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-

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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-

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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-

162



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 ARCHITECTURE 1

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

172



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

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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