The criticism may have already arisen in the reader's mind that the
"Town" and "School" of our analysis are by no means so simple as we have
assumed them. Our surveys of antique towns ever disclose the material
survivals, at least the vestiges, of the cloister or the acropolis of
the past, of its cathedral or its forum. The processes of our
industries, in what is now their daily artisan routine, include, repeat,
condense, what were yesterday or longer ago living inventions, each
instinct with Promethean fire. The hackneyed ornament of our homes was
once glowing with beauty, radiant or dark with symbolism. So it is for
our everyday customs and institutions, and so for living languages; our
own, perhaps, most of all. These, of course, are facts made familiar by
investigators of all orders, from the scholar and antiquary of old, the
historian and philologist of yesterday, to the geographer or the
sociologist of our own time: witness Mr. Spencer's masterly treatment of
their main results. How, then, shall we correlate this process of all
things growing old with the analysis of cities above attempted? In other
words, how shall we interpret the course of their historic evolution,
their renewed growth and decay, progress and degeneracy, their present
condition, crowded with residues of the past, with those potentialities
which our outline discloses? This is the more necessary since this
fourfold analysis applies in principle to all human groupings from the
simplest village to the Eternal City. To this, indeed, we have in
principle already traced it, onwards from our primitive valley section
with its humble hamlets, its fundamental occupations. Returning then to
our main diagram, with its four-fold analysis of the City so soon as we
have completed this, and [Page: 94] carried its progress up to the level
of city life proper, we must next turn over the leaf and begin a new
page, with place and work and folk once more. This simplest of acts
expresses with graphic significance the very process of history; for in
closing our diagram page its "Cloister" has been folded down on the
"School," our cathedral and forum, our "City" proper upon the "Town."
Thus it is that the ideals and the achievements of one day and
generation and city are ever melting away, and passing out of sight of
the next; so that to the joy or sorrow of the successors the new page
seems well nigh bare, though ever there comes faintly through some image
or at least blurred suggestion of the fading past. Hence each page of
history is a palimpsest. Hence our modern town, even when yesterday but
prairie, was no mere vacant site, but was at once enriched and
encumbered by the surviving traditions of the past; so that even its new
buildings are for the most part but vacant shells of past art, of which
now only the student cares to trace the objective annals, much less
penetrate to the inner history. So for the decayed Renaissance learning
of our schools, for the most part so literally dead since the
"Grammarian's Funeral"; and so, too, for the unthinking routines, the
dead customs and conventions, and largely too the laws and rituals of
our urban lives. Hence, then, it is that for the arrest and the decay of
cities we have no need to go for our examples to the ancient East. These
processes, like those of individual senility and death, are going on
everywhere day by day.
Upon the new page, then, it is but a complexer "Town" and "School" anew:
we have no continuing City. This too commonly has existed at its best
but for the rare generation which created it, or little longer; though
its historic glories, like those of sunset and of after-glow, may long
shed radiance and glamour upon its town, and linger in the world's
memory long after not only these have faded, but their very folk have
vanished, their walls fallen, nay their very site been buried or
forgotten. Upon all these degrees of dying, all these faint and fading
steps between immortality and oblivion, we may arrange what we call our
historic cities. Obviously in the [Page: 95] deeper and more living
sense the city exists only in actualising itself; and thus to us it is
that the ideal city lies ever in the future. Yet it is the very essence
of this whole argument that an ideal city is latent in every town. Where
shall we in these days find our cloistered retreats to think out such
ideals as may be applicable in our time and circumstances: the needed
kinetic ethics, the needed synthetic philosophy and science, the needed
vision and imagery and expression of them all?