architectural giant do when summoned to Rome to look after the construction of St. Peter’s? In the eyes of American commercialism, he made a goose of himself, he simply missed the chance of his life. He waived jealousy, he waived ambition, patronage and emolument because he preferred the serving of God and of his art to the serving of self. Fancy such a thing in our day! Michelangelo requested that all the plans of his illustrious predecessor, Bramante, the original designer of the cathedral, be brought to him: and fully appreciating the responsibility of the complex work that had descended to him by the rightful heirship of true art, Michelangelo emphatically declared he conceived it to be his duty to carry forward Bramante’s design, and, moreover, that wherever the intercedent tinkers had departed from this design, just so much had they erred. How strange this policy sounds placed in contrast to the ethics of American expediency! No doubt, the mighty Renaissance fabric at Rome has lost inestimably because this remarkable man could not live to complete it. In our day, we have changed all that. The main chance is not now art—it is money. We are still the America of Martin Chuzzlewit plus population. Our greatest architect is our greatest “stunt-master” and bears to American commercialism the same relationship that a certain society leader bears to his equally noted patroness. And it does not require the perspicacity of a Voodoo woman either, to see how ephemeral, in comparison to the ages of good architectural development, is this modern American extravaganza, which, not unlike the airy creatures who enjoyed existence in the dream of the White-King in Lewis Carroll’s classic, “Through the Looking Glass,” is liable to go out of vogue bang! at any moment, upon his majesty’s—or rather upon true art’s—awakening.
In [Plate XV] there is presented a type of American farm-house of the early eighteenth century. Engraved upon a tablet let into the front wall of the chimneystack appears the impressive date 1727. This house is still standing in an admirable state of preservation nearby a quaint old village called Durham, in Connecticut. It was erected by a man named Miles Merwin, and a lineal descendant of its builder still occupies it. When he visited this house last summer the interior
SO FAR AS TEACHING ARCHITECTURAL ART IS CONCERNED, IT MUST BE ADMITTED OUR PUBLIC SCHOOLS HAVE BEEN A DEAD FAILURE.
TYPE OF FARMHOUSE, EPOCH END OF 18TH CENTURY.
impressed the writer fully as much as the exterior. It seemed to me that the same influence came back again that rushed over my senses when first I beheld the worn steps to the royal tombs at Westminster. It was so very old and replete with atmosphere! It had so much history to tell that one’s most natural inclination was to sit down quickly upon the roughly hewn doorsteps bedabbled by streaks of sunlight filtering through the foliage, and just listen. Ah, how ridiculous it would be to imagine that the wonderfully satisfying lines of the roof, the delicious overhang of the gable, the relationship of the stone chimney and the proportions generally were evolved by Miles Merwin himself, out of a printed book upon the æsthetics of design! For neither Miles Merwin nor his master-builder may be said to have originated the house they erected. I do not fancy, for one moment, that they ever contemplated such an ill-advised departure from precedent. They had been taught how to construct three or four different kinds of roofs, and they simply selected the one most suitable to the needs of this case. It was the influence and teaching of more than one great architect that designed the ancient farm-house at Durham. And now you need no longer conjecture why Colonial architecture is so good and remains in fashion. You know.