bid adieu to Art, to its surprises, its freshness, its thrills, its eternal variety corresponding to the eternal variety of creative moods. And then to think of the dulness, the monotony of the old things vamped up to suit new conditions. And how can we behold otherwise than with consternation and despair the robbery of the beautiful old, to decorate the questionable new. Mantels, walls, ceilings-alas, my pupils, I have spoken to you before of this vandalism, this acquiescence in impotency, this doing what incompetent Romans did—this despoiling of Greece to embellish Rome. But these are dithyrambs, pardonable, perhaps, in the pages of a letter.

IV

IF there be anything more interesting than another in our land it is our so-called cottage architecture, sharing with our steelcage structures the admiration of foreigners. Many a country house have I seen that has been planned by a master's hand, suited to its rustic environment, suited to the needs of the client, admirably adapted to our extremes of temperature, decorated fittingly and structurally by an artistic use of material, by play of light and shade, by study of sky-line, by skilful adaptation of nature's resources, and perhaps a modicum of formal gardening to give the necessary contrastnot a ridiculous travesty of the gardens of the Villa Lante or of Versailles and, withal, no columns cribbed from the books. Your attention is called to this cottage architecture because it illustrates most aptly the principles of good design, of free impulse, controlled by erudition, expressive of our needs, habits, tastes. In other words, it is a living thing. While the multi-storied business building is not always a model of beauty, owing to commercial exactions rather than to lack of taste on the architect's part, yet the new forms and distribution of the masses imposed by novel conditions have been at times very adroitly and beautifully rendered by ingenious men. Certainly they are far more vital and interesting than the dreary and costly monumental buildings on which legislatures and universities are lavishing millions dreary platitudes, copies of copies, shadows of shadows, lifeless masses, dead at their very birth.

V

JUST at present the world of decorative design is divided into two hostile camps, the pro-academic and the anti-academic; the original versus the traditional; those who are inspired exclusively by nature and feeling, and those who calmly and coldly follow precedent. Strife is wholesome, though neither side may be altogether right. Out of the turmoil often emerges the very acme of excellence, the works of assimilative men, men respectful of older tradition, creative men guided by common-sense, men that seek the juste milieu as all the great sane geniuses have ever done.

Your attention has been called in the first part of this letter to eloquent examples of good design, to the works of Majano, Rossellino, Robbia, Civitale. These artists invented-here transposing traditional forms into new conceits, there adapting nature to architectural exigencies--but ever designing freely, with feeling, with personality, and always in an erudite way, for without erudition we are as nothing. Is poetry imaginable that is heedless of scholarly measure? What would the metrical effect of an epic be, composed of a mixture of heroic iambics, hendecasyllables and alexandrines in no ordained sequence? What would a sonnet be were it made up of fourteen unscanable, rhymeless lines? Yet we have something very much like this in the unscholarly, freakish work that is passed off to-day as Art Nouveau, and which can be found in nearly all the illustrated art magazines.

Art Nouveau ! There never has been, nor ever will be an art nouveau in the sense that its disciples would have us believe, unless there is to be a Man Nouveau. Human taste is essentially the result of aggregated experience, and the old man must be taken into account. There may indeed be novelty, but not necessarily art. Follow the course of art down the perspective of years from its infancy to the present day, and you will never find a "new art" at any specified moment. It is a gradual evolution. If at times a new art has seemed to burst suddenly into being, it is only because the missing links have been undetected. Archæology has taught us this much, and let us be grateful. The geniuses added their grain of personality to accumulated knowledge, not a great deal, but enough to give interest and the personal note, the

sine qua non of all great things; but none of them ever dreamed of throwing off the past and starting ab initio. Yet this is just what the clamorer for new things would do. They exact too much. They throw off too much. If they knew more, if they retained more, they would give more. Nor do they seem to have any sense of the humorous. To the uninitiated this lack of humor is less obvious in their decorative design where the figure is eliminated. But where there are figures, how ludicrous they often are! Lanky, malarious, grotesque; affected even to absurdity! And their decorative forms are ludicrous, too. On the table before me there lies an amusing reproduction of a restless interior, the latest expression perhaps of Art Nouveau. On its wall a stringy scheme swirls from wainscot to ceiling in fatuous lines. Liberated telegraph wires, snarled and swayed by the storm, seem to be the fundamental motive of another decorative scheme. On still another wall there is whimsically placed a mass of pseudo-Japanese forms that violate all decorative decency. Beneficent revolutions, we are told, must be accompanied by violence and bloodshed. Then let us hope that these anarchistic vagaries may be the precursors of the millennium, for we must deem them something akin to violence and bloodshed."

There are plenty of new things to be done on guaranteed lines, plenty of new inspirations to be cajoled from nature if she be humored and studied. The expressions of them must be very largely in terms of the past, modified to meet new thought and feeling. Men must be taught personally to observe and feel, if they ever are to do living things. Academicians fail when they look and feel with altruistic eye and heart. This is hopeless. But equally hopeless is the inept emancipation from all previous experience, the reliance on the ill-regulated impulse of the moment. Experience has taught us that Beauty implies order, choice, harmonious arrangement-never chaos. Beauty is the all in all, but it must be a living beauty, not a pale semblance of the past; it cannot be either dull on the one hand, or licentious on the other.

VI

THE question may very properly be asked, what is the standard of beauty and who sets it? Not such an easy question to answer, after all; for we are creatures of fashion and

The

fads; apt to like the habitual, or the vogue of the moment. Unfortunately we can accustom ourselves, through sheer power of habit, to like things that are fundamentally ugly. That is a danger against which we are obliged to strive daily. Then, too, we are often dragooned into ephemeral admirations by an enthusiastic minority of possessed men who make a great noise. true answer to the question is, that the accumulated taste of cultivated generations sets the standard Estimates of individual genius may vary with the centuries, but it is safe to assert that civilized man has accepted the supremacy of certain works, almost from the dawn of art and for certain definite reasons. What these reasons are cannot be given here. It must suffice to say that one of them is Law, or Order, and another is the Personal Inspiration.

Examined in detail, without reference to the whole, some inspired works may seem to approach perilously near the ugly, whether expressed in terms of music, poetry, painting, architecture, or the plastic arts. The creative artist not unfrequently strikes harshly to prepare for the oncoming harmony, to touch an almost brutal note to give the greater value to the sweet, to tone darkly to enhance the light, to weave the involved to heighten the simple. These apparent aberrations are committed with just intent. They are not the lawless expressions of untrained minds bent on novelty at any price; they are the deliberate efforts of the artist to use these expedients to make the ensemble of his work more perfect. For he knows that this work must be dominated by Beauty, and by a beauty peculiar to itself, if it is to survive. The question is daily asked why this production lives and that perishes; why certain operas, books, pictures are still listened to, read, or admired. It is because they are vitally, feelingly, beautiful. The world has always loved, and will always love the creator of beautiful, impassioned things. No homage that it may render him seems excessive. We may insist that this is a hard-headed, scientific age, not an emotional or romantic