truth. But by "the better use of the senses" draftsmen discovered the facts of perspective drawing centuries before demonstration and proof of vanishing points and horizons were made by an English mathematician. Similarly the harmonies of sound were written down in scale music long before Helmholtz and others elaborated the facts that vibrations carry sound, and that harmony is due to mathematical correspondences between the numbers of vibrations in a given period of time. Some day, science, after gaining a proper understanding of the human eye as a super-delicate keyboard of rods and cones for the testing and selecting of shapes, tones, and colors, will be able to demonstrate exact rules of visual esthetics. In the long history of human art these rules are illustrated by the independent invention of the same shapes and color combinations in different parts of the world.

A close parallel may be drawn between the life history of the art of a social group of human beings and the life history of plant and animal families.

Both are organic and have a long period of development and a shorter period of florescence. In the case of human art the cycle is completed in a few centuries while in plant and animal life it may take geological epochs. Conservative and radical forces operate throughout nature as they do in human art. If we take a given form embodying use, which may be a tool, a magical design, a plant, or an animal species, we find it modified, first by a continual refinement leading to a type form that meets the general conditions and requirements of life, second by a continual selection of special forms that meet special conditions. A canoe, for example, is refined until it reaches a shape that moves most readily through the water. Such a shape cannot avoid having an esthetic interest because it is orderly. But while such refinement leads to a type form, it is

found that the canoe men have also been introducing changes in shape for sea-going canoes as contrasted with those for river navigation. Usually there is a new factor of mechanical advantage entering into the question. Differentiation in plants and animals is usually along lines of new mechanical advantage.

But specialization, while it strengthens in a special field, weakens in the general field of activity. Thus Palæolithic man had at first a stone tool that came to have pretty definite shape and which he used to chop, cut, and drill with. Later special shapes were developed for these special uses but general efficiency was lost in the process. In other words it was more difficult to chop or cut with the drill form than it was with the original undifferentiated tool of all work.

In any case esthetic qualities come into a form which is developed by and for use. There is a point of fine balance and after that the quality of estheties in an object becomes a growing danger. Biologists recognize as "end products" many highly specialized plants and animals which have developed esthetic characters along with their adaptations to narrow conditions. Such esthetic characters are iridescence and similar bright color effects, spines, and other fantastic excrescences, and extreme convolution or attenuation of the body. Among plants the orchid family shows many examples of extreme specialization in life associated with strange shapes and colors, and among animals, the many-chambered nautilus is analogous. These are about to die, as the sea lilies, trilobites, ammonites, brachiopods, and giant lizards have already died through overspecialization, leaving only a few of the more sturdy members to represent the family.

The life story of human art on the esthetic side is from strong simple forms associated with use to compli

cated and flamboyant forms in which the usefulness is largely suppressed. Then comes the end. There is flamboyant Greek art, flamboyant Gothic art, flamboyant Mayan art, all showing the same tendencies that parallel the end products of natural history. Out of efficiency comes beauty, and out of beauty comes death.

The Art of a Mechanical Age

It has never fallen to the lot of any nation to give to the world so many new ideas in processes, machines, and constructions as we of the United States have given in the brief span of our history. Invention has been riot among us ever since the English officer observed that the children on Boston Common breathed in freedom from the very air. Our faculty of doing new things unthought of before, or of doing old things in new ways, is essentially a social phenomenon coming out of the release from traditional restraints. The citizens of the United States of America have shown a collective quality of mind as regards mechanics, which does not owe its origin to any particular line of blood or training. That something "from the very air" infected John Ericsson no less than Robert Fulton, and it continues to infect the heterogeneous sons of a hundred Old World nations who come to our shores to build new homes in the sunlight of a new philosophy.

The decoration that goes into the lives of people in this mechanical age must be largely produced by machinery; but it must be given spiritual and intellectual content.

We may

wink at Homer and take our designs where we will, but we must fill these designs with the spirit of our own times. There is work for great artists, and those who regret they could not learn their trade at the feet of Phidias or Michelangelo need not apply.

There are still many persons in America who judge art by three tests

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when only one is necessary. For them, a thing to be artistic must be rare and costly as well as beautiful. As a result of this curious kink in appreciation the industrial art of a previous epoch is to these people fine art while that of today is not. An invidious distinction has been fostered in the public mind that objects of art, passing into quantity production, necessarily lose fineness and spirituality and take on a smell of machinery.

It is true that to have fine art you must have the scrutinizing care of fine workmen over their product. But there have always been machines and each age has used the best it could devise. The sculptors of today model in impermanent materials and then turn the making of the permanent copy over to an artisan operating a power-driven chisel or to a bronze founder who knows the technique of casting metals.

There are class distinctions among artists which have come down from the days when princes were patrons and which hardly belong in a democracy. A portrait painter is put on a higher artistic plane (quite aside from the merits of his work) than a maker of costumes who may administer to the same personality for a comparable reward. One kind of art is condemned as regards the higher values of appreciation by being called commercial and the other vaunted as noncommercial. The distinction is no longer a real one. As to the relations between emotional expression and money, everyone has heard divergent sentiments like the following: "No real work of art was ever made for money." "Poor man, his finest efforts were potboilers." There is a great deal of false sentiment concerning artists. They are nothing more than specialized workers, like physicians, lawyers, and scientists, and they earn a precarious or magnificent livelihood by a display of individual ability. But there is also splendid romance amid the whir of wheels, or

where the cantilevers reach out to join hands across the river. There are men in all walks of life who have faith to follow airy voices and logic to prove the impossible easily possible. There are master workmen in mills and factories who, while they recognize the master workmanship of a distant past, see in it only a spur toward greater achievements in the future.

Has decorative art a practical value in commercial products? In the naïve minds of savages designs are often regarded as magical devices to bring good and ward off evil, and as continuous prayers to the gods. I like to think that decorative art is still magical and able to fill dark places with sunshine. But the business man often wants practical value counted out on the table. Successful decoration adds distinction to any product. American textile houses during the last four years have learned how to add good decoration to good construction. As a result American silks have sold in Paris, and selling silks in Paris is like selling coal in Newcastle. With such a guarantee of artistic quality, should we not sell to the most discriminating buvers both at home and abroad? Artistic quality in the goods of commerce. means a higher proportional value of mind and a lesser value of material in the manufactured article. Where the raw materials have to be imported as in the case of silks, fine pottery, and the like, it behooves the manufacturer to enlarge the proportional value of workmanship in the completed product.

Art education in America has until recently been in appreciation rather than in production. The most successful artists in textiles and costumes have come out of commercial workshops rather than art schools. But the schools are better capable of inculcating a sound and fundamental philosophy of art than are the workshops. The youth of America should be taught that only the good is beautiful and

that only normal and organic ornament deserves praise. Let the slogan be "Beauty is as beauty does."

Symbols and Loyalties

Because man is a herding animal he cannot avoid community loyalties. There are the family, the tribe, the nation, each based upon a larger and larger idea of coöperation. There are also other human associations that fall outside the three already mentioned and that compete with them for a share of loyalty and support. For instance, secret societies and lodges are found among both primitive and civilized peoples; there are ceremonial organizations of warriors, hunters, and medicine men; there are masons' and drapers' guilds, granges, trade unions, clubs, and political parties. But as a supreme human group the nation goes far beyond the primitive bond of blood or the selfish bond of common vocation and develops the essentially intellectual bond of common thought. For a civilized people the first of all group loyalties should be loyalty to the nation, and this becomes stronger as symbols are invented to express it.

The flag is preeminently a symbol of nationality, and other symbols are public buildings and utilities such as highways and wide-arching bridges, which give a sense of common ownership stretching beyond narrow acres. And there are many other subtle or direct symbols that unexpectedly voice widely felt but inarticulate desires. National art brings about social amalgamation whether the means of expression be slogans and rallying songs, monuments, parades, uniforms that put rich and poor in the same rank, or simple objects of use and beauty, such as costumes, flower jars and fountain pens, that build up an understanding of life which is good, true, and of our own times. With common thoughts as warp and weft a strong fabric may be woven which shall become truly beautiful as

it is embroidered with deeper and deeper emotions.

And loyalties that are developed through art, what part may they take in the political life of a people? It is strangely true that loyalty thrives on the very duties and sacrifices that its existence makes practicable. If an organization, great or small, does not demand service of its members it can hardly continue to exist. The success of revolutionary movements in art, politics, or religion is measured by the degree in which the individual is made to feel his submersion in the group. Always there must be symbols, like the carved fishes in the catacombs, to lighten the hours of trial and torment and to record permanently the hours of joy and triumph. The nation is best equipped to exert its full power for progress and production when it can oppose the forces that would undermine its hold on individual members, by loyalty that is personal, concrete, and pictured in every mind.

We hear much of internationalism. Perhaps this means sympathy and a sense of justice among nations and a modus operandi of securing these things. Nationalism divides mankind geographically and develops vertical loyalties that unite different classes of society into an organic whole capable

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of diversified production. There is, of course, always the danger of conflict. between two nations just as there is between two individuals. But if internationalism means a horizontal division of mankind on the basis of class, with the threat of conflict above or below, it can offer no advantage to the world. History indicates that the nation is the largest association of human beings capable of having and adequately expressing communal ideas of use and beauty. It may expand far beyond the limits of blood and speech and may, perhaps, even encompass the world. Let there be friendliness between political units by all means but let there also be refreshing contrasts in thought.

A truly national art will express and extend the joys and satisfactions of the people as a whole; it will awaken a consciousness of universal sympathy, and put new purpose and beauty into many lives. The esthetic art will be organic and useful in itself and not a senseless load upon the utilities of the age, nor an empty gratification of vanity, nor a mere sensuous tickling of nerve ends. It will be beauty in cotton as much as in silk, in copper as much as in gold. It will be joyous Romance and heartfelt Ceremony in our homes and in our streets, in our work and in our play for the seven days of the week.

SINCE the preceding article was written the first general American exhibition of textiles and costumes, illustrating the splendid advances in industrial decorative art during the last six years, has been held in the halls of the American Museum of Natural History. The exhibition developed the value of first principles in construction and decoration even where commercial vogue in fabrics and women's clothes is concerned. Historical sources were shown for the machine, for the design, and for the costume.

The great roaring machines of today are but the logical extension of mechanical parts

and principles known of old, weaving in some form or other is as old as human society, and there has always been personal adornment forming a basis of the costumer's

art. The Jacquard looms, with their busy shuttles and myriad harness strings, bewilder with a multiplicity of detail. Yet the essential features can nearly all be seen in simple machines used by Philippine tribes. All the types of weaving, as well as many methods of decoration, such as cylinder printing, block printing, warp tie-dyeing, batik, embroidery, appliqué, and stenciling, are found among the lesser and earlier nations. The

modern designer and artist cannot afford to neglect fields in which the fittest and finest have been determined by centuries of selection.

The special contributions of our age are new sources of power to replace the muscles of man, new possibilities of collection and distribution that bring us materials from afar and that send our made products across the limits which divide nations, and, lastly, new horizons of suggestions and inspiration for our ideas that are practicable and profitable.

In five or six years America has come a long way toward developing an adequate expression of her artistic individuality. But this progress has been in the shops rather than in the schools. It has come from a use of facts, not theories, and from an objective study of the relations between form and ornament, between the technical process and the design. The examples of applied art in the various museum collections have aided in this forward movement.

Behind all progress, however, there are human personalities. Always there are some men and women who see with an inner eye the things that may be and then with ingenuity and courage make them the things that are. It is not only to the new artists

who have found success that praise should go for the recent advances of American industrial art and for the bright hopes of the future. Likewise a tribute should be given to certain definite individuals: M. D. C. Crawford, who established contacts between science and the trade and who wrote, talked, and clarified till the last doubt died; E. W. Fairchild, who put money and enthusiasm into a program of publicity when the skies were unpropitious; David Aaron, Albert Blum, Charles Cheney, Irving E. Hanson, Max Meyer, and Jessie Franklyn Turner, who from the first have joined their faith with ours and whose artistic skill and perception have stamped qualities of distinction on new products.

The problem now broadens to one of general education in the public and private schools of America. For the schools will be called upon to supply the industries with craftsmen whose minds and hands have been prepared for efficient service in the present world. The explorers and the pioneers have blazed a trail and marked a road. They have come with an earnest of accomplishment in their hands and an offer of experience and tested success that those who come after may build safely and grandly.

DAVID AARON & Co., INC., embroideries

AMERICAN BEAD CO., INC., dress accessories

A. BELLER & Co., cloaks and suits
EMILE BERNET, tapestry yarns
BLANCK & Co., embroideries

SIDNEY BLUMENTHAL & CO., INC., velvets BONWIT TELLER & Co., tea gowns and negligees

CHENEY BROTHERS, silks

HARRY COLLINS, costumes

B. C. FAULKNER, blouses

MARSHALL FIELD & CO., INC., cretonnes

A. H. FLANDERS & Co., blouses

FUNSTEN BROS. & Co., sealskins

JOHNSON, COWDIN & CO., INC., ribbon weaving

OTTO KAHN, INC., fur garments
KEVORKIAN GALLERIES, oriental art
H. R. MALLINSON & CO., INC., silks
J. A. MIGEL, INC., Jacquard loom
MARIAN POWYS, laces
RUTH REEVES, batiks

MARTHA RYTHER, batiks

BARBARA SIMONDS, hand prints

HAZEL BURNHAM SLAUGHTER, batiks MARY TANNAHILL, batiks

J. WISE CO., INC., costumes

Women's Wear, costume books