XVII. RELIGIOUS ART

THE TREATMENT OF CHURCH INTERIORS

MR. RALPH ADAMS CRAM

BOSTON, MASSACHUSETTS

As art has owed its very existence to religion, and must continue doing so to the end of time, so is the converse true, that religion finds its visible expression through the art it has created for its service. You cannot dissociate the two without infinite injury to both. Our Puritan ancestors and the emancipated genius of the present age are at one in this, and the painters and architects who think to survive aloof from all religious influence will fail just as signally as the iconoclasts and vandals of the sixteenth century failed in their warfare against beauty, and its symbolism, and its didacticism, and its prophetic faculty.

Religion simply cannot get along without art. And by "art" I do not mean such passing whims of society as may for the moment be the vogue, but the eternal, indestructible principle of beauty which is as definite a thing as the precession of the equinoxes. There was a time when an instinct for beauty was the heritage of every human being. The effort to separate religion from art and man from religion has resulted in changing all that, and now there is no art instinct among any civilized people except the Japanese. Hence the lamentable falling back upon professional artists, of whatever special calling, who, nine times out of ten, though perhaps highly trained, are yet just as deficient in the instinct for beauty as those who call them into their service. We have, for instance, the "ecclesiastical decorator and furnisher," with his brass pulpits, ingenious stained glass and tawdry embroidery, his egregious carved-oak altars and spun-brass candlesticks, his glittering mosaics, and, above all, his remarkable schemes for color decoration. He advertises copiously, and his name stands perhaps for all that is rich and elegant, but really he is an affliction, for there is neither religious feeling nor reliable instinct behind him.

Yet beauty in the service of God we must have; and the need is absolute. Nothing we possess is really worthy to be used in God's service, but by some manifestation of infinite Wisdom it happens that the labor of love and devotion, the pains spent to bring forth absolute beauty, as well as that beauty itself, all serve to give a new value to a knot of wood or a knob of stone, and this value is so great that, if it were possible, the

product thus obtained is in a way worthy of the service to which it is put. Beauty, then, and perfection, are utterly inseparable from the idea of an acceptable church, and beauty and perfection we must have.

Art is a service and a factor in education; in either of its aspects, it must be of the best obtainable, or it is evil. Here is one place, at least, where substitutes are out of the question. In its first function it is the intrinsically precious, the laboriously fashioned, the exquisitely perfected, that alone is admissible; makeshifts, imitations, are ruled out of court, and economical devices for obtaining fallacious appearances, labour-saving expedients, and cheap substitutes are impious and tinged by sacrilege.

Really, I believe that art - that is, concrete and absolute beauty acting as a system of subtle, spiritual, and psychological influence — is perhaps the greatest teaching agency, the greatest, because the most subtle and penetrating in its power, man has ever developed. We try to make our churches beautiful and intrinsically precious because beauty and intrinsic worth are a kind of sacrifice, an oblation poured out before God, but we make them this as well because one fact that runs through all earthly experience is that the lasting lessons come through the medium of the soul as well as through that of the mind.

The artistic treatment of a church interior must depend, not upon the taste or the wealth of a given congregation, but upon the nature of the visible methods of worship, for the including of which the building has erected. Puritanism was logical, granting its premises; it eliminated art from its public services, and therefore it refused art in the treatment of its temples. This was a sane and rational thing to do. The whitewashed meeting-house, void of the least hint of art of every shape and kind, fitted perfectly the Puritan service from which art had been banished in equal measure. Now conditions are changing; art, scorned and humiliated for several centuries, is coming once more into favor. It is felt that if the liturgical churches are becoming once more redolent of beauty, the non-liturgical should not fall behind, and pictures, sculpture, carving, stained glass, and music are put under requisition, as they were of old. Good; but it seems to me there is a danger of misrepresentation here, a danger not always avoided. To duplicate, in a nonliturgical and rigorously evangelical church, the ornamentation appropriate to another that is sacramental in its doctrine and liturgical in its worship, is at the least ungrammatical. Frank and honest exposition of principle and doctrine is one of the first functions of art in its relation to religion. For the Roman and Anglican communities there is no limit to what may possibly be done, but elsewhere it seems to me that

good taste and consistency rather demand a measure of restraint, for the time being, at least.

Now, about getting the best art. I am not here to give a few easy rules for testing the design of a pulpit or altar or stained-glass window; to explain how colors should be mixed or placed in juxtaposition, to demonstrate the proper principles and limits of decoration in a Gothic church, a Georgian meeting-house, or a Christian science tabernacle. These are the province of the architect employed to do a given piece of work; and to the architect,willy-nilly, must you go until those happier times are come again when art is once more so much a part of civilization that the clergyman, the householder, and the stone-mason all come once again so fully into their heritage of the instinct for beauty that each. is himself an artist and architect, and a better man than any to-day. In the mean time, how weigh conflicting claims, and decide as between architect and architect or decorator and decorator? By a competition of schemes and a vote of a building committee, or a poll of the congregation? Never, under any circumstances whatever. How then? Simply by recognizing the fact that from the first moment of recorded history, and whether in Europe or Asia, the laws and principles of good art were absolutely the same, whether expressed in the lines of a Greek or Buddhist temple, a Roman basilica, or a Gothic cathedral, down to some ill-defined point in the first half of the sixteenth century, and that after that the laws were entirely new, and, except in music, literature, and the drama, just as entirely bad. This, then, is the bar of justice before which any artistic postulant for favor must plead. If in his words and work he shows that he understands, accepts, and tries to follow the pre-sixteenth-century laws, then he is the man to tie to. He may fail, and he will fail, to produce work that will rival that of the great years, but he will not disgrace you, and through the employment you give him, and the standards to which you hold him, he will go on to better and better things.

And, lest you misunderstand me, let me say that acceptance of the laws does not mean, in my mind acceptance of the forms. I can imagine a building and its ornament, exterior and interior, in which should appear no single form, molding, or piece of carving the genesis of which could be directly traced to any given period of the past, but which should, nevertheless, be so dominated by the eternal laws of beauty in composition, form and decoration, that it would be equally good with the best that ever was. Shifting and ever-changing modes are one thing, underlying laws are quite other, and these are the things that count.

You see it is, after all, and must be, a matter of general principles. It

is impossible to separate the question of interior decoration of churches from that of their outward and visible form and their inward and spiritual grace. It is a great question, perhaps architecturally the greatest, since a church is the noblest structure that man may build. From the standpoint of religion, doctrine, and education, the problem is unparalleled in its importance. I am only pleading for this priority, asserting the persistence and immutability of law, and condemning the old doctrine that it is all a matter of fashion or taste, and that in art every man has a right to say that though he knows nothing of art, he does know what he likes.

Finally, have some one man responsible during his life for all that is added to a church. If it is a new edifice, then retain the architect permanently to pass on every window, every piece of decoration, every stick of furniture that is subsequently added. You can ruin a good church by bad glass and worse ornaments; you can save many an indifferent structure by good things of their several kinds. A true church is never finished, and it is unwise to change horses in the middle of a river.

THE TREATMENT OF CHURCH EXTERIORS

MR. JAMES STURGIS PRAY

ASSISTANT IN LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE, HARVARD UNIVERSITY,

BOSTON, MASSACHUSETTS

I shall only attempt,- 1. To call attention to the crying need that more trained thought be given to the treatment of church exteriors; 2. To point out some general principles most important to be kept clearly in view in the treatment of each individual case; and 3. To refer in some detail to the treatment of two well-marked types of church grounds, with a few practical suggestions to those who for any reason, in treating such grounds, cannot conveniently obtain the services of a good landscape architect. In all this it must be borne in mind that I am literally only touching upon the outside of the subject.

Of beautiful churches to-day we have almost no end, and, what is far more encouraging, they are multiplying at an ever-increasing rate. More and more is wealth being devoted to rearing substantial, convenient, and beautiful church buildings; but generally, alas, without as yet any corresponding attention being given to the equally appropriate treatment of the grounds about them. To design a monumental church edifice, an architect, as a matter of course, and one of recognized ability and taste, is employed. But when it comes to the grounds, either this same architect, who has not the special training to fit him for the special work, or, far worse, an ordinary gardener, is enough. The fact, however, that you have asked a landscape-architect to talk to you this afternoon on the subject proves that you who, as a great educational organization, can well exert the widest influence, recognize that we have now reached in this country that point in the evolution of our church homes when more careful attention to the building's setting, its convenient approaches, and the beautification of such grounds as it may haply possess, is in order,—is fitting, if not imperative. It is coming to be no longer sufficient that the building should be beautiful and satisfying after one has entered its portals; the importance of its outward appearance before the world is to be considered. Not that its interior and exterior are to be regarded as separate matters, however, for they are, and should be, recognized as but parts of one whole. The appearance of the exterior is but another aspect of this whole and indeed, in one way, the primary aspect, since by its quality it attracts to the interior or repels from it, as the case