The Modern Home
[We shall be pleased to reply to any enquiries arising from the articles we publish on the Modern Home page. Enquiries should be addressed to the Editor,. The" Spectator," 99, Gower Street. W.C. 1, with "Modern Home Page" written in the left hand corner of the envelope.]
Ancient v. Modern
THE recent correspondence in The Times on the design of the new Bodleian gave a good perspective in miniature of the never-ending controversy between the ancients and moderns —those who know that what is past is best against those who believe that we can do still better, and demand, at least, the opportunity to try. An excellent letter from Professor Julian Huxley drew replies from those who appeared to think that a " modern " Bodleian must be a more or less close copy of the Underground building at St. James's Park, must necessarily be devoid of any fitness to its surroundings, and that the only suitable course is to go on copying Gothic. They urged the necessity of preserving continuity in the development of architecture (failing to see that regression gives a very negative sort of continuity), and denied modern architecture the pos- session of any principles at all, much less those principles which alwayshave been and always must be its guide:, The fight has always raged, since it is between the two fun.. damental types of human intelligence—the quick and the dead—and on every subject ; but, so far as architecture and domestic art are concerned, it is, perhaps, being fought-to-day more keenly than ever before. There are two reasons for this : our modern self-consciousness and the spate of ne'w materials and methods of construction. Self-consciousness, is the greatest danger to our artistic as it is perhaps the greatest hope for our social problems. Only when it is strictly con- trolled can art have that sincerity without which it is never truly great. In the past, new materials and methods have been slow to make their appearance, and, in consequence, the development of architecture appears to us a gradual and logical process. But once they had appeared, there was little hesitation in exploring and exploiting their possibilities to the utmost. One cannot see a Norman architect sitting down to his drawing-board and saying : "Now I'm going to build in wattle, because it is so old-world and in harmony with its surroundings." He used stone for practical reasons ; he developed the Norman arch for practical reasons—and, because he didn't bother too much about it, he usually achieved real beauty. To-day we are in danger of losing this directness of purpose. There is so great a choice of methods and materials. Shall we make it Gothic or Doric—or what about a bit of Rlizabethan timbered work ? And all the time we are clogged by the stultifying advice of those who think it would be best to make it just like something which is already considered beautiful.
May I be forgiven the truism that 'art cannot stand still : it cannot attain true and live beauty by copying. Also—and this is less of a platitude—it cannot do so by self-consciously trying to keep in touch with its precursors while judiciously employing a few touches of modernity aped from genuine modern work. It must go the whole hog—since the whole hog implies logic—or nothing. Dreadful warnings against the former course are beginning to appear in Tottenham Court Road and other places, where designers, steeped in the tradition of copying various "periods," are now turning their attention to the products of the modern school.
I have already tried to show in these articles that though
modern domestic art is partly a reaction from the excessive use of machine-made ornament, it is very much more. It has decided that the only safe course is to be guided by the fundamental principles of utility: perfect fitness to purpose combined with the proper selection and employment of materials. The beauty revealed by such procedure must always be more austere than the beauty dependent on extraneous ornamentation ; but it is felt that this austerity is properly complementary to the elaboration and luxury of modern life in other respects. This beauty can only be perceived by a live mind. The eye used to seeing beauty only in ornament must be disciplined, must be trained to see things anew.
G. M. BOU116/111EY;
Previous page
