THE DEVELOPMENT OF AMERICAN ARCHITECTURE.
The rule held, anciently, that a nation's architecture was the exponent of its national character, growing with and out of its social, civil, and religious peculiarities, and modified by climate, habit, and taste. In those early ages, the halcyon days of the art, men built with a purpose, built what they wanted in a natural and appropriate way, and—built successfully. So true was this, that to this day, most of their relics proclaim their own origin, just as fossils determine the relative positions of their enclosing strata, and history owes to architecture the solution of many of her hardest problems. The ancient Egyptians, for instance, gloried in the erection of the most magnificent tombs that their genius could produce, and, ruined as they are, we find that it is in their sepulchral monuments—the rock-wrought mausoleum, and the stupendous pyramid—that their art-current found its readiest flow. Compare these with the light and graceful structures of the Moors, the cool, arcaded courts, and the tesselated pavements, the orange trees, and the fountains. 'But no comparison,' says Fergusson, 'is applicable to objects so totally different. Each is a true representative of the feeling and character of the people by whom it was raised. The plaster Alhambra would be totally out of place and contemptible beside the great temple-palace of Karnak. No less would the granite works of Egypt be considered monuments of ill-directed labor if placed in the palace of the gay and luxurious Arab fatalist, to whom the present was everything, and with whom the enjoyment of the passing hour was all in all.'
Still another idea, grander than any aspiration of Saracen or Egyptian, we find, when Europe, slowly shaking off the lethargy of the Dark Ages, was developing the idea of religion. It was material, however, as well as spiritual. God was glorified, not only by repentance or holiness of life, but also by the devotion of hand and heart and fortune to His earthly temples and the jewelled shrines of His saints. All that impetus which is now given to religion itself, was turned into the channels of religious art. And yet, temporally speaking, how grand were the results! Slowly but surely arose those vast and wonderful cathedrals, springing lightly out of the quaintly gabled streets, with their richly wrought transepts and their pinnacled spires. Not trailing along the ground like the Greek temple or the Arab mosque—of the earth, earthy—but leading the soul heavenward with their upward flow of harmony. Vast Bibles of stone, bearing on lofty façade and on buttressed flank the sculptured details of Holy Writ—silent lessons, but not lost upon the rude though reverent men who dwelt within their shadow. It is sad to think that there can never be any more cathedrals. For they grew in those times: now they would have to be built.
But we are following a tangent. Our idea is, that architecture, to be good, must be appropriate—expressive of the spirit of the age. It should be an epitome of the nation's progress, an abstract of its guiding principles, condensed, as it were, and crystallized into an art. Of what use would a garment be, though ever so elaborate, if it did not fit? Just so our houses, which are but a broader kind of clothing, should be fitted to their purpose, or they will never yield us any pleasure.
Suppose that, in searching the ruins of ancient Greece, we found nothing but pusillanimous, sham imitations of Egyptian art. Would we not despise such a paltry method of making matter serve for mind—such a miserable make-shift to save the labor of invention? And yet it is this same servile imitation of classical and foreign models that is fettering the progress of art in America. Instead of honestly constructing what we want, and then decorating it with a style of ornament that should assist, explain, and intensify it, we go wandering off to the ends of the earth, building Grecian temples and Veronese palaces, some entire and some in slices, dreary, indefinite-looking objects, devoid of all constructive principles within, and ornamented with falsified gewgaws without, stuck on in the hope of hiding rather than helping out the flimsy design. Our 'national style' we are sure can never be born of any such travesties. Borrowed architecture never fits well.
The fact is, we ignore the first great principle—the essence and sine qua non, of the art—DECORATED CONSTRUCTION. By construction is meant that mechanical arrangement of parts which is best suited to convenience and most conducive to stability. It is what the French would call the motif, the end in view, while decoration is only the means. And the moment we lose sight of it, in our anxiety to make room for some pet ornament, that very ornament becomes an eyesore, and will persist in spoiling the design, for the simple reason that the end is sacrificed to the means. Set it down, then, at the start, that ornament must be dependent upon construction, and not construction upon ornament. The useful begets the beautiful, and the order cannot be reversed.
But before proceeding to what American architecture might be, we must, in all fairness, examine it as it is.
Our great cities, of course, claim our attention first, for these centres of wealth and intellect must necessarily be centres of art, and there, if at all, are we to discover our prospects for a national style. As a single example of what it has attained to so far, nothing can be better suited to our purpose than Broadway, New York, our best-known and most essentially American thoroughfare. But what to compare it to we know not. Neither history nor geography affords a parallel. It resembles neither the London Strand nor the Parisian Boulevard, nor is it like the Ludwig Strasse of Munich, nor the Grand Canal of Venice; and yet it has something or other in common with all of these. There is all the incongruity of the English thoroughfare and the brilliancy of the French, while the frequent succession of vast palatial structures allies it still closer to the last-named examples. Perhaps, after all, the Grand Canal—the silent highway of the City of the Sea—is more like it in general effect than any other street in Europe. The one, it is true, is as straight as an airline, and the other nearly the shape of an S; the one a paved roadway, noisy with the rush of traffic, and, in the other, the water washing the very walls of palaces that are mournful and deserted—while, as regards style, there is scarcely a single specimen of the Venetian in this country.
But the resemblance is this: your prevailing impression from first to last is the absence of all general arrangement, and the independent elegance of each separate façade. Each tells the same story: it is the wealth and enterprise of the citizen, and not the munificence of the sovereign, that has added palace to palace, and made the dumb stones eloquent. Remembering, then, that it is private taste and influence that is to develop our art, we proceed to the analysis of the great thoroughfare in question.
Fancy yourself, patient reader, at one end of this street, so as to command its vista. What do you see? Architecture? Very little, we imagine. Save the buildings immediately at your right and left, all the others are seen in profile, a contingency never reckoned on by their builders. The decoration is all piled on the front, as elaborate a design, often, as Palladio ever dreamt of, but at the side, every cornice and stringpiece stops as short as if it had been sawn off, and the whole side is a flat blank piece of brickwork. This is greatly aggravated by the disparity in height, and the ponderous cornices. As to construction, the prevailing type is a flimsy pile of brick and timber, 'put up,' apparently, by mutual connivance of the contractor and the coroner, and screened off from the street by a thin veneer of 'architecture.' Now there is a certain merit, sui generis, in a clever deception, but those in vogue here are too utterly transparent to claim even this. The telltale wall of brick cheats you out of the pleasure of cheating yourself, no matter how charitably disposed.