THE Massachusetts Society for Promoting Good Citizenship has been the medium, during the few years of its existence, through which many important subjects of reform have been first or most strenuously urged upon the attention of the Boston and New England public. In the lectures given under its auspices, in the Old South Meeting-House, the cause of municipal reform, now grown so popular and strong that in all our great cities special leagues are being organized to promote it, was for two successive seasons presented by expert scholars and experienced political men, able to tell our people, when few of them knew or properly appreciated the facts, of the remarkable progress in municipal organization and administration in Birmingham, in London, in Paris and Berlin, and a score of the great cities of Europe, compared with which our own cities were still managing their affairs in very rude, crude fashion. The lectures given a year ago, by Mr. Warner, Dr. Hale, Professor Levermore and others, upon "The Newspaper in American Life," pointed out the evils in our newspapers today and the lines upon which reform ought to proceed, in plain and courageous terms, which compelled wholesome discussion, not only at home but all through the country.

But the society has never taken up a more timely or necessary subject than that to which its lectures the present season are devoted, opening just as this number of our magazine is published, -the subject of "A More Beautiful Public Life." The special subjects of the lectures in this interesting and important course are these: "The Lesson of the White City," "Boards of Beauty," "Municipal Art," "Art Museums and how to bring them home to the People," "Art in the Public Schools," and "Boston - the City of God"; the several lecturers being Prof. Edward S. Morse, Mr. C. Howard Walker, Mr. Edmund Hudson, Mr. Ernest F. Fenollosa, Mr. Percival Chubb and Rev. Charles G. Ames. The high significance and value of this course of lectures lie in the fact that it is, we think, the first course of such a character and purpose which has ever been given in the country,-the first course addressed to the people, devoted expressly to pleading for the rights of beauty in our public life and for informing our American art, now almost entirely dependent upon the private parlor, with a true public spirit. American art to-day is not public, we have said this more than once in these pages, and it cannot be said too often, and that is chiefly why it suffers and is not great and representative. An American painting or statue is seldom published to-day, as an American poem, or story, or song is published, as a painting was published in Florence or Antwerp in the days of Raphael and Rubens, as a statue was published in Athens in the times of Phidias and Praxiteles. The painting is painted in private, to be exhibited in the perfumed art rooms or the club where the

common people do not come, and sold into hiding in the parlor of such rich man as can pay for it. The painter and the sculptor have almost no opportunity for that incitement and that correction which come to the poet, the novelist and the playwright from the public interest and participation, the public censorship and public praise. There is no province of our life which suffers more grievously from our exaggerated individualism and grotesque theories of property and society than our art. It has hardly yet entered into the heads of most of our people that art is anything which has to do with them as a people, that it is related to any other realm than that of private luxury and indulgence. Very far from them is it to see that in truth beauty has claim upon the whole of life, that it should be a controlling principle in public education, and that it should determine the whole environment of a rational people, shaping and ordering their homes, their schools, their shops, and their cities. For the city itself, the city of a rational, well-educated, and properly organized people, must be a work of art, not an agglomeration of freaks, where ugliness jostles fitness and taste, where the wise man and the fool is each alike permitted to rear what he will, where he will, where there is no thought or suggestion of architectural unity or harmony in the street line, and no hint in the aspect of the whole city of any corporate consciousness or care for noble and beautiful effect.

THE grounds and buildings of the Chicago Exposition, the White City, had an overpowering effect upon the American people. The charm of the place was something unique in our national experience, and it was a charm which steadily grew from first to last. It was not the charm of this and that beautiful structure; it was the charm of a noble unity, a beautiful adaptation of great means to great ends. Here, for the first time, was a veritable city, springing suddenly into existence, like the baseless fabric of a dream, in a night for but a day, conceived and constructed and controlled upon the principles of beauty and of reason, a city where throughout was regard for the fitness of things. This was indeed unlike what the man from Boston or Philadelphia or New York had left behind, in Broadway or the Bowery, and he had a right to be overpowered. It was indeed a contrast to the Chicago into which he plunged when the street car or the steamboat bore him away. He left an ephemeral city reared and sustained by strong men according to rational law, for a city where the same strong men are content to spend their lives and do their work amidst ugliness, with no thought of law at all. They were all proud to sit in the council of the White City, giving to it freely their great and magnificent energies; no one of them

sits in the council of the Black City, which is the reason why it is black.

The problem of the American city is how to get into its ordering and control something of the same principles of rationality and art, something of the same public spirit and civic pride, which accomplished such results at Chicago. Mr. Howells sent his Traveller from Altruria to the White City, and he found it a real bit of Altruria in America, the one place where, in an ambitious way, beauty and fitness and efficiency had been achieved, because the men behind the great enterprise had all worked harmoniously together for a common end, with every place filled by the man best able in that place to promote the common end. This is not the principle which the Altrurian finds governing New York when he comes there. Here is no common end, no organized effort to make reason and beauty control and fashion things; and they do not control and fashion them. No tracts could well be written telling more trenchantly or more explicitly how a city should not be built, or what the things are which the lover of beauty wishes to see reformed in our municipal life, than the letters of Mr. Howells's Altrurian about New York; only we do not wish to be understood as holding that the letters might not just as well have been written about Boston or Chicago.

WE shall not have efficient reform in this matter until our people have their eyes opened to know beauty when they see it and ugliness when they see it, and until they have such a desire to have their cities beautiful as shall prompt them to act in their corporate capacity in things pertaining to beauty as they have now come to act corporately in things pertaining to health. Boards of health, as we know them, are of very recent origin. Indeed, the police system, as we know it, is a thing of but yesterday; the terms

Bobby" and "Peeler," still applied to the London policeman, tell of Sir Robert Peel, the founder of the system. The police duties and the interests of health were looked after in our cities at the beginning of the century in a way only less irregular than the way in which we now look after the interests of beauty. The rational city of the future will recognize the Board of Beauty as being equally essential to its organization with the Board of Health. It will see that this man has no more right to pile a piece of stone or iron ugliness upon the corner, to be seen of all men for years, than this other has to pitch his garbage into the street, as he used to do in the times of the ignorance which the public winked at. The inside of our buildings is, perhaps, our own, to do with as we please, although even this is to be said with important reservations; but the outside stands in relation to other men quite as much as to ourselves, and its beauty and fitness, both as concerns itself and as concerns its position alongside other buildings, are matters not of private but of public interest. The White City was beautiful because its Board of Construction was a Board of Beauty, and every building in it was built with proper reference to every other. The boulevards of Paris, although the style of

architecture is not the most noble or pleasing, are impressive and fine, because they were treated architecturally as wholes, en bloc, and a principle of unity pervades them. A Board of Beauty superintended their construction and superintends their growth and changes. No Board of Beauty had to do with Washington Street or Broadway or Pennsylvania Avenue, as their long lines gradually extended; and so we see what we see, a hodgepodge of magnificence and meanness, miles of architectural drunkenness, grotesque disparity and chaos, with never any harmonious or beautiful general effect, however many beautiful isolated structures. In the smaller American cities it is worse than in the large cities. Yet beauty is as cheap as ugliness, and a little foresight, a little planning, a general view, a Board of Beauty with very simple advisory and regulative powers, would have secured beauty instead of ugliness in every place. It would not seek to reproduce spectacular White Cities all over the country, nor to get them reproduced; for the White City was a World's Fair, and not a city of homes. What is beautiful and fitting in one place and for one purpose is not fitting for another; but there is a beauty befitting a city of homes as well as a World's Fair. The Board of Beauty in a rational city would not be tyrannical any more than the Board of Health is tyrannical. The Board of Health does not play the part of the physician and tell us when to eat rice and when to avoid watermelon; but it does look after what affects the health of the community. The Board of Beauty would not seek to suppress individuality and originality, except in savages, of whom, unhappily, there are yet so many in the city. It would make itself an authority upon municipal architecture; it would keep the people informed of whatever is fine and beautiful in other cities; it would look at the construction and improvement of the city in a broad and public way, and train the whole people to do the same; it would study harmony and general effect, and reconcile the conflicting aims and tastes of adjacent builders; it would instruct the municipality how to sweep away every pestilent tenement house and alley, and put sweetness and light into the present nurseries of contagion and crime; and it would have the power of absolute veto upon any proposed monstrosity. It would be the permanent and final arbiter upon all matters of public taste.

With such a Board of Beauty in the city, an authoritative body of educated men, a board of artists and experts, the era of the ward politician in art, the graduate of the corner grocery armed with prerogative to coach the sculptor how to put Cupid into breeches and Psyche into petticoats, would come to an end; and the fate of statues would no longer be decided by the dyspepsia of Alderman Murphy. Boston would not see such proceedings as resulted in the building of her new Court House and as now attend the planning for her new City Hall. Massachusetts would not see such doings as those she is now seeing in connection with her new State House.

IT would seem as if a people could have no greater provocation or incitement to a method of

doing things as they ought to be done than the people of Boston and Massachusetts are having at this moment in their experience in seeing things done as they ought not to be. Boston needs a new City Hall. She wisely says to herself that she must inform herself about what is excellent in city halls elsewhere. How does she do it?

But

Does she go to anybody in her borders who knows anything about the subject? God forbid ! Such persons there are, many of them, thorough students of municipal architecture, men conversant with the best which has been done in England and Belgium and Germany and France, with the plans of the new town halls of Manchester and Birmingham and a dozen European cities doubtless hanging on their walls. Boston does not turn to these. She sends a carload of aldermen, not one of whom, heaven knows, was ever accused or suspected of knowing anything about architecture, to visit the city halls of Philadelphia, Baltimore, Chicago and other cities, and come home and tell in print what they had found worth copying. Of course they found very little, because there was little to be found; and that little could have been furnished the city government by any bright architect's clerk or newspaper reporter with almost no expenditure of time or money. The committee's report was, indeed, an addition to literature. At Cincinnati, we read, "considerable time was spent in inspecting the city hall, and everything was examined in detail. A blinding snowstorm was raging all the time, and the weather was very cold. The courtesies extended to your committee in Cincinnati deserve special mention, many inducements being held out for the committee to remain over; but business had to be attended to, and at 7.20 P. M. the party left for Richmond, intending to stop over one hour and fifty minutes in Washington, but the snowstorm continued through the night, delaying the train two hours and forty minutes, arriving in Washington just in time to take the train for Richmond, where the party arrived at 11.30 Friday night, having been on the train twenty-eight hours and one half." But literature was not what Boston wanted in the exigency. Emerson and Lowell and Hawthorne were on the shelves, Howells was in his prime, and the NEW ENGLAND MAGAZINE had already been three years in existence! Nor was Boston interested in the adventures of travelling aldermen; the biography of Capt. Kidd, accessible to all, was more romantic and exciting. What Boston wanted was useful knowledge about city halls; and this she could have got this is the point which we are urging by enclosing a two-cent postage stamp to one of her educated architects, instead of sending her aldermen, who knew nothing about architecture, to visit a lot of cities which had no city halls worth knowing about, with the risk of being snowed in on the railroads and possible pneumonia. In a rationally organized city, we say, with a Board of Beauty, all this would have been impossible.

-

Impossible, too, in a rationally organized state, with a State Board of Beauty, would be such a situation as Massachusetts now finds herself in with reference to her new State House. In the absence of such a permanent state board as that

here urged, common sense would surely seem to dictate the creation of a special board of artists and experts of the highest technical training to deal with so important an enterprise; and such a board would always do one thing, it would submit its problem to the ablest architects of the country and, in conference with them, solve it. What do we have, as a result of the rule-of-thumb methods actually pursued — pursued, be it said, by most able and excellent men, only men not trained to deal with the class of problems here involved? In the first place, a great annex -- not beautiful, but not offensive - was built behind the old State House, with the understanding that the latter should not be disturbed. Only when this great annex approaches completion does the board of construction discover, what would have been clear from the beginning to the expert eye, that when the old and new are hitched together, the effect must be inartistic, clumsy and ridiculous; and hence comes the demand that the old building shall be demolished and be rebuilt so as to conform more properly to the annex. Meantime the cardinal fact looms into true proportion, that even were this done in the manner proposed, what was meant to be the side of the building has become its main front, with a dome on one end instead of in the middle! With things brought to this pass, it is not strange that the Legislature declines to authorize further proceedings until the people have time to collect their senses and act with mature judgment, and postpones for a year appropriations either for rebuilding or repairing the old house. It is the only sensible thing the Legislature can do. The sensible thing for the people to do during the year is to reflect upon the system which makes such a situation possible.

With reference to the particular situation, there is, it seems to us, one important thing to be said: that the State House on Beacon Hill should front on Boston Common, as it now does, this front being the real front and not the end of a wing. In due time, then, when the public sentiment and culture are ripe for it, let such a State House be built, in classic forms like those of the present capitol, but larger and in stone, with a noble dome, such as Bulfinch, would have been glad to build, had he had behind him the resources of a proud, rich state, instead of a poor, pinched one. To this State House the present annex may properly be united by a beautiful bridge of some sort, if that be thought necessary or important, as it would seem to be, since one of the legislative chambers is located in this annex; or, with no very fundamental changes, it could be kept a separate building, with broad passages beneath the street connecting the halls and corridors of the two basements.

But the main thing for the people of Boston and of Massachusetts is to determine not to let such a situation occur again. They can prevent such situations only by taking a genuine public interest in their public buildings and in the beauty of the city and the state. Public buildings of the importance of those here referred to could not be erected or proposed in Edinburgh or London or Paris or Berlin without arousing a degree of popular interest and discussion vastly greater than we

see in our American cities. The management of such matters in the great European cities is always intrusted to men of the highest special knowledge and training. It accuses us as a people that we take so slight and unintelligent an interest in these matters. It accuses us that every city and every state has not its Board of Beauty.

THERE is one department in which it may rightly be claimed that we have acted, in this time, with much energy and much wisdom; and that is the department of public parks. We are yet far behind many of the great cities of Europe in this respect; but from the day when New York, with fine foresight, reserved Central Park, in what is rapidly becoming the real centre of the city, and laid it out for the people, the work which has been accomplished in this line in our American cities has been very great. Prospect Park in Brooklyn, and Fairmount Park in Philadelphia, are noble illustrations. The park system of Chicago, so broadly and beautifully planned, is one of the most wonderful features of that wonderful city. The great new park in St. Louis is being laid out on a most generous and splendid scale. The work in smaller cities, in Buffalo, for instance, and Detroit, is admirably conceived. Our own little city of Lynn, here in Massachusetts, has acted in this matter with a foresight and public spirit which almost entitle her to be called the banner city of the country so far as the matter of parks is concerned. "Lynn Woods," so close at hand, nearer than Richmond Park to London or St. Germain to Paris, will soon come to be regarded by the people of Boston as one of their own dearest possessions. The work now being carried on by Boston herself in the development of her park system, culminating recently in the acquirement of the entire region containing the Blue Hills of Milton, a tract of four thousand acres, is of an ambitious, far-reaching and magnificent character of which few even of her own citizens have adequate knowledge. The last report of her park commissioners- a true Board of Beauty of the best description - is an ideal document, the study of which is a liberal education in this important field.

We need to apply to every department of our public life the same principles which we are applying to this matter of parks. If we are building bridges, let them be things of beauty, not things of ugliness. How picturesque and beautiful are hundreds of the old stone bridges of Europe, whose pictures linger in the traveller's memory! How ugly are the bridges with which Boston has spanned the Charles, and with which every American city seated by a river has spanned its river, compared with the bridges with which London has spanned the Thames, Paris the Seine, Dresden the Elbe! A river, which furnishes always the most transcendent architectural opportunity, is invariably treated by every American city blessed with one simply as a sewer or a part of the back yard.

Our railway stations have till this latest time been most dismal and unlovely places. But here we are seeing a sudden reformation, which in its

The

progress bids fair to give us a set of stations as fine and beautiful as the noble stations in the cities of Germany. The two great stations in Philadelphia, as yet the finest in the country, stand at the head; but such stations as those in Springfield and Portland show how well our smaller cities may deal with this problem; and many of the new stations in the villages along the line of the Boston and Albany Railroad and elsewhere mark the great advance in this respect. There is no town which cannot well afford to co-operate generously with the railroad company to secure a beautiful station. How greatly the respect of the traveller rises for a town like Laconia in New Hampshire, as he looks out of the window, while his train pauses, at the chaste and elegant station which has replaced the dingy barrack of a few years ago! It is as if the town itself had put on a clean collar and blacked its boots, making itself fit for good society. railroad station, in our modern life, is a public institution, as truly as the church, the library and the town hall, a place where more almost than in any other the people congregate; and it should always be a beautiful place. Our Board of Beauty will keep the town informed of everything beautiful and convenient in the railroad stations of other places in the country and in Europe. If a church is to be built, or a school, or a library, or a town hall, or a monument, or a bridge, it will be its duty to submit to the people descriptions and illustrations of the best things of this kind elsewhere, - of the village library at Woburn, Mass., 1 of the beautiful memorial bridge at Milford, Conn.,2 of the noble public buildings given by the Ames family to North Easton, by the Fairbanks family to St. Johnsbury,3 by Mr. Rindge to. Cambridge, of a hundred village churches in Old England, -that so they may have beauty in the town, the beauty which is as cheap as the ugliness they would have else, and a perpetual benediction. A wholesome and promising movement in behalf of a more beautiful public life has already begun in many New England villages; we see its results in such places as Stockbridge and Williamstown and Amherst. The case is better in many a little town than in the cities. The Village Improvement Society is a true anticipation of the Board of Beauty.

THE multiplication of Art Museums will accomplish more than almost anything else in the promotion of a more beautiful public life in America. They will familiarize the people with what is best in the architecture, sculpture and painting of the world, and accustom them to a larger and more ambitious manner of thinking in matters of art and beauty. The great service of the White City for our artists and our people was that it gave the one opportunity to plan and build and decorate on a broader and bolder scale than ever before, and the other their first real acquaintance with fine architectural effect and artistic unity. Both artists and people will demand and essay greater 1 See article on "A Model Village Library" in the NEW ENGLAND MAGAZINE for February, 1890.

2" An Old Connecticut Town," November, 1889. 3" A Model New England Village," February, 1991. "The Rindge Gifts to Cambridge," February, 1891.

things in every city in the land as a direct consequence. But the art museum, as it becomes common and its treasures are brought home to the people, will show them that other peoples have done beautiful things in a great way. It will show them what Athens and Rome did in the old time, what Florence and Venice and Nuremberg did in the Middle Ages, what the spirit was in which the great cathedrals grew, and how, when Leipzig and Munich build a theatre or a music hall, these are monumental structures, standing apart with beautiful environment, not crowded behind the warehouses of the alley, with some poor entrance from the avenue, between the druggist's and the grogshop. The art museum will make artists as well as train a public for them. About it the art schools and art clubs will gather, and it will become the centre from which will radiate a thousand impulses to the love and cultivation of beauty. It will, in a multitude of places, stir the generosity of men like Mr. Hyde and Col. Pope, in Boston, who, through the Boston Art Club, have just offered a prize of $5,000 for the best American painting exhibted during the year. The rapid growth of the Art Museums of New York, of Boston, of Cincinnati and St. Louis and others of our cities, of Chicago above all, is one of the most satisfying things of the time. The galleries established in these recent years at many of our colleges at Amherst and Yale, at Smith and Wellesley will exercise a refining and stimulating influence where it will have most fruitful results. ought not to be any important community in the country without the benefit of such influence. We trust that, as we are seeing now an era of the endowment of public libraries in our New England towns, so we shall see an era of the endowment of public art museums in New England and throughout the country. The public art museum, like the public library, must be brought into close and organic relation with the public schools, every pupil being made familiar with its treaures. How great a boon and blessing to a town is such an institution as the Slater gallery at Norwalk and the Fairbanks gallery at St. Johnsbury! The art museum in eich little town can not expect to possess treasures such as these possess, although it were to be hoped that many would gradually accumulate some precious little store of original works; but in this day of cheap reproductions, there are few towns so poor as not to be able to secure good copies of all the world's great masterpieces of architecture and sculpture and painting, and give them fitting lodging and arrangement. Such collection might well be an adjunct of the town library. The village Art Club should become as regular as the Literary Society and, by meetings and discussions and exhibitions, bring art home to the people, bring it home especially to the children of the public schools.

There

THE public school is the place to which we should turn chief attention in our effort to promote a more beautiful public life in America, just as we recently had occasion to say in these columns that it is the place to which we should constantly turn chief attention in our effort for a better political life. The schoolhouse and the

school grounds should be beautiful, and the child should be surrounded by beauty in the schoolroom from first to last. Trained in the habit of seeing beauty and knowing it, he will come instinctively to hate ugliness in the home and in the street, as he goes out into life. A dozen years ago or more there was formed in England an "Art for Schools Association." Its object was to arouse in the teachers and pupils of the public schools a love of beauty and an interest in art, and to make provision for supplying good engravings and photographs, copies of the best pictures, to the schools, at the lowest possible rates. The work of this society has been most important, and has been popular. Upon the walls of hundreds of schools in England hang copies of the paintings of Raphael and Murillo, Rembrandt and Dürer, Turner and Landseer and Millet, walls which would have been bare and silent had not the earnest men and women of this society made them eloquent. We have noticed in these columns the work of Mr. Ross Turner in the adornment of one of the public schools of Salem with excellent pictures; and there have been other pioneer efforts in this direction in America. Several years ago copies of the Elgin marbles- the Parthenon bas-reliefsand casts of several of the famous Greek statues were placed in the hall of the Girls' High School in Boston. There was founded in Boston two years ago a Public School Art League," "for the purpose of promoting art culture in the public schools, and for the formation of associate leagues throughout the towns and cities of the United States." It is in the power of this society, if it is managed with wisdom and energy, to do an immense work in the country. It has already made a good beginning in Boston. It has decorated a room in the English High School with subjects pertaining to Rome, - photographs of the Arch of Constantine, the Colosseum, St. Peter's, etc., busts of Cæsar, Cicero, and Virgil, the room now being known as the "Roman Room"; a room in the Rice Primary School, called the "American Room," since most of its subjects are American; and a room in the Latin School, called the "Randall Room," it being a memorial room, the funds for its decoration having been donated, all the works illustrating the period of the Revolution.

There is in New York a new Municipal Art League, founded to promote the adornment of the public buildings of the city with good works of art. Such a league might well expand into a Board of Beauty devoted to all the great art interests of the city.

The important work which may be done in the teaching of history by good pictures in the schools copies of great originals - is indicated by such a room as that in the Boston Latin School. A wise art publisher in Boston, Mr. Elson, recognizing how great a field is opening here, has begun the publication, for schools, of a notable series of reproductions of the most famous portraits of our great American statesmen and poets, and of the most famous pictures by Trumbull, and others, of the great events in American history. Messrs. Prang & Co. are beginning important work in the same direction. The teaching of