To tell the truth, a pall had fallen over the industrial city: contemporary writers in the ’forties and ’fifties speak of the filth and smoke, and without doubt the chocolate brownstone front was introduced as a measure of protective coloration. In this dingy environment, men turned to nature as a refuge against the soiled and bedraggled works of man’s creation; and as the creeping factory and railroad train removed Nature farther from their doors, the park was introduced as a more convenient means of escape. The congested capitals of Europe had already learnt this lesson; traveled Americans, like William Cullen Bryant, brought it home; and Central Park, planned in 1853, was the first of the great landscape parks to serve as a people’s pleasance. Conceived in contrast to the deflowered landscape and the muddled city, the park alone re-created the traditions of civilization—of man naturalized, and therefore at home, of nature humanized, and therefore enriched. And even today our parks are what our cities should be, and are not.
By 1860 the halcyon day of American civilization was over; the spirit had lingered in letters and scholarship, in the work of Parkman and Motley and Emerson and Melville and Thoreau, but the sun had already sunk below the horizon, and what seemed a promise was in reality an afterglow. By the time the Civil War came, architecture had recorded faithfully the social transformation; it was sullen, grim, gauche, unstable. While in almost every age architecture has an independent value to the spirit, so that we can rejoice in Chartres or Winchester even though we have abandoned the Roman faith, in the early industrial period architecture is reduced to a symptom. Romanticism had not restored the past, nor had industrialism made the future more welcome. Architecture wandered between two worlds, “one dead, the other powerless to be born.”
CHAPTER FIVE
THE DEFEAT OF ROMANTICISM
I
Between 1860 and 1890, some of the forces that were latent in industrialism were realized in American architecture. Where the first pioneers had fared timidly, hampered by insufficient resources, the generation that had been stimulated by war industries and profiteering, by the discovery of petroleum and natural gas, by the spanning of the American continent and by cable communication with Europe, rioted over its new-found wealth.
“The Song of the Broad-Ax” still faintly lingered on the Pacific slopes; but the land pioneer was rapidly giving way to the pioneer in industry; and for perhaps the first time during the century, the surplus of capital outran the immediate demand for new plant and equipment. The Iron Age reached its peak of achievement in a series of great bridges, beginning with the Eads Bridge at St. Louis; and romanticism made a last stand. It will pay us, perhaps, to take one last look at the romantic effort, in order to see how impossible and hopeless was the task it set out to perform.
In England, the romantic movement in architecture had made the return to the Middle Ages a definite symbol of social reform: in Ruskin’s mind it was associated with the restoration of a medieval type of polity, something like a reformed manor, while with Morris it meant cutting loose from the machine and returning to the meticulous handicraft of the town-guilds. In America, the romantic movement lacked these social and economic implications; and while it is not unfair to say that the literary expression of English romanticism was on the whole much better than the architecture, in the proportion that The Stones of Venice was better than the Ashmolean Museum or the Albert Memorial, the reverse is true on this side of the Atlantic.
Inarticulate as H. H. Richardson, the chief exponent of American romanticism, was, it seemed for a while as if he might breast the tide of mechanical industry and create for a good part of the scene a sense of stability and harmony which it had all too plainly lacked. In relation to his age, however, Richardson was in the biological sense a “sport”; surrounded by jerry-builders, who had degraded the craft of building, and engineers who ignored it, he was perhaps the last of the great medieval line of master-masons.
Richardson began his career in America directly after the Civil War. Almost the first of the new generation of Americans to be trained by the Ecole des Beaux Arts, he brought back to America none of those atrocious adaptations of the French Renaissance like the New York, Philadelphia, and Boston Post Offices. On the contrary, he had come under the influence of Viollet-le-Duc; and for about ten years he struggled with incongruous forms and materials in the anomalous manner known as Free Gothic. The end of this period of experiment came in 1872, when he received the commission for Trinity Church in Boston; and although it was not until ten years later that he saw any Romanesque buildings other than in photographs—for he had not traveled during his student-years in Paris—it was in this sturdy mode that he cast his best work. Richardson was not a decorator, but a builder: in going back to Romanesque precedent, with its round arches and massive stone members, he was following out a dictum of Viollet-le-Duc’s: “only primitive sources supply the energy for a long career.” Turning away from “applied Gothic,” Richardson started to build from the bottom up. So far had the art of masonry disappeared that in Trinity Church Richardson sometimes introduced struts and girders without any attempt to assimilate them in the composition; but as far as any single man could absorb and live with a vanished tradition, Richardson did.
The proof of Richardson’s genius as a builder lies in the difference between the accepted drawings for Trinity Church and the finished building. His ideas altered with the progress of the work, and in almost every case the building itself is a vast improvement over the paper design. Moreover, in his capacity as master-mason, Richardson trained an able corps of craftsmen; and so pervasive was his influence that one still finds on houses Richardson never saw, the touches of delicate, leafy stone-carving he had introduced. With carving and sculpture, the other arts entered, and by his fine designs and exacting standards of work, Richardson elevated the position of the minor crafts, at the same time that he turned over unreservedly to men like John La Farge and Augustus St. Gaudens the major elements of decoration.