e were obliged after
several attempts to give up the idea of founding or maintaining a city
of philosophers, notably owing to the incessant trouble caused by the
tribe of sociologists who are the most unsociable of mankind.

Let us not forget, by the way, to mention the city of "sappers" (we no
longer speak of architects), whose speciality is to work out the plans
for excavating and repairing all our crypts and to direct the carrying
out of the work by our machines. Quitting the hackneyed paths of former
architecture, they have created in every detail our modern architecture
so profoundly original of which nothing could give an idea to our
forefathers. The public building of the ancient architect was a kind of
massive and voluminous work of art. It was entirely a thing by itself.
Its exterior, and especially its front, occupied his attention far more
than the inside. For the modern architect the interior alone exists, and
each work is linked on to those which have gone before. None stands by
itself. They are only an extension and ramification, one of another, an
endless continuation like the epics of the East. The work of the ancient
architect with its misplaced individuality, with its symmetry, which
gave it a mock air of being a living thing, yet only rendered it more
out of keeping with the surrounding landscape, the more symmetrical and
more skilfully designed it was, produced the effect of a verse in prose,
or of a hackneyed theme in a fantasia. Its special function was to
represent correctness, coldness, and stiffness amid the luxuriant
disorder of nature and the freedom of the other arts. But to-day,
instead of being the most tight-laced of the arts, architecture is the
freest and most wanton of them all. It is the chief element of
picturesqueness in our life, its artificial and veritably artistic
scenery lends to all the masterpieces of our painters and sculptors the
horizon of its perspective, the sky of its vaults, the tangled
vegetation of its innumerable colonnades, whose shafts are a copy of the
idealised trunk of all the antique essence of tree-life, whose capitals
imitate the idealised form of all the antique flowers. Here is nature
winnowed and perfected, which has become human in order to delight
humanity, and which humanity has deified in order to shelter love
beneath its shade. This perfection has only been, however, attained
after much groping in the dark. Many falls of rock, occasioned by
foolhardy