Arts and Letters

The keenest enjoyment of a finer mind is in whatever makes the absent and unreal present and apparent. This emotion is basic to all the fine arts without exception, for it gives almost unhampered play to the imagination, to the representative faculties, which embody without the limit and clog of matter that subtle essence which in successive stages of social development is felt to be beautiful. Poetry, painting, and sculpture, the imitative arts, do this manifestly; less patently, but even more poignantly, do likewise music and architecture. Whatever the inner structure of the music, the resultant voice of its production arouses emotions which in their very vagueness are universal and to the initiated almost articulate, which entrance because they summon thoughts and visions from sources never before tapped and often unsuspected to exist. Architecture, aside from the categorical imperative of utility to which it is subject, presents to the eye, as music to the ear, intricate combinations that likewise afford a unitary resultant free from the trammels of imitation, which abstractedly and vaguely lures the mind into a sense of proportion and sublimity that awakens spiritual aspiration.

These familiar and generally accepted views are recalled to connect the commemoration of Charles Follen McKim with those of the founders who preceded him in their passage to the beyond. It is noteworthy as an aid to memory that our great composer and our great architect were in recollection left to us and to posterity as comrades in time and activity, the one with world renown for his appeal to humanity through the trained ear, the other with similar fame through his command of the trained eye. Both have been honored in other lands than this, their local fame has been carried to the stars by appreciative fellow-laborers and by a national public. What posterity may decide we know not, but the test of genius is as fully in the inspiration and stimulus given to the present age as it is in the instruction and the plaudits of succeeding ones. In this respect McKim stands forth a preëminent figure. His life began in a heroic epoch of tumult and national reform, and ended in an age of struggle for emancipation from materialism and its complementary tension of nervous exaltation. Throughout he stood apart, a citizen of the nation and of the world, detached from the popular movement, as had been his ancestry, but keenly observant of the slowly forming aspiration of society toward permanence of institutions and the equilibrium of mind and matter, of soul and body, of social and personal balance. Historically minded in the highest degree, he marked the moment of his nation's birth, the stock of which it was a mighty bough, the forms in which its already ancient civilization had then expressed itself. He felt intense interest in the divagations of national taste, in the evidences of contrition for structural faults in politics and art, in the eclecticism which was proof of a search for garments that would fit, in the freaks of selection or abortion which were misnamed pure American, in the totality of effort, conscious or unconscious, for a place in the procession of nations and ages. In short he was a profound student, a shrewd observer, a man of meditation and philosophy before he became the poetic creator which he finally was. This was the spiritual and intellectual training which drew upon him the attention of his fellows, of his own people, of craftsmen and artists beyond the sea. The sincerity and vigor of his art made him the prophet of a school, much, there is reason to believe, against his will. But the greatness which was his own having once been recognized and leadership having been thrust upon him, he did not shrink from the responsibility. During his ripest years he was hospitable to collaboration, receptive to all assistance from the ancillary arts, catholic in association and taste. Commanding his clients, personal, corporate, or national, he dominated them and their commissions by force of character and the array of proof. It was thus that he made the capital city of his country one focus of his ellipse, her metropolis the other. For both the lines of architectural development in present and future work were convincingly set forth by weighty argument. And for one generation at least the public taste was directed toward the beginnings of national architecture in those modifications of Georgian and classical style which seemed to him in further evolution likely to furnish the perfect garb for the faith and ambition of his land, the solid substance of the vision vouchsafed to a people who had asserted partnership in the affairs of the world. For politics, for commerce, and for the fine arts he left symbolic structures: the War College, the Pennsylvania station, the Morgan library, all of which exhibit complicated unity, sensibility in structure, refinement in decoration, and adequacy in mass. These alone would suffice as permanent foundation for his fame as a creative artist. Space forbids the enumeration of his works in other fields of human life; they are quite as illustrious each in its own way—his homes for the club, the family, the church.