has stood the test of time, is represented by the 17th and 18th century châlets of Switzerland, and I doubt if even Yankee ingenuity could have evolved anything half so good. As a matter of fact we have no ancient Gothic exemplars. It is said that the old Pickering house on Broad Street in Salem, built A.D. 1649 ([see Plate III]), was a replica in wood of a Jacobean tavern in England, namely, the Peacock Inn, Derbyshire. The venerable dwelling at Salem has passed through many vicissitudes, and in 1842, when the influence of John Ruskin was so misused in America, the Pickering house was largely remodeled, so that it is impossible to say, to-day, how successful an adaptation of Jacobean work this was. But even Jacobean architecture is scarcely Gothic architecture since England incorporates it with all the rest of her Renaissance.
Sir Christopher Wren was supreme upon the architectural stage of England when the prosperity of the American colonies was sufficient to warrant the academic study of domestic architecture upon this side of the Atlantic, and Sir Christopher was the very life of the English Renaissance in its stricter sense. During this great history-making epoch, the giant forests of America came into excellent play for following out—if often in a crude and kind of miniature way—whatever the prodigious architect executed in stone. There was no bit of classic detail from either Athens or Rome, transmitted to London through what I may call the “Florentine Clearing-house” presided over by Palladio, Sansovino, Scammozzi and their contemporaries, but what could be carved more readily in wood; and time and history have thrown a glamour over all this wooden development of ours, and established its right of succession with a hall-mark.
But the main point in favor of Renaissance architecture, it must be remembered, was that it lent itself extremely well to the Anglo-Saxon home-feeling. It emanated from a land that had reached the pinnacle of attainment in the arts of peace—Italy—and it was so easy to fashion and make minister to most Anglo-Saxon home requirements. Luckily, the Colonial builders were conservative artificers, neither so clever nor so restless as this generation, or they, certainly, could not have resisted the eloquence of false prophets and knavish architectural promoters and fakirs who came their way. And we should have been deprived of our illustrious inheritance, which, happily, cannot be taken from us now.
Fortunately for American architecture, Sir Christopher Wren was what we would call in our vernacular “all right.” He had a good thing, an inexhaustible mine for supplying ideas for all manner of buildings, and he worked it for the best interests of all concerned. His reputation and success have fired many a modern, would-be Wren to dare to try the experiment of some rival kind of architecture. Such is the aspect we have now of the late H. H. Richardson and his Romanesque style (Plate V).
Trinity Church in Boston was a superb design when it was finished, and continues to be so to-day. But its best influence, I fear, has been perverted forever. A quarter of a century ago Richardson was hailed as an apostle equal with Wren, and America went mad, not in a Romanesque revival, but in a carnival of it, by which I mean to say it was burlesqued. It is sad to reflect that such a genius as the man who designed the church in Boston should have allowed himself to succumb to the wiles of the flatterers enough to be drawn into the disgraceful saturnalia which followed so close upon his brilliant début.
Now the home of the Romanesque was not Florence. It pretended to nothing of the court of Lorenzo the Magnificent, which, if it stood for anything, was elegant living. Mediæval, benighted south of France was the home proper of the Romanesque, and its proper medium of expression—churches, cloisters, and monasteries. What could such a style of architecture contribute to the Anglo-Saxon home? Absolutely nothing. And when Trinity Church was finally completed, Richardson had practically exhausted everything there was in the newly borrowed style. He could have gone on, probably, raising ecclesiastic edifices, designing an occasional library or two in good form, without directly cribbing from his masterpiece; but neither he nor his imitators—and they were legion—cared a fig for the ethics or proprieties of architecture. They appear to have been actuated alone by the same principles of expediency which govern the
SHIRLEY-ON-THE-JAMES. See Chapter V.
