new attention to the art of worship will likely revive many good things from mediaeval liturgics. If this should be the case, as I believe it will, buildings of Gothic derivation will be appropriate where the people understand and desire this meaning.

In many ways it is, in the nature of the case, easier to express new thoughts by the usage of some one of the classic periods as the inspiration for a modern church building. Yet it is not easy to select any one of these as an adequate mode. To go far back to Greece or to Rome is to place too much paganism in the structure and also to come too close, as the Christian Scientists have done, to the forms characteristic of our state houses and post offices. The early basilica is too administrative and too authoritative. Some kinds of Renaissance are too secular, worldly, or elegant. Some of the Romanesque is too crude. Further work in the Colonial strain will be appropriate for some churches. Further "translations" of certain ideas or motives in Byzantine, Romanesque, and early Renaissance structures can be made vital and beautiful.

Can there be a new architecture? In the sense of disconnectedness with the past, no; any more than there can be a new learning disconnected from history. In the sense of freshly saying what we newly experience and feel about life, yes. What will the new architecture be? No one can say until the genius arrives who will know us so well that he can describe us. If you can say when the great American novel will appear, you will also date the advent of the great American church.

It will not be pure Gothic, though it often use the pointed arch, but have something about it of greater breadth, comprehensiveness, and intellectuality. It will express a greater clarity of mind, even about the past. It will teach the youth the glorious history of the church more artistically and symbolically than the bare churches do, but less vaguely and narrowly than by the shadowy figures in a Gothic portal or reredos.

It will not be pure Renaissance, but intimate more aspiration, more faith, more zeal. It will correct the wandering

eclecticism and futile false freedom that is a passing phase of our life. By greater height, it will lift the emotions, and by greater length fix the will, to definite choice and devotion.

Nor will it be so tentlike and temporary as our common American church, which has neither classic lucidity of mind nor Gothic passion. Yet it will rise out of our best common American morality. With new forms for the new time it will yet be built upon the best in the Classicist's love of truth, the Romanticist's love of nature's beauty, and the Puritan's zeal for goodness.

M

Chapter XX: Structural Tone

ANY people are aware of being affected by the tones of rooms. They have said to themselves, What a peaceful place! or they have felt restless and uncomfortable without knowing precisely why. It is possible immediately and profoundly to influence people by the tonal character of an interior. Every competent house decorator is not only aware of this but is a student of the physical arrangements of shape and of color, of lights and of shadows, which will produce his desired effects. Every stage manager knows something about this and the best of them know a great deal about it. Designers of churches ought to know a great deal about it. If common people take the trouble to design cheerful playrooms or cheerful bedrooms, quiet reading rooms and stimulating dining rooms, how much more should building committees seek to define the tone they desire in the House of God and seek to understand the physical compositions that produce that tone.

Just precisely what physical arrangements can be counted upon for certain atmospheric effects is hard to say. This is the point at which we must fall back upon the genius of the artist. Partly it depends upon the style of the structure. As already suggested, the definite historic styles in themselves intimate certain emotional attitudes. Buildings which are not constructed in one of the great historic modes are, as would be expected, not very effective in intimating anything. They are neutral and nondescript, negative in their effects because not positive in their structural character.

Probably a good deal more, however, depends upon the treatment of the style than upon the style itself. A Gothic building, active in structural principle, may be so designed as to produce an effect of greater repose than a badly constructed classic building. The problem of a successful church, therefore, is not solved merely by the determination

of its style; it turns also upon the manner of treatment to the end of producing a definite effect of tone.

I am not attempting to solve the question here, but rather to raise it, and to indicate two or three of the most common faults and two or three of the desirable virtues in this matter. One goes into a church and straightway pronounces it cold, or homelike, or splendid, or elegant, or restless, or warm, or bare, or cheerful. Obviously none of these qualities is sufficient for a House of God and no church is successful if any of these adjectives can be applied to it as its chief characteristic.

Definite tonal effects are easily produced if you know how. Not long since, I went into a moving picture theater that is more than ordinarily popular. The method used in this place was that of a lavish display of color. The orchestral numbers between pictures were accompanied by skilful color settings, changed and modulated, until the rainbow itself was outdone. The color was literally sweet and syrupy. It was cloying and atrocious, but popular, and the artist knew precisely what he was doing with the clientele to which he made his appeal. The tone he developed in his theater is not a fit tone for a church. But the fact of his taking the pains to develop it, while the average church takes no pains to develop an effective tone, is at least one of the reasons why he gets more people than the church does.

The most of church buildings fail, not because they can be at once so easily described, but because they are simply indefinite, Neutral, with no very positive qualities at all. The average church interior is uninteresting. Without necessarily being ugly in detail, there is no commanding excellence. The tinted walls, commonplace woodwork, and inferior windows rouse no surprise or delight in the visitor and become a deadening influence on the regular worshiper. The organ pipes which usually occupy the most noticeable space may not in themselves be offensive, but it is a provertystricken imagination which can conceive no more significant treatment of that precious space. Your building will have an effect whether you want it to or not, and this effect of ineffectiveness is one of the most unfortunate.

Very close to the fault of neutrality is that of Comfortableness. Some churches are so warm and cosy, with curving and well-cushioned pews, that the note of ease or comfort predominates. There is a kind of family-at-home feeling about this atmosphere which is pleasant, but it is not sufficient for a church. Sometimes a parish is so insistent on expressing its character in this way, though perhaps subconsciously, that the air of a building good in other respects is vitiated by this fault.

A very recently built church with several highly successful features of the structure, has been spoiled, in my view, by this tone of treatment. In this case it is so easy to specify the physical factors responsible for the fault as to be worth especial note. The building is the First Methodist Church of Evanston, Illinois. In structure, it is very much more true to the proper feeling of its style than many recent church buildings in that style. It is a beautiful building; in the composition of the exterior façade, in the height of the structural aisles and the proportions of nave arches and aisle windows, in the lift of the walls by a clerestory, in the beamed ceiling and in other features.

But much of the structural effect is thrown away by an interior treatment entirely out of harmony with it. It is merely comfortable. Three things make it so. First, the strongly marked and strongly felt curves of the gallery balustrade, both forward and rear, and of the pews on the floor are alone sufficient to produce this sense of comfort. These, by the way, constitute a great divergence from the tone of the structure itself. Paradoxically, this divergence makes you uncomfortable, the curved lines being set over against the lift of the piers and the vertical lines of the organ case. This gallery, like the running track of a gymnasium, cuts directly across the dominant structural lines. Nevertheless, seated on the first floor one gets chiefly the comfortable feeling of the curved lines. This is enhanced by the second element, the softly modulated color scheme. In the third place, there is nothing in the foreground composition of platform, choir loft, and organ pipes, either in design or color, to break this comfortable monotony.