Greeks.  The effect was so charming, and made the rest of the place seem by contrast so cold and dun, that the author came then and there to the conclusion that architecture without polychromy was architecture incomplete.  Mr. Bacon spent three years in Asia Minor, and elsewhere, studying the remains of Greek architecture, and he found and brought home a fragment of an antefix from the temple of Assos, in which the applied color was still pure and strong.  The Greeks were a joyous people.  When joy comes back into life, color will come back into architecture.

Ceramic products are ideal as a means to this end.  The Greeks themselves recognized their value for they used them widely and wisely:  it has been discovered that they even attached bands of colored terra-cotta to the marble mouldings of their temples.  How different must have been such a temple’s real appearance from that imagined by the Classical Revivalists, whose tradition of the inviolable cold Parian purity of Greek architecture has persisted, even against archaeological evidence to the contrary, up to the present day.

In one way we have an advantage over the Greek, if we only had the wit to profit by it.  His palette, like his musical scale, was more limited than ours.  Nearly the whole gamut of the spectrum is now available to the architect who wishes to employ ceramics.  The colors do not change or fade, and possess a beautiful quality.  Our craftsmen and manufacturers of face-brick, terra-cotta, and colored tile, after much costly experimentation, have succeeded in producing ceramics of a high order of excellence and intrinsic beauty; they can do practically anything demanded of them; but from that quarter where they should reap the greatest commercial advantage—­the field of architecture—­there is all too little demand.  The architect who should lead, teach and dictate in this field, is often through ignorance obliged to learn and follow instead.  This has led to an ignominious situation—­ignominious, that is, to the architect.  He has come to require of the manufacturer—­when he requires anything at all—­assistance in the very matter in which he should assist:  the determination of color design.  It is no wonder that the results are often bad, and therefore discouraging.  The manufacturers of ceramics welcome co-operation and assistance on the part of the architect with an eagerness which is almost pathetic, on those rare occasions when assistance is offered.

But the architect is not really to blame:  the reason for his failure lies deep in his general predicament of having to know a little of everything, and do a great deal more than he can possibly do well.  To cope with this, if his practice warrants the expenditure, he surrounds himself with specialists in various fields, and assigns various departments of his work to them.  He cannot be expected to have on his staff a specialist in ceramics, nor can he, with all his manifold activities, be expected to become such a specialist himself.