The ministry of art

THE MINISTRY OF ART

THE MINISTRY OF ART

BY

RALPH ADAMS CRAM

LITT.D., F.A.I. A., F.R.G.S.

BOSTON AND NEW YORK

HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY
dbe ftitoergibe preg
1914

COPYRIGHT, 1914, BY RALPH ADAMS CRAM
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

Published May 1914

SANTA

To

HER GRACE ADELINE MARIE
DUCHESS OF BEDFORD

PREFACE

IN bringing together for publication lectures
and addresses delivered at different times, be-
fore various audiences, and in places widely
separated from each other, the question inevit-
ably arises whether they shall be printed as they
were given or, instead, wholly recast through
the elimination of ideas and passages that are
common to several or even all of them. To fol-
low the latter course is almost impossible with-
out total destruction of such chain of thought
as may exist, and, therefore, it seems better to
rest under the charge of indulging in vain repeti-
tions than to lay one's self open to the opposite
charge of incoherency of thought.

After all, there is no longer the possibility of
novelty in ideas, except where these are inde-
fensible by any argument based on history and
precedent : the fundamental laws — spiritual,
ethical, philosophical — were long ago either
revealed or determined, and the only excuse for
their reiteration to-day is that so many of them

vii

PREFACE

have been forgotten and overlaid by the detri-
tus of loose thinking, it must fall to some to
rescue them from their temporary (but curiously
periodic) oblivion. In bringing them forward
once more, the best one can hope to do is to
clothe them in some new dress that, however
defective it may be, shall yet serve to arouse
interest and attract attention.

So these fugitive papers must stand in their
original estate, repetitions and all, on the chance
that whatever things are in them worthy of
attention (assuming such qualities to exist)
shall at least be heard for their much speaking.

So far as the title is concerned, if any explana-
tion or justification is necessary other than what
will, I trust, appear from the contents of the
essays themselves, let me say that by the words
"The Ministry of Art" I mean that function
which I think art has performed, and always
can perform, as an agency working toward the
redemption of human character; and in this
aspect (which is, of course, only one of several)
it takes on something of that quality which
characterizes the ministers of the Christian
Church.

viii

PREFACE

From the earliest times there have always
been three major orders of this ministry, bish-
ops, priests, and deacons, who at their several
ordinations receive "Character" which is indel-
ible, which may not be repeated, and which
gives them, severally, certain definite author-
ity, with power to administer certain sacra-
ments. These are the major orders, but there
are minor orders as well, as acolytes, exorcists,
readers, who, without special sacramental
power, are yet definitely "ministers " of religion.

Now, as there are also seven major sacra-
ments, which nevertheless do not in themselves
take up and include all that sacramentalism
which is, indeed, not only the most essential
element in the Church, but also the very under-
lying law of life itself, extending into the far-
thest fringes of being, so the ministerial quality
is not monopolized by the divinely established
orders, but reaches out in weakening degree
amongst many classes of men, whereby they
themselves are, or may become, "ministers"
in potency and in fact.

And this I conceive to be the highest function
of the artist and the art that is his agency of

ix

PREFACE

operation. Not that I would for a moment
make this an exclusive property; art has suffi-
cient reason for existence in its quality as a crea-
tor of simple, sensuous joy and refreshment; as
a beneficent force expressing itself through -
and absolutely restricted to — pure beauty. As,
however, each material thing in the universe
has its sacramental quality, expressing a secret
spiritual grace through an outward and visible
form, from the crystalline snowflake that sym-
bolizes the fancy of playful angels working
under inexorable law, to the mind of man which
is but the crude, material type of the very-
Mind of God, so abstract art may do more than
make life beautiful (at times), in that it can
act symbolically, tropically, sacramentally, and
so become the supreme means of expressing,
and of inciting and exalting, those emotions
which transcend experience and may not in any
degree find voice through those channels of
expression which are entirely adequate for the
purposes of the intellect.

In this aspect the master of art (the word
"artist" has acquired a sickly connotation
which almost rules it out of use in this connec-

x

PREFACE

tion) wields a power of most astonishing mag-
nitude, and he may, if he likes, become through
his works one of the greatest agencies of right-
eousness and light, and, conversely, he may too
easily become the servant of damnation. That
he has so often become the latter is less his own
fault, perhaps, than that of society itself, which,
when it periodically strikes its downward course,
becomes actually poisonous, and very swiftly
metamorphoses the best of arts and the most
willing of artists into Circean beasts. If the
master of art himself, and the world he would
serve, were more clearly and persistently con-
vinced of the great educational, expressive, and
dynamic force of art as art and as a sacra-
mental agency, it is even possible that, though
they might not be avoided, the depths to
which civilization periodically falls might not
be so abysmal as history records, the crests
more enduring and prolonged, the nodal points
less closely set together.

And now again, as the descending curve meets
the ascending swell and we confront a crossing
of tendencies with all this ever has implied of
cross-currents and confusion, it is particularly

xi

PREFACE

important that the higher aspects of art in all
its forms should be brought to mind, while we
call upon it to exercise its just and unique func-
tions of expression and eduction. There is a
new strength in all the arts, as always happens
when the power that created them is losing
force, and while this cannot possibly arrest the
fall of one dynasty or the rise of the other, it
has a great part to perform, if it wholly realizes
itself, in giving expression to all that is worth
preserving in an era so fast becoming history,
and in bridging the inevitable chasm now open-
ing between one definite epoch and the next. In
the interregnum we may expect a general break-
down of what we now consider a triumphant
civilization, but the artist has the same part to
play here that was so splendidly performed by
the monasteries of the Dark Ages. In his work,
whatever it may be, he must record and preserve
all that was and is best in a shattered era, that
this may be carried over into the next and play
its new part, no longer of conservation but of
re-creation.

So, in a sense, the artist stands as a minister
in minor orders, and so his life and acts take

xii

PREFACE

hold of that sacramentalism that is the founda-
tion of both the Church and the world: if he
plays his part honestly and as one so charged
with duties and privileges, he may see the art
to which he is sworn become once more, not
only a great recorder of true civilization, but the
surety of its eventual restoration.

RALPH ADAMS CRAM.

WHITEHALL,
SUDBURY, MASSACHUSETTS.

CONTENTS

I. ART THE REVEALER i
II. THE PHILOSOPHY OF THE GOTHIC

RESTORATION 19

III. THE PLACE OF THE FINE ARTS IN PUBLIC

EDUCATION 65

IV. THE ARTIST AND THE WORLD 103
V. THE CRAFTSMAN AND THE ARCHITECT 141

VI. AMERICAN UNIVERSITY ARCHITECTURE 167

VII. THE MINISTRY OF ART 213

THE MINISTRY OF ART

I

ART THE REVEALER

THE MINISTRY OF ART

ART THE REVEALER1

AFTER what fashion shall I, follower of art
in a sense, speak on this debatable sub-
ject, here at the inauguration of a great institu-
tion of culture and learning, and before you,
its earliest and forever most honoured guests,
who personally and officially represent Church,
State, and School, and here and now pay tribute
to that great power whose duty it is to lead
onward and forward every[child born of man,
until, man at last, he is worthy to play his part
in the life that opens before him of service and
charity and righteousness and worship.

I might speak of art historically, as the per-
fect flowering of sequent epochs of civilization,
as the evanescent record of man's power of
great achievement, as a glory of history in
Homer and Pheidias, in Virgil and Anthemius of

1 Address at the inauguration of Rice Institute, Houston,
Texas.

THE MINISTRY OF ART

Tralles, in Ambrosian chant and Gregorian
plain-song, in the Arthurian legends and the
Nibelungenlied, in Adam of St. Victor and
Dante, in Cimabue and Giotto and their great
successors, in the cathedrals and abbeys of
mediaevalism, in the sculptures of Pisa and
Paris and Amiens, in Catholic ceremonial, in
the glass of Chartres, the tapestries of Flanders,
the metal-work of Spain, in the drama of Mar-
lowe and Shakespeare, in the music of modern
Germany, in the verse of the English Victori-
ans. I might speak of art as an ornament and
amenity of life, a splendid vesture covering
the nakedness of society. I might speak of it
in its economic aspect, or as the handmaid
and exponent of religion.

Art is so great a thing, so inalienably a heri-
tage and a natural right of man, it has all these
aspects, and more; but for the moment I nar-
row myself to yet another consideration, — the
function of art as an essential element in edu-
cation.

The adjective may strike you strangely -
"an essential element" — not an accessory, an
extension ; but I use it with intention, though to

4

ART THE REVEALER

justify such use I must hasten to disavow any
reference to the teaching of art as this now ob-
tains either in art schools or under university
faculties of fine arts. It is, I admit, hard to con-
ceive such teaching as being of necessity an in-
tegral part of any scheme of general education,
— however efficient it may be when viewed in
the light of its own self-determined ends, — and
I should expect, from no source, endorsement
of any argument for the universal necessity of
an art education conceived on similar lines ; but
I plead for a higher, or at least broader, type
of such teaching, because I try to place myself
amongst those who set a higher estimate on
art, conceiving it to be not an applied science
or a branch of industrial training, or yet an ex-
treme refinement of culture study, but simply
an indispensable means toward the achieve-
ment of that which is the end and object of
education, namely, the building of character.

There were days, and I think they were very
bad old days, when it was held that education
should take no cognizance whatever of charac-
ter, of the making of sane, sound, honourable
men and women, but only of mental training

5

THE MINISTRY OF ART

and mental discipline. Then it was said with
grave assurance that it was not the province of
public education to deal with religion, ethics,
or morals, except from a strictly historical and
conscientiously non-sectarian standpoint, and
that the place for the teaching of those things
was the HOME — spelled with very large capi-
tals. After a while the compulsion of events
forced a readjustment of judgments, and we
became conscious of the fact that a combina-
tion of influences — amongst them our very
schools themselves — had resulted in the pro-
duction of homes where neither religion nor
ethics was taught at all, and where conscious
character building was of the most superficial
nature, while the concrete results were some-
what perilous to society. Struck at last by the
fact that our most dangerous criminal classes
were made up of those who were thoroughly
well educated, we were compelled, as Walt
Whitman says, "to reexamine philosophies and
religions/* and some of us came to the conclu-
sion that if the schools were to save the day —
as they certainly must and certainly could — a
new vision was necessary, and that what they

6

ART THE REVEALER

were set to do was the bending of all their en-
ergies and powers toward character-building,
toward the making, not of specialists, but of
fine men and women, and good citizens.

Under the old system the significance of art
and the part it could play in' education were
generally ignored ; it was treated either as an
"extra," as a special study like Egyptology or
Anglo-Saxon, and so regarded as the somewhat
effeminate affectation of the dilettante, or as
a "vocational course," ranking so with mining
engineering, dentistry, and business science.
So taught, it was, indeed, no essential element
in general education, but if we are right in our
new view of the province thereof it may be that
our old estimate of art and its function and its
significance needs as drastic a revision, and that
out of this may come a new method for the
teaching of art.

What is it, then, this strange thing that has
accompanied man's development through all
history, always by his side, as faithful a servant
and companion as the horse or the dog, as in-
separable from him as religion itself? this baf-
fling potentiality that has left us authentic his-

7

THE MINISTRY OF ART

torical records where written history is silent,
and where tradition darkens its guiding light ?
Is it simply a collection of crafts like hunting
and husbandry, building and war ? Is it a pas-
time, the industry of the idle, the amusement of
the rich ? None of these, I venture to assert, but
rather the visible record of all that is noblest in
man, the enduring proof of the divine nature
that is the breath of his nostrils.

Henri Bergson says in speaking of what he
calls — inadequately, I think — intuition : " It
glimmers wherever a vital instinct is at stake.
On our personality, on our liberty, on the place
we occupy in the whole of nature, on our origin,
and perhaps also on our destiny it throws a
light, feeble and vacillating, but which never-
theless pierces the darkness of the night in
which the intellect leaves us." Here lies the
province of art, where it has ever lain ; for in
all its manifestations, whether as architecture,
painting, sculpture, drama, poetry, or ritual, it
is the only visible and concrete expression of
this mystical power in man which is greater
than physical force, greater than physical mind,
whether with M. Bergson we call it intuition

8

ART THE REVEALER

or with Christian philosophers we call it the
immortal soul.

And as the greatest of modern philosophers
has curbed the intellectualism of the nineteenth
century, setting metes and bounds to the prov-
ince of the mind, so he indicates again the
great spiritual domain into which man pene-
trates by his divine nature, that domain re-
vealed to Plato and Plotinus, to Hugh of
St. Victor and St. Bernard and St. Thomas
Aquinas. As Browning wrote, "A man's reach
must exceed his grasp, or what is a heaven for,"
and so, as man himself, transcending the lim-
itations of his intellect, reaches out from the
world of phenomena to that of the noumenon,
as he forsakes the accidents to lay hold on the
substance, he finds to his wonder and amaze-
ment the possibility of achievement, or at least
of approximation, and simultaneously the over-
whelming necessity for self-expression. He has
entered into a consciousness that is above con-
sciousness ; words and mental concepts fail, fall
short, misrepresent, for again, as M. Bergson
says, "The intellect is characterized by a nat-
ural inability to comprehend life," and it is

9

THE MINISTRY OF ART

life itself he now sees face to face, not the iner-
tia of material things, and it is here that art in
all its varied forms enters in as a more mobile
and adequate form of self-expression, since it
is, in its highest estate, the symbolic expression
of otherwise inexpressible ideas.

Through art, then, we come to the revelation
of the highest that man has achieved ; not in
conduct, not in mentality, not in his contest
with the forces of nature, but in the things that
rank even higher than these — in spiritual
emancipation and an apprehension of the ab-
solute, the unconditioned. The most perfect
plexus of perfected arts the world has ever
known was such a cathedral as Chartres, before
its choir was defiled by the noxious horrors of
the eighteenth century; when its gray walls
were hung with storied tapestries, its dim vaults
echoed to solemn Gregorians instead of operatic
futilities, and the splendid and dramatic cere-
monial of mediaeval Catholicism made visible
the poignant religion of a Christian people.
And in this amazing revelation of consummate
art, music was more than "a concord of sweet
sounds," painting and sculpture more than the

10

ART THE REVEALER

counterfeit presentment of defective nature,
architecture more than ingenious masonry.
Through these, and all the other assembled
arts, radiated, like the coloured fires through
the jewelled windows, awe, wonder, and wor-
ship, of men who had seen some faint adum-
bration of the Beatific Vision, and who called
aloud to their fellows, in the universal language
of art, the glad tidings of great joy that, by art,
man might achieve, and through art he might
reveal.

Now if art is, indeed, all this, — and the
proof lies clear in itself, — then its place in lib-
eral education becomes manifest and its claims
incontestable. If education is the eduction of
all that is best in man, the making possible the
realization of all his potentialities, the building-
up of personality through the dynamic force of
the assembled achievements of the human race
throughout history, and all toward the end of
perfecting sane and righteous and honourable
character, then must you make art, so under-
stood and so taught, as integral a part of your
curriculum as natural science, or mathematics,
or biology. Not in dynastic mutations, not in

II

THE MINISTRY OF ART

the red records of war, not in economic vacilla-
tions, or in mechanical achievements, lies the
revelation of man in his highest and noblest
estate, but in those spiritual adventures, those
strivings after the unattainable, those emanci-
pations of the human soul from the hindrance
of the material form, which mark the highest
points of his rise, presage his final victory, and
are recorded and revealed in the art which is
their voicing.

The Venus of Melos, "Antigone," Ay a
Sophia, Gregorian music, Latin hymnology, the
" Divina Commedia," Giotto's Arena Chapel,
Chartres, Westminster Abbey, "Hamlet,"
Goethe's "Faust," "Parsifal," "Abt Vogler"
— all great art, and as great art beyond price ;
but greater, more significant by far as living in-
dications of what man may be when he plays
his full part in God's cosmogony.

Where is art taught in this sense and to this
end? I confess I do not know. Indeed, I find
in many places laboratories of art industry
where, after one fashion or another, ambitious
youth — and not always well advised — is
shown how to spread paint on canvas ; how to

12

ART THE REVEALER

pat mud into some quaint resemblance to hu-^
man and zoological forms ; how to produce the
voice in singing ; how to manipulate the fingers
in uneven contest with ingenious musical instru-
ments; how to assemble lines' and washes on
Whatman paper so that an alien mason may
translate them, with as little violence as possi-
ble, into terms of brick and stone — or plaster
and papier mache. And I find names, dates,
sequences of artists taught from textbooks, and
sources and influences taught from fertile imag-
inations, together with erudite schemes and
plots of authorship and attribution ; but where
shall we find the philosophy, the rationale of
art, inculcated as an elemental portion of the
history of man and of his civilization ?

Categories, always categories; and we con-
fuse them to our own undoing. There have been
historians who have compiled histories with no
knowledge of art and with scant reference to its
existence; there have been artists who have
taught art with no knowledge of history and
with some degree of contempt for its preten-
sions ; yet the two are one, and neither — from
an educational standpoint — is intelligible with-

13

THE MINISTRY OF ART

out the other. It is through Homer and ^Eschy-
lus that we understand Hellas; through Aya
Sophia that we understand Byzantium ; through
Gothic art that we know medievalism; through
St. Peter's and Guido Reni that the goal of the
Renaissance is revealed to us. And so, on the
other hand, what, for example, is the art of the
Middle Ages if we know nothing of the burgeon-
ing life that burst into this splendid flowering ?
What are the cathedral builders to us, and the
myriad artists allied with them, when severed
from monasticism, the Catholic revival, the
crusades, feudalism, the guilds and communes,
the sacramental philosophy of Hugh of St.
Victor, and the scholastic philosophy of St.
Thomas Aquinas ? We build our little categori-
cal box-stalls and herd history in one, art in
another, religion in a third, philosophy in a
fourth, and so on, until we have built a laby-
rinth of little cells, hermetically sealed and se-
curely insulated, and then we wonder that our
own civilization is of the same sort, and that
over us hangs the threat of an ultimate burst-
ing forth of imprisoned and antagonistic forces,
with chaos and anarchy as the predicted end.

ART THE REVEALER

Again we approach one of those great mo-
ments of readjustment when much that has
been perishes, and much that was not, comes
into being. For five centuries the tendencies
set in motion by the Renaissance have had
full sway, and as the great epoch of mediae-
valism ended at last in a decadence that was
inevitable, so is it with our era, called of En-
lightenment, the essence of which was analysis
as the essence of that was synthesis. As medi-
aevalism was centripetal, so is modernism cen-
trifugal, and disintegration follows on, faster
and ever faster. Even now, however, the falling
wave meets in its plunge and foam the rising
wave that bears on its smooth and potent surge
the promise and potency of a new epoch, nobler
than the last, and again synthetic, creative,
centripetal.

No longer is it possible for us to sever being
into its component parts and look for life in
each moiety ; for us, and for our successors, the
building-up of a new synthesis, the new vision
of life as a whole, where no more are we in-
terested in isolating religion, politics, educa-
tion, industry, art, like so many curious fever

IS

THE MINISTRY OF ART

germs, but where once more we realize that
the potency of each lies, not in its own dis-
tinctive characteristics, but in the interplay
of all.

And with this vision we return to the con-
sciousness that all great art is a light to lighten
the darkness of mere activity, that at the same
time it achieves and reveals. So, as art shows
forth man's transfiguration, does it also serve
as a gloss on his actions, revealing that
which was hid, illuminating that which was
obscure.

So estimated and so inculcated, art becomes,
not an accessory, but an essential, and as such
it must be made an integral portion of every
scheme of higher education. A college can well
do without a school of architecture, or music, or
painting, or drama, and the world will perhaps
be none the poorer ; but it cannot do without
the best of every art in its material form, and
in the cultural influences it brings to bear upon
those committed to its charge, nor can it play
its full part in their training and the develop-
ment of their character unless out of the his-
tory of art it builds a philosophy of art that is

16

ART THE REVEALER

not for the embellishment of the specialist but
for all.

"Man is the measure of all things," said Pro-
tagoras, and with equal truth we can say: Art
is the measure of man.

II

THE PHILOSOPHY OF THE GOTHIC
RESTORATION

II

THE PHILOSOPHY OF THE GOTHIC
RESTORATION1

THIS is a stimulating subject that you
have set me; it may lead us far — it has
led me far, as you are destined to discover; for
there is this about art — and particularly archi-
tecture, anyway, — it refuses to stay in its neat
little category of aesthetics, and branches out
amazingly until it sends its roots deep down
into the beginnings of things, its flower-tipped
branches high up into the free air of prophecy.
You may think it ought to be easy enough for
me to give you a succinct account of the erratic
growth of the new Gothic spirit in architecture,
from the early nineteenth-century Pugins down
to the latest neo-mediaevalist practising to-day ;
easy enough for me to content myself with what
is really a very interesting history (and task
enough, too, for that matter), but if you do
think this you little know the provocative na-

1 Read before the Contemporary Club of Philadelphia.
21

THE MINISTRY OF ART

ture of the subject — or the susceptible nature
of your speaker. No, it is impossible to deal with
the matter in a superficial way, for it is not a case
of adventuring into a new wonderland of style
from sheer ennui, for the sake of a new sensation :
the inception and growth and culmination of the
new Gothic mode is not a whimsey of chance,
a sport of erratic fancy ; it was and is a manifest-
ation in art forms of a world impulse, as fun-
damental as that which gave itself visible form
in the Renaissance, as that which blossomed
in the first Gothic of the twelfth century, as
that which created Aya Sophia or the Parthe-
non. It meant something when it happened, it
means something to us to-day, it will mean more
to our children ; and deliberately I am going to
disappoint you — I fear — by trying to show
what this is, instead of telling you, and demon-
strating to you in pictures, what our forbears
have done, what some of us are trying to do
to-day.

I am convinced there is nothing accidental in
our stylistic development, or in the universe,
for that matter. There was once a very wise
man who, on speaking of a miracle to a friend,

22

THE GOTHIC RESTORATION

and being confronted by the assertion that the
event was not that but rather a coincidence,
devoutly said that he thanked God he was not
so superstitious as to believe in coincidences.
So, chaotic and illogical as our devious wander-
ings after the strange gods of style may be, I
am disposed to think that even here we may
find evidences of design, of a Providence that
overrules all things for good; "an idea," as
Chesterton would say, "not without humour."
For chaos is the only word that one can justly
apply to the quaint and inconsequent conceits
in which we have indulged since that monu-
mental moment in the early nineteenth century
when, architecturally, all that had been since
the beginning ceased, and that which had never
been before, on land or sea, began. A walk up
Fifth Avenue in New York, from Madison
Square to the Park, with one's eyes open, is an
experience of some surprises and equal illumi-
nation, and it leaves an indelible impression
of that primal chaos that is certainly without
form, if it is not wholly void. Here one may see
in a scant two miles (scant, but how replete
with experiences !) treasure-trove of all peoples

23

THE MINISTRY OF ART

and all generations : Roman temples and Paris-
ian shops; Gothic of sorts (and out of sorts)
from the "carpenter-Gothic" of 1845, through
Victorian of that ilk, to the most modern and
competent recasting of ancient forms and re-
stored ideals ; Venetian palaces and Louis Seize
palaces, and Roman palaces, and more palaces
from wherever palaces were ever built ; delicate
little Georgian ghosts, shrinking in their un-
premeditated contact with Babylonian sky-
scrapers that poise their towering masses of
plausible masonry on an unconvincing sub-
structure of plate glass. And it is all contempo-
rary,— the oldest of it dates not back two
generations, — while it is all wildly and im-
probably different.

The experience prompts retrospection, and
we turn over the dog-eared leaves of the imme-
diate past ; apparently it was the same, only
less so, back to the decade between 1820 and
1830, and there we find a reasonably firm foot-
hold. Here at last, at the beginning of the cen-
tury, we discover actual unanimity, and with
some relief we go back century after century,
tracing variations, but discovering no precedent

24

THE GOTHIC RESTORATION

for the chaos we have left. From time to time,
even to the first Olympiad, we suddenly find
ourselves at some brief period where a fight is
manifestly going on ; but there were never more
than two parties to the contest, and this once
passed, we have another four or five centuries
of peaceful and unified development. Our own
Colonial merges without a shock in English
Georgian; this, through Inigo Jones, in the
Renaissance of the Continent. A generation of
warfare lands us in Flamboyant Gothic, and
so to real Gothic that stretches back through
logical vicissitudes to the twelfth century.
Another upheaval, and in a moment we are
with the Romanesque that touches Rome
itself, and behind Rome lies Greece. No chaos
here; definite and lawful development; infin-
ite variety, infinite personality, and a vitality
that demands a more illimitable word than
"infinite." What happened, then, in 1825;
what is happening now; what is going to hap-
pen, and why ?

We may try for an answer, but first we must
lightly run over the well-thumbed leaves again.

We all know what our own Colonial was like;
25

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perhaps we do not fully realize how varied it
was as between one section and another, but
at least we appreciate its simplicity and direct-
ness, its honesty, its native refinement and
delicacy, its frequent originality. It is not the
same as English Georgian ; sometimes it is dis-
tinctly better; and, however humble or collo-
quial, it is marked always by extreme good
taste. If anything it improved during the al-
most two centuries of Colonial growth, and
when the nineteenth century opened it was still
instinct with life. A half-century later where
were we? Remember 1850, and all that that
date connotes of structural dishonesty, barbar-
ism, and general ugliness ! Here is the debatable
period, and we may narrow it, for in 1810, in
1820, good work was still being done, while in
1840, yes, in 1830, the sodden savagery diluted
with shameless artifice was generally preva-
lent. To me this decade between 1820 and 1830
is one of the great moments in architectural
history, for then the last flicker of instinctive
art amongst men died away, and a new period
came in. Such a thing had never happened
before: it is true Rome never matched Greece

26

THE GOTHIC RESTORATION

in perfection of art ; the Dark Ages after her fall
were dark, indeed ; the second Dark Ages after
the death of Charlemagne were equally black,
while the transition from Gothic to Renaissance
was not without elements of disappointment,
but at none of these transitional moments were
people absolutely wrong-headed, never was the
work of their hands positively shameless. Even
now we put their poor products in our art
museums, where they are not outfaced by the
splendid monuments of the great and crescent
epochs. In a word, what happened about 1825
was anomalous ; it happened for the first time ;
and for the first time whatever man tried to do
in art was not only wrong, it was absolutely and
unescapably bad.

I should like to deal with this matter in
detail, but we have no time. In a word, what
had happened, it seems to me, was this : The
Renaissance had struck a wrong note — and
in several things besides architecture ; for the
first time man self-confidently set to work to
invent and popularize a new and perfectly arti-
ficial style. I am not concerned here with the
question whether it was a good style or not ; the

27

THE MINISTRY OF ART

point is that it was done with malice afore-
thought ; it was invented by a cabal of paint-
ers, goldsmiths, scenic artists, and literary
men, and railroaded through a stunned society
that, busied with other matters, took what
was offered it, abandoned its old native ways,
and later, when time for thought offered, found
it was too late to go back. Outside Italy there
was as little desire for the new-fangled mode
as there was for the doctrinal Reformation
outside Germany. In France and England good
taste still reigned supreme, and though the
dogmatic iconoclasts took good care that the
best of the old work should be destroyed and
that suspicion should be cast on what — from
sheer exhaustion — they allowed to remain ;
though for one reason and another the new
Classic style came in, the good taste of the
people still remained operative, and while
Italy and Germany were mired in Rococo and
Baroque, they continued building lovely things
that were good in spite of their artificial style,
because their people had not lost their sense or
their taste.

It could not last, however: certain essential
28

THE GOTHIC RESTORATION

elements had been lost out of life during the
Renaissance and the Reformation; the Revo-
lution— third act in the great melodrama —
was a foregone conclusion. It completed the
working-out of the foreordained plot, and after
it was over and the curtain had been rung
down, whatever had been won, good taste had
been lost, and remained only the memory of a
thing that had been born with man's civiliza-
tion and had accompanied it until that time.

You cannot sever art from society ; you can-
not make it grow in unfavourable soil, however
zealously you may labour and lecture and sub-
sidize. It follows from certain spiritual and
social conditions, and without these it is a dead
twig thrust in sand, and only a divine miracle
can make such bloom, as blossomed the staff of
St. Joseph of Arimathea at Glastonbury.

Well, Alberti and Palladio and Inigo Jones
had dissolved and disappeared in the slim re-
finements of American Colonial. What fol-
lowed ? For a brief time and in one or two cate-
gories of activity the spacious and delusive
imitations that Jefferson more or less popular-
ized, the style sometimes known as "Neo-

29

THE MINISTRY OF ART

Grec," but more accurately termed — because
of its wide use for Protestant meeting-houses in
country districts — the "Graeco-Baptist" style.
You know it ? — Front porticoes of well-de-
signed, four-foot Classical columns made of
seven-eighths-inch pine stock, neatly nailed
together, painted white, and echoing like a
drum to the incautious kick of the heel; slab
sides covered with clapboards, green blinds to
the round-topped windows, and a little bit of a
brick chimney sticking up at the stern where
once, in happier days, stood the little cote that
housed the Sanctus bell.

Then came what is well called "Carpenter-
Gothic," marked by the same high indifference
to structural integrity, and with even less reli-
ance on precedent for its architectural forms;
a perfectly awful farrago of libelous details, —
pointed arches, clustered columns, buttresses,
parapets, pinnacles, — and all of the ever-
present pine lumber painted gray, and usually
sanded as a final refinement of verisimilitude.
And with these wonderful monuments, cheek by
jowl, Italian villas, very white and much bal-
conied ; Swiss chalets, and every other imagin-

30

THE GOTHIC RESTORATION

able thing that the immortal Batty Langly, or
later the admirable Mr. Downing, could invent,
with, for evidence of sterling American inge-
nuity, the "jig-saw-and-batten" refinement of
crime. We really could not stand all this, you
know, and when the Centennial in Philadelphia
finally revealed us as, artistically speaking, the
most savage of nations, we began to look about
for means of amendment. We were not strik-
ingly successful, as is evidenced by the so-called
"Queen Anne" and "Eastlake" products of the
morning after the celebration ; but the Ruskin-
ian leaven was working, and a group of men did
go to work to produce something that at least
had some vestiges of thought behind it. There
is much of this very strange product now at
large; it is generally considered very awful,
indeed, — and so it is — but it was the first
sincere and enthusiastic work for generations,
and demands a word of recognition. Its vivid
ugliness is due to the fact that in the space of
seventy-five years the last faintest flicker of
sense of beauty had vanished from the Amer-
ican citizen; its intensity of purpose bears
witness to the sincerity of the men who did

THE MINISTRY OF ART

it, and I for one would give them praise, not
blame.

We are approaching — in our review — an-
other era in the development of our architec-
ture. Let us gather up the many strands in
preparation therefor. Here were the "wild and
whirling words " of Hunt, Eidlitz, Furness ; here
is the grave old Gothic of Upjohn's following,
Renwick, Congdon, Haight, — admirable, much
of it, in little country churches; here is the
Ruskinian fold, Cummings, Sturgis, Cabot, —
rather Bostonian, you will note; here was the
old Classical tradition that had slipped very,
very far from the standards of Thornton, Bui-
finch, McComb, now flaring luridly in the ap-
palling forms of Mullet's Government buildings,
and the Philadelphia City Hall. Let us pursue
the subject no further: there were others, but
let them be nameless ; we have enough to indi-
cate a condition of some complexity and a cer-
tain lack of conviction, or even racial unity.
Then the Event occurred, and its name was
H. H. Richardson. The first great genius in
American architecture, he rolled like an aes-
thetic Juggernaut over the prostrate bodies of

32

THE GOTHIC RESTORATION

his peers and the public, and in ten years we did
have substantial unity. We were like the vil-
lage fireman who did n't care what colour they
painted the old tub, so long as they painted her
red : we did n't care what our architecture was
so long as it was Romanesque. For another ten
years we had a love-feast of cavernous arches,
quarry-faced ashlar, cyclopean voussoirs and
seaweed decorations; village schools, railway
stations, cottages, — all, all were of the sacro-
sanct style of certain rather barbarous peoples
in the south of France at the close of the Dark
Ages.

And in another ten years Richardson was
dead, and his style, which had followed the
course of empire to the prairies, and the alkali
lands, and the lands beyond the Sierras ; and a
few years ago I found some of it in Japan ! It
was splendid, and it was compelling, as its dis-
coverer handled it, but it was alien, artificial,
and impossible, equally with the bad things it
displaced. But it did displace them, and Rich-
ardson will be remembered, not as the discov-
erer of a new style, but as the man who made
architecture a living art once more.

33

THE MINISTRY OF ART

Eighteen hundred and ninety, and we start
again. Two tendencies are clear and explicit.
A new and revivified Classic with McKim as its
protagonist, and a new Gothic. The first splits
up at once into three lines of development : pure
Classic, Beaux Arts, and Colonial, each vital,
brilliant, and beautiful in varying degrees. The
second was? and remains, more or less one, a
taking-over of the late Gothic of England and
prolonging it into new fields, sometimes into
new beauties. So matters run on for another
ten years. At the end of that time the pure
Classic has won new laurels for its clean and
scholarly beauty; the Beaux Arts following has
abandoned much of its banality of French bad
taste and has become better than the best con-
temporary work in France; the neo-Colonial
has developed into a living thing of exquisite
charm, while the Gothic advance has been no
less than that of its Classical rival — or should
I say, bedfellow ?

And now two new elements enter ; steel-frame
construction on the one hand, on the other,
the secessionist. The steel frame is the enfant
terrible of architecture, but like so many of the

34

THE GOTHIC RESTORATION

same genus it may grow up to be a serious-
minded citizen and a good father. It is n't that
now; it is a menace, not only to architecture,
but to society, but it is young and it is having
its fling. If we can make it realize that it is
a new force, not a substitute, we shall do well.
When it contents itself in its own proper sphere,
and the municipality says kindly but firmly,
"thus far and no farther," — the "thus far"
being about one hundred and twenty-five feet
above street level, as in my own wise town of
Boston, — then it may be a good servant. Like
all good servants it makes the worst possible
master; and when it claims as its chiefest virtue
that it enables us to reproduce the Baths of
Caracalla, vaults and all, at half the price, or
build a second Chartres Cathedral with no
danger from thrusting arches, and with flying
buttresses that may be content beautifully to
exist, since they will have no other work to do,
then it is time to call a halt. The foundation of
good architecture is structural integrity, and it
does not matter if a building is as beautiful as
the Pennsylvania Station in New York; if its
columns merely hide the working steel within,

35

THE MINISTRY OF ART

if its vast vaults are plaster on steel frame and
expanded metal, then it is not architecture, it is
scene-painting, and it takes its place with that
other scene-painting of the late Renaissance
to which we mistakenly apply the name of
architecture.

The secessionist — one might sometimes call
him Post-Impressionist, Cubist, even — is the
latest element to be introduced, and in some
ways he is the most interesting. Unlike his
confreres in Germany, Spain, and Scandinavia,
he shows himself little except in minor domestic
work — for at heart we are a conservative race,
whatever individuals may be, — but here he is
stimulating. His habitat seems to be Chicago
and the Pacific Coast ; his governing conviction
a strongly developed enmity to archaeological
forms of any kind. Some of the little houses of
the Middle West are striking, quite novel, and
inordinately clever; some of the Far Western
work, particularly around Pasadena, is exquis-
ite, — no less. Personally I don't believe it is
possible wholly to sever one's self from the past
and its forms of expression, and it certainly
would be undesirable ; on the other hand, how-

36

THE GOTHIC RESTORATION

ever, the astute archaeology of some of our best
modern work, whether Classic or Gothic, is
stupefying and leads nowhere. Out of the inter-
play of these two much of value may arise.

And there you are : three kinds of Classic, two
kinds of Gothic, skeleton-frame, and secession-
ist, all are operative to-day ; each with its strong
following, each, one admits, consummately
clever and improving every day ; for there is no
architectural retrogression in America ; there is
steady and startling advance, not only in facil-
ity for handling and developing styles, but in
that far more important matter, recognition of
the fact that styles matter far less than style.
From a purely professional standpoint the most
encouraging thing is that breadth of culture,
that philosophical insight into the essence of
things, that liberality of judgment that mark so
many of the profession to-day. Gone are the
old days of the "Battle of the Styles"; the
swords are beaten into pruning-hooks, and these
are being used very efficiently in clearing away
the thicket of superstitions and prejudices that
for so long choked the struggling flower of sound
artistic development. The Goth and the Pagan

37

THE MINISTRY OF ART

can now meet safely in street or drawing-room
without danger of acute disorder; even the
structural engineer and the artist preserve the
peace (in public) ; for all have found out that
architecture is much bigger than its forms, that
the fundamental laws are the same for all good
styles, and that the things that count are struc-
tural integrity, good taste, restraint, vision, and
significance. No one now would claim with the
clangour of trumpets that the day of victory
was about to dawn for the Beaux Arts, Gothic,
or steel-frame styles, or for any other, for that
matter; each is contributing something to the
mysterious alembic we are brewing, and all we
hope is that out of it may come the Philoso-
pher's Stone, that, touching base metal, shall
turn it into refined gold — which, by the way,
is the proper function of architecture and of
all the arts.

Chaos then confronts us, in that there is no
single architectural following, but legion ; and in
that fact lies the honour of our art, for neither
is society one, or even at one with itself. Ar-
chitecture is nothing unless it is intimately
expressive, and if utterly different things clam-

38

THE GOTHIC RESTORATION

our for voicing, different also must be their
architectural manifestation. You cannot build
a Roman Catholic or Episcopal church in the
Beaux Arts vernacular (it has been done, but it
is extremely silly); because the Church is the
eternal and fundamentally immutable thing in
a world of change and novelty and experiment,
and it has to express this quality through the
connotation of the forms it developed through a
thousand years to voice the fulness of its genius
that was developing simultaneously. Neither
can you use the steel frame or reenforced con-
crete to the same ends, though this very sordid
wickedness has also been perpetrated, I have
grounds for believing. On the other hand,
think of using the consummate art of Chartres
Cathedral for a railway terminal, or the Ste.
Chapelle for a stock exchange, or Haddon Hall
for an Atlantic City hotel, or the Ducal Palace
in Venice for a department store, or the Erech-
theion for a fire-engine house. The case has
merely to be stated to be given leave to with-
draw, and with it goes, for the time, the talk
we once heard of an "American Style." Styles
come from unity of impulse ; styles come from a

39

THE MINISTRY OF ART

just and universal estimate of comparative
values ; styles come where there is the all-envel-
oping influence and the vivid stimulus of a clear
and explicit and compelling religious faith ; and
these occur, not at the moment of wild confu-
sion when one epoch of five centuries is yield-
ing to another, but after the change in dynasty
has been effected, and the new era has begun
its ascending course. The only premeditated
architecture I know, the only style that was
deliberately devised and worked out according
to preconceived ideas, — the style of the
Renaissance, — was yet not half so artificial
as it looks (and as some of us would like to
think), for in a sense it was inevitable, granting
the postulates of the humanists and the flimsy
dogmas of the materialists of the fifteenth
century. It did not develop insensibly and
instinctively like Hellenic and Byzantine and
Gothic and Chinese Buddhist art, — the really
great arts in history, — but once the great
parabola of mediaeval civilization curved down-
ward to its end, once Constantinople fell, some-
thing of the sort was not to be escaped.
Now I do not feel that we shall be content
40

THE GOTHIC RESTORATION

with an art of the scope of that of the Renais-
sance; I do not feel that we shall be content
with a new epoch of civilization on Renaissance
lines. There are better ways of life, and saner,
and more wholesome, and after Constantinople
has fallen again (God send the day quickly), so
marking the end, as the other fall in 1453, five
centuries ago, marked the beginning, of the
epoch now nearing the moment of its dissolu-
tion, I believe all the wonderful new forces, now
working hiddenly, or revealing themselves spo-
radically, will assemble to a new synthesis that
will have issue in a great epoch of civilization as
unified as ours is disunited, as centripetal as
ours is centrifugal, as spiritually efficient as ours
is materially efficient, and that then will come,
and come naturally and insensibly, the inevit-
able art that will be glorious and great, because
it shows forth a national character, a national
life that also is great and glorious.

Reduced to its simplest terms, our architec-
ture is seen to have had two epochs; the first
the attempted conservation of a definite style
which, whatever its genesis, had become an
essential part of our racial character, and its

THE MINISTRY OF ART

complete disappearance exactly at the time
when the serious and conservative nature of the
people of the United States gave place, with
almost equal suddenness, to a new quality born
partly of political independence, partly of new
and stimulating natural conditions, partly of
the back-wash from Continental revolution, and
above all of the swift working-out, at last, of
powers latent in the Renaissance-Reformation
itself. Second, the confused activities of many
men of many minds, who had cut loose from
tradition become moribund, and who were in
the position of the puppy sent by express, whose
destination could not be determined because, as
the expressman said, he "had eat his tag."
Communal interests, the sense of solidarity
inherited from the Middle Ages (which gives
us the true pattern of the only possible social-
ism) persisting in strange new forms even
through the Renaissance epoch itself, had
yielded to a crescent individualism, and archi-
tecture, like a good art, followed close to heel.

This is really all there is to our architectural
history between Jamestown and Plymouth
Rock at one end, and syndicalism and the

42

THE GOTHIC RESTORATION

Panama Exposition at the other, and I have
used many words in saying what might have
been expressed in a sentence. The old solidarity
in life which expressed itself for four thousand
years in a succession of quite distinct, but al-
ways sequent, styles died out at last, and the
new individualism of pigeonhole society and
personal followings came in. What lies before
us? More pigeonholes, more personal follow-
ings, more individualism, with anarchy at the
end ? I do not think so, but rather exactly the
reverse. Architecture, I insist, is always expres-
sive; sometimes it reveals metaphysical and
biological truth, when in itself there is no truth
whatever. If we built Independence Hall in
Philadelphia there was something in us of the
same nature, and we glory in the fact. If we
built the City Hall in Philadelphia, there was
something in us like that, arresting as the
thought must be. If we are doing three Classics,
and two Gothics, and steel-frame, and Post-
Impressionism (not to mention the others) at
the present moment, then that is because our
nature is the same. Now, can we again prove
the truth of the saying, "Ex pede Herculem,"

43

THE MINISTRY OF ART

and, using our present output as the foot, (I ad-
mit the connotation is of the centipede) , create
the Hercules ? I mean can we, from what we are
doing to-day, predict anything of the future?
Not of our future style ; that will be what our
society makes it; but of society itself? For my
own part, I think we can. To me all that we are
doing in architecture indicates the accuracy of
the deduction we draw from myriad other mani-
festations, that we are at the end of an epoch
of materialism, rationalism, and intellectualism,
and at the beginning of a wonderful new epoch,
when once more we achieve a just estimate of
comparative values; when material achieve-
ment becomes the slave again, and no longer
the slave-driver; when spiritual intuition drives
mere intellect back into its proper and very cir-
cumscribed sphere; and when religion, at the
same time dogmatic, sacramental, and mystic,
becomes, in the ancient and sounding phrase,
"One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic," and as-
sumes again its rightful place as the supreme
element in life and thought, the golden chain
on which are strung, and by which are bound
together, the varied jewels of action.

44

THE GOTHIC RESTORATION

Everywhere, and at the very moment when
our material activity and our material triumphs
seem to threaten the high stars, appear the evi-
dences that this wonderful thing is coming to
pass, and architecture adds its modicum of
proof. What else does it mean, that on every
hand men now demand in art better things than
ever before, and get them, from an ever increas-
ing number of men, whether they are Pagans,
Goths, or Vandals ? What is the meaning of the
return to Gothic, not only in form, but "in
spirit and in truth"? Is it that we are pleased
with its forms and wearied of others? Not at
all. It is simply this, that the Renaissance-
Reformation-Revolution having run its course,
and its epoch having reached its appointed
term, we go back, deliberately, or instinctively,
— back, as life goes back, as history goes back,
to restore something of the antecedent epoch,
to win again something we had lost, to return to
the fork in the roads, to gain again the old
lamps we credulously bartered for new. Men
laugh (or did ; I think they have given it over of
late) at what they call the reactionary nature
and the affectation of the Gothic restoration of

45

THE MINISTRY OF ART

the moment, and they would be right if it meant
what they think it means. Its significance is
higher than their estimate, higher than the con-
scious impulses of those who are furthering the
work, for back of it all lies the fact that what
we need to-day in our society, in the State, in
the Church, is precisely what we abandoned
when, as one man, we arose to the cry of the
leaders and abettors of the Renaissance. We
lost much, but we gained much ; now the time
has come for us to conserve all that we gained of
good, slough off the rest, and then gather up
once more the priceless heritage of medievalism,
so long disregarded.

And that is what the Gothic restoration
means, a returning to other days — not for the
retrieving of pleasant but forgotten forms, but
for the recovery of those impulses in life which
made these forms inevitable. Do you think
the Pugins in England in the early part of
the nineteenth century chose to build Gothic
churches because they liked the forms better
than those of the current Classic then in its last
estate ? Not at all, or at all events, not prima-
rily ; but rather because they passionately loved

THE GOTHIC RESTORATION

the old Catholic religion that voiced itself in
these same churches they took as their models.
And the same is true of those of us who build
Gothic churches to-day : instinctively we revolt
from the strange religion that, under Medici
and Borgia, built the Rococo abominations of
Italy, and equally from that other religion that
found adequate self-expression in the barren
meeting-houses of Puritan England and Amer-
ica; and when again we try to restore to our
colleges, as at Princeton and the University of
Pennsylvania and Chicago and Bryn Mawr,
something of the wonderful dynamic architec-
ture of Oxford and Cambridge and Eton and
Winchester, we do it far less because we like the
style better than that — or rather those — of
Columbia and Harvard and Yale, than because
we are impelled to our course by an instinctive
mental affiliation with the impulses behind the
older art and with the cultural and educational
principles for which they stand.

I want to emphasize this point very fully : the
Gothic restoration is neither a fad nor a case
of stylistic predilections. Of course,~we like it
better than any of the others to which we have

47

THE MINISTRY OF ART

any shadow of right, and we think it better art
than anything the Renaissance ever produced ;
but back of this is either a clear conviction or a
dim instinct (one is as good as the other as an
incentive) that the power that expressed itself
through Gothic forms was a saner and more
wholesome and altogether nobler thing than
that which expressed itself through the art of
the Renaissance and all that has succeeded it.
In other words, the world is coming to realize
something of the significances of art, and its
import as human language, not spoken, — for
the audible tongue has its own function of ex-
pressing mental concepts, — but conveying its
message symbolically, and to the imagination,
the intuition — if you like, to the soul.

In a way it is all a part of a great revolution,
or restoration, that is even now taking place,
and is far more significant than many of the
more conspicuous and loudly heralded trans-
formations with which the century is rife, a
revolution that was inevitable, that is part of
the great rhythm of human life that is the
underlying force of history. By some mysteri-
ous law this vast vibration seems to divide itself

THE GOTHIC RESTORATION

into epochs of about five centuries, during each
of which a tendency initiated in the preceding
period rises to the surface, submerges its pred-
ecessor, lifts on an enormous swell, crests, —
and then in its turn breaks down and disap-
pears, giving place to its successor whose
inconspicuous beginnings have already been
disclosed, though dimly. In this great rhythm
there are, of course, periodical nodes which are
the points where the ascending wave passes
that which is descending, and these nodes come
almost exactly at five-hundred-year intervals,
before and following the Christian era. To
speak only of what has been since that date, we
find the years 450 to 550, 950 to 1050, and 1450
to 1550 fraught with enormous significance and
containing within their span those sudden and
violent activities that spelled at the same time
the death of one epoch, the birth of another.
Similarly we may assume that at least from
1950 on we, or our descendants, shall confront
a revolution of the same nature, during which
what we now call "modern civilization"
(which may be dated roughly from the fall of
Constantinople in 1453) will dissolve and disap-

49

THE MINISTRY OF ART

pear as completely as the Roman Empire van-
ished at the first node after the birth of Christ,
the Carolingian empire at the second, and
medievalism at the third ; while what takes its
place will be as radically different as happened
in each of these historic instances. As I have
said before, however, the antecedents of revo-
lution and re-creation run far back of the node
itself, and as at the cresting of mediaevalism we
may find in Abelard and the Albigenses, and
veiled even in scholasticism, the seed that was
not to germinate for many generations, so now,
although the great convulsion may be half a
century away, we can, if we look, discover the
leaven at work and from its manifestations
make some estimate of what it will produce
when it is in full operation.

Now this leaven shows itself in many forms,
and the revival of Gothic architecture is one of
them. It is a wide fellowship, this of the proph-
ets, the path-breakers : if, on the one hand, we
find, as we should expect, close kin in all the
arts, from the nineteenth-century Romanticists
in literature and the Pre-Raphaelites and the
artist-craftsmen of Morris's following, and

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THE GOTHIC RESTORATION

Richard Wagner, down to the horde of lesser
lights to-day in literature and painting and
music who have broken away from the classical-
agnostic type of the latter part of the last cen-
tury and are returning to the Catholic Middle
Ages for their inspiration and their models, so,
on the other, do we find an infinity of move-
ments of similar impulse but in far-sundered
fields : socialism, for instance, which is a rather
insecure and blundering revolt against the whole
economic theory and material practice of the
last epoch of history ; the monastic revival, one
of the most significant and amazing episodes of
the present day, ignored by the world, yet
forging onward year after year with a vitality
matched only in the seventh, the twelfth, and
the seventeenth centuries ; radicalism in politics
which, however stupid it may be in its passionate
panaceas, is still a real mediaeval revolt against
the impossible governmental system engendered
in the centuries between the Renaissance and
our own ; the new literature of spiritual dynam-
ics with Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc at the
head, battling gloriously against the paynim in
the shape of Bennett, Wells, and their kind ;

Si

THE MINISTRY OF ART

the new-old religious propaganda of such men
as Fr. Figgis, Fr. Waggett, the Abbot of Caldey,
and Fr. McNabb, withering with its prophetic
breath the plausible and ingenious heresies of a
Campbell, a Canon Henson, and a Mrs. Eddy;
finally, — though there is much unnamed be-
fore,— the new philosophy, James, Eucken,
Bergson, — the last the greatest figure, perhaps,
since St. Thomas Aquinas.

A varied list, is it not? And much still re-
mains unspecified ; but it all hangs together ; it is
all part of a great movement; and the most
interesting thing is the fact that it all happens
synchronously with the very culmination of its
antithesis, the thing it is destined to destroy,
the apotheosis of that materialism that is the
essence of the epoch now closing in triumphant
glory, in war and anarchy, and in the despera-
tion of unrevealed but inevitable defeat.

And here is a point worth noting and that may
be made useful. To-day we are surrounded by
a very cyclone of reform : from the four winds
of heaven we are battered and tempest-tossed
by hurtling reforms that leave us no peace and
— it must be confessed — afford us scant bene-

52

THE GOTHIC RESTORATION

fit. We seize them all, we are voracious for
reforms, we accept them at their face value, and
— again to change the simile — wolf them down
like one o'clock. The result is usually unfortu-
nate, for as a matter of fact all is not reform
that revolutionizes. There are two kinds of
reform, the first that is protective, preventive:
reactions' engendered by a dying force to save
itself, tangents springing from a falling curve
and striving to arrest the inevitable descent;
the second that engenders tangents that leap
upward from the ascending curve, each one of
which actually lifts the curve more lightly into
the air. At this moment the descending and
ascending curves cross, the tangential reactions
are very much mixed, and no wonder helpless
humanity is confused. But it all becomes clear
if we can segregate them in their proper cate-
gories. Half the so-called reforms of to-day,
and those most loudly acclaimed and avidly
accepted, are really no more than the desperate
efforts of a dying force to prolong for an hour
its pitiful existence, to postpone for a day its
inevitable plunge into the sea of oblivion. On
the other hand, the other half, — who shall

S3

THE MINISTRY OF ART

estimate its vast significance, its illimitable
dynamic force ? Under its varied forms lie the
promise and potency of a new era, a new epoch
of civilization ; and I honestly think the great
question that confronts every man to-day, and
that must be promptly answered is "On which
wave are you riding?" If on that whose crest
loomed in the immediate past, then you are
riding down the swift glissade of dissolution
and your day is nearly done ; if on that which
only lately has risen out of the dark, then before
you lifts an ascent that cannot be checked and
whose cresting is perhaps two or three centuries
ahead. And in choosing your wave, the isola-
tion of reforms in the two categories I have
named will be of assistance towards the deter-
mination; for, once accomplished, you will see
how many of those alluring panaceas that
promise well are but the eloquence of a patent
medicine circular, are but dregs and ashes, while
things you had little noted, or noted with
amused contempt, are actually those centres of
vitality, of dynamic force, that are at the same
time the guaranty of the termination of a dy-
nasty become corrupt and festering, and of the

54

THE GOTHIC RESTORATION

initiation of another that shall be strong with
new and crescent life.

You see? I told you the word "Gothic"
would lead me far: farther than you asked, or
will like, or will agree to; but to some of us it
is like an oriflamme, a standard set up by the
king for the rallying of loyalty : the fiery cross
of Constantine with its prophetic legend, " By
this sign conquer!" Whether we know it or
not, — and some of us act by instinct rather
than conviction, — we are fighting the battles of
a new civilization, which, like all true civiliza-
tion, is also the old. And it is for this very rea-
son that, unlike our forbears of the beginnings
of the crusade, we cannot urge our Gothic as
either a universal style, fitted for all conceiv-
able purposes, or as a final thing which consists
in the restoration and perpetuation of a mode
of art sufficiently determined in the Middle
Ages, as Greek, for example, was determined in
the Hellenic epoch. Let me say a word on these
two points.

The argument — one might almost say the
passionate prayer — fora "National Style" is
based on an insufficient apprehension of the

55

THE MINISTRY OF ART

premises. A national style implies unity of
civilization, such, for instance, as happened
in the fourth century B.C., the fourth cen-
tury A.D. in the Eastern Empire, or the thir-
teenth century throughout Christian Europe:
such a condition does not exist to-day — is as
far from existence as then it was near. This
twentieth century is like a salad dressing : com-
posed of two opposite ingredients which, nev-
ertheless, assembled in unstable equilibrium,
produce a most interesting and even useful
condiment. On the one hand, we have all the
amazing precedents of the last four centuries,
from materialism, intellectualism, atheism, and
democracy to "big business," syndicalism, and
" Votes for Women " ; on the other, we have an
inheritance from alien and far-distant times:
the Home (as distinguished from the uptown
flat), the School (when it has not surrendered to
manual, vocational, and business training), and
the Church, in its ancient aspect, untouched
by rationalism, the social club idea, and emo-
tional insanity. There are infinite ramifications
of each branch, but the branches are distinct,
and like a trunk grafted with apples and roses (I

56

THE GOTHIC RESTORATION

believe this may be done), the flowers are differ-
ent, and the fruit. Now, as I have said before
(and as my hour prolongs itself more strenuously
maintain), art is expressive, the highest voicing
of the highest things, and if it has two opposites
to make manifest it must be true to each and
express them in different ways. I do not know
what may be the exact and perfect architec-
tural expressions of Wall Street, yellow journal-
ism, commercial colleges, the Structural Steel
Union, Christian Science, and equal suffrage : I
dare say they are, or may be made, as beautiful
as Hellenic or Byzantine or Buddhist architec-
ture ; but I am reasonably sure they are not like
any of these, and I am firmly persuaded that
they cannot be Gothic in any form. On the
other hand, as I think I have said before, I am
equally sure that a Christian home, a con-
scientious and high-minded ( university, and
the Catholic Faith are not to be put forward
in the sight of men clothed in the Rococo rai-
ment of a Medici-Borgia masquerade or the
quaint habiliments of the Ecole des Beaux
Arts.

" Every man to his taste," and to each cate-
57

THE MINISTRY OF ART

gory of human activity its own stylistic expres-
sion, for each has its own and nothing is gained
by a confusion of categories. Because, we will
say, the art of Imperial Rome best expresses
the spirit and the function of a metropolitan
railway station, it does not follow that it must
also be used for the library of a great univer-
sity; because the soul of the Ecole des Beaux
Arts as made manifest through the apartment
houses of the Boulevard Raspail, must also in-
spire the material form of the town house of a
"Captain of Industry," it need not inevitably
perform the same function in the case of a
cathedral ; because Gothic of some sort or other
best reveals the lineage, the impulse, and the
law of an Episcopal parish church, we are not
compelled to postulate it for a stock exchange
or a department store. In fact, the very reverse
is true in all these instances, and those who are
most zealous in urging the cause of Gothic for
church and school and home are also most jeal-
ous of its employment elsewhere ; for they know
that only those elements in modern civilization
which still retain something of the spirit that
informed their immediate forbears -in the Mid-

THE GOTHIC RESTORATION

die Ages have any right to the forms that spirit
created for its own self-expression.

And now, just a word as to these forms them-
selves, lest you should think, as others have,
that the Gothic restoration aims not only at
universal sovereignty, but that it is content as
well with the restoration as such, aiming to
bring back in all its integrity both a dead
civilization and its forms. Such an idea would
be far from the facts ; it is true that at present
those that are engaged in the Gothic restoration
seldom diverge very far from historical methods
and forms. Perhaps the late J. D. Sedding, and
George Scott, architect for Liverpool Cathe-
dral, and Leonard Stokes, sometime president
of the Royal Institute, diverge farther in this
direction; but even they venture but a little
way into untrodden paths, while the great
majority of practitioners, such as the late
George Bodley in England, and Vaughan in
America, adhere very closely, indeed, to what
has been, adapting it rather than transforming
it. This is not because there is anything sacro-
sanct in these forms and methods, it is not be-
cause, as individuals, the men I have named

59

THE MINISTRY OF ART

lack either inspiration or power of invention;
it is simply because, in the first place, they know
that man must not only destroy but restore
before he can rebuild, and, in the second place,
because they lack the great push behind them
of a popular uprising, the incentive of a univer-
sal demand, which alone can make individual-
ism creative rather than destructive, dynamic
rather than anarchical. This is a fact that is
frequently forgotten in categories of activity
other than those purely aesthetic, and if in
economics, politics, and philosophy men would
realize its truth, we should less often be threat-
ened by plausible reforms that are actually
deformatory in their character. However this
may be, it is certainly so in architecture, and,
therefore, we are content at present to restore ;
for we know that by so doing not only do we
regain a body of laws, precedents, and forms
that are the only foundation for the superstruc-
ture of which we dream, but also because
through these very qualities we may, in a meas-
ure, establish and make operative again, by
analogy and suggestion, those stimuli that in
time may react on society itself, transforming it

60

THE GOTHIC RESTORATION

into a new estate, when man will enter into the
new spiritual life which will demand a creative
and revealing art, such as that of the Middle
Ages, and in accordance with law this demand
will guarantee the supply.

For art of all sorts is not only expressive, it is
also creative : if it is in one sense the flower of a
civilization, it is in another the fruit, and in its
burgeoning lies also the promise of a new life
after the winter of the declining curve is past
and the new line begins its ascending course.
Bad art — for there is such, though it is a con-
tradiction in terms — works powerfully for bad
living and bad thinking, while, on the other
hand, good art is in its very nature regenera-
tive and beneficent. It cannot save the age of
which it is the flower from inevitable decay,
but, even as the treasures of classical civiliza-
tion were preserved in the monasteries of the
Dark Ages until better days, so does it lie fal-
low for generations only to rise again into the
light for the inception of a new civilization.

This, then, is the significance of the contem-
porary Gothic restoration, and we who believe
in it, who give it our most earnest support, do

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THE MINISTRY OF ART

so less as artists than as missionaries, confident
that if we can bring it back, even at first on the
old lines, we shall have been working in the serv-
ice of humanity.

Shall we rest there ? Shall we restore a style,
and a way of life, and a mode of thought ? Shall
we re-create an amorphous medievalism and
live listlessly in that fool's paradise ? On the con-
trary. When a man finds himself confronting a
narrow stream, with no bridge in sight, does he
leap convulsively on the very brink and then
project himself into space ? If he does he is very
apt to fail of his immediate object, which is to
get across. No; he retraces his steps, gains his
running start, and clears the obstacle at a
bound. This is what we architects are doing
when we fall back on the great past for our
inspiration ; this is what, specifically, the Goth-
icists are particularly doing. We are getting our
running start, we are retracing our steps to the
great Christian Middle Ages, not that there we
may remain, but that we may achieve an ade-
quate point of departure; what follows must
take care of itself.

And, by your leave, in following this course
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THE GOTHIC RESTORATION

we are not alone, we have life with us; for at
last life also is going backward, back to gather
up the golden apples lost in the wild race for
prizes of another sort, back for its running start,
that it may clear the crevasse that startlingly
has opened before it. Beyond this chasm lies a
new field, and a fair field, and it is ours if we
will. The night has darkened, but lightened
toward dawn ; there is silver on the edges of the
hills and promise of a new day, not only for
architects, but for every man.

Ill

THE PLACE OF THE FINE ARTS IN
PUBLIC EDUCATION

Ill

THE PLACE OF THE FINE ARTS IN
PUBLIC EDUCATION l

AS the strange madness we call the Renais-
sance prevailed increasingly over Europe,
blotting out the last faint flickerings of that
artistic fire that had been a lamp to the feet
of innumerable generations, and substituting
therefor the pale ignis-fatuus of conscious and
scholastic artifice, synchronously grew an origi-
nal and hitherto unheard-of theory of the nature
and function of the fine arts, carrying with it the
novel and alien idea of concrete, specific, pre-
meditated "art education." A new thing, in-
deed, as though one should establish schools of
gastronomy, lectureships on the art of sleep,
academies of inhalation and exhalation. Novel,
yes; but imperative both then and now, owing
necessity, however, not to a more liberal and
enlightened conception of art in itself, but

1 Read at Commencement, Yale University School of
Fine Arts.

67

THE MINISTRY OF ART

rather to the ominous and most unwholesome
revolution that, in the tempest of change, had
hurled from their enduring pedestals the proven
laws of life, substituting in their place the
brazen images of a dumb idolatry; robbing
man of his divine birthright in beauty, the her-
itage of ages unnumbered, the indelible mark
and token of God in His world.

When the great epoch of paganism crumbled
and sunk into dust and ashes, tried and found
wanting by the touchstone of divine revelation,
St. Benedict was raised up for the founding of a
new institution, based on the stern rejection of
the dearest privileges of man, but, because of
this very rejection and denial, competent to
meet in the highest degree the desperate needs
of a racked and shattered era. But for the
monks in their hidden monasteries, the very
seed of civilization would have perished from
the earth; and so we may say with equal truth
that, however false the new view of art, how-
ever unwholesome the new idea of premeditated
art education, but for these same schools of art,
from the days of the Medici until now, the
world would have lost that which was even of

68

THE FINE ARTS IN EDUCATION

greater value than the Greek and Roman manu-
scripts and the dim traditions of perished glory,
that lay for centuries in monkish cloisters and
in monkish hearts.

But the pious conserving of shards and shreds
is not all, and with the mediaeval monks in their
first estate, we have sometimes been content
with such conservation, forgetting that some-
thing lies behind, and that, the inner meaning
of the stores in our treasure-house ; their func-
tion, their message, their significance.

Nothing else, indeed, would have been pos-
sible, for with the Renaissance came into the
world a new theory of art: and this was that,
instead of being what it is, the touchstone of
civilization, it was simply an amenity of life, a
conscious product, and a marketable commod-
ity. This novel idea has persisted until to-day,
and the result is that the real nature of art has
remained forgotten, and in spite of the protests
of the artist and of the teacher, we have per-
sisted in regarding our art schools much as we
do our "commercial colleges" and our schools
of applied science; that is, as agencies' of special-
ization maintained for the benefit of those who,

69

THE MINISTRY OF ART

by their mental temper, are biased in favour of
architecture or painting or the industrial arts,
on the one hand, or of bookkeeping, stenog-
raphy, mechanical engineering, on the other.
This is to miss the entire significance of art and
to relegate it to a position where it is mean-
ingless, impotent, dead. We study Greek and
Latin, history, literature, philosophy, mathe-
matics, not, primarily, that we may become
specialists in the use of one or the other, at a
given rate of pecuniary compensation, but that
we may become cultivated men, and this should
be our attitude toward the fine arts ; for the day
is not far distant when the school of art will be,
not an accessory or an adjunct to a university,
as is the school of mines or the dental school,
but as absolutely and intimately a part of its
prescribed curriculum as the ancient languages
or philosophy or letters.

Art is, I repeat, neither an industry nor a
product ; it is a mystery, a manifestation, and a
result. Through it alone we come face to face
with the spiritual output of the racial soul,
through it is revealed all that endures in civili-
zation. I claim for it, therefore, a coordinate

70

THE FINE ARTS IN EDUCATION

position with all other branches of learning, as
indispensable in a complete curriculum, since
it is at the same time inerrant as a record of
achievement, inspiring toward effective action
to a degree unmatched in other categories, and
finally, a great language for the voicing of the
greatest things, a language for which there is no
substitute, and he who is not learned therein,
either in its active or its passive aspect, is to
that extent ignorant, unlearned, uncultured.

Art is the revelation of the human soul, not a
by-product of industrialism.

During the great period of Christian civiliza-
tion, this truth was held universally; not con-
sciously, of course, nor as the outcome of a
scientific demonstration; the Christian centu-
ries worked after another method. To the sane
men of medievalism there were two categories
of phenomena : axioms and mysteries ; and the
frontiers of the two domains were fixed and
final. Very fortunately for the future, the mys-
teries were themselves held to be axiomatic,
and so long as this was true a just balance ex-
isted in life. It was not until the daimon of a
haunting paganism rose from the tomb of a

71

THE MINISTRY OF ART

dead past, bringing the bright fruit of the tree
of knowledge in its hands, and on its lips the
words the serpent had said before, " Eat thereof,
then your eyes shall be opened and ye shall be
as gods, knowing good and evil, " — it was not
until then, the fruit eaten, that man swelled in
pride and said, " Behold, there is no mystery,"
and the victory of the Renaissance was accom-
plished.

As the nineteenth century takes its place in
history, we obtain a certain effect of perspec-
tive and we see how wholly it was meshed in
that web of futility and error, "There is no
mystery." Truly, to us of the new century it
begins to seem that nothing else rightly exists.
At all events, we realize that the things of
worth and moment are the mysteries; the
things of indifference the demonstrable facts.
So medievalism held art ; a thing universal and
inevitable; inseparable from life and bound up
in the being of every man ; but a thing so potent,
so sovereign, and in its effects so dispropor-
tioned to its palpable means, that it became one
with all the other inexplicable potencies — a
mystery.

72

THE FINE ARTS IN EDUCATION

Now, it is a curious fact that when we come
to understand a thing finally and explicitly, we
are unable to use it to our spiritual advantage,
or to the ultimate welfare of the race. Here lies
the most serious stigma upon the last century,
which was so given over to the inordinate man-
ufacturing of the most exquisite and technically
faultless theories, devices, and machines for
the production of quite useless institutions and
commodities. The phenomenon we accept but
cannot comprehend ; the looming wonder that
compels us but eludes hand and brain forever;
— this is the momentous thing, the driving
impulse of all that splendid spiritual and in-
tellectual activity that, through its immortal
products, endures eternally as the ever-grow-
ing heritage of man. Where knowledge ceases,
mystery begins, and the better part of man
never emerges from those cloud confines where
amid the lightning and the tempest God is seen
face to face ; that magical castle of cloud and
mist across whose dim portals the rainbow
writes, "Knowledge abandon, ye who enter
here."

This revelation of the eternal, impassable
73

THE MINISTRY OF ART

limitation of human knowledge, combined with
that other which is its perfect compensation,
the doctrine that all things are sacramental,
possessing an "inward and spiritual grace" that
is apprehended through the "outward and vis-
ible sign," was and is the essential element in
Christianity which made it victor over the pa-
ganism that believed all things were possible
to the human mind. So mediaevalism held, and
holding brought into being St. Thomas Aquinas
and St. Francis, Dante and Giotto and Fra
Angelico ; the cathedral builders of France and
the abbey builders of England. For the two es-
sential truths in the world are religion and art,
and these two are mysteries; rationalize them
and they cease, for their motive power is gone.
Of this rationalizing, of this Pandora's quest
for the facts in the case, there was nothing, and,
therefore, misled in no degree as to the sup-
posed existence of a science either of religion or
of art, mediaevalism raised both to the highest
point yet attained by man.

With the outbreak of the Renaissance came
the catastrophe, for behind the recrudescent
pagan forms, behind the cry of humanism and

74

THE FINE ARTS IN EDUCATION

emancipation, lay the old pagan theory that to
human reason all things are possible. Mystery
was abolished by edict, and the " light of pure
reason" took its place, though three centuries
and more were necessary wholly to effect the
substitution. Little by little the Renaissance
modulated into the Reformation, and this in
its turn merged in the Revolution. Each of
these several aspects of one primary impulse
played its own necessary part in the great
breaking-up of the just and well-balanced order
Christianity had brought into being. The Re-
naissance of Borgia and Medici destroyed the
whole system of natural morality and made for
the moment the Church herself a stench to the
nostrils and a scandal. The Protestantism of
Luther and Calvin, frantic against the flagrant
immorality raging like a pestilence around the
very throne of St. Peter, turned, the ethical
regeneration inaugurated, into a propaganda
for the substitution, in place of the wonder and
the mysticism of the Catholic Faith, of hard,
mechanical, logical, and literal dogmas; easily
framed in words, clearly demonstrable to the
most cloudy mental faculties. Finally, the Rev-

75

THE MINISTRY OF ART

olution came to deny everything: Catholic,
Renaissance, Protestant alike; law and order,
obedience, honour, even the palpable decencies
of life; one thing only it did not deny, the basic
principle of the Renaissance, "There is no
mystery." Then the Revolution passed like a
paralyzing nightmare, leaving the field swept
clear of all that Christianity had brought into
existence, and since then we have been per-
mitted year by year to watch the unshackled,
untrammelled mind struggling to build a new
heaven and a new earth over the ruins of the old.
Now the reaction comes, and the gray dawn
that glimmered fitfully through the storm
wrack of the nineteenth century brightens to
another day. The light falls on every domain
of life, shining through the still buffeting
storm; on industry, economics, philosophy,
ethics, politics, education, letters, religion; but
nowhere does it lie with a kindlier radiance than
on the great domain of art. It is not alone that
once more man clamours for beauty and its
ministry, and men rise up to answer the demand
in kind: beyond this lies the fact that the old
dogmas no longer hold; and the question goes

THE FINE ARTS IN EDUCATION

forth, "What is art, what does it signify, what
are the laws of its causation?" Everywhere
men are searching the answer, poring over the
art records of the past that the great cataclysm
has left us, comparing them with the times that
brought them forth, testing these times again
by the spirit that led them, building up by slow
degrees a new biology that is in very fact the
science of civilization.

In the process strange things are revealed;
no longer bound by inherited prejudice, and
not wholly in bondage now to the intellectual
superstitions of the period of modern enlighten-
ment, while acquiring a measure of Christian
humility in the matter of the omnipotence of
mentality, we go back to the original records,
draw our own independent inferences, and,
comparing these with long accepted authori-
ties, discover that the deductions and conclu-
sions that served for past generations satisfy us
no longer. Are we right in thinking it all a sys-
tem of specious special pleading, this mass of
august testimony to the essential barbarism of
Christian civilization and to the essential glory
of the threefold epoch that took its place ? To

77

THE MINISTRY OF ART

such a new conclusion we tend beyond a doubt ;
and while we still admit the great necessity of
many post-mediaeval principles and motives,
we are coming to believe that these developed
through the Renaissance, the Reformation, and
the Revolution, not by reason of them ; while
each has left us, on the other hand, a heritage
of evil to the extinction of which the present
century is consecrated.

It would be a facile task and fascinating to
examine, one by one, the several categories of
contemporary spiritual, mental, and physical
activity, pointing out in each how the evil as-
pects, that force themselves on us with such in-
sistency to-day, hark back inevitably to one or
the other of the three allied dominations that
controlled the destinies of the world from the
exile of the Popes at Avignon to the battle of
Waterloo. It is sufficient for the moment for us
to deal only with the question of the fine arts,
since my object in speaking to you is to draw
your attention to certain aspects of the question
of the place the study of the philosophy and
history of art should have in the scheme of
liberal education.

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THE FINE ARTS IN EDUCATION

Before all else, however, we must disabuse
our minds of that idea of the nature of art which
has maintained itself so firmly during the last
four centuries. Art is not a possibly desirable
amenity of life, to be acquired as a gloss to a
commercial and industrial supremacy; neither
is it a series of highly specialized professions.
Art is a result, not a product; and it is also a
language. Given a certain degree of individual
or racial or national civilization and the in-
evitable reaction is art in the abstract. The
demand for expression is instant and, under the
same civilized conditions, the manifestation is
immediate and instinctive, and this is art in
the concrete. Art is, therefore, a language, but
it deals with emotions, concepts, and impulses
that cannot be expressed through any other
medium known to man, because these emotions,
concepts, and impulses are the highest, and
therefore the most mysterious and tenuous, of
which the soul has cognition. "There is a phys-
ical body and a spiritual body"; and so also
there is a physical mind and a spiritual mind.
The former deals with all that lies between the
cradle and the grave, the latter with the treas-

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THE MINISTRY OF ART

ured consciousness of the innumerable aeons
of life that preceded this little hour of earthly
habitation, and with the innumerable aeons
that shall succeed. Natural science is the con-
crete manifestation of the first, religion of the
second, and art in all its forms is the perfect
manifestation of this spiritual mind, as the
written and spoken language is the voicing of
the physical mind until, indeed, it takes upon
itself symbolical quality, when it becomes one
with the fine arts and consecrated to other serv-
ice.

Art, then, is language and its mode is symbol-
ism, and the thing that lies behind is the es-
sential man in his highest estate.

As we became more and more ignorant of the
very meaning of the word, we, as children of
the Renaissance, slowly and arduously evolved
the nineteenth-century theory of art which, even
more than the Renaissance and the Reforma-
tion, was instrumental in stamping out the last
smouldering embers of the thing itself. Where
once art had been as natural and inevitable an
attribute of man as religion or love or war or
children, it now found itself an exotic, an ap-

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panage of the elect few, a thing too tenuous and
aloof for common humanity. Such a theory
as this means simply the extinction of art,
which cannot live in the thin air of Brahmini-
cal exclusiveness ; it is the exact, the instant,
and the complete language of man in his spirit-
ual experiences ; and while to only one in a thou-
sand is it given now, or ever was given, to
become a creative artist, behind such a one lies
the clamouring world of men, and it is this that
manifests itself through his art, not his own
solitary soul. If, like Phidias, Sophocles, Dante,
Giotto, Shakespeare, Wagner, Browning, he is
a true and faithful interpreter of the best, the
race answers instantly, unless it has lost or
stultified this sixth and highest sense, as has
happened in history only in modern times. To
bring back this marvellous gift of God to a
hungry generation, to win again the old lamps
foolishly bartered for new, — the old lamps
that, at a touch, brought genii and afrits and
all the magical spirits of fire and air to the serv-
ice of the summoner, — this is the task before
us. And the labour is not, as the amateurs and
savants and literati of the Renaissance, or the

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THE MINISTRY OF ART

aesthetes of the nineteenth-century decadence
would have held, because it is a polite accom-
plishment and a facile means of class distinc-
tion, but because it is the immutable mark of
civilization, the infallible touchstone of human
achievement. Art means civilization, the lack
of it barbarism, and year by year, in spite of
splendid sporadic manifestations, this lack has
become ever more and more marked since the
middle of the fourteenth century, when the old
lamps were sold for the new.

Now, it is quite clear that to endeavour to
foster the passion for beauty and the instinct for
art, by the deliberate and scientific methods
that have held for some five centuries, is to con-
tinue our self-indulgence in the vain repetition
of history. By taking thought we cannot add
one cubit to our stature, devise a new religion
(though of late some have thought otherwise),
or re-create art. We can do many things, but
none of these. Art is the result of certain condi-
tions: bring these into being, and you cannot
escape great art ; eliminate them, and no power
on earth can make art live. For five centuries we
have been bending all our energies toward the

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THE FINE ARTS IN EDUCATION

extinction of these conditions, and the success
that has followed has been very considerable.
If we desire a vital art we must reverse our pol-
icy. Art cannot exist side by side with atheism,
agnosticism, or infidelity; it is impossible in
conjunction with our contemporary conception
of what constitutes democracy : it dies before
defiance of law and order and denial of the
principle of subservience to authority; before
the individualism of the nineteenth century
and contemporary standards of caste; it is
trampled to death in the economic and indus-
trial Armageddon that surges over the stricken
field of contemporary life. In a word, the evils
of the Renaissance-Reformation-Revolution,
which for the moment are somewhat more con-
spicuous in their activity than the virtues, are
the negation of art-producing conditions.

We may put to one side the thought of a con-
scious propaganda for the restoration of art,
devoting ourselves to the achievement of art-
producing conditions, the solving of the re-
ligious, governmental, economic, industrial, and
social problems that confront us, like the solid
ranks of a conquering army. If we solve

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them aright, art follows as the guerdon of
victory.

And here emerges from the mist of theory the
new doctrine of the importance of the fine arts
in every scheme of liberal education. I am not
speaking now of the creative artist or of the
manner of his education ; indeed, I am not sure
that to him education is a necessity, or that by
such methods can he be created. He will occur,
however unfavourable the conditions or incle-
ment and forbidding the time. The question
before us is the place of the fine arts in general
education, in their function as contributors to
the making of a well-founded man. Now, in
the process of development, we have reached a
point where we no longer sound the tocsin,
plant the standard of battle, build barricades
in city streets, and go forth killing and, if it
may be, to conquer. We have another way, we
teach ; substituting education for coercion, and
until the event dethrones our theory, we shall
believe the way a better one, and that by our
schools and colleges and universities we shall
build such character as will restore those just
and wholesome conditions that will express

THE FINE ARTS IN EDUCATION

themselves through that great paean of joy and
exultation and worship we call art.

There are certain schemes of education that
tend inevitably to this end; there are others
that work as inevitably against it. Art-pro-
ducing civilization is engendered by educational
systems that are conceived on the lines of eter-
nal truth, not on those of time-serving expedi-
ency. During the nineteenth century a new
theory came into vogue, the theory, novel and
without recognizable ancestry, that the object
of education is the breeding of specialists,
whether they be dental surgeons or bacteriolo-
gists, bankers, or veterinarians ; and that, to this
end, everything not conspicuously contributory
to intensified specialization should be elimin-
ated ; that the years given to education should
be shortened, and again shortened, in order that
a man might the sooner hurl himself into the
struggle for life. From this point of view every-
thing not obviously practical was discredited :
Latin and Greek became matters of indifference
when 'an electrician or a financier was in the
making; the history of civilization, the develop-
ment of organized religion, comparative litera-

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THE MINISTRY OF ART

ture, philosophy, were eliminated from the edu-
cation of the architect and the engineer. That
the result was a great body of men of unbal-
anced intellect and very flimsy culture is, I
think, a statement that may be defended, and
the present century, even in its extreme youth,
gives evidence of a radical revolt from the once
popular standards of its predecessor. A new
principle has come, — or rather an old princi-
ple has been restored ; and we confront the def-
inite dogma that specialization is almost wholly
a matter for post-graduate education, while
the object of the school and the college and
the university is above all else the develop-
ment of gentlemen of well-rounded personali-
ties, who, grounded and fixed in all that pertains
to general culture, rendered conversant with all
the civilization of the past and its monuments,
trained and disciplined in all that pertains to
intellectual and spiritual experience, may be
prepared for entering at a later time into that
course of specialization which is imperative
and inevitable.

Professor William James has of late shown
very clearly the questionable results, in the do-

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main of pure science, of a system of education
too highly specialized and too contemptuous of
other fields of mental and spiritual activity;
and already a movement has begun amongst
architects and engineers — two of the most
highly specialized of professions — in favour
of a scheme of training which shall extend over
a far longer term of years and be devoted, for
the major part of this period, to the assimila-
tion of those elements of pure culture which ap-
parently, and in the nineteenth-century view,
have no direct bearing on the case, but tend
only toward the goal of general cultivation.

The old system of electives, specialization,
and short-term training has brought us to a de-
batable pass; our civilization is menaced by
strange and ominous tendencies and impulses;
if we are to stem the tide of crescent barbarism,
which in spite of our vast and penetrating edu-
cational organism has risen up against us, we
must follow, not the nineteenth but the twen-
tieth century in its educational tendencies.
And so following, we shall find that it is not a
question of conservation that confronts us, but
of extension, of the acceptance of new or long-

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forgotten agencies toward the development of
pure culture, and of these none quite stands on
the level of the history and theory and phil-
osophy of the fine arts. Abandoning forever
the idea of the arts as a product, and accepting
them as a manifestation, we shall soon realize
that without a full familiarity with their history
and of the philosophy of their being, liberal
education is an impossibility. These things can
no more be omitted from the education of the
prospective merchant and financier and scien-
tist than from that of the professional educa-
tor; for they are the basis of culture, and with-
out culture we are barbarians, however much
the balance of trade may be in our favour at
the end of any given fiscal year.

And of all these great educational agencies
I place at the head, art, in its history, its philos-
ophy, its practice ; for it is the summing-up of
all that goes before : the true history of the true
man ; and its records are infinitely more reliable
and significant than are those chronicles that
concern themselves with the unimportant de-
tails of the rise and fall of dynasties, the fabri-
cation and annulment of laws, the doings and

THE FINE ARTS IN EDUCATION

death of kings. The Middle Ages are inex-
plicable unless you read their revelation in
Chartres and Amiens and Paris and Westmin-
ster and Wells, and in the shattered vestiges of
monastic glory that cast their wistful glamour
over the English counties while they blot a
nation's history with the enduring annals of
a stupendous crime. The Renaissance is an
impossible interlude of horror, dissociated
from the splendid vesture the painters and
sculptors and poets wrought out of the inheri-
tance of medievalism to clothe its pagan naked-
ness. And why? Simply because through art
alone has been expressed those qualities which
reach above the earth-circle, those things
which are the essential elements of the race and
time.

For art is the voicing of the oversoul, the
manifestation of the superman, and through art
alone can we read of essential things. Monasti-
cism, the crusades, feudalism, chivalry are to us
matters aloof and incredible, but they brought
into being an art that rises even higher than the
art of Greece ; and through study of this art we
are able to see into the soul of the time-spirit

THE MINISTRY OF ART

that created it, and, so seeing, we are no longer
able to call the great institutions of mediaeval-
ism barbarous and darkened, for their real na-
ture is revealed, and we know them for what
they were, foundation stones of civilization.

For many generations we have been taught
to look on the Dark Ages, mediaevalism, the
Renaissance, the Reformation, the Revolution,
from certain definite standpoints. We have been
led to believe that with the climax of the Middle
Ages, the great epoch associated with the names
of Greece and Rome, which had slowly crumbled
after Rome herself had received her deathblow
at the hands of Northern barbarians, had, in its
long-continued degeneration, reached at last its
pit of final fall, whence it has been steadily
emerging by virtue of the impulse imparted by
the Renaissance, established by the Reforma-
tion, and guaranteed by the Revolution, until
at last it has mounted to the dizzy height where
now it stands poised for further flight. Now this
theory, so simple, so cheerful and gratifying, is
challenged ; men are not wanting to declare the
Middle Ages to be one of the starlike points of
man's achievement, the Renaissance but the

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first aspect of a great catastrophe that was to
overwhelm Christian civilization in ruin. Now,
even if this theory is extreme and but the
natural revulsion of feeling sequent on the sud-
den discovery of a false path followed too long,
it is still true that the present estimate of the
Renaissance is quite as different from the old as
is the new view of medievalism. For this radi-
cal and most salutary change we are indebted
in a great degree to the rediscovery of the
fine arts that occurred in the last century, and
to the resulting conviction that through them
we might scrutinize the history of the times
that employed them, to our own advantage
and to the extreme benefit of our historical per-
spective. Already through our study of mediae-
val art we have come to learn something of
what medievalism really was, and now we are
applying the same test to the Renaissance;
though with a difference, for here we have for-
given Alexander VI and Leo X, Torquemada
and Machiavelli, for the sake of Leonardo,
Botticelli, Donatello, and Mino da Fiesole,
whereas, when we come to study the philos-
ophy of the art of the Renaissance, we find that

THE MINISTRY OF ART

the major part of it was, not the fruit of the
" Revival of Learning/* but in simple fact the
very flowering of medievalism ; acquiring little
from the Renaissance beyond certain accidents
of form, the soul remaining mediaeval still.
Shorn of the great names of the cinquecento,
and with little left of artistic glory save the
transitionals (Michelangelo, Raphael, Cellini),
the Renaissance seems gaunt enough, for its
true artistic expression appears in such doleful
form as Guido, the Caracci, Salvator Rosa, and
the so-called "architects" of Roman grandi-
osity. Here are two examples of the radical
change in our view of comparative civilization
that has been effected through the study and
appreciation of art; and if a third is needed,
witness Japan, where, through art apprecia-
tion, our eyes became opened to the existence of
a great and wonderful civilization unparallelled,
almost, in its intensity and its enduring nature.
But it is not only as the test of history, the
measure of comparative civilization, that the
study and appreciation of art in all its forms is
of inestimable value. Above all this, it is the
touchstone of life, the prover of standards, the

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director of choice. Accepted, assimilated, it
becomes one of the great builders of character,
linked indissolubly with religion and philosophy
toward the final goal of right feeling, right think-
ing, and right conduct. The false principles of
the sixteeeth century, the savage hatred of
the seventeenth, the chaos and violence on the
one hand and the empty formalism on the other,
of the eighteenth, the materialism and the men-
tal self-satisfaction of the nineteenth century,
all worked together to crush out of humanity
this greatest gift of God ; but the revulsion has
come, the fruit of the tree of knowledge has
been eaten and it is very bitter, and once more
men rise up to proclaim the existence and the
glory of the unsolvable mysteries, and to de-
mand again their heritage in beauty and art.

For from the beginning of things beauty has
been the last resort of man when he has risen
above his earthly limitations and has laid hold
on immortality. In Eastern philosophy we read
of karma, that essential thing that persists
through death and beyond dissolution, linking
life to life in an endless sequence of change and
evolution; and whether, with the East, we be-

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THE MINISTRY OF ART

lieve this golden chain to be woven of myriads
of sequent lives that are yet one, or whether, with
the West, we hold it to be but the persisting
inheritance from equal myriads of ancestors,
the thing itself we accept, and art, itself a sacra-
ment, shows through the outward and visible
sign, which is beauty, the inward and spiritual
grace that is built up of sequent lives and com-
bined experiences.

Beauty is a mystery, for it is a great symbol.
Why, we do not know, but the fact is there.
Out of the accumulated approximations to
infinity that have marked ten thousand thou-
sand forgotten lives, we have reared a Great
Approximation, which may be called the Inti-
mation of the Absolute, and beauty is the mode
of its manifestation, art the concrete expres-
sion thereof. Regarded in this light and not as a
group of specialized activities, we see at once how
absolutely it becomes a part of a liberal educa-
tion, perhaps even the highest part. In them-
selves the facts of date and method and au-
thorship are secondary and unimportant when
we study the cathedrals of France, the abbeys
of England, the sculpture of Greece and that

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of thirteenth-century Europe and of Fuji-
wara Japan, the Gregorian music of Italy and
the nineteenth-century music of Germany, the
painting of the Italian cinquecento, and of the
Hangchou epoch in China and the Ashikaga
period in Japan. These are but the documents
in the case, the data furnished us by genera-
tions unnumbered; and through them, by
the processes of pure philosophy, we may lay
hold of that which we cannot acquire through
any other means whatever — the spiritual ex-
periences and the spiritual achievements of
dead civilizations.

And this is history, its acquisition and assimi-
lation, culture. Dynastic facts, material pro-
ducts, the historical kaleidoscope of changing
laws and customs, ecclesiastical councils, fluc-
tuant heresies and defiant counter-reformations,
— what are these but the dry bones religion
and art make beautiful and alive? The art of
a time is the touchstone of its efficiency and by
that art shall it be judged. And more: through
study of the philosophy of beauty and through
a recognition of what art signifies of any race
or time, we shall come to that revision of stand-

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ards which is the inevitable precursor of a new
epoch of civilization. Neither socialism nor
public-school education, secularism nor ethical
culture, free silver nor the strenuous life, can
serve as antidote to the ills that confront us;
but only that fundamental revision of standards
that will show us the true inwardness of the
trust and the labour union, the professional
politician and the grafter, the money test of
social distinctions, and contemporary news-
paper journalism. By acceptance of the artis-
tic tests, and by proficiency in that philosophy
of art which makes the application of these tests
possible, we are put in possession of a kind of
universal solvent, a final common denominator,
and before our eyes the baffling chaos of chron-
icles, records, and historic facts opens out into
order and simplicity; for the facts in the case
prove only what was done, the art testimony
reveals what was thought and felt and imagined
— in other words, why the things were done.

And so we return to our original proposition :
the statement that the Renaissance brought
into being a theory of art categorically false
and inevitably destructive of that which it

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THE FINE ARTS IN EDUCATION

strove to patronize. To do this, to foist this
profound and far-reaching heresy on the world,
it had first to destroy the sound and lucid view
of art that had been inherited from paganism
by Christianity and maintained intact until the
fifteenth century. The time has come at last
for a return to the ancient ideals, for the falsity
of the substitute has proved itself; and to effect
this end the first thing we have to do is to admit
that beauty is one of the sacraments in a uni-
verse wholly and absolutely sacramental in its
nature; the second is to realize that this same
sacrament of beauty is the symbolical expres-
sion of the experiences and the achievements of
the human soul ; and the third is to reject the
Renaissance idea that art is an affair of caste
as already we have rejected the Protestant idea
that it is a snare of the devil, recognizing it, as
in truth it is, the evidence of true civilization
and its only unerring record.

Then follows the new building-up ; the study
and formulating of the philosophy of art as a
result, a manifestation, and a language. And
in the process greater things will follow than a
revision of our historical estimates, than a new

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THE MINISTRY OF ART

vision of the essential things in human life.
We shall, I believe, change our attitude toward
the great thousand years of Christian domina-
tion, toward the Renaissance and the several
modifications thereof which we know beneath
a different nomenclature. It is conceivable,
also, that our estimate of the nineteenth cen-
tury itself may be modified in certain particu-
lars ; but, however desirable these changes may
be, and to me it seems that their importance
can hardly be estimated in words, there is yet
another thing that will follow, of importance
paramount and inestimable, and that is the
great revision of standards, the reestablishing
of that proper sense of proportion that alone
can guarantee the continuation and the onward
development of civilization itself.

It has been sometimes said, though without
a deep sense of conviction, and certainly with-
out enthusiastic response on the part of the
general public, that whatever we have gained
through our great eras of the dominion of in-
dustrialism and of natural science has been at
the expense of a sense of proportion. To me
this seems axiomatic, despite its unpopularity.

THE FINE ARTS IN EDUCATION

Scrutinize closely the standards that reveal
themselves through contemporary journalism,
Pennsylvania politics, San Francisco graft, the
Cceur d'Alene affair, the life insurance and rail-
road and trust investigations, the present pro-
tective tariff, the congressional attitude toward
pensions, river and harbour improvements, and
colonial import duties, the divorce epidemic,
Dowieism, Eddyism, Sanfordism ; and, contrast-
ing these, as they reveal themselves, with the
standards of the monasticism of the Dark Ages,
the crusades and the chivalry of medievalism,
answer whether or no "lack of sense of propor-
tion " is not the gentlest term that may be ap-
plied to the contemporary spirit of the world.
I began by saying that to me the inalienable
rights of man were religion, art, and joyful
labour. We have rejected the first, destroyed
the latter, and I am willing to defend the thesis
that our action in these directions is primarily
responsible for the disappearance of the third
from life as we know it. How are we to regain
our birthright; how reestablish once more the
consciousness of the impassable barrier between
the knowable and the unknowable; restore

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THE MINISTRY OF ART

again acceptance of the eternal truth that the
seen is but the pale type of the unseen ; over-
throw the great heresy, "There is no mystery" ?
how rebuild that essential sense of proportion
and of relative values, how effect that revision
of standards that must precede a new epoch of
civilization? History gives record of but two
methods that have been effective in the past;
the vast religious revolution and the purging
fire of national disaster and barbarian invasion.
As for the first, no St. Benedict, St. Bernard,
or St. Francis is for the moment visible, but
only false prophets of a false dawn ; and as for
the latter, God forbid that we should await
this last resort of divine justice. There is,
theoretically speaking, a third way, but one
which has, I believe, never yet been essayed
with success; still, the chance is there, and, if
we are wise, we shall take the chance. From
the standpoint of pure reason it would seem
possible for us to learn a lesson from the past
and so avert that vain repetition of history to
which we claim to be averse. And what the real
past was, not what it seems through its mere ma-
terialization, art most potently helps us to know.

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THE FINE ARTS IN EDUCATION

To art men turned when the joy of living and
the wonder of spiritual experience and the pas-
sion of religious ardour became intolerable in
their poignancy and clamorous for perfect ex-
pression; to art we must return, that, by its
talismanic potency, it may unlock the barred
gates of human experience. This also is the
primary object of liberal education, and when
we have achieved this knowledge, we shall find
that the veil is lifted, that our sense of propor-
tion has returned, that our standards are again
at one with the standards of all history and need
no further revision. Once more we shall find
religion and art and joyful labour the restored
essentials of life, and then the higher mission of
our schools of art will have been accomplished,
and our burgeoning civilization will blossom
gloriously in the painters and the sculptors and
architects, the musicians and poets and crafts-
men, who, no longer voices crying in the wilder-
ness, will become the inspired mouthpieces of
an emancipated race, proclaiming the wonder
and the glory of a noble and a beautiful and a
joyful life.

IV

THE ARTIST AND THE WORLD

IV

THE ARTIST AND THE WORLD l

ITVDR two generations we have watched the
-*- crescent enthusiasm for art, and the fever-
ish widening of art interest and art activity
that are the continuance in a new community

Nrf a movement engendered in the Old World,
now nearly a century ago. The significance of
the movement is profound, its possibilities for
good almost unlimited, but its dangers are no
less, and it is of these dangers I desire to speak
at this time.

t propose to say something as to the relation
of the artist to society, to the world of men
and women that is at the same time his environ-

- ment, his inspiration, and his opportunity. Of
the artist, whatever one of the seven great arts
he follows, — for artistic differentiation is acci-
dental, — the artistic impulse is one.

We hear very much of the relation of the artist
to his own particular art, to art itself, to history

i Read at Commencement, Yale University School of
Fine Arts.

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THE MINISTRY OF ART

and tradition : I myself have had the honour of
speaking in this place on the position art should
hold in its relation to education ; in season and
out of season I have urged the intimate bond
that unites art and religion in a common service.
With your permission we will broaden the scope
of our persistent inquiry, and ask as to the func-
tion of the artist as an integral member of that
human society which is so much greater and
more momentous than he or any other indi-
vidual ; that common life of humanity of which
the artist is the product and that he is bound
to serve with all the great and singular powers
that mark his personality.

It is not inappropriate that such an inquiry
should be made in this place and at this time.
The Yale School of Fine Arts is not a centre of
empirical theorizing, an archaeological gymna-
sium, a laboratory of scientific research ; it is a
school of artists ; it aims to reveal something of
the eternal significance of art, to arouse those
aesthetic faculties that have lain dormant in our
race so many generations, in order that they
may become creative agencies, manifesting
themselves in time and space for the service of

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THE ARTIST AND THE WORLD

man, and therefore for the glory of God. Such
a school I conceive to be the only type that is
justifiable, — since schools we must have for
the regaining of our lost heritage, — but it is
precisely here that perils intrude themselves
most insidiously, wherefore they must always
be held clearly in mind; for not even religion
itself is more endangered by the "false doctrine,
heresy, and schism" from which we rightly pray
to be delivered.

Do not misunderstand me, I beg of you. I
do not dream of postulating of art schools in
general, still less of this Yale school in particu-
lar, a primacy in error or a peculiarity of sole
possession. The dangers lie, not in the schools
as such, but in society itself; in the very bone
and sinew of man as he is to-day. They are part
and parcel of our own contemporary civiliza-
tion, and they show themselves in Church and
in state, in business and professional and social
life, more generally, perhaps, than in the life
of art ; but it is in the latter category that they
may be most fatal in their operation. It matters
comparatively little if for the moment the
Church or some sect abandons itself to evil

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artistic tendencies ; if a combination of illiter-
ate legislators and a temporarily omnipotent
politician are victorious in their schemes for
defeating the ends of culture and civilization ;
if the preponderating weight of public opinion
degrades the drama, prostitutes music and
poetry to the most ignoble ends, and makes of
the great art of religious ceremonial a barren
desert or a riot of degenerate taste. All these
pass; they are the froth of a churning mael-
strom of new activity ; but if the artist is him-
self false to the ideal of his art, if he yields to the
insidious influences that surround him, then
not only is he faithless to the trust imposed
in him through the gift of artistic expression,
but he engenders a poison that courses subtly
and far through the veins of the society he came
into the world to serve.

During the last century it is hard to suppose
that a true philosophical conception of art
should have achieved popular acceptance, and
as a matter of fact it did not, the proudest
products being similar in their nature to that
definition of beauty evolved by Grant Allen:
"The aesthetically beautiful is that which af-

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THE ARTIST AND THE WORLD

fords the maximum of stimulation with the
minimum of fatigue or waste, in processes not
directly connected with vital functions " ; surely
the most grotesque example of serene incapac-
ity anywhere recorded in that congeries of
incapacities, the literature of aesthetics. It is,
however, of great value as putting in concrete
form the spiritual inefficiency of the dominant
influence in the nineteenth century, and it is
just because a new tendency now is visible that
we may take heart of hope and believe that a
saner and more penetrating view is possible.

As a matter of fact, a profound revolution
is now in process, a revolution that is inter-
penetrating every category of intellectual and
spiritual activity, and by the glare of the red
conflagrations that are crumbling the tall towers
of our intellectual pride, we see revealed the
cloud-capped mountains of spiritual endeavour,
piercing that very heaven of mystery we with
infinite labour had striven to scale with our
Babel-towers of misguided ingenuity.

Very slowly it is dawning on us that for
several centuries we have been confusing our
categories and, by methods and agencies ade-

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quate to the estimating of phenomena, have
been trying to weigh and determine the Abso-
lute Truth that lies behind and above. Failing
miserably, we have come to doubt, not the effi-
ciency of our methods, but the very existence
of anything they could not demonstrate. This,
I think, is the essence of the great revolution
now going on about us, and even more within
ourselves: the discovery that those brilliant
products of our epoch, natural science and natu-
ral philosophy, have their limitations ; that be-
yond the uttermost radius of their possible ac-
tivity lies the vast and mysterious domain
of the real, the Absolute ; as vital to man and as
unconquered as ever it was in the past ; as un-
conquered, but neither forbidden nor beyond
achievement, since by the grace of God even
that Absolute, that final mystery of ultimate
truth, reveals itself symbolically to those who
open their hearts in reverence and with humble
spirit, even though it is denied to that insolence
of assumed wisdom that presumes to set metes
and bounds to the infinite majesty of God.

And it is this high function of superhuman
revelation to which I refer when I speak of all

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art as the natural, and, indeed, the only ade-
quate, expression in time and space of spiritual
things. This it has been in all the great past;
this it must be in the great future. Adopting
this final view of the essential function of art,
we shall see, I think, how great the danger that
follows from the acceptance of any less lofty
view, how incalculable the loss to society, and
how much a matter of moment is the question
of the relation of the artist to the world of men
and women in which he lives, how limitless the
field that opens before him, how far-flung and
wide-reaching the lines of his service.

Master of the great language, articulate
amongst the tongueless, it is for him to express
all the spiritual essays, ventures, and dis-
coveries ; all the dreams, aspirations, and visions
of the mounting wave of humanity that bears
him on its crest toward the stars. Seer, spokes-
man, and prophet, he divines in scientific tri-
umphs the inner significance that gives them
value and that the scientist himself some-
times sees not at all ; material, industrial, eco-
nomical development are to him but husks
hiding a precious kernel ; democracy, socialism,

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anarchy but the ugly outward form of the
enchanted prince in the fairy tale. Through
crabbed shards he penetrates to the hidden
jewel, snatches it forth, and uplifts it in the
sight of wondering men. This he does in his
function as seer : as mouthpiece he proclaims the
hidden mysteries of the soul, the quests and pil-
grimages and adventures of the knights-errant
of the spirit ; not his own alone, — less his than
those of all his fellows, to whom, by- some
mystical affinity, his consciousness is delicately
attuned, answering the faint and distant call,
voicing it in the universal language he alone
commands, though every God-given soul wholly
and instantly comprehends. And as prophet
he distances the runners in the race of life,
mounting the crags and cliffs of the cloud-
capped hills until he sees the far horizons of
the promised, the inevitable, but as yet the
unachieved.

Sophocles and Phidias, Virgil, Anthemius of
Tralles, the unknown builders of mediaeval ab-
beys and cathedrals, the forgotten creators of
the Nibelungenlied and the Arthurian legends ;
St. Gregory and his masters of music ; St. Bene-

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diet Biscop and St. Dunstan with their crafts-
men: Cimabue and Giotto and Leonardo;
Dante and Shakespeare; Bach, Beethoven,
Wagner, Browning — what are they and their
fellows and peers but divinely constituted seers,
clamant trumpets, prophets whose lips have
been touched with the live coal of the altar of
God ; speaking now in the Pentecostal tongues
of art, the which every man hears as his own
language ; hears and understands ?

To every artist it is given so to voice some-
thing of that which is best and highest in man.
To the sculptor no less than the poet, to the
architect no less than the painter, to the drama-
tist and the maker of liturgies and ceremonial
no less than the master of music. Each art has
its own peculiar methods, the ordained instru-
ments of its operation ; but each is but a dialect
of a normal language that reveals, in symbolical
form and through the unsolvable mystery of
beauty, all that men may achieve of the mysti-
cal knowledge of that Absolute Truth and Ab-
solute Beauty that transcend material experi-
ence and intellectual expression, since they are
of the essential being of God.

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The artist is bound and controlled by the
laws of his art, but doubly is he bound by his
duty to society. If he is prohibited — as he is
under penalty of aesthetic damnation — from
denying beauty or contenting himself with ex-
pedients, or sacrificing any jot or tittle of the
integrity of his art to fashion, or vulgarity, or
the lust of evil things, still more is he bound to
mankind by the law of noblesse oblige, and by
the fear of God, to use his art only for the high-
est ends, to proclaim only the vision of perfec-
tion, to cleave only to the revelation of heav-
enly things. The architect who abandons
himself to the creation of ugliness, however
academic may be its cachet ; the painter who
"paints what he sees" or makes his art the
ministry of lust; the sculptor who regards the
form and sees nothing of the substance ; the poet
who glorifies the hideous shape of atheism, or
the grossness of the accidents of life ; the musi-
cian who exalts the morbid and the horrible;
the maker of ceremonials who assembles de-
praved arts in a vain simulacrum of ancient and
noble liturgies, — these are but traitors to man
and God, and however competent their craft,

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they are enemies of the people, and to them
should be meted the condemnation of their
kind.

For many generations there has been too
much of this, and the plea offered in extenua-
tion, "The public demands it," is not a justifi-
cation, but an intensification of criminality.
It is vicious enough in journalism and politics,
since it is the death-warrant of society, but it
is ten times more evil in art, for the life-blood
of art is the giving of something a little better
than men consciously desire; the expression of
the subconscious, which so often is the real man
working deeply in the mysterious fastnesses of
the soul. If the artist sells himself for bread, if
he is driven by the harsh compulsion of poverty
to sacrifice his art to Hydra, there should be
pity for him on earth as there surely is mercy
for him in heaven, but I know of no other justi-
fication for his sin. Even in the golden days
when men could rename a road, calling it the
Street of Rejoicing, because in a singing pro-
cession all the people of the quarter had carried
through it to its altar in the parish church a
new picture by a new painter, the art they ac-

"5

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claimed was good to them, not because it was
the old and familiar art they knew, given them
by the mechanical purveyors of Byzantine tra-
dition, but because it was a newer and better
thing, the picture in their hearts, not the pic-
ture in their minds. How much more, then, now
that the popular instinct for beauty has become
a craving for the hideous and the uncouth, how
much more is it necessary that every artist,
whatever the mode of his work, should lay
down his life, if need be, in a last defence of the
"something better," knowing his day, his
year, his life to have been misspent if at the
end of either one he could not say, "I have
given better than was asked or expected of
me."

Yet even in this, in the impulse that drives
ever onward, that marks the artist as does his
sense of beauty and his creative power, there
is danger of the sharpest kind ; the peril that
lurks on the serpent tongue of the time-spirit,
luring men into vain imaginings of "new art."
It is a subtle and specious temptation ; it comes
with all the support of popular enthusiasms
for breadth and liberality, personal emanci-

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pation and intellectual independence, human-
ism, and a certain temporal and racial self-con-
sciousness. It is of the same ilk as that eco-
nomic nervousness that devises pseudo-scientific
panaceas for social and industrial ills; as that
religious hysteria that fills the Saturday edi-
tions of the evening papers with astonishing
advertisements of unearthly cults and wild
philosophies : it asserts the need of new modes
of expression for new manifestations of life, cast-
ing doubt and disfavour on old philosophies,
old religions, old arts. Plato and Aristotle
and St. Thomas Aquinas were well enough for
their own time, and doubtless quite wonderful.
The Catholic Faith, yes, Christianity itself,
whatever its form, served excellently in an unde-
veloped stage of society and mental accomplish-
ment. Gothic architecture was a good expres-
sion of its peculiar time. But we, now that the
shackles of superstition have been shattered,
now that the intellect is really emancipated and
we have produced a civilization in comparison
with which Hellas and the Roman Republic
and the Christian Middle Ages were but as
tentative beginnings, full of false steps and

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vagarious wanderings, we must create our own
philosophy, our own religion, our own art.

And we try: whether Monism and Pragma-
tism, New Thought, Christian Science, and
the "Church of the Higher Life," Matisse,
Richard Strauss, and D'Annunzio achieve a
degree of vital and enduring expression of essen-
tial things that gives them place above the
philosophy, the religion, and the art of the
past, is, I submit, a question susceptible of dis-
cussion. For my own part I am persuaded that
they do nothing of the kind, but rather that
what they produce is in no respect either new
philosophy, new religion, or new art, but simply
the troubled ferment of an epoch that, having
lost its sense of proportion, fails to grasp either
its own deficiencies or the notable advantages
that are attributable to the times and the men
and the works it now regards with a patronizing
toleration.

And in holding this I do not lose sight of cer-
tain elements of value that exist in each one
of the revolutionary and sometimes anarchical
protests against a frozen tradition, the value
of precisely this protest. As a matter of fact,

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we are bound hand and foot to a traditionalism
that is Byzantine in its rigidity and mounts
often to the level of an historic superstition.
The nineteenth century, instead of being an
era of emancipation, was the very age wherein
were forged the most efficient shackles on true
freedom of thought and action. Then were fixed
in final form all the narrowing tendencies of
modern life: the stolid formulae that are mak-
ing of parliamentary government a synonym
for corruption and inefficiency ; the pretensions
of physical science that have turned religion out
of house and home; the carnival of industrial
activity that has threatened to revolutionize
education into a wilderness of "institutes of
commerce*' and "vocational schools"; that has
brought in a new and awful form of serfage and
slavery and has almost overturned the ethical
standards of society; the fanatical exaggeration
of the value inherent in "free speech and a free
press" that has built up an irresponsible and
unprincipled engine that is fast becoming a
menace to civilization ; the literary standard of
the "best seller," the dramatic standard of the
"successful run," the academic and mechanical

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theories of art that metamorphose the gift of
God into a series of hidebound formulae that
are taught as one teaches sanitary engineering
or stenography.

In so far as the suffragettes and Mrs. Eddy
and Matisse and Debussy and the prophets of
"art nouveau" are a protest and a rebellion
against the mordant superstitions of the nine-
teenth century, we may wish them well in their
revolt, but when they assume to rebuild as well
as to destroy, then we must arise to do them
battle. The Renaissance broke a splendid path
through a fast-thickening jungle, but once in
the saddle, Machiavelli followed, and Alexan-
der VI ; the Reformation was a mighty destroyer
of evil, but its substitutions were calamitous;
the Revolution swept Europe clear of a pesti-
lence that bred death and hell, but, conquering,
it engendered a poison that still runs in the veins
of society. The power that destroys can never
under any circumstances rebuild ; the conquer-
ors in battle may never organize the victory, —
a lesson the world seems never to learn even in
its gray hairs. And so, for the artist, the very
plausibility of the new revolutionists, the mani-

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fest righteousness of their crusade, wins a con-
fidence in their constructive propaganda that
is justified only in their campaign of destruc-
tion. It is true the Old Salon is simply an ever-
renewed museum of mechanical toys that re-
fuse to go, and when Matisse in decent scorn
and disgust paints his protest in a kind of pic-
torial anarchy, when Cezanne thrusts gratuitous
ugliness in the face and eyes of smug imbecility,
we cheer them on, and are bound to come to
their aid ; but we are no more bound thereafter
to their following than we should have been to
that of Marat and Robespierre because we had
taken part in the affair of the Tennis Court.

It would be folly to deny that our own era
has innumerable elements of conspicuous nov-
elty, many of them admirable and deeply to
be desired, others no less loudly acclaimed, but
essentially worthy only of condemnation. That
the novel things are so radical in their nature,
so Minerva-like in their spontaneous genera-
tion, that before them antiquity stands wonder-
ing and impotent, I venture to deny. Neither
the hand, nor the mind, nor the soul of man has
created or revealed during the last four centuries

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any single truth or aspect of truth that trans-
cends the powers of expression of the philosophy,
the religion, or the art of the past. New modes
of expression, — yes, quite possibly; indeed,
surely ; but variety of expression does not in-
volve a revolution in the fundamental law. The
philosophy of St. Thomas did no violence to
that of Aristotle; the religion of St. Bernard, or
St. Francis, or St. Bona venture was one with the
religion of the Apostles ; the art of the Middle
Ages was based on the fundamental law of the
art of Hellas ; and yet how infinitely varied, how
bright with the clear light of new dawns, how
infused and palpitant with new blood, new
visions, new revelations. The eternal laws that
control the operations of the universe were
effective before the nineteenth century, and
they were perceived and acted upon before the
invention of printing and the popularizing of
experimental science and the emancipation of
the intellect. New foundations there are none,
new superstructures there must always be, end-
less in variety, better intrinsically, perhaps, than
those we have known before, but if they are to
be this, if they are to rank even in the same

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category with the wonders of the past, they
must be wrought in obedience to the same
laws that have held from the beginning of time.

Therefore, the artist who, fired by the out-
ward diversity and the crescent vitality of the
life that environs him and of which he is a part,
steps beyond the bounds of possible variation
in method and violates the eternal law of his
art, ceases at that instant to be an artist and
becomes a charlatan, and as such an enemy of
the people.

All the art of every time is founded on some
specific art of the past ; without this there is no
foundation save that of shifting sands. If it re-
mains in bondage to this older art, if, like the
Munich painting, the English architecture, the
American sculpture of half a century ago, it
wanders in the twilight of precedent or, in fear
and trembling, chains itself to the rock of
archaeology, then again it ceases to be art —
ceases? no; it has never even begun: it is only
a dreary mocking of a shattered idol, a futile
picture-puzzle to beguile a tedious day.

Between these perils on either hand, the
temptation toward anarchical novelty, and the

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temptation toward archaeological sterility, the
artist falls often to the ground ; to steer a safe
course between Scylla and Charybdis, is hard,
indeed, the more so in that the old landmarks,
the old buoys and beacons have disappeared.
If we only possessed at least the conviction that
art is never wholly an end in itself, the problem
would be simpler, but this knowledge we do
not have. We are taught, indeed, the nobility
of art, the varied and wonderful and hardly
acquired methods of its accomplishment; but
when our schools (which in several of the cate-
gories of art are vastly superior to any that
have existed before) have accomplished their
due task, life itself, either in its material or its
spiritual aspect, does not step in to show the
artist how to use his art toward the highest
ends. In France, for example, architecture is
taught more brilliantly and efficiently than
anywhere else in the world ; yet when a young
man graduates from the Ecole des Beaux Arts
and seeks to put into practice the art he has
acquired, what does he find for an environ-
ment, what are the powers and influences of
society that are brought to bear on him for

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the development of his personality? Anarchy
thinly veiled by socialistic nomenclature; reli-
gion a scorn and a laughing-stock; materialism
supreme in nearly every department of life;
education that is mechanical, and supposedly
scientific, but with no faintest cognizance of
the spiritual side of human nature ; immorality
rampant, and unchecked in its appalling in-
crease. Is it any wonder that no French archi-
tect bred in the Ecole since it was organized
has brought into being any work whatever that
belongs in the same class with that of the un-
learned master-masons of the time four cen-
turies ago when France was still a Christian
nation ?

Something of the same danger confronts us
here in our own country, though nowhere in the
world are the powers of evil marshalled so mas-
sively against righteousness as in unhappy
France. So long as it is true, even in a measure,
that the obvious and salient forces of society
are leagued against the development of the
spiritual and idealistic elements in man, so
long will our schools of art fail of accomplishing
their mission. They frame the law, but right-

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eous life is itself the "enacting clause," and
without this, legislation is inoperative.

There is a certain hedonistic view of life that
breeds the doctrine that art is the product of
luxury, culture, and ease. No more poisonous
heresy was ever devised. The springs of art lie
in right living and good citizenship and the
fear of God. We may organize schools of archi-
tecture in every state ; crowd the villas of Rome
with ambitious young sculptors, and the Pari-
sian ateliers with potential painters; we may
patronize poets even to the point of giving
them a living wage, and endow opera-houses
and theatres in every village; our millionaires
may shed their golden rain over a thirsty land,
and public opinion may demand high art even
if it has to get it with an axe — it is all
but "vanity; feeding the wind and folly,"
as Sir Thomas has it, if beneath it all, the
only enduring foundation, we have not a right
attitude to ourselves, to our fellows, and to
God.

But, men may say, perhaps, this is the affair
of the Church and the school, of the teacher
of ethics, the social reformer, the philosopher,

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and the priest. Not altogether, by any means.
Art, rightly understood, rightly practised, is
so wonderful a thing that it has many and
varied aspects. Not only is it a revelation, it
is an incentive: not only is it the flower, it is
also the seed. Every art is at the same time
vocative and dynamic: it voices the highest and
the best; it subtly urges to emulation; it is
perhaps the greatest "civilizing influence in the
world. Yet if it is a seed, it must fall neither
amongst thorns, nor on stony ground, nor yet
in a soil so rich that the weeds spring up and
choke it. We deny this manifest truth of the
civilizing potency of art for the very reason to
which I alluded earlier, namely, that we esti-
mate art by its highest reaches, and since these
always came like the aftermath of harvest,
when the fields of civilization had been reaped
and the frosts of winter were at hand, the fer-
tile seed shrivelled and perished and the fields
remained barren and dead. When art was
crescent, when it was the great outpouring
through the chosen few of the spiritual experi-
ences of a people, then it found its fertile soil,
and the reward was an hundred fold.

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If we believed, — which God forbid ! — that
we of this race and time and generation could
offer nothing but an unfruitful soil, then were
our labours vain ; but while we know we come
at the decadent end of one epoch of five centu-
ries, it is gloriously true that we are at the very
beginnings of yet another: the night is deep,
but there is dawn on the uttermost hills. Before
us lies the choice of fields for our sowing : if we
turn to those that are exhausted by five cen-
turies of reckless husbandry, to the fields of
materialism and anarchy and infidelity, then
our future is without hope ; but if we go forward
to the new lands of the new day, then there are
no limits that may be placed on our service
and our accomplishment.

In the very fact we deplore, that we have no
immortal artists such as those of the great
moments of the past, lies the cause of our
greatest courage. Were this a time of art such
as that which flung the radiant glamour of its
matchless glory over the charnel-house of the
Italy of the pagan Renaissance, then we might
despair, for we should know that the issue was
hopeless ; but because of this, because we must

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lament our lack of art instead of exulting over
its triumphant possession, we are full of cour-
age, knowing that the tide has turned and that
we are at the beginning of things, not at the
lamentable end.

Before every artist of this day and generation
open limitless and glittering possibilities. There
is a new light on the hills, a new word on the
wind, a new joy in the heart. France goes her
way to the pit she has digged; England crum-
bles daily before our eyes; anarchy looms in
the Latin countries of Europe ; and we ourselves
are for the moment staggered by persistent
and mordant corruption in public, private,
commercial, and industrial life; and yet we
know these are the last things of an epoch
only, not of a race; that they are episodes of
a phase of growth and sequent decay, not the
final revelation of the genius of a people. Al-
ready, though sometimes in baffling and devi-
ous ways, the new impulse is manifesting itself:
again men turn to religion and to the everlast-
ing things of the spirit, to law and order, to a
new righteousness of life. For ourselves, the
crash of crumbling superstitions and persistent

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error: for our children, the building of new
mansions of righteousness and truth.

Therefore, there is for the artist a clear field :
man is in revolt against materialism; thinking
thoughts and dreaming dreams and seeing
visions that cry aloud for utterance through
that great agency of art that always in the past
has answered the call and recorded in enduring
monuments all that makes for nobility and
righteousness in any race or time. Also, the
ground is prepared for the sowing, and all that
art can do toward furthering the process of a
great regeneration may now be done with full
effect. Rightly conceived and nobly executed,
every work of art that is created in answer to
the great new call of man may become an active
agency in the momentous crusade. Church and
college and school are, it is true, the prime edu-
cational and regenerating influences, but no
one of these agencies, great as it is, can accom-
plish its completest destiny unless it recognizes
the educational potency of art, and effects
with it that alliance against which the powers
of evil cannot prevail. Every church — nay,
every building of whatever kind — that is

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infused with beauty and significance; every
picture or statue that tells of eternal things
through the same quality of sacramental
beauty; every poem, every musical creation,
every drama that exalts the sacred and hidden
things of the soul over the flamboyant and
futile phantasms of the world, becomes a living
energy, an irresistible influence toward those
very ends for the attainment of which the
Church and the school exist.

Art may no longer remain "cribbed, cab-
ined, and confined" in the private possession
of those who can pay its price: as it is the lan-
guage of the people, so must it become their
free possession. Architecture has always been
for all men, for none could hide its light —
or darkness, perhaps — under a bushel ; but all
the other arts must come forth into the open,
and in the Church, the school, the public build-
ings of city and state, offer themselves and
their wide beneficence to all humanity. For
centuries we have made great music, great
pictures, great sculpture either an appanage
of the rich, or the professionally venerating
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to be seen on payment of twenty-five cents
on week days, free on Sundays and holidays.
This is the nadir of civilization : better almost
a generation that knew not even the name of
art than one that so utterly misjudged it as
so to misuse it. There may be some question
as to whether free speech, a free press, and the
electoral franchise are inalienable rights of the
people; there is none as to the nature of art:
either it is the divine heritage of all men, or it
is nothing ; if it is the ear-mark of a class, the
privilege of a caste, it is no more than the
monster of Frankenstein, a dead horror, moving
and sentient, but without a soul.

This also is a part of the duty of the artist
to the public, the giving back of the seven old
lamps, heedlessly bartered for new. They can-
not raise the potent genie of the fire and air,
these new lamps, for all their rubbing. Give
back the old lamps, and once more the

" Djins and Afrits of the enchanted deep "

bow obedient, filling our hands with the over-
flowing treasures of the wonderland of the
spirit and the soul.

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To voice, to reveal, to prophesy; yes, and to
fight manfully in the new crusade. There is
besotted ignorance in the high places of the
city and the state and the nation ; there is an
illustrated journalism that is working insidi-
ously and overtime to break down not alone
the new-found sense of beauty, but civilization
itself; there is a popular drama — not the good
old melodrama, that had some rough semblance
of truth and beauty, but the new and horrible
thing exploited by the racial enemies of Chris-
tianity — that finds its parallel only in the
dark annals of toxicology; there is an insane
rationalism in painting and sculpture that
builds on the mad formula that the measure
of art is its fidelity to the observed facts of
nature; there is the on-rushing pestilence of
bill-boards, the gross humbug of the art fakir,
and a score of other depressing things of similar
nature against which every civilized man must
contend, but the artist more than all, for each
is to him a personal insult, and he can see more
clearly than others the menace they are, not
only to him and to his art, but to the whole
life of man that speaks through him.

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There is war enough, God knows, and a
field for good fighting. The artist who cares
for his art, who knows what it means and why
it is given him, knows also that his work is done
not only in the studio, but on the field of action,
in fierce fighting against the marshalled enemies
of society and civilization, and for the bringing
back to the people of their long-lost heritage.

And specifically there is one field where all
these ends are furthered in one: I refer, of
course, to art in its association with religion.
A few years ago there was not this possibility:
then religion reviled art and would none of it ;
then also it was the fashion to sneer at relig-
ious things and to consider them unworthy the
attention of an emancipated intellect and
beneath the dignity of a reputable artist. The
results were not such as to encourage a per-
sistence in these courses. Now it is no longer
fashionable to sneer at religion, nor is it a mark
of intelligence. Infidelity, agnosticism, indif-
ference are now notes of an outgrown supersti-
tion, while the Church, roused from her long
nightmare of iconoclasm, and worse, clamours
for the aid of her old ally.

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Above all things I pray that she may have
it, both for her own sake and that of the artist,
and that of society itself. If art is, indeed, as
I have said, one of the really great agents of
civilization, the Church is preeminently the
place where its work may be made most effec-
tive. Beautiful buildings, pictures, and sculp-
ture in schools and libraries, popular produc-
tions of the Greek and Elizabethan dramas,
all are good and powerful influences toward
education and regeneration; but the Church
is more than all, for it has been, and is coming
to be again, the great centre of spiritual energy.
Each art is fine in itself, but a great and beauti-
ful church, living with pictorial and sculptured
decoration, where the sublime, appalling mys-
tery of the Christian Faith is solemnized
through the assembling of all the other arts —
music, poetry, drama, and ceremonial — in
one vast, organic work of art built up of every
one of them raised to its highest level of possi-
bility, and all fused in one consummate opus
Dei, — this, the Catholic Mass in a Gothic
church, is, in simple fact and in plain speech,
the greatest artistic achievement, the most

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perfect proof of man's divine nature thus far
recorded in the annals of humanity.

Here, above all other places, art performs
its highest function, becomes most intimately
the art of all the people, and gives to every
artist his most perfect opportunity both for
artistic expression and artistic service. In the
new epoch that is even now at dawn, it will be,
not in the palaces of captains of industry, or
in any secular capacity whatever, that each
and every art will find its opportunities both
for creation and for service, but, as in the golden
past, in churches and monastery chapels and
cathedrals, themselves once more become, as
also in that same past, the most essential,
intimate, and important single thing in the
life of every man.

Therefore, if the artist is to serve the public,
he must become the proud and reverent ally
of organized religion ; first of all, winning back
for himself the faith filched from him, and
learning once more to speak the tongue God
gave him and as it was taught him — whatever
his art — by this same Church herself.

Is this too great a thing to ask? It has
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THE ARTIST AND THE WORLD

happened over and over again in the past, and
it must happen again: if not to-day, then
to-morrow. Religion and the sacramental
vision of Absolute Truth and Absolute Beauty
are knit together by indissoluble bonds, and
with them art is involved in a union that
neither man nor devils may break asunder.
The effort is made, and for a time it seems to
be successful, but always and invariably the
result is incalculable loss ; to art, to religion, to
the world. Religion wavers, yields to insidious
heresies, breaks up into futile sects, fails to
enforce its appeal to men ; while art loses, first
its highest ideals, then all ideals whatever; and
finally follows after false leaders and silly
theories, and so breaks down in ruin. This is
the thing that has happened in the centuries
that have followed the fall of Constantinople,
and now once more begins the great recovery,
the new epoch of restoration: already the
ground gained amongst those of our own
Northern blood and speech is enormous, but
it must continue farther yet, — infinitely farther,
— and the next step is inevitable. Alone,
isolated, neither religion nor art can accom-

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plish its destiny, which is to seize upon society
and lift it to those heights of righteous achieve-
ment that have made and marked the eras of
the past. Religion lacks its Pentecostal tongue ;
art lacks the Pentecostal flames of divine in-
spiration. The Church is conscious now of
what this alliance will mean, for herself, for
art, and for humanity: she is ready, with wel-
coming hands; and if the artist answers in
kind, if he breaks the bonds of plausible ma-
terialism and rationalism, forsaking the ex-
hausted fields of a squandered past for the
fertile soil of a burgeoning future, then he will
achieve that new life in his own spirit and in
his art that is the guaranty of the fulfilment of
the destiny that brought him into the world.

And here we find the revelation of the func-
tion of the artist in his relation to the world ;
in his choice between the two fields offered for
his sowing. If he is false to the light within
him, yielding his divine art for the pleasure of
the votaries of pleasure; binding himself in
servitude to the defiant corruption of a lost
and ended cause ; sitting in darkness and in the
shadow of death; his reward is as theirs and

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he goes down to his appointed place with all
other unfaithful servants. But if he chooses
otherwise, making himself the mouthpiece of
the new crusaders who march ever onward
for the redemption of the holy places of the
soul, answering the call of the best in man with
the best that is in himself, revealing to human-
ity, through sacred beauty, the truth that shall
make men free, consecrating himself to the
showing, through whatever art where God has
given him craft, "the light which lighteth
every man that cometh into the world, " then,
for a time his reward may be poor in material
measure, but in the end for him is reserved
that crown of righteousness that is for them
that are faithful and true, and that serve God
through the serving of them that He made in
His image and redeemed in the darkness and the
thunderings of Calvary.

V

THE CRAFTSMAN AND THE ARCHITECT

THE CRAFTSMAN AND THE ARCHITECT1

IN its last Annual Report the Committee on
Education of the American Institute of
Architects laid particular emphasis on the re-
lationship between the architect and the crafts-
man, pointed out the almost complete lack of
good artificers in America and the shocking
disparity between educational agencies in Eu-
rope and this country, and urged upon the
architectural profession the paramount neces-
sity of taking heed of the existing condition
and the necessity of amending it without delay.
The Report said in part : —

From time to time we have referred more or
less casually to the fact that while we have the
most copious and widespread architectural edu-
cation to be found in any country, we have practi-
cally no agencies for the education of craftsmen.
The result must be, and is, extremely injurious,
if not fatal, to architecture itself. We may on

1 Address at the convention of the American Federation
of Arts in Washington.

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THE MINISTRY OF ART

paper create visions that rival those of Coleridge's
Kubla Khan; we may on arising from a weary
drawing board, our creative task accomplished,
say with Justinian (and believe ourselves in the
saying), "Solomon, I have surpassed thee," but
when we see our drawings and our designs ma-
terialized in three dimensions we realize that,
were we buried within their walls, the globe-
trotting New Zealander, a century hence, looking
for our personal monuments, would hardly say
with Sir Christopher's eulogist, "Circumspice."
In the good old days when an architectural
monument was a plexus of all the arts, the archi-
tect was pretty much at the mercy of the crafts-
man, and he still is, with a difference; for then
every bit of sculpture or painting or carving or
metal-work and joinery, and glass and needle-
work— when these latter came into play —
enhanced the architecture, glorified it, and
sometimes redeemed it as well; now either our
carving is butchered, our sculpture and painting
conceived on lines that deny their architectural
setting, our metal-work turned out by the com-
mercial ton, our stained-glass work defiant of
every law of God, man, or architect, or it is all
reduced to a dead level of technical plausibility,
without an atom of feeling or artistry — and we
are glad to take it this way, for the sake of escap-
ing worse.

Every architect knows that the success or
failure of his work depends largely on the crafts-

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CRAFTSMAN AND ARCHITECT

men who carry it out and complete it with all
its decorative features of form and colour, and
yet in a nation of one hundred million people,
with a dozen schools of architecture, practically
nothing is done toward educating these same
craftsmen, and we either secure the services of
foreign-trained men, accept tenth-rate native
work, or go without. Take a case in point; it is
decided to build a metropolitan cathedral, with
little regard to cost; plans are made (we will say
satisfactorily), — what then? If it is to be a great
and comprehensive work of art it needs (and
exactly as much as it needs its architect) sculptors,
painters, carvers in wood and stone, glassmakers,
mosaicists, embroiderers, leather-workers. Are
there enough schools in America to train all the
craftsmen needed on this one monument, is there
one school, and if so, where? One of the foolish
arguments against Gothic is that it is quite de-
pendent on artist craftsmen, and as we have
none we must abandon the style; one of the
foolish arguments in favour of Classical design
is that anybody can learn to carve an acanthus,
therefore we had better stick to what we know we
can do. Neither argument is sound; if we have
no artist-craftsmen, then it would be better for
us to close up half the schools that are turning
out architects and employ the funds for the
training of the only men who can give life to the
architects' designs.
Apart from the industrial arts in their rela-

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THE MINISTRY OF ART

tionship to architecture, their importance in this
country, where art manufactures or products
are so enormously in demand, is too obvious to
need demonstration. Nearly all our expert labour
in the artistic trades is imported from Europe.
We pay large wages to foreign workmen, but
refuse to educate our own people so that this
financial benefit may accrue to them. In other
words, our prosperity results in benefiting the
alien, and we allow our own citizens to degenerate,
furnishing no new employment for the rising
generation, but fitting it only for those limited
callings which are already overstocked, and in
which it can command but a minimum wage.

The Report then summarized the educational
activities of France, so far as the arts allied
with architecture are concerned, and although
even there some of the most important crafts
are as yet unrecognized, it appeared that in
three alone there were in Paris four hundred
and twenty-five students with an annual budget
of seventy-two thousand dollars. It then con-
sidered what is being done (or not done) in
New York in the line of architectural modelling
and painting, and after showing its extreme
inadequacy, it continued : —

Now, if all this is true of architectural model-
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CRAFTSMAN AND ARCHITECT

ling and painting, it is at least equally true of
the other arts, such as wood-carving, the making
of stained glass, and metal-work of all kinds;
obviously little is done educationally in any of
those directions, and as a consequence when we
want really good work we go abroad for it, or
employ foreign-trained men who have taken up
their residence in this country. Some time ago,
a member of this Committee was asked to give
a list of artist-craftsmen who were competent
in design and execution, and who were willing
to work with due regard to the architectural
environment of their products; he reported that
there were two Americans who were doing well
as beginners in stained glass, but that it would
be safer to go to England where the ancient
tradition in design and workmanship still main-
tains in a measure; he named two good sculptors
in wood, one a Bavarian, one a German; one ad-
mirable iron-worker, a German; one goldsmith,
an Englishman; and two architectural sculptors,
one a Welshman, the other American.

Of course, this is all wrong; there should be
an hundred craftsmen in each category, if archi-
tectural dreams are to be properly materialized
and embellished, and these should be our own
people, not imported aliens, however competent
they may be.

It should be understood that we are not refer-
ring to the sculptor and painter as architectural
allies; we have great men in both categories, and

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their relationship to the profession was considered
by the Committee on Allied Arts of last year;
we are speaking of the craftsmen whose work
enters more intimately into the ordinary archi-
tectural practice, and so speaking we do not
hesitate to say that the present state of things
is barbarous, uneconomical, and in the last de-
gree discreditable to the architectural profession.

"Barbarous, uneconomical, and discredita-
ble, " these words are none too strong to apply
to a condition of things which has endured for
long, and even now fails to arouse indignation,
or even a measure of recognition. I could make
a strong case against the present system, or
lack of system, on economic grounds alone,
showing how unpatriotic, unbusinesslike, and
unpractical it is for America to deny to its own
citizens a field of work that is remunerative
and that must be filled, so putting a premium
on the alien workman who has been able to
acquire his dominant proficiency in his native
and more generous land; a strong case also
against the labour unions that disparage the
apprentice system, and discourage the spirit
of emulation that results in individual advance-
ment and consequently increased returns to

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CRAFTSMAN AND ARCHITECT

the specially able men; a strong case, finally,
against a system that simply means that for
many products of the artist-craftsman the
owner or architect must perforce go across
the ocean, paying his money not even into the
hands of foreign-born American citizens, but to
foreign residents, and then paying his further
tax as well to the National Government for
the protection of American producers, who, so
far as the essential element in the product is
concerned, — quality, — simply do not exist.

It would be interesting to go into the matter
in detail and show the barbarism and the dull
ignorance of the present condition, but, for the
moment, I must waive this and confine myself
to the matter that more closely affects the
owner and the architect, and that is the heavy
handicap that is placed on every one, lay or
professional, who tries to create some work of
art that shall be not only acceptable in idea,
but even tolerable in its working-out.

Now, why is it that in spite of the most com-
plete and effective architectural education the
world has ever known, wealth that could buy
the labour that built the pyramids, that made

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THE MINISTRY OF ART

Chartres Cathedral almost a revelation of
Divinity, and fretted the lacey fabric of the
Taj Mahal, and as many practising architects
in the directory of a great city as all Europe
numbered during the whole epoch of medi-
aevalism, — how is it that with these notable
advantages we cannot succeed in building one
structure to match a minor Greek temple,
a second-class mediaeval monastery, or a pro-
vincial Buddhist shrine of twelfth-century
Japan? There are, I think, three reasons; the
first two do not concern us at this moment,
the third very much does. I name the two first,
for nobody can stop me, — an abandonment
of definite and concrete and inspiring religious
conviction, and our disregard of the sound
principles of law and order and obedience, —
and having named them, we shall hear no more
of them at this time. The third is precisely
that which is the subject of this paper, the
disappearance of the individual, independent,
and self-respecting craftsman, and by this
third loss, we are left helpless and hopeless,
indeed; for as the Renaissance demonstrates,
the real craftsman can do much, as he did do
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CRAFTSMAN AND ARCHITECT

much, to make amends for the loss of greater
things, and, so long as he endures, as through
the Renaissance he did endure, can raise an
inferior architecture to a level of credit that in
itself it could not claim, while giving to an
equally inferior civilization a glamour of glory
that rightly could not proceed from its own
inherent nature.

We may sit spellbound before the august
majesty of the Ecole des Beaux Arts, and to
it, by grace of a generous French Government,
we may send our boys by hundreds; we may
found, equip, and endow schools of architect-
ure in every college in America; we may rear
architectural museums in every state, estab-
lish architectural lectureships that will subject
the railways to an unfair test of their carrying
capacity, and crowd the transatlantic steam-
ships with eager holders of travelling student-
ships, — it will be of little avail if we cannot
entrust our dreams and our working drawings
to genuine craftsmen for the carrying-out, but
instead find ourselves compelled to hand them
over to the tender mercies of general con-
tractors, "Ecclesiastical Art Decorators and

THE MINISTRY OF ART

Furnishers," and department stores where
the watchwords are "efficiency," division of
labour, and "You give us sketches. We do the

rest."

, By itself architecture is nothing; allied with
the structural crafts and the artist crafts, it
is everything, — the greatest art in the world ;
for it is a plexus of all the arts; it assembles
them in a great synthesis that is vaster than
any art by -itself alone, that gathers them
together in the perfect service of God and man.
Without the craftsman an architectural de-
sign is worth little more than the paper on
which it is drawn; it is an ephemera, a simu-
lacrum of glory. From a distance, or at first
sight, it may have majesty of form, power of
composition, impressiveness of silhouette, and
richness of light and shade, but close at hand, it
is a dead thing, without a vivifying soul, and
it neither reveals the heart of a people, nor eats
itself into their affections so that for them or
their successors it becomes what to us to-day
are the monuments of Greece and Byzantium
and the Catholic Middle Ages. With the artist-
craftsman, working independently but in close

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CRAFTSMAN AND ARCHITECT

alliance, we may have again a San Marco, a
Chartres, or a Seville — if, as well, our faith
and our works are as those of them that built
those wonders and enriched them with their
splendour of decoration.

We exercise ourselves over the manifold
questions of the faculties and the curriculums
of the architectural schools in which we take
such justifiable pride; we found one scholar-
ship after another, and incessantly multiply
our architectural lectureships and exhibitions;
we even animatedly discuss the possibility of
that plainly desirable thing, — a post-graduate
school of architecture in Washington ; and all
the while we see with equanimity our designs
butchered or frozen to death, our ornaments
and furnishings provided by others than our
own people, and usually in a perfectly com-
mercial and mechanical manner at that; and
finally we are content that our buildings should
become, not the rich and opulent showing-
forth of a great civilization through innumer-
able allied arts, but, instead, academic essays
in theoretical design expressing nothing but
the genius — or otherwise — of the architect,

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THE MINISTRY OF ART

even to the machine-chiselled carving, the
stencilled colour and the cast-plaster ornaments,
all from his own full-size designs worked out
by his own draughtsmen.

Think how the carved capitals of Lincoln,
the statues of Wells and of Rheims, the inlay
of Monreale, the mosaics of Ravenna and of
the Trastevere, the glass of Bourges and of
Chartres, the frescoes of Assisi, the grilles and
"retables" of Seville and of Salamanca and of
Mexico, the joinery of Henry the Seventh's
Chapel and of Toledo, the metal-work of
Nuremberg — consider how all these were
made, and why and when, and then exult over
our triumphant civilization, or marvel that all
the wealth and all the architects and artists
of the world could not rival to-day or equal the
Capella Palatina in Palermo, which was merely
the private chapel of a second-rate prince, in a
frontier land in the dusk of the Dark Ages.

Of course, the basic reason for this deplorable
condition of things is economic; it finds its
root in the fantastic substitution, during and
after the Renaissance, in place of a communism
that developed true personality, of an indivi-

154

CRAFTSMAN AND ARCHITECT

dualism that destroyed personality. As the
splendid liberty of v mediaeval society has hard-
ened into a mechanical and irresponsible des-
potism that preserves only the empty name
of liberty, so the triumphant individuality of
the Renaissance has hardened into an economic
system that, through mechanics, capitalism,
the wage system, and division of labour, has
become a very sordid kind of slavery. To effect
a vital, comprehensive, and enduring reform,
we should have to strike deep, and elsewhere
than in the domain of art; but something can
be done in a tentative and partial sort of way,
pending the coming of that inevitable revolt
and revolution that will "make all things new,"
for in minor ways, both the public that builds
and the architect that serves this public are to
blame. As a result of the economic revolution
of the past three centuries, the architect has
fallen into the habit of thinking that architec-
ture is all there is to architecture; that planes
and contours and spacings of light and shade
make up his art ; that ornament and furnishings
are adventitious, anyway; and that, in any
case, whatever is to be done by way of embel-

THE MINISTRY OF ART

lishment can best be done by highly specialized
draughtsmen, under his own direction, with
adequate photographs and reliable books and
plenty of brown paper, charcoal, and tube
colours, — together with a system of supervis-
ing the human and mechanical engines that
turn these two-dimension creations into three
dimensions during an eight-hour day and sub-
ject to the regulations of the labour unions.

Well, perhaps it can — as conditions now
are; but if so we had better change the condi-
tions. Just so long as the architect makes a
blanket contract with a general contractor, or
turns over his carving and sculpture to a well-
capitalized corporation of stone-masons, or
abandons his colour embellishment to some
plausible organization of "decorators," or his
church or palace to an august Fifth Avenue
establishment, or his windows and his metal-
work to an admirably advertised syndicate of
artists with sufficient capital behind it to in-
sure easy and pleasant conditions for all con-
cerned, — just so long will he produce nothing
that will outlast his lifetime, or give joy to any
one concerned.

CRAFTSMAN AND ARCHITECT

For it is not a case of no alternative ; there are
real craftsmen living to-day, and in this coun-
try, and turning out exquisite work after the
ancient fashion, though Heaven knows why it
should be so. I know three makers of tiles and
other products of burnt clay and glazes, who
are consummate artists (one of them is a
woman), and who are to be dealt with only as
individuals, and who, if they are treated as
allies, not as commercial purveyors of trade
goods, can glorify any building with which they
come in contact ; I know two workers in forged
and wrought iron who are blood brothers of
Adam Kraft; three goldsmiths who would
gladden the heart of Cellini ; a woodcarver who
is Peter Vischer restored to life ; two sculptors
who are really architectural sculptors as were
the men who immortalized Chartres and Wells ;
a stone cutter whose craft matches that of the
masons of Venice and Rouen ; a maker of stained
glass who needs only opportunity to restore
some measure of the wonder of this lost art ; a
maker of ecclesiastical vestments whose needle-
work is that of the fifteenth century; a scribe
who can do real missals and other illumina-

157

THE MINISTRY OF ART

tion as these once were done long ago. And
not one of them has really enough to keep
him busy or return him more than a living
wage, while by default thousands of dollars
worth of work they could do consummately
goes weekly to factories and similar places
where it becomes simply so much plausible
sham.

Now, it is the manifest duty of the architect
to search out these individual craftsmen and to
bring them into alliance with himself. You will
note that I speak of an "alliance," for this is
almost the crux of the whole matter ; whoever
the craftsman is he must work with and not for
the architect, although the latter must exercise
a general oversight over everything, and form
in a sense the court of last resort. Really an
architect is, or should be, more a coordinator
than a general designer; he should be a kind of
universal solvent, by means of which architec-
tural designers, workmen, artificers, craftsmen,
and artists should come together, and, while
preserving their own personality, merge their
identity in a great artistic whole, somewhat as
the instruments of a great orchestra are as-

158

CRAFTSMAN AND ARCHITECT

sembled to the perfect rendering of a sym-
phony by the master and conductor.

This free field for the exercise of personality
was always accorded the artist and the crafts-
man during that greatest and most successful
of building epochs, the Middle Ages, and that
it is now denied is due quite as much to the
grasping nature of the architect as it is to
the progressive degeneracy of the craftsman.
The two elements are interrelated ; as the crafts-
man decayed, the architect more and more took
into his own hands the work he could not get
well done elsewhere, and as he did so he dis-
couraged and destroyed the craftsman already
on the downward path.

Now, there is no reason why the architect
should have to design his carving and tiles and
glass and metal-work and joinery and colour
decoration, except that no one else can do it,
and when he does, by default, the result is
only a poor and unenduring expedient. Now
that true craftsmen are beginning to emerge
from the welter of commercialism, it is, as I
have said, the manifest duty of the architect to
search them out and give them not only the

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THE MINISTRY OF ART

preference, but the utmost measure of liberty
of action of which they are worthy. What we
are looking for, and what was always obtained
in the epochs of high civilization, is not merely
technical proficiency, but such proficiency
united to creative capacity. There is no true
craftsman who is not the personal designer of
what he fashions, and it is the negation of this
principle that vitiates so much of the work
produced through the so-called "arts and
crafts" societies of the present day. For my
own part, I have lost much of my confidence in
a movement that once seemed to promise so
much, just because I have found there the same
old vicious system ; one man making the design,
the other carrying it out. This is fatal, and I
believe that the arts and crafts movement is
doomed to immediate failure unless it prohibits
absolutely the showing or selling or approval of
any work that is not fashioned by the man who
designed it, or is not designed by the man who
fashioned it.

It is better to accept work that is in a meas-
ure defective, if it is so created, than a more
perfect and plausible product that involves

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CRAFTSMAN AND ARCHITECT

division of labour. I have in mind a certain
woodcarver who cuts his statues directly from
baulks of oak, without the intervention of
either sketch or model, and though I am not
always wholly in sympathy with what he does,
though sometimes there is a naivete in what he
does that would scandalize a trained sculptor
or a purist architect, I would not change this
for a moment; for if I did, it would mean the
achievement of efficiency and regularity at the
expense of a better thing, and that is person-
ality.

Of course, there are at present very few men
who can be trusted implicitly, but there are
many who have, and show, promise of possible
development, and such men should be en-
couraged and given the widest possible latitude.
They will repay this confidence tenfold, and
considerate guidance linked with confidence
and opportunity will give surprising results. I
should like to suggest, therefore, that a kind of
"White List" be compiled and published, and
added to from time to time, of those craftsmen
who have shown the ability and the promise ;
that it be given the widest publicity amongst

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THE MINISTRY OF ART

architects, and that they should consider them-
selves bound in honour to go to these men, and
work with them, rather than over them, in
preference to the more august and widely
heralded concerns that commend themselves
rather by their financial than their artistic
capital.

In the end, and that we may finally get back
to the old and ideal state of things, we shall
have to restore the ancient guild idea, and as
well the workshops assembled around some
great architectural undertaking. If a cathedral
is to be built, or a university, or a public library,
with the turning of the first sod should go the
raising of temporary workshops, and the as-
sembling of the varied workers that will be
brought into play for the embellishing of the
fabric. Think what a future cathedral close
might be ; in the midst, the slowly rising walls,
and all around, busy workshops; here a group
of stone-carvers under a competent foreman
(but minus special designers and modellers),
surrounded by casts and photographs and
drawings of the carving of Chartres and Rheims
and Venice and Wells and Lincoln ; here glass-

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CRAFTSMAN AND ARCHITECT

workers with their models from Bourges and
Chartres and York, slowly fashioning (each
man his own window) the jewelled filling for the
tracerized apertures of the temple ; here join-
ers and woodworkers with the same kind of
surroundings, and workers in wrought and
forged iron, and in gold and silver; tilemakers,
with their Dutch and Persian and Spanish
models; and so on, until all the varied list is
filled. Each group would form its own inde-
pendent guild, self-governing, self-controlled;
all united then in a general guild which would
have a broad supervision of all that was done,
and provide models, books, teachers, while the
architect Jiimself would go daily through all
the works, suggesting here, correcting there,
inspiring everywhere. And with the primary
craft activity would go also certain social ele-
ments, that would bind the several guilds to-
gether and give them coordination ; educational
elements, religious elements, and those features
of assurance against loss through sickness and
of participation in a division of profits, that
were fundamental in the guilds of the Middle
Ages. Can there be any doubt as to the result?

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THE MINISTRY OF ART

If such a thing as that could come into being in
connection with one great contemporary build-
ing, it would mean that the problem was solved,
and that for the future there would be enough
real craftsmen and a better art, and a higher
civilization.

You will say this is a dream impossible of
achievement; that no owner would for a mo-
ment think of financing such a venture; that
enough workmen could not be found to man
any one of the workshops even if an adequate
foreman could be obtained; that the idea of
team work has so utterly died out of a hyper-
individualized generation that a communal
spirit could not be built up; and that such a
scheme, if started, would immediately disin-
tegrate through jealousy, suspicion, and ava-
rice; and finally that the labour unions would
refuse to permit anything of the kind and would
destroy it, if initiated, by the simple method of
calling a strike amongst the labourers on the
works but outside the guilds.

I admit the force only of the last claim, and
even here I think it is exaggerated. I cannot
believe that organized labour could be so short-

164.

CRAFTSMAN AND ARCHITECT

sighted as to fail to see that such a scheme was
quite in harmony with the high ideals they
openly avow ; and if they were, I am sure the
time is close at hand when the growing force of
public opinion will suppress with a heavy hand
the corruptions of unionism which are so un-
representative of, and injurious to, its better
principles.

However this may be, the thing must come
and will come, for we cannot much longer sub-
mit to a condition so unwholesome and so de-
plorable in its results, or even to a type of civili-
zation that makes this condition inevitable.
If individualism or commercialism or division
of labour or the trade unions stand in the way,
they will be swept out of existence, going down
in defeat before the resolution that will surely in
its progress bring back again many of the old
conditions that marked, as they will ever mark,
estates of high civilization. In the mean time,
we can — and I close as I began — do much
toward the amelioration of no longer endurable
conditions, much even toward the bringing-in
of the great and fundamental reforms. I doubt
if the state can do this, for its achievements in

THE MINISTRY OF ART

the line of popular education are not such as to
enlist confidence; it is too blackly tarred with
the same stick of secularism, mechanism, and
the division of labour. I doubt if the schools
and colleges can do it, or would do it. But the
architect can, and the owner, for both can make
the demand and foster and further the supply.
It is to them, therefore, that we must turn in
our emergency; to the owner, in the hope that
he will demand real craftsmanship and accept
no commercial or syndicated substitute; to the
architect, in the confidence that he will search
out the individual craftsman, give him the pre-
ference, and accord him the greatest measure of
liberty of which he is worthy — and even a
little more. And in these hopes we shall not be
disappointed, for once the condition is recog-
nized there is no alternative, — action, imme-
diate, comprehensive, and persistent, becomes a
matter of honour.

VI

AMERICAN UNIVERSITY ARCHITECTURE

VI

AMERICAN UNIVERSITY ARCHITECTURE1

IT would be impossible for me to express in
any adequate fashion my deep apprecia-
tion of the honour you do me in asking me to
supplement, in some small degree, the penetrat-
ing and comprehensive paper Mr. Warren al-
ready has read before you, with a consideration
and a showing of that other collegiate architec-
ture over-seas which, as he so justly says, is
in its impulse and its achievement a natural
continuation of British tradition. We have in
America, as you in your colonies, the residential
college — the early, the perfect, the indestruct-
ible type — elsewhere abandoned, and with
great loss in respect to those results in charac-
ter-building (and therefore national civiliza-
tion) for which no intensive scholarship can
ever make amends. The foundations of sane
and sound and wholesome society are neither

1 Read before the Royal Institute of British Architects,
London, 1912.

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THE MINISTRY OF ART

industrial supremacy, nor world-wide trade, nor
hoarded wealth ; they are personal honour, clean
living, fearlessness in action, self-reliance,
generosity of impulse, good-fellowship, obedi-
ence to law, reverence, and the fear of God, —
all those elements which are implied in the
word "character," which is the end of educa-
tion and which is the proudest product of the
old English residential college, and the old
English educational idea that brought it into
being, maintained it for centuries, and holds it
now a bulwark against the tides of anarchy and
materialism that threaten the very endurance
of civilization itself.

From time to time we have yielded more or
less to novel impulses, coquetting with that
questionable lady sometimes known as the
"Spirit of the Age," accepting even her insidi-
ous doctrine that, after all, the object of educa-
tion is not the building of character, but the
breeding of intensive specialists, or the turning
of a boy at the earliest possible moment into a
wage-earning animal. We still hold to the dam-
nable opinion that education may be divorced
from religion, and ethics inculcated apart from a

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UNIVERSITY ARCHITECTURE

dogmatic religious faith, and having sown the
wind of an insane secularism, we are reaping
the whirlwind of civic corruption and industrial
anarchy. I do not mean to say that we were
alone in our error: you yourselves know that
across narrower seas than the Atlantic the same
is true, and in greater degree, while even here,
in these narrow islands that so often have been
the last refuge and stronghold of Christian
civilization, I have heard strange rumours of
those who would sacrifice Latin and Greek and
the humanities to applied science and voca-
tional training ; who would drive the very name
of religion from the schools ; who would, in the
ringing words of an eminent French statesman,
"put out the lights in heaven," and, to quote
Karl Marx, "destroy the idea of God which is
the keystone of a perverted civilization." We
have, I think, rather got beyond taking this
sort of thing seriously, and I doubt if you ever
will do so even for a moment ; for when we stop
doing things long enough to think, we all realize
that, as the Dean of St. Paul's has recently said,
"The real test of progress is the kind of people
that a country turns out," and the product of

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THE MINISTRY OF ART

secularized and intensive education is not of
a quality that develops in sane and healthy
minds a sense either of covetousness or emula-
tion.

So, in spite of our backing and filling, we are,
I think, in America, well beyond the turn of the
tide. I myself have seen it at its flood, and I
have seen the ebb begin. It is not so long ago
that our ideal seemed to be a kind of so-called
education that might be labelled "made in Ger-
many": we prescribed nothing, and accepted
anything a freshman in his wisdom might elect ;
we joined schools of dental surgery and "busi-
ness science " (whatever that may be) and jour-
nalism and farriery to our august universities;
we ignored Greek and smiled at Latin ; we tried
to teach theology on an undogmatic basis (an
idea not without humour), and we cut out re-
ligious worship altogether. It was all evanes-
cent, however; now the "free electives" are
passing, even at Harvard where they began and
ran full riot ; at Princeton the preceptorial sys-
tem has been restored, and is coming elsewhere ;
there, also, a great college chapel is contem-
plated, while at the University of Chicago one is

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UNIVERSITY ARCHITECTURE

about to be built at a cost of some three hun-
dred thousand pounds. Everywhere residential
quads are coming into existence: one ancient
college — Amherst — is considering abandon-
ing all its scientific schools and falling back on
the sound old classical basis, while lately our
own American Institute of Architects has en-
dorsed the principle that our schools of archi-
tecture should grant degrees only to those rea-
sonably proficient in Latin.

And so we return step by step to the old ideals
and sound methods of English colleges ; return to
the mother that bore us, just as we return year
after year to our old home for refreshment and
inspiration; return, even in a wider sense, to
those eternally battered but eternally enduring
principles in life and thought and aspiration
which make up the great Anglo-Saxon heritage
of which we proudly claim to be joint heirs with
yourselves. And in this return we find our-
selves recurring once more to the very forms of
the architecture — or rather, we hope, to its
underlying spirit — through which this great
tradition has manifested itself. In our earliest
days we followed, as closely as we could, the

THE MINISTRY OF ART

work going on at home ; then we yielded to our
new nationality and wandered off after strange
gods, — some of them very strange, indeed, —
expressing our experiments in experimental
styles until the last shadow of a memory of
England seemed wholly gone ; and then, as the
last flicker died, behold a new restoration! for
with the reaction toward a broader culture
comes the return to the architecture of Eton
and Winchester, Oxford and Cambridge, that
so fully expressed that very culture itself.

Consider for a moment and you will see that
no other course was possible: not because the
fifteenth and sixteenth and early seventeenth
century collegiate architecture of England is
the most perfect style ever devised by man to
this particular end. It is this, of course, but the
real reason for our return lies deeper, and it is
simply that it is the only style that absolutely
expresses our new-old, crescent ideals of an edu-
cation that makes for culture and makes for
character. I myself have been coming back to
Oxford and Cambridge year after year now for
a full generation, others for even longer terms ;
and every year I send, from my own and from

UNIVERSITY ARCHITECTURE

other offices, boys and young men, to the same
shrines of causes, not lost, but gone before,
who are vail of them beginning the same cycle of
periodicity that has marked the lives of their
elders ; and to all of us, young and old, these
gray and wonderful cities mean, not great art
alone, but, even more, the greater impulse that
incarnated itself in such personalities as Duns
Scotus and Henry V; Sir Philip Sidney and Sir
Walter Raleigh; Grocyn, Linacre, and Eras-
mus ; Laud, and Strafford and Falkland ; Hamp-
den and Cromwell, the Duke of Wellington,
John Keble, and Cardinal Newman. For one
thing we know, at least, and that is that archi-
tecture, together with all art, is no matter of
fashion or predilection, no vain but desirable
amenity of life, but rather an unerring though
perishable record of civilization, more exact
than written history, and the only perfect show-
ing of the civilization of a time. By its fruitage
of art we know the tree of life, and further we
know that this fruit is not seedless, but the
guaranty of life to such ages as use it rightly.
We love it for what it is in itself; more for what
it reveals to us of a great past ; most of all, for

175

THE MINISTRY OF ART

what it promises our future. Art has dynamic
potency; it records, indeed, but it is evocative
also ; and we who would have Sidneys and Straf-
fords and Newmans to redeem and defend and
ennoble our civilization use the architecture
that is their voicing that it may re-create their
spirit in a later age and in a distant but not
alien land.

So much, then, by way of the introduction
you did not bring me over-seas to say; and now
let us turn to the work itself of which you
expect me to speak.

And first of all let me show you from Harvard
one or two examples of what we did for a begin-
ning. It was n't very much, I suppose, but we
care for it extremely, just because it spells our
own brief antiquity, while it was honest and
sincere, and not without a certain pathetic
element of far-away longing for an old but not
forgotten home. English it was, of course, so
far as we could make it, for we were all English,
— or^rather British, — in bone and blood and
tradition, down to half a century ago. The old
artistic impulse that had remained with man
from the beginning was slowly dying, for the

176

UNIVERSITY ARCHITECTURE

first time in recorded history ; it had been losing
vitality ever since the Renaissance and Refor-
.mation, but it was still instinctive, and so re-
mained until that Revolution, which included
so much more than the French Terror, came to
give it its quietus. This day — or night — was
still far off, and in the seventeenth and eigh-
teenth centuries there was still exquisite delicacy
and refinement and wealth of invention. I wish
I could show you some proofs of this in the
shape of domestic and ecclesiastical work from
Massachusetts Bay Colony, and Virginia and
Maryland and the Carolinas, for it is true that
little of this appears in our collegiate work.
Here funds were scant and dearly obtained,
while the planters of the South and the great
merchants of the North were more lavish in
their outlay ; as it is, our early college buildings
make their appeal through their fine propor-
tions and their frank simplicity.

Of course practically all the seventeenth-cen-
tury work, and nine -tenths of that of the eigh-
teenth is gone, including much of the best, and
we must re-create our vision of the past from
shreds and patches; but fortunately at Harvard

177

THE MINISTRY OF ART

there remains a notable group that has yielded
neither to vandalism nor conflagration. As
you will see from the plan of the old " Yard,"
the typical English quadrangular arrangement
was abandoned for a grouping of isolated build-
ings, at first more or less formal, then develop-
ing into final chaos as other men with other
minds came on the scene and placed their
buildings, and designed them also, at their own
sweet will. As for the material, it was almost
invariably brick, at first imported from the old
country, for the visible stone supply in New
England was intractible granite, and even
where a kinder material was available, there was
in the beginning little skill in cutting, and later
little money to pay for the labour involved.
With few exceptions the trimmings of doors
and windows and cornices were of delicately
moulded wood painted white, the Vignolan
laws as to proportion being intelligently modi-
fied to fit the new material, while the roofs were
covered with split shingles.

The first evidence of decadence appears, I
think, in the advent of that more pompous
style Jefferson did so much to advance.

UNIVERSITY ARCHITECTURE

Hitherto what had been done was done simply
and unaffectedly; now came the conscious
desire for architecture, which is a dangerous
ambition at best. At the University of Vir-
ginia we have the original setting out, almost
intact, and if we deplore the unnecessarily
unreasonable classical porticoes, with columns,
entablatures, and pediments complete, — and
all built of deal boards framed up in the sem-
blance of a newly discovered paganism, — we
must admit the great dignity of the plan and
the singular charm of the ensemble.

This "Jeffersonian" style rapidly took the
place of the old Georgian, but its day was brief;
and somewhere between 1820 and 1830 oc-
curred that ominous point when the last flicker-
ing tradition of good taste and the last weak
impulse of instinctive art vanished, and the
new era began wherein the desires and predil-
ections of society as a whole were no longer for
good things and beautiful things, but explicitly
and even clamorously for bad things and ugly
things, while the uncertain offices of the archi-
tect were the only agencies that from time to
time redeemed the general chaos.

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THE MINISTRY OF ART

Fortunately, there was little collegiate build-
ing with us during this dismal second quarter
of the nineteenth century, or rather, and also
fortunately, little of it has survived ; and when
first the architect appears on the scene as the
mentor rather than the exemplar of public
opinion, it is in novel guise, nothing less, in-
deed, than as the protagonist of Gothic. He
was not very Gothic, I must admit, and in the
beginning he contented himself with a few
apologetic and quite casual buttresses, pointed
arches over his door and window openings, an
octagonal turret or two, and of course battle-
ments, usually of two-inch deal neatly painted,
and sometimes sprinkled with sand as a conces-
sion to appearances. What took place in do-
mestic and ecclesiastical architecture, I dare
not even reveal to you, but the college work was
a shade less horrific ; for sometimes, as at West
Point, it was of stone, and good stone work will
cover a multitude of sins — as it still does in
our own day and generation, I believe.

Perhaps it is hardly fair to attribute this first
"Gothic" to architects; really it was the work
of the ambitious builder who, after crystallizing

1 80

UNIVERSITY ARCHITECTURE

under the immortal Batty Langley's handbooks
on classical architecture, suddenly expanded
with almost explosive force beneath the influ-
ence of that amazing work of the same gifted
author wherein he reduces Gothic also to a sys-
tem of "orders" and demonstrates how by a
few simple rules one can easily learn to pro-
duce "genteel and appropriate Structures in the
Gothic Taste." But the Oxford Movement and
Pugin's Gothic Revival soon passed beyond the
admirable Batty Langley, and the influence of
Pugin himself entered America, largely through
a really great architect, Upjohn. I think he did
no collegiate work, but John Ruskin produced
those that did, and from the close of our War
between the States down to about 1880, the new
Gothic that expressed his really enormous influ-
ence might be said to have run riot through our
colleges. There were those like Renwick and
Congdon, and Mr. Haight (who is still living),
that held conscientiously to the grave and
archaeological type established by the Pugins;
there were others who tried to incorporate
Ruskinian doctrines in more personal, original,
and mobile work, as Blomfield and Butterfield

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THE MINISTRY OF ART

were doing here in England . The results were at
least lacking in monotony, but few of them
achieved the simplicity and the dignity of Mr.
Haight's work, while many of them reached a
point of violence and anarchy hardly to be
matched in history.

It was all a "false dawn," however, and
ceased almost in a moment (though for a brief
period only, as we shall see) when that great
genius and greater personality, Richardson,
flashed like an unpredicted comet across the
sky. The later seventies were desperate, no
less ; and the group of conscientious men could
not withstand the flood of falsity and bad taste
and artificiality that involved the whole art of
architecture. Richardson alone turned the tide,
brushed away the whole card-house of artifice,
and deliberately forced a new and alien style on
a bewildered people. He did great work, some
of it immortal work, in his powerful mode ; but
he died before his mission was accomplished,
and though he killed the " French roof style "
and the futile Gothic, and all the other absurdi-
ties, he left behind no one of his own calibre to
carry on the crusade, but instead a multitude of

182

UNIVERSITY ARCHITECTURE

imitators who, though at first doing fine work
under the memory and inspiration of their mas-
ter, gradually turned away into other fields,
leaving the Romanesque propaganda to the
most inadequate exponents imaginable. For a
decade we wallowed in lilliputian cyclopeanism,
and then, to change the simile, the summer
storm swept west and south, and over the deso-
lation it had left loomed, almost simultaneously,
three new tendencies, Colonial, Perpendicular
Gothic, and "Beaux Arts." Three less well-
assorted bedfellows it would be hard to find, but
with a magnanimity rare in history these three
rivals more or less succeeded in establishing a
modus vivendi, Colonial taking over part of the
new, and again triply divided, Gaul, in the shape
of domestic work; Gothic annexing, so far as it
could, all collegiate, scholastic, and ecclesiasti-
cal building; while to the Beaux Arts propa-
ganda fell all it could get of the rest — par-
ticularly Carnegie libraries, town houses, and
banks. As a matter of fact, this partitioning of
architectural activity was not the result of
amity, nor was it in the least definitive: the
Colonial style claimed the patronage of our

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THE MINISTRY OF ART

nonconformist brethren (with show of reason
and propriety), Gothic tried vainly to break
into the library fold, while the Beaux Arts
architects made unavailing eyes at the Church,
and, indeed, claimed everything in sight. Their
pretensions did not go without questioning,
however, for in the mean time the old and most
classical Classic was re-born (it had never wholly
died), and at the hands of that great man,
Charles McKim, it suddenly achieved a height
of serene nobility where it could and did chal-
lenge the claims of its rivals. And there were
other claimants for the architectural crown now
so completely "in commission": there was the
Spanish pretender with its doubtful offspring,
the quaintly denominated "Mission style";
there was the secessionist Americanism of the
inspired but unguarded Mr. Sullivan; there
was a kind of neo-Byzantinism ; there was a
hidden but persistent Japanese propaganda. In
fact I was wrong when I said that the architec-
tural Gaul was divided into three parts : it is not
such a triple partition that confronts us now, it
is an omnivorous eclecticism that bears some
of the ear-marks of anarchy. To use one of our

184

UNIVERSITY ARCHITECTURE

own phrases, "everything goes," and much of it
goes exceedingly well, amazingly so, in fact ; but
the result is somewhat lacking in the qualities of
unity and lucidity.

Fortunately, we have to do with few of the
varied schools, for though all of them have foot-
holds in the several colleges, only two have
established their claims, Georgian and Gothic,
and at the present time the latter has the call
and has produced the most notable results: it
may almost be said that, except where lack
of funds or climatic conditions argue against
Gothic, this has the field absolutely to itself.
The ascetic and fastidious classicism of McKim
created Columbia University and occurs spo-
radically elsewhere ; the Boulevardesque of the
Beaux Arts men appears in a single building at
Yale, and in the slow-growing University of
California and the Naval College at Annapolis ;
Spanish elements go to the making of Leland
Stanford ; and in Texas my own firm is doing "a
deed without a name " that you must judge for
yourselves and justify if you can and as we do
ourselves. Elsewhere it is, as I said, Georgian
or Gothic, and to the college trustee it is now

185

THE MINISTRY OF ART

the question, "under which King, Bezonian."
Harvard, after swinging the circle of every pos-
sible architectural dogma and heresy, seems to
have settled down, as she should, to Georgian,
as has Williams, and so many of the smaller and
poorer preparatory schools and colleges, par-
ticularly in the South; but Yale, West Point,
Pennsylvania, New York, Princeton, Bryn
Mawr, Washington University, St. Louis, and
Chicago, together with all the larger prepara-
tory and Church schools, and the newer Roman
Catholic institutions, are uncompromisingly
Gothic of the type made immortal in England.
Before showing you the nature of this work,
it may be well to examine a typical American
university, in its setting-out, in its component
parts, and in its organization. I will choose for
this purpose Princeton, of which I am a mem-
ber by adoption and where I have the honor
to act as supervising architect. The title itself
will indicate at once one of the many points of
divergence between the English and American
systems, for I fancy there is no university in the
United Kingdom where one man is given almost
complete authority over all matters of the

1 86

UNIVERSITY ARCHITECTURE

choice of architects, supervision of their work
both in design and execution, acceptance or
rejection of gifts and their placing if accepted,
the development of roads and paths, and the
planting of trees and shrubs. Until recently
such an office was unknown in America, but
since Princeton took the lead, some five or six
years ago, others have followed rapidly and the
practice has now become an established cus-
tom.

It was time, too, that something should be
done : as I have already indicated, our colleges
were like Topsy — they "just growed" —
without rhyme or reason, subject to the most
vacillating fashion and the quaint whims of
emancipated individualism, while the results
were generally shocking. In the plan of Prince-
ton you will easily see how lawless had been the
growth, and conditions were even worse at Har-
vard and Yale. You will note at once from the
wide spacing and the lack of coordination an-
other point of difference : with us almost every
college has begun in open country, as an original
foundation. We have nothing like Oxford and
Cambridge, partly because of this fact, and

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THE MINISTRY OF ART

partly because each college is with us a unit ; we
have no gathering up of many and independent
foundations, loosely knit together for admin-
istrative purposes: we have instead self-con-
tained units, sometimes of enormous size, and
each new benefactor founds, not a new college,
but a dormitory, a library, a school of law or
medicine or forestry or — journalism. Person-
ally, I think this plan must be abandoned, and
a breaking-up into more manageable units take
place. It seems to me demonstrable that in
schools that have from four to six thousand stu-
dents half the character-building qualities of
education are lost, and that the personal ele-
ment must be regained by breaking up these
unwieldy masses into working units of not
more than two hundred men each, at least for
living and social purposes. This was attempted
two years ago at Princeton, but the time was
not ripe and the reform failed ; still the leaven
is working at Harvard and Cornell and else-
where, and is, I think, within measurable dis-
tance of accomplishment.

In the new plan of Princeton, which shows
the university as it now is, and indicates its fu-

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UNIVERSITY ARCHITECTURE

ture lines of development, you will see at once
how strong the tendency is toward the standard
type: here the dormitories are assuming quad-
rangular form, and in time may become full
residential colleges, each with its common room
and great hall and, when times have still further
changed, perhaps its chapel. In the beginning
our dormitories were simply barracks, with liv-
ing rooms opening off long halls, with startling
results so far as order and discipline were con-
cerned. Now the "entry" type is almost uni-
versal, the type that holds in England, while
the old sequence of regular cells serving both as
study and bedroom for one or even two men,
with a common necessarium two or three hun-
dred yards away, has given place to the stand-
ard type of suites consisting of a study and two
bedrooms for two undergraduates, and a study
and bedroom for each graduate student. In
the former case each stairway is separated from
the next by a party wall, unbroken except in the
basement to which all staircases descend, and
here a general corridor gives access to groups of
baths and toilets, and to the box-rooms, and to
the other staircases in the quadrangle as well.

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THE MINISTRY OF ART

In the newest of our buildings for graduate stu-
dents every two suites have a private bath
between. Of course, we pride ourselves very
much on our plumbing, and I sometimes
wonder if we are not becoming almost Roman
in our luxuries for bathing: it is possible we
have gone too far, and that in time we shall
return to more Spartan arrangements; but at
present there is no denying the fact that we
give nine tenths of our students more than
they are accustomed to at home.

Another thing that will strike you is the mag-
nificence of our gymnasiums and the dominat-
ing quality of our schools of science. There is
really a rivalry amongst our colleges as to which
shall have the biggest and most perfectly
equipped gymnasium and swimming-pool, but
this is partly excused by the fact that our
winters are so severe that for three or four
months skating, snow-shoeing, and ice-boating
are about the only possible forms of out-of-door
exercise in the North. Then we have general
physical directors, as well as special trainers for
the varied forms of athletics, and in many col-
leges regular and searching examinations of the

190

UNIVERSITY ARCHITECTURE

men for physical and functional weaknesses,
and as a result the health of our schools is well
above normal. As for our science buildings, you
know, as we know only too well, how almost
unbalanced we have become in our devotion to
practical and "vocational" training, and how
obsessed we have become with the mania for
natural science. Here at Princeton there is less
of this than elsewhere, but two of our newest
and most magnificent buildings are devoted,
the one to biology, the other to physics, though
as yet we have no schools of mechanical and
electrical and mining engineering, as happens so
often elsewhere.

One novelty you will not notice on the
Princeton plan, and that is the clubs and fra-
ternities. We have as many "Greek-Letter So-
cieties" (which are very awful and very secret
organizations) as we have colleges, and there
are some institutions in America where these
fraternity houses almost outnumber the aca-
demic buildings themselves. At Princeton no
Greek-letter societies are allowed, but there are
two old secret organizations, the Whig and the
Clio, whose white marble mausoleums form the

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very centre of the campus, while to the east
stretches a great street absolutely lined with the
private clubs which grew up when the fratern-
ities were taboo. These clubs take in only a cer-
tain number of new members each year ; they
are distinctly aristocratic in their tone, though
aristocratic of a sound and healthy type ; and
the buildings generally follow the lines of an old
and palatial country house.

From all these points of difference you will
see, then, that our American university is a very
different matter, in its architectural form, from
those in this country. Our newest graduate col-
leges come nearer, as you will see when I show
you the now rising buildings for Princeton which
lie half a mile to the west.

In the mean time let us examine the begin-
nings of what has been a notable Gothic renais-
sance amongst our colleges, and we need not
forsake Princeton to do this, for it was here, in
the shape of the new library, that it came into
being. Alexander Hall had just been completed
in the verbose and turgid style that followed
the memory of Richardson like a Nemesis, and
its architect was given orders to abandon this

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UNIVERSITY ARCHITECTURE

and revert to what we sometimes call "Ox-
ford Gothic." It was not a style with which
he had either sympathy or familiarity, and he
produced a work which, while acceptable in
its mass and general composition, fails sadly
through its coarse scale and its mechanical
ornamentation. Almost simultaneously, how-
ever, certain new dormitories were put in hand
— Blair and Little Halls ; and here the archi-
tects were two young men of Philadelphia who
most unaccountably could think and feel in
Gothic terms. I like to record their names
whenever I can, — John Stewardson and Wal-
ter Cope, — for in addition to being singularly
lovable fellows, they were geniuses of no infer-
ior order; they brought into being, at Princeton,
Bryn Mawr, and the University of Pennsyl-
vania, structures that are to me singularly beau-
tiful and inspiring, and they left their mark for
all time on American architecture. Both are
dead, and at a pathetically early age, while the
profession of architecture is the poorer thereby.
About the same time a transplanted English-
man, Mr. Vaughan, sometime pupil of that
immortal master of the new Gothic, the late

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THE MINISTRY OF ART

George Bodley, and still with us I am glad to
say, began the introduction of the same style
into our great preparatory schools, which you
here would call "public schools." His work at
St. Paul's marked a new era in this category
of scholastic architecture, and was continued
later in more sumptuous fashion at Groton.
My own firm has been following his leadership
in the convent school of St. Mary at Peekskill,
and theTaft School in Connecticut, while there
are innumerable examples of the same sort of
thing all over the country.

It was really Cope and Stewardson's work
at Princeton that set the pace, however, and
so beautiful was it, so convincing as to the
possibilities of adapting this perfect style to
all modern scholastic requirements, that the
Princeton authorities, with a wisdom beyond
their generation, passed a law that for the
future every building erected there should fol-
low the same general style. "Seventy-nine"
Hall, Patton, McCosh, and the Gymnasium
followed in quick succession; then came the
great Palmer Physical Laboratory, the Biolog-
ical Laboratory — Guyot Hall — Upper Pyne

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UNIVERSITY ARCHITECTURE

and Lower Pyne, and a little later, after I had
become supervising architect, Campbell Hall,
by my own firm, and the altogether wonderful
quadrangles of Holder and Hamilton Halls, by
Messrs. Day Brothers and Klauder, of Phila-
delphia. These latter buildings mark one of the
very high points we have achieved in Collegiate
Gothic in modern times. When the great quads
are completed, we shall, I think, confront a
masterpiece.

The most recent Princeton work is the great
Graduate College my own firm is now building
on the crest of a low hill, half a mile from the
college campus, and commanding a gently slop-
ing lawn of about eighty acres. This new col-
lege is, of course, only for graduate students;
it has an endowment of over half a million
pounds; it is conceived and organized on the
most liberal, cultural, and scholastic lines, far
away, indeed, from the popular schemes of "vo-
cational" training; and it should go far toward
restoring the balance in favour of sound learning
and noble scholarship. The plan shows only
the work now in hand, the first quad, with the
great hall and its kitchens, together with the

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THE MINISTRY OF ART

Cleveland Tower, which is a national memorial
to one of our greatest Presidents, who spent his
years, after retiring from office, in Princeton, as
a trustee of the university and a devoted friend
of the new Graduate College on the lines that
had been determined by its Dean, Dr. West.
At present the placing of the great tower seems
a little too like that of the Victoria Tower at
Westminster to be wholly satisfactory, but in
some distant future a second quadrangle will be
constructed to the south and east, containing
the Chapel, the Library, and quarters for Fel-
lows, which will restore the tower itself to the
centre of the composition. Some day, also, a
third quad will be developed to the northeast,
and then the group will be complete, for the
Dean's lodgings, with their private gardens, to
the southwest of the great hall, are already
under construction.

Let us now turn from Princeton to some
others of our many colleges ; but before we take
up the Gothic tale, let us see what has been
done in other stylistic directions, for I would
not give you the idea that the restoration of
what one of your own great Gothicists, Mr.
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UNIVERSITY ARCHITECTURE

Champneys, has called so well the "Oxford
Mixture," is all plain sailing, or that splendid
work has not been done in other directions.
Columbia University in New York — the old
King's College of Colonial days — stands, of
course, as the noblest type of the pure Classi-
cal idea, and its majestical library will always
remain a national monument. Unfortunately,
the site is crowded and fatally restricted: the
mistake was made of fixing this — when the
change was necessary a generation ago — too
near the outposts of the advancing city, which
like a conquering army has already swept up to
its gates and miles beyond. For myself I can't
imagine a great centre of higher education in
the howl and war of a great city, or anywhere,
in fact, except in the quiet country or in the vil-
lage environment it has built for itself, and I
fancy another generation will see another mov-
ing on of Columbia ; .and when this happens I
venture to predict that, in spite of the grave and
scholarly mastery of McKim, Mead, and White's
work, the new housing will be on the lines that
Oxford and Cambridge have not only made
their own, but universal and eternal.

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THE MINISTRY OF ART

There is little else that is purely Classical
amongst our universities, though Carrere and
Hastings have built a most engagingly Parisian
Alumni Hall at Yale, the Naval Academy at
Annapolis is strictly French, and the University
of California is growing on scrupulously ficole
des Beaux Arts lines, afar on the Pacific Coast.
Georgian, however, has established itself as a
determined rival of the "Oxford Mixture," and
some of its products are not only logical and
lovely, but genuinely scholastic as well. Har-
vard, as I have said, is beginning to follow
this line, and so is Williams, where we ourselves
are trying to show we have no hard feelings,
by building a Commencement Hall, and a new
quadrangle, in this quite characteristically
American style. In Virginia, also, we are slowly
constructing a great college for women, while
we are using the same style for another of
our oldest and most famous "preparatory
schools" at Exeter, as well as at yet another
girls' college, Wheaton, in Massachusetts.
Georgian also, with rather quaint Roman ele-
ments, has been used by McKim, Mead, and
White for the vast War College at Washing-

198

UNIVERSITY ARCHITECTURE

ton, and altogether it is, as we say in our
colloquial way, giving Gothic "a run for its
money."

The University of Pennyslvania shows still
more of Cope and Stewardson's wonderful
work, though here it is couched in an extremely
rich Elizabethan vernacular; and I am sure you
will admit that the style is handled in a magnifi-
cent and competent fashion. Here it is all red
brick and yellow stone, and the same materials
are used in Mr. Day's beautifully proportioned
and very reserved Gymnasium. Bryn Mawr
again is built of the wonderful stone that un-
derlies all Pennsylvania and New Jersey, putting
a premium on good architecture. Here in Eng-
land all building stone is finely dressed, but in
America we have adopted the practice of using
"ledge stone" for our ashlar, our trimmings
only being tooled. Fortunately, we have a wide
variety of singularly beautiful stones, ranging
in colour through all shades of gray, brown, pur-
ple, and tawny, easily obtained, inexpensive
and durable. In a way I think we gain a rich-
ness in colour and texture that is obtainable in no
other way, while we also acquire something of

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THE MINISTRY OF ART

that effect of age, which is, after all, so essential
a part of architecture.

Washington University, St. Louis, is later
work of this same firm of Cope and Steward-
son, after the latter had died, and good as it is,
it shows the loss of the peculiar poetry that
marked everything Stewardson touched. The
plan is exceedingly interesting and very mas-
terly, you will admit. It was laid out de novo,
and after our college authorities had experi-
enced a change of heart. With Chicago Univer-
sity we come to another of those institutions
where the reverse course was followed : here the
first buildings were distributed without any
regard to architectural effect, and Shepley,
Rutan and Coolidge, in taking over the work,
have been badly handicapped. This is the most
archaeological of the "College Gothic" in Amer-
ica, accurate, conservative, and reserved. For
contrast consider Mr. Post's "College of the
City of New York," which is as poetical, fantas-
tic, and imaginative as the other is austere and
cautious. I am afraid I think that here is an
example of carrying a good thing too far in the
use of one stone for ashlar and another for

200

UNIVERSITY ARCHITECTURE

trimmings. Here the ashlar is almost black (the
trap-rock that forms a great dyke along the
geological "fault" that forms the Hudson
River), while the trimming stones are not stone
at all, but a pure white terra-cotta with a sur-
face like ivory. In itself the design is so striking,
so forceful, so full of life and spirit, one rather
wishes it might have been expressed in mate-
rials of greater coherency.

Fortunately, both for education and architec-
ture, practically all our collegiate work is fixed
in the country, where there is land enough and
we are able to keep down to those modest walls
and few ranges of windows that are so essentially
a part of the models we now follow : at Prince-
ton, for instance, the residential buildings are
seldom more than two stories in height, even
when perhaps three would be better ; but we are
very afraid, and justly, of the aspiring tenden-
cies, in our light-footed land, that lead to the
building of Towers of Babel, sometimes, I re-
gret to say, Gothic in style — or rather with
passably acceptable Gothic detail. In one in-
stance, however, that of the Union Theologi-
cal Seminary (a Presbyterian institution), in
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THE MINISTRY OF ART

New York, strange counsels prevailed as to
site and this was chosen well within the city,
and where land already possessed an altogether
artificial value. As a result the architects,
Messrs. Allen and Collens, were confronted
with the very grievous necessity of piling up
their levels into a total with which, I think,
Gothic, either in spirit or in method, has little
sympathy. They have a fine chapel, however,
and when the enormous corner tower is built,
it will probably do much toward reducing the
other buildings to a more reasonable frame of
mind.

At the beginnings of another theological
seminary, Roman Catholic this time, Messrs.
Maginnis and Walsh have already completed
one building, the tower of which is, I think,
very beautiful. The general plan is not yet
wholly determined, but it includes a huge parish
church and will give a great opportunity for the
architects to strike another blow for Roman
Catholic Emancipation. I should shrink from
trying to give you any faintest idea of the career
of architectural crime that has been led by the
Roman Church in America until now — and

202

UNIVERSITY ARCHITECTURE

the stars of promise are even yet dim and
widely scattered. It has been a carnival of hor-
ror unbroken by any ray of light — except,
perhaps, St. Patrick's Cathedral and the Paul-
ist Church in New York ; but it is much that
so good a thing as Boston College should come
into existence, and it may serve as a leaven
until we Anglicans in America, as you here in
England, may have to look alive to prevent
Rome outdoing us at our own game, which has
always been good architecture and plenty of it.
Near this Roman college, another great insti-
tution is rising, not strictly collegiate, though
certainly educational, the " Perkins Institution
for the Blind," where Mr. R. C. Sturgis is
developing a singularly personal and intimate
piece of semi-domestic Gothic. In fact, as I said
at the beginning, good Gothic is encroaching
steadily on the preserves of Classicist, Boule-
vardier, and Colonial, and this in spite of the
fact that, with the single exception of Harvard,
every one of our schools of architecture abso-
lutely disregards every type and phase of
Gothic, both in design and in theory. Of course,
it can't quite be suppressed in history and ar-

203

THE MINISTRY OF ART

chaeology, but it is treated rather as the madcap
escapade of a callow youth, and passed over as
lightly as possible. In spite of this, architects
do appear who love Gothic, and, what is more,
know about it also. Religion clamours for it,
education annexes it, and even, in one instance,
the Government of the United States itself
accepted it with alacrity, and has found it not
half so bad as it looked. For an end, therefore,
of this casual showing, I want to place before
you some views of the United States Military
Academy at West Point, of which, as a military
training-school, we are so inordinately and so
justly proud. I cannot begin to give you any
idea of the extravagant beauty of the site of
West Point: it is like the loveliest part of the
Rhine, only bolder and more dramatic. Moun-
tains rise from the river on either hand, deeply
forested, Storm-King and Dunderberg lifting
highest of all; and on a narrow plateau, one
hundred and fifty feet above the river, stands
the Academy, its buildings forming a rampart
along the cliff and creeping up the mountain-
sides all around. Of course there was n't any-
thing one could do there except Gothic, — of

204

UNIVERSITY ARCHITECTURE

sorts, — though others had thought differently,
as one who built there a lovely pagan fane like
a dream of Imperial Rome. Moreover, most of
the old work was pseudo-Gothic, and it had
made a tradition, — everything does this at
West Point, I am glad to say, — so it was not
startling after all that our Classical Govern-
ment should have endorsed a Gothic school.

I am not sure they got it: I think the chapel
on its crag, dominating the whole group, would
pass, though it surely is not archaeological ; the
site is compelling, however, and really what we
tried to do was to translate the rocks and trees
and ribbed cliffs into architectural form. In the
interior there is perhaps something more of the
scholastic quality: in any case it is all honest
masonry throughout, — floor, walls, and vault,
— and it ought to stand for all time. Just what
the cavalry and artillery buildings may be, I
don't know, nor does it much matter: they are
an attempt to express outwardly their function
and in the simplest terms ; the stables sweep in
an enormous arc around one side of the cavalry
plain, and at the back, against the towering
hills, are the barracks, one for each branch of

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THE MINISTRY OF ART

the service. The riding hall is no more, archi-
tecturally, than a rampart of rock, heavily but-
tressed, and six hundred feet in length, a di-
mension that is prolonged to the south by the
tower, and the power-house that breaks down
step by step, along the coal-conveyor, to the
water level and the railway tunnel. The cadet
barracks are the result of an amour (perhaps
illicit) between ironclad military regulations
and a very free and easy Gothic, but their inter-
minable ranges of windows and buttresses show
not unpicturesquely through the great trees
that border the Infantry Plain. The gymna-
sium is something freer still, but not unpleasing
in its colour, of tawny brick of a kind of velvet
texture, and creamy stone trimmings. Unfortu-
nately some of the most important work is not
yet begun. There are scores of semi-detached
quarters for married officers, from many of
which the views are such as one crosses con-
tinents to see ; but the new academic building
is not yet finished, while no funds have been
made available for the vast quadrangles of the
quartermaster's department, the cadet head-
quarters which will, from the plain, form the
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UNIVERSITY ARCHITECTURE

structural base for the chapel (though this will
be well behind and above), the hotel, and —
most needed of all — the staff headquarters.
This latter group will terminate the main axis,
which will stretch a full half-mile from the land-
ing on the upper level at the elevator tower and
below the hotel, past the infirmary, between the
old and the new academic buildings connected
by their vast triumphal arch with its niched
statues, past the enormous post headquarters,
and so across the middle of the Infantry
Plain. The group will be made up of residen-
tial quarters for the superintendent, comman-
dant of cadets, quartermaster, adjutant, and
surgeon, all grouped around an open court
that contains the state apartments of the Presi-
dent, the secretary of war, and distinguished
guests. There will be a great tower pierced
by an arched sally-port, a banqueting-room
vaulted and walled in stone, state reception-
rooms, and all the other accommodations neces-
sary at a place that appeals with singular force
to all the people of the Republic, from its Chief
Magistrate down to the humblest taxpayer.
Lacking these buildings, West Point is, of
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THE MINISTRY OF ART

course, quite incomplete, but it is worth seeing
even now, and for my own part I think, of the
finished buildings, the post headquarters is not
the least interesting. It is built on the edge of
the cliff, and the entrance by the base gate is
four stories below the main court, which is
entered from the upper level. It is a pretty big
building, but it is wholly occupied by the ad-
ministration of the Academy and the military
museum, and I want particularly to say that,
massive as it is, it is all real masonry: it is no
steel-frame skeleton clothed indifferently with
a veneering of masonry; it is all of stone dug
from the reservation cliffs and shot down to
these lower levels.

And the same is true not only of the rest of
the buildings at West Point, but of practically
all the other work I have shown you as well.
We do, indeed, indulge in skeleton construction
and reinforced concrete and other structural
expedients and substitutes, but deep in our
racial consciousness, as in that of all other
Anglo-Saxon peoples, is the solid conviction
that, after all, there are but three real things
in the world, — the home, the school, and the
208

UNIVERSITY ARCHITECTURE

Church, — and that when we are dealing with
eternal verities honest and enduring construc-
tion is alone admissible. And it is to the same
consciousness, I think, that we may attribute
the very universal return to Gothic of some
form for our churches and our colleges and our
schools. After all, there have never been but
three real styles of architecture in the West,
noble in impulse, organic in structure, perfect
in detail ; and these three are Greek, Byzantine,
and Gothic : everything else is either a patois or
a form of slang. Greek and Byzantine are in es-
sence alien to our blood and temper, and Gothic
alone remains. Over-seas, flushed with a new
and half-unconscious recognition of the revolu-
tion that is slowly lifting the world out of ma-
terialism to the high free levels of a new ideal-
ism and spirituality, we instinctively revert to
the very style which came into being to voice
the old idealism and the old spirituality of the
great Christian Middle Ages. Thus far we have,
perhaps, done little more than reproduce; re-
cording our reverence for the great works of
our common ancestors, in buildings that hold
closely to type. We have not hammered out
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THE MINISTRY OF ART

our own intimate style, or national and con-
temporary architecture, any more than have
any other modern races and peoples ; but this
will come by and by. At present we architects
are, I conceive, no longer as in the past the
mouthpiece of a people, creating the visible
form for a great dominating social impulse that
is the mark of supreme civilization : rather are
we the voices crying in the wilderness, the
pioneers of the vanguard of the new life, the
men who re-create from antiquity the beauty
that is primarily educational, that so it may
work subtly through the consciousness of those
who come under its influence, slowly building
up a new civilization that, when it has come
full tide, will burst the shell of archaeological
forms and come forth in its new and significant
and splendid shape.

We have not now, nor have had for three
centuries, a civilization that demanded or could
create such artistic expression ; but the light is
already on the edges of the high hills, and we
know that a new dawn is at hand. In the
mean time, like the monks in the dim monas-
teries of the Dark Ages, we cherish and con-
210

UNIVERSITY ARCHITECTURE

serve all that was great in our greatest past,
building as well as we may new Oxfords and
new Westminster Abbeys, new Lincolns, new
Richmond Castles, new Haddon Halls, not for
a last new word in architectural expression, but
as schoolmasters and as prophets, content with
the educational work we are accomplishing,
leaving to our successors the equal but not
more honourable task of voicing in novel and
adequate form the new civilization we are help-
ing to create.

VII

THE MINISTRY OF ART

VII

THE MINISTRY OF ART1

\ RCHITECTURE, even in a title, can
•**• hardly be disassociated from the other
component parts of that wonderful gift of God
that, in our indifferent use of words, we denom-
inate "art." In each one of them, whether it
be sculpture, painting, or architecture, poetry,
music, the drama, or ceremonial, there is, of
course, one peculiar mode whereby it manifests
itself, the instrument of its operation ; but each
of these is but a dialect of a normal language ;
together they are the Pentecostal tongues
through which the Holy Spirit manifests Him-
self in a peculiar way to all nations and kindreds
and peoples. Art is not only a function of the
soul, an inalienable heritage of man, an attri-
bute of all godly and righteous society; it is
also the language of all spiritual ventures and
experiences, while, more potently than any
other of the works of man, it proclaims the

1 Read before the American Church Congress, Troy, N.Y.
215

THE MINISTRY OF ART

glory of God, revealing in symbolical form some
measure of that absolute truth and that abso-
lute beauty that are His being.

Through all the varied qualities of this seven-
fold mystery of art runs one unchanging and
unchangeable principle, and the nature of this
principle we must define before we consider the
particularities of one art alone and the scope
and potency of its service.

In this necessity there is, let us admit, some-
thing unnatural. Never in the past has there
been a great art that was clearly conscious of
its nature: none that by taking thought has
added one cubit to its stature. Art that is self-
conscious halts on the perilous rim of artifice.
The intensive activities of art analysis and art
education have brought into being never an art
and never an artist of the measure of the artist
and the art of a past so absorbed in spiritual
adventures and material accomplishments that
it lacked the time for self-analysis. And yet, so
novel is the basis of our contemporary life, so
severed from the spiritual succession of history,
so bound by the chains of analysis to the rock of
definition, we are compelled by circumstance to

216

THE MINISTRY OF ART

analyze and define as never before ; nor can we
keep our curious hands from the Pandora's box
of very mystery itself, forgetting that the lifted
lid means, not the clear revealing of strange and
hidden wonders, but their instant and implaca-
ble flight.

The curious inquiries of Calvin wrought
hopeless havoc with the heavenly vision of St.
Augustine ; the insolent brutalities of eugenics
are the Nemesis of wholesome humanity; the
picking and stealing fingers of the Renaissance
broke the Psyche wings of art ; and yet, in defi-
ance of precedent, we essay again the excuseless
and the impossible. What do we mean by "art,"
the thing once so instinctive that it needed no
more definition than did " thought " or " action "
or "prayer"? Well, we have made of an in-
stinct an accessory, and since such it has be-
come, and since it has almost been lost in the
process, we may, in defiance of fate, define
again.

Now, none of us, here and now, means what

the word has been held to imply since the dawn

of the debatable epoch above named. We know

it is neither a commodity, a form of amusement,

217

THE MINISTRY OF ART

an amenity of life, or even the guinea stamp of
civilization. Of course, it is, in a measure, the
last, to the extent that it is not a product, but a
result of that quality of life that is the manifes-
tation, in time and space, of righteous impulses
and modes of human activity. In its high
estate it is never a by-product of barbarism;
though it sometimes seems so, as in the case of
the Renaissance where we find most noble art
synchronizing with an almost complete col-
lapse of Christian civilization. The same thing
has happened before, and will again, for while
all sound and wholesome and well-balanced life
of necessity expresses itself in that instinctive
art which is the art of the people, this great art
product seldom achieves its perfect fruition
until after the great impulse that created it has
broken down and yielded to inevitable degen-
eration. Thus we find the most splendid, if not
the most noble, Gothic architecture blossoming
in the fourteenth century after the high tide of
mediaevalism had begun to ebb ; while painting
reached its climax during the unspeakable bar-
barism of the epoch of the Medici and the
Borgia ; Shakespeare and his circle — soul-

218

THE MINISTRY OF ART

children of the Catholic Middle Ages — weav-
ing the glamour of their divine genius over the
decadent era of Elizabeth; and music, most
subtle of all the arts, giving to Protestant Ger-
many a glory that by her intrinsic nature she
could scarcely claim.

In these and the similar cases in earlier his-
tory there is no discrepancy, no ground for
arguing that art is a natural product either of
heresy, immorality, or disorder : born of right-
eousness of impulse and sanity of life, it is the
longest to endure, lingering like the afterglow
long past the actual setting of the sun, — a
memory and at the same time a hope.

In a time that is curiously prone to false esti-
mates of comparative values, that is positively
triumphant in its capacity for misjudging the
quality of essentials, we measure nearly all the
arts by the dazzling products of the last great
geniuses who linger beyond their time, quite
forgetting the centuries of less splendid activity
that, manifesting, as they did, the art instinct
of a people, were intrinsically nobler, and in
themselves were the energy behind the corus-
cating stars of a rocket that had already burst.

219

THE MINISTRY OF ART

In judging art, in determining its function, in
estimating its potency, it is necessary, there-
fore, to go behind the evidences of Rouen and
the chapel of Henry VII, of Botticelli and Tin-
toretto, of Shakespeare and Marlowe, of Bach
and Beethoven, — to name only the latest of
the great periods of history, — and to regard
that wonder-work of the great centuries from
Gregory VII to the exile at Avignon, which is
the true product of a triumphant Christian
civilization.

And so regarded, we find that art, as I have
already said, is neither a commodity, nor a form
of amusement, nor an amenity of life, but a
wonderful attribute of man who is made in
God's image, a subtle language, and a mystery
that, in its nature, we may with reverence call
sacramental.

This, I believe, is the secret and the function
of art. It is a language of divine revelation, the
great sequence of mystical symbols that alone
are adequate and efficient when the soul of man
enters into the infinite realm of eternal truth.
To each its proper tongue: to reason, dealing
with phenomena and their knowable relations,

220

THE MINISTRY OF ART

the language of natural science and of natural
philosophy; to the soul, by the grace of God
penetrating beyond the veil that limits our
mortal sense, achieving the quest of the Holy
Grail of ultimate truth, the language of art,
which is beauty, sacramentally comprehended,
sacramentally employed. Other language there
is none : before the Beatific Vision, even though
now we see it as in a glass, darkly, even though
the symbol alone is all our undeveloped spirit-
uality can apprehend, the language that is so
adequate for dealing with the mere accidents
and phenomena of the Absolute fails utterly
before the dim vision of the substance that lies
behind, informing all. Natural science and
natural philosophy are sufficient unto them-
selves: they need no aid from the Pentecostal
tongues of art ; but religion, which deals alone
with ultimate realities, finds in the "form of
sound words" only her panoply of defence
against the insolence of insubordinate reason;
for her self-revelation, for the communicating
of her infinitely higher and more subliminal
reason, she turns to the tongue God gave her
to this end, to painting, sculpture, and archi-

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tecture ; to poetry, music, the drama, and cere-
monial; to art, the great symbol; to art, the
language of the soul.

Postulating this of art in its intrinsic nature,
let me say at once that I do not confine the
thing itself simply to the great arts already
named; as there are seven sacraments defined
by the Church, while nevertheless the sacra-
mental quality extends, in varying degrees,
into infinite ramifications throughout creation,
so art itself, which is made up of seven major
modes, reaches out into innumerable fields of
potent activity. Beauty is the instrument of
art ; without it art does not exist, and wherever
beauty is used either for self-revelation or for
the communicating of spiritual energy, there is
art, whether it be in the majestic modes of mu-
sic and architecture, or in the modest ministry
of woodcarving or embroidery. The existence
and manifestation of beauty is the one test, the
philosopher's stone that transmutes the base
metal of reason into the fine gold of spiritual
revelation.

Now, I do not mean to involve myself in the
perilous definition of this mystical and incom-

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prehensible thing, beauty; says St. Thomas a
Kempis, in writing of the sublime Mystery of
the Catholic Faith, "'Twere well not to in-
quire too curiously into the nature of this holy
sacrament "; and the same warning may well
be held in mind when we approach the mystery
of beauty. It is, and its operations are acknowl-
edged; this is really all we need to know. In
this paper I am supposed to deal only with this
operation, and in the one category of architec-
ture, so all that is needed is the confession we
all can make that beauty exists and that it is the
great symbolic language of the soul, whether it
manifests itself through colour or form or light
and shade, through tone, melody, harmony and
rhythm, or through any combination of these,
or any other of the numberless modes of its ex-
pression.

It may be said that not the half of art is thus
specifically spiritual in its activity ; that in whole
schools and for long periods of time art of noble
quality is followed and determined solely for
the sheer joy of pleasurable sensations. This
we may admit, for conscious revelation of higher
things is no essential part of art ; my only con-
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tention is that it alone has been so used, and
may be again, even though for generations we
may, in our hardness of heart, deny the very
existence of any realm of truth beyond that
accidental domain of the material and the con-
ditioned, which from time to time obsesses men
with the delusion of its own finality. And even
here I think the thesis might be defended that
this very sensuous satisfaction, as we call it, is
not sensuous at all, but the blind answering of
an atrophied soul to a spiritual stimulus, the
noble nature of which is disregarded or denied.
The obvious melodies of popular music, the
rudimentary colour-harmonies of popular paint-
ing, the superficial jingles of popular verse, are
pleasurable to those who like them, not because
of some satisfying titillation of the sensory
nerves, but because they, even they, are in-
formed with some faint and far-blown scent of
mystical fields, and strange gardens seen in for-
gotten dreams ; because each one, however nar-
row the vista it reveals, is in some sense one of
those

" Magic casements opening on the foam
Of perilous seas, by faery lands forlorn " —

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that are the avenues of spiritual revelation
through the mystical agency of art.

On this very matter writes that beautiful
soul, Sir Thomas Browne: "For even that
vulgar and Tavern-Musick, which makes one
man merry, another mad, strikes in me a deep
fit of devotion, and a profound contemplation of
the First Composer. There is something in it of
Divinity more than the ear discovers: it is an
Hieroglyphical and shadowed lesson of the
whole World, and creatures of God; such a
melody to the ear, as the whole World, well
understood, would afford the understanding.
In brief, it is a sensible fit of that harmony
which intellectually sounds in the ears of God."

This by the way, for our inquiry is not
here, and I try to return to the path that may,
in the end, lead at the very last to our subject.

I have said enough to indicate what I mean
when I speak of all art as the natural, and, in-
deed, the only adequate, expression in time and
space of spiritual things. If it is this, then it fol-
lows of necessity that it is the ordained language
of religion, for religion, through theology, is the
divine science which is higher than all natural

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sciences, in that it deals with Absolute Truth
through perfectly adequate agencies, while the
natural sciences deal only with finite phenom-
ena through agencies adequate to this end and
to this alone. It follows, then, that preemi-
nently and in a very special fashion art is, or
should be, a matter of absolutely vital import-
ance to religion, since it is ordered by God Him-
self as its mode of visible manifestation. As a
matter of fact, this always has been so from
the very beginnings of recorded history. "God
has never left Himself without a witness"; and
even in the ethnic religions of antiquity, or the
paganism that preceded the Incarnation, or in
the pseudo-religious philosophies of the East,
the dim witnesses of God have made for them-
selves out of art in all its forms witnesses before
men of whatever shadowy glimmerings of truth
were given to them. Babylon, Assyria, Egypt,
all wrought for themselves great art, but always
the beginnings were at the hands of priests and
prophets, and however great the secular art
that ensued, always its greatest glories were
achieved in religious service. And so through
history, century after century, through the

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fastidious and exquisite temples of Greece and
the half-barbarian "grandeur that was Rome,"
to the solemn basilicas of Constantine, the
golden and glimmering shrines of Justinian, the
grave majesty of the churches of Charlemagne,
the towering abbeys of Frank and Norman
Benedictines, the first fine Gothic of the Cister-
cian monasteries, to the crowning glory of the
mediaeval cathedrals of France and the abbeys
of England. Even when civilization was break-
ing down under the assaults of the new pagan-
ism after the exile at Avignon and the fall of
Constantinople, it was religion, whatever we
may think of its momentary condition, that was
still, through the visible Church, leading the
van in the building-up of a new though fictitious
form of art ; and it was not until the Reforma-
tion that, for the first time in the history of the
world, organized religion turned against art,
and, denying its virtue or its efficacy, devoted
itself to the destruction of what it had created
and what had been, in solemn fact, one of its
most potent agencies of operation. And then
followed, also for the first time in history, that
ominous thing, the extinction of all art, of every

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kind whatever, as an attribute of human life, as
a heritage of civilization. Indeed, what actu-
ally ensued was worse even than extinction : it
was the substitution, first, of something with
little beauty and with no art at all in place of
the perfect beauty man already had perfectly
made manifest; then the wild yet deliberate
beating down and utter destruction of these
dumb memorials of a great material and spirit-
ual past; and finally, the setting-up, for the
worship of degenerate society, of the brazen
images of ugliness. A stranger and more omin-
ous thing than this history has hardly recorded.
We have seen, and many times, the perishing
of great civilizations : the flowering of art during
some epoch of splendid development, and its
slow dissolution after that epoch had yielded
to the law of the world, which is the law of de-
generation, in opposition to the law of the
spirit, which is the law of regeneration and de-
velopment. We have seen the exquisite art of
Greece go down in the wake of Greek civiliza-
tion, while the art of Rome that followed on was
immeasurably less noble and complete. In its
turn we have beheld the fall of Rome and the

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coming of the Dark Ages, with even here, at the
height of such culture as came during a barbar-
ian cycle, art that was art still, though less ad-
mirable even than that which developed under
"the drums and tramplings of three conquests/'
Then at last this also was gone with the dying
of the "false dawn" of Carlovingian civiliza-
tion, and night fell again, deeper than ever
before ; night that was to be dispelled for cen-
turies, a little later, when the mingling of
Northern blood with the great life-current of a
regenerated monasticism was to make possible
the first great triumph of Christian civilization.
Time upon time it has seemed that art has
been lost ; but even in the deepest depths it has
struggled for light, and never once has it been
false to its own nature. There might be little,
and that little poor, but its impulse was always
right, until that great world-drama (the three
acts of which we call the Renaissance, the
Reformation, and the Revolution) took posses-
sion of the stage ; and since then the tale has
been different. The Renaissance, by its false
doctrine of the sufficiency of the intellect, set up
a scholastic and artificial theory of the nature
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THE MINISTRY OF ART

of beauty and the function of art ; the Reforma-
tion, by its substitution of a manufactured
religion for that of God's Revelation, dried up
the springs of spiritual energy which are the
source of the art-impulse ; the Revolution shook
the very foundations of religious society and
established economic conditions in which art
could no longer endure; while all these cata-
clysms, as a by-product of their activity, an-
nihilated a good half of the monuments of
past generations, and denied the virtue of the
poor remainder they did not destroy.

It was the greatest break-down on record,
and the results were commensurate with the
cause. Art was gone, for the first time in his-
tory; and with the opening of the nineteenth
century not only was the world more empty
than ever before, but there were false gods in
every shrine, hideous idols of the worship of
ugliness and lies. Here and there was a voice
crying in the wilderness, but when it became
audible over the din of an uncouth saturnalia,
it was the voice of a painter, a poet, or a musi-
cian; sculptor and architect had "none so mean
as to do them reverence."

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And now the wheel has come full turn, and
everywhere is a feverish effort at artistic res-
toration. We are ashamed, and we seek for
the wherewithal to cover our aesthetic naked-
ness ; more than this, the old virus is working
itself out : the fruits of the Renaissance, Refor-
mation, and Revolution have been eaten, the
good is by way of being assimilated, the evil
rejected, and the gray dawn of a new day light-
ens on the hills. In spite of the curial inepti-
tudes of Rome, the invincible Erastianism of
the East, the uncertainties of our own estate ; in
spite of the momentary triumph of atheism and
anarchy in France, the outbreak of unearthly
heresies and superstitions in Russia and New
England, and the apparent victory of secular-
ism in education ; in spite of the ethical, politi-
cal, industrial, and economic disorder, the doom
of the post-Renaissance era is sealed, and in the
midst of all our uncertainties one thing is glori-
ously certain, and that is that a new epoch is
dawning when religion will once more achieve
its due supremacy over man and nations, the
Catholic Faith regain its beneficent dominion
over the souls that God made in His own image.
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THE MINISTRY OF ART

It is this conviction, whether avowed or hid-
den, whether conscious or latent, that lies at
the base of the great turning of religion to art
once more in these latest days. Not the desire
of emulation, not the hunger for refinements of
culture, but the dawning consciousness that
each one of the arts is by right a paladin of the
new crusade, that they are all, by the nature
given them by God, soldiers of the Cross, and
that their hearts and their swords are not
lightly to be despised in the new winning of the
world to Christ.

Michelet has somewhere said that "history is
only a series of resurrections " ; and this is what
the Church is doing to-day — returning to the
old and tried methods of the past, when the
builder and painter and carver, the musician
and poet and maker of liturgies, marched side
by side with the prophet and monk and mis-
sionary into the strongholds of barbarism and
infidelity, putting into visible and audible
form the faith they practised.

No other course was possible. Since beauty
is the revelation of all that lies beyond the hori-
zon of our finite vision, art, which is beauty

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organized and made operative, becomes the
great language of the soul, and therefore it is
crushed, mutilated, impotent when it remains
in bondage to material things, while without it
religion is shorn of one of her greatest agencies
of self-expression and of influence. This is the
meaning of the wonderful revival of religious
art of every kind that began simultaneously
with the spiritual upheaval of the Oxford
Movement, and has kept pace, step by step,
with the growing consciousness of her Catholic
heritage which, for now three quarters of a cen-
tury, has penetrated the Church of the English-
speaking race. This is the meaning of the new
life in religious painting and sculpture ; in glass-
making and metal-working and embroidery; in
architecture, music, and ceremonial. We look,
sometimes with amusement, sometimes with
horror, on the ecclesiastical fabrics of the early
nineteenth century, on the barren and hideous
forms, the apologetic music, the thin and enerv-
ated ceremonial. Now we, and not we alone,
but all Protestantism with us, are building
churches as near in spirit and in form to those
of the great Middle Ages as the somewhat lim-
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ited capacities of our architects will permit : we
demand the glass of Chartres and York, the
sculptures of Amiens and Wells, the gold and
silver and brass and iron of Hildesheim and
Venice and Dalmatia, the pictures of Umbria,
the music of Milan, the vestments of the treas-
uries of Spain. Daily our ceremonial grows
richer and more beautiful, and its widening
ring takes in, one after another, men and places
that but a few years ago were staunch defenders,
if not of Calvinistic theology, at least of Calvin-
istic art. Even the old shibboleth of "Roman-
izing, Romanizing," is heard no more, for its
absurdity is recognized, and the basic impulse
of religious art is seen to be other than a pre-
liminary symptom of disaffection. It is not
because we want something that Rome alone
has got, but because at last we know we have it
also, the thing itself, that we return to our sis-
ter, Beauty, and call upon her once again to cry
to all the manifold products of God's hand,
"O all ye works of the Lord, bless ye the Lord,
praise Him and magnify Him forever."

The theological peculiarities of Geneva and
Edinburgh can adequately be communicated by

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the spoken and unadorned word: the marvel-
lous mysteries of the Catholic Faith breathe
themselves into the spiritual consciousness
through the mediumship of art.

To every movement, then, toward the
restoration of diplomatic relations between
religion and art, the Church must give her
earnest support. Everywhere the artist and
the craftsman are looking wistfully toward the
old-time mistress of their art. Usually they
have lost their faith, and they are not wholly to
blame for it ; but in their art lies the possibility
of their conversion, or at least the assurance
that, accepted, it will be easier for those that
follow to regain their faith, or hold it whole and
intact. To all the workers in all the arts the
Church must now go, saying, "We made you;
we forsook you ; we are sorry; and now we need
you again : give us of your best that we may
offer it on the altar of God."

"The best." Here, perhaps, lies the kernel of
it all. For centuries we have taken the worst,
and as little of that as possible ; now we take
anything that comes along, not from perver-
sity but from lack of knowledge, and from a

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certain innocent trustfulness that takes a man
— and particularly an artist — at his own
valuation, or at least at the valuation placed
upon him by some person or thing of which we
stand in awe. Late Italian Mass music and
decadent ceremonial ; plausible and loudly her-
alded stained glass of barbaric splendour ; com-
mercial products in metal and woodwork, sac-
charine statues — sometimes of plaster — of
the type dear to the heart of the Latin "par-
rocchio"; imitation Gothic architecture — also
sometimes of plaster, with a little harmless,
necessary steel or iron encased within. We want
the real thing, the real beauty, the real art, but
the trouble is we sometimes can be induced to
accept a substitute, while sometimes also the
best of us know too well what we like, and this
is always dangerous.

" The first battle has been won — the battle
for Beauty; we know now that this we must
have ; now let us establish the victory by win-
ning the battle for Truth.

And this does not mean the easy victory over
plaster and papier-m&che, gold-leaf and lac-
quer, imitation marble, steel covered with con-

236

THE MINISTRY OF ART

crete, and all the other substitutes that are now
so tempting to the eye hungry for beauty com-
bined with the emaciated purse. It means the
far more arduous battle for the fundamental
truth of aesthetic ideals, for art that shall be
significant, and vital with the breath of the
great art of the past.

It is not the fault of the priest, or the building
committee, or the altar society that here we so
often fail ; it is the fault, in great measure, of the
artist ; but I honestly believe he himself is only
a victim of that most pernicious and devil-
engendered principle of the present age, namely,
"Give the people what they want." Of course,
any society that acts on that basis has its end-
ing in the pit of perdition ; but this we do not
see with perfect clarity, and so the artist pros-
titutes his God-given art to the false ideal of
what is demanded of him. He is wrong; no one
nowadays wants anything but the best in art —
which is one of the most encouraging signs in
a dubious day; but this demand is not always
couched in unmistakable terms. Be specific,
make it clear that you look on the artist as
a minister in minor orders, and that on him
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THE MINISTRY OF ART

alone rests the obligation to make his work, in
however small a degree, a revelation of spiritual
truth, and I do not think he will fail you.

I do not mean that as yet any artist can
safely be given his head ; least of all, the ar-
chitect. Art is still in bondage to that spirit of
the Renaissance-Reformation-Revolution the
Church has now freed herself from to so sur-
prising a degree; but I do mean that the time
has come when a principle only may safely be
enunciated, the details being left wholly to the
artist. It is not so long ago that priests who had
read Parker's "Glossary," or some handbook
on church-building, or had spent a summer in
England, felt it their duty to instruct an archi-
tect as to the working-out of his plans, even
in some cases demanding that some church or
other in England should be duplicated. Well,
this was bad enough, but I dare say better than
the terrible things that might have happened —
and did happen, for that matter — when the
architect was permitted to give free rein to his
fervid imagination. In any case, this time has
gone, and in spite of the schools of architecture
there are now many artists of every kind — and

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THE MINISTRY OF ART

paiticularly architects — who may safely be
trusted to do honourable and competent work.
Nevertheless, there is still one function that the
priest, or, better still, the Church, must per-
form, and that is the laying-down of the funda-
mental law of all religious art.

What is this law ? It is a very simple one,
namely, that religious art must express, not the
predilections of one man, or the arbitrary the-
ories of a school, but the Church herself; in
other words, a divine institution unchangeable
in essentials, infinitely adaptable in everything
else. And this means that whatever is done
must be faithful, first of all, to the universal
laws of Christian art ; then, that it must pre-
serve an unbroken continuity with the art of
our own blood and race; and finally, that it
must declare itself of our own time as to the
accidents of its expression.

Several principles develop from this: under
the first heading we are forced back five cen-
turies to the time when Christian art came to
an end ; across the desert wastes of Protestant-
ism and the opulent gardens of neo-paganism,
back to the Middle Ages, when the living
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THE MINISTRY OF ART

stream, that had refreshed a thirsty land from
before the days of Hellas and Byzantium, disap-
peared below the surface into some subterra-
nean channel wherefrom comes now only the
murmur of troubled waters impatient for
release. So far as the art expression of religion
is concerned, nothing has happened since the fall
of Constantinople in which we need display any
particular interest. Back to medievalism we
must go, and begin again. And as to continuity,
that indispensable succession that alone insures
the vitality of art while it parallels that apostol-
ical succession which alone insures the divine
vitality of the Catholic Church, it means that
we are not at liberty to pick and choose among
the tentative styles of a crescent Christianity,
but that we must return to the one style our
forefathers at last created for the full expres-
sion of their blood and faith. Lombard we may
like, or Byzantine, or Norman, or Romanesque,
but they are not for us, for they were stepping-
stones only, not accomplished facts. Those that
were of the South or the East are of alien blood.
Our Church and we ourselves are of the North,
northern. We are of them that purged the
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world of a great paganism, dead, and infecting
all Europe with the miasma of its corruption.
Frank and Teuton, Norman and Burgundian,
Celt and Saxon and Dane are in our blood and
bone and our very flesh, and for the major part
of what we are we owe an everlasting debt to
this fierce blood of the Baltic shores, tamed and
turned into righteous courses by the monks of
St. Benedict, St. Robert, St. Bernard, and St.
Norbert.

We forget it all, for a time, but we return at
last, and as now perhaps the most significant
thing in the development of our own moiety of
the Church is the restoration of that monasti-
cism which was the engendering fire of Chris-
tian medievalism, so by inevitable analogy we
return to the art that blossomed in the gardens
the monks made in the wilderness ; to the heri-
tage of our name and race, the Gothic of
France and England and of all our own north
countries, washed by our own north seas. Yet
there is danger in this — the danger of archaeo-
logical dry rot. We must begin somewhere ; we
no longer have within ourselves the power of
artistic generation ; and even if we had, if we
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could produce an art like that of Paris or Can-
terbury or York out of our own inner selves, we
should lack the right, for we must above all
things show that our religion stretches, without
a break, through mediaevalism and the Dark
Ages, to Calvary. Gothic architecture and
Gothic art do this, for in them are gathered up
and perfected all the tentative efforts of all
Christendom ; but if we stop there we deny the
Faith, for we know that in accordance with the
promise of Christ He is with His Church even
unto the end of the world, and that through the
abiding presence of the Holy Spirit she is being
led into all truth. The Christian life is a life of
progressive development ; the life of the Church
is no other ; and little by little new aspects of old
wonders are opened before our eyes. Therefore,
our art must content itself with no finalities ; it
must grow ever and onward, from the highest
point thus far it has reached, the mountain
summit of mediaevalism, from whose cloud-
encircled top dim visions already unroll of still
loftier summits, accessible at last, once we for-
sake the mistaken path that long ago opened
out, broad and inviting, only to disappear in the
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morass of artificial paganism. And so our new
art, refounded on the old, must be mobile,
adaptable, sensitive to all righteous influences,
repellent of all that are evil ; not a simulacrum,
but a living thing.

Is this too much to ask? Greater has been
before, and with faith we may move mountains.

The part that art is to play in the rebuilding
of a new civilization is hardly to be estimated in
words, and of all the arts the one that is des-
tined to do the greatest work is architecture.
Why this is so I confess I do not know, but so
it has been in the past. There is some strange
quality in architecture that makes its spiritual
efficiency dominant over the other arts. Music
is more poignant, painting more human in its
appeal, while each art in its turn exerts some
special influence beyond the province of the
others. Architecture binds them in one, har-
monizing, controlling, directing them, and lift-
ing them up in a great structural Te Deum.

A perfect church, within whose walls is pass-
ing the ordered pageantry unnumbered genera-
tions have built up in beauty, and through the
seven arts, to do honour and reverence to the

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Creator and Redeemer of the world, there
present in the Holy Sacrament of the altar, is
the greatest work of man. Into it enters every
art raised now to the highest point of achieve-
ment, and as architecture, painting, and sculp-
ture assemble for the building of the tabernacle
itself, so do music, poetry, the drama, and cere-
monial gather into another great work of art,
that prefigures the infinite wonder of Heaven
itself.

And we threw it all away, once, in our blind-
ness of heart and contempt of God's word
and commandment : blowing up the matchless
fabrics with gunpowder; beating out the
jewelled windows and shattering with hammer
and axe the fretted altars and shrines and tombs
and chiselled images of saints and martyrs, even
the Crucifix itself, the sign of our Redemption ;
filching the jewels from vestments and sacred
vessels, casting consecrated gold and silver into
the melting-pot, turning copes and chasubles
into bed-hangings, and altar-cloths into chair-
cushions, leaving the few churches we did not
destroy barren, empty, desolated.

Now we are doing what we can by way of
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amendment. We are handicapped by the deeds
of our fathers, and by their consequences, but
the restoration must be accomplished, however
arduous the effort.

And the reward is worthy the effort. Create
in imagination the figure of what may be again:
cathedrals like those of Paris and Chartres and
Gloucester and Exeter; sculptures like the
marshalled saints of Amiens and Wells, pic-
tures and altar-pieces like those of Giotto and
Fra Angelico; windows that rival those of
Bourges and York; the beating of sublime
Gregorian chants like the echo of heavenly
harmonies ; and ceremonial that absorbs half of
the regenerated arts, composing them into a
whole that is the perfection of all that man can
do to honour in material and sensible form the
central mystery of the Catholic Faith.

Once more at the hand of man all the works
of the Lord shall praise Him and magnify Him
forever, and from every cathedral or monastery
or parish church shall go out the vast, subtle,
insistent missionary influence of art, again
restored to her due place as the handmaid of
religion ; breaking down that pride of intellect
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THE MINISTRY OF ART

that will not yield to intellectual attack; win-
ning souls hungry but defiant; dissolving the
barriers that man in his insolence has reared to
make of no avail the prayer of Christ that all
His children might be made one ; manifesting to
the world the Absolute Truth and Beauty that
are the Revelation of God. Architecture, with
all the arts, is the God-given language of
religion. It has been too long in bondage to the
world ; let it now serve God again through the
Holy Catholic Church.

THE END

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