Were it necessary to represent this street upon the stage, the decorator would simply have to paint his scenes upon the edges, and leave the side toward the audience bare. As you walk along you see a given building sideways for five minutes or more, but you cannot see it as it was meant to be seen—full in front—for as many seconds. We even know of churches in the cross streets, though near Broadway, whose square towers are stone-fronted after the usual fashion, but present nothing to the crowded thoroughfare but undressed walls of brick! Yes, a Christian church, in flagrante delictu.
It will be objected to this that there is no use in finishing the sides of city buildings, as they may afterward be hidden by others. This would do well enough if they were all of the same height; but they are not, and never can be. Indeed, a house is by many considered 'handsomer' than its neighbors, just so far forth as it overtops them. The builder would hardly think it a fair beat if the cornices corresponded. The successive erections on a row of vacant lots, usually illustrate this popular ambition. Some one secures the corner and builds his house. So far, so good. Presently number two comes along, and, to secure himself from invidious comparison, piles his house half a story higher than number one. But his triumph is short, for the third aspirant soon arrives, who, true to principle, takes another step in the ascending series. So it goes till the block is finished, the whole thing looking as if architecture was a sort of auction, in which the prize of success was awarded to the highest builder.
It being one of our social necessities that our houses differ in size, we must pay some attention to their sides. Not giving them as decided a treatment as the front, but something compatible with a plain surface. And, above all, the principal cornice and roof lines should be carried round on the sides, at least as far as they can be seen. In some rare instances, where this has been done, it is astonishing to note the improved appearance and finish, that it gives.
Did you ever consider the superior elegance of a corner house? Yet it is not so much the position as the fact that the position is taken advantage of. Being finished on both sides, it gives to the mind the idea of thickness as well as length and breadth. It is, in short, a solid, while the affair next door, overtopping it perhaps a story or two, is merely a superficies.
But this is only a side thrust. Our 'commercial palaces' challenge the same criticism face to face. For the front, considered by itself even, is generally incomplete. A supposititious formula determines that the house must be in the Italian palace style, but the narrow lot forbidding an entire design, the builder, as he cannot put in all, puts in all he can, so that, instead of the house being a house, it is only a specimen slice of a palace. It has no particular beginning or middle or ending, and, with the long viscera of brickwork trailing off behind, it looks as if just wrenched out of the side of some Florentine or Genoese mansion. And, in very truth, is it not?
The common cause of these errors and incongruities is our self-abasement to a style which depends for its effect upon continuous uniformity of design, while, from the very nature of our society, our houses must be diverse in size and pretension. We are a social people, it is true, but our individualities are strongly marked, and our dwellings, while designed with reference to each other, should never be too uniform. How frightful those white-shuttered brick piles which monotonize the streets of Philadelphia! But to assert its individuality the house need not shoot up like a vein of trap rock through a stratum of conglomerate: an American rises, not through the mass, but out of it.
Have you ever seen a street view of Bruges or Nuremberg, those fantastic old cities of mediæval Germany? You remember them, the tall gabled houses with projecting stories, the picturesque grouping of porch and gallery and oriel, the curious old bridges and the Gothic fountains, the grotesque carvings over the doorways, and the perfect population of dormer windows and turrets and lanterns. And did you not, entre nous, like it better than those stiff, formal views of the French and Italian cities? Was not the poetry more pleasing than the prose?
'Oh well,' you say, 'these turrets and gables and things look all very well in pictures, but they would never do for our streets: we must build in some regular style, you know.' The same old error again, the same servile imitation of a vague something or other, which we call classic. Do you think the old German burghers built in any regular style? Not a bit of it. They built just what they wanted, in the most natural and plain-spoken manner. If they wanted a porch over the door, or a bay window at a certain corner, or a turret to enjoy some favorite view—they made them, put them just where they were needed. Convenience was everything, and precedent nothing.
Is there not something about this individual originality, this perfect freedom of thought and expression, that might be adapted to express the American character? And if more pleasing, why cling to the effete and cumbrous tyrannies of a soulless classicism? Why crush out all symptoms of natural growth to make room for the unsightly exotic?
Nature herself has made the law that beauty is variety. Monotony, though magnificent, will become irksome, but variety is an unceasing delight. Versailles, with its formal avenues of shorn foliage, and its geometrical lawns and terraces, may please you more at first sight than an English park, because the mind feels a sort of pride in being able to grasp such vast ideas at a glance. But you will find, upon a second or third visit, that the unnatural arrangement of the French pleasure grounds has something of staleness about it. Nature disdains such bondage. Louis XIV, it is said, grew weary of his splendid plaything, almost before it was finished. How different the English landscape garden, where graceful sweeps and irregular masses of foliage meet the eye with unlooked-for beauties at every turn! Well do we remember how, after a few days spent in viewing the grand dullness of the Bavarian capital, we looked wearily back to the delightful visit we made at Nuremberg, with its curious old streets and fountains: