CHAPTER IIART AND COMMERCIALISM

PLATE V.SHIRLEY-ON-THE-JAMES.See Chapter V.

PLATE V.

SHIRLEY-ON-THE-JAMES.See Chapter V.

AMERICAN ROMANESQUE DWELLING, BY AN IMITATOR OF RICHARDSON.Date about 1890.

AMERICAN ROMANESQUE DWELLING, BY AN IMITATOR OF RICHARDSON.

Date about 1890.

“New Art” movement. They invented an exaggerated architectural grammar, without doubt derived from the old mediæval cathedrals in the south of France, but so vulgarized as to establish a clear case of libel for those eminently respectable prototypes. This grammar the rabid reformers proceeded to apply to every kind of secular building in America, finally to American dwelling-houses themselves. They did not reckon with their grandparents for an instant, not they. They apparently took the keenest delight in walking rough-shod over every sacred home memory. They openly insulted the very ancestors to whom they owed existence. But the balance of good and evil there is in the world cannot be disturbed so suddenly or arbitrarily. Outraged history was not slow to assert itself, and after a while would have no more of the dwelling-house Romanesque. I regret to say that Richardson’s imitators were not the last of their race, and that there have been other and as rabid architectural reformers, of whom I shall speak in the next chapter.

Notvery long ago two enterprising architects in a Western State succeeded in inventing a characteristic style of architecture of some merit. I do not know its name. I am not sure that it has any. But as it is likely to be somewhat in vogue for several years to come, I may as well print herewith a simple recipe for combining its essential elements:

Recipe: First, you must endeavor to find some valuable fragment of ancient Greece or Rome, preferably a pedestal for a statue, base of a column, or even the shaft itself and capital, which should not be too attenuated, however, and is to be translated, if necessary, from a cylindrical form into a rectangular one. Now, here is the scheme:

Punch your elevations full of rectangular holes in seemly rows, divide them into latitudinal sections by

PLATE VI.DOORWAY, BRISTOL, R. I.

PLATE VI.

DOORWAY, BRISTOL, R. I.

several belt courses of East Indian flat-carving, and bore a semi-circular opening or a series of them (they may be semi-ellipses if preferred) upon the ground line or the projected edifice to afford a mode of ingress and egress corresponding, proportionately, to the same convenience designed for bees in a bee-hive. Next, pour in Alice in Wonderland’s “Drink me” elixir to make it grow, and await results of the magic drug. This is the critical moment. All must work harmoniously, and, having reached the height limit imposed by the elevator manufacturer, perhaps, quickly cap the building with some red, corrugated tiles, if you choose, in the form of a Moresque roof, ornament with lantern and flagstaff, and, behold!—the charm operates!—the great American “sky-scraper” of a commercial city has been achieved.

It is not within the province of this review to enter into a discussion of the problem of housing commercialism. It is odd that nobody hints how posterity is going to laugh at us, censure our cupidity, and eventually raze every one of our hideous “sky-scrapers” that shall be left standing. It is odd that the present congestion of Manhattan as a crime against decency,with all the idle land that is adjacent and available, is not painfully manifest in this so-called year of grace MCMIV. But it is within the province of this review to say that whenever the soaring kind of architecture precipitated itself upon the Anglo-Saxon dwelling-house there was a tremendous crash and revolution. It was telescoped, it was flattened—grotesquely flattened, but still it was remarkable for ingenuity, for cleverness, and, above everything, for novelty, as would be a dwelling-house loaned by another planet. So strange, indeed, this newly-invented architecture grew that it became simply impossible to prevail upon ancestral ghosts, legends and folk-lore, that habitually are part and parcel of the habitation of man, to have anything to do with a deviceà la modethat appeared to be in every way so very much better suited to the needs of a Roman bath-house after the manner of Alma Tadema. The following lines from Edgar Allan Poe’s “Ulalume” may aptly express the injured feelings of those sentimental amenities:

“Oh, hasten!—oh, let us not linger!Oh, fly!—let us fly!—for we must.”

PLATE VII.AMERICAN RENAISSANCE.ANALYSIS.Moresque Spain0per cent.Moresque Algiers0“Moresque California Mission0“East Indian0“Newly reclaimed land0“Chinese ornament0“Modern invention0“Anglo-Saxon home atmosphere100“

PLATE VII.

AMERICAN RENAISSANCE.

PLATE VIII.THE NEWLY INVENTED ARCHITECTURE.ANALYSIS.Moresque Spain10per cent.Moresque Algiers10“Moresque California Mission10“East Indian5“Newly reclaimed land10“Chinese ornament5“Modern invention, pure50“Anglo-Saxon home atmosphere00“

PLATE VIII.

THE NEWLY INVENTED ARCHITECTURE.

EASTOVER TERRACE AND PERISTYLE.

For convenient reference of the reader a sample of this newly-invented architecture is respectfully submitted (Plate VIII), and a very clever sample it is. The inventors of the style themselves could have done no better; only the irresistible melancholy in the rhyming of Poe’s poem is not easily put out of the head, especially when, as in this case, it happens to be extremely appropriate. So let us continue:

“And we passed to the end of a vista,But were stopped by the door of a tomb—By the door of a legended tomb.”

Certainly it is unfamiliar environment from which one’s mind naturally reverts to his childhood (you must have had a childhood)—reverts to the wondrous houses we visited in the impressionable days of long ago. Ah, they were a very different kind of houses, were they not?—houses with significance, houses with personality, if building material may ever be said to incorporate that. They had a history to tell. They had legends, too. As we think of them they seem to have been literally covered with legends, some of themcut with the jack-knife deep in the attic timbers. But they were all legends that appeal to happiness. They were not the legends of tombs. And the old sensations come back to us again. Perhaps it is just as the afternoon light begins to fail so that we can no longer read, and the sunset is very beautiful.

No, no, the vagaries of geometrical invention will never supplant those first loves!

For you, then, when your lamp is lighted—I hope it is not the dazzling, 16-candle-power electric bulb of commercialism, made still further terrifying by a gorgeous glass globe—for you I have a treat in store to soothe the nerves the newly-invented architecture has indescribably rasped. It is a “sure enough” old-fashioned house. To borrow the style of Ik Marvel in his “Reveries of a Bachelor,” I can see how you will carefully put this book where you will not miss it to show your architect in the morning. You will remember the number of the page that you do not waste the time of a busy professional man in finding the place; and this is about what you will say to him: “I do not know how good the architecture is, that

PLATE IX.EASTOVER.The Garden Front.A modern development of Annapolitan architecture under the Colonial régime in Anne Arundel County, Maryland. Time of George II.

PLATE IX.

EASTOVER.The Garden Front.A modern development of Annapolitan architecture under the Colonial régime in Anne Arundel County, Maryland. Time of George II.

EASTOVER.

The Garden Front.

A modern development of Annapolitan architecture under the Colonial régime in Anne Arundel County, Maryland. Time of George II.

the old house on Benefit Street in Providence represents (Plate VII); but I do know it has just the atmosphere that reaches the inner man, and that is the atmosphere I want.”

But not every architect is able to give you this atmosphere (Plate X). None of the architectural schools teach it, and commercialism in some form usually doles out the architect’s bread and butter, so that he is accustomed in his work to reduce your proposition to a cold calculation of so much house for so much money. He is made tosmile grimly(with Mr. R. H. Davis’s kind permission) over what he considers your sentimental impracticality, then says: “We build houses by the cubic foot, you know.” And after the size, position, number of rooms, etc., are determined, then, whatsoever art may be applied just as well as not without materially adding to the cost is made to serve as the meek handmaid of commercialism; and I must say of this applied art as we see it every day, exemplified in America, it certainly looks the part.

All through the Berkshires, wherever a commanding eminence rises in the midst of natural loveliness, thebristling odd conceits—they are not art—of the prodigious captain of industry who has made his money by always “driving three in a buggy,” testifies that even in his dwelling-place he calculates to get the worth of every dollar, and every dollar is made to show—a veritable monument to his commercial sagacity. But to my mind, Sharon in Connecticut, which lies some fifty miles, perhaps, to the southward of the Berkshires, is the most beautiful inland village we have in New England. Architecturally, it is not remarkable either for good or bad work; but toward the lower end of the main street there is one startling beauty in the fabric of the John Cotton Smith manse. (See illustrations, PlatesXandXXXIV.) As an appreciative tenant is about vacating, I suppose the envious eyes of commercialism will soon light upon this charming exemplar of Colonial days with an idea of adding extensions, verandas or what not to make it “real stylish like.” But for once, commercialism will be disappointed, for I am told that money will not buy the Cotton Smith house.

The despoiler of beautiful landmarks, however, is

PLATE X.NOT EVERY ARCHITECT IS ABLE TO GIVE YOU THIS ATMOSPHERE.

PLATE X.

NOT EVERY ARCHITECT IS ABLE TO GIVE YOU THIS ATMOSPHERE.

MONEY WILL NOT BUY THE COTTON SMITH HOUSE.

rarely idle. He knocks first at one door, and then at the next. New houses or old, it makes no difference so long as the design be good, and worth spoiling. The Cotton Smith mansion is one bright particular exception that goes to prove the rule, for, ordinarily, commercialism suffers no rebuke, and especially is this true of New York City. Here, whatever commercialism wants it takes without more ado. A “sky-scraper” would pay the owners of the northeast corner of Fifth Avenue and Eighteenth Street much better than the admirable and famous twin mansions (Plate XI), that until lately occupied the site, so this good architecture was promptly sacrificed to an object which is sordid and mean.

But into what absurdities will the all-worshipful rate per cent. theory, which is conducive of such splendid quantity and such meagre quality, not eventually lead us? Already, we have a “flat-iron building” which I have seen measured by art standards in a contemporary review. I mean to say that such a thing was, in all good faith, attempted. We find the opinion expressed that the “flat-iron building” was a necessity, and as a necessity we should endeavor to make art harmonizewith it somehow. In all the hardness of our hearts we accept the greedy commercial theory, as the people of Moses accepted the divorce bill, that “sky-scrapers” are a necessity; but they are not. We should be unquestionably better off without them. They are only the lame device of the epoch in which we live to facilitate business until such time as we shall interfere with our neighbor’s daylight beyond all endurance, and here we must perforce desist. Well, one may toady to commercialism himself, if he likes—if he conceives that such a course is really going to be to his advantage; but he cannot make art do it.

To the contrary, art is itself a very jealous god, and does not permit the serving of two masters, at least, two such antithetical masters as itself and commercialism. Art demands that there shall be, first, a sinking fund absolutely within its own control, irrevocable, and forever charged off the commercial ledger. Commercialism has no adequate sum of money that is available for the purpose. Because we define art as dexterity and as cunning, we have been determined to make it fit the exigencies of commercialism; but we

PLATE XI.VICTIMS OF COMMERCIALISM.The Belmont Houses, Fifth Ave. and 18th St.

PLATE XI.

VICTIMS OF COMMERCIALISM.The Belmont Houses, Fifth Ave. and 18th St.

VICTIMS OF COMMERCIALISM.

The Belmont Houses, Fifth Ave. and 18th St.

CHIMNEY-PIECE, AMERICAN RENAISSANCE, MODERN.Designed byT. Henry Randall, Architect.

CHIMNEY-PIECE, AMERICAN RENAISSANCE, MODERN.

Designed byT. Henry Randall, Architect.

PLATE XII.THE SIMPLICITY OF ART.The Wadsworth House, Middletown, Conn.

PLATE XII.

THE SIMPLICITY OF ART.The Wadsworth House, Middletown, Conn.

THE SIMPLICITY OF ART.

The Wadsworth House, Middletown, Conn.

EFFLORESCENCE OF COMMERCIALISM.

have not succeeded. It is, indeed, a grand misfit, because we do not define art rightly. Yet people appear not to want to divine the true definition, no doubt on account of a well-founded premonition that it is going to be an unequivocal rebuke to the selfishness that exacts a certain rate per cent. of return out of everything. Commercialism may defer, but cannot defeat, the enevitable. Art means charity. Now if it were only that kind of charity which the lexicon of commercialism defines as the giving of tithes of whatever a man possesses to the poor, we could still manage as did a certain rich young man we have read about in the lesson. And like him, not being entirely satisfied in our consciences nor with results, we could demand, as did he, what we yet lack, what latent phase of cunning we have overlooked? And it will then become our turn to be the exceeding sorrowful party, for there is no cunning about it. What this generation yet lacks—we have quite everything else—is a sufficiency of the vast, comprehensive form of charity that was intended to be the end and object of every life. That is the synonym of art.

Venerationfor ancestors, and for what ancestors knew, has not been regarded as an American virtue. Yet there was a time entirely beyond the memory of this generation when traditions were religiously handed down and respected in America. It is heresy to suppose that the Colonial builders wereau faitin the science of æsthetics. They were not. There was more excuse for ignorance upon their part than there is for ignorance upon ours; but architecture as a fine art was as little understood by the farmer at large in pre-revolutionary times as is evidenced by the modern farmer whose concrete ideas upon the subject are so charmingly set forth in the curiosity I have been fortunate to secure for this chapter (Plate XVIII). Only, no Colonial farmer would have dared to perpetuate such originality, even though he dreamed it in his

PLATE XIII.MANTELPIECE, AMERICAN RENAISSANCE. EPOCH 1806.

PLATE XIII.

MANTELPIECE, AMERICAN RENAISSANCE. EPOCH 1806.

BOTH NAME AND IDENTITY OF ITS DESIGNER HAVE IN ALL PROBABILITY BEEN IRRETRIEVABLY MISLAID IN OBLIVION, BUT HE WAS AN ARCHITECT.Orne-Ropes’ House, Salem.

BOTH NAME AND IDENTITY OF ITS DESIGNER HAVE IN ALL PROBABILITY BEEN IRRETRIEVABLY MISLAID IN OBLIVION, BUT HE WAS AN ARCHITECT.

Orne-Ropes’ House, Salem.

dreams, which is the only way he could possibly have conceived it. The unalienable right of the American citizen to build whatever he pleases has precedents running backward only to the 4th of March, 1829, when that popular hero, General Andrew Jackson, was inaugurated. This appears to have been the red-flag signal of license for all the vast output of American Jacobin architecture, which, of course, is not to be confused with theJacobeanof England, the seemingly innocent contraction of the suffix having the effect of a disenchanter’s wand.

Previous to this advent of rabid democracy there lingered a vestige of a certain code of social restrictions which once regulated architecture almost as absolutely as it did the private affairs of every family in the land. Once upon a time the house-builder would have no more thought of departing from what I shall call “the straight and narrow path” of precedent in architecture than he would have been guilty of a religious defection such as wilfully absenting himself from meeting, or an ethical defection such as purposely remaining single. This abrogation of personal liberty bore rather roughly,perhaps, upon the individual; but it was the very salvation of architecture, being the censorship to which we are indebted for whatever true inspiration we are enabled to draw out of the Colonial exemplars. “Precept” was the word upon which the American Renaissance was founded. The Colonial builders builded as they were taught to build, not as they may have wished to experiment. And let us see, for a moment, who their masters were, that we may be in a position to understand something of the reason for their success.

While, in olden times, the architect and the builder were often united in the same person, it must have been a very differently equipped individual from the one who awaits his customers behind the pretentious signboard thus lettered which nowadays adorns the front of many a contractor’s place of business; because this legend has come to mean extreme mediocrity in both callings. Nor does the word “architect” alone signify everything it should in a great commercial era such as ours. I have heard the head draughtsman of a noted modern architectural office in New York City distinguish one of his principals from the other partners

PLATE XIV.DOORWAY, MEANS’ HOUSE, AMHERST, N. H.

PLATE XIV.

DOORWAY, MEANS’ HOUSE, AMHERST, N. H.

of the firm by a very significant expression, viz.: “Mr. —— is anarchitect.” And I am constrained to discriminate with equal severity when I see the illustration or the usual “modern American house,” so called, placed in “deadly parallel column” beside a Colonial exemplar erected a century ago. Nobody, as a rule, can inform us who made the drawings of our fascinating prototype. Both name and identity of its designer have, in all probability, been irretrievably mislaid in oblivion; but he was anarchitect! (SeePlate XIII).

In some recent and necessary researches for this and other work I have run across the names of a few of these architects. Their biographies are not to be found in libraries, though they merit shelf-room beside those of our greatest heroes, statesmen and authors. Samuel McIntyre of Salem, Massachusetts, and Russell Warren of Bristol, Rhode Island, respectively, aretwoI could mention in particular that should be done up in full levant with notes and comments upon their work and times, edited by Mr. Russell Sturgis or some one else equally competent to do so. And then the funof it was that many a most refined and skilful artificer of the ancientrégimenever considered the propriety of adding the word “Architect” to his subscription. I suppose he fancied he lacked his diploma or the requisite reputation afforded by some stupendous public work. Yet, Fouquet with his celebratedVaux le Vicomte, or Louis XIV at Versailles had no better architectural advice than had the colonists of America. The greatest architects of the world really directed the planning of the Colonial houses. Unseen, the masterhandsandmindswere working through the agency of deferential and obedient apprentices.

These apprentices essayed no—what boys denominate—“stunts” (see Plate XV), and their masters, to whom they frequently served life-long apprenticeships, affected no “stunts” either. Sir Christopher Wren, himself, and Inigo Jones never tried “stunts” nor did Palladio in Italy, before them, nor even the great Michelangelo. Now, if there ever was an architect justified in exploiting “stunts” it was Michelangelo, to whom marble or pigments, chisels or brushes were as subservient as to magic. But what did this

PLATE XV.THESE APPRENTICES ESSAYED NO STUNTS.Munro-French House, Bristol, R. I. A. D. 1800.

PLATE XV.

THESE APPRENTICES ESSAYED NO STUNTS.Munro-French House, Bristol, R. I. A. D. 1800.

THESE APPRENTICES ESSAYED NO STUNTS.

Munro-French House, Bristol, R. I. A. D. 1800.

AN ANCIENT FARMHOUSE AT DURHAM, CONN.

architectural giant do when summoned to Rome to look after the construction of St. Peter’s? In the eyes of American commercialism, he made a goose of himself, he simply missed the chance of his life. He waived jealousy, he waived ambition, patronage and emolument because he preferred the serving of God and of his art to the serving of self. Fancy such a thing in our day! Michelangelo requested that all the plans of his illustrious predecessor, Bramante, the original designer of the cathedral, be brought to him: and fully appreciating the responsibility of the complex work that had descended to him by the rightful heirship of true art, Michelangelo emphatically declared he conceived it to be his duty to carry forward Bramante’s design, and, moreover, that wherever the intercedent tinkers had departed from this design, just so much had they erred. How strange this policy sounds placed in contrast to the ethics of American expediency! No doubt, the mighty Renaissance fabric at Rome has lost inestimably because this remarkable man could not live to complete it. In our day, we have changed all that. The main chance is not nowart—it is money. We are stillthe America of Martin Chuzzlewit plus population. Our greatest architect is our greatest “stunt-master” and bears to American commercialism the same relationship that a certain society leader bears to his equally noted patroness. And it does not require the perspicacity of a Voodoo woman either, to see how ephemeral, in comparison to the ages of good architectural development, is this modern American extravaganza, which, not unlike the airy creatures who enjoyed existence in the dream of the White-King in Lewis Carroll’s classic, “Through the Looking Glass,” is liable to go out of voguebang!at any moment, upon his majesty’s—or rather upontrue art’s—awakening.

InPlate XVthere is presented a type of American farm-house of the early eighteenth century. Engraved upon a tablet let into the front wall of the chimneystack appears the impressive date 1727. This house is still standing in an admirable state of preservation nearby a quaint old village called Durham, in Connecticut. It was erected by a man named Miles Merwin, and a lineal descendant of its builder still occupies it. When he visited this house last summer the interior

PLATE XVI.SO FAR AS TEACHING ARCHITECTURAL ART IS CONCERNED, IT MUST BE ADMITTED OUR PUBLIC SCHOOLS HAVE BEEN A DEAD FAILURE.

PLATE XVI.

SO FAR AS TEACHING ARCHITECTURAL ART IS CONCERNED, IT MUST BE ADMITTED OUR PUBLIC SCHOOLS HAVE BEEN A DEAD FAILURE.

TYPE OF FARMHOUSE, EPOCH END OF 18TH CENTURY.

impressed the writer fully as much as the exterior. It seemed to me that the same influence came back again that rushed over my senses when first I beheld the worn steps to the royal tombs at Westminster. It was so very old and replete with atmosphere! It had so much history to tell that one’s most natural inclination was to sit down quickly upon the roughly hewn doorsteps bedabbled by streaks of sunlight filtering through the foliage, and just listen. Ah, how ridiculous it would be to imagine that the wonderfully satisfying lines of the roof, the delicious overhang of the gable, the relationship of the stone chimney and the proportions generally were evolved by Miles Merwin himself, out of a printed book upon the æsthetics of design! For neither Miles Merwin nor his master-builder may be said to have originated the house they erected. I do not fancy, for one moment, that they ever contemplated such an ill-advised departure from precedent. They had been taught how to construct three or four different kinds of roofs, and they simply selected the one most suitable to the needs of this case. It was the influence and teaching of more than one great architectthat designed the ancient farm-house at Durham. And now you need no longer conjecture why Colonial architecture is so good and remains in fashion. You know.

Select, if you please, the detail of the hooded entrance. A modern house-builder requested to supply some unique shelter for the doorway would understand you to mean that you wished him to invent something which, by the way, is a task infinitely agreeable to the modern practitioner. It is safe to aver that the adviser of Miles Merwin, whoever he was, had never invented anything in his life. He would not have dared to try the experiment in architecture, at any rate, more than had he been the indentured apprentice of a Florentine architect. Although I can, very easily, imagine him quoting his grandsire that this particular kind of hood he was recommending to his principal, with its deep cornice, was an exceptionally rigid and durable one. The truth of which observation time has sufficiently demonstrated. It was “Old Hickory” who issued the emancipation proclamation to young America absolving him from the time-honored and universal fealty to Art. But young America was deceived; it was a

PLATE XVII.PERISTYLE TO A HOUSE IN WYOMING, N. J., 1897.

PLATE XVII.

PERISTYLE TO A HOUSE IN WYOMING, N. J., 1897.

AMERICAN RENAISSANCE, 1899.

campaign lie. Young America was not emancipated at all. Another master was set over him, and that master was unrelenting expediency, who forthwith usurped the throne of deposed art. Perhaps we are just beginning to suspect the ruse after seventy-five years of license and anarchy in art matters. What we did was simply to exchange a legitimate sovereign for a coarse, unlettered and brutal demagogue, of whom every American, young and old, by this time, should be heartily ashamed.

And I think the present generation is somewhat ashamed notwithstanding the fact that our modern system of public instruction, liberal as it purports to be, is painfully lame in the department of the arts. They are like so many sealed books to the scholars who are expected to shape our history. The policy of Donna Inez in Byron’s great epic was to withold natural history only from her son’s course of studies. Our policy is to disseminate all the natural history available. The mixed class in physiology recites its lessons unblushingly. We encourage the sciences. The farmer builds his house, to-day, with the best of sanitary arrangements; they are nearly perfect, he installs hot-waterheaters and electric lights, he keeps in touch with the moving procession upon all points save one.—What does he know about Art and American Renaissance?

The example of modern farm-house (Plate XVI) herewith respectfully submitted indicates the modern farmer’s limitations. So far as teaching architectural art is concerned, it must be admitted that our public schools have been a dead failure.

But let us not look upon these things too gloomily, and lest the reader, by this time, discover some sinister intention upon my part to slur the memory of the hero of New Orleans, I wish to state that, personally, I have only the greatest respect and admiration for a man who positively refused to be frightened. Like Napoleon, Jackson was unquestionably the man for the hour—the times, and devilishly bad times they must have been by 1837 to have grown inimical to the very commercial interests that had let them loose. By their aid, however, are we not permitted to see ourselves somewhat as others see us, so at last, we shall have discovered the true mission of these times in the economy of art?

PLATE XVIII.DETAIL, PRINCESSGATE. 1896.

PLATE XVIII.

DETAIL, PRINCESSGATE. 1896.

A little learning is a dangerous thing;Drink deep, or taste not, the Pierian spring;For shallow draughts intoxicate the brain,But drinking largely sobers us again.

PLATE XIX.WYCK, GERMANTOWN. EPOCH, A. D. 1700.“The charm that is not deducible by mathematics.”—Miss Polly Fairfax.

PLATE XIX.

WYCK, GERMANTOWN. EPOCH, A. D. 1700.“The charm that is not deducible by mathematics.”—Miss Polly Fairfax.

WYCK, GERMANTOWN. EPOCH, A. D. 1700.

“The charm that is not deducible by mathematics.”—Miss Polly Fairfax.

Itis unfair to place these humble beginnings of American Renaissance beside such highly developed architecture, for example, as English “Country Life” exploits week after week, under its heading of “Country Homes, Gardens, Old and New” as to make one believe that England must have an unlimited store for the magazine to draw upon. And this is all the more remarkable because one’s recollection of English landscape as it reveals itself through windows of the railway carriages along the main routes of travel—especially along the Great Eastern road from London to Kings Lynn—distinguishes it little from that uninteresting stretch of country which lies between Trenton and New Brunswick on the Pennsylvania railroad. Evidently, all these magnificent halls were erected long before the advent of railways, and are in no way affiliated with the vulgar wake of commercialism. Accessibility, which governs so largely in America, must be a matter of supreme indifference to possessors of great estates in England, or, it seems to me, the railway lines would meander in such a manner as closely to skirt the confines of a magnificent demesne, occasionally. It is unfair to a country whose visible architectural development is barely two centuries old to bring it in contrast with one where no building is really ancient without a history dating backward three or four hundred years, at least.

We, perhaps, fancy we have in America some modern country estates quite worth while mentioning and which might easily withstand the odious ordeal of comparison; but can the reader name one in the same category with such a country seat as is illustrated in “Country Life” for July 12, 1902, described as “Osmaston Manor, Derbyshire” (Plate XXVI)?—and this is a number of the periodical picked up without especial selection—“Biltmore,” in the North Carolina mountains, possibly, with the H. W. Poor house at Tuxedo, New Jersey, as an alternate choice, one French

PLATE XX.“Extremely humble, yet genteel.”DOORWAY, PHILADELPHIA CLUB.13th and Walnut Streets.

PLATE XX.

“Extremely humble, yet genteel.”DOORWAY, PHILADELPHIA CLUB.13th and Walnut Streets.

“Extremely humble, yet genteel.”

DOORWAY, PHILADELPHIA CLUB.

13th and Walnut Streets.

Renaissance, the other Jacobean. But certainly, Newport, with its miserable crowding and elbowing of American pretentiousness, much of the pretentiousness belonging to the modern invention type of architecture, offers no comparison at all. The Hunnewell gardens and some others we have seen photographed and discussed of late look more like tree nurseries than Renaissance gardens, while nearly all the modern American show places illustrated from time to time in the different magazines deal only with that primitive kind of splendor indigenous to provinces.

No, we may not compare American Renaissance after this manner. We are entirely too young a nation for that kind of architecture which presupposes a renowned antiquity which we lack. But what we may do becomingly is to select the homely and humble cottages of Great Britain, such cottages as the one we are shown where lived the poet Robert Burns, for instance. Place those, if you please, beside the farmhouses of our Colonial régime, and then you may be surprised to find we have something to be proud of, even though it be the fashion to belittle these essentially good antecedents by modern architectural scholars. I am reminded herein of the story that is told of a noted professor of music—Kullak, who, having discovered that the number on the programme which the orchestra had rendered to the great delight of everyone, was a Strauss waltz (it must have been one of the less known as “Autumn Leaves,” it could not have been the hackneyed “Blue Danube,” which has been so much overrated), turned to his pupils, ever loyal to their master’s prejudices, beside him, and furtively whispered, “Well, don’t say anything about it, boys; but it’s awfully nice!” The sentiment thus expressed is the cultivated sentiment of the average architect toward the early Renaissance of America. He appears to be constrained by some artificial position—some pedantic make-believe that allows him to acknowledge the merit of a Witch-Colonial exemplar (see Plate XXI), with only the poorest kind of grace.

But I have already explained why the old stuff remaining in America is so “awfully nice” as to charm all unprejudiced artists who have studied our history, so that mystery about it, I trust, need be no

PLATE XXI.DERBY-WARD HOUSE, SALEM, MASS. 17TH CENTURY.

PLATE XXI.

DERBY-WARD HOUSE, SALEM, MASS. 17TH CENTURY.

SOUVENIR OF ABIGAIL AND DELIVERANCE HOBBS (TWO ALLEGED WITCHES), OF TOPSFIELD, MASS. 17TH CENTURY.

longer. The paramount business in hand is to get rid of American nonsense, to put it entirely out of the head, if possible, that nothing may stand in the way of returning meekly and in a receptive spirit to those ancient and honorable first principles of ours which were unerring. This surgical-like operation accomplished, let us see what may be done with the Derby-Ward house, erectedA.D.1680 in Salem (Plate XXI), to make it habitable, convenient and desirable to-day.

At this stage of the art of house-building, upon which subject there has been so much written and published, an architect would yet be considered plumb crazy who had the temerity to submit such a picture to a prospective client as the kind of house best suited to his needs. Yet, why not? Has the reader no imagination? Can he not see how, given a generous forecourt, with prim flower beds, a brick walk and box, this frowning prototype of “Scarlet Letter” morals and punishment would take on a very different aspect, its repelling severity mollified by a little gracious environment? And we do not stop here, by any means. We make a feature of the entrance, either by the aidof a true witch entry or a bewitching hood shadowing a roughly-hewn platform resting upon a wide step, say 16 inches, returned on two sides—the inviting kind. We repair the cornice and embellish the overhang with moulded or turned drops at effective intervals. We re-knit the rifts in the single chimney, making a clustered stack of it above the roof. We flank the main edifice with a becoming woodshed which deft handling will transform into a most delightful loggia. And then we visit the nearby shop of an upholsterer. If the tiny panes of glass in the windows have become through age iridescent, more delicate than that of Tiffany favrile manufacture, so much the better for the figured dimity or the bobbinet we intend to hang against them, perpendicularly, not looped, but simply hemmed, and with deep valance. By this time the scheme will have easily dawned upon the mind of the sceptical onlooker. No longer does he adjudge us entirely crazy. Why, no; we commence to be artists now—indeed, magicians! He quotes Kullak, involuntarily.

We have ordered a hot-water heater installed, likewise sanitary plumbing, and a range, these being the

PLATE XXII.THE PIRSSON COTTAGE, WYOMING, N. J. MODERN HOUSE WITH GERMANTOWN HOOD.

PLATE XXII.

THE PIRSSON COTTAGE, WYOMING, N. J. MODERN HOUSE WITH GERMANTOWN HOOD.

MODERN COTTAGE WITH A DUTCH HOOD.

only contracts we have signed with modern invention. All the rest has been of the most conservative architectonic development.

“But the plans! One has to live in the house after it is built, you know. Can you make it liveable with only the one chimney, and that in the very centre?” we are asked. I think we can. Let me submit one solution of the problem, at any rate, and you are quite at liberty to take it home and improve upon it as much as you please.

These Witch-houses are the pioneers of the procession. Nothing older than they has been able to withstand the vicissitudes of our erratic climate’s racket, though contemporary with them are the early houses of Connecticut, which have been admirably described in a book by Norman M. Isham, A.M., and Albert F. Brown. The Sumner house at Middletown, illustrated herewith (Plate XXIV), exhibits a method of construction which I believe is peculiar to the State of Connecticut alone. It consists of a 3-inch offset at the second story, and continuing around the four sides, the gables projecting 3 inches more. A great central

Back to Index Next