His ornament is usually very flat; and it is at its best executed in either terra-cotta or metal, or some material suggesting a thin covering.

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The century just closed witnessed the culmination of the first great wave of music-sense and musical expression of which we have record; it witnessed the growth and what now seems the decline of a renaissance of the pictorial arts, inferior indeed to that which closed the middle-ages, but impressive in its results, nevertheless. The musical wave reached its height in Germany: the pictorial renaissance centred in France; but a fact that must not be overlooked is this: that with the spread of the modern means of communication of thought and matter, in all essentials sectional distinctions are being wiped out, except those arising from climate and other natural conditions, even the influence of national temperament having been reduced to a minimum by the railroad and the telegraph.

The result of this will be that all art of the future must tend toward the expression of the modern cosmopolitan spirit, rather than a distinctively national idea, and that the architectural renaissance so much desired will sweep without much variation about the whole world, reaching its culminating point among the people that has best appreciated the modern idea of life as shelt ered within walls. Whether this shall be our own land it is too early to say; but hitherto, at least, America is the great modern nation in the external activities, and has already given its name to the wholesale nature of modern methods. Consider only the case of those young Norsemen, several hundreds in number, who, some years ago, left their sweethearts in the land of their fathers, while they came to this country to prepare the home where they might live on better terms with fortune than elsewhere. In the far Northwest, beyond the great lakes, they laid out their farms and built their houses, and then, three hundred or more strong, they chartered a steamer. Consider that steamer, leaving our

shores, carrying with her as her sole burden three hundred young men, each going to his marriage day; consider her again as she returns; she brings back three hundred strong men, and with each his newly wedded wife; strong in number and eager with the hopes of youth, what shall we say to them? What shall we say of all that bears the stamp of the enterprise and vigor which we alternately call modern and American? Shall it be a Doric Column ?* A quotation from some old writer? Shame on us if we have no new words, no new thought springing up to greet the new deed! Our very newspapers-things of a dayhave better grasped the idea of sincerity and have obtained a truer reaction from their surroundings than the builders who build of stone.

The strength of our craft lies, meanwhile, in the leadership of such men as Mr. Sullivan, as workers and as teachers; it lies, as yet hardly awakened, in the efforts of hundreds of earnest men who see the basic principles of living art defining themselves more and more clearly in the works of their leaders, though with but semiarticulate answer in their own work. For it must be remembered that the incommunicable insight of genius is as necessary as just principles; that while a true understanding of the meaning of art can save, it cannot make the true architect, and it is not within the reach of any man's will to stand among those through whom has come, and through whom shall come again, an enduring response to the needs of man through the medium which bounds the province of the artist as archi

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RE American Beaux Art architects con

Asciously or unconsciously engaged in

"Gallicizing" American cities?

A very great number of people say they are doing so; that, whereas the commercial, social and climatic conditions of America differ from those of any other country, and demand and give splendid opportunities for treatment individually American, these Beaux Arts architects are simply repeating, often in an emasculated form, the style which the Frenchmen have evolved for their own and entirely different requirements. That they should do so is treason to the principle upon which the whole Beaux Arts system is founded.

But there is at least one Beaux Arts man in this country who has been always true to the fundamental teaching of his Alma Mater, and that is Louis H. Sullivan, of Chicago. No one can accuse him either of trying to gallicize an American city, or of borrowing designs and apply ing them in a perfunctory manner. Everything that he has touched has the note of freshness and spontaneity, and is distinctively American, because it has grown out of distinctively American conditions and requirements. To put the reader at once in the attitude of knowing something about Mr. Sullivan, let me say that he designed the Auditorium Hotel, in Chicago. His father was an Irishman, his mother a French woman, and he was born and reared in Boston. At the School of Technology in that city he obtained his first professional training, and supplemented it by a course in the École des Beaux Arts in Paris. Heredity, environment and education were all favorable to his development as an architect. He is an artist in the first place, with an exuberance of imagination and craving for the beautiful in art and nature that is quite unusual. His range of artistic sensibility is not confined to his own special medium. Literature, music and nature are sources of beauty which he has drank from. He will take as much pleasure in showing you the photographs of his cottage on the shores of the Gulf of Mexico, and in telling you of his roses and of the way in which the birch trees and pines fling their silhouettes athwart the Southern sunsets, as he will in discussing his giant skyscrapers. For the life work of this man-poet, philosopher and worshipper of beauty-is chiefly to build office-buildings in the most material city in the universe, where in the strictest sense busi

ness is business and money is what talks loudest. In the completeness with which he conforms to the economic demands of his position, one may see the influence of his French ancestry and New England training. But in reality it is due to something far broader. It is the result of the poetic and imaginative side of his nature. The noblest faculty of poetry is to divine the relation between the actual and the ideal, between what one must do and what one longs to do. His imagination has reached up and caught at the possibilities and the meaning which are enshrined in those huge office structures. To him they are not merely buildings, to be deprecated for their negation of all that has been held beautiful in the architecture of the past. They are, or may be made, vital embodiments of the colossal energy and aspiring enterprise of American life. fact that this piling of story upon story has its origin in the commercial necessities of real estate and in the congestion of population within certain limited areas, does not prevent him from seeing the spiritual possibilities which lurk, undreamed of by most people, in this inert mass of apparently brutal materialism.

"What is the chief characteristic of the tall office building?" asks Mr. Sullivan in one of his published articles, and he answers: "It is lofty. This loftiness is to the artist nature its thrilling aspect. It must be tall, every inch of it tall. The force and power of altitude must be in it; the glory and pride of exaltation must be in it. It must be every inch a proud and soaring thing, rising in sheer exultation that from bottom to top it is a unit without a dissenting line-that it is the new, the unexpected, the eloquent peroration of most bold, most sinister, most forbidding conditions. The man who designs in this spirit and with this sense of responsibility to the generation he lives in must be no coward, no denier, no bookworm, no dilettante. He must live of his life and for his life in the fullest, most consummate sense. He must realize at once and with the grasp of inspiration that the problem of the tall office building is one of the most stupendous, one of the most magnificent opportunities that the Lord of Nature in his benefices has ever offered to the proud spirit of man."

This is how Mr. Sullivan views his work from the imaginative and æsthetic side. His attitude toward the practical issues is equally noteworthy.

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The majority of architects regard the problem of the office-building as one of compromise between the practical and the aesthetic. Mr. Sullivan, on the other hand, fully and frankly recognizes that the root of the whole matter is practical, evolves it consistently in a practical direction, and finds that the æsthetic qualities in each case grow naturally out of the special practical require ments. His theoretical and working formula is that "Form Follows Function." He first gives the business man exactly what he asks for, and out of this agglomeration of necessities his artistmind gets the inspiration for the form, which will make a monumental mass of the whole and give to each part its appropriate decoration. As a decorator, no man in the country comes near him. Ornament emanates from his brain as spontaneously and exuberantly as notes from a songbird's throat. But here, again, form follows function. His ornament is never for its own sake, but always is an expression of the special purpose or function of the space decorated. The inexhaustible variety of his ornament has proved so fascinating, that many students have overlooked the big qualities of his work, of which the decoration is only a part. His true title to

fame is that he has grasped the possibilities of the office-building more fully, more resolutely and with greater elevation of purpose, than any other man. While his buildings are practical to the minutest detail, they are characterized by a treatment that is generally very simple and unaffected, but always monumental. With him there is no contention between the practical and the æsthetic. The useful finds its own artistic expression; the result is æsthetically satisfactory, because it has satisfied the requirements of necessity. So he does not try to adopt the design of a three-story Italian palace of the sixteenth century to a fifteen-story office-building of modern America, or apply to the same problem, whose chief feature is height, the principles derived from classical buildings, in which a long, low, horizontal effect was striven for. His buildings are modern and American in purpose, spirit and appearance. And he never repeats himself. Each problem gets its own separate solution. The simplicity of greatness, the fitness of a thing that has grown out of itself, the inherent dignity of what nobly seems its place in life, belong to all the examples of his work.

CHARLES H. CAFFIN.