IV
If the architecture of the early eighteenth century in America is a little prim and angular, if it never rises far above a sturdy provincialism, it is not without its own kind of interest; and Faneuil Hall, for example, is not the worst of Boston’s buildings, though it is overshadowed by the great utilitarian hulks that line the streets about it. By studying the classical forms at one remove, the builders of the eighteenth century in America had the same kind of advantage that Wren had in England. Wren’s “Renaissance” churches, with their box-like naves and their series of superimposed orders for steeples, had no parallel, so far as I am aware, in Italy, and certainly had no likeness to anything that had been built in classic times: they were the products of a playful and original fancy, like the mermaid. Mere knowledge, mere imitation, would never have achieved Renaissance architecture; it was the very imperfection of the knowledge and discipleship that made it the appropriate shell of its age. Coming to America in handbooks and prints, chastely rendered, the models of antiquity were, down to the Revolution, followed just so far as they conveniently served. Instead of curbing invention, they gave it a more definite problem to work upon.
It was a happy accident that made the carpenter-builders and cabinet makers of America see their China, their Paris, their Rome through a distance, dimly. What those who admire the eighteenth century style do not, perhaps, see is that an accident cannot be recovered. However painstakingly we may cut the waistcoat, the stock, the knee-breeches of an eighteenth-century costume, it is now only a fancy dress: its “moment” in history is over. The same principle holds true for Georgian or colonial architecture, even more than it does for that of the seventeenth century; for one might, indeed, conceive of a breakdown in the transportation system or the credit system which would force a builder to rely for a while upon the products of his own region; whereas, while our civilization remains intact there are a hundred handbooks, measured drawings, and photographs which make a naïve recovery of antiquity impossible.
Once we have genuinely appreciated the influence that created early colonial architecture, we see that it is irrecoverable: what we call a revival is really a second burial. All the king’s horses and all the king’s men have been hauling and tugging vigorously during the last fifty years to bring back the simple beauties and graces of the colonial dwelling, and the collectors’ hunt for the products of the Salem, Newburyport and Philadelphia cabinetmakers is a long and merry one; but the only beneficent effect of this movement has been the preservation of a handful of antiquities, which would otherwise have been impiously torn down. What we have built in the colonial mode is all very well in its way: unfortunately, it bears the same relation to the work of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries that the Woolworth Building bears to the cathedrals of the Middle Age, or the patriotism of the National Security League to the principles of Franklin and Jefferson. Photographic accuracy, neatly touched up—this is its capital virtue, and plainly, it has precious little to do with a living architecture. Like the ruined chapel in The Pirates of Penzance, our modern colonial houses are often attached to ancestral estates that were established—a year ago; and if their occupants are “descendants by purchase,” what shall we say of their architects?
CHAPTER THREE
THE CLASSICAL MYTH
I
The transformation of European society and its material shell that took place during the period we call the Renaissance is associated with the break-up of the town economy and its replacement by a mercantile economy devoted to the advantage of the State. Along with this goes the destruction of the village community, and the predominance in social affairs of a landholding oligarchy who have thrown off feudal responsibilities while they have retained most of the feudal privileges, and a merchant class, buttressed by riches derived from war, piracy, and sharp trade.
America reproduced in miniature the changes that were taking place in Europe. Because of its isolation and the absence of an established social order, it showed these changes without the blur and confusion that attended them abroad.
It is sometimes a little difficult to tell whether the classical modes of building were a result of these changes in society or, among other things, an incentive to them; whether the classical frame fitted the needs of the time, or whether men’s activities expanded to occupy the idolum that had seized their imagination. At any rate, the notion that the classical taste in architecture developed mainly through technical interests in design will not hold; for the severely classical shell arose only in regions where the social conditions had laid a foundation for the classical myth.
The first development of the grand style in the American renaissance was in the manors of Virginia and Maryland. It came originally through an imitation of the country houses of England, and then, after the Revolutionary War, it led to a direct adaptation of the Roman villa and the Greek temple. One does not have to go very deep to fetch up the obvious parallel between the land-monopoly and slavery that prevailed in the American manors and the conditions that permitted the Roman villa itself to assume its stately proportions; nor need one dwell too long upon the natural subordination, in this regime, of the carpenter-builder to the gentleman-architect. “In the town palaces and churches,” as Mr. Fiske Kimball justly says, “there was a strong contradiction between modern conditions and ancient forms, so that it was only in the country that Palladio’s ideas of domestic architecture could come to a clear and successful expression. These monuments, since so much neglected, served in Palladio’s book expressly to represent the ‘Antients’ designs of country-houses....’”