very little thought about the colors which they propose to employ,
making it an after-consideration; but the two things should be
considered synchronously for the best final effect. There is a cryptic
saying that "color is at right angles to form," that is, color is
capable of making surfaces advance toward or recede from the eye, just
as modelling does; and for this reason, if color is used, a great deal
of modelling may be dispensed with. If a receding color is used on a
recessed plane, it deepens that plane unduly; while on the other hand
if a color which refuses to recede--like yellow for example--is used
where depth is wanted, the receding plane and the approaching color
neutralize one another, resulting in an effect of flatness not
intended. The tyro should not complicate his problem by combining
color with high relief modelling, bringing inevitably in the element
of light and shade. He should leave that for older hands and concern
himself rather with flat or nearly flat surfaces, using his modelling
much as the worker in cloisonné uses his little rims of brass--to
confine and define each color within its own allotted area. Then,
as he gains experience, he may gradually enrich his pattern by the
addition of the element of light and shade, should he so decide.
Now as to certain general considerations in relation to the
appropriate and logical use of ceramics in the construction and
adornment of buildings, exterior and interior. In our northern
latitudes care should be taken that ceramics are not used in places
and in ways where the accumulation of snow and ice render the joints
subject to alternate freezing and thawing, for in such case, unless
the joints are protected with metal, the units will work loose in
time. On vertical surfaces such protection is not necessary; the use
of ceramics should therefore be confined for the most part to such
surfaces: for friezes, panels, door and window architraves, and the
like. When it is desirable for æsthetic reasons to tie a series of
windows together vertically by means of some "fill" of a material
different from that of the body of the wall, ceramics lend themselves
admirably to the purpose--better than wood, which rots; than iron,
which rusts; than bronze, which turns black; and than marble, which
soon loses its color and texture in exposed situations of this sort.
On the interior of buildings, the most universal use of ceramics is,
of course, for floors, and with the non-slip devices of various sorts
which have come into the market, they are no less good for stairs.
There is nothing better for wainscoting, and in fact for any surface
whatsoever subject to soil and wear. These materials combine permanent
protection and permanent decoration. But fired by the zeal of the
convert the use of ceramics may be overdone. One easily recalls
entire rooms of this material, floors, walls, ceilings, which are less
successful than as though a variety of materials had been employed. It
is just such variety--each material treated in a characteristic, and
therefore different way--that gives charm to so many foreign churches
and cathedrals: walls of stone, floors of marble, choir-stalls of
carved wood, and rood-screen of metal: it is the difference between
an orchestra of various instruments and a mandolin orchestra or a
saxaphone sextette. Ceramics should never invade the domain of the
plasterer, the mural painter, the cabinet maker. Do not let us, in
our zeal for ceramics, be like Bottom the weaver, eager to play every
part.
Ceramics have, as regards architecture, a distinct and honorable
function. This function should be recognized, taken advantage of, but
never overpassed. They offer opportunities large but not limitless.
They constitute one instrument of the orchestra of which the architect
is the conductor, an instrument beautiful in the hands of a master,
and doubly beautiful in concert and contrast with those other
materials whose harmonious ensemble makes that music in three
dimensions: architectural art.
SYMBOLS AND SACRAMENTS
Architecture is the concrete presentment in space of the soul of a
people. If that soul be petty and sordid--"stirred like a child
by little things"--no great architecture is possible because great
architecture can image only greatness. Before any worthy architecture
can arise in the modern world the soul must be aroused. The cannons
of Europe are bringing about this awakening. The world--the world of
thought and emotion from whence flow acts and events--is no longer
decrepit, but like Swedenborg's angels it is advancing toward the
springtide of its youth: down the ringing grooves of change "we sweep
into the younger day."
After the war we are likely to witness an art evolution which will
not be restricted to statues and pictures and insincere essays in
dry-as-dust architectural styles, but one which will permeate the
whole social fabric, and make it palpitate with the rhythm of a
younger, a more abundant life. Beauty and mystery will again make
their dwelling among men; the Voiceless will speak in music, and the
Formless will spin rhythmic patterns on the loom of space. We shall
seek and find a new language of symbols to express the joy of the
soul, freed from the thrall of an iron age of materialism, and
fronting the unimaginable splendors of the spiritual life.
[Illustration: PLATE XV. SYMBOL OF RESURRECTION]
For every æsthetic awakening is the result of a spiritual awakening
of some sort. Every great religious movement found an art expression
eloquent of it. When religion languished, such things as Versailles
and the Paris Opera House were possible, but not such things as the
Parthenon, or Notre Dame. The temples of Egypt were built for the
celebration of the rites of the religion of Egypt; so also in the
case of Greece. Roman architecture was more widely secular, but Rome's
noblest monument, the Pantheon, was a religious edifice. The Moors,
inflamed with religious ardor, swept across Europe, blazing their
trail with mosques and palaces conceived seemingly in some ecstatic
state of dream. The Renaissance, tainted though it was by worldliness,
found still its inspiration in sacred themes, and recorded
its beginning and its end in two mighty religious monuments:
Brunelleschi's and Michael Angelo's domical churches, "wrought in a
sad sincerity" by deeply religious men. Gothic art is a synonym for
mediaeval Christianity; while in the Orient art is scarcely secular at
all, but a symbolical language framed and employed for the expression
of spiritual ideas.
This law, that spirituality and not materialism distils the precious
attar of great art, is permanently true and perennially applicable,
for laws of this order do not change from age to age, however various
their manifestation. The inference is plain: until we become a
religious people great architecture is far from us. We are becoming
religious in that broad sense in which churches and creeds, forms
and ceremonies, play little part. Ours is the search of the heart
for something greater than itself which is still itself; it is the
religion of brotherhood, whose creed is love, whose ritual is service.
This transformed and transforming religion of the West, the tardy
fruit of the teachings of Christ, now secretly active in the hearts
of men, will receive enrichment from many sources. Science will reveal
the manner in which the spirit weaves its seven-fold veil of illusion;
nature, freshly sensed, will yield new symbols which art will organize
into a language; out of the experience of the soul will grow new
rituals and observances. But one precious tincture of this new
religion our civilization and our past cannot supply; it is the
heritage of Asia, cherished in her brooding bosom for uncounted
centuries, until, by the operation of the law of cycles, the time
should come for the giving of it to the West.
This secret is Yoga, the method of self-development whereby the seeker
for union is enabled to perceive the shining of the Inward Light. This
is achieved by daily discipline in stilling the mind and directing the
consciousness inward instead of outward. The Self is within, and
the mind, which is normally centrifugal, must first be arrested,
controlled, and then turned back upon itself, and held with perfect
steadiness. All this is naively expressed in the Upanishads in the
passage, "The Self-existent pierced the openings of the senses so that
they turn forward, not backward into himself. Some wise man, however,
with eyes closed and wishing for immortality, saw the Self behind."
This stilling of the mind, its subjugation and control whereby it may
be concentrated on anything at will, is particularly hard for persons
of our race and training, a race the natural direction of whose
consciousness is strongly outward, a training in which the practice of
introspective meditation finds no place.
Yoga--that "union" which brings inward vision, the contribution of the
East to the spiritual life of the West--will bring profound changes
into the art of the West, since art springs from consciousness. The
consciousness of the West now concerns itself with the visible world
almost exclusively, and Western art is therefore characterized by an
almost slavish fidelity to the ephemeral appearances of things--the
record of particular moods and moments. The consciousness of the East
on the other hand, is subjective, introspective. Its art accordingly
concerns itself with eternal aspects, with a world of archetypal
ideas in which things exist not for their own sake, but as symbols of
supernal things. The Oriental artist avoids as far as possible trivial
and individual rhythms, seeking always the fundamental rhythm of the
larger, deeper life.
Now this quality so earnestly sought and so highly prized in Oriental
art, is the very thing which our art and our architecture most
conspicuously lack. To the eye sensitive to rhythm, our essays in
these fields appear awkward and unconvincing, lacking a certain
_inevitability_. We must restore to art that first great canon of
Chinese æsthetics, "_Rhythmic vitality,_ or the life movement of the
spirit through the rhythm of things." It cannot be interjected from
the outside, but must be inwardly realized by the "stilling" of the
mind above described.
Art cannot dispense with symbolism; as the letters on this page convey
thoughts to the mind, so do the things of this world, organized into
a language of symbols, speak to the soul through art. But in the
building of our towers of Babel, again mankind is stricken with a
confusion of tongues. Art has no _common language;_ its symbols are
no longer valid, or are no longer understood. This is a condition for
which materialism has no remedy, for the reason that materialism sees
always the pattern but never that which the pattern represents. We
must become _spiritually illumined_ before we can read nature truly,
and re-create, from such a reading, fresh and universal symbols for
art. This is a task beyond the power of our sad generation, enchained
by negative thinking, overshadowed by war, but we can at least glimpse
the nature of the reaction between the mystic consciousness and the
things of this world which will produce a new language of symbols. The
mystic consciousness looks upon nature as an arras embroidered over
with symbols of the things it conceals from view. We are ourselves
symbols, dwelling in a world of symbols--a world many times removed
from that ultimate reality to which all things bear figurative
witness; the commonest thing has yet some mystic meaning, and ugliness
and vulgarity exist only in the unillumined mind.
What mystic meaning, it may be asked, is contained in such things as
a brick, a house, a hat, a pair of shoes? A brick is the ultimate
atom of a building; a house is the larger body which man makes for his
uses, just as the Self has built its habitation of flesh and bones;
hat and shoes are felt and leather insulators with which we seek to
cut ourselves off from the currents which flow through earth and air
from God. It may be objected that these answers only substitute
for the lesser symbol a greater, but this is inevitable: if for the
greater symbol were named one still more abstract and inclusive, the
ultimate verity would be as far from affirmation as before. There is
nothing of which the human mind can conceive that is not a symbol of
something greater and higher than itself.
The dictionary defines a symbol as "something that stands for
something else and serves to represent it, or to bring to mind one or
more of its qualities." Now this world is a _reflection_ of a higher
world, and that of a higher world still, and so on. Accordingly,
everything is a symbol of something higher, since by reflecting, it
"stands for, and serves to represent it," and the thing symbolized,
being itself a reflection, is, by the same token, itself a symbol.
By reiterated repetitions of this reflecting process throughout the
numberless planes and sub-planes of nature, each thing becomes a
symbol, not of one thing only, but of many things, all intimately
correlated, and this gives rise to those underlying analogies, those
"secret subterranean passages between matter and soul" which have ever
been the especial preoccupation of the poet and the mystic, but which
may one day become the subject of serious examination by scientific
men.
Let us briefly pass in review the various terms of such an ascending
series of symbols: members of one family, they might be called, since
they follow a single line of descent.
Take gold: as a thing in itself, without any symbolical significance,
it is a metallic element, having a characteristic yellow color, very
heavy, very soft, the most ductile, malleable, and indestructible of
metals. In its minted form it is the life force of the body economic,
since on its abundance and free circulation the well-being of that
body depends; it is that for which all men strive and contend, because
without it they cannot comfortably live. This, then, is gold in its
first and lowest symbolical aspect: a life principle, a motive force
in human affairs. But it is not gold which has gained for man his
lordship over nature; it is fire, the yellow gold, not of the earth,
but of the air,--cities and civilizations, arts and industries, have
ever followed the camp fire of the pioneer. Sunlight comes next in
sequence--sunlight, which focussed in a burning glass, spontaneously
produces flame. The world subsists on sunlight; all animate creation
grows by it, and languishes without it, as the prosperity of cities
waxes or wanes with the presence or absence of a supply of gold. The
magnetic force of the sun, specialized as _prana_ (which is not the
breath which goes up and the breath which goes down, but that other,
in which the two repose), fulfils the same function in the human body
as does gold in civilization, sunlight in nature: its abundance makes
for health, its meagreness for enervation. Higher than _prana_ is the
mind, that golden sceptre of man's dominion, the Promethean gift of
fire with which he menaces the empire of the gods. Higher still, in
the soul, love is the motive force, the conqueror: a "heart of gold"
is one warmed and lighted by love. Still other is the desire of the
spirit, which no human affection satisfies, but truth only, the Golden
Person, the Light of the World, the very Godhead itself. Thus there is
earthy, airy, etheric gold; gold as intellect, gold as love, gold as
truth; from the curse of the world, the cause of a thousand crimes,
there ascends a Jacob's Ladder of symbols to divinity itself, whereby
men may learn that God works by sacrifice: that His universe is itself
His broken body. As gold in the purse, fire on the forge, sunlight
for the eyes, breath in the body, knowledge in the mind, love in the
heart, and wisdom in the understanding, He draws all men unto Him,
teaching them the wise use of wealth, the mastery over nature, the
care of the body, the cultivation of the mind, the love of wife and
child and neighbour, and, last lesson of all, He teaches them that in
industry, in science, in art, in sympathy and understanding, He it is
they are all the while knowing, loving, becoming; and that even when
they flee Him, His are the wings--
"When me they fly, I am the wings."
This attempt to define gold as a symbol ends with the indication of an
ubiquitous and immanent divinity in everything. Thus it is always: in
attempting to dislodge a single voussoir from the arch of truth, the
temple itself is shaken, so cunningly are the stones fitted together.
All roads lead to Rome, and every symbol is a key to the Great
Mystery: for example, read in the light of these correspondences, the
alchemist's transmutation of base metals into gold, is seen to be the
sublimation of man's lower nature into "that highest golden sheath,
which is Brahman."
Keeping the first sequence clearly in mind, let us now attempt to
trace another, parallel to it: the feminine of which the first may
be considered the corresponding masculine. Silver is a white, ductile
metallic element. In coinage it is the synonym for ready cash,--gold
in the bank is silver in the pocket; hence, in a sense, silver is
the _reflection_, or the second power of gold. Just as ruddy gold is
correlated with fire, so is pale silver with water; and as fire is
affiliated with the sun, so do the waters of the earth follow the
moon in her courses. The golden sun, the silver moon: these commonly
employed descriptive adjectives themselves supply the correlation we
are seeking; another indication of its validity lies in the fact that
one of the characteristics of water is its power of reflecting; that
moonlight is reflected sunlight. If gold is the mind, silver is the
body, in which the mind is imaged, objectified; if gold is flamelike
love, silver is brooding affection; and in the highest regions of
consciousness, beauty is the feminine or form side of truth--its
silver mirror.
There are two forces in the world, one of projection, the other
of recall; two states, activity and rest. Nature, with tireless
ingenuity, everywhere publishes this fact: in bursting bud and falling
seed, in the updrawn waters and the descending rain; throw a stone
into the air, and when the impulse is exhausted, gravity brings it to
earth again. In civilized society these centrifugal and centripetal
forces find expression in the anarchic and radical spirit which breaks
down and re-forms existing institutions, and in the conservative
spirit which preserves and upbuilds by gradual accretion; they are
analogous to igneous and to aqueous action in the formation and
upbuilding of the earth itself, and find their prototype again in man
and woman: man, the warrior, who prevails by the active exercise
of his powers, and woman, "the treasury of the continued race,"
who conquers by continual quietness. Man and woman symbolize forces
centrifugal and centripetal not alone in their inner nature, and
in the social and economic functions peculiar to each, but in their
physical aspects and peculiarities as well, for man is small of flank
and broad of shoulder, with relatively large extremities, _i.e.,
centrifugal_: while woman is formed with broad hips, narrow shoulders,
and small feet and hands, _i.e., centripetal_. Woman's instinctive
and unconscious gestures are _towards_ herself, man's are _away from_
himself. The physiologist might hold that the anatomical differences
between the sexes result from their difference in function in the
reproduction and conservation of the race, and this is a true view,
but the lesser truth need not necessarily exclude the greater. As
Chesterton says, "Something in the evil spirit of our time forces
people always to pretend to have found some material and mechanical
explanation." Such would have us believe, with Schopenhauer and
Bernard Shaw, that the lover's delight in the beauty of his mistress
dwells solely in his instinctive perception of her fitness to be the
mother of his child. This is undoubtedly a factor in the glamour
woman casts on man, but there are other factors too, higher as well as
lower, corresponding to different departments of our manifold nature.
First of all, there is mere physical attraction: to the man physical,
woman is a cup of delight; next, there is emotional love, whereby
woman appeals through her need of protection, her power of tenderness;
on the mental plane she is man's intellectual companion, his masculine
reason would supplement itself with her feminine intuition; he
recognizes in her an objectification, in some sort, of his own soul,
his spirit's bride, predestined throughout the ages; while the god
within him perceives her to be that portion of himself which he put
forth before the world was, to be the mother, not alone of human
children, but of all those myriad forms, within which entering, "as in
a sheath, a knife," he becomes the Enjoyer, and realizes, vividly and
concretely, his bliss, his wisdom, and his power.
Adam and Eve, and the tree in the midst of the garden! After man and
woman, a tree is perhaps the most significant symbol in the
world: every tree is the Tree of Life in the sense that it is a
representation of universal becoming. To say that all things have for
their mother _prakriti_, undifferentiated substance, and for their
father _purusha_, the creative fire, is vague and metaphysical, and
conveys little meaning to our image-bred, image-fed minds; on the
physical plane we can only learn these transcendental truths by means
of symbols, and so to each of us is given a human father and a human
mother from whose relation to one another and to oneself may be
learned our relation to nature, the universal mother, and to that
immortal spirit which is the father of us all. We are given, moreover,
the symbol of the tree, which, rooted in the earth, its mother, and
nourished by her juices, strives ever upward towards its father, the
sun. The mathematician may be able to demonstrate, as a result of a
lifetime of hard thinking, that unity and infinity are but two aspects
of one thing; this is not clear to ordinary minds, but made concrete
in the tree--unity in the trunk, infinity in the foliage--any one
is able to understand it. We perceive that all things grow as a tree
grows, from unity to multiplicity, from simplicity and strength to
beauty and fineness. The generation of the line from the point, the
plane from the line, and from the plane, the solid, is a matter,
again, which chiefly interests the geometrician, but the inevitable
sequence stands revealed in seed, stem, leaf, and fruit: a point, a
line, a surface, and a sphere. There is another order of truths, also,
which a tree teaches: the renewal of its life each year is a symbol
of the reincarnation of the soul, teaching that life is never-ending
climax, and that what appears to be cessation is merely a change
of state. A tree grows great by being firmly rooted; we too, though
children of the air, need the earth, and grow by good deeds, hidden,
like the roots of the tree, out of sight; for the tree, rain and
sunshine: for the soul, tears and laughter thrill the imprisoned
spirit into conscious life.
We love and understand the trees because we have ourselves passed
through their evolution, and they survive in us still, for the
arterial and nervous systems are trees, the roots of one in the heart,
of the other in the brain. Has not our body its trunk, bearing aloft
the head, like a flower: a cup to hold the precious juices of the
brain? Has not that trunk its tapering limbs which ramify into hands
and feet, and these into fingers and toes, after the manner of the
twigs and branches of a tree?
Closely related to symbolism is sacramentalism; the man who sees
nature as a book of symbols is likely to regard life as a sacrament.
Because this is a point of view vitalizing to art let us glance at
the sacramental life, divorced from the forms and observances of any
specific religion.
This life consists in the habitual perception of an ulterior meaning,
a hidden beauty and significance in the objects, acts, and events
of every day. Though binding us to a sensuous existence, these
nevertheless contain within themselves the power of emancipating us
from it: over and above their immediate use, their pleasure or their
profit, they have a hidden meaning which contains some healing message
for the soul.