people, asked to mention a third, would
promptly answer, I suspect--Simplification. To instance simplification
as a peculiarity of the art of any particular age seems queer, since
simplification is essential to all art. Without it art cannot exist; for
art is the creation of significant form, and simplification is the
liberating of what is significant from what is not. Yet to such depths
had art sunk in the nineteenth century, that in the eyes of the rabble
the greatest crime of Whistler and the Impressionists was their by no
means drastic simplification. And we are not yet clear of the Victorian
slough. The spent dip stinks on into the dawn. You have only to look at
almost any modern building to see masses of elaboration and detail that
form no part of any real design and serve no useful purpose. Nothing
stands in greater need of simplification than architecture, and nowhere
is simplification more dreaded and detested than amongst architects.
Walk the streets of London; everywhere you will see huge blocks of
ready-made decoration, pilasters and porticoes, friezes and facades,
hoisted on cranes to hang from ferro-concrete walls. Public buildings
have become public laughing-stocks. They are as senseless as slag-heaps,
and far less beautiful. Only where economy has banished the architect do
we see masonry of any merit. The engineers, who have at least a
scientific problem to solve, create, in factories and railway-bridges,
our most creditable monuments. They at least are not ashamed of their
construction, or, at any rate, they are not allowed to smother it in
beauty at thirty shillings a foot. We shall have no more architecture in
Europe till architects understand that all these tawdry excrescences
have got to be simplified away, till they make up their minds to express
themselves in the materials of the age--steel, concrete, and glass--and
to create in these admirable media vast, simple, and significant forms.

The contemporary movement has pushed simplification a great deal further
than Manet and his friends pushed it, thereby distinguishing itself from
anything we have seen since the twelfth century. Since the twelfth
century, in sculpture and glass, the thirteenth, in painting and
drawing, the drift has been towards realism and away from art. Now the
essence of realism is detail. Since Zola, every novelist has known that
nothing gives so imposing an air of reality as a mass of irrelevant
facts, and very few have cared