Excerpt from The Architectural Record, Vol. 4: Published Quarterly With Illustrations
The subject that has been assigned to me is that which I should have chosen had I been left free to choose. It is more true, perhaps, of architecture than of any other of the arts that deal with form that the prosperity and advancement of it depend upon the existence of an enlightened public as well as of skillful practitioners. It is true that the public, any public, is enlightened by the efforts of the practitioners and can be enlightened in no other way. The philosophy of art at least is a philosophy teaching by examples. It is only by familiarity with admirable examples that we come to admire rightly. A sense of responsibility for ones admirations may be called the very beginning of culture, nor can a culture be deemed complete that does not include a discriminating judgment of the works of the oldest and the most pervading of all the arts. It is not to be expected, nor perhaps to be desired, that an educated layman shall possess theories of art and standards of judgment either acquired for himself or derived from others. But it is very much to be desired that he shall have a sense so habitual and automatic that it may well seem to be instinctive of the fitness or unfitness, congruity or incongruity, beauty or ugliness of the buildings that he daily passes, and that in any case must exert upon him an influence that is not the less but the more powerful for being unconsciously felt. Such a sense comes most readily and most surely from the habitual contemplation of excellent works. It is the birthright of a man who has been born and reared in a country in which admirable monuments have been familiar to him from childhood. It is a means of education from which we in this country are necessarily to a great degree debarred, for I suppose it will not be denied that there are many American communities in which one may grow up to manhood without once having sight of a respectable specimen of the art of architecture. I remember standing in the square upon which fronts the Cathedral of Rouen, one of the loveliest of the legacies the Middle Ages have bequeathed to modern times, and watching the busy throng of Frenchmen and Frenchwomen, the citizens of a bustling modern town, that passed beneath it. There was scarcely one, of whatever rank in life, that did pot pause, in passing, long enough to cast one recognizing and admiring glance at the weatherworn and fretted front. Think what an education the daily sight of such a monument constitutes, how it trains the generations that are reared in its shadow, and how deeply a people so unconsciously trained would fail to admire the very smartest and most ornate edifices of many American towns.
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