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
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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
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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-
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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
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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
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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 ART 1
\ 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
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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-
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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-
221
THE MINISTRY OF ART
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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THE MINISTRY OF ART
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-
223
THE MINISTRY OF ART
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