THE MODERN MOVEMENT

nursery-school work. You cannot accept any plan on authority; it
must be evolved anew every time from fundamentals. This Back-
to-Fundamentals attitude with regard to function encouraged the
same attitude to form. Again no authority was accepted, and again
—after the first Art Nouveau flourish of unshackled imagination—
the basic principles were rediscovered. This happened—a very hope-
ful sign—not only in architecture, but also in painting and sculpture.
Cubism and then abstract art were the outcome, the most architec-
tural art that had existed since the Middle Ages. In architecture,
sheer proportion at last took its legitimate place again. No mould-
ings, no frills were permitted to detract one's attention from true
architectural values: the relation of wall to window, solid to void,
volume to space, block to block. I need not here go into more
detail about things which belong to our own day and not to
history yet.

The one fact that matters to the historian already now, and the one
that he can state without falling into the r61e of counsel for the defence
or for prosecution, is that the Modern Movement is a genuine and
independent style. This fact is full of promise. For over a hundred
years no style in that sense had existed. As Western civilisation had
become more and more subdivided, it had lost its faculty to create
a language of its own. An atomised society cannot have an archi-
tectural style. Can we not take it then that the recovery of a true
style in the visual arts, one in which once again building rules, and
painting and sculpture serve, and one in which form is obviously
representative of character, indicates the return of unity in society
too ? Granted that this new style often looks rather forbidding and
seems to lack human warmth. But is not the same true of contem-
porary life ? Here, too, amenities to which we have been used are
being replaced by something more exacting and more elementary.

Beyond stating this the historian should not go. Whether the
new social and architectural attitude heralds a last phase of Western
civilisation or the dawn of a new, whether the style of the future will
be at all similar to our own, and whether we shall like it—all this it
is not for the historian to foretell. His job is done when he has applied
the principles of historical analysis as far into the problems of the
present day as they can safely be applied.

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