tion and pleasing arrangement, was a useful member of such society as existed ; in fact it is easy to imagine that he was instrumental in the establishment of that early social order. When our cave architect was assisting the neighbor to build a pleasing and individual characteristic protection, that is, one embodying and interpreting the neighbor’s individual characteristics, he was on the safe and sane ground of an advancing art. But when he lost, as he came to, his individualistic sympathies in a formulating of stale traditions his art was .rudderless on a receding tide.
What with improved weapons, and the banding together of hunters and of warriors in groups, times became less stressful for the individual who wished to devote more of himself or all of himself to the arts, and our craftsman architect, in natural course, came frequently to be called upon to assist his less accomplished or more externally involved neighbor. With that he began to delegate the task of construction to his assistants, while he selected the stones, giving oral directions as to the setting and arrangement. Sometimes he scratched a sketch of an arrangement, with a charred stick, on a stone, or with a point on the sand—and with this he struck a new idea—a something, (shall we say?) easy. Now, no longer was it for him a selection and harmonious arrangement of the stones he found ready to hand; he made shapes up out of his own head (or some of them did) and had his assistants fashion the various units of the wall to meet the exigencies of his design (here the seeds of modern architecture were sown and here began the downfall of an art). This . was apparently so easy that it presented a delightful field of occupation to certain ones possessed with an “artistic” temperament and certain others whose fond parents imagined them so possessed. All that was needed was a sharp stick and a level stretch of sand. (Analogous to the pencil point and the gum rubber of our modern drafting board.) At first a few really did invent new and conventional forms after they bad tired of reproducing ad nauseum the old natural forms. Others took these newer conventions and played upon them and varied them in sweet and pretty manner imagining all the while that they were originating, that they were creating, that they were making forms up out of their own heads. (And perhaps they were—the forms certainly were commonplace and conventional enough to warrant the assumption.)
As the warriors had banded together and had become a class with a class consciousness—marching in ranks and files and obeying commands from above; and as the hunters had become a distinct and recognized group ; and as the right hand of the earlier architect—the builders and masons:— had organized and asserted their rights, (and loudly mouthed their supposed wrongs,) our cave
architects, impelled to do the commonplace and conventional thing, banded together, formed a guild, and became class conscious. As the establishment of convention was the beginning, so was this creation of a class conscious group an end of architectural cave art (as it is likely to be the end of architectural art today) ; for art depends upon individual freedom and initiative and these are not acceptable in a convention ridden community. .For a class cannot minister to the individual—a class must needs minister to a class; and to give that class something to minister to the class conscious architects established meretricious conventions and bade the building class to conform tlieir individual ideas to these superimposed conventions. And the more firmly to impose these altogether extraneous conventions, the technically class conscious established schools of art and design where the patterns of architecture could be taught to striplings who thenceforth were in bonds. In order that the victim might swallow the more easily the pseudo-architectural dose, the schools based their design on details of various well known cave walls of an earlier day and applied these forms to the walls of compounds and buildings which, because of improved physical conditions, could be built in the open. Some symbol or semblance of the mouth of a cave always appeared even on walls out on the open plain. The architectural schools in cave dwelling times never kept pace with the advancing civilization ; they lagged far—in fact, centuries—behind. With the authority of the schools in the ascendant there was no chance for the individual to contribute his share to the public or social advancement, or add any vital increment to artistic growth. In fact the class conscious guild of architects who had washed their hands of the contaminating soil of craftsmanship, proclaimed, and had made into the law of the land, that no person who had not succumbed to their ideas, manners, and modes of operation and design, should he permitted to design or to assist as an architectural principal in the erection of any sort of structure which had foundations, walls and a roof. Thus the cave architects had the business of architecture “sewed up” tight, and the art of architecture strangled to the Queen’s taste.
In his initial stage our cave architect had within him the embryo of a real architect ; and in some of his descendants that embryo was developed. The real thing is easily recognized ; it is easy to trace. It does not consist in “building beautifully.” If it did, certain builders could claim to be architects. Any wall with uniform courses perfectly laid would come under the category of architecture. But it is not. In order to be architecture it must he imbued with rhythm, with variety, with unity, with harmony. A simple wall may hold these elements, which are spiritual,