Major L’Enfant’s plan for Washington was the last gasp, it seems to me, of the classical order; Jefferson’s University of Virginia was perhaps its most perfect consummation, for Jefferson had planned for the life of the institution as well as for the shell which was to contain it. Before the nineteenth century was long under way men’s minds ceased to move freely within the classical idolum; and by 1860 the mood was obliterated and a large part of the work had been submerged or destroyed. The final ironic commentary upon the dignity and austerity of the earlier temples is illustrated in a house in Kennebunkport, Maine; for there the serene, pillared façade is broken up in the rear by a later, and alas! a necessary addition: a two-story bow-window projected far enough beyond the eaves to give a little light to the occupants of the rooms!
In sum, there was a pathetic incompatibility in this architecture between need and achievement, between pretensions and matter-of-fact—a rigid opposition to common sense that a vernacular, however playful, would never countenance. These temples were built with the marmoreal gesture of eternity; they satisfied the desire and fashion of the moment; and today their ghosts parade before us, brave but incredible.
CHAPTER FOUR
THE DIASPORA OF THE PIONEER
I
From the standpoint of architecture, the early part of the nineteenth century was a period of disintegration. The gap between sheer utility and art, which the Renaissance had emphasized, was widened with the coming of machinery. That part of architecture which was touched by industrialism became crude beyond belief: the new mills and factories were usually packing boxes, lacking in light and ventilation, and the homes of the factory workers, when they were not the emptied houses of merchants and tradesmen, made to serve a dozen families instead of the original one, were little more than covered pens, as crowded as a cattle market. At the same time that the old forms were undermined by the new methods of mechanical production, a sentimental longing to retain those forms, just because they were old, seized men’s minds; and so industrialism and romanticism divided the field of architecture between them.
It was no accident that caused romanticism and industrialism to appear at the same time. They were rather the two faces of the new civilization, one looking towards the past, and the other towards the future; one glorifying the new, the other clinging to the old; industrialism intent on increasing the physical means of subsistence, romanticism living in a sickly fashion on the hollow glamour of the past. The age not merely presented these two aspects; it sought to enjoy each of them. Where industrialism took root, the traditions of architecture were disregarded; where romanticism flourished, on the other hand, in the mansions, public buildings, and churches, architecture became capricious and absurd, and it returned to a past that had never existed. Against the gross callousness which a Bounderby exhibited toward beauty and amenity, there was only the bland piety of a Pecksniff.
The dream that is dying and the dream that is coming to birth do not stand in sequence, but mingle as do the images in a dissolving view; and during the very years that the architecture of the Renaissance, both in Europe and America, achieved new heights of formal design, the first factories were being planted in Staffordshire and Yorkshire, the Duke of Bridgewater built his famous canal, and Horace Walpole designed his “Gothic” mansion on Strawberry Hill. The coincidence of industrialism and romanticism is just as emphatic in America as in England; and it is not without historic justice that the architect who in 1807 designed the chapel of St. Mary’s Seminary in Baltimore, after the Gothic fashion, successfully introduced a steam pumping system in Philadelphia’s waterworks. While the industrial buildings of the period represented nothing but a lapse from the current vernacular, due to haste and insufficient resources, romantic architecture was a positive influence; and it will perhaps best serve our purpose to examine the romantic heritage in its pristine form, rather than in the work of disciples like Latrobe, whose American practice is dated about two generations later.
The author of The Castle of Otranto had a perverse and wayward interest in the past; and the spirit he exhibited in both his novel and his country home was typical of the romantic attitude everywhere. What attracted Walpole to the Gothic style was little more than the phosphorescence of decay: he summoned up the ghosts of the Middle Ages but not the guilds; and instead of admiring the soundness of medieval masonry, those who followed directly in his path were affected rather by the spectacle of its dilapidation, so that the production of authentic ruins became one of the chief efforts of the eighteenth-century landscape gardener.
It is not a great step from building a ruin to building a mansion that is little better than a ruin. While Walpole defended Strawberry Hill by saying he did not aim to make his house so Gothic as to exclude convenience, it happened again and again that the picturesque was the enemy of simple honesty and necessity; and just as Walpole himself in his refectory used wall paper that imitated stucco, so did other owners and builders use plaster and hangings and wall paper and carpet to cover up defects of construction. Towers that no one ever climbed, turrets that no one could enter, and battlements that no one rose to defend, took the place of the classic orders. The drawbridge-and-moat that embellished Mr. Wemmick’s villa in Great Expectations was not a wild conceit of Dickens but a relic of Walpole and his successors.
As a disguise for mean or thoughtless workmanship, the application of antique “style” was the romantic contribution to architecture; and it served very handily during the period of speculative building and selling that accompanied the growth of the new industrial towns. Even where style did not conceal commercial disingenuousness, it covered up a poverty of imagination in handling the elements of a building. Gothic touches about doors and the exterior of windows, and a heap of bric-a-brac and curios on the inside, softened the gauntness and bareness of this architecture, or rather, distracted attention from them. Curiosity was the dominant mood of the time, acquisitiveness its principal impulse, and comfort its end. Many good things doubtless came out of this situation; but architecture was not one of them.