Page:A hundred years hence - the expectations of an optimist (IA hundredyearshenc00russrich).pdf/206

 There has been, in my opinion, too great a readiness on the part of most writers to assume that high civilisation necessarily creates epochs of ugliness. No doubt railways, factories and other civilised and civilising conveniences do not, in the natural course of things, tend to assume forms gratifying to the æsthetician. The present tendency of domestic architecture, for instance, shows an abject sort of spirit by basing any effort which it may make for comeliness on an attempt to imitate the picturesqueness of the past rather than to form new and beautiful styles adapted to modern requirements. Because old red-brick, timbered rough-cast, and the quaintly-shaped buildings of old time please the eye by contrast more than by inherent beauty, unintelligent builders just now think they can redeem dwelling-houses from plain ugliness by imitating ehese peculiarities, and they are encouraged in this course by the people who are to live in such houses and by the exploiters of estate development. But such fine examples as the new Westminster Cathedral show that the spirit of beauty has not left our architects. The growing intelligence of the new age ought, at all events, to develop, as its resources will reward, originality. And the developed æstheticism of the age will demand beautiful buildings, not slavishly copied from the antique, but created by the imagination of the modern. Reverence