serve by adding to the visual splendor and by intensifying the emotional and dramatic life of the dance.

THE VISUAL, RHYTHMIC, EMOTIONAL, AND DRAMATIC OR

GANIZATION OF ELEMENTS

Unless all the elements-rhythm, pose, gesture, costume and setting-are unified and interrelated, the dance fails of its meaning as a work of art. There must, first of all, be visual organization. Gesture must be related to pose; there must be harmonies of color and line and of grouping; and a converging visual splendor. But that is only part of the task, for the meaning of the dance lies in time as well as in space, and so there must be rhythmic organization. Imagine a series of poses, revealed by flash-light stabs at the darkness. Each pose would strike us separately with a sort of visual self-sufficiency. Not so in the dance! The visual splendor changes from moment to moment, pose melts into pose, lines flutter and settle and flutter. This is not a mere scene-shifting. Every pose, every line, is felt to be mobile and transitional. The dancer carries the principle of continuity in his body; with him, therefore, rests the task of modulating the changing life of the dance and throwing it into rhythmic patterns. But there is more work to be done. Rhythms, poses, and gestures are the carriers of emotions and moods; through their aid dances may express gaiety, sadness, exultation, passion, absorption, grief, melancholy, lightheartedness. One of the problems of the dance is to achieve a single emotional color-tone or the complex unity of an emotional color-poem. There remains the need of dramatic organization. The dramatic theme, or idea, of the dance must not be confused with the subject or story. The subject may be Salome before Herod or the drowning of Narcissus or a tragic love-tangle. Around such subjects the dance, enlisting the services of music, weaves a system

of dramatic values-of contrasted passions, of startling gestures and sharply accentuated movements, of tumult and repose, of visualized emotion. In the bending of its manifold expressiveness to this unity of theme lies the most difficult task and the greatest opportunity of the dance.

ARCHITECTURE

Architecture, of all the major arts, keeps closest to practical life. Whatever else it may be, it is first of all the art of building; and as such it must submit to an alien will, which chooses the material, sets the cost, fixes a constructive program and carries it out through the genius and craftsmanship of the architect. Because of this it has been set by Kant as a dependent art over against the free arts, in which the artist is allowed to express himself unhampered by practical dictation. Two facts wreck such a theory. Any and every art may be dependent without losing its artistic value. Of this, monumental sculpture, religious dances, and commemorative poetry are examples. Again, in architecture, where the practical control is strongest, this very control serves as a challenge and an opportunity to the architect to be an artist as well as a builder, and to form a variously accented and patterned beauty with the material he has been set to work in and within the specifications of type and cost which are not his.

The close relation, however, makes it difficult for us, engrossed as we are in the technique of living, to respond to a building aesthetically instead of seeing it as part of the business or setting of social life. If we succeed in avoiding this, there is still a difficulty. The will to art in architecture is complex; it does not allow an easy survey and conquest, but demands for its appreciation a disciplined eye and the power to grasp unity of design in intricate masses of heavy, inert material.

What is the aesthetic soul of architecture, and how is

this soul expressed in the living body of architectural effects?

THE AESTHETIC MEANING OF ARCHITECTURE

A building is a block carved from cubical space. It lacks the simultaneity of impressions which is possible in a painting, and the easy roundness and compactness of a sculptured figure. The spirit of isolation to be found in these arts is lacking in architecture: the block is shaped in relation to the surrounding space and its objects. The site and the setting offer artistic as well as practical problems and opportunities. There are good reasons for the position of a medieval robber castle: it was difficult of access and dominated the road below; when studied as a work of art part of its meaning is to be found in the countryside it gripped and ruled.1

The more or less massive shell of this hollow block contains either smaller blocks, each separated from the other by ceilings, floors, and interior walls or a large interior broken up into related and communicating spaces. No reading of architecture is complete which neglects interiors, for it is in their fashioning and elaboration that much of the genius of the architecture is revealed. In the Pantheon, a circular temple, there is one vast interior losing itself at its periphery in the depressions of a panelled dome and sweeping past Corinthian columns into the recesses of seven niches. In Gothic cathedrals spatial continuity is combined with bewilderingly complex dividing and stressing. The nave in its reach from portal to choir is flanked by single or double aisles and galleries marked off by pillars and arches and is cut across by transepts; semi-circular chapels break up and individualize the sides; and groined or ribbed vaulting, the

1 Architectural responsiveness to environment may be studied in the California hillside bungalow; and in city planning, which is coming to be looked upon more and more as a problem in art.

roof. This modulated unity of the interiors of churches, halls, and theatres cannot be gained in office buildings and conventional houses. The modern office building is committed to the "boxes within a box" scheme; the parcelled offices and the mechanical connection of floors by the rectangular block of the elevator shaft or uniformly regular stairs make an artistic interior in the fullest sense impossible. Architects in planning houses are abandoning this scheme. They are doing away with doors, making rooms responsive to each other, and treating halls and stairways in a new manner. In the bungalow superimposed stories are eliminated because of their vertical estrangement, and the rooms are made to share in a common horizontal life. The use of an inner court, or patio offers a combination of seclusion-an exterior serving as an interior-and a freely circulating domestic life.

Looked at from the outside, a building is seen as a mass of marble or brick or stone and mortar whose artistic effects are tri-dimensional and manifold, and whose full meaning as a work of art can be grasped only by series of eye-movements and measurements of spaces, planes, and angles in their relations, and of diverse visual excursions and motor responses. This is true of the simple, stacked triangles of the Pyramids as well as of the domed, turreted, and arched exterior of St. Mark's or of a Gothic cathedral with contours that play in and out, filigreed surfaces, flying arches, buttresses, spires, pinnacles, and gables. We never see the exterior all at once, nor do we see it flat. When we are limited to one side of it we see that side as composed of projections and depressions. The limiting lines are felt as edges, windows and doors as openings, and window-facings as planes slanting into the frame. Cornices and pillars are not seen as horizontal and vertical lines; porticoes and doorways thrust out at us or draw us in after them. Surfaces are broken up by mouldings and the plastic help of sculp