Where All Roads Lead

When the Master-Builder spoke apprehensively of the younger generation knocking at the door, it certainly never occurred to him to apprehend that it might be the church-door. And yet even in the figure of Ibsen might have been found signs of so strange a sequel. The very words Master-Builder are but a tradition from a medieval system, and it is that very system which some would now make a rough model for the modern system. And if the Master-Builder had been driven by his ruthless lady friend to make a tour of Europe, looking for the tallest towers to climb, he would soon have discovered what people of what period had the right to be called masters of building He would have found himself in the tracks of many a master, who not only climbed his own tower but carved his own angels or devils at the four corners of it, hanging as on wings above the void. The artists and art critics of the rising generation had already begun knocking at the church-door fifty years ago, in the time of Ruskin and William Morris. In our own time a yet younger generation of art students are justifying their bold or possibly bald simplifications by yet severer doctrines drawn from the Primitives. The new artists may be in a chronological sense Post-Impressionists, but they are also in a strict historical sense Pre-Raphaelites. But this youngest generation knocks at the door of the Master-Builder, not only to ask about the church of which he was the builder

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