A DIARY OF CIVILISATION

BOOKS OF THE DAY

By ALISTAIR COOKE

" Cities are a product of the earth . . . and emblems of that settled life which began with permanent agriculture . . . What the shepherd, the woodman, and the miner know, becomes transformed

. . into durable elements in the human heritage. Within the city the essence of each type of soil and labour and economic goal is concentrated. Cities are a product of time. They are the moulds in which men's lifetimes have cooled and congealed . . . Layer upon layer, past times preserve themselves in the city until life itself is finally threatened with suffocation ; then, in sheer defence, modem man invents the museum."

Wirm this definition and warning, Mr. Mumford introduces his tremendous study of cities which, though a work complete in itself, concludes the testament of human living Mr. Mumford started four years ago with Technics and Civilisation. In that now classic study of the machine he began by identifying the human impulses that required satisfying with machines ; showed the progress of technics over static institutions like the monastery, the mine, and the battlefield ; showed man himself to be the best natural model for the machine ; then wrote the history of social habits during eight centuries, staking off the main three phases into three stages of history : what he called the " eotechnic " phase—the idea and progress of

power-machinery, with the wheel as symbol ; the " paleo- technic " era, founded on the mine, the nineteenth-century contribution of " multiplying and vulgarising " production ; and finally the " neotechnics " phase, provoked by the electric cell and the dynamo—an era in which, with much blinking,

we are beginning to feel at home.

The present work is a history of the most permanent clearing

house of these means and conflicts—the city. Of what it is, how it has functioned in the Western world since the tenth century, why its physical pattern is the residue of social fears and assertions. Under Mr. Mumford's serenely practical gaze, the mediaeval city is neither quaint nor curious. Indeed, it is necessary to insist on that word " function " to appreciate the beautifully articulate knowledge that makes Mr. Mumford a critic and expositor far above the encyclopaedia, the academic

art historian, the architect-propagandist, all of which he can superficially claim to be. It is function he is examining and elucidating all the time ; he comes to his study with no battery of appraising adjectives or mere learned enthusiasm. He comes equipped. with a quarter century's personal knowledge of the physical plant of cities the world over, and with a severely

enquiring western intelligence, always asking and wondering why in this place a clump of trees should be on a hill, why in that a church. Mr. Mumford's command of generalisation is that of a great historian rather than of a great philosopher, at its best—when he is analysing the complex and " insensate " industrial town—reminding one of the ability of Professor Panowsky to know two truisms, far apart in art history, which when combined produce a shattering and undeniable truth.

It can be indicated best in a short review by quoting a few of his notes to the book's profuse and always apt illustrations, thus :

" Park design, after Le Nfitre. The two poles (of park design) are the parade ground and the wild forest. Fill in the parade ground with uniform rows of trees in military formation and you have the formal park : thin out the forest irregularly and you have the romantic park. The nineteenth century endeavoured to combine philanthropy (crowds) with naturalism (privacy)."

" Hanley, a pottery town . . . pottery kilns placed next to dwel- lings, as if there were no difference between a furnace, a kiln, and a domestic workshop. The mass production of pottery for eating vessels

The Culture of Cities. By Lewis Mumford. (New York : Harcourt Brace. $4.50.)

and wash-bowls, toilet bowls, and urinals was a genuine triumph of the paleotechnic period : but as with so many of its short-;:ighted achievements, the means often defied and partly annulled the end."

" Modern American kitchen : a well organised laboratory for the preparation of food : compact, efficient, it ceases in itself to he a living room but encourages the use of adjoining space as a dining area . . . Modern form, indeed, begins to How back from the kitchen and the bathroom, the two great biotechnic utilities of the modern dwelling—which completely distinguish it from other cultures— into the remaining rooms of the house."

" Rear of a handsome facade in Edinburgh : barracks architecture, facing a catwalk : typical indifference to rear views characteristic of scene painting. An architecture of fronts. Beautiful silks : costly perfumes : ditty bodies. Elegance and smallpox. Out of sight, out of mind."

In these extracts appear some of Mr. Mumford's virtues and the defects that grow from them, including one for which he has been, I think, too recklessly abused. Namely, a habit of private formulations in vocabulary which do not fall easily into anybody's general or special ken. He is especially fond of his own Greek compounds, admirable when they are attempts to deduce or explain an order, chaotic when they are ornamenting Mr. Mumford's prophecies and hopes for the modern world. Incidentally, it must be regretted that so excellent a naturalist should have succumbed to philosophy and concluded his survey of planned regionalism —which he believes to be our sheet anchor—with a philosophic blueprint, a wishful prayer that the emerging city form will build itself out of certain passionate idealisms.

This seems an ungenerous cry, when it is stimulated by the author's own genius for tracing city growth from the historical mesh of human impulses and not only from the more noble ones. But it is inevitable at a time when A.R.P. underlines the fact that idealism is possibly the last drive a community acts on when it decides to rebuild itself. Profit, plague, satiation, and especially fear are paramount ; a regrettable conclusion that Mr. Mumford himself amply proves in his section on " War as City-Builder."

He tells in masterly detail of the mediaeval city's ache for security after five centuries of looting and civic bankruptcy. But it is likely that radical reform in street-planning, and (in this country) in greenbelt planning, will take effect not from somebody's idealism but from Mr. Langdon-Davies's insistence that air raids make such foresight inevitable. Planning for war may, in this instance, bring about peace-time playgrounds that philanthropy would never have created.

The subsidiary fault, his often too private vocabulary, offers side by side its own rich rewards. In Technics and Civilisation he made permanently valid and available to all later writers the root divisions of eotechnic, paleotechnic, and neotechnic. In The Culture of Cities, he brilliantly borrows from Mendel two biological terms, of dominant and recessive, adds two of his own (" survivals " and " mutations ") and so makes himself a fine and accurate tool for dissecting the permanent ideals of civic order. Thus to Imperial Rome the Church is a mutation ; in the mediaeval city it is a dominant ; by the end of the six- teenth century, a recessive ; and in our modern metropolis undeniably a survival. Mr. Mumford's less happy inventions produce many a knotty page. But his critics should remember it is no special irritant of Mumford. It is the price one has to pay for understanding Coleridge, Bentham, or any other pioneer naturalist. And it is, for all the passing exasperation, not too much to forgive in the most remarkable social critic of our time.