a certain lucidity and calm of mind.  The discussion of Responsibility, Democracy, Education, etc., has inevitably detached the lurking spirit of pessimism.  It has to be:—­Into the depths and darkness we descend, and the work reaches the tragic climax in the third out-of-door scene—­Winter.

Now that the forces have been gathered and marshalled the true, sane movement of the work is entered upon and pushed at high tension, and with swift, copious modulations to its foreordained climax and optimistic peroration in the fourth and last out-of-door scene as portrayed in the Spring Song.  The locale of this closing number is the beautiful spot in the woods, on the shore of Biloxi Bay:—­where I am writing this.

I would suggest in passing that a considerable part of the K.C. is in rhythmic prose—­some of it declamatory.  I have endeavoured throughout this work to represent, or reproduce to the mind and heart of the reader the spoken word and intonation—­not written language.  It really should be read aloud, especially the descriptive and exalted passages.

There was a movement once on the part of Mr. Sullivan’s admirers to issue Kindergarten Chats in book form, but he was asked to tone it down and expurgate it, a thing which he very naturally refused to do.  Mr. Sullivan has always been completely alive to our cowardice when it comes to hearing the truth about ourselves, and alive to the danger which this cowardice entails, for to his imaginary pupil he says,

If you wish to read the current architecture of your country, you must go at it courageously, and not pick out merely the little bits that please you.  I am going to soak you with it until you are absolutely nauseated, and your faculties turn in rebellion.  I may be a hard taskmaster, but I strive to be a good one.  When I am through with you, you will know architecture from the ground up.  You will know its virtuous reality and you will know the fake and the fraud and the humbug.  I will spare nothing—­for your sake.  I will stir up the cesspool to its utmost depths of stench, and also the pious, hypocritical virtues of our so-called architecture—­the nice, good, mealy-mouthed, suave, dexterous, diplomatic architecture, I will show you also the kind of architecture our “cultured” people believe in.  And why do they believe in it?  Because they do not believe in themselves.

Kindergarten Chats is even more pertinent and pointed today than it was some twenty years ago, when it was written.  Speech that is full of truth is timeless, and therefore prophetic.  Mr. Sullivan forecast some of the very evils by which we have been overtaken.  He was able to do this on account of the fundamental soundness of his point of view, which finds expression in the following words:  “Once you learn to look upon architecture not merely as an art more or less well, or more or less badly done, but as a social manifestation, the critical eye becomes clairvoyant, and obscure, unnoted phenomena become illumined.”