Mortar and Mankind
MORTAR AND MANKIND A PUBLIC speaker declared recently that a story is written on every human face, the child's open countenance being a blank book and the mature man's hardened features an...
...It was all quite as if a gardener had left his flowers in a dingy cellar with the hopeful assurance that they would be placed within reach of the sun next season...
...The people housed there had come, for the most part, from peasant hovels or the ghetto...
...Or is it to be opposed radically, so that gradual escape from it will be made possible...
...On the other hand are those files of standardized, inhabitable houses which have sprung up in answer to the demands created by a universally prevalent policy of industrial centralization...
...And the more fully a stanza realizes the concept of form, the more capable does it prove of revealing the mysteries of language and emotion— those vast mysteries man accepts from nature but employs in his own higher, more spiritual way...
...They were inured to hardship...
...Doubtless the report on Probation and Delinquency prepared and issued by the New York Catholic Charities Bureau is destined to have a great effect upon arousing public interest in the housing problem...
...Very likely it would be possible to write a fairly accurate interpretation of American life if one noted only the details and the changes registered by the history of homes...
...It is 534 equivalent to saying that God was merely extravagant when He lavished so much glory on the original habitation of man...
...Are we to reckon with this centralization as permanent and bend every effort to adapt ourselves to it as well as possible...
...At present Americans are aware, at least, how perilously near to chronic social immoralism their wholesale neglect of psychology has brought them...
...But we have felt something of the same kind in simple German farm-houses, in less pretentious French chateaux—something that was mingled dignity and simplicity, human service and consciousness of the Divine Will...
...The today was always a step to the greater and different tomorrow...
...There is truth in the statement, no doubt...
...Did not the sudden mushroom growth of tenement districts and stifling slums indicate the swirl of industrialism into which the country plunged...
...It is merely a matter of finding evidence of the soul's presence...
...Materials combined with no reference to the principle of form brutalize by mere contact the human race...
...Today, the prevalence of moral and physical decadence, traceable to a large extent to ineffectual homes, will gradually compel America to rickon with that neglect of housing and hearth which has been the country's greatest sin against the poor...
...A mere glance at rooms in which harmony reigns, in which the charm of meditative artisanship stands revealed in multiform color and line, ought to make a great many realize how very absorbing the art of home-building can become...
...Perhaps one is not justified in saying that cramped souls are the outcome of cramped quarters...
...Nor is there any habit, any environment, which from the beginning has played such a part in annealing him to the purposes given him to accomplish than the mortar which cements the stones of the dwelling into which he is born, through which he lives his days, and in the purposeful form of which he sees, to some extent, the shadow of his own soul...
...Neither they nor any of us ought to forget the marvelous fact that the home is the site of a sacrament, proceeding continually and benignly throughout the days of life...
...If the criminal as we face him today is not a certain kind of individual, but simply an individual produced by any one of a number of kinds of deleterious environment, then it becomes necessary to explore these and remove the sources of contamination...
...No doubt the sur-misal is correct, though there are other things at Chartres...
...It might just as well be said that the more fully the average home realizes the same concept of form, the more successfully are the hallowed things in which it is enshrined revealed...
...The second now engrosses the attention of social observers in all ranks of life...
...Was not the habit prevalent among generations of fanners to pile their families into rickety shacks while the cattle lived in model barns a fairly good sign that farming was to be a temporary occupation from which the children would graduate into more urban circumstances...
...The former condition can be corrected only by a longer tenure of money and some development of taste...
...Last, but possibly most significant, was the drift of the American who had been accustomed to a parcel of land, a hearth and a garden, into those long lanes of towering apartments which testify to the nation's readiness to centralize its activities, to stake its all upon one great industrial and commercial gamble...
...Something more than accident is responsible for the fact that the poetic word stanza means, originally, a house...
...But little by little we shall very likely be made to see very clearly the staggering fact that the hovels we relied upon to breed conscientious workers have brought forth a legion of murderous parasites...
...No matter how widely radical persons may toy with the idea of the family, it remains the basic plot in which most human actors can achieve a happy ending...
...From the mere architectural outline one could infer, it seems to us, that tremendous wave of homelessness which has bred so much anti-social feeling and crime...
...From this point of view it can be seen that the embellishment of a home is a work of the same kind as the beautifying of a church...
...It seemed as if these places had been mellowed by generations of insight into the sacredness of mere living, of contact with the mystery of children...
...MORTAR AND MANKIND A PUBLIC speaker declared recently that a story is written on every human face, the child's open countenance being a blank book and the mature man's hardened features an autobiography...
...As yet, scientists have not looked into all of them thoroughly enough to justify their using definite labels...
...A great hope is held out, therefore, by the varied exhibitions of architectural and housing crafts now drawing popular attention in so many places...
...The idea that human beings can live under any kind of shelter is as perverse and as rooted in ignorance as any other kind of heresy...
...It is not a question of aesthetics or nicely blended colors...
...The necessity for stemming a plague created a great remedial effort...
...A conventional form, to be sure...
...but inside it the visionary glow is safe from waste and sure of satisfactory fulfillment...
...During recent years America has developed, through contact "with Europe and in other ways, certain very promising decorative arts...
...And until one can find it generally present in America (it does exist here and there) one cannot feel sure that the home is safe against the attacks of barbarism and license...
...It may be that the Chicago statistics which tend to prove that most of the city's criminals are reared in congested central districts do not lead immediately to the conclusion that such districts ought not to house human beings...
...There would come (as the advertisements have it) money, prestige, intellectual enlightenment...
...No question is more deserving of attention...
...On the one hand is that pretentiousness which builds for the sake of display—builds not a home, but a "show-place" having all the sublimely enviable characteristics of a museum...
...they could have endured anything for the sake of the promise held out by the Eldorado beyond Ellis Island...
...For a generation the watchword has been "opportunity...
...For they are like chaos in the sense that the spirit dwells not in them...
...but it is still more correct to say that every home frames an epic or a drama the outcome of which helps to tell society what it is...
...Years ago, the virulence of tuberculosis forced an anxious society to see to the matter of drainage and sanitation...
...Hundreds of people who dabble in writing or painting, without the slightest qualification for success in either, may be led to see the transcendent opportunity which awaits them within four walls...
...For the sake of this, it was assumed, all else might be sacrificed and everything dared...
...Irwin Edman allows his meditative young hero to surmise at Chartres that "you could leave your history and imagination behind and carry only a pair of eyes to be caught up by the piercing magic of that lingering blue in the west window and be hushed to tranquillity by those long brown aisles...
...Of course, the truth remains that until certain social barriers have been surmounted it will remain impossible for many families to create an adequate environment...
...The normal human being can no more help being prepared for "tomorrow" by his present habits and environment than a rosebush can avoid the influence of frost...
...The molding of iron, the weaving of tapestries, the construction and ornamentation of furniture have made strides until they are quite comparable with the elaborate, porcelain-covered cult of hygiene...
Vol. 5 • March 1927 • No. 20
