Part 4

A convenient way of picturing the change of outlook that has led to this revival is to compare two familiar works of nineteenth-century fiction separated by a generation or two. Gautier’s _Mademoiselle de Maupin_ contains long passages redolent of that nature-worship which made Wordsworth a best-seller and which inspired our Ruskin to discard the principles of decorative design in favour of those derived from the study of plant growth. Innumerable landscapes are presented to us in this book, many of them bathed in moonlight of the most impeccable romantic quality. Country mansions, pleasure-pavilions, creeper-clad cottages, all these are concealed beneath a dense mass of verdure, their existence briefly hinted at, while the sinuous paths by which they may be approached are made the subject of the closest description, together with the trees, shrubs, creepers, herbs and mosses which form their setting. Such power of attention as remains in the reader is skilfully directed upon the subject of feminine apparel, to the treatment of which the author brings a sympathy and animation almost equal to those with which he approaches the vegetable kingdom. But the apartments through which his characters move, the walls and furniture against which their forms, so exquisitely clad, stand disclosed to the reader, receive as little thought as the exterior of the buildings, so that it is impossible for us to say what they are like. As soon as the men and women cross the threshold of a house, an impenetrable mist descends upon their surroundings. Alas, there was no one to take any interest in even the most delightful of the houses or rooms, and we are left to reconstruct them for ourselves, aided only by our knowledge of a few authentic remains.

In Zola’s Nana we have a complete antithesis to this fatigue, this chlorosis of the decorative faculty. The adornment of her immediate setting has with this famous character become a consuming passion. Her intuitive artistic knowledge, her manifold inventiveness, never cease to astonish the architects and decorators who work at her bidding. Nor, in her brief but triumphant career through the world of vice, does she once tire of devising fresh schemes of decoration, schemes which Zola himself appears to regard with an enthusiasm approaching that of his heroine. As she pauses at last on the brink of financial ruin, this passion for decoration flares up with an almost hysterical intensity. It is then that she dreams of “un prodige, un éblouissement ... un lit comme il n’en existait pas, un trône, un autel ... en or et en argent repoussés, pareil à un grand bijou.” To the end her preoccupation maintains its firm hold upon her, for through it alone it was that she could gain her mysterious ascendancy over the minds and the senses of men. “Jamais elle n’avait senti si profondément la force de son sexe,” remarks Zola as he shows her to us happily contemplating the scenes of prodigious elegance that she had established around her. Such is the change of attitude which nineteenth-century society must somehow have witnessed before it could be so brilliantly recorded in writing. It is a similar change that has infused new life into modern decoration.

The question may present itself whether to connect this movement with Zola’s unfortunate heroine is not to detract from its merit or importance. That must remain entirely a matter for individual judgment. I will here but remark that, in borrowing their light from the constellation of unhappy spirits in which Nana shone so vividly, the decorative arts are only imitating the example set throughout Europe and America by the art of feminine dress, and that whatever is said of one of these arts applies to the other also. But this superficial resemblance is not the only thing that unites decoration with dress, for the modern movement in decoration cannot be better described than as an enlargement of the old and more immediate business of personal adornment. Both currents spring from a common source, and if the younger of them will always remain in some respects apart from its sartorial companion, grown with the centuries into a venerable historic stream, we yet have reason to be thankful that the arid waste of decoration is being watered again, however fitfully.

What is it that has turned the decorator of to-day into a kind of 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”?

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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.