INTRODUCTION
A man of the eighteenth century, plunged suddenly into our civilization, might well have the impression of something akin to a nightmare.
A man of the 'nineties, looking at much of modern European painting, might well have the impression of something akin to a nightmare.[1]
A man of to-day, reading this book, may have the impression of something akin to a nightmare. Many of our most cherished ideas in regard to the "Englishman's castle"—the lichened tiled roof, the gabled house, patina—are treated as toys to be discarded, and we are offered instead human warrens of sixty storeys, the concrete house hard and clean, fittings as coldly efficient as those of a ship's cabin or of a motor-car, and the standardized products of mass production throughout.
We need not be unduly alarmed. All the inventions that make up our modern civilization, so far as it has gone, have awakened the same terrors. The railway, it was prophesied, would ruin the countryside, the motor-car the roads, and the airplane the upper air. All these things have happened, and to a large extent the criticisms were true, and yet man still survives and carries on, and seems happy or unhappy to much the same degree as- ↑ The first Post-Impressionist show in England horrified most people at the time, yet now the fauves of that receding pre-war past are hailed as being in the great tradition, and are used as sticks with which to beat their successors and followers.
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