ndertakes to summarize and interpret that message
to a public to which Mr. Sullivan is indeed a name, but not a voice.

That he is not a voice can be attributed neither to his lack of
eloquence--for he is eloquent--nor to the indifference of the younger
generation of architects which has grown up since he has ceased,
in any public way, to speak. It is due rather to a curious fatality
whereby his memorabilia have been confined to sheets which the
winds of time have scattered--pamphlets, ephemeral magazines, trade
journals--never the bound volume which alone guards the sacred flame
from the gusts of evil chance.

And Mr. Sullivan's is a "sacred flame," because it was kindled solely
with the idea of service--a beacon to keep young men from
shipwreck traversing those straits made dangerous by the Scylla of
Conventionality, and the Charybdis of License. The labour his writing
cost him was enormous. "I shall never again make so great a sacrifice
for the younger generation," he says in a letter, "I am amazed to
note how insignificant, how almost nil is the effect produced, in
comparison to the cost, in vitality to me. Or perhaps it is I who
am in error. Perhaps one must have reached middle age, or the Indian
Summer of life, must have seen much, heard much, felt and produced
much and been much in solitude to receive in reading what I gave in
writing 'with hands overfull.'"

This was written with reference to _Kindergarten Chats. A sketch
Analysis of Contemporaneous American Architecture_, which constitutes
Mr. Sullivan's most extended and characteristic preachment to the
young men of his day. It appeared in 1901, in fifty-two consecutive
numbers of _The Interstate Architect and Builder_, a magazine now
no longer published. In it the author, as mentor, leads an imaginary
disciple up and down the land, pointing out to him the "bold,
upholsterrific blunders" to be found in the architecture of the day,
and commenting on them in a caustic, colloquial style--large, loose,
discursive--a blend of Ruskin, Carlyle and Whitman, yet all Mr.
Sullivan's own. He descends, at times, almost to ribaldry, at others
he rises to poetic and prophetic heights. This is all a part of his
method alternately to shame and inspire his pupil to some sort of
creative activity. The syllabus of Mr. Sullivan's scheme, as it
existed in his mind during the writing of _Kindergarten Chats_,
and outlined by him in a letter to the author is such a torch of
illumi