened day after day, week after week, month after
month. Why may not man emulate such infinite patience and content, and let his
thoughts ripen, with time, as they hang from the boughs of his mind; and so come
to a full fruitage in their due season! See! *Tis only a few, short months since the
tree was leafless amid winter's snows! But the power to bear apples was there. And
when the springtime came it burst most joyously into bloom and now we see
the ripening fruit!

Ah, here we are again at the inn! What a gladsome day this has been for me!
In the cool and calm of its glory many a thought has clarified for me. How glad I
am that we came here; for there has come to my understanding, never to depart
from it, a clean and a wholesome sense of what you mean by the out-of-doors of the
spirit a thought, crystalline, beautiful and serene as has been this autumn day.

XXXVIL The Elements of Architecture: Objectiveand Subjective (i)Pler an d Lintel

You may recall that in the course of my talk on values, and of the objective and
subjective aspects of values, I stated in effect that the great painter transferred to
canvas and paints something of the world and something of himself; that he caused
to become subjective that which was before objective; that he thus sublimated mate-
rial things and gave to them a new value the value of personality and being; and
that this power to inspire material element we call genius, talent, skill, etc., according
to the relative values of these powers. I said moreover that it would become a vital
part of our undertaking to revalue the accepted values in our contemporary so-called
art. This latter we have done in a measure, and on the surface of things. We must
now go deeper, we must search the past to lay bare the elements, the basic origins of
our art elements and origins independent of time, of period, epoch, styles, or style.
For, what canvas, paints and brushes manifestly are to the painter, the objective ele-
ments of our art must manifestly appear to us; the rest, as I will show to you, is an
added or infused subjectivity, a personality, or a racial propensity, made up of sensi-
bility, of thought, of imagination and of the power of expression the objective
aspect of which latter is evidenced by technical skill.

To understand ourselves well, we must arrive first at a simple basis : then build up
from it.

That we have seen things badly done, or done in a vacant., helpless spirit of imita-
tion or reminiscence, has a broad value for us now. It has enabled us to see through
the uninspired. On the other hand, we have been out of doors, and you have seen
how inspired, how eloquent is Nature. You have felt the glow of her presence, and
have found in your heart a response thereto. These two aspects, one of man's errancy,

120. Kindergarten Chats

the other of the eternal urge and freshness of nature's creative power, have been
placed, for the moment, in a sufficiently marked contrast.

Therefore let us begin to seek out those manifestations in our art, which, because
instinctive and impulsive, may well be called natural: and little by little to discern
to discover, as it were why they are natural. To begin a constructive study of the
art of expression, or even an analytical study of historical monuments, without a
prior investigation, summary and understanding of underlying elements, would be
illogical, would lead us astray. To begin the serious study of architecture by a scholarly
examination and analysis of its finished forms, as exhibited in certain periods of the
past, or its artificial academic forms, the present-day echoes thereof, is a method I
leave to the schools, their professors, and their joint folly : for it is evident they arrive
nowhere.

Now let me impress upon you again, let me inspire you with the idea, that every-
thing you see around and about you, however near, however remote, however mi-
nute, however vast, however complex, apparently bewildering, confusing or awe-
inspiring, has a simple basis. That all you feel within you has a simple basis. The
greatest utterances or works of the greatest men past and present have this same
simple basis : whether they know, it or not. And while at the end of the subtlest and
furthest-pushed analysis we shall surely find this basis to be not material but spiritual,
we are not to go that far now. We have not as yet arrived at the time for a logical
elaboration of this theme, although its form is already apparent by inference.

Sufficient for the moment will be for us an examination of the simplest physical
beginnings, the rudiments, the naked elements as yet without definite organization
as nearly formless as possible. Of these, as we casually know, the simplest is the ver-
tical element^ the PIER regardless of its fortuitous shape or material. It rests upon
the ground, it thus has support; but it already aspires, for it rises vertically from its
ground-support into the air. It is stable, for it has both weight and strength. It is
serene because within itself are balanced the two great forces, the simplest, ele-
mental rhythms of Nature, to wit, the rhythm of growth, of aspiration a of that which
would rise into the air: which impulse we shall call the Rhythm of Life: and the
counter-rhythm of decadence, of destruction, of that which would crush to the earth,
of that which makes for a. return to the elements of earth, the Rhythm of Death.

This pier-form or entity is, for this reason, the simplest of architectural elements.
It is in equilibrium at seeming rest. While it seems aspiring, it seems also solidly
founded: it impresses us as immovable, as static: as timeless. Simple as it seems and is
to our sense of sight, it is nevertheless compound; for it is the field of operation of
the two synchronous forces downward and upward; yet it is as near to the utterly
simple in physical practice as we are likely to arrive: the absolute-simple, as the
absolute-anything is an image in metaphysical thought. We might, for pictorial pur-
poses, have presupposed our pier as a tree trunk or a long stone, or a number of
stones lying on the ground; but that view applies perhaps more significantly to the
second element, namely the LINTEL, Our pier may stand alone as a monument, a
memorial, a boundary, a guide; even as a boulder; yet with it the architectural art
literally begins. But with the lintel comes into view a radically new element, a most
subtle, strange and abstruse element. Alone, lying flat on the ground it is function-
less, useless: (it may become a pier). That it shall definitely assert a function there

121. The Elements of Architecture: Objective and Subjective (i)

must pre-exist two piers. But the moment this lintel (this latent thing), is laid upon
the two piers and connects their activities presto! by the subtlest of conceivable
magic, instantly the Science of Architecture comes into being, as surely, as inevitably
as, when two chemical elements unite, a new force or product at once appears. This
phenomenon is, in Nature, the exact opposite of catastrophe or sudden death it
is sudden, instant, BIRTH! We have no true name for it in the language. But if you
fix the phenomenon well in your thought, the absence of an exact word for it need
not matter much. And be sure that you do, for later on I shall have much to say to
you in further subjective elaboration of the two great rhythms of growth and decay,
or of life and death as you may choose to call them and concerning the
innumerable rhythms bom of them, exterior to man and within him,

So 3 when the lintel is placed upon the two piers, architecture springs into being
not only as a science, and a useful art, but also as an art of expression; and the
Architect comes into primitive being with this primitive beginning of his great crea-
tive work, with this simple, ingenious union of two elementals. You see it is all plain
and natural; there is no immediate physical mystery in it however inexhaustibly
deep it may be as a spiritual manifestation. You see how spontaneously architecture
is born of Nature and man, how it emerges from his need and his power: how it
fulfills his desires. That the lintel is essentially unstable in fact and in time, however
placid in appearance, you well know; and how complex are the forces at work within
it, modern science teaches us. In simplest terms, reposing, both, flat on the earth,
pier and lintel cannot be distinguished one from the other: their potentiality is the
same. (It is only when by man's touch they are slightly differentiated, that they are
separable, in evident function.) Yet when erected into place by the power of man's
mind and body, in response to his need, his desire, supported all by the kindly earth
a new, a primitive FORM appears without and within man, [Fig. g]

To recapitulate: The pier and the lintel, elemental in nature, form, in combina-
tion, the simple visible origin of our art. To be sure, you may think the wall more
primitive than the pier, but that is of no real consequence; you may look on the wall
as a lengthened pier or on the pier as a shortened wall; it does not signify. The
essence of each is that it is a vertical mass resting on the ground, and capable of
support.

What is essential is to note the entry of the personal or human element at the
earliest primitive beginnings of the art; and to note, with high concentration, how,
by virtue of the inexhaustible powers of the expressive mind, have sprung, from the
simple elements pier and lintel architectures of great beauty, yet differing em-
phatically from each other in rich and vivid display of poetic expression, fertile
fancy, and dramatic power: witness the Assyrian, the Egyptian and the Greek archi-
tectures. How eloquent, how characteristic, is each, of its race; and yet each and all
of them arose from the same simple elements. It shows what man can do. It exhibits,
as in a moving panorama, the splendor of his powers: the vast scope of his needs; the
powers that reside within his structures reside within himself.

It is related in Genesis that the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground,
and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul.
So did these peoples the Assyrians, the Egyptians and the Greeks and in the
same allegorical sense make their varied architecture of the dust of the earth,

122. Kindergarten Chats

and breathe into the simple elements, lintel and pier, the breath of life, and they
became living art, filled with the soul of the race, with the soul, the identity of those
who made great architecture out of the dust, as the author of Genesis made man
out of the dust.

These simple elements, lintel and pier, are yours. Extrinsically and intrinsically
they belong to no time, no people, no race. Go., breathe into them the breath of your
life, that, formed of the dust> under the urge of your need and your will, they be-
come inspired of a living soul! You were bom with spiritual power; for the Lord
God r now as ever, breathes it into the dust from which man is continually making.
You were at birth a living soul! See to it that that soul does not die within you.
But more of all this later. At our next talk we will carry further the study of otir
elements.

XXXVIII. The Element's of Architecture: Objective and Subjective (2) The Arch

Picking up again the thread of our theme: It appears that three great civiliza-
tions of the past evolved their diversified, and highly characteristic, architecture from
pier and lintel ; that they amplified the expression of these two primitive forms, and
their combined form, with the expansiveness of their life-experiences, and that thus
they builded wisely, graciously, even fatefully.

Yet, how it happened I know not whether the caving in of a troglodyte's home,
the stones over the roof becoming wedged into a certain roughly-spanning shape, or
what not certain it seems that at some time in the purple dim of the past a prim-
itive imagination wondered if stones might not be braced against each other to
span over something or other a cave or what not. Doubtless the beginning was
as rude as man himself. But, however it happened and that matters not especially
some man at some time, or successive men in successive times, by a series of
rough approximations conceived and carried out the idea of wilfully placing stones,
the one against the other^ to span over something or other, and gradually through
the course of time the process was elaborated, and defined. [Fig, 10]

So came into being the AKCH. It is difficult to conceive the arch as a creation of a
single mind; I do not recall an instance of creative power approaching this in
sublimity. To the reflective mind the arch is a wonder, a marvel, a miracle. But,
come it did; and it is with us; and has been with our predecessors for thousands
of years. It is the third and last of our elements or elementals.

We need not stop to discuss inconsequential imaginary or romantic origins of a
form so primal, so masterful and yet so winsome as the arch; but I feel pretty
sure of this, in my mind: that it came in its primitive form about the time pier
and lintel came. How many thousands or tens of thousands of years ago the three
appeared, I am not inclined to hazard a thought. But when they carne into being,

123. The Elements of Architecture: Objective and Subjective (2)

as such, in man's experience, there came also into being the three physical facts,
the three symbols, I might say the three letters, which constitute the alphabet
of our art the briefest of them all. I wish deeply to impress upon you this
simple fact; for it is of the utmost importance that you carry its significance ever in
mind. It is a triune fact, the simple germinal phenomenon from which has arisen
the vast, splendid, sumptuous Art of Architecture.

More subtle, more intricate., more subjective than either pier or lintel, the arch
has just so much more of man in it. We may therefore view it both as a triumph
over an abyss and as the very crystallization of that abyss itself. It is a form so
much against Fate, that Fate, as we say, ever most relentlessly seeks its destruction.
Yet does it rise in power so graciously, floating through the air from abutment to
abutment, that it seems ever, to me, a symbol and epitome of our own ephemeral
span.

The Arch is,, of all constructive forms, the most emotional. It is susceptible in
possibility and promise to the uttermost degree of fulfillment that the creative
imagination can forecast. Its plasticity is limitless, as that of man himself: he may
turn to it the most hard, the most delicate, the most imaginative use. It responds
to every need. Under man's hand it becomes what he will. In all its power it is a
form so frail in essence, so gracious, so ethereal, that it must need ever touch the
heart attuned to Nature's mysteries.

The Romans held it in bondage, as a useful thing. The Chinese used it more
graciously as a useful thing. The Saracens, the Hindus, the Persians, said lovely
words with it and about it. Its soul was partly known to them. In Byzantine,
Romanesque, medieval times you see it again as it was needed and understood.
All such uses, however, were local, limited and typical. Nowhere do we see a
full grasp and intensive comprehension of the arch as such. That is why I am
endeavoring, ever more fervently, to impress upon you the simple truth immeas-
urable in power of expansion of the subjective possibilities of objective things.
In short, to clarify for you the origin and power of BEAUTY: to let you see that it is
resident in function and form.

So is ugliness, isn't it?

To be sure.

Is there anything that does not reside in function and form?

Not that I have been able to discover.

Why have you said nothing concerning the cantilever?

Because it is not primary. It belongs among those secondary structural forms
which may be classed as expedients. It is neither one thing nor the other; neither
pier, lintel nor arch, though it seems curiously to partake of their functions in a
reverse or imitative way. It may assist pier, lintel and arch. Its essence is overhang.
The pier, lintel and arch are in their simplest forms primary propositions. The
cantilever belongs in the province of morphology.

What would the modern bridge engineer do without the cantilever?

That is his business. What he does with it does not change its nature, however
wonderful the performance. The same may be said of his impressive development
of lintel and arch. Because of his needs, and in response to his needs, he has raised
the primitive cantilever to a position of high importance, but its nature remains

124. Kindergarten Chats

unaltered. But I am not following the development of the science of engineering,
however fascinating the topic may be. It is our immediate business to deal with
the art of architecture. So let us return to the road.

Then perhaps I may put in a word: If I get the drift, the abutments of the arch
are esssentialy piers; and the two abutments, with the arch rising between them,
form a triune-simple which does not differ in essence from the triune-simple you
have visualized as a resultant type-form of the two piers and a lintel.

Very good; but what do you infer?

I infer this: that you, in your philosophical, psychological, metaphysical and
somewhat poetical way, wish me to conclude that these two triune-simples are so
similar in their nature that they evidently derive from the single function SPAN.

Very good. You have saved me time.

Shall we go further?

Not now. Time's up! You may dream about it.

I fear I shall: and of the variants.

XXXIX. illumination

I have dreamed and dreamed. Dreamed of the pier, the lintel and the arch as you
have set them forth; and I have mused upon their implications, so subtle, so mani-
fold. I have evaporated in speculations, and condensed and descended again upon
the humanities. How great is man, how manifold his power! How he recreates him-
self in what he does! I am beginning to see and to feel. It is all wonderful too won-
derful : you are setting forth man in a new light a light at once tender and clear
a light suffused by his own grandeur, his instability, his folly. I have been as it
were in a trance, filled with thoughts that come from where I know not. Thoughts
that seemed to arise from the depths and suffuse my vision. Gradually this state has
passed away, leaving, however, its immemorial impression. I have come at least to
know what the word subjective contains, implies: that it is a word immeasurable
as man, immeasurable as the universe. I have come to understand, what I could
not possibly have understood hitherto; I have arrived at last where I may under-
stand the plastic nature of the objective. It has taken you all of these talks to get
into my head the meaning of two words which, at first, I regarded as pedantic and
technical. Now I see that they are human immensely human. That to grasp these
two words means to grasp two great powers. And so it has been with the word
function and the word form, and the word power. You have uncorked the flagons
that held three words in bondage, and now they fill the earth and the sky: and
now they fill the soul. I begin to understand what you have said about words. How
they come to us with their contained power: how they may be surcharged by us
with new powers, new meanings, how they may be recreated. I have come to learn
with startled consciousness how terrible a thing is a word. How immense, how

125. Illumination

world-wide may be the power of a single word, for good or for 111. In such sense I
am coming to understand the word Feudalism and the word Democracy. The world
is beginning to live for me. The world of the present, the world of the past: the
great world of man flowing through space and time: the world of his dreams and
his deeds. It has become all so human so passionately human. It elevates, it de-
presses : I could almost f aint, as in the solitude of my soul I view this far-flung pan-
orama of man and the earth his home. It is all so human, so utterly human, so
stupendous in grandeur and folly as man alone can be. So man begins to live for
me. Within my dream he is coming into his own. He Is coming true.

That's pretty fine for a youngster.

Thank you for waking me. I came here to ask a few questions and immediately I
began to rave, to speak in a strange tongue. Is that what it means when it is said
that sometime in his life a man may have an illumination?

That's exactly what it means. I have been looking for it in your case.

Well, if that is so, then I can come down to earth and not lose my dream my
vision?

It will remain with you forever. You are born again. For illumination is but that
cataclysm of birth of which you have heard me speak.

Then you think I can safely ask a few questions and make a few suggestions I
am very nervous.

Why certainly. Quiet down and go ahead.

Then I will begin: Let me start with the pier; taking as a basis the pier In its
rudest form, its most primitive significance, any ensuing change in form or signif-
icance is due to man's touch or manipulation, to his plastic power as a worker.
That as the pier gradually takes on definition, or perhaps I had better say CHAR-
ACTER, it does so because of its own plastic nature, for all materials, however refrac-
tory, yield to the will of the craftsman man. Now why does the objective material,
once it has yielded to the subjective will, at once assume human characteristics?
Would it not show finer feeling, deeper insight, if instead of saying the material
yields, [we were] to say that it consents; that it has awaited the will of man? Is this
metaphysical moonshine or is it an immediate vital proposition in our art and in our
regard of the art of the past? Is it not more fruitful of result to aver this unison of
craftsman and material than to posit them as separate and isolated : has not the time
come to discriminate between force and power? For have you not been exhibiting
man as power, not as force? Am I spinning too fine a thread: if so, it is my own,
and I believe it to be strong as a cable in its every-day application and use. I see
you are not disagreeing, so I will go on: What made man wish to make changes in
the simplest form of the pier? Was it not in response to some need physical,
intellectual, emotional? And was not and is not the need at bottom of all needs the
need, the desire to procreate his own personality, temperament: the need, the desire
that the creations of his hands, of his brain should fit him that he might feel at
home with himself? That when he looked upon his creations they satisfied him : else
why that singular allegory that the Lord God looked upon his works and declared
them good? Are not all works to be judged by this basic standard, independent of
what the word good really means : taking it only as implying satisfaction of a need,
of a desire of the exercise of a power! Now, assuming this much, were not all changes

126. Kindergarten Chats

in the pier, subsequent to its primitive shape, essentially morphological in then-
nature: following man's temperament in its manifold metamorphoses? And are we
not to read in all the changes in structural form the artistic treatment of the pier,
in all those manifold subtleties of changing shape, in involved and evolving char-
acter, are we not to read in them a record of man's changing moods, of his ever
shifting attitude of mind and heart, of his response to the world of nature, to
the world of men and to his own inner world? If this is so, does not the historic
spread of our art through the centuries resolve itself into an unceasing flow exhib-
iting the flow of man himself! From the character of a pier may we not discern the
character of a race: and from the slowly changing character of a developed pier
may we not discern the temperamental changes taking place in a race: its growth,
its fulfillment, its decay! Has man at any time, can man at any time, can he now lay
his hand upon anything, can he focus his mind upon anything, without leaving upon
that thing the impress of his character? Is it not evident that under modern social
conditions a man may impress upon materials the character of his mind without
even touching the materials with his own hands? Is it not evident that though he
may lose actual physical contact with materials, he need not, he must not, he shall
not lose actual, emotional, intellectual, spiritual contact with them any more than
though seemingly isolated he shall lose contact with his people, times contact of
heart and spirit?

Better than I could have said it! You have ardor; the ardor of youth. The world
is new to you, but you are beginning to see it.

Passing that sweet saying by is not what I have said and implied concerning the
pier and its morphology applicable in full measure not only to lintel and arch but
likewise and in even fuller measure to the triune-simple based upon pier, lintel and
arch, and the structural and expressional morphology of these triune-simples?

It is certainly the case.

Then if such is certainly so, we may view and interpret all manifestations of the
architecture of the past and present in the light of man's temperamental changes;
they become for us demonstrations of character, episodes in manner, indexes of
civilization and the changes of mood within civilization; and by this light those
architectural manifestations we moderns rather foolishly, rather emptily, call the
Historic Styles, appear to us as luminous symbols of the past; and the past thus
lives for us again even while we know it to be past. Now I come to the crux of
my proposition: How is it, why is it, that we of the present, in contrast to those
of the past, seem to have no present of our own except in a materialistic sense? In
any other sense we seem empty and amorphous without form and void, as the
scripture has it. To me this is the great modern enigma. Does it signify decay, moral
stasis, spiritual degeneration, or does this marvelous materialism really signify a new
epoch, a gestation period of spirituality within the huge body of materialism; is
that body really pregnant, does this vast materialism signify and prophesy a terrific
cataclysm of birth? Can it mean, in its immensity, the coming release of the heart
from its bondage to the intellect? Can it mean this or am I hoping against hope?
It is all like a huge high wall to me. I cannot see through it or over it or around it.
It seems as though I were living in a cocoon, a cocoon spun by the thought of the
ages. I can dream of the past, I can, as it were, see the past and live in the past,

127. Illumination

but I cannot see the world about me. I feel as though I were at the edge of an abyss
I totter.

You are not at the edge of an abyss; you are climbing a summit. You are high
enough now to see something of the past. Climb higher and you will see the present.

Is that really so? Then I feel better.

NOTE: This chapter, rewritten completely, was in the earlier version entitled "On the Historic Styles."

XL. On Scholarship

If then, the historic modes of building, those attitudes, emotional and mental,
expressed in materials, we call the historic styles, were and are what we deem them,
that is, records of an eloquent past, a memorandum of states of feeling, active and
purposeful in their day, having definite direction in their day, but not possessed
of these specialized qualities for us today what shall we say of those in our day
who try and they try very hard, it must be confessed to duplicate, imitate or
plagiarize these historic monuments expressive of moods gone by, and in the doing,
believe, or affect to believe, such impertinence of forgery to be the chief end and aim
of modern architectural endeavor?

An architect is, literally, according to the dictionaries, a chief worker, or some-
thing of that sort; at least, I take it, a person who directs the making of something
germane, of something useful, of something timely; an individual who has the brains
to imitate, to propel, to lead in a work, in a constructive plan of operations, deriving
from actual needs, and resulting in a building definitely organized in every sense for
a predetermined specific use; and standing as the full attainment of an end.

Now to simple unadulterated minds it would seem that the chief usefulness of an
architect, that which should justify his name, must lie in the initiation of a building;
in fostering its growth from germinal conditions; in securing its maturity. That is to
say, the architect must be, first of all a clear, comprehensive thinker; he must have
that mental grasp of things material and spiritual, which shall provide him the
power to initiate, to supply that emotional impulse and that creative energy which
shall result in a building coming naturally, logically and graciously out of its condi-
tions physical and social. That to be a thinker in this sense, such a man must be
possessor of a bold, well-controlled, fertile and accurate imagination, sympathetic
understanding, and an intelligence calm, well-trained, accurate, alert and cognizant,
and a high social aim in a complete accomplishment: no cultural factor overlooked.

But this, while a simple enough conception for us, at this stage of our progress, is
not the current view; particularly is it not the view obtaining among people of re-
finement, cultivation and good manners setting aside for the moment the newly
rich, the vulgar rich, and the hard-headed, practical business man he who is
never mistaken.

128. Kindergarten Chats

Their cultivated view, indeed, is quite the opposite of that which I have set forth
briefly as ours. They hold perhaps without consciously voicing it that there is
something vulgar, or at the least unrefined, in the actual conditions of the life
and civilization of our day: in its unshapen elements, in its very quality of transi-
tion or sturdy growth, in its eddying currents of thought and feeling, in its unrest,
its fierce urge, its ceaseless ferment and ebullition. To them all this clamor and dis-
turbance is chaos forgetting that the world was ever thus and they turn, with
a genuine desire, to find something manageable, something culturally domesticated,
something that will stand still, something in repose and stationary: with wistful
gaze toward those periods of the past, the ebullition and roar of whose life has
settled into the calm and the silence of permanent rest. Such minds, to be sure, are
not masterful, they are timorous; they ache to be correct. They seek a sleek peace,
not achievement; tranquillity, not strife; problems that have been solved, not
disturbing problems that must be solved. Therefore do they turn to the tranquil
records of the past; forgetting or ignoring that these very achievements, so serene
as it would seem, were, in their own day, the output of strife, or tumult, of ebulli-
tion, of uncertainties : that the timorous and finical were there also.

Hence, comes also from this neurasthenic, fastidious, precious feeling, or inclina-
tion, or revulsion as it may be, a desire to find strength in the past; and, while
thus delving for countenance and support, to exalt the values of all the findings,
even to the extent of appraising unearthed commonplace as treasure-trove.
Depreciating the immense powers of our day, they belong to the class that may be
called ashamed.

Far be it from me to underrate the studious habit of a serious mind in whatever
channel it may choose to run. When sincerity and simplicity of heart are hand-
maidens of such a mind, and a positive, definite purpose really useful to us is its goal,
I am the last to say nay.

But that is not the point; and we must carefully discriminate between semi-hon-
esty and semi-dishonesty; between seriousness and frivolity, between strength and
weakness, between boldness, cowardice or evasion of purpose.

Every and any field of inquiry is a legitimate province of activity for a certain
mind of a certain cast, provided the results of such inquiry are couched in terms
distinctly germane, and reached with entire mental candor. But when such inquiry
is made under dubious pretenses, and its results couched in terms that are irrelevant
or misleading, such procedure can be classed only as egoistic and reactionary: in
short, as mental dishonesty.

The desire to take refuge in the past has both its honest and its dishonest aspects;
and, generally speaking, the desire to live in the past and to taste its fruits in soli-
tude is called scholarship; but little discriminaton has thus far been made, by cul-
tivated people, between candid and uncandid scholarship: between the scholarship
of stealth and the scholarship of courage. Particularly has this held true of archi-
tectural scholarship. Once it was innocent; now, with us, it is vicious.

Therefore must we be resolute to separate true scholarship from pseudo-scholar-
ship in our art.

In the Roman-Temple-Bank, the Doric Column, and the College-Library-Building

129. On Scholarship

we have seen the astonishing insincerity of commercial scholarship. In these struc-
tures., as I sought to show you, irrelevance is carried to the limit of credibility.

Of the drift of true scholarship I have sought to give you a hint in my talks on
the Elements of Architecture and as well, inferentially, in other talks. Briefly,, it is
evident that results of scholarship, to be true, must bear a relation of unmistakable
value to the day and generation of the scholar otherwise he has no function, no
excuse for being he becomes a parasite. Nor does this view ignore on the one
hand the exceeding complexity of our modern civilization and on the other the
recondite nature of a true scholar's labor.

Aside, therefore, from the great touchstone, Democracy, we have this broad
test of the value of modern scholarship, namely, that to be true it must bear a
genuine relation to the vital, aspiring thought of our day and generation. And thus,
specifically, the highest, the truest, the most useful, the most sane scholarship for us
Americans of today is that which tests the past; which draws from the recorded life
of the past such inspiration as will stimulate us and animate us; strengthen our own
hearts and quicken our own minds to solve, and wisely solve in our own tempera-
mental way, the pressing problems of democracy which confront us, and which
daily seek so urgently for a salutary solution. If this be true in a broad way, it is
acutely true in an architectural way. In a nutshell; we learn that, in the eminent
periods of the past, which we so sincerely admire, people did things in their own
way. By this test, when we ask an architect to make for us a bank building and he
gives us a weird imitation-Roman-temple, he is not a scholar, he is a plain fraud!

So, when we ask an architect to build a memorial to the Great Lakes, the primeval
forests and the hardy voyageurs and he gives us a Doric Column, he is not a
scholar, he is a faker I

So, when we ask an architect to build a twenty-odd-story office-building, and he
throws up a swaggering mass of Roman remnants, he is not a scholar but a brute.

And so, when we ask an architect to make a library building for a modern Amer-
ican university, and he gives us fragments of what the Greeks did, and guesses at
what the Greeks might have done, he is not a scholar, he is an aimless pedant:
selling his modern birthright for a pseudo-scholarly mess of classic pottage.

In short, when we ask a modern American architect to solve with candor any one
of a hundred directly and distinctly modern American problems hitherto unsolved,
and further ask him, in the doing, to bring to bear upon his solution the highest
qualities and powers of a trained and active sympathy, (true fruits of scholarship),
and thereupon, he, shrinking, shirking the vital issue, builds for us ineffectually,
after the manner of civilizations long since gone, though not forgotten, which had
little or nothing in common with our own specialized needs, and soulfully dubs his
work as of such and such a "style" : such man is not a scholar, he is a plain public
nuisance, obstructive alike of our growth in democracy and in spiritual welfare.
And yet I have known such an architect, yea, an eminent one, to smile and shudder
at the mere thought of liberating the creative impulse. 1 If his conception of the
creative impulse is on a par with his conception of scholarship, I smile and "shudder"
with him..

1. Details of this incident are given in Appendix C, because it is probably characteristic of an artist's relations
with exponents of the status quo and it explains the sense of premonition and the recurrent tone of urgency in
Kindergarten Chats.

130. Kindergarten Chats

My boy, if this is what current scholarship results in, in our specialty, you were
better off without it, and to go it alone. But that sort of hybridism is far away from
what democratic scholarship means.

Think of it my lad! and take it to your heart: an architect, a gentleman and
a scholar who can find nothing great, nothing inspiring in his own land his own
times, his own people! Think of it: a scholar who has seen the creative impulse
spontaneously liberate itself amongst us in so many fields of activity and bring forth
results under his very eyes that have made his country great among the intellectual
and moral and material forces of the world and yet this "scholar" dreads and
"shudders" lest this same vital, energetic, creative American mind seek and find
liberty for the exercise of its power in the field of a genuinely productive, tempera-
mental architectural art! So much for the education you and your predecessors
have received.

True scholarship, my son, is a sane and beautiful thing. It is born of reverence
and of love, and fills the mind with wisdom, the heart with tenderness. No true man
can look into the mysterious depths of by-gone days, as they pass in solemn proces-
sion through ever deepening twilights into the impenetrable abyss of oblivion, with-
out being overcome by a profound feeling of awe and tenderness and wonder and
inspiration at the power and the glory of that Infinite Creative Impulse, which has
evolved from itself these countless generations of men upheaving and subsiding in
waves of civilization. And to him surely will come the companion reflection that we,
in our turn, are a new wave of civilization, huge and portentous, rising and slowly
swelling toward its crest; and that the impulse of that wave is not militarism, not
feudalism, but Democracy!

You and I are but the minutest of passing wavelets in that uprising sea. We come
and go none knows whence or whither out of the sea and into the sea! Little
wavelets we a breath and we are gone! But souls have we which blow from
the same Infinite Breath that upheaves the sea; and to those souls we will be true
while the swell of the wavelet lasts.

So, my lad, do not falter though others fall. Of true scholarship you can never
have too much. It never burdens and wearies, nor does it dull the mind and dry the
heart; rather does it give wings to the spirit, serenity to the mind, and to the heart
eternal youth!

So opens to us something of the richness of the human mind: the ego; that mar-
velous agency of power under the arching sky! It is Nature's most glorious achieve-
ment in simplicity: the power of powers: the marvel of marvels! So should you
hold Nature in ever growing reverence and love; for she is the eternally fruitful
mother of the great race of Man.

So move we a little further forward in our theme. Its ever broadening harmonies
appall me as they come, like springtime, surging into view. And I am dismayed.
For how little of their indwelling life have I the power of speech or e'en the power
of love to unfold. Alas, how weak is utterance!

131. On Scholarship

XLi. On Culture

What strange and wonderful things words are. I have been thinking of the word,
culture. What a puzzling word it is. What is its real meaning at the core?

It often happens that a certain word, through oft-recurring unimaginative use,
becomes so glib that its significance blurs and dissipates and we dull to its active
meaning. It loses tang. How surely, for instance, the word, war, loses its terrible
meaning during a protracted time of peace. How soon does the word, poetry, part
company with its loftiness among a prosaic people: You can readily see how, little
by little, it falls from its high estate, degenerating into a mere synonym of rhyme, or,
at the highest, versification falling, ever lower, until at last, among a dull people,
it becomes little else than a covert term of reproach. Through what extraordinary
vicissitudes has the word, God, passed I To what depths of banality and common-
place utility has it descended ; through what Saharas of materialism has it wandered,
forlorn and forgotten, when a spiritual night has fallen. Into what quagmires has
the word, art, floundered yet from them it has often struggled forth.

So, know that words hold only that which is continually imparted to them. They
are vital when those who use them vitalize them. They expand with the expansion
of a thought; they decline when that virtue or power they stand for declines in a
people. Bear this in mind: words are unreal, the most illusory of symbols; yet have
they an objective life and story of their own, both as a race of words and as single
words ; wherefore is it that each and every word in our language, or in any language,
is, at any given time, in its own special condition of health or decline. Yet in each
case, the condition of the word is an index of the subjective status of the people who
use it, collectively and individually. So when you listen to talk, or read in a book,
listen with the inner ear, and see with the inner eye; thus will you sometimes be
amazed, sometimes disheartened; sometimes you may be inspired thereby.

So too when you, in turn, use words, make sure that you possess the wherewithal
to charge them lest you be a bow without an arrow a seedless husk from which
no living thing can sprout. See to it above all that when you use the term, creative
art, your mind, your whole being shall be charged to saturation; and when you
speak of the liberation of the creative impulse, be doubly, trebly sure that you are
not an empty husk! Of arrowless bows and seedless husks Lord knows the world is
full. But of all the words that are just now ill unto death, fallen into decrepitude of
neglect, of emaciation, the word, culture, seems to me the most pitiful.

Stop to recall, my son! Did I not promise I would be your gardener, and that
you should be for me as a fair garden under the glad sun that shines for all? Did I
not say that, after plowing and harrowing the fallow field, I would plant, in the
soil of youth, seeds of many thoughts; and, further, when they had germinated in
the darkness, and sprouted forth in tender eagerness, I would water the tiny shoots
with the water of life?

I have not, to be sure, said much to you directly or indirectly of culture as such;
but I have said much to you of manliness of head and heart, of clarity of vision, of
indomitable courage. I have sought with all due insistence to impress upon you, as
a maxim, the simple truth that the heart is greater, worthier, nobler, finer than the

132. Kindergarten Chats

head: that the heart is the sanctuary of the Temple of Man, the head its portal.
That from the heart comes forth Sympathy into the open: the subtlest, the tenderest,
the most human of emotions; and that of Sympathy is born that child of delight
which illumines our pathway, and which we call Imagination. Yet withal, have I
said little to you of culture: for you could not then grasp what true culture means;
you would be last in the crowd of masqueraders, nonplussed by the varied
camouflage.

Openly though wearily have I shown you disease, that you may the better know
what health means. 1 have shown to you the aspects of decay solely that you might
the better grasp the wholesome meaning of growth. I have given you a glimpse of
cynicism and pessimism that I may the more surely lead you on the path to stable
optimism. 1 have shown to you the damnable folly of greed and selfishness, and how
it kills the soul, that you may eventually and surely grasp the wisdom of altruism,
that your soul may live its life yet have I said to you little of culture.

I have spoken, at some length, of Democracy, because I know and deeply feel
how greatly the meaning of the word needs expansion, in every heart and mind.

I have striven, in a measure, as far as you were ripe to understand, to make the
sense of reality known to you the flowing reality of past and present: the reality
of man. The reality of his powers. I have been helping you to form an idea of man,
and to feel for yourself how greatly that word, also, needs expansion, until it shall
meet our pressing need.

I have taught you something of the nature, the use and the value of thought; yet
have I ever prudently outbalanced human logic with the exquisite logic of Nature's
powers and deeds. I have shown to you the difference between things unorganized,
miscellaneous, complicated, involved, and things organic, single, simple, complex:
and again have I taken you to Nature for her proofs.

I have warned you of the pitfalls of words and phrases, and have impressed upon
you, directly and indirectly, that the highest thought is not only wordless, but of
necessity must remain so. Yet has language its wondrous uses.

I have talked to you of the training of the senses ; and have assured you that the
physical senses are the only avenues whereby the outer world can reach your inner
world; that the senses have a higher and a lower range, the one called physical,
the other spiritual or objective and subjective, as you prefer; or outer and inner,
as you prefer.

I have talked of values; and have urged you ever to discriminate between those
values which are enlightened and those which are unenlightened. I have intimated
to you that all values are weighable strictly and surely on the amount and force of
their contained subjectivity or spirit; which explains to you why a building is merely
a screen behind which resides its real value, great or small a personality and
that such weighing in the balance will reveal the spiritual poverty or wealth, the
humanity or the inhumanity, the democracy or the undemocracy of that person-
ality. And yet I have said to you little of Culture! And why not? BECAUSE THESE

THINGS ARE OF THE SPIRIT AND SUBSTANCE OF CULTURE!

Would you plow and harrow, and plant no seed? Is that culture?
Is it culture to let the fallow field revert to weeds and brambles, when plowing
and harrowing are done?

133. On Culture

Would you put a young man's nose in a book, ^ay to him : this is finality? Would
you show him without rational explanation,, completed, complex documents he
cannot in his immaturity understand, because they do not, unaided, find their way
directly to the intelligence and the heart? Is that culture? Is it culture to conceal
from him his native powers, if not indeed to belittle them because you fondly
believe genius to be exceptional? Would you show him great works and refrain from
telling him these works are man and that he too is man? Would you dare tell him
these great works are unapproachable by us? Would you so belittle us all? Would
you so belittle universal human powers you fail to understand for lack of heart and
brain?

Would you narrow his mind, or would you seek in every way to broaden
it? Would you enlarge his sympathy, or would you constrict it? Would you intimate
to him that his own times, his own land, his own people are valueless, hopelessly
vulgar and negligible, or would you tell him that they are what, during all his life,
should and shall be nearest and dearest to him that they are his home? Which
view stands for culture?

Would you in utter rashness, seek to make of him in your various image a pedant,
a fashion-monger, a phrase-maker, an attitudinizer, an opportunist, or would you
awaken in him the creative thinker that surely is within him the truly productive
worker the real man? Which result would stand for culture?

Would you tell a young architect that democracy has nothing to do with his art,
and his art still less to do with democracy: that no one ever heard of so strange,
so preposterous a notion; or would you tell him that in that very democracy lies an
inexhaustible wealth of inspiration needing only the open eye, the open mind to
receive it, to interpret it, and to convey it? Which course would stand for culture?

Would you tell a young architect that the enormously varied problems large and
small of building, under modern American conditions, material and social, are to
be met and solved, not by personal, individual force of sympathy, intellect and will,
but by the application of an artificial memory of things past and gone; unsympa-
thetic now, and inapplicable! Would that be culture? Or would you say to him, as
I now say to you: My son, the world is seeking now, more than ever, men of force
of intellect and strength of character: MEN OF CULTURE. It needs them; for it has
much for them to do. Supremely does your own country need such men in all walks
of life; it sadly needs them, it as sadly needs confidence in them, to make for it its
buildings. Such men it needs in every walk, in every function, in every activity, in
order conclusively to express the re'alities of its destiny, the realities of its racial
wisdom and character, the realities of the land and the time the genius of the
people: once it believes in them it will welcome them. You are in truth not asked
by them to tarry with superficialities, to be their flunky; you are expected to go
intimately deep; to come intimately near; you are expected to be wholly, not partly,
efficient; you are expected to sympathize, to understand: you are expected to be
obviously human and true.

Now just so long as our educational institutions above the grade of the kinder-
garten and kindred aspects persist in foisting a feudal and hence now artificial sys-
tem of thinking and feeling upon an active-minded people, just so long shall we
continue to be characterized by spiritual poverty instead of spiritual wealth in our

134. Kindergarten Chats

civilization and in our art. For our art cannot differ materially from our civilization,
and our civilization cannot essentially differ from our thought, our education. Hence,
we may seek and find the existing center of gravity of our art within the nature and
tendencies of our educational methods. I am gratefully aware of important move-
ments for educational betterment, even though they be sporadic. I know the bril-
liant minds impelling these movements striving against the inertia of academic
convention and the languor of habit The leaven is working, and some day will
surely work largely.

Thus, my son, do we obtain a general view of the orderly form and content of
true culture, in contrast to the relative shapelessness and emptiness of what, amongst
us, passes for culture* Culture to be real, to ring true, in this day and land and for
our people, must become democratic: as they must become. It must justify itself
as the most simple, impressively obvious output of the spirit of democracy in its
subjective aim and social form. Otherwise, culture for us is an illusion, a delusion,
not a power. When two such words as Democracy and Culture are conjoined, there
arises from the conjunction a new idea, a new sense and vision of power a new
world wherein Democratic-Culture shall signify man's highest estate.

True Culture means the full opening of the heart: its veritable blooming. With-
out this all else is vanity and vexation of spirit.

Now we are beginning!

He that endureth to the end shall be saved!

XLII. What is an Architect?

What's on your mind this time?

Pater, this is, for sure, a weary world! I cannot reach the heights of it: I am hung
up by the middle. Suspended in the center of a minute vacuum of my own, by a
string invisible, the end of which reaches up beyond my ken. Yet do I gravitate by
my own weight, feathery tho s that be; and if the string were cut, I flutter, like an
autumn leaf, and settle upon the solid earth of another vacuum unreal and intan-
gible as this Infinite of which you speak, illusory and elusive as the democracy of
which you speak, unreal and intangible and yet just as commonplace as the land and
the people of which you speak fugitive and furtive and evanescent as the realities
of which you speak.

Ah, that which is near at hand is farther off than mountains! Why did you tell
me that the near-at-hand might be grasped? The nearer at hand the farther away!
It is only illusions that can be grasped and held! Realities escape our every touch;
they recede as we advance.

We are creatures of illusion and must remain ever such for realities, as you
have said, are divine; they are of and for the Infinite; they are not for us.

135. What is an Architect?

Yet am I not sad, nor cast down, but resolute I am merely out of focus; for
no man can look forward and backward, up and down, right and left, near and far
at the same time.

Go on, pater; I have girded up my heart! I am your hardy mariner O.K., but
it is a heavy, foggy calm, and dead-reckoning is no joke! No; I will not be a por-
celain ship upon a porcelain sea! Let the waves break and roar! Better to drown in
turbulent waters than collapse in a tenuous air!

I am a seed deep in the dark ground! Would that I might sprout, and my spear
shoot into the lambent light and air, and delicately pierce the melody of spring!

Realities, realities! What are realities to the living-dead! What are sights to the
eyeless! What are sounds to the earless! What are joys and sorrows to the heart-
less! What is the Infinite to the mindless! What is man to man the beast?

Ah, it's all very fine, very fine indeed to be out of focus; especially when you know
it. What does it comfort me that most men are out of focus! for they know naught
of the open air, while I I have had glimpses II only to lose them except
in memory's hold! Verily life has every weather, every water's depth!

Why is it farther to the nearest dewdrop than to the moon? Why is the nearest
man you know unreachable as the pole? And yet, and yet, we press a button and a
current flows that did not flow before, and there is light an artificial light to be
sure. But what are all our lights but artificial lights?

While you have been talking, I have been thinking, pater. Perhaps my thoughts
were tinkling bells who can say! Time alone can tell, and Time is rudely silent
thereupon. Will she consecrate or will she blast I do not care! For I am stub-
born, now, with Fate, and must push on!

To what depths must we dig to find a solid soil! What a ridiculously elaborate
scaffolding must we erect! And when our little structure's done and the scaffold
down and the tools and the rubbish removed and our darling left to the world, the
Stupid says: "Oh, how stupid: I could do that." I do not care; even though to
move a people is harder than to move a rock! I suppose when Moses struck the rock
and the waters flowed forth, that was another oriental allegory. I don't care
whether it was or not, if it has to be explained. Why must we be eternally explaining
things! Why don't things explain themselves! Why don't we understand without
these everlasting explanations which explain nothing! We either see or don't see,
don't we? And that's about the beginning and the end of it, isn't it? We are a dull
crew all of us, and I am superlatively dull! When will the scales stay fallen from my
eyes! When shall I be born again in strength! What avails it that I think, if my
thought is sterile and brings forth not something fruitful into the light! Yet what
do I care! Why should I care?

What is an architect, anyway, pater? I mean a real architect? I know what the
common breed is. What sort of unusual hocus-pocus is he? From what particular
heavenly menagerie is he supposed to have escaped, that he is to roam thus, as you
intimate, through the wilderness of our land and day? You implied that he comes
as a storm; and I think your whole storm-business was merely an occidental allegory.
Allegories are all right if you are talking to an imaginative people; but stop to
think!

That a poet should arise as an exhalation from the spiritual agony and drought

136. Kindergarten Chats

of his people, to condense, and return the waters, and after that that there should
be rainbows and other beautiful things is line, but it's too metaphysical. It's taken
me three months to get it through my head. I thought, at the time, that you were
talking and rhapsodizing about the actual physical storm we saw and felt How
could I know for a certainty that you were at the same time talking about a storm
that I did not see and could not feel? But let that go, I want to think about it some
more.

The main question in my mind is, what is an architect? Just as another question
is: What is American; or, for that matter, what is an apple, a horse, a pine-tree
and, of course, ultimately, what is a building? And, again, more ultimately, what
is architecture, what is a man, what are you, what am I, what is God, what is any-
thing, and so on and on, around and around the circle, only to go around and
around again, like a moth fluttering around the reality of a candle flame, which
after all is only an illusion for the moth the reality comes when the moth is
burned.

Pater, learning this metaphysical business is a good deal like learning to control
an aeroplane: the main thing is to keep your balance, not lose confidence, and go
ahead. I shall learn the vertiginous game after a little, because I've made up my
mind to it, and because I'm beginning to see that there is a deal in it that is useful
in the way of aerial observation.

But for the moment let's bar it. Tell me what an architect is in fact, in reality,
so to speak. I'm getting my own mind pretty well made up, after what you said on
Culture, but I want to hear your view first just to see if it's right, so to speak
you know. I want to get down to the practicalities.

Now don't look wistful, and tell me that if I want to see what an unreal architect
is like to go look long and steadily in a mirror and learn by contrast. I don't like
these sarcasms. They hurt now, for I have growing-pains; I am beginning to take
myself very seriously, and flippancy scratches. From the duplicity of your heights,
where contraries unite, you may treat serious matters with a certain irony and dis-
dain or am I entirely mistaken! In any event, kindly bear in mind that I am the
shorn lamb and that you have shorn me; so temper the wind while I gather new
wool for what is art but wool-gathering after all?

But I digress. What I want to know is, what is an architect? Let's get down to
business or perhaps I might ask: What is an architect not? Shall we proceed by
elimination or by cumulation, by frontal or by flank attack? And please bear in
mind, pater, that I am an architect. Pardon me don't look at me like that I
hasten to amend I think I am an architect and

Oh, let up, boy; you tire me to death. Bottle up that effervescence and save it
for your next fit of blues.

That's right, daddy. I kiss the hand that chastens. I don't believe that an architect
is a plumber, or a bricklayer or a mortar-mixer, or a teamster or a quarry-man, or
a woodchopper, or a saw-mill, or a railroad, do you?

Of course not?

Nor is he a tinsmith, a glazier, a drain-layer, a roofer, a stone-cutter, a marble
worker, a tile-layer, a jack-carpenter, a cabinet-maker, a wood-finisher, a painter, a

137. What is an Architect?

derrick hand, a wire cable, or coal, or water, or the earth on which the building
rests, or the air in which it grows is he?

No.

I intend no allegory.

Go on, go on!

I am speaking objectively.

Will you go on!

Nor is he a moulder, a blacksmith, a forge, an anvil, a miner digging in the mines,
a blast furnace, a rolling-mill.

Well, what of it?

Why, this: All these men and all these things enter as a genesis into the creation
of a building, do they not? And yet they are not architects.

First rate. Go on.

Neither is he a surveyor, a mechanical engineer, an electrical engineer, a civil en-
gineer, is he? Otherwise why are these men so called? Why are they not called
architects?

That is well put.

Nor yet is he a builder, else why the name builder?

Very good.

And yet as regards a building the builder has his function, the engineer has his,
the blacksmith his, the stone-cutter his, the man with a shovel his, the railroad train-
man his, the railroad president his, the steel mill superintendent his, the banker his,
the merchant his, the policeman his, and so on and on and on in an ever including
and widening cyclus which extends ever outward and inward from the center to the
borders of our civilization, and from its borders to the center. And why? Because
Man has a desire to shelter himself and his products from the elements. Yet, so far,
we have no architect. And why? Because none of these people and none of these
things is called architect. Yet there is a name architect, therefore there must be a
function architect a real function a real architect an architect solus.

I have been thinking this out all by myself. You see, I want to isolate the architect
and study him, just as biologists isolate a bacillus and study him. The bacillus is not
the fever, the bacillus is the bacillus. So the architect is not the building, the architect
is the architect. The bacillus causes the fever by acting on the body corporeal; so the
architect causes the building by acting on the body social. The simile is not a nice
one; in fact it's rather crude; but it gives you an idea of what I'm thinking.

But, on the other hand, the architect is a product of the body social, a product of
our civilization. This you have shown me clearly. My simile breaks down here in a
measure, but let it go I'm through with it. So we approach him from two sides
as a product and as an agency; so of course I come at once to his true function,
namely the double one: TO INTERPRET AND TO INITIATE!

That's very well done. You are beginning to show that you possess a logical and
a perspicacious mind, and that you know how to use it.

Thank you. That's the first sincere compliment you've paid me.

It's the first you have earned.

Well, now, if our architect is at once a product and an agency, and if his func-

138. Kindergarten Chats

tion is at once to interpret and to initiate, what is he to interpret and what is he to
initiate? What is it that justifies the name architect, what is his special, exclusive
function? What is he expected to do, and what is he, alone, assumed to have the
capacity to do, under our scheme and arrangement of civilization?

I hereby wave aside from the inquiry the hybrid-architect: the architect who
believes himself an engineer, a carpenter, a merchant, a broker, a manufacturer, a
business man or what not and never stops to inquire if he is or is not an architect
If the merchant, broker, etc., were architects they would be called architects. They
are not architects and that is why they are not called architects. Conversely, the
architect who deems himself merchant, broker, etc., ceases to be architect and be-
comes hybrid, just to the extent that he believes it.

Of course, I assume that other men than architects may be and are products
and agencies, and interpret and initiate. The dramatist may be such, the merchant
such and many others : in fact, in the broadest sense, all are such, in larger or lesser
degree, under the terms and conditions of modern civilization. But not one of these
is expected to interpret the wants of the people with a view to initiate buildings.
Hence the true function of the architect is to initiate such buildings as shall cor-
respond to the real needs of the people.

Very good. Have you finished? If

No, no! Let me talk. I have thought about this a great deal, in my own way.
I am coming to the crux of the discussion; it is this: if it be true, as I have declared,
that the true function of the architect is to initiate such buildings as shall correspond
to the real needs of the people, how shall I infuse such unmistakable integrity of
meaning and purpose into the word, initiate, the word correspond, and the phrase,
real needs of the people, that mutton-heads and knaves can't use them for their
own shameful purposes, by effecting a change of significance in the formula?

My boy, formulas are dangerous things. They are apt to prove the undoing of a
genuine art, however helpful they may be, in the beginning, to the individual. The
formula of an art remains and becomes more and more dry, rigid and shriveled
with time, while the spirit of that art escapes, and vanishes forever. The bright
spirit of art must be free. It will not live in a cage of words. Its willing home is in
boundless nature, in the heart of the people, in the heart of the poet and in the
work of the poet. It cannot live in text-books, in formulas, or in definitions. It must
be free, else it departs as the light departs with the setting sun, and the darkness of
folly is upon us.

Yes, I feel that, and I am beginning to feel in a very practical way the truth of
what you said concerning the trickiness of words. Yet what am I to do I must
make others understand what I mean.

You can never make others understand what you mean. It's sheer folly to think
of it. That, my boy, is an illusion a fetish of the learned.

You understand what you understand, and another understands what he under-
stands. You can't understand him and he can't understand you and that's a
beginning and an end of it. There exists between you and every one of your fellow
beings a chasrn infinitesimally narrow, yet absolutely uncrossable. The heart cannot
cross it, the soul cannot cross it: much less can words cross it. Thus do you, thus
does every human being live in the solitude of isolation whence comes the word

139. What is an Architect?

identity. This isolation is unreachable and unescapable. It is for each one of us a
dungeon, or a boundless universe according to the largeness or the littleness of his
soul; and around every living thing is there such an infinitesimal yet impassible gulf:
around every tree., around every animal, every insect, every bird, every plant Yet,
within the confines of that circling chasm, lies an identity, a soul unreachable,
inscrutable; the ultimate reality; the very presence of the Eternal Spirit a spirit
of such infinite marvel that it brings forth an infinitude of infinitudes of identities
wonderful 1 wonderful! Spirit of the Universe! The Eternal Sun!

So, my boy, do not trouble yourself as to whether or not others understand your
words as you do. Seek rather to understand yourself regardless of words; and in
due time, if so it be written in the great book of destiny, others will perceive in your
works more or less of what you, more or less adequately, have thought, felt, lived,
loved and understood*

Yes, that's doubtless all true, although I had never thought of it in just that way.
Moreover, it's a rather creepy and scary thought this notion of an invisible, im-
passible gulf which separates you from everything and everybody, so that you even
cannot understand a friend. But still that shouldn't prevent me from attempting to
define myself with a reasonable degree of clearness. So again, let me try to be ex-
plicit concerning the words interpret, and initiate, and the phrase, real needs of the
people^ as I understand them. To rny own statement that the true function of the
architect is to initiate such buildings as shall correspond to the real needs of the
people, I now add your statement, that he must cause a building to grow naturally,
logically and poetically out of its conditions. Now all of this means, and practically
all that you have said to me means, I take it, in a few words, that the real architect
is first, last and all the time, not a merchant, broker, manufacturer, business man,
or anything of that sort, but a poet who uses not words but building materials as a
medium of expression: Just in the same sense that a great painter uses pigments
as his medium of expression; a musician, tones; a sculptor, the marble block; a
literatus, the written word; and an orator, the spoken word and, like them, to
be truly great, really useful, he must impart to the passive materials a subjective
or spiritual human quality which shall make them live for other humans other-
wise he fails utterly and is, in a high sense, a public nuisance instead of a public
benefactor. Isn't that so?

It is indeed so.

Well, then, if it is so, and if it is true that this is the core of the matter, what's
the use of talking about the so-called practicabilities. It can go without the saying,
can't it, that a knowledge of administration, construction, equipment,, materials,
methods, processes and workmanship are part of his technical equipment whereby
he has the efficiency and power to express the poetic thought just as language
and a knowledge of words are the technical equipment of the literatus. It is not,
I take it, the words that make the poem, it is the manner in which the words are
marshaled, organized and vitalized, that makes a poem a poem. And just so with
building materials; they must be organized and vitalized in order that a real build-
ing may exist. Therefore to vitalize building materials, to animate them collectively
with a thought, a state of feeling, to charge them with a subjective significance and

140. Kindergarten Chats

value, to make them a visible part of the genuine social fabric, to infuse into them
the true life of the people, to impart to them the best that is in the people, as the
eye of the poet, looking below the surface of life, sees the best that is in the people
such is the real function of the architect; for, understood in these terms, the
architect is one kind of poet, and his work one form of poetry using the word
in its broad, inclusive, actual sense. And if this view of the function of the architect
be the true one, the real one, I can now understand what I did not fully grasp at
the time, namely, your views concerning the methods of our architectural schools,
your exasperation at the professor, and your contempt for what is currently called
scholarship and culture. Truly it is inspiring, when one begins to acquire the faculty
of looking at things with the inner or spiritual eye! Truly .such an eye illuminates
that which it sees, and opens to the inner view, and to the grasp of understanding,
the great world of realities. This is, substantially, about as far as I can carry my
thesis, with my present incomplete understanding of it. I suppose I have dropped
a few stitches in knitting my argument.

No matter about the dropped stitches, for the present. You have done very well.
Keep on observing, thinking in the back of your head, in your spinal marrow, in
your blood corpuscles, in your heart, liver, stomach, little finger, or wheresoever or
by whatsoever real thinking is done * I don't know and, slowly, but surely, you
will find your thought grow, develop, personify itself and take on the inscrutable
quality of identity: just as a plant grows by nutrition, assimilation and organization:
and, when your flowering time conies ah, ray lad, when your flowering time
comes! your thought will flower and exhale the perfume I call architecture. You
will be a real architect; sound of spirit, head, and clean of heart.

That is very kind. You fill me with hope. But don't you wish to take up my thesis
where I left it and carry it on to a full and fine conclusion?

No, that isn't necessary. As I told you, long ago, you must do your own thinking.
My task is simply to coach you a little, in calling your attention to certain things,
certain conditions, certain powers, that exist in nature, in the world of men, in your
land, in your people and in yourself, and to point out to you certain things or es-
sences that are eternal. My chiefest joy, and my greatest care, has been and is to
protect you, until you are really strong, against illusions, delusions, and that self-
secreted poison we call self-deception," and to inspire you with courage, manliness
and an abiding sense of personal accountability. In such regard my work has been, is
and shall continue to the end a work of love, born of reverence for youth and of
fidelity to country and mankind. But I repeat, and should repeat over and over
again: all the rest you must do, I cannot do your thinking, your living or your grow-
ing for you. I cannot define your personality : I will not delimit it. The true work of
the architect is to organize, integrate and glorify UTILITY. Then and then only is he

truly MASTER-WORKER.

Moreover, we still have far to go^ through shadowy valleys, over chilling heights,
through flowering meadows, before you shall be prepared to reach, by yourself, the
threshold of the hidden temple of our art. Indeed, I fear lest as we come in sight of
it that temple will recede, like a fearful rainbow: for of all things elusive, the fair
spirit of art, whose abode is that temple, is the most unreal in the evanescence of its
reality. If it come at all, it comes to us ; we cannot go to it. And that it may come to

14.1. What Is an Architect?

us, that it may desire to come to us, we must ever truly seek it within the boundless
power, beauty, and the sumptuous, fertile chastity of Nature. We must seek with
fervent minds, with open hearts in the plein air of the spirit.

Amen! I see I have some job before me. The architect is now hovering in my ma-
t\iring imagination^ not as a super-man, but as a real man a philosophic man of
the world: as the creating, guiding, sustaining SPIRIT: to the end that the finished
building may and shall be an ethical TOTALITY however large, however small

XI!!!. On Criticism

It was said, of old: For what shall it profit a man if he shall gain the whole world
and lose his own soul: An inquiry doubtless as old as inquiring Man which
arises ever again when the Questioner speaks within the heart. Asked, of one's self,
it is the perennial query addressed to one's self by one's self concerning poise, balance,
symmetry in life: concerning one's life value considered as a totality. It may be trans-
posed into many forms; but its essence always is: If I gain this and lose that? It is
a question ever intensifying as the years go by and the reckoning-day approaches. It
is a progressive or retrospective weighing of values, material, moral, spiritual. It is
the question of maturity, of advancing age it is the question born of experience,
retrospection and introspection; it is seldom asked by the young. It is the ultimate
question of proportion, of an attempted adjudication and adjustment of values in
life's long account an account scrutinized all too often in the nearing end, with
the calm eye of sorrow and infinite regret and the yearning to begin anew: or the
yearning to die speedily and to close the false account forever to blot it out.

Man is unbalanced through the extravagant force of his mental perversity and by
pressure of education and circumstance. He is a sorry victim of varied impulse, of
callousness, of short and dim sight; and irrational to an incredible degree, if not al-
ways consciously brutal. Youth is his period of diffused illusion, hyperbole and ro-
mance; middle age his period of concentrated illusion, of specialized insight, judg-
ment and narrowed sense of reality; and old age the period of statical illusion, of in-
finitely useless regret, of a sorrow more or less delicate, more or less roseate, more
or less sombre, more or less terrible as his sun sinks nearer its horizon, and the coin-
ing twilight brings the refrain more or less unvoiced: What profiteth it a man if he
gain the world and in so doing lose his soul? Self-criticism in old age may be mellow
or futile; in middle age vigorous or futile; in youth it is doomed to futility as a flower
is doomed to fade: unless yes, unless! This unless is the motive power, the inter-
pretation of all I have said and shall say: the germ of my constant purpose to unify
for you the outer and the Inner life: to define the power of choice. For Man's great
historic search has been for poise, for balance, for anchorage in his universe, for a
stable foundation on which to base his hopes. From lack of such balance and [of] a
knowledge how to adjust the lack comes to us by far the greater part of the ennui,

142. Kindergarten Chats

the disenchantment, the cynicism, the pessimism, and the disgust and hollowness of
our lives: the weariness, fever and pallor.

If the fullness of life be an ideal, so shall the fullness of work be an Ideal; and the
work is to be judged by us solely as it may approach in its flow of expression that full-
ness of life which is assumed by us to be the ideal of all arts of expression, and the
implications of which ideal we have been extending to all social activities, considered,
in their turn, as democratic arts of expression, or expressions of a democratic art.
And consequently, civilization itself looms before us as an expression and an art of
expression; and, finally, Democratic Civilization as the complete art of expression by,
of and for a people.

By way of illustration, note the flower of the field! How resonant of life! How elo-
quently complete in expression! How rational and exquisite in structure, function and
form! With what consummate organization and unfolding has it arisen with its pur-
pose from the seed and the soil; expanding in sunshine, watered by rain and dew.
Can you not vision forth its extended counterpart in a civilization?

By way of counter-illustration, turn now to the nearest every-day building large
or small. How melancholy the contrast! And yet we speak of the wayside flower as a
weed unaware that in sanity of procedure we have not succeeded hi rivaling the
weed, much less in surpassing it. We allude to the weed as common, as wild. It may
be "common" as we say, it may be "wild" as we say, but it is a miracle nevertheless.
It is a most impressive symbol.

Now why does the work of a given man, why does the work of society as a whole,
compare thus with the work of a given weed? Is it not a genuine function of modern
criticism to make this inquiry?

One answer is obvious : It is this : The weed is of the work of Nature, remains with
Nature and is, therefore, "natural" as we say. The man, strangely enough it might
seem, has departed from Nature whence he came. Strangely he has, in pride of in-
tellect, denied INSTINCT: called it a weed, and wild, as it were. He has become "edu-
cated," sophisticated, perverse, inverted; and, in a span, he has come to despise the
Mother Nature that bore him, and has become an IshmaeL Is it not a function of
criticism to inquire into this? to note wherein lies this abnormality of intellect?

Now and then, a man-child remains with Nature, and thence puts forth, as she
does, the utterance of his heart in one or another form: music, words, sculpture, phil-
osophy, ethics or other voice of that fathomless subconscious world which is
Nature's own.

Now why does it almost invariably happen that at first he is ridiculed as a human
weed and wild? Why was Nature's greatest man-child crucified? Is it because he is
as it were the Ugly Duckling, because he seems not like his kind for men know not
the child of Nature? But Eternal Nature knows her man-children and will not be
gainsaid! When she speaks through one of her chosen she will not be denied! Only
through the voices of her true ones can her message to her recalcitrant brood be con-
veyed.

So, in time, after hardships and sufferings and despair (because he is not like his
kind, and can be none other than himself), the Ugly Duckling is seen by Swans
to be a SWAN! And thus the Child of Nature, the master-worker, the wonder-
worker, at last is glorified, or his memory is glorified, by the sons of men, who hail

143. On Criticism

him when they may no longer deny him a visionary genius: a benefactor of his
race. Why is he a genius? Is it not of the high power of criticism to inquire into such
phenomena and to widen the inquiry to the limits of knowledge and understanding.
Must not criticism itself partake of Nature's quality?

If under present conditions one man in a million may keep in touch with Nature
and be inspired by the influence of her subtle power, may not two in a million, three
in a million, ten, one hundred, five hundred thousand, or all under SANE condi-
tions?

If sophistication, waywardness, perversity and inversion mark the half-man, if
naturalness, simplicity and truth mark the whole-man., why are there not more whole-
men? Is it not a function of criticism to inquire deeply into this?

If tradition, education, are, in any measure, responsible for half-men, and I be-
lieve them largely responsible, is it not a high function of criticism to inquire closely
into the basis, the spirit of our traditions, of our educational methods and to in-
quire why such tradition, such methods, make or tend to make half -men?

Now does current criticism generally and seriously busy itself with such investiga-
tions, or with cognate subjects? In so far as I am aware, scarcely at all. Architectural
criticism surely does not : It busies itself almost solely with externals, with superficiali-
ties, with literal, verbose, petty things, with refinements which refine nothing widely
valuable, with analyses which analyze nothing to the core, with discussions which
disclose nothing essential to our need. It busies itself with empty shells of human
life. It deals with the littleness of "styles," not the largeness of humanity the ur-
gency of propositions! It seeks and finds small truths among the mutabilities of things
done. It does not search the heart of man for the native why and wherefore of these
things done. If criticism in other departments of activity excels, I leave it to you to
discover, by experiment and comparison.

Truly, my lad, we need the whole-man critic as urgently as we need architects
gifted with whole-power to create. For the high function of the critic is to reinterpret
to the people the works of such as truly interpret the people: to make plain to them
who have not the leisure, or the special training, themselves to undertake the work
of sifting wheat from chaff, the real nature and the true drift of the architectural
art, the real nature, the true drift of democratic civilization: to show to them clearly,
concisely, what elementary education may become when based upon a knowledge and
understanding of man's power to absorb and to create. Then the art of architecture
will cease to be a sealed book, and the greater book the art of civilization will
open to our gaze.

144. Kindergarten Chats

XLiV. On Knowledge and Understanding

In your talk on Criticism, you so interested me that in my absorption I forgot to
ask questions. And, for that matter, it has happened before. But this time I have
been reflecting, rather than dreaming; or perhaps dreaming with open eyes, seeing,
as it were, a dream coming true, and at the same time seeing other dreams fading
away as in a grand transformation scene. What impresses me particularly at this
moment is the fact very considerably disturbing and yet expectantly inspiring
that, when it would appear in my judgment that you have brought your general
thesis substantially to a close, you begin anew, and a new flower of thought blooms
forth in my consciousness as an instinctive response. You have, for instance, added
a new work to my vocabulary the word Criticism. You have charged it for me
with a richness of meaning I had not supposed it contained, that I had no idea it
could contain. As a result, I am led to climb higher up that summit of which you
spoke and which, when reached, you said would reveal to view our modern world.
You have set more thoughts agoing in me than I can ever work out in a lifetime.

The landscape is clarifying in the light of the modern sun. But is there to be no
end to these beginnings, these unfoldings of one truth from a preceding truth; these
ever greater, ever expanding rebeginnings : new births from a parent idea, I might
call them? Is it really true, as my instinct tells me you imply, that our very world of
men is now actually at the beginning of a new beginning, that civilization is about
to emerge from its past and begin a new advance, with a new, inspiring, luminous
thought, a thought born not of the deep valley, but of the summit of altruism? Is
there no end to the new beginnings, the new unfoldings of man's powers? For truly
I am beginning a new beginning. I am beginning to see Man in the light of his
powers. To see what he may accomplish if he but choose aright. Tell me some more.
I am hungry and athirst for knowledge, for understanding.

Then let me tell you, now, to choose your words with greater care as you advance.
The phenomenon you mention is not a beginning but a becoming.

Isn't that a rather fine metaphysical distinction?

No. It is a metaphysical clarity. That is what metaphysics is for to be put to
human use. There is all the difference in the world between beginning and becom-
ing: one is almost mechanical in import, the other deeply spiritual. A similar differ-
ence exists between two other big words you used, namely Knowledge and Under-
standing. My ostensible thesis has been Architecture as a social function, as an art of
expression. My real thesis underlying that one and all others of all other men is that
within man, a spiritual being, resides a spiritual power capable of infinite unfolding,
unnumbered beginnings and expanding rebeginnings truth out of luminous truth.
That power in its becoming I call Democracy, and hail as man's becoming.

I think I see fairly well what you mean, and accept it as true because you say it
is true.

You will accept nothing as true because I say it is true. Why fall again into the pit
out of which I have dragged you the worship of authority of dogma? If you say
you accept provisionally as true what I say is true, well and good. If you see it is
true, so much the better. The proof of all the statements I have made lies not in me

145. On Knowledge and Understanding

but in the broad populous world about you, present and past. With open eyes you
will see; with veiled eyes you will not see. But bear in mind this: It is not sufficient
to have Knowledge alone; one must have also UNDERSTANDING.

Is this to be a logic-chopping expedition? Let us return to the poetic side. I under-
stand it better. Close thinking tires me. I prefer to dream.

I wish to broaden your dream: to expose something of the drama of the ages
the drama of man. Let us climb the summit somewhat higher.

Yes, let us climb together. What will you talk about on the way? I can't yet grasp
the idea of becoming.

I shall preach a sermon on the text you yourself have selected: Knowledge and
Understanding. For of what avail is Knowledge without Understanding? And yet
Understanding is begotten of Knowledge but not by it. The world is filled with
Knowledge; it is almost empty of Understanding. For, let me tell you, Knowledge
is of the head. Understanding is of the heart. Knowledge is of the intellect, Under-
standing is of instinct. To a person older than yourself this might seem a wild and
weedlike statement, in view of world accomplishments* To you, for the moment,
it may mean nothing. But be patient. I do not question that fullness of Understand-
ing may and should follow upon fullness of Knowledge; increase in Understanding
upon increase in Knowledge. But has it in the past? Does it today? I do not ques-
tion that in their native qualities they should mutually react to the increase of joint
power. But have they? Do they? Or has Knowledge far outstripped Understanding,
or has Understanding lagged? It seems strange that Knowledge and Understanding
should not have gone forward together hand in hand. It seems a far and tragic sepa-
ration, or has Knowledge overestimated itself, or Understanding failed to assert itself,
or has Knowledge, so to speak ; bullied Understanding? Or, has the intellect domi-
neered over instinct and suppressed it? It is a strange, strange drama, a drama begin-
ning with the dawn of civilization and extending even to this day, this hour. It is
true there has arisen a power called Reason, but reason has failed thus far to effect
a reconciliation, assuming that it has ever made the attempt or even recognized the
disparity. For reason prides itself upon its coldness, its pulchritude, it calls itself pure.
And intellect aspires to this selfsame purity; it tends even toward abstraction. It is
strange, a strange role in the strange drama, that intellect, proclaimed by man his
highest power, tends ever to forsake man; and man, following this motile star, falls
in the ditch; climbs out, falls in again; and again climbs out and again pursues. For
Knowledge, man says, is power. He also says after a fall that a little Knowl-
edge is a dangerous thing. Now is it to be supposed that if man were to extend his
Knowledge he might arrive at a knowledge of Understanding? I do not mean to say
or infer or imply that man has not arrived at a fair understanding of some things;
that he has not made some use of the vassal. His knowledge certainly is phenomenal
in so far as it represents immense and patient labor, and the stored-up results. It
would seem almost as though man's knowledge were sufficient unto the day. With in-
defatigable energy, patience and perseverance he has extended his perpetual curi-
osity far into the limitless vast and far into the limitless minute. He has drawn up
Leviathan with a hook; he has loosed the bands of Orion; but he has not bound the
sweet influence of Pleiades, nor has he sought to guide Arcturus with his sons. He has
tested, analyzed, classified. He has enumerated and computed; he has weighed and

146. Kindergarten Chats

measured and recorded. As man the inquirer, he has stood back of man the worker.
With admirable ingenuity he has extended his powers of observation, of analysis, of
synthesis. With unceasing industry he has formulated. He has given his findings with
generous, overflowing hands to the world of active work. With equal abandon he has
given over his findings to those who create from them systems of thought, systems
of procedure, systems of explanation theories and hypotheses and speculations
whereby it is purposed to elucidate man and his universe. Man's intellect has exam-
ined all things piecemeal, it has examined man minutely in his body and his mind.
It has erected extraordinary systems in explanation of man's soul. It has produced
vastly erudite accounts of man's career, historic and prehistoric, biological, sociologi-
cal, emotional and intellectual. It has erected its own conception of man in its own
intellectual image: THEREFORE, it has utterly failed to understand man. It neither
sought nor found him. What it sought and found was an abstract intellectual con-
cept a complete inversion of the reality.

And yet man has been face-to-face with man for untold ages. True, here and there
through the past came men who caught glimpses of man. But they were neither scien-
tists nor logicians, nor philosophers, nor theologians ; they were compassionate dream-
ers overflowing with love. The wise could not understand them. Only the common
people could glimpse an understanding; for the multitude also are compassionate
they are near to the earth. If ever there has been an example of that pride which
goeth before destruction, and that haughty spirit which goeth before a fall, it is this
unique colossal failure of the intellect to discern and welcome man; to reveal him
to his own perturbed and anxious self. And yet it could be confidently stated a priori,
without this preamble, that intellect could not but fail in such search; for such
search, such recognition, such acclaim, lies in the specific province of INSTINCT. It is
through the primordial power of instinct alone that we may seek and find man. In-
tellect, having forsaken instinct, is at present unfitted for such fine work. That work
must be done through the HEART: for it is the heart alone that understands; it is
the hand-maiden of Instinct pulchritudinous and pure. When we, perchance,
momentarily cease our labors with the electron, and the double-stars, we may per-
haps predicate the appearance of a new double-star within the human firmament,
the star of intellect and the star of instinct each in its orbit, and each and both re-
sponsive to their common center of gravity. When such star shall shine within man's
soul, his becoming will increase and glow in splendor. He will be prepared to know
and welcome Man.

Hence it is today that every vicious attitude of man's intellect, every cowardly
brutality, every cold-blooded cruelty, every stupidity it perpetrates is attributed to his
instinct. Hence it is that ignominy upon ignominy has been cast by man himself upon
the better part of himself, in his intellectual fear, in his fatuity of misunderstanding.
The unique characteristic of intellect is that, alone uncontrolled and unsupported, it
is peculiarly unstable; it tends ever toward insanity, toward self-destruction. It leads
man to cataclysms of downfall. Those diseases, selfishness, greed, domination, sup-
pression, usually attributed to the heart, are distinctly attitudes (not attributes) of
the intellect in its unbalance. To speak of a man as hard of heart is foolish : to speak
of him as hard in intellect is the truth. For ages man has been the victim of his intel-
lect, and such victim he is today. In his folly he has denied to the heart equal part-

147. On Knowledge and Understanding

nership. In his utter folly of intellectual self-hypnosis, he has become socially mad.
No wonder modern man does not know man when he sees him. No wonder he is this
very day in the tragic throes of intellectual agony, that this is his cataclysmic hour of
bloody sweat,

Long, long ago in the dawn of proto-man, when the function, man, was seeking
form and power within a hostile world, it sent forth out of the abysm of instinct a
sub-function which we now call intellect. This new-appearing power sought form
and activity that it might watch, ward and direct; that it might assist in the self-
preservation and self-assertion of the ego that primordial power seeking form and
assertion in the beginnings of man's becoming. As proto-man, in evolving, ap-
proached the form and contour of primitive man, intellect became more and more
active, more and more dominant, while instinct as steadily declined in outward mani-
festation of power. Ego chose intellect for its counsellor and guide, through fear. And
here began selfishness, here Feudalism began its long career. Here began man's down-
fall, so vividly portrayed in Genesis in the impressive spiritual allegory of the garden.
Here man parted with his innocence. Here began sin: the sin of intellect. Verily he
tasted of the fruit of the tree of Knowledge. What a price he since has paid! For
when man parted with Instinct the conserver, the preserver, the sure sustainer, he
parted company with himself, he lost himself, and became a wanderer and then a
seeker, as one going with outstretching arms and half-closed eyes, seeking to recall
an all but forgotten dream seeking himself seeking man. Instinct was not dead
within him. It slumbered. Hence man in his hunger sought with his intellect to
create a companion, he became dual. He put forth an image of his loneliness which
took shape in dual philosophies, dual religions, dual civilizations, by way of compen-
sation and balance. Thus man in becoming dual lost his integrity. But unitary ego
was not dead, rather was it in a trance. It slumbered and put forth intellectual won-
ders and aberrations : now and then dreaming gently of its own integrity as a holy
dream within an all-enfolding illusion. Meanwhile the heart yearned, it knew not for
what. It yearned for surcease, it yearned for peace, for happiness it yearned in
silence for an understanding: while the intellect strutted, raved on in an ecstasy of
ambition, and civilizations rose and civilizations fell The intellect, with all its power,
could find no stabilizing thought; Knowledge and Understanding were far apart. The
heart from time to time burst forth in storms of emotional protest. And ever and
again the intellect laid flat its chilling hand and gloried in itself. Meanwhile man
worked wonders. Self was his guiding star. He emitted glories, he exalted himself
astoundingly. He drew Leviathan with a hook. He loosed the bands of Orion, Mean-
while the multitudes dreamed that this was their dream corne true. From time to
time they awoke in horror to slumber again and dream anew. For man had not
found man: had not found his forgotten self.

Such was the past; such is our own day, merely with new names, new agencies
and change in local color. The essence is the same, for man has not yet found man:
though, the multitudes of earth, suffering in sleep, are now dreaming a new dream:
heavily dreaming of a brotherhood of man; fitfully dreaming of the man that was
lost and must be found; dreaming vaguely of man's integrity; dreaming deeply and
more deeply of man's becoming: dreaming the long-, long-coming dream of Democ-
racy, Dreaming, perhaps, that some day man shall understand. For it is out of the

148. Kindergarten Chats

dreams of the multitudes that civilizations arise and institutions unfold. It is thus
that the mighty arose and held sway; they were true to the dream of the multitude.

Tell me, tell me quick! How shall Knowledge and Understanding be reconciled?

There is but one agency, SYMPATHY.

What? So weak a thing as sympathy!

You mean so great a power as Sympathy.

Sympathy is that power, long dormant in man, which may harmonize all his
thoughts, all his outward activities; which may integrate them, which may establish
for them a valid center of gravity, an arbital self -impulse as our world moves through
the infinite depths of space, carrying its precious human freightage. For Sympathy is
of Spirit. It is at once the Searcher, the Visionary, the INTERPRETER. Its ethereal power
underlies and enfolds both knowledge and understanding were we but aware of it.
It is man's greatest unused power. You may call it intuition, you may call it inner-
sight, you may call it vision, you may call it the sixth sense, if you will. You may
even call it Love, if you but sufficiently expand and charge that word. What you call
it matters not: for it contains, encloses and sets in motion and guides to a definite
goal, all that is of human value all of man's powers and the output of those
powers. Sympathy is the long-awaited modern Messiah. It is the essence and vital
form of compassion. It tempers all things, it inspires all things when it comes forth
as a suspiration from newfound man. Viewed from the summit of Sympathy the
world to the clear eye of the prophet, the poet, the world of today changes its dull,
forbidding aspect and becomes a revelation.

I was in despair. It all seemed hopeless. It seemed like a huge incubus of pessi-
mism, like a vampire, a ghost from man's own graveyard of the past seeking the
blood of the man of today, sapping his life at his heart.

And so it is, in the uninterpreted surface facts of the world's feudal life, present
and past. But it has been our business to peer beneath the surface. In our progressing
function as constructive critics, it is precisely Sympathy that has so clarified our
vision that we might see man behind the screen of his acts, his institutions, his edi-
fices, material and immaterial. That we might, as we have done, see through the
screen of a building to the man behind. That we might discern ever multiplying,
ever enlarging screens, and behind them the realities. To see, is worthless, unless we
interpret; it is in this sense that sympathy is interpreter. To possess knowledge with-
out understanding is not only a misfortune, it is socially dangerous: and here again
Sympathy interprets Man. Once inaugurate, the power of sympathy in its solvent
action ever increasingly interprets, explains, stabilizes and guides, world without end.
Its gentle, clarifying, mellowing, illuminating power is man's most precious posses-
sion. May he henceforth and forever hold it such. It will mean for him his emergence
from his age-old cocoon, self-spun of his sophistries, and the coming forth of his
spirit, on radiant wings, into the open air of the humanities.

It seems to me, (or is it a hope?) the chrysalis is stirring, even now.

Then shall its age-long imprisonment be our inspiration, now and forever.

NOTE: This chapter was completely rewritten, 1918.

149. On Knowledge and Understanding

XLV. On Citizenship

It were idle, in these times, to discuss architecture as an art did not such discus-
sion lead with certainty to the architect as a man. And it is idle to consider the
architect as man in name only. We must follow him to his function and place as
citizen. His citizenship must be outlined and defined as a function of democracy: for
democracy is our universal, constant medium.

Conversely, if a full-grown sense of personal responsibility and of personal account-
ability be of the essence of sound democracy, if sound individual choice and self-
poise be its key., so must these be of the essence of sound democratic citizenship; and
if the architect is to be in truth a citizen, such powers must in turn abide in him and
be outpoured in his works. He must show by his works that he is doing his share in
the upbuilding into visible fact of the great World-Dream, Democracy.

If knowledge without understanding makes, as I aver, for mischief tending ever
away from democracy and toward anarchy the burden is upon him to prove, by
his works, that he is not a mischief-maker.

If knowledge with understanding makes for highest usefulness, his works must
bear witness that he is sincerely striving.

If imagination and reflection are powers or aspects of human power, his works
must show by a radiation of these living qualities that he is a well-wisher to human-
ity at large, not a stranger to it, and heedless of it.

If thought is a power, his works must reveal him man of thought. Lacking this., he
lacks usefulness in the actual upbuilding of democracy.

If sympathy be the beneficent and fruitful quality of spirit I hold it, his work must
show that sympathy has illumined his path in illumining his heart, and hence his
understanding, and that he has desired the good of all in seeking and finding an ex-
pression of aspiring democratic life. By this test his citizenship may be tested.

If, as I hold, democratic scholarship is of high usefulness in that it implies wealth
of vision, knowledge, imagination and sympathy hence understanding his works
must so reflect such scholarship as to prove his fealty to understanding, to make evi-
dent and incontestable that his scholarship is used as a means toward attaining
wholesome ends: that his scholarship has been applied for the good and the enlight-
enment of all the people, not for the pampering of a class, the misleading of that
class and all others. His works must prove, in short (and the burden of proof is on
him), that he is a democratic citizen, not a lackey, a true exponent of democracy,
not a tool of the most insidious form of anarchy.

If democratic culture be, as I hold it to be, the very flowering of heart and rnind,
the fine expression of personal and collective poise of heart and mind, of completed
power of graceful, natural self-government., the fullest index of the spiritual demo-
cratic type because of the boldness, the breadth and the warmth of its understanding,
its nearness to all and its power to comprehend and unify the aspirations of all
his works must show beyond cavil that his culture is true. By this test shall his citizen-
ship be tested.

The highest scholarship, the most enlightened culture manifestly may not be, in
their completeness of finished expression, within the reach of attainment of all the

150. Kindergarten Chats

people; but the simple, noble principles animating such scholarship and culture are
not only within the reach of all the people, but most certainly they live as ideals
within the hearts and minds of the people. The universal desire for education shows
this. The aspiration for democracy is eloquent of it.

Per contra., there can be no surer test of the spuriousness, the falsity, the narrow-
ness, the venom of an alleged scholarship or an alleged culture than this: that it
holds itself aloof from the people, above them, exclusive,, aristocratic, assuming that
it is unintelligible by the people, and meant only for a self -sufficient^ withdrawn and
supercilious class. Such scholarship, such culture, is barren, because self-centered.
It brings forth no fruit other than the shriveled fruit of popular ridicule, contempt
and distrust.

If it happens that a given man be gifted, as is said, with stronger brain, more
resolute will, a more fluid imagination, and greater natural powers of concentration,
of comprehending, prophetic vision, of organization and of expression than his fel-
lows, let him pause to reflect that these powers are not truly speaking his alone, that
he did not make these original powers, but that they make him^ by inspiring him to
consciousness of them, and that they came to him out of the long birth-and-death
struggles of the people of all times, were born, through the race, in him, and that
he is answerable to all people to the world for their prolific democratic use.
It is precisely here that there must enter into the drama of democratic life the
dominant roles of personal responsibility, personal accountability and self-govern-
ment, if the powerful equipped man is to be a blessing to his time and not a curse.
Turn loose upon a people such a man lacking in such self-imposed restraint and
therefore feudal and you are turning loose upon them a beast of prey; for he will
use these powers for their exploitation, their suppression and his dominating aggran-
dizement. This is not, politely, called anarchy; but it is in fact, to the reflective
mind, a form of anarchy so insidious, so powerful, so undermining of the social
fabric and so destructive of democratic principles, that the ranting of a few profes-
sional anarchists is as the sweet singing of birds in comparison.

Hence in a democracy there can be but one test of citizenship, namely: Are you
using such gifts, such powers as you possess, for or against the march of spiritual
freedom, the emancipation of man, and his powers, the unfolding of his knowledge
and his understanding? Are you for or against the people? For or against Dem-
ocracy?

To be sure, this view can be quibbled with, juggled with, sophisticated and gen-
erally obscured and turned to contrary designs. But to the mind seeing squarely and
steadfastly with clear eye, to the seeing eye which discerns totalities, the question
cannot be begged and can be answered in but one way and that the RIGHT WAY.

In a healthy democracy the individual may not, cannot, have TWO systems of
ethics: one for his private use, and one for business, professional or political uses.

Yet the active existence of this DOUBLE SYSTEM OF ETHICS is the direct cause of
most of the diseases from which our body-democratic long has suffered and now suf-
fers; it is specifically visible to us in the greater part of our architectural output. It
is equally visible in other activities,

The remedy I have already indicated to you. It lies in that SINGLE STANDARD OF
ETHICS implied in the idea of direct personal accountability here and now.

151. On Citizenship

It Is for YOU to accept or reject that SINGLE STANDARD!

It is useless to quibble and to say: If one man denatures the food he makes, why
may not another man denature the architecture he makes? It is fatuous to say the
eminent denature thought and adulterate ideals. That we are a nation of adulter-
ators. That we believe in makeshifts. That we temporize.

The question is : WHAT ARE YOU GOING TO DO?

WHAT ARE YOU GOING TO DO?

And just SO) it is useless to multiply instances. The principle is as clear with two
as with two hundred.

No democracy can long survive that does not rest upon a sound moral principle
endorsed by its people and the people means YOU !

If our civilization is showing signs of internal disintegration, the corrective can
be found only in the counter-power of change of vision, change of choice, and of the
establishment of sound popular education: an education which shall inculcate, as
its basic element, that simple, wholesome moral sense that makes for true citizenship
and a resultant sound, noble fabric of individual, communal and national democracy.

This, my son, is the essence of all my preachments to you on the ethical aspects of
a truly democratic architecture.

We are at the grand climacteric of our national growth, of our continued exist-
ence as a democratic people.

If you have the soundness of this growth, the continuance of our ideals at heart,
do what is RIGHT and you will have done your share. That is all that can be asked
of YOU!

You may have thought that I have dealt roughly with our aimless architecture
and specifically with some of its structures. And so I have; but I have endeavored
to deal with knowledge, with understanding, and justly.

You may have thought that I have dealt savagely with our architectural schools.
And so I have. Who would not, that had the intelligence and the sympathy to per-
ceive the damage they, in their stiff-necked or feeble imbecility, are doing to this
land and people! You may have thought me unkind toward the public. Quite the
contrary. My heart goes out to them. They are suffering from an imposed and arti-
ficial culture, from an utterly inadequate system of education: from a pest of emi-
nent demagogues and cultured weaklings. The people wish to be expressed. They
wish for national self-expression. In the finer sense this has been denied them by all
those who have proved disloyal to Democracy and its aims.

In a democratic land, architecture can have no value, no significance as a plastic
art unless it reflects, with high sense and fine quality, the true life of all the people
and their institutions: unless its deep life is their deep life. To this end, archi-
tects in a democratic land must be not only competent artists, as the word is cur-
rently used, but such superb artists as fine citizenship and its accompanying sense of
high artistic responsibility and accountability to the people implies and demands.

I trust that it is rather superfluous at this late day for me again to remind you
that those architects who have been and who are now applying to our democratic
life and institutions the unfit, the unbecoming garments of other days are not of
this class. They are masqueraders in a graveyard. They fear the truth as though it
were an upstart ghost.

152. Kindergarten Chats

But go your way: and, at times, when your path seems too rough, and too deso-
late, and insurmountable, think not only of your architecture as your chosen art^
but as the chosen expression of your citizenship!

XL VI. Pessimism

The mind has its day and its night.

When Sympathy illumines, there is the light.

When Sympathy departs, comes on the twilight, the deepening darkness; and
therewith the obscuration of those things which in the light are real.

Then sees the mind darkly, for all is in shadow.

A long, long night comes to some minds.

Then, to them, the dark things become real, and the darkened mind wanders and
prowls with a certain cunning among sombre shades and phantoms.

A certain night-sight comes to these minds; and in time they declare darkness the
one normal and permanent fact of being.

For them, the soul of man is black; the heart is black; the mind is black; all light-
ness, unfathomable, perverse, and doomed to despair and dissolution.

For them, Humanity, with all its hopes, is but a Niagara of the night, endlessly
pouring its vast, ceaseless volume of wretchedness over the gigantic precipice of Fate,
descending, as a huge cataract of folly and sin, into the abyss of eternal night.

For them, all tenderness is folly; love is a delusion; and honor a gloomy jest.

For them, Man is born in sin: thrust by a mighty, but malicious hand into a
world of hopeless illusion and corruption, and there to be propelled by an irresist-
ible, an unseen, power, through that long, dreary agony he calls life.

For them, Man may not prevail with Destiny more than a rain-drop may prevail
with the hurricane in night's engulfing folds.

For them, Man is a futile thing; corrupt in his body; corrupt in his mind; corrupt
in his heart; and worthless as to his soul.

For them, Man is the incarnation of evil.

For them, the springtime is Nature's time of pessimism: the folly of procreation.
The mania of survival. The grandiose delusion of love. Over its tender, joyous
efflorescing they spread the shroud of denial.

For them, winter is Nature's single moment of sanity: the resolve to die amid
the chill of ice and snow, and sullen frozen skies. A wise resolve, endlessly renewed;
but which the folly of Spring again and again dissolves in carnal orgies.

For them, all life is cruel; and Death, Man's only friend.

For them, all men are cruel; and no man has a friend.

For them, the best in the heart is the worst, because it is a deception.

For them, the best in the mind is worthless, because powerless.

For them, the soul is a sorrow which intensifies our sorrow.

153. Pessimism

For them, God is Evil : and this God they dread and revile.

For them, whatever is, is wrong, and but food for discontent.

For them, Man, created in the image of his God, is therefore evil; and will
corrupt and betray his neighbor until the crack of doom.

For them, honor, loyalty, fidelity, love, are words invented by Man, in his evil-
ness, that he may the more surely betray his neighbor.

For them, personal responsibility and personal accountability are jocose phrases
evolved from the folly of the heart, the tempter phrases, like poison-flowers,
attractive in form, alluring in color; but, inhale their odor, and you sicken and die.
Phrases meant to catch the unwary, that the wary may gain.

For them, all virtue is folly and weakness; for evil reigns: evil is normal.

For them, hope is the idle dream of folly: sorrow is our lot, and despair our
birthright.

For them, the end of all thought lies in nihilism and disgust, in bitterness and
negation.

For them, two and two do not make four two and two make nothing what-
soever.

For them, Knowledge is a chimera; and Understanding, a mirage.

For them, Man is the supreme traitor.

For them, all human thoughts and acts are born of selfishness, nurtured in cyn-
icism, and mature in perfidy.

For them, failure is normal ; success, a caprice of Fate.

For them, it is normal that Man should war upon man; for folly and evil are our
common curse.

And so has the mind its seasons ; as it wings its flight about mysterious, attracting
life the dark sun of existence for some, its radiant orb for others.

But winter comes also, when that sun retires; and the heart shudders, the dread
chill falls upon it; ice locks up the laughing waters; snow floats down from lowering
skies. Summer has long since departed; leaves are fallen and forgot. All is rigid,
lifeless and forlorn.

Pessimism is that winter which falls upon the mind when sympathy has flown.

Pessimism is that winter which congeals all affluence of thought, which freezes all
unselfishness of feeling, which nullifies understanding, which locks up the waters of
life's well-springs, and many a cadenced rivulet, and broad, sweeping stream.

For pessimism is the winter of the mind, the winter of the heart, the winter of the
World.

And yet pessimism may become a passionate protest 1

We have not yet reached that pitch of agony where we must moan with Job : Let
the day perish wherein I was born, and the night in which it was said, There is a
man child conceived.

For indeed it must be an unfathomable pessimism which holds within the solitudes
of its darkness no regenerative seed.

1. This sentence, added by Sullivan in revision, stands in place of many further paragraphs inveighing against
pessimism.

154. Kindergarten Chats

Why do you drive this murky cloud across my vision? Why do you put my great
hope in eclipse? Why do you affright me when I was beginning to feel sure?
Because my soul is sick: I must have air: I must seek the open.
But it is winter.
Nevertheless I go.
Then I go also.

XLVII. Winter

O, pater, what a gloomy day is this!

How sad and saddening is winter, here, in the open country!

This leaden sky of late afternoon. This vast coverlet of dull white. The tops of
the fences, only, visible here and there in their long, disconsolate lines. The trees,
standing, bare and dusky, on the low hills here and there; standing, melancholy and
still, against a still and melancholy day.

What ineffable, what unspeakable sadness here!

And the dreadful silence of it all!

What miserere is Nature chanting, here, with numberless voices unbearable to our
ears?

Oh, this vast, universal sleep; this torpor; this profound subsidence of life!

Why are we here!

Is it not depressing; is it not sorrowful!

It is not more depressing, not more sorrowful than is the present state of our art
throughout the land.

The thought of THAT brings winter to my mind winter indeed !

And I must have sorrow, would that I had not this sorrow!

For in that seems to lie no hope.

In Nature's winter there lies ever a hope.

No spectacle is more depressing than the torpor, the silent wintry sleep of the
human mind.

No spectacle, more sorrowful, than a leafless art in which the sap has ceased to
flow.

No spectacle, quite so pessimistic, as an art in the winter of its decline.

I have lived to see this!

Shall I live to see aught else?

Winter! Winter! Winter of the heart has fallen, like the pallid pall of winter here!

Winter has fallen upon our art!

Winter now falls upon my soul!

Leave me; I would commune, here, with that Infinite which dwells within the
winter, here, in the broad expanse.

155. Winter

I will not leave you.

I would be alone, here; alone with that Mighty Spirit which fathers all the seasons,
and whose breath is the breath of life and likewise the breath of death.

I would fain talk with the God of this leaden sky, of the leaden snow, of the
sombre, silent trees, of this freezing air.

I would fain immerse my spirit in his spirit.

I would fain question God, here, in this wilderness ; for my soul is become such a
wilderness a solemn, wintry wilderness in which no voice is heard:

Lord of this vast o'erhanging sky, Lord of the wintry heart, Lord of every sombre
tree and pallid snowflake! Why hast thou let a winter fall upon my soul? Why are
the seeds of my spirit dormant? Why are the fair flowers of my fancy moribund?
Why are the well-springs of my heart congealed? Why do they no longer ripple and
murmur in sunshine and gladness?

Spirit Sublime! Why hast thou let a winter fall upon the hearts of my country-
men?

Have I not lived for my art? an art grown up in praise of thee.

Must I then die for it?

And, dying, lea.ve nought behind else a few precarious, scattered seeds, overlaid
with the snow when my heart was so filled with fertility, in thine honor, and in
response to thine everlasting glory and power.

Must I repeat the ancient cry: Oh, for a daysman between thee and me!

Mysterious Power, why dost thou bring agony to them that bring forth in they
name?

Why art thou silent as birth, silent as the tomb, when the heart cries out to thee
in its extremity of sorrow?

Inscrutable Presence! Why hast thdu caused me to know sorrow, 'less it be that
my soul shall be pregnant of Sorrow and give birth from Sorrow?

All-bearing Spirit! Why dost thou suppress my spirit? Why is it locked up and
sealed, in winter's ice; as thou dost lock up the violet and the wind-flower in winter's
tomb; as the lily and the gentian are rigid and still, under the snow; as all life, here,
is so silent under the silent snow?

Do they dream of thee, as my soul dreams of thee in this silence of winter? Or are
they, thy children of the woods and fields, soulless, and dreamless under the pallid
coverlet of white petals fallen from the sombre garden of the clouds?

The strength of thy spirit is the strength of thy winter which, as a white breath,
breathes over the broad earth; for it, also, is the breath of thy spirit. But in my
winter is no strength; no spirit; no breath.

For thou art Lord of Death. For Death, also, is the breath of thy spirit. For thou
art all in all.

But what is Man! What shall he know of Death, other than to see his shadow, to
see his smile!

So little is man, in his understanding, that he knows not whether Death be the
child of Life, or Life the child of death.

But thou, Inscrutable Spirit in thy unfathomable purpose, why leavest thou

156. Kindergarten Chats

man to his sorrow as thou leavest him in his joys? Thou disturbest him not in his
living death!

Man may see thee, thou seekest not man but leavest man helpless before the
inscrutable mystery of his own soul.

Why dost thou not seek man?

Why dost thou not cross the chasm of his isolation?

Canst thou not cross?

Why dost thou leave man a riddle to himself?

Why dost thou leave man helpless and perplexed before the mysteries of thy
works :

Helpless and torpid in the winter of his soul the emptiness of his mind?

Why hast thou made the soul of man an endless marvel to himself, yet but a speck
among the myriad works of thy hand?

Why hast thou sent a night to darken the mind of man, that he has set up gold
for god in thy stead?

Why hast thou filled man's eyes with ugliness, that he ignores the endless, radiant
beauty of thy works?

Why hast thou estopped man's ears, that he hears not, day by day, the beauty of
thy voice, the ceaseless melodies thereof?

Why hast thou let man so go astray that he praises thee with lip-praise, not with
heart-praise, and the paeans of his spirit, the adoration of his mind, the works of his
hand; meanwhile praises he himself with overpraise.

Why abidest thou, in the winter, here, silent and grim, imperturbable, passionless,
voiceless?

Dost thou speak, and I hear not?

Dost thou call me, and I am unaware?

Unspeakable mystery 1 Where art thou? What art thou, that thou dost affright and
fascinate me here? That I cry out, and the wintry silence alone answers me that
the chill and the torpor alone answer me that no man, no thing answers me; that
mine own soul answers me not! That thou dost answer me not!

Alas! there is no answer; save the merciless and sombre gloom the falling snow!

So, must I go my way.

So, must I seek my way alone if way there be.

So, must my soul abide its wintertime.

So, must the tiny, hidden seed of hope await its day.

For man is unto man alone!

God hears him not, God sees him not in his winter in the fatal winter of his
sou l nor does God see him in his springtime in the springtime of his soul nor
in the summer thereof, nor in the autumn God sees not man.

Man surely is alone and so must he be his own and only god his only god;
aside from Thee!

Oh, master, do not speak in this way!

It appalls me!

See how the snow is gently falling, with wet, heavy flakes, as if in rebuke to you.

157. Winter

And the twilight is falling upon us, and upon all nature, as in explanation and re-
buke.

Darker and darker it grows!

I see you now but dimly!

While more steadily and heavily the snow falls in infinite gentleness.

A sleigh passes in the dusk. A tinkle and it is gone; muffled up and quieted in the
growing night.

So is Man's little life, but a tinkle that is muffled quickly in eternal night.

Oh, say not so!

How dark it grows! And the snow falls and falls upon us. Why do you not stir?
Why do you not speak? Answer me! I no longer see you I can but feel you with
my hand. Answer me! !

So would I speak with God> and feel him with my hand, but God will not an-
swer me!

He sends me for answer the silent darkness and the snow: so touches he me with
his hand.

But 'tis enough! It is enough!

It is enough for darkling Nature here. Why not enough for me?

For the snow falls likewise within my spirit, and darkness quiets it to rest.

And my spirit is stilled within me, and sinks into its winter-night.

It is enough, it is enough!

Enough for me, is winter and the winter's God.

For I am as but a flake of snow within this winter's night; slowly settling to my
rest, among the myriad of flakes; asking no more; seeking no more; questioning no
more accepting all.

You appall me, master!

Why should I appall?

I should think you would despair!

Why despair?

Oh, in this mournful winter night, and all that it implies!

And so I might, were not, likewise, implanted in my heart THE BELIEF IN SPRING!

XLVIIS. On Poetry

Why, master, did you lead me with you into the winter night?

To refresh my spirit, and to reveal to you something of the limitations and the
boundaries of the mind: to bring you face to face with the wall against which men
have broken their hearts.

And why did you appeal so despairingly to the Infinite?

158. Kindergarten Chats

To show you the unhappy limitations and the far-off boundaries of the soul. To
show you at once man's solitude and his power. To try your soul. To test your strength,
to fortify your courage.

And why did you all of this?

To help you make of yourself an interpreter, a poet.

And why should I be a poet?

In order that you may evince power of interpretation, and extol poetry in your
useful art.

And how can I express poetry in my art?

As one expresses poetry in anything by first living it. For poetry is life. To
express life we must know life, and understand it in its bearings. To know the sim-
plicity of all life we must grasp its complexity; we must view it from many angles,
envisage its many moods and seeming contrarieties; and to know its complexity we
must grasp, with all the power of understanding, its deep-down simplicity. To know
the soul we must arouse the soul. To know the spirit we must liberate the spirit and
let it face the open and move in the open until it knows not fear.

So have I striven to round your view of life; and will still strive to expand and
to round it, to the end that, as your knowledge increases, your power of interpreting,
understanding and expressing may keep pace.

So have I taken you to Nature, and shall again take you to Nature, to show you
how our moods parallel her moods ; how her problems parallel our problems ; and to
bring you directly to the one unfailing source, the visible effect of creative energy,
that you may find there, now and evermore, the key to solutions; to make plain to
you what man may read in Nature's book, to the end that her processes may be our
processes: that we may absorb somewhat of her fertility of recourse, her admirable
logic, her progression from function into form her poetic finalities.

For Nature is ever the background across which man moves as in a drama: that
dream within which man, the dreamer, moves in his dream; that reality which is
man's reality.

For all life, collectively is but one vast drama, one vast dream, and the soul of
man its chief spectator.

For I would also give you some knowledge, some understanding of rhythm, I
would cause you to feel, in your inmost conviction, that man cannot stand alone:
that man must seek and find within his own spirit a sure anchorage within the visible
and invisible universe, upon the earth, his home, and in the world and the hearts of
his fellow men.

For in man's rhythmical adjustment with Nature and his kind lies his happiness;
in discord, lies his misery.

I would give you of your art some persuasively adequate notion of its latent, un-
used beauty, its inexhaustible capacity for utility in expression, its fluency, its lyric
quality, its fervent interpretative dramatic power when once it but come, within
your spirit, into kinship with Nature's rhythms: when once you have aroused to the
sense of uniting her power with your own. And how can you know this to be true
unless you have felt its approach? How can you understand it in its workings if you
have not sought to know it? How can you hope to express it unless you have LIVED
it and understood it?

159. On Poetry

Here is shaping perpetually before man the spectacle of Nature's affluent, chang-
ing moods; of those gloriously varied rhythms, those equilibriums born of the union
of Sun and Earth: a myriad progeny taking visible organic form. Should man do
less in satisfying his utilitarian needs ! It is the function of the poet, in whatever walk
of life, to regard these things; to make them his own; to express them in his works:
whatever those works ; whatever his special activities may be. Thus do we enlarge
our working conception of the nature and utility of the poet. On the other hand, you
cannot express, whatever your walk in life, unless you have a system of expression;
and you cannot have a system of expression unless you have a prior system of cognate
thinking and feeling; and you cannot have a system of thinking and feeling unless
you have had a basic system of living.

When all is said and done, the great masterpiece,, or the little masterpiece, what-
ever its kind, is but the condensed expression of such philosophy as is held by the
worker who creates it. It stands for his views, his more or less ripened, organized
and rounded views of Nature, of Man as an entity in nature, of his fellow men, of
an infinite pervading and guiding Spirit; of his views and convictions concerning the
human mind, the human heart and soul, and the progress and destiny of the race:
in short, his philosophy of life.

These views, such philosophy, may not be expressed categorically as in a cate-
chism, but they are of the initial determining impulse of such works; and indeed
a great work whatever its kind is scarcely conceivable which is not the expres-
sion of the philosophy of life held by its creator.

To assume that a man may at his pleasure create a great work, without in his
own way having held communion with the flow of life, as he may have vision to see
it, without having in his own way contemplated humanity as he may have vision to
see it: its trials, its entanglements; the fleeting frailty of individual life and the pro-
found duration and import of the great life would be but to express crudely what
is crudely thought.

To fancy, languorously, that a man may create a great work by reproducing a
Greek temple, or any past vital work, is an example in such crude vacuity of think-
ing: indeed, the misapplication of the very notion of thinking. It is simply minus-
thinking.

For a great work, for us, must be an organism that is, possessed of a life of its
own; an individual life that functionates in all its parts; and which finds its varia-
tions in expression in the variations of its main function, and in the consequent, con-
tinuous, systematic variations in form, as the organic complexity of expression un-
folds: all proceeding from one single impulse of desire to express our day and our
needs: to seek earnestly and faithfully to satisfy those needs. To make our world a
pleasant place.

Now the popular method, the mere setting together of ready-made fragments,
parts, or features, the setting together of ready-made ideas, of conventional assump-
tions, is a mechanical, not an organic, process; it is, indeed, the very antithesis of an
organic process. It may tax the mind; for it is, essentially, a species of unwholesome
compromise; but it finds no place for the exercise of the higher faculties of thought
and feeling, which lie at the base of an organic or creative work, an enterprise, an
adventure of any kind.

1 60, Kindergarten Chats

Hence, if the aggregative or miscellaneous process be called scholarly, as it is so
called, by many, such a term but brightens our image of a creative or poetic art:
utilitarian in foundation, harmonious in superstructure,

To be sure there will ever be temperamental variation, in time and place, amongst
those who produce great works. This must be so, for such variation lies within the
nature of individual identity and a great work is, always, a great individual ex-
pression; the expression of a single thought or a single mood born of a contempla-
tive, active, clear-sighted creative mind.

Hence, how impotent does the imitative method become to a normal view. It
needs as foundation no philosophy of life, no serious resolve, no sense of adventure:
it needs only a myopic view of the past, a blurred, an unseeing view of our day.

Nor does it avail to say that such imitation professes the reproduction, in our day,
of forms, of procedures of ancient origin, which the world has long held in high
esteem. That is a mere begging the question. For, in the first place, you can reani-
mate nothing that is passed ; the men who created these works in their image have
gone to their fathers. Those men alone could have made other works in the same
SPIRIT. In the second place, if your mind is lofty enough, sympathetic and honorable
enough, to come into a genuine companionship and communion with theirs, you will
wish, through such communion, to emulate them, not to imitate them, to do what
they did, namely, to reproduce: to interpret the life of your own people, the spirit
of your times, in terms of knowledge and understanding.

Hence, to a serious mind, to a mind honestly intent, the entire fabric of imitative
art and imitative procedure falls to the ground and is shown to have been but too
manifestly the resort of the weak of will, the unresourceful, the inconsequential.

It does not profit here to talk of "veneration for the past," for such talk will not
change the aspect of facts and we are dealing with the psychic as well as the
physical facts of our contemporaneous civilization, and its specific architectural aspect
or expression.

Do not mistake my meaning, nor my attitude toward the great works of the men
of the past. None can, I believe, venerate them more sincerely than do I, nor more
clearly and gratefully discern their beauty, their worth, their inspiring evidence of
what man can do when he wills. But such appraisal, such enthusiasm would go for
naught were I to stultify both myself and them by denying them their privacy.

For, my lad, beauty has not really departed from the sons of Earth.

Nor is high thinking but a memory of days gone.

Nor is the winsome art of saying done for.

Nor has the power of man forsaken him.

If he has lost them, on his way, he has but to call to them:

They will answer and come gladly.

His spirit will revive.

161. On Poetry

XLIX. The Art f Expression

In the springtime, greeting the sun when ice and snow are gone, sap mounts within
the trees, seeds awaken, a new utterance of life begins. Out of the darkness, out of
the silence of winter, comes a song. The filigree of Nature's resurrection reappears.
She chants of her deliverance.

And thus, the dormant soul of man awakening to the sun of sympathy, he puts
forth the beginning of his springtime the utterance of things long forming, long
hidden, long obscured, long unfelt, but now stirring toward the light, seeking form,
seeking growth, seeking expression.

Thus does Nature, thus does Man burgeon the promise of fertility.

Perhaps, my lad, never with truly open welcoming eyes have you beheld the
springtime!

We shall see it, soon, together!

Then will my last word be said.

For, if the moving spectacle of spring shall not invade you to the depths, you may
never truly learn how sonorous are the great words in our art; how fluent, how
satisfying the lesser ones; how sweet the many minor sayings.

An art of expression must flow from an inner reservoir. It must be the gathered
and stored force seeking outlet. It is not as a garment a something to be worn or
not worn it is inseparable from life, a symbol of life.

Hence, an Art of Expression should be the earliest upbuilding element to enter
into the curriculum of a thorough education. It should grow as the body grows and
mature as the will evolves. It should evidence human capacity and human possi-
bility. It should open the mind, open the heart, to direct impressions at the very
beginning. These are to the human what sunlight, soil and rain are to vegetation.
Then, let utterance of these impressions begin so soon as it is evident that they are
impressions. After which, new impressions, then new utterance ever continuous,
ever reciprocal, ever broadening, surely organizing, unfolding, ever growing in power
more coherent, more plastic, more fluent; ever growing in receptivity, ever growing
in aspiration; ever growing in mobility, ever growing in serenity; ever growing more
complex paralleling the complexity of life; ever growing more simple parallel-
ing the simplicity of life; ever gaining in strength, ever gaining in delicacy; ever in
ferment, ever clarifying those elemental powers which are so subtle yet the most
potent of all the power of receiving, the power of uttering!

Then, in clarity, one may see not merely over the surface of things, but into the
being of things, and of man.

Then may one express life, because he has lived.

Then will one's work be poems, for they shall spring from life, its needs, and its
desires. 1

Now it has been part of our work to expand and concentrate the meaning of
words, of phrases. To extricate them from their provincial confinement and let them
go free in the world of men. Such a parlor-phrase is now before us, namely: the art
of expression. Its use has been limited almost exclusively to the so-called fine arts and

1, From this point, the chapter was completely rewritten in 1918.

162. Kindergarten Chats

perhaps particularly to the art of writing poetry and prose. That is to say, it has re-
tained a strictly feudal meaning, in the sense that it is a direct expression of the ego
in a quite limited aristocratic and sub-sufficient sense. I call it provincial, not be-
cause it is so in actual fact but because it is so in actual use. Like almost all feudal
words and phrases it ignores the needs of humanity, it centers in a narrow egoism.
The phrase therefore needs liberation. It must take on a great expansiveness and
power of symbolism. It must be exalted into a universal guiding principle and
power: else shall it fail to satisfy and inspire the brain, the heart of a democratic
work. In short, we must change its significance from feudal to democratic. We must
so broaden its scope that it shall include every human activity. For it is the func-
tion of Democracy to liberate, broaden, intensify and focus every human faculty; to
utilize every human power now unused, abused, or running to waste. This is high
democratic efficiency. For Democracy in its heart would abolish all human wastages
in their tortuous windings, in impasses, in sorrow, in vicious misdirection, expressed
in the phantom word, Prosperity. It would, in its efficiency, its thorough-going knowl-
edge and understanding, establish universal productiveness and racial poise; the first
fruits of its vision, of its discovery of man and his powers. Its conception of the art
of expression is founded on man's evident spiritual integrity, and his high moral
power of choice. It proposes to guide him, to organize him, in the exercise of his
various powers of Worker, Inquirer, Thinker and Dreamer. It purposes that man
shall sense himself and realize himself. It knows and understands why feudal civili-
zations have ever ended in downfall and the wreckage of disaster. It knows and un-
derstands the soul of feudalism. It knows that the thought, the feeling, of the world
of man is slowly, surely passing out of that domain of provincialism of the mind
which the word, the thought, the deed Feudalism surely signifies. It knows that man's
heart is essentially pure, his mind essentially clean. It knows that man thus far has
lived by fear alone. In its own courage, Democracy would abolish fear, would banish
it, would dispel it as a fetid ghost. It would blow down, it would dissolve, the wall
that Fate has seemed to rear, it would expose the world to man's clearing vision.

Thus is it necessary in a democracy that men in all walks of life (especially those
who assume to be leaders in thought) qualify, each in his way, in the all-inclusive
art of expression. For Democracy has real things to express, it insists on their expres-
sion, it will make sure they are expressed. The steady gaze of Democracy pierces all
feudal screens, all veils, all pretense, all subterfuge, all hypocrisies, all cant. It sees
through them and beyond them to the feudal realities of our day. But the will of
Democracy lies in its wish. With ever cumulating power it is seeking and will surely
find expression in social function and form. It is seeking and will find a consistent,
highly diversified, highly organized expression springing with superb logic from the
contained power of its germinal idea: the sole social idea that stands for complete
SANITY, the sole spiritual idea that is worthy of man and his powers. Therefore the
art of developing Democracy into a complete, complex yet simple, working civiliza-
tion is the one great art of expression confronting man today. It is the one art includ-
ing 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, bend his facul-
ties, and exercise his superb powers as creator.

163. The Art of Expression

It is needless that I should go further into detail. The implications should be obvi-
ous. The great world-need is sanity.

In regard to yourself, my object all along has been, first, to isolate the architectural
art as a specialized social activity and then to show how inextricably, in its genuine
state, it is interwoven with the needs, the thoughts, the aspirations of the people,
that it cannot have a real life without them, and then to raise it into the higher
realms of interpretation. That, to become a real art of expression for us, it must be
inspired by the democratic urge, it must take its vigorous origin in the direct prac-
tical, utilitarian needs, must avail itself of all modern resources. It must first fully
satisfy the needs, fully utilize the resources. Then and then only is it justified in en-
tering the realms of sentiment and poetic imagination; and then only for the pur-
pose of giving to the utilitarian its needed aspect of beauty, thus contributing its
share to the happiness of mankind to the poem of Democracy. Then and then
only may architecture worthily be called an art of expression.

Much less do I need to go with you into the technical details of our art. Nature
furnishes the materials and you have but to use them with intelligence, and feeling.
All geometric forms are at your disposal, they are universal; it is for you to utilize
them, to manipulate them, to transmute them, with feeling and intelligence. Engi-
neering science has substantially solved all problems of construction. The industrial
arts, the so-called fine arts, mechanical skill, craftsmanship are at your disposal. The
organized building arts, transportation, communication are at your disposal; lan-
guage is at your disposal. Nature's manifold expressions of function and form are at
your disposal. What more do you need as a medium of expression. The rest is "up
to you," as it is said.

To make these things, these instrumentalities, plastic to your ends is your business ;
indeed it is to be your career. I have carefully avoided laying down any rules they
tend merely to circumscribe and repress. What I have attentively laid stress on is
underlying principles; I have shown you how simple, how universal they are. I have
shown you also something of the complexity of their unfolding.

Inasmuch as these general principles are universal and proceed from Life, they
are at your disposal to apply in your own instinctive way with intelligence and
feeling.

However, inasmuch as you will have problems to meet and solve, let me give you
this pointer: Every problem contains and suggests its own solution. Don't waste time
looking anywhere else for it. In this mental attitude, in this mood of understanding,
lies the technical beginning of the art of expression.

164. Kindergarten Chats

L The Creative Impulse

You have a singular habit of assuming, when you suddenly make a compact state-
ment, novel in character, that I am capable of digesting it at once. For instance, I
am still puzzling over your statement that every problem contains and suggests its
own solution; and that to seek the solution elsewhere is a waste of time. Now I can't
see that a problem contains its solution; still less can I see that it suggests it.

I admit the impeachment. It is likely to happen, when one has given years of
thought to a particular subject, that his working idea concerning it is apt to con-
centrate into a statement so terse that, while axiomatic to himself, it is not self-evi-
dent to others.

That is just where I stand: it is not self-evident to me. My training tended the
other way. And yet the suggestion excites my vivid curiosity. It sounds neat if noth-
ing more.

I have come to regard as valuable those truths only which are universal. And it
is a bit surprising to note how many truths are universal or may be expanded into a
universal application. I don't suppose that anyone who succeeds In solving a problem
really goes out of it for the solution; and this assumption doubtless also accounts
for innumerable failures. And the failures certainly are self-evident: the world is
filled with debris of this sort. Particularly is this characteristic of the intellectuals.
The unsophisticated man is often better qualified to go straight to the core of a
matter: by a process of feeling to sense its reality. Now to give a very simple case:
if you are given a peanut-pod and the problem is to find the peanut, you simply open
the pod and there is your peanut. The conditions are extremely simple, but the truth
is there: the germ of a universal truth, which, with sufficiently extended experience
will formulate itself in an axiom, or what scientists call a law: for to scientists, truths
are laws : in which little word you may incidentally note the survival of an autocratic
notion of the universe.

If we gradually enlarge our problem, we find its husk of conditions becoming com-
plicated, and its contained germ of solution less and less obvious. But when we have
solved our problem by confining our attention to it, we find the "law" holds good.
And when we have had further experience, we become aware that the very nature
of the limiting conditions suggests to us what must be the nature and the limitations
of the solution. If you are searching for a peanut you come to know by experience
that you will not find it within the burr of a chestnut. Thus a given problem takes
on the character of individuality, of identity. And you become aware that your
solution must partake of that identity. If you come across a problem which does not
possess an identity, you know by such token that the problem is not a problem but
a figment. As the problem becomes more complex it becomes the more necessary to
know all the conditions, to have all the data, and especially to make sure as to the
limitations. Now suppose we extend the problem to its broad human limit and pose
it as the problem of Democracy. The conditions seem enormously complicated and
complex, and sternly limited by what is called human nature; the solution not only
doubtful but nowhere in sight. Yet, let us but patiently stick to our "law," and we
finally, perhaps after many years, penetrate this vast husk of humanity and fictions,

165. The Creative Impulse

and find the germ of the solution to be individual man himself, and the fundamental
nature of man within him. Having discovered one man, his spirit and his powers,
we have discovered all men. Having discovered man, the problem reverses, takes on
a new, a constructive aspect; an aspect and purpose born of the desire to create. So
I will leave you to make your own specific applications of the "law" as the need
arises, and proceed to talk about what is uppermost in my mind, and yet which will
grow rather naturally out of your inquiry. And, by the way, what sort of problem
do you fancy you presented, in your precious self, when first you came to me?

What I want to talk about concerns this query: What underlies man's desire to
create? It surely must have in it much of the nature of his problems.

To begin with, man must originally have had the notion that he could make
rather than that he could create. His idea was to do something, to fashion something,
for Ms immediate use; to satisfy his immediate physical wants. And this germinal
notion still survives, in its simplicty, through all the complexities of ensuing civiliza-
tions, up to the present day of our calendar. Hence we may assume as a basis that
the idea of doing something came into being before the idea of creating something.
That man the worker, in biological sequence, preceded man the inquirer, the
thinker, the poet the creator. We are probably justified, moreover, in believing
that the power to work and the power of emotion, while contemporaneous in man,
were not equally satisfied, that in man's emotional nature lay a germ, an unshapen
idea, which gradually grew in assertiveness within him and sought outward realiza-
tion. This germ was the inarticulate beginning of the desire to express himself wholly;
the earliest indication of his need of an art of expression; the latent beginning of the

CREATIVE IMPULSE.

Now, the particularly delicate point involved is: Why did man wish to create?
Was it not that he felt lonely? That he desired emotional, psychic companionship?
Was not this subdued and shadowy anxiety, a problem shaping for him, gradually
but vaguely pressing for solution? Now, how did early man solve this unique problem
which would prostrate a modern mind if it were suddenly new? Still guided emo-
tionally by instinct, he sought the solution by instinct, and found it precisely where
it was within himself. He did not formulate laws on the subject; he simply acted
out his instinct his instinct of reproduction. He infused his bare work with the
quality of his emotions and thus found in them the companionship he yearned for
because they were of himself. His growing intellect might have gone on satisfy-
ing his physical needs and amplifying their expression. Instinct alone, in inspiring
the work of his hand and his intellect, could satisfy the craving of his heart, the
hunger of his soul. Thus man unconsciously began to create in his own image. His
work slowly grew in power of impulse, in power of expression. As civilizations arose,
man's work in those outwardly differing civilizations evinced his temperamental
variation. In some, the intellectual force predominates, in others, the emotions.
Seldom have they approached a balance. Never did they achieve it. For such achieve-
ment was beyond the range of the feudal mind. It lies in the domain of sanity.

In our own day, sadly enough, as I have told you, Instinct has departed, in form
if not in substance. To its beautifully varied powers we, unconscious of their origin,
give many beautiful names; to the primal impulse which we emptily call instinct we
apply terms of obloquy and reproach. And we do this, not because we are over-

166. Kindergarten Chats

civilized, but because we are half -civilized. We have given to intellect a loose rein,
utterly regardless or ignorant of the fact that in the end it would surely run amuck
and attempt to drive us like sheep over the precipice or into the morass of social
suicide.

Now, therefore, arises again 3 this time for us, the selfsame problem that confronted
early man. There exists in us the same power to make something, the same vague,
instinctive yearning for emotional and psychic companionship, the same inarticulate
desire to image ourselves forth. But intellect has long held repressive sway, while
Instinct has been biding its time. We have been "practical 59 so long that what we
have imaged forth is relatively monstrous, and by sane standards unreal, untrue to
man's oneness : true only to his dualism. Modern man is a traitor to himself in sup-
pressing one-half of himself. In a measure he realizes this, and makes attempts at
betterment, as he calls it, feeble, miscellaneous, and misdirected, employing but a
minute part of his power in endeavoring to effect that consummation he so devotedly
worships and which he calls Compromise. In other words, he is attempting the im-
possible task of eating his cake and keeping it. It is true that he is constantly put-
ting forth multitudinous intellectual images of himself and the unique character of
these works indicates the corresponding status of his intellectual reach. The fact
that he is not putting forth equal works based on instinct shows as clearly his inten-
tion that the intellect shall continue to dominate the heart: that lie is practical.
Therefore modern man's attempts at solving the basic problem of life have been
unsuccessful, because he has looked everywhere for a solution, or a suggestion of
solution, except within the problem itself.

It is always fatal to a solution to approach a problem with a preconception or
fixed attitude of mind; with a mind made up as to what the nature of the solution
will be, must be, ought to be, shall be. And yet modern man has made this specific,
particularly grave blunder. He has begun by surrounding the husk containing the
germ of solution a husk already thick enough with a fibrous super-husk of in-
tellectual misconceptions concerning man, his powers and his relation to his fellow
man. In other words, he has attempted to solve a problem wholly altruistic in nature
by the application of methods wholly selfish and therefore external in nature. In
fact, we might pause here to say that man, throughout his history, has preponder-
atingly sought explanations in the external instead of seeking them as he should, in
the internal. This mental attitude accounts accurately for the phenomenon that man
projected out of himself that vast sombre and inexorable image of himself which he
has called Fate.

The man of the past has shown to us his power to create multiform images of him-
self in his feudal status. These images arose in actuality of physical form, or as mar-
velous airy fabrics of his emotional dreams, his spiritual hunger for companionship,
directly from the need, the impulse, to create. Yet he did not know (though doubt-
less he may have felt) that these many things he created, these many systems he
created, the many gods he created, were but sublime projections of himself into the
outer world; which creations, as visioned forth by him, awakened a reaction within
his inner world; and that, in his simultaneous outer and inner world he found the
companionship he sought; he felt at home among the family of images of himself

167. The Creative Impulse

Hs veritable progeny. And thus his civilizations, with all their contained institutions,
were the collective Image of the multitudes, the instinctive unconscious output of
their powers, the visible glorifying symbol which the voice of nature Instinct
told them was theirs, but which Intellect assured them in their waking, toiling hours
could not possibly be of them but was a gift to them from on high. And as the lowly
as well as the highborn were under the sway of intellect, the multitudes believed and
consented. Hence there is not and never was such thing (except in passive moments)
as a government existing independently of the consent of the governed. The feudal
governments, past and present, have rested upon the foundation [of the] feudal
thought of the people. Our civilizations have thus been superstructures erected upon
such intellectually and emotionally ethereal, yet physical solid, foundation.

However and let this be particularly noted when the massive thought of the

multitudes changes, the civilizations, the institutions supported and sustained by that
thought, correspondingly change with it, for no civilization, no institution, can long
exist after the creative impulse, the emotional desire, the intellectual consent of the
multitudes,, is withdrawn. For such civilization has by such token ceased to be their
image, It no longer responds to their dreams. Or, it may be, their dream fades, and
the image fades or is destroyed. Usually in past times these changes have progressed
slowly. In modern times there is a visible tendency toward acceleration. And, be it
further noted that in all the glory of the past, man had not solved the problem of
man.

Now comes to us a new yearning, a new sense of loneliness, a new anxiety for
companionship. The old images, the old gods, the old procedures no longer satisfy.
Slowly there is awakening and stirring in modern man, a new desire, a new, a vaster
creative impulse, a new movement of instinct. This is what makes the aspect of our
world today so thrilling, so dramatic, so potent in new solutions, in new creations.
The thought of modern man is swiftly shaping itself, with self-impelling power, upon
the new-appearing center of gravity within himself; about a new conjunction of In-
tellect and emotion, a new assertion of Instinct, a new and concentrated creative
impulse; a new desire to see his new self imaged in new institutions, giving him a
new satisfaction, a new sense of fulfilled companionship. Engrossed now in the an-
alytical stage, he soon will enter the constructive stage. For the creative impulse,
intimately subjective in origin, fulfills its function in objective realities.

All this may seem a digression from our main theme, but I have made it pur-
posely, that you may locate wide boundaries and concentrate upon simple initia-
tives. That you may see the day that man will soon, with open eyes, find himself
confronted by portentous images of himself which he will reluctantly recognize as
such. That with selfsame open eyes he will recognize his prudery and prurience of
intellect in extenso and, for his own healing, will become ashamed.

Furthermore, while what I have said may cause our art to seem insignificantly
small in comparison, we may easily note, in concentrating our thought upon it ; that
it is indissolubly a part of the larger undertaking, and in our application thereto of
an analytical creative impulse phasing into a synthetic, constructive, creative im-
pulse, we are doing our special work in connection with the greatest adventure the
spirit of man ever has entered.

1 68. Kindergarten Chats

So let your art be of, for and by this new creative impulse of our clay, that it may
in due time put forth true images of man's free spirit.

NOTE: This, and the following, represent entirely new chapters, written in 1918.

LI. Optimism

And now, my dear boy, we have, substantially, rounded out our thesis. We have
done so, to be sure, crudely enough, in a most sketchlike fashion. We have passed
in review the phenomena of our contemporaneous American architecture. We have
also taken a glance at the man of the past. From a summit laboriously reached, we
have been enabled to secure a view of the man of today. Meanwhile, we have sought
simple basic explanations.

We have arrived close to the ending of your primary education, and the begin-
ning of your new, self -creative education; for our talks, in part, have been but Kin-
dergarten Chats.

That the undertaking has been in some respects not altogether an agreeable one,
is regrettable; and yet, what would you? Conditions are as they are.

If we have seen much of pessimism, it is because much pessimism exists. The same
may be said of cynicism.

If we have discovered ignorance in high quarters it is because ignorance is to be
found in high quarters. The same may be said of the ineptitude of the schools, of
many other repellent aspects of the intellect.

If in our investigations, our search, we have come across these things, and others
equally disconcerting, it is because they were there to begin with.

But having descended into this dark valley of negations, having crossed it and
begun our climb out of it, we began to come across pleasanter things, and, as we
trudged on, ever ascending toward the summit, we unearthed truth after truth,
wholesome, immensely valuable and inspiring. And when we had reached our high-
est point, man, the priceless treasure, revealed himself to us and we believed in him
MAN THE CREATOR! the redeemer, the Messiah.

I have marked out for you a tenuous but secure foundation of thought, in the
making of which you have bravely assisted in your enthusiasm of optimism: a basis
of sanity and good will.

Let me remark in passing, what this poor word optimism has suffered at the hand
of the silly, the superficial and unreflecting, and, above all, at the hand of the pro-
fessional optimist. We have seen enough to know that a modern optimism must be
based on a faith in things and assurances fairly well seen, rather than in a vague
essence of things unseen. And among these things and assurances fairly well seen by
us are man's powers: and the creative fertility of nature.

What with us savors of the essence of things unseen, but devoutly forecast, is that

169. Optimism

man, in his enlarging knowledge and understanding of man and his powers, his in-
creasing insight into nature's processes, will arrive at an optimism completely sane,
and utilize it as an interpretative, creative, constructive power for the upbuilding
of his new home. Such optimism is truly worthwhile. Its basis is clear to the imag-
inative inquiring mind: its uses equally clear to the imaginative constructive mind.

In this sense, the beginning of an optimistic career by you may be considered
weU grounded, and there remains but little danger that you will decline into
considering optimism of will and of character but a sentimental, fleeting or capricious
attitude of mind. You will meet with difficulities, to be sure; but with patience
these may be overcome by means of a thoroughly developed professional technique.
Remember above all, not only that your art starts with utility, but that the founda-
tion of utility is the sole foundation and guaranty of its expression in your hands into
the beautiful. It lies with you to demonstrate the thorough-going value of optimism
as imaged in results.

Now while this talk is in the nature of a farewell address . . .

Oh, say not so, I could go on forever . . .

I wish to say a few lingering words, lest it be too abrupt. So remember, and bear
ever in mind in your thinking and your doings, that FORM EVER FOLLOWS FUNCTION.,
that this is the law a universal truth. That the main function, so far as you will
be concerned, will focus in the specific needs of those who wish to build, and that
such needs are quite apt to be emotional as well as what is so generally called prac-
tical. That your share will be to investigate and assimilate these needs with the ut-
most care, to find in the problem, which in the aggregate they form, a true solution,
and then to express in truthful terms, in satisfying beautiful forms, a creative im-
pulse which shall conserve and not suppress.

This is perhaps all that need be said by way of caution. If you have taken to heart
the substance and spirit of our various chats and experiences together, if you have
thoroughly absorbed them, they will reappear in due time, newly expressed through
your individual nature, tempered, colored and, I hope, amplified, by the influence
of growing observation, experience and reflection, until you are completely con-
vinced not only that architecture is A PLASTIC ART but that you have become a
master of the sane and beautiful plastic art of expression; a MASTER at once of Dem-
ocratic thought and Democratic art, and that thus you are inspired!

But let us not thus part. Winter is gone: the Spring is here, I feel her incense per-
meate the air.

Oh, let us then not part until we greet the Spring!

She comes on now apace, in all her power.

And the heart melts at the thought of her greeting; and our rejuvenescence, our
resurrection, and her own. It was for her companionship I yearned I knew not why.

170. Kindergarten Chats

US. Spring Song

They say that Love is blind, but 'tis not so Love is clairvoyant the loved one
is blind.

They say many a thing, my lad, but 'tis not so Where Love is not, naught else
exists.

They say well no matter what they say, Love is Love, it is the power of powers.
'Tis why we live. 'Tis our last refuge, our first hope, our unsullied and our simplest joy.

It is the springy O Lord!

It is the spring!

Sweet fragrance fills the air 3

Dim censers swing,

It is the spring,

U4*4kv 'spring!

How languorous the gentle breeze.

How suasive are the opening buds,

How softly sings the spring of infancy,

It is the spring!

It is the spring of springs!

The newborn,

The delicate,,

The ineffable.

3 Tis that which melts, dissolves;

3 Tis that which wakens love;

It is that joy which causes love to bloom forever in the garden.

It is the springy

It is the dawn,

It is the hour;

Love comes to Life Life comes to Love

The twain are one.

Good is born,

Power comes forth in splendor,

Tenderness is here.

An overwhelming joy awakens as Spring sings her limpid song;

We hear the melody.

And our bell sounds, t>

For 'tis OUR Spring that sings in the song,

While springtime listening murmurs her response;

'Tis our response to springtime's melting mood.

That which would form must melt;
The heart melts that it form;
The soul melts;
The body melts that it re-form anew.

171. Spring Song

It is the spring the languorous, surging spring,

The sensuous, mighty spring,

The erotic spring without, within,

The spring of action of ebullient blare,

Charged with love,

Charged with fecund passion,

Charged with infinite affection,

Charged with desire,

Surcharged with power to do.

See! in the top of yonder pine, the mocking-bird bursting his throat in love for his
mate. How he sways with the bough. How he sings and sings in the breeze, singing
in the springtime singing his song of Love's ecstasy. And how well the breeze knows
it. And how well the springtime knows it. And his mate on yonder tree yearning for
love> yearning in the springtime of her sweet pure heart the heart of a mock-
ing bird!

' Oh, shut not your heart to the springtime, O Man. ^T

Shame on the prude who shuns that which is chaste, who would
shut the ear to the melody of procreation.

See! how the dogwood blooms!
Shall I sometime bloom like it?

Surely! you shall if you WILL!

The dogwood blooms in love of spring,

Love Spring and bloom.

For Love is Life;

For Love is You ;

For Love is I ;

For Love is the springtime.

It is all in life;

All in religion;

All in philosophy;

And without Love alas !

Does not the wild azalea tell you this?

Need I tell it? I?

What am I?

It is the Spring not I. f^vO^C

But where is my spring song? When shall it begin?

How raucous my treble grates within this splendor;

How pallid my wish and will against this polychrome;

How shallow I, how void of all but love.

With overflowing heart I try to sing;

And the springtime sings and sings in ecstasy / have not lost the

ear to hear I listen and am amazed anew such beauty, such

gentleness, such fluency, such gracious pride.

Behold! the far-flung glory of the spring!

Hear her call! Hear echoing splendor everywhere!

172. Kindergarten Chats

Oh, for an art of spring,

A comprehending utterance.

Oh, for one mighty soul to hear and sing the song of spring:

One man to chant this hymn of hymns.

How inarticulate and hoarse are we the while all Nature is in tune.

Oh, let there be one vibrant voice to answer, to proclaim;

To sunder the vast sky with pealing anthem;

One heart to swallow up the saturating radiance here!

Behold! Here is the volcanic warmth of life,
The mighty power of resurgent growth;
The ardent soul of ALL is here,
Oh, for one eye to see,
One will to shape!

Her sweet contagion comes so softly to my heart,

Her power seeks so winsomely an entry to the mind;

Her goodness comes so silently, so gently, toward the soul.

She knocks so timorously at the door.

It is the Spring! All hail! All hail, thou! Lovely Spring!

For mak'st thou not a dream to shape and sing now in my heart?

Would that I might wholly sing of thee in my beatitude.

Oh, take my wistful song, my famished song, my silent song if so

must be.

Take it lest I pass away;

For as I love thee, gentle Spring, with all my heart, with all my soul,

Take this pale offering of all I have.

Poor am I, yet take me, take me for my love.

How brilliantly the waters sparkle in the bay,

How softly shines the great, glad sun, which makes the waters sparkle.

So shine on me, thou gladsome Springy-
Shine on me as on waters that I like waves may dance and gleam.

How softly moves the south breeze, coming to us from far o'er the
bay, from over broad and distant seas come to us to join your
song, O Spring.

How every insect chirps and creaks;
How birds attune;
How flowers exhale.

It is the Spring!

It is the sweetest spring of springs;

For that arises now triumphant in rny souL

After weird winter a spring-song melts me I am born again.

O amorous springtime!

Why art thou thus gentle in thy power?

Why art thou, sweet spirit, thus so tender: as this, my

springtime is sweet and tender as all Nature is pellucid?

J 73- Spring Song

Surely God hath loved and sought thee; so thou sing'st of Him,
Then as surely will God come to me who watch and wait.
Then will He gladden my heart as He sends the sun to gladden the
water and the birds and every living thing that hails Him with no
creed but Life and Love,

The Spring is singing her gladsome song,

Hear it, all my lad :

Hear its diapason,

Hear the splendor of its flow :

Remember it forever.

There surely will another spring arise: You shall prevail!

There surely will a springtime come into the garden of the heart:

You shall prevail

Then will come Beauty, then will come Power,
Then create! You shall prevail!
Be not self-shamed, as Spring is not self -shamed.
Be virile to the end!

Radiant Spring! Inspiring Spring!

The glory and the gentleness of her power will come to you

Use it wisely,, use it well : You shall prevail

EnTam&ujd an^namau

The Spring thatTfdlows""

as ftvpr spa&on such as Man.

So hope, in the Spring it is the time for hope;

So shall I believe, in Spring it is the time to believe.

SO SHALL WE WILL, IN THE SPRINGTIME :
IT IS OUR TIME FOR WILLING!

NOW BEGIN

174. Kindergarten Chats

Additional Papers 1885-1906

Characteristics and Tendencies of American Architecture

This essay, Sullivan's first formal writing so far as is known, was delivered as an address
before the Western Association of Architects in 1885.

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 deplor-
able; 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 grafting or transplanting process. They have been proved empirical by the
sufficient 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 resultant 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 architectural feeling arising in sympathy with
the emotions latent or conspicuous in our people.

It is reasonable to believe that an unconquered country, peopled by 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 nur-
ture emotions of rare quality and of a fruitfulness 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 in-

NOTE: Figs. 12-17 show examples of Sullivan's work (Figs. 12-16 by the firm, Adler and Sullivan) which in
chronology, subject-matter and variety reflect the sequence of the essays.

177. Characteristics and Tendencies of American Architecture

dividual is from day to day seeking expedients by means of which to shape his im-
mediate 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 characteristic, 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 im-
pulse appearing as an element of warmth tingeing scholastic formalism; sometimes
as a seemingly paradoxical 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 hold; and above all,
we are to look for it in the creations of the gifted ones whose souls are finely attuned
to the touching beauty of nature and of humanity. To an apprehension of this sub-
tle 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, tim-
idity and embarrassment in the delineation 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 emphatically
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 compla-
cently call our art, is too much a matter of heart and fingers, and too little an off-
spring 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 dependence upon our artistic inheritance.

Our art is for the day 5 is suited to the day, and will also change as the day changes.
The law of variation is an ever present force, and coordination is its goal. The first
step toward a new order of things is accomplished when there appear minds receiv-
ing 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

178. Additional Papers

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 sur-
faces.

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 dependent upon
the verbal explanation and comment of Its exponents. A knowledge of their vocab-
ulary 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 comprehen-
sion of many things apparently incomprehensible. Metaphor and simile are ram-
pant 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 intertwin-
ings 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 vary-
ing 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 oth-
ers 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 investigation, we may gladly become convinced that behind a some-
what 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 or-
ganic 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 plasti