The Cruise of the Branwen

THE PARTHENON it into being, it will fail in every other age, and will appeal to no other form of life. Now it is fashionable, as I have noticed, to be pessimistic about our own times and our own country. But without being that, it is possible to say that both are presented to any thinking man to-day as a far more complex environment than was the case in any country even only two centuries ago. Within that short span of history boundaries have lapsed, races and nationalities have slid into each other or changed their temperament in the melting-pot of war, distances have decreased, the material difficulties of time and space have almost disappeared. Politics present themselves under the form of compromise; patriotisms tend to become vague generalities of colour; nation– alities are but the reflection of wide-reaching ties of blood that constant inter-marriage weakens every day. If it is difficult~to appeal to a public which is no longer homogeneous, it is still more difficult to express that monstrous shape which shall embody its distinctive personality. So it is not the English architect alone who is to blame for the absence, in this twentieth century, of any architectural style that can express or reflect the age and the life in which he lives. That marvellous moment in the early sixteenth century when all the knowledge of his time could be garnered in a Leonardo's single brain has gone; its parallel can never more return. Know– ledge has now perforce become a divided kingdom in which the specialist, in his own ring-fence, explores his own few acres with very little 53