Page:The Pacific Monthly vol. 14.djvu/57



HE best art is that which most fitly embodies the characteristics of its subject, preserves the harmonies and emphasizes the aesthetic qualities that make it worthy of reproduction. In these days of rather indiscriminate architecture, where little attention is paid to the eternal fitness of things from an artistic standpoint, it is gratifying to find a structure that meets so many of these requirements as does the Forestry building at the Lewis and Clark Exposition.

Situated as it is on one of the highest elevations on the grounds, surrounded by snow-capped peaks, wooded hills, and sloping terraces mirrored in the clear waters of a natural lake, the edifice is at once the most unique, the most picturesque and the most impressive of them all. With the possible exception of the California building, whose mission style very adequately recalls the first architecture of the sunny state, the Forestry building is the only one which is really representative of a locality. All the others, beautiful as they are, have been constructed along conventional lines which reflect various influences typical of a universal rather than a specific civilization. The Forestry building, however, represents not only a particular place, but it stands at once for the history of the past, the accomplishments of the present, and the possibilities of the future, and thus personifies all the principles for which the Exposition itself was organized.

To the utilitarian who sees in the structure only those great commercial attributes which it embodies, the enumeration of its statistical features is of paramount interest. The fact that two miles of logs five and six feet in diameter, eight miles of poles, and tons of shingles and slabs were used to produce it, is of itself remarkable. When it is learned further that each of these logs is from thirty to fifty feet long and contains lumber enough to build a one-story cottage forty by forty feet, there is left nothing at which to marvel. These things appeal to the wholly practical man who is interested in the problems of production and who appreciates what it means to fell and saw and skid such massive bulk out of its native forest and down to the waters of the Columbia, where it floats for seventy-five miles before entering the Willamette and passing on to the Exposition grounds. To him also it means much that these huge sections of timber have been raised by powerful mechanical means, piled one upon another, hewed, mortised, and made firm with wooden pegs, to evolve finally into a great building in the construction of which no carpentry has entered.

But to the imaginative mind which perceives less of the practical than the picturesque, there is also a certain poetical significance in the structure—a significance that personifies the whole history of the West.

As one enters the door of the building and comes immediately into the presence of these monarchs of the forest, it is like being transported suddenly out of the confused activities of a trivial present into the solemn hush of a mysterious past. With the first breath of pungent air, fragrant with the incense of the pines, with the first view of immense colonnades outlining a great nave through the center and cutting off chapels on either side, with the soft notes of an organ whispering through its lofts and aisles, one finds him and self involuntarily reverential in a cathedral whose deity is Nature. Here is a memory of the forest primeval, of those first temples which for ages have ministered to the needs of living things, and which sheltered that explorer who came with axe and compass to blaze the first trail from the known into the unknown.

In the logs themselves, strong, sturdy, and enduring, one sees embodied the characteristics of those pioneers who followed in the path of the leader and who came as an advance guard to the army of settlers behind them. Powerful in physical strength, firm, steadfast, bearing a rough exterior, but staunch, true-hearted and vigorous within, they, too, have performed their work and accomplished