effort of any importance to enhance the effect of architecture by artificial illumination, and to use colored light with a view to its purely pictorial value.  Though certain buildings have since been illuminated with excellent effect, it remains true that the corset, chewing-gum, beer and automobile sky signs of our Great White Ways indicate the height to which our imagination has risen in utilizing this Promethean gift in any but necessary ways.  Interior lighting, except negatively, has not been dealt with from the standpoint of beauty, but of efficiency; the engineer has preempted this field to the exclusion of the artist.

All this is the result of the atrophy of that faculty to worship and wonder which alone induces the mood from which the creation of beauty springs.  Light we regard only as a convenience “to see things by” instead of as the power and glory that it inherently is.  Its intense and potent vibrations and the rainbow glory of its colour beat at the door of consciousness in vain.  When we awaken to these things we shall organize light into a language of spontaneous emotion, just as from sound music was organized.

It is beside the purpose of this essay to attempt to trace the evolution of this new art form, made possible by modern invention, to indicate what phases it is likely to pass through on the way to what perfections, but that it is bound to add a new glory to architecture is sure.  This will come about in two ways:  directly, by giving color, quality, subtlety to outdoor and indoor lighting, and indirectly by educating the eye to color values, as the ear has been educated by music; thus creating a need for more color everywhere.

As light is the visible symbol of an inner radiance, so is color the sign manual of happiness, of joy.  Our cities are so dun and drab in their outward aspects, by reason of the weight of care that burdens us down.  We decry the happy irresponsibility of the savage, and the patient contentment of the Oriental with his lot, but both are able to achieve marvels of color in their environment beyond the compass of civilized man.  The glory of mediaeval cathedral windows is a still living confutation of the belief that in those far-off times the human heart was sad.  Architecture is the index of the inner life of those who produced it, and whenever it is colorful that inner life contains an inner joy.

In the coming Golden Age life will be joyous, and if it is joyous, colour will come into architecture again.  Our psychological state even now, alone prevents it, for we are rich in materials and methods to make such polychromy possible.  In an article in a recent number of The Architectural Record, Mr. Leon V. Solon, writing from an entirely different point of view, divines this tendency, and expresses the opinion that color is again renascent.  This tendency is so marked, and this opinion is so shared that we may look with confidence toward a color-evolution in architectural art.