uses in modern ways"; and is not this the same practical formula as Mr. Cram's? We confess that we should like to know what know what the different "principles" are upon which two excellent architects who hold such different attitudes towards the Beaux Arts gospel would actually go to work in dealing with the same problem.

Mr. Flagg then sees "unmistakable signs" of what Mr. Cram "promptly and decidedly" denies signs of, the evolution of a distinctly national style of architecture. Everything up to this has been illogical and not American, save only the Colonial style, whose principles did not take deep enough root to survive. This promises evolution because it is not a fashion, a manner, but a method. Against it, making against the formation of an architecture of our own, is what Mr. Flagg calls the archæological force, the mere imitation of foreign buildings and ancient styles; and he arraigns the Chicago Exhibition as a conspicuous product. It appears that those of us who admired the White City, and especially those who reared it, were guilty of a "sickly sentimentalism" which threatens all real "virility."

Mr. Carrère, who is also, we think, a Beaux Arts man, does not speak with Mr. Flagg's assurance, but he notes as the most encouraging features of our present architectural work the facts that "composition is being recognized as paramount to detail" and that we are beginning to solve our own problems in Our Own way instead of adapting to them the past solutions of past problems. It is, we think, with something the same feeling that Mr. Gilbert believes he sees much work here that is distinctively American and is contributing to the production of a modern type of architecture. But, "for myself," he says, "I prefer the development of art as a whole, in its larger sense, rather than the development of

an American art, and do not greatly sympathize with the desire for a strictly national art. If the architecture of our country is beautiful and appropriate, the question of originality will take care of itself."

The most "distinctively American" or "indigenous" man of the group is Mr. Sullivan. He does not see many signs of an indigenous architecture among us, but the opportunities and inspirations for it are so great that its delay surprises him. It is not possible, he feels, that from a free and democratic people like ourselves, "possessed of their own bodies, possessed of their own souls, self-centred, deep of aspiration, there shall not some day suspire as an exhalation an architectural art germane to those gifts, responsive to that throb." The architecture which we have inherited is "feudal or monarchical, an architecture of the governed for the governing." When American architects become American in thought and sympathy, then we shall have the art forms of a free people, instead of those of a not free people. "Before we can have an indigenous architecture, the American architect must himself become indigenous; . . . he must absorb into his heart and brain his own country and his own people."

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We suspect that Mr. Sullivan draws largely on his imagination for his facts. Certain castellated structures among us may be "feudal or monarchical" in their architectural spirit-notably the massive, ostentatious stone armories which are multiplying so fast in our cities; and we are glad that they are-if so be, they may the more forcibly remind our people that they do not harmonize with our modern civilization and ought to be swept out of existence. But there is nothing "feudal or monarchical" about a Greek temple nor a Gothic church nor a Renaissance library nor an Elizabethan mansion nor

a Flemish town hall. These styles sprang from the people, not from kings; they attained their greatest perfection among the freest people and in the freest places of their times; the great creative epochs were epochs of freedom. The American architect may draw as freely upon them all as the American scholar may draw upon Eschylus and Dante and Shakespeare, and be quite sure that his "throbbing" as a democrat is not thereby endangered, and that he still "possesses his own body and his own soul."

Yet while this is so, and while the American which Mr. Sullivan talks is a little Kentuckian and large, we should be slow, indeed, to minify the main point of his sermon, which is one that we are ourself much given to preaching. The American intellectual worker in any field, if he is to be valid as an American, if he is to exert any strong or original influence, if he is to touch the people, if he is to manifest "virility," as Mr. Flagg would say, if, indeed, he has virility, will and must be a believing and genuine American, a man with a country, lovingly at home in his country's life and history, and informed and inspired by what is genuine and great in his country's genius and vocation. Have not Emerson and Lowell told us this with power, and does not the history of our literature make it plain? Has not our painting for the most part been weak and unimportant because our painters have not been told it with sufficient power? It does not mean that the American artist or the American poet or patriot must be a patriot in the same narrow sense that the Greek once was or the Jew or the Venetian or Virginian, or whilom the good American. Civilization now, indeed, becomes one as never before, and the good American, the adequate American, to-day is a citizen of the world before he is an American, as he is an American before he is a Virginian or a Massachusetts man. The nation is not less a fact, and patriotism

is not less a virtue and inspiration; and it is no less true that the virile artist must smack of the soil, must have roots, have the open eye, and look forward and not backward. But this, it seems to us, is an imperative which concerns subject matter more than style, and concerns the style of the architect much less than that of the painter or the writer. As an imperative for the architect, it seems to us to tell him little more than to be sincere and honest, to adapt his buildings practically and well to the real uses for which they are intended; as for the rest, for detail and ornament and "style," the most original of them need not fear culture or the past and need not gasp for something, the like of which was never seen in effete Europe. "If the architecture of our country is beautiful and appropriate," we repeat Mr. Gilbert's sensible and simple word, "the question of originality will take care of itself"; and so will the question of "indigenousness" and the distinctively American.

Unaffected means two things; it means uninfluenced, and it means genuine and sincere. An uninfluenced school of modern architecture in America we shall not have and do not want. Sincere and genuine architecture is precisely what we want; and it is in promoting thought of this and devotion to it that the value of such a body of frank and fine opinion as that which the T Square Club has brought together lies. There is now at last in America a really great body of highly cultivated architects, and there is in the body a great sum total of good thought, good taste, public spirit and ambition. There is already in the body a splendid esprit de corps, a spirit more and more like the old guild spirit; and from this we have the right to expect much and to demand much. We need much from these men, because they can do more than any other body

of men for the interests of public beauty in America,-and those interests to-day are of great moment. It is grateful and most hopeful at such a juncture to know that all of the architects whose names we love or whose names stand for something, however they may differ among themselves about the styles, are at one in denouncing the vulgar, grotesque, and meretricious creations with which our cities are so burdened and in aiming in claiming, at least, to aim at things which are pure and honest and strong and beautiful.

Simplicity, where simplicity will serve, is what beauty always commands; and pretentiousness and ostentation have been the peculiar vices of the things most vicious in the American architecture of the last thirty years. We have been the victims of the architects of whom Mr. Flagg speaks as those who "think they are called upon to do something wonderful and succeed in doing it." The plea for simplicity to-day is a welcome plea; and so certainly is the plea against this nothing that we have said must be construed to militate for special affection towards every good thing of native growth. Association itself counts for much, becoming oftentimes a valid factor in æsthetic enjoyment; and when the home product furnishes a good basis for development and further proceedings, we are fortunate. "Last summer, looking from a moving train in Vermont," writes Mr. Kelsey, the editor of this excellent T Club catalog, in a letter which lies on our table — and what healthy person does not sympathize with him?"I was struck by the charm of the white village architecture, which was so much more truthful than the affectation in the larger towns where architects had really been employed; the former represented local custom by the carpenter's art much more truthfully. Yesterday, coming down the James

River, I noted how much more architectural the old homesteads along the bank are than the sham displays in modern settlements. What our architects need is a point of view."

The true point of view is that of simplicity and sincerity. Mr. Kelsey's illustrations are of country architecture. We are thinking for the moment chiefly of city architecture; and here it is in the conception of the city or of important sections of it as a whole, more than in the thought of the detail or style of particular buildings, that it seems to us our architects can render us chief service to-day. Into the battle of the styles we shall not enter. We are of those who have a love for almost every style, and feel that there is room for every one in the great modern city, and that the variety, properly managed, must enhance the charm and interest of life. Howells used to think of Venice as he rode out from Boston at evening in the Cambridge horse-car. Why should we not have a real bit of Venice there, utilizing the splendid opportunity which the Charles River Basin gives by treating the whole Cambridge embankment in Venetian Gothic, and this without feeling any necessity for Venetian Gothic in any other quarter of the town? We know the risk we run of the charge of "sickly sentimentalism," and we feel anxiously the pulse of our "virility," as we suggest this Venetianism; yet we take the risk. It would not trouble us to come at some street corner upon a church whose motive was borrowed from the Sainte Chapelle, if half a mile away we had found one with its motive borrowed from St. Stephen's, Walbrook, and in the park half a mile farther on a monument modelled upon the Temple of Vesta. We should be willing to see this square treated in this style, and that street or group of streets in that; but what we do crave is some principle of unity or relation in a given section,

some breadth and largeness of architectural effect.

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That was the charm and virtue of the White City. Mr. Flagg accuses the "out-of-date" character of its architecture and its inconsistency with "common sense." We are not going into polemics with him here, although we think much better of much of the architecture than he does; we doubt exceedingly whether the problem could have been solved half so well in modern French, although we wish that some of the architects who think it could would some time, while waiting for clients, concoct a picture. What we do say is that the general effect was magnificent, vastly finer and more impressive than anything we had seen. before in America; and this was because of the degree of unity there was in it, the breadth and largeness of architectural effect. To most of those who went there it was a revelation. It is not the details of the creation which linger in memory; it is the city as a whole. This lesson of wholeness, of unity and breadth and relation, the shaping imperative of a common purpose, was the lesson of the White City; and it was a lesson which will not be lost upon American architects nor the American people. Why should these cities where we spend our lives be such a hodgepodge, so disobedient to architectural laws, so lacking in all legislation and all plan so far as beauty goes, when that city of a summer was so harmoniously constructed and controlled, and therefore gave us joy? That is the question which it is useful to keep asking; and no body of men, we say, can ask it to such purpose as our architects. It is in creating a demand for this view of the city as an architectural whole, rather than in anxiety about the relative virtues of Romanesque and Renaissance and Yankee, that they can confer their greatest gift upon America to-day

and prove themselves the truest servants of beauty. The architect whom our cities chiefly need to-day must be more than an architect; he must also be an engineer

Such architects are going to appear. They are appearing. The Architectural League of New York recently appointed a committee to study the problem of making New York a truly magnificent and beautiful city, manifesting some unity and plan, some impressive general effect. The report of this committee has been made, and it is noteworthy for a bold and ambitious dealing with this architectural problem of the city such as we have not heretofore been used to. The inspirer of the plan is Mr. Post, the veteran architect, whose great Arts and Manufactures Building at Chicago certainly lacked neither "virility" nor "common sense,' and certainly also had a beauty greater than that of any similar building which we shall see next year at Paris if we may speak upon the strength of the Paris pictures which have already come to

us.

We wonder whether this plan for a more beautiful New York would ever have been born if the White City had never been born. The plan relates to the lower part of the city. It involves the remodelling of the tenement and business districts, would sweep away acres of slums, laying out avenues and boulevards where now are crowded narrow streets and alleys, and would create a great elevated square, with terraces upon its slopes, for a new city hall and other municipal buildings, all having a grand approach from Broadway through a spacious Court of Honor. And this bold and ambitious scheme, we are assured, could be carried out at actual profit to the city, by virtue of the resulting better

ments.

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Boston ought to take up the con

sideration of her beauty and rational arrangement as a city in the same serious way that the subject is being considered in New York. Her architects should take the lead. Boston is a city of such natural character and surroundings as manifestly destine it to be a city of beauty; and its people are most short-sighted and most guilty if they do not with a zeal according to the best available knowledge coöperate with kind and gracious circumstance. The inviting outline of the city, the magnificent water front, the crowning Beacon Hill, the historic Common, presenting at the very centre such commanding opportunity for a veritable Court of Honor and of Beauty as no other city in the land possesses, the greater opportunities still of the Charles River Basin, whose bridges and embankments should all be works of art, combined in noble and harmonious plan, these should well-nigh intoxicate the architects of Boston and the proud citizens of Boston. The time has come when Boston should no longer be content to do things or to have things done in a small and pottering way, but should do things in strong, beautiful and great ways. The whole business portion of the city should be reconstructed on a plan as radical as that which Mr. Post has submitted for New York. The entire section between the two great railway stations, which now determine the business centre of the city for a period very long, should be laid out on rational and beautiful principles, the section from State Street all the way to Chambers Street almost swept away for the sake of better things.

In one of the suburbs of Boston, a year ago, there was a meeting which ought to prove the seed and provocation for similar meetings in every town and city of the land. The enterprising and artistic young men of the town held a conference to consider how "the Ideal Watertown" could be

made to take the place of the Watertown which now is. The situation of the village, directly on the bank of the Charles, is all that heart could wish; but man's part in the village has been shockingly done. The young architects and engineers and landscape gardeners submitted their plans for reconstruction; and the pictures and the speeches, all gathered presently into a pamphlet, were stimulating, indeed. We wish that they might stimulate a convention upon the Ideal Boston.

We trust that all architects and all other men taking part in such a conference upon the Ideal Boston may be actuated by that spirit of hatred of sham and pretension and love of sincerity and purity which inspired the recent inquiry of the Philadelphia T Square Club and inspired the answers to it. We trust they may also be actuated by the enthusiasm for architectural unity and breadth, the great thought of the city as a whole. They will at the outset have to consider a very stubborn fact. They will remember last year's fight for Copley Square; they will remember this year's fight for the environment of the State House: and they will think of the long running fight in the long past, stretching on into the future, with Jack and Tom and Will and Dick rising up against each new public interest, in behalf of the heirs of their deceased wives' sisters, having a lien upon this plot or that, forty by eighty, or thirty-five by seventy-six. They may presently ask themselves, more and more of them, whatever their general notion about land laws, whether the time has not come for a general principle to put an end to these pottering fights and this general confusion, and whether common sense does not now prescribe that all land in a city shall be controlled by the city and that the city shall be ordered purely with reference to the public beauty and the public good.