Claude Fayette Bragdon

“ SOLIDARITY That we are all members of one body, branches of one vine, is a matter of faith and of feeling; but with the first use of the weapon of higher thought the paradox of the one and the many is capable of so clear and simple a resolution that the sublime idea of human solidarity is brought down from the nebulous heaven of the mystic to the earth of every day life. To our ordinary space-thought, men are isolated, distinct, each "an infinitely repellent particle," but we conceive of space too narrowly. ”

“ Architecture mirrors the life of the individual and of the race, which is the life of the individual written large in time and space. The terrors of childhood; the keen interests and appetites of youth; the strong stern joy of conflict which comes with manhood; the lust, the greed, the cruelty of a materialized old age—all these serve but as a preparation for the life of the spirit, in which the man becomes again as a little child, going over the whole round, but on a higher arc of the spiral. ”

“ The Beyond-man discovers beauty in the abyss, and ugliness in mere worldly rectitude. Leonardo painted the Medusa head, with its charnel pallor and its crown of writhing snakes, no less lovingly than the sweet-tender face of the Christ of the Cenacolo, and the beauty is not less, though of an opposite sort. Shakespeare's most profound sayings and most magical poetry are as often as not put in the mouths of his villains and his clowns. To genius, pain is purgation; ugliness, beauty in disturbance. It injects the acid of irony into success, and distils the attar of felicity from failure. ”

“ For beauty is ever the very face of love. From the architecture of a true democracy, founded on love and mutual service, beauty would inevitably shine forth; its absence convicts us of a maladjustment in our social and economic life. A skyscraper shouldering itself aloft at the expense of its more humble neighbors, stealing their air and their sunlight, is a symbol, written large against the sky, of the will-to-power of a man or a group of men—of that ruthless and tireless aggression on the part of the cunning and the strong so characteristic of the period which produced the skyscraper. ”

“ Sullivan, awake among the sleepers, drenches us with bucketfuls of cold, tonic, energizing truth. The poppy and mandragora of the past, of Europe, poisons us, but in this, our hour of battle, we must not be permitted to dream on. He saw, from far back, that "we, as a people, not only have betrayed each other, but have failed in that trust which the world spirit of democracy placed in our hands, as we, a new people, emerged to fill a new and spacious land." ”

“ Every form of art, though primarily a vehicle for the expression and transmission of particular ideas and emotions, has subsidiary offices, just as a musical tone has harmonics which render it more sweet. Painting reveals the nature of color; music, of sound—in wood, in brass, and in stretched strings; architecture shows forth the qualities of light, and the strength and beauty of materials. All of the arts, and particularly music and architecture, portray in different manners and degrees the truths of number. ”

“ We all feel that the dreams we cannot remember are the most wonderful. Who has not wakened with the sense of some incommunicable experience of terror or felicity, too strange and poignant to submit itself to concrete symbolization, and so is groped for by the memory in vain? We know that dreams grow more ordered and significant as they recede from the surface of consciousness to its depths. Deep sleep dreams are in the true sense clairvoyant, though for the most part irrecoverable— "Canst thou draw out Leviathan with an hook?" ”

“ In Egyptian architecture is symbolized the condition of the human soul awakened from its long sleep in nature, and become conscious at once of its divine source and of the leaden burden of its fleshy envelope. Egypt is humanity new-born, bound still with an umbilical cord to nature, and strong not so much with its own strength as with the strength of its mother. This idea is aptly symbolized in those gigantic colossi flanking the entrance to some rock-cut temple, which though entire are yet part of the living cliff out of which they were fashioned. ”

“ For light is a far more potent medium than sound. The sphere of sound is the earth-sphere; the little limits of our atmosphere mark the uttermost boundaries to which sound, even the most strident can possibly prevail. But the medium of light is the ether, which links us with the most distant stars. May not this serve as a symbol of the potency of light to usher the human spirit into realms of being at the doors of which music itself shall beat in vain? ”

“ If from any masterpiece we could abstract everything not strictly rational—every element of wonder, mystery, and enchantment—it would be like taking all of the unknown quantities out of an equation: there would be nothing left to solve. The mind of genius is a wireless station attuned to the vibrations from the daemonic sphere; the works of genius fascinate and delight us largely for this reason: we, too, respond to these vibrations and are demonologists in our secret hearts.
For the interest which we take in genius has its root in the interest which we take in ourselves. ”

“ Thought and emotion tend to crystallize into forms of beauty as inevitably as does the frost on a window pane. Art therefore in one of its aspects is the weaving of a pattern, the communication of an order and a method to the material or medium employed. Although no masterpiece was ever created by the conscious following to set rules, for the true artist works unconsciously, instinctively, as the bird sings or as the bee builds its honey-cell, yet an analysis of any masterpiece reveals the fact that its author (like the bird and the bee) has "followed the rules without knowing them." ”

“ The brook, pursuing its tortuous and stony pathway in untiring effort to reach its gravitational centre, is a symbol of the Pilgrim's progress, impelled by love to seek God within his heart. The modest daisy by the roadside, and the wanton sunflower in the garden alike seek to image the sun, the god of their worship, a core of seeds and fringe of petals representing their best effort to mimic the flaming disc and far-flung corona of the sun. Man seeks less ardently, and so more ineffectively in his will and imagination to image God. ”

“ Though genius rebels at our moralities, it always submits itself to beauty. Emerson says, "Goethe and Carlyle, and perhaps Novalis, have an undisguised dislike or contempt for common virtue standing on common principles. Meantime they are dear lovers, steadfast maintainers of the pure, ideal morality. But they worship it as the highest beauty, their love is artistic." And so it is throughout the whole hierarchy of men of genius. "Beauty is Truth: Truth, Beauty," is the motto which guides their far-faring feet, as they lead us wheresoever they will. ”

“ The architect should occupy himself with identities, not differences. If he will but bear in mind that architecture is pattern in space, just as music is pattern in time, he will come to perceive the essential identity between, say, a Greek rosette and a Gothic rose-window; an arcade and an egg and dart moulding (Illustration 94) . All architectural forms and arrangements which give enduring pleasure are in their essence musical. Every well composed façade makes harmony in three dimensions; every good roof-line sings a melody against the sky. ”

“ Before any worthy architecture can arise in the modern world the soul must be aroused. The cannons of Europe are bringing about this awakening. The world—the world of thought and emotion from whence flow acts and events—is no longer decrepit, but like Swedenborg's angels it is advancing toward the springtide of its youth: down the ringing grooves of change "we sweep into the younger day." ”

“ By this disastrous sentence direct vision is denied to us; we can see only by the aid of the outer light; these are but windows that we possess—not eyes. Nor will our pain be less when we hear in the fraternal breathing of the winds with which no longer can we mingle our own, since ours will have for its dwelling, instead of the sublime and open world, the narrow prison of the breast! ”

“ Music is pure beauty, the voice of the unfettered and perpetually vanishing soul of things; architecture is that soul imprisoned in a form, become subject to the law of causality, beaten upon by the elements, at war with gravity, the slave of man. ”

“ And because the more remote these are from the things of sense, from knowledge and experience, the projected figures of four-dimensional geometry would lend themselves to these uses with an especial grace. Color without form is as a soul without a body; yet the body of light must be without any taint of materiality. Four-dimensional forms are as immaterial as anything that could be imagined and they could be made to serve the useful purpose of separating colors one from another, as lead lines do in old cathedral windows, than which nothing more beautiful has ever been devised. ”

“ This "eternal return," so far from being a new idea, is so old that it has been forgotten. Its reappearance in novel guise, along with so many other recrudescences, itself beautifully illustrates time curvature in consciousness. Yugas, time cycles, are an integral and inexpugnable part of Oriental metaphysics. "Since the soul perpetually runs," says Zoroaster, "in a certain space of time it passes through all things, which circulation being accomplished, it is compelled to run back again through all things, and unfold the same web of generation in the world." ”