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self-consciousness, for actual use and pleasant dwelling; traditional
construction and the habits of making belonging to the country-side.
These still linger in the time-honoured ways of making the waggon and
the cart and the plough; but they have vanished from architecture and
building except in so far as they are being now, as I have said,
consciously and deliberately revived by men who are going back from
academic methods, to found their arts once more upon the actual making
of things with their own hand and as their hand and materials will guide
them.

This was what happened in the time to which I have referred: in the dawn
of the Christian era and of a new civilisation; and it has special
interest for us of today, because it was not a case of an infant or
savage race, beginning all things from seed; but the revival, as in
Sparta, centuries before it, of simplicity and sincerity of life, in the
midst of enervation, luxury, and decay.

This seems our hope for the future.

There has already gathered together in the great field of the arts of
today a little Byzantium of the crafts setting itself to learn from the
beginning how things are actually made, how built, hammered, painted,
cut, stitched; casting aside theories and academical thought, and
founding itself upon simplicity, and sincerity, and materials. And the
architect who condescends, or, as we should rather say, aspires, to be a
builder and a master-mason, true director of his craft, will, if things
go on as they seem now going, find in the near future a band around him
of other workers so minded, and will have these bright tools of the
accessory crafts ready to his hand. This it is, if anything, that will
solve all the vexed questions of "style," and lead, if anything will, to
the art of the times to be. For the reason why the nineteenth century
complained so constantly that it had "no style of architecture" was
surely because it had _every_ style of architecture, and a race of
architects who could design in every style because they could build in
no style; knew by practical handling and tooling nothing of the real
natures and capacities of stone or brick or wood or glass; received no
criticism from their materials; whereas these should have daily and
hourly moulded their work and formed the very breath of its life,
warning and forbidding on the one hand, suggesting on the other, and so
directing over all.

I have thought fit, dear student, to touch on