OLD MARITIME EXCHANGE, PHILADELPHIA.
Classic Revival.
mode, if Monticello is to be regarded as a specimen of Classic Revival work, had a dignity, honesty and sincerity about it that was afterwards often lost sight of when employed by other men.
One cannot quit the task of reviewing the Georgian architecture of the South without feeling deeply impressed with the great dignity and breadth manifested in all its forms. It was a sincere expression of the architectural needs of an important social condition and while it was founded on time-honoured precedent, at the same time its application was thoroughly American and full of vitality.
CHAPTER X
THE POST-COLONIAL PERIOD AND THE CLASSIC REVIVAL
AFTER the close of the Revolutionary War came a period of comparatively rapid evolution in architecture. This phase of post-Colonial evolution reached its culminating point in the signal successes and almost ludicrous failures of the Greek or Classic Revival, successes and failures that occurred simultaneously, strange as it may seem, though caused by the same influences, and are still to be seen in the older cities of our land, oftentimes standing in close proximity.
Historically considered, this process of swift evolution is attributable to several causes of which the chief were the rapidly increasing affluence and prosperity of the new republic and the general approval with which French influences and fashions were regarded. In the era of vigorous mercantile and industrial reaction after the stress and strain of a long and exhausting war, it was but natural that not only merchants, manufacturers and other men of substance, but also whole communities as well, should seek to express in structures domestic and public the proper pride and confidence of their new-found political importance and freedom. New social and civic demands were to be met and architecture was quick to reflect the spirit of growth and progress. In a measure, too, there were the ravages of shot, shell and fire and the decay incident to a long financial depression to be repaired. With an access of material prosperity came also an access of economic elegancies and men of means and position demanded that their domestic surroundings should measure up to new standards of luxury. When they found themselves in circumstances to build anew, as they not infrequently did, their houses, while usually following much the old arrangement of plan and number of rooms, displayed new influences of ornamental detail and the alteration or addition of features in conformity to the new mode. Furthermore—and this was by no means the least factor affecting the new conditions—in the general social overturn, wrought by the event of war, the Loyalists, who represented a large portion of the wealth and refinement of the Colonial period, had been ruined, dispossessed of their estates, driven from the country or had withdrawn to England or some of the other Colonies and their places had oftentimes been taken by persons who had hitherto held a humbler state of life. These men of new wealth and standing, who owed their advancement to their warm espousal of the American cause, built themselves houses to accord with their recently acquired rank and sought by the fineness of their dwellings, as is the wont of parvenus, to make up for lack of birth and breeding. It was but natural, too, in all these cases just mentioned, that popular taste should incline toward an architectural vogue that was French in its immediate inspiration rather than toward any style whose precedents were to be found in the Mother Country whose recent political domination was still held in bitter remembrance.
Architecturally considered, this evolution that culminated in the full fruition of the Classic Revival shows three influences that are to be reckoned in any attempt at its analysis. In the first place, there was the Adam phase of the Georgian mode which had begun to find pronounced expression in the American Colonies from about 1770 onward. The greater refinements of this type, as analysed in preceding chapters, were strongly in evidence up to 1800 or shortly afterward and their Adam provenance was clearly distinguishable. In the second place, there were the carpenter-designed and built houses of plainly defined Georgian ancestry. During the eighteenth century, the public mind had become so thoroughly imbued with the Georgian spirit of architectural classicism, tempered and modified, to be sure, by conveyance through a British medium, but classicism all the same, that even the most unpretentious little houses gave evidence of the prevailing influence in one form or another. It might be a house door with pilasters and pediment or it might be a mantel. The pilasters flanking the doorway might have lost all traces of near kinship to any of the classic orders, so far as their details were concerned, and so might the pediment also, but the mere fact that they were there showed plainly the source whence they were derived. These carpenter-designed-and-built houses of the end of the eighteenth century may be regarded as a residuum of the architectural spirit of the epoch. Last of all, there was the pure classic influence, the circumstances of whose transplanting to America we shall examine in detail.
Both the architecture of the Georgian period and the architecture of the Classic Revival were essentially classic in spirit but there was a vast difference between their several manifestations of classicality and it is most important that we should grasp that fundamental difference. The classicism of Georgian architecture was free in its spirit and interpretation and was elastic in its adaptability to the requirements of domestic or public edifices. The architects who applied it were blessed with common sense and while they incorporated a distinct element of formal order in their work, they were not trammelled by so narrow a conventionalism that they feared to make such adaptations as their own original genius prompted, provided they were consistent with the source of general inspiration. In other words, the classicism of Georgian architecture was classicism humanised and rationalised by transmission through the channels of the Renaissance or the labours of such discriminating students of antiquity as the Brothers Adam. It was elastic and suited alike to public edifices and abodes of both high and low degree. It was also direct and simple and had the dignity and vitality that art unaffected and ingenuous always shows. For this very reason it was so convincing and so long retained its hold upon popular taste.