Evening Star Newspaper, July 26, 1931, Page 65

*Cathedrals are not tossed together as hotels and office buildings are. They grow slowly . BY JAMES W ALDO FAWCETT. HAVE never visited an old cathedral and realized its wounds and scars that I have not wished in my heart that I might have seen it while it was building, while it was still unmarred by the years, still unhurt by the brutality or the neglect of men. I know that there is a kind of grace that time bestows upon old churches. The lovely windows are often partly so because they are coated with the grime of centuries. The soft and delicate lines of many a pillar and many an arch are often enough the work of erosion and decay. There are certainly elements of quiet loveliness which slow destruction creates. And it is likewise true that many an ancient church has a peculiar atmosphere, difficult to describe, a character of sanctity resulting doubtless from the fact that it has been for generations a house of prayer, something not architectural at all but rather psychological—if we may speak of the psychology of a building: one feels this subtly, and it cannot be analyzed. But the original beauty of a fine church is the loveliness really intended by its builders. The central tower at Canterbury must have been a glorious c:eation when first it rose, so clean and confident, so proud against the sky. It is glorious still, but it seems just a trifle apologetic. “Yes, yes,” it seems to say, “but you should have come here 400 years ago.” And in this instance of the Angel tower only time has been at work. At Exeter it is a dif- ferent story. There man has deliberately wrought the irreparable damage that still cries protest: the broken, battered, hideously mis- treated west front. Think what it must have been as the carvers left it that day long ago when they said “It is done!” Once when I was a boy I heard a mighty sermon centered about the idea that while Christ labored and taught in Jerusalem there were probably many men in the city who simply did not trouble to see or hear Him, men without curiosity enough to cross the street to see for themselves the Central Character of the greatest, the most pitiful drama the world has ever known. They had heard that He was in the city, they understood that multitudes werza following Him about, but they were not interested. I suppose there are men today who would not step to the window to see a President or a King, a gilted painter or a great poet, pass in the street below. But I wonder what manner of men they can be. Surely a normal curiosity is an essential quality in the healthy, mind. I REMEMBER a phrase used by Kennedy Moor- head one evening just before he sailed for France in the staggering Spring of 1917. “This war,” he said, “is the greatest thing that has happened in a hundéred years. I'd be ashamed not to see it.” He saw more than a year of it; he perished in it as it closed. But he was wholly right in his attitude toward it. It de- served to be seen. No man worthy of the title could ignore it. And I have a similar feeling about these great new cathedrals that are slowly growing, slowly being grown on their several hills— Liverpool, New York and Washington. How can we fail to notice them? For centuries after we have gone they are to stand against the sun. Men who will follow us in the high- ways of the world will see them, will think of them as monuments of our time, symbols of our. lives, our aspirations, our ideals. These later men will behold them as completed struc- tures. They cannot share with us the oppor- tunity to see them being built. That is our own particular privilege. In Liverpool I met an old sailor at the foot of St. James’ Mount on which the majestic church is being raised. “I come here often,” he said, “just to look at it. You know it does ehange from one day to another.” I never met " THE SUNDAY STAR, WASHINGTON, D. C, JULY 26, 1931. Future Generations Who I'ill Visit the Washington Cathedral as a Monument of Our Time, a Symbol of Our Ideals, Cannot Share I'ith Us the Opportunity to See 1t Being Built— Appreciation of the Manifold Problems and the Intricate Handiwork in Its Molding. - him again, but I shall remember him. Just a man in the street, an “average man,” but bless him for his genius of appreciation! I could share his thought; he perceives that, for en- during values, for values that will last, the cathedral is the most important enterprise in Liverpool today; he is not ignoring it, he is not unmindful of it, he is awake to its meaning, to its beauty, to the drama of it. Returning to New York I noticed groups of men standing about Fifth avenue and Thirty- fourth street, watching the finishing touches being put on the great skyscraper that replaces the old Waldorf-Astoria Hotel. Not one in a dozen of these men was conscious of any nov- elty in the thing he had paused to view. Sky- scrapers are & commonplace of our time and circumstance. They are thrown together in a few weeks: they are of a single pattern; they ate products of a simple technique; they are more truly assembled than built. But men have poetry enough in their hearts to appreciate them, to respond to them, ordinary as they are. It is because I understand this reaction that I am sure there must be many ‘“average men” who will take advantage of the opportunity to see the cathedral enterprises of America while they are “in process of construction.” The at- traction is immeasurably greater. Cathedrals are not tossed together as hotels and office buildings are. They grow slowly. Work designed to endure for centuries cannot be hurriedly done. Cathedrals are built with regard to laws evolved through more than a thousand years—particular laws of construction, of symbolic design, of decoration. When an ordinary office building is planned the architect specifies such and such glass for the windows. The material desired is available in a score of commercial factories. A ’phone call will serve to bring it upon the scene. Any glazier can set such a pane of glass. There is no special problem about it. How different the windows of a cathedral! Soil Carried by Rivers Costly to Nations. WHEN the average Washingtonian sees the muddy color of the Potomac water after a heavy rain and contrasts it with the clear, sparkling water of mountain streams he has seen at other times he thinks longingly of the clear water, but probably does not stop lo think that when he watches the muddy water of the Potomac he is watching the enactment of what is really a national tragedy, for the muddy water is the visible evidence of the slow but certain process of erosion, which is wasting away the fertile top soil of the pro- ducing acres of the hillsides. Now and then when a cloudburst or long, hard rain washes gullies down through the fields, erosion is spectacular and perhaps gives birth to a vague sort of thought that some- thing ought to be done about it. Erosion bec- comes strikingly evident in those times. Any one can see and appreciate its dangers, but the comforting thought always arises that the heavy storms are more or less infrequent, and not too serious a danger. It is the slow, unnoticed sheet erosion, the type that takes just a little soil away even during gentle rainfalls, that is doing the real damage. It is this sheet erosion which is arousing the apprehensions of the soil experts who have studied the situation and seen the loss of 4 to 14 inches of top and subsoil in periods ranging only from 25 to 50 years. They have seen the gradual loss of productivity of once fertile fields. They have known how use- less was the desperate turning to the use of fertilizers, for even with fertilizer the under soil has little value in crop raising, for it is only in the first few inches of soil that the plants find their food. The land in question, of course, is that which lles back, away from the main streams, lands washed by the rains which go to make up the feeders that flow into the main streams. In the low alluvial plains erosion, of course, does not wash away the top soil. It simply. ruins - it by burying it under the constant loads of worthless sandy soil which the streams are now bringing down in many instances from land long since washed clean of its top soil. A summary of the situation made recently by H H. Bennett, a soil scientist of the De- partment of Agriculture, points out that more that 17,000,000 acres of once productive land has been virtually destroyed and a vastly larger area is slowly but surely being reduced to the same condition. The trouble goes back to man-made condi- tions, conditions which have become habit through the wastefulness which unfortunately goes hand and hand with plenty. Primarily the fault lies with the eradication of once virgin forests. In this instance the sins of the fathers are surely visited upon the children unto the third and fourth generations. The failure to leave any trees standing to hold back with their roots and the spongy soil above them the rainfall of succeeding years invited and in many instances has brought disaster. Cleared land on the hillsides without the pro- tection of trees above has becen further broken up and made more susceptible to erosion through the trampling of live stock. Mr. Bennett estimates that in the Pledmont Plateau, which extends from Alabama to New Jersey and comprises about 50,000,000 acres, between 60 and 65 per cent of the land has lost from 4 to 14 inches of top soil. In one South Carolina County 23,000 of the original 27,000 acres of good alluvial soil. has been ruined by the wash of poor soil from the higher lands forming the watershed of the streams running through the low plains. The great rolling black lands of Central Texas have lost a large part of their productivity through erosion and in the Tennessee Valley serious wastage has occurred. These are offered only as examples of conditions similar in many other places, some on equally large scales and smnl:s on small, but nevertheless just as tragic scales. . . For centuries after we have gone they are to stand against the sunX The ancient law of cathedral construction proe vides that the glass for a great church must be of a particular kind. It must be part of the doctrine which the cathedral is to teach in terms of symbols. It must tell part of the gospel story. It must be specially made, spe- cially colored or stained, specially wrought {from first to last. It must be shaped and placed in obedience to a special design. Weeks of thought and labor are required for the construction of each individual section in each window. No machine process will serve the need. It is all handwork. The builders of Washington Cathe- dral have established a studio and laboratory of their own to produce the lovely windows they realize they must have in their beautiful house of prayer. They are obeying the ancient law in so doing. The work is arduous and exacting, but the men who are privileged to perform it are placing the American people under an ob- ligation almost unparalleled in this century. Multitudes, in time to come, will appreciate the results of their toil, and the thoughtful pilgrim will feel a deep and poignant gratitude toward the names, remembered or forgotten, of the creators of the iridescent glories of the come pleted church. Visitors to Chartres, in France, or to Leon, in Spain, today lift grateful eyes to windows filled by workmen centuries dead. O, too, it is with every other phase of a cathedral enterprise. The stone, for exame ple, is cut and shaped, set and decorated ac- cording to principles of great antiquity and of particular architectural and iconographic sig- nificance. Obviously one stone differs from an- other. So a pattern must be made and executed for each. I have seen a stone for which 70 patterns were made—a stone, so to say, with 70 facets. Each stone has a particular function, occupies a particular place in the design, just as each syllable has a particular value in a line of verse and each line a particular value in a complete poem. Perhaps we might agree that an office building or a hotel is “prose,” while a cathedral is “poetry”—a glorious hvmn, a mag= nificent anthem of praise to the Master Bullldes of the universe. There can be nothing “ready made” about & cathedral. Only the principles, the laws, the ideals of cathedral-building come down to us from old time. The translation of these ideals into accomplished fact is a business of infinite creative detail. There is no factory to which cathedral architects may telegraph for a thoue sand carved bosses or a hundred carved pin- nacles. Each detail must be executed to pare ticular order. And from this fact derives part of the come pelling attraction of cathedral-building. Nothe ing the visitor sees today in the cathedrals of Liverpool, New York and Washington is com- monplace. Everything is novel and unique. No§ for many generations has there been any work of construction comparable with these. The technique we see is one that has not been used since the old cathedrals of Europe were built in the Middle Ages. We glimpse the difference in a dramatic man- ner when we understand that, though this is the age of steel, there is no structural steel being used in the construction of Washington Cathedral. For such an edifice solid masonry is imperative. It was solid masonry the builders of the old cathedrals used. That is one reason why the old cathedrals have survived the wear and tear of centuries. Not ordinary materials, then, nor ordinary methods are employed in the making of the beautiful fabrics of this new cathedral age in which we live. In no other way could unique results desired be obtained than by faithful adherence to the highest architectural ideals. The builders of the cathedrals of the twentieth century are building for all time, They are building for beauty. They are build« ing for service. They are building, they believe, for God. So it has been said that the making of a great cathedral is a miracle—a mirasle of God at work in mea.