that the specimens of it which he commends to your admiration are the work of architects of “Eastern” birth or training. Now, if not in Dickens’s time, the “man of Boston raisin’” is recognized in the West to have his uses. The question whether there is any American architecture is not yet so triumphantly answered that it is other than provincial to lay much stress on local differences. The general impression that the Eastern observer derives from Western architecture is the same that American architecture in general makes upon the European observer; and that is, that it is a very much emancipated architecture. Our architects are assuredly less trammelled by tradition than those of any older countries, and the architects of the West are even less trammelled than those of the East. Their characteristic buildings show this characteristic equally, whether they be good or bad. The towering commercial structures that are forced upon them by new conditions and
DWELLINGS IN ST. PAUL.
Wilcox & Johnson, Architects.
facilities are very seldom specimens of any historical style; and the best and the worst of these, the most and the least studied, are apt to be equally hard to classify. To be emancipated is not a merit; and to judge whether or not it is an advantage, one needs to examine the performances in which the emancipation is exhibited. “That a good man be ‘free,’ as we call it,” says Carlyle, in one of his most emphatic Jeremiads—“be permitted to unfold himself in works of goodness and nobleness—is surely a blessing to him, immense and indispensable; to him and to those about him. But that a bad man be ‘free’—permitted to unfold himself in his particular way—is, contrariwise, the fatallest curse you could inflict upon him; curse, and nothing else, to him and all his neighbors.”
There is here not a question of morals, but of knowledge and competency. The restraints in architecture of a recognized school, of a prevailing style, are useful and salutary in proportion to the absence of restraint that the architect is capable of imposing upon himself. The secular tradition of French architecture, imposed by public authority and inculcated by official academics, is felt as a trammel by many architects, who, nevertheless, have every reason to feel grateful for the power of design which this same official curriculum has trained and developed. In England the fear of the archæologists and of the ecclesiologists operated, during the period of modern Gothic at least, with equal force, though without any official sanction. To be “ungrammatical,” not to adopt a particular phase of historical architecture, and not to confine one’s self to it in a design, was there the unforgivable offence, even though the incongruities that resulted from transcending it were imperceptible to an artist and obvious only to an archæologist. A designer thoroughly trained under either of these systems, and then transferred to this country as a practitioner, must feel, as many such a practitioner has in fact felt, that he was suddenly unshackled, and that his emancipation was an unmixed advantage to him; but it is none the less true that his power to use his liberty wisely came from the discipline that was now relaxed. The academic prolusions of the Beaux Arts, or the exercises of a draughtsman, have served their purpose in qualifying him for independent design. The advocates of the curriculum of the English public schools maintain that,
PORCH IN ST. PAUL.