Renaissance, the other Jacobean. But certainly, Newport, with its miserable crowding and elbowing of American pretentiousness, much of the pretentiousness belonging to the modern invention type of architecture, offers no comparison at all. The Hunnewell gardens and some others we have seen photographed and discussed of late look more like tree nurseries than Renaissance gardens, while nearly all the modern American show places illustrated from time to time in the different magazines deal only with that primitive kind of splendor indigenous to provinces.
No, we may not compare American Renaissance after this manner. We are entirely too young a nation for that kind of architecture which presupposes a renowned antiquity which we lack. But what we may do becomingly is to select the homely and humble cottages of Great Britain, such cottages as the one we are shown where lived the poet Robert Burns, for instance. Place those, if you please, beside the farmhouses of our Colonial régime, and then you may be surprised to find we have something to be proud of, even though it be the fashion to belittle these essentially good antecedents by modern architectural scholars. I am reminded herein of the story that is told of a noted professor of music—Kullak, who, having discovered that the number on the programme which the orchestra had rendered to the great delight of everyone, was a Strauss waltz (it must have been one of the less known as “Autumn Leaves,” it could not have been the hackneyed “Blue Danube,” which has been so much overrated), turned to his pupils, ever loyal to their master’s prejudices, beside him, and furtively whispered, “Well, don’t say anything about it, boys; but it’s awfully nice!” The sentiment thus expressed is the cultivated sentiment of the average architect toward the early Renaissance of America. He appears to be constrained by some artificial position—some pedantic make-believe that allows him to acknowledge the merit of a Witch-Colonial exemplar ([see Plate XXI]), with only the poorest kind of grace.
But I have already explained why the old stuff remaining in America is so “awfully nice” as to charm all unprejudiced artists who have studied our history, so that mystery about it, I trust, need be no
DERBY-WARD HOUSE, SALEM, MASS. 17TH CENTURY.
SOUVENIR OF ABIGAIL AND DELIVERANCE HOBBS (TWO ALLEGED WITCHES), OF TOPSFIELD, MASS. 17TH CENTURY.
longer. The paramount business in hand is to get rid of American nonsense, to put it entirely out of the head, if possible, that nothing may stand in the way of returning meekly and in a receptive spirit to those ancient and honorable first principles of ours which were unerring. This surgical-like operation accomplished, let us see what may be done with the Derby-Ward house, erected A.D. 1680 in Salem (Plate XXI), to make it habitable, convenient and desirable to-day.