"B

UT where are your dormitories ?" you asked, when some undergraduate showed you over the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Boston. "And where is your chapel?"

He replied with a grin and a sweep of the hand toward the Hotel Brunswick (five dollars a day) and the beautiful ivied cloisters of Trinity Church. It was an old joke—as old, almost, as the stock observation in New England colleges, "Don't expect much of the Tech team. There's no athletic field at M. I. T., and no 'gym,' and all they do is 'grind' day and night in dowdy lodginghouse rooms. Tech isn't any more a college than the Sorbonne is, or the University of London."

Both the joke and the taunt are done with now. Last week's pageant in Cambridge celebrated not only the inauguration of Tech's magnificent new $7,000,000 "plant " facing the Charles River at the right as one crosses the Harvard Bridge from Boston, but also the beginnings of college life. With its clubhouses, its athletic field, its gymnasium, and its splendidly equipped dormitories, the new Tech will be all that the old Tech was not.

Naturally, the multitudes of returning alumni were most impressed by the great $4,000,000 Educational Building, a ninth of a mile along its front, the first structure of monumental proportions ever erected in concrete, the largest monolith in the world, and a solution of that very difficult æsthetic problem-to take a mill and make it a temple. [A photograph appears this week in The Outlook.] Sheathed in white stone, and with long, low lines severely classic, it confines its decoration to a huge central dome, reproducing that of the Roman Pantheon, and an Ionic porch at the inner end of a court of honor whose corner pavilions, reservedly ornate, have Greek roofs receding in steps.

Seen from Boston, the total effect appears somewhat chill. One admits its unity, its simplicity, its entire reasonableness, but resents the rather unsympathetic rigidity of its cold horizontals. However, the trees next the boulevard on the Cambridge shore are growing fast and will relieve the stiffness. No doubt Mr. Bosworth counted on this when he shaped his designs.

Seen close at hand, the effect is altogether charming. Perspective lends grace and lightness to what had seemed uncompromising. The snowy dome hangs in air. The monotonous, grim horizontals gain a genial and highly interesting variety, while unadorned walls, with their rows of tall windows, become colonnades. On the whole, then, an architectural triumph, dignified, appropriate, and at all points creditable. Nowhere departing from traditional standards, it will endure the test of time.

One opportunity to make the structure declare its immensity-Mr. Bosworth has intentionally ignored. You would never guess that two Boston public libraries could find space inside the court of honor and leave room for quite a profitable little farm, or that the five-hundred-foot tower of Boston's new Custom House, if laid prostrate there, would fall short of reaching from one side to the other. And yet just this refusal to emphasize the building's dimensions yields an added attractiveness. You are not merely amused at being deceived and undeceived, as at St. Peter's or the Pyramids; you sense the genius that has given coherency to such a vast composition. No matter where you stand, it is one building, whereas with only a slight alteration it would be a somewhat considerable World's Fair.

Inside it is pretty nearly that, with shops, draughting-rooms, museums, laboratories, and studios, everywhere embodying the last word in modern efficiency. Most amazing is the colossal hydraulic laboratory, which resembles an indoor shipyard partly, and partly a swimming-pool for giants. As an example of the niceties observed throughout the new Tech, note the apparatus at each window for laundering the air as it comes in. A dustless town is the new Tech-for reasons technical. With its concrete monolith it is also free from tremors, whereas trolley cars joggled the old Tech, and in order to read a measuring scale through a microscope it was necessary to dig a well, build a pillar from the well's bottom, and set the microscope on top of the pillar.

To engineers the astounding thing about this enormous Educational Building is the speed with which it has gone up. All in a year! Impossible, save for a system of stra

tegic railways, the hoisting of concrete by means of temporary towers from which it poured rapidly through long, adjustable, antenna-like pipes, and particularly the shed erected for architects, contractors, and professors to squabble in. Instead of waiting for details to be thrashed out in advance, the policy has been to go ahead, make mistakes, and correct them. Without that policy the work would have taken two years. As it is, the mere job of moving from Boston will take all summer.

Curiously, the new Tech will not have abandoned its native soil. The made land it stands on in Cambridge consists of dirt dug out of the Boylston Street subway. Nor is the new Tech by any means entirely new. Thanks to the advertising its assured future gave it, the Institute grew astonishingly even a year ago, matriculating nineteen hundred students and enrolling enough recruits for next September to expand its number to two thousand, the maximum it is prepared to shelter.

As for its financial programme—

namely, when you haven't got a cent left, spend it-it remains unaltered. Never once has Tech limited its ambitions because of its poverty. It has run into debt, achieved brilliant results without knowing who would foot the bills, and trusted some enthusiast to see the results and wipe out the deficit. This worked. To-day, of the $7,000,000 contributed by the Du Ponts, the alumni, and the "mysterious " Mr. Smith, who was to have been unveiled last week but lacked the fortitude, every cent goes into equipment, and the designs for the immense Educational Building depict a structure as large again. What of it? "Mr. Smith gave $3,000,000, and there will be additional "Mr. Smiths." Tech can rely on them.

PR

ROFESSOR GEORGE H. PALMER has written a very suggestive pamphlet entitled "The Glory of the Imperfect." This is the glory of democracy; the glory of development out of the imperfect; the glory not of achievement but of achieving. Of this glory Tennyson has sung:

"Glory of Virtue, to fight, to struggle to right the wrong

Nay, but she aim'd not at glory, no lover of glory she;

Give her the glory of going on, and still to be."

This is the glory of Democracy-the glory of going on. In a true sense, she might take Paul's motto to be her motto: "Not as though I had already attained; . . . but I follow after."

...

This glory of the imperfect, this glory of going on, this glory of following after, appeals to me and makes me a democrat.. So it is that all that the cynics say about the imperfection and crudity of American life

makes me more than ever glad that I am an American.

Some years ago I heard a scholarly lecturer say, if I recollect aright, that prior to 1800 there were in Christendom very few parks and still fewer museums or art galleries which belonged to the people. Such as existed belonged to kings or cardinals or lay lords, who gave to the people as a favor the privilege of visiting them at times appointed, a relic of which age exists to-day in the remarkable art home of Mrs. Jack Gardner, of Boston, opened by her generosity once a year to the public. When I was a boy, the popular musical entertainment in New York City was furnished by Christie's minstrels; the present Central Park was an unpicturesque wilderness occupied by the slovenly huts of squatters and made perilous for the pedestrian even in the daytime by biting dogs and bucking goats; as to art galleries, I do not recall a single one. Now we have in that city four or five symphonic orchestras,

a great park system, and three considerable public art galleries, besides a number of private galleries open to the public. Nearly every considerable city has an organized system of orchestral concerts; every large city has its park system, and an increasing number of villages have playgrounds for the children; and there are worthy art collections, not only in such centers as Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Chicago, St. Louis, Minneapolis, but smaller and in every way worthy collections in lesser cities, such as Worcester, Hartford, New Haven, Buffalo, Toledo. The Outlook not long since published a list of some fifteen or twenty of these art galleries established within the last quarter of a century. The Old World has greater art collections than the New World can boast. But nowhere has the growth in music, landscape architecture, and art been so rapid as in America. And I experience a great joy in living in a country whose pride is not in what it has achieved but in what it is achieving, whose glory is the glory of going on.

These reflections have been recently revived by the story of the creation and development of the art gallery in Toledo, Ohio, which, as told to me by a friend, I endeavor to retell here to the readers of The Outlook.

The city of Toledo is neither very large nor very rich, and until recently was better known as a center of intersecting railways thán as an art center. That it now has a growing and somewhat unique art reputation is due to the initiative of one man-George W. Stevens. Its Museum was started a few years ago without the incentive of an endowment or a bequest. It possessed in its cradle one painting, a mummy cat, six chairs, and an enthusiastic desire and a settled and invincible resolve to be simple, direct, practical, and useful. It is now housed in a beautiful white marble temple of Ionic architecture with a hundred feet frontage, standing in an oak grove in the residential section of the city. It comprises a large sculpture court, two large and four smaller galleries, club rooms, a library, and an auditorium. In the size of its apartments the building is reported as ranking next to the Museums in New York City, Boston, Pittsburgh, and Chicago.

That it now owns property approximately worth a million dollars and is entirely out of debt is, however, its least notable feature.

Such a museum has two important func

tions to render to the community-art conservation and art education. In a democracy the latter is the more important function of the two, for in a democracy the acquisition and conservation of objects of art are chiefly valuable because they promote art education among the people. In every community there are a few who naturally visit the art gallery for purposes either of study or of enjoyment. But also there are in every community unestimated numbers of men, women, and children who have a latent capacity for art intelligence and art enjoyment which needs only to be stimulated and guided. It is no small part of a museum's duty, not only to open its doors to the people, but to take efficient measures to bring the people to its doors. This the Toledo Museum has done by various methods. The Museum is a school. Free educational motion pictures are furnished on Saturdays and Sundays; free modeling classes are maintained for young people from six to sixteen years of age; free concerts for children are given every week; annual exhibitions of the work of the children bring their parents in great numbers to see not only the progress which the pupils have made, but also the art ideals which are put before them. The interest of the children in the Museum is enhanced by giving them a share in the responsibility of its management, for it is policed not by paid guards but by a volunteer force of small boys. The same principle has created a universal municipal interest in the Museum by devolving the responsibility for its maintenance, not upon a few rich men, but upon the entire community. No less than thirty thousand people subscribed sums for its erection ranging from ten cents to ten thousand dollars each, and it is maintained by the dues of upwards of two thousand members.

Nor has the Museum confined its efforts at art education to operations under its own roof. It has stimulated the planting of trees throughout the city, and the placing in these trees of ten thousand bird-houses built by the children. It has even held a vegetable show, in the faith that those interested in growing vegetables would presumably be next interested in growing flowers and in beautifying their own surroundings. In a sentence, Toledo, which a few years ago was neither more nor less materialistic and sordid than the average American railway and manufacturing city, is being transformed by this Mu(Continued on page 418)