transcendent costumier? I here have room to hint at a couple of
reasons only. In the first place, it should be remembered that while
the avowed ideal of masculine clothing is to render its wearers
inconspicuous by causing them all to look alike, the ideal of feminine
clothing is to give an appearance of strangeness and singularity. Now,
nothing could accord more happily with our mechanical civilization than
the masculine ideal; nothing, on the other hand, could come into more
violent and more disappointing conflict with it than the feminine.
Modern industry does not discriminate; it holds out to both sexes
the same opportunities for acquisition, it heaps upon both the same
monotonous profusion of manufactured goods. A hat, a mantle, a gown,
is no sooner devised than a million others of the selfsame pattern
pour in steady streams into every corner of the world. A startling
colour cannot be affected by someone eager to achieve distinction of
appearance without multiplying more rapidly than the budding green
in Mr. Wells’ _Time Machine_. Provincial visitors to the West End of
London are astonished at the number of well-dressed women they see
about the streets, and profess themselves unable to distinguish between
a duchess and a shop-assistant, while Londoners who tread for the
first time the pavements of Paris or New York find themselves similarly
baffled. Thanks to the ceaseless activities of the large drapers’
store (supported by the admirable enterprise of artificial silk
manufacturers) no woman to-day, however penurious, need deny herself
any of those elegant accessories that were the crowning luxury of her
ancestors. But, pleasing as this facility may be to the multitude, is
it to be imagined that the more fortunate or ambitious can look upon it
with the same satisfaction? Assuredly not, for they have even invoked
the law of copyright in their attempt to resist it.
In drawing our conclusions from this spectacle of unwelcome equality
it is useful also to bear in mind the relation between the female and
the male populations of Western Europe. During the last half century
the excess of women in this country has, roughly speaking, doubled
in proportion to the total number of inhabitants of both sexes. The
effect of a fixed and constant inequality may be neutralized by a
series of adjustments in the social structure, but when the inequality
threatens to increase fourfold in the course of a century the pressure
it engenders is not so easily relieved. One of the most distressing
sights to be met with in Paris to-day is the large number of coloured
and mostly negroid males that is gradually being assimilated by the
white population. There are some even who predict that France will soon
have become a bi-coloured republic. Should this unpleasant prophecy
be realized, the present excess of white females will no doubt go a
long way to account for the change. Whether or not this excess has
done anything to stimulate the new movement in decoration it is, of
course, impossible to say with certainty, but our surmise receives
the strongest confirmation from the fact that in the United States
of America, alone among modern countries in this respect, the modern
decorative movement appears to be awakening no response at all. For in
that country alone the male population exceeds the female by a surplus
that is increasing at almost exactly the same rate as our own female
surplus is increasing.
The new movement has been described as an enlargement of the art of
dress, an affinity which those who visited the 1925 Paris Exhibition
of Decorative Art will be ready enough to acknowledge. Among the
most skilful of the exponents of the movement is M. Maurice Dufrène,
and no one could wish for a more complete expression of its main
characteristics than his _Chambre de Dame_, shown at the 1925
exhibition along with other apartments by the same artist. Wherever
one may turn in this room, one’s eye rests upon long sinuous curves
whose rise and fall is as the billowing of an exquisite garment. The
richness and amplitude of its lines recall nothing so much as the
famous liquefaction that the silk frock of Herrick’s Julia would
undergo, more particularly while the poet watched her in the act of
walking. The dressing-table undulates round its absent mistress with
a softness of movement that causes one to think of a fur or a cloak,
while in the distance, framed in a background of streaming silver,
the bed rolls lazily like a magic carpet suspended on the breeze. The
cushions and lampshades have the appearance of intimate garments too
pertly displayed. From an elongated hollow in the ceiling, fringed
with curling foam, a golden light descends with studied moderation
upon the skin of a giant polar bear, the canine adjunct enlarged and
architecturalized, its muzzle caught in the loops of a heavy rope
of silver. Everybody said the room was a distinguished success, and
this, in so far as it served to enhance a brilliant though imaginary
personality, it indubitably was.
The chief manifestation of the new movement, however, lies not so much
in its forms as in the teguments wherein those forms are clothed. They
are invariably of the greatest succulence. Soft, smooth, evenly or
sharply luminous, they answer one another like the modulated textures
of the dressmaker’s products. Even metallic surfaces are made to play
their dull or glittering part in the combination, for there is nothing,
as Baudelaire wrote in one of his poems, that provides so telling a
foil to the warmth of woven materials as “l’énivrante monotonie du
métal, du marbre et de l’eau.” It is only fit, therefore, that among
the most successful of all these designers should be the metalworker
Edgar Brandt, whose fame has securely established itself even on the
other shore of the Atlantic. To infuse with profound feminine charm
the design of a metal grille or an ornamental chandelier may appear
difficult, but this is what M. Edgar Brandt has succeeded in doing;
nor could we ask for a more striking testimony to the strength and
singleness of the impulse from which this modern movement in decoration
derives than we may find in his triumphant enlistment of such unlikely
aids as these. The proper place and function of his work, of which
I will not attempt a detailed description, is as unmistakable as the
work itself. Only the other day a candidate for an academic prize in
architecture introduced an imitation of it into a design for a bank
building. Of course, he had to be rebuked on behalf of the prize
committee, happily through the person of that witty and scholarly
critic, Mr. H. S. Goodhart-Rendel. The particular manner of design
he had chosen, the designer was told, should be confined to “the
surroundings of beautiful and expensive women.” Its nature could not
have been more succinctly defined.
Such, then, are, to the best of my belief, the most important forces
at work in architecture to-day. Without doubt these forces will drive
the architecture of to-morrow into a mould that is much like the one
I have here attempted to describe. Are any new currents likely to
manifest themselves, adding their influence to that of the currents
with which we are already familiar? Few men living to-day are so bold
that they would care to prophesy without some visible omen to justify
their words. Our ideas about progress and the future have themselves
shrunk somewhat; they have become more modest than they were. To the
nineteenth-century European, whose faith was so miraculously fortified
by the discovery of natural selection, these things had grown to be the
first and greatest realities of human existence. Progress was to him a
pleasing and uninterrupted enlargement of his worldly self, a direct
and positive increase of comfort, power, and general importance. As for
the future, the element of variability, of possible differentiation,
that was contained in it seemed about as great as the growth of a
crystal might show in a constantly replenished solution. Even to-day
there are some men living who (like that most eloquent of worshippers
at the favourite Victorian shrine, Mr. H. G. Wells) still look forward
to a continued expansion of the social organism, an unbroken if less
unvarying accession of prosperity and power. But it is becoming only
too clear that the band of orthodox believers is rapidly dwindling;
already in some places the object of their worship is openly blasphemed
against. We are told that the growth of an industrial society must
necessarily be limited in extent――nay, that it must even be of limited
duration. It is argued with depressing force that the opening-up of
markets is like everything else in this world, and can only continue
so long as there are markets to open up. Every day the future of our
urbanized civilization appears wrapped in a darker cloud. Every day
it becomes more uncertain how long Balbus will continue to build even
in fulfilment of needs that exist here and now. The modern amorphous
building, the “zoning” of volume and outline, the labour-saving
residence, the subservience of the new decoration to feminine dress:
all these spring from forces that exist to-day and that must continue
for some time longer provided civilization is able to maintain itself
in its present form. More than this it is impossible to foretell,
except one thing only, with an inadequate reference to which I must
bring this essay to an end.
It has been observed how the growth of population of our towns is
even now being followed by the architectural expansion which is the
somewhat retarded concomitant of such a growth. This growth, however,
is slowing down and, it may be, gradually subsiding. We continue to
build, but the tenants of the buildings we put up will before long
have ceased to multiply. We have rediscovered the first principles of
the forgotten art of town-planning, but only at a time when our towns
are becoming almost adequate to the needs of their populations. One
of the most momentous chapters in the history of humanity is thus
about to be closed, and it is surely permissible at such a moment to
speculate awhile on what will succeed it. What is to follow the great
age of city-building, whose ironic fate it was to discern the laws
that should have governed its activities when it was too late to obey
these laws except on a point of secondary importance, being then able
to obey only under penalty of death? Are we to meet, after failing
to grasp the illusive opportunities of town-planning, with new, and
real, and unexhausted opportunities of country-planning? I have not
in this essay attempted a detailed description of the growth of our
towns, which is a thing of the present and the past, but have confined
myself to certain things that must happen within the boundaries of
these towns before many more years have elapsed. And though it is
too early as yet to speak with any particularity of the repopulation
of the countryside, it is clear that no discussion of the future can
claim to be even approximately just if it does not bear witness to this
new phase in the history of building. Following unobtrusively upon
a lengthy procession of works on town-planning, the first treatise
on country-planning has recently made its appearance. Though only a
pamphlet of modest dimensions, it is fairly certain that the outward
growth it heralds will not be less important than the centripetal one
which is even now being arrested, for the exodus from the city has
hardly begun to-day, and the architecture of the countryside still
requires to pass beyond the experimental stage and assume some measure
of permanence. But when rural England has grown thus far, we may rest
assured that its permanence and stability will exceed all that the city
at any time possessed, and in this manner will come to pass what was
prophesied to the Roman philosopher Ædesius who, it will be recalled,
awoke one morning and saw that the back of his left hand was covered
with writing. “After reverently saluting his hand and the letters,” so
the story goes, “he found that the following oracle was written on his
hand: ‘On the warp of the two Fates’ spinning lie the threads of thy
life’s web. If thy choice is the cities and towns of men, thy renown
shall be deathless, shepherding the god-given impulse of youth. But
if thou shalt be the shepherd of sheep and bulls, then hope that thou
thyself shalt be the associate of the blessed immortals.’” Thus speaks
the divine portent of the future of architecture also, and to whom
except the architect skilled in country-planning, the architect of
to-morrow, could it be said (as it was said of Ædesius and his pupils)
that “when they spread their wings further than those of Icarus, though
they were even more fragile, he would lead them gently down, not into
the sea, but to the land and to human life”?
* * * * *
Transcriber’s Notes:
――Text in italics is enclosed by underscores (_italics_).
――Archaic and variable spelling has been preserved.
――Variations in hyphenation and compound words have been preserved.
――The Publisher’s Catalog for the _To-day and To-morrow_ series,
referred to in the front matter above, was not contained in the
source material.