CHAPTER FOURTHE DIASPORA OF THE PIONEER
From the standpoint of architecture, the early part of the nineteenth century was a period of disintegration. The gap between sheer utility and art, which the Renaissance had emphasized, was widened with the coming of machinery. That part of architecture which was touched by industrialism became crude beyond belief: the new mills and factories were usually packing boxes, lacking in light and ventilation, and the homes of the factory workers, when they were not the emptied houses of merchants and tradesmen, made to serve a dozen families instead of the original one, were little more than covered pens, as crowded as a cattle market. At the same time that the old forms were undermined by the new methods of mechanical production, a sentimental longing to retain those forms, just because they were old, seized men’s minds; and so industrialism and romanticism divided the field of architecture between them.
It was no accident that caused romanticism and industrialism to appear at the same time. Theywere rather the two faces of the new civilization, one looking towards the past, and the other towards the future; one glorifying the new, the other clinging to the old; industrialism intent on increasing the physical means of subsistence, romanticism living in a sickly fashion on the hollow glamour of the past. The age not merely presented these two aspects; it sought to enjoy each of them. Where industrialism took root, the traditions of architecture were disregarded; where romanticism flourished, on the other hand, in the mansions, public buildings, and churches, architecture became capricious and absurd, and it returned to a past that had never existed. Against the gross callousness which a Bounderby exhibited toward beauty and amenity, there was only the bland piety of a Pecksniff.
The dream that is dying and the dream that is coming to birth do not stand in sequence, but mingle as do the images in a dissolving view; and during the very years that the architecture of the Renaissance, both in Europe and America, achieved new heights of formal design, the first factories were being planted in Staffordshire and Yorkshire, the Duke of Bridgewater built his famous canal, and Horace Walpole designed his “Gothic” mansion on StrawberryHill. The coincidence of industrialism and romanticism is just as emphatic in America as in England; and it is not without historic justice that the architect who in 1807 designed the chapel of St. Mary’s Seminary in Baltimore, after the Gothic fashion, successfully introduced a steam pumping system in Philadelphia’s waterworks. While the industrial buildings of the period represented nothing but a lapse from the current vernacular, due to haste and insufficient resources, romantic architecture was a positive influence; and it will perhaps best serve our purpose to examine the romantic heritage in its pristine form, rather than in the work of disciples like Latrobe, whose American practice is dated about two generations later.
The author of The Castle of Otranto had a perverse and wayward interest in the past; and the spirit he exhibited in both his novel and his country home was typical of the romantic attitude everywhere. What attracted Walpole to the Gothic style was little more than the phosphorescence of decay: he summoned up the ghosts of the Middle Ages but not the guilds; and instead of admiring the soundness of medieval masonry, those who followed directly in his path were affected rather by the spectacle ofits dilapidation, so that the production of authentic ruins became one of the chief efforts of the eighteenth-century landscape gardener.
It is not a great step from building a ruin to building a mansion that is little better than a ruin. While Walpole defended Strawberry Hill by saying he did not aim to make his house so Gothic as to exclude convenience, it happened again and again that the picturesque was the enemy of simple honesty and necessity; and just as Walpole himself in his refectory used wall paper that imitated stucco, so did other owners and builders use plaster and hangings and wall paper and carpet to cover up defects of construction. Towers that no one ever climbed, turrets that no one could enter, and battlements that no one rose to defend, took the place of the classic orders. The drawbridge-and-moat that embellished Mr. Wemmick’s villa in Great Expectations was not a wild conceit of Dickens but a relic of Walpole and his successors.
As a disguise for mean or thoughtless workmanship, the application of antique “style” was the romantic contribution to architecture; and it served very handily during the period of speculative building and selling that accompanied the growth of thenew industrial towns. Even where style did not conceal commercial disingenuousness, it covered up a poverty of imagination in handling the elements of a building. Gothic touches about doors and the exterior of windows, and a heap of bric-a-brac and curios on the inside, softened the gauntness and bareness of this architecture, or rather, distracted attention from them. Curiosity was the dominant mood of the time, acquisitiveness its principal impulse, and comfort its end. Many good things doubtless came out of this situation; but architecture was not one of them.
Modern industrialism began to take root in America after the War of Independence, and its effect was twofold: it started up new villages which centered about the waterfall or the iron mine and had scarcely any other concern than industry; at the same time, by cutting canals which tapped the interior, it drew life away from the smaller provincial ports and concentrated commerce and population in great towns like Boston, Philadelphia, and New York. In New England, as in the EnglishCotswolds from Whitney to Chalford, the mechanical regime was humanized by the presence of an older civilization, and the first generation of factory hands were farmers’ lads and lasses who neither lost nor endangered their independence; but where the factory depended upon paupers or immigrants, as it did in the big towns and in some of the unsettled parts of the country, the community relapsed into a barbarism which affected the masters as well as the hands. There was more than a difference in literary taste between the Corinths and Bethels named by an earlier generation and the Mechanicsvilles that followed them.
The chief watchwords of the time were progress and expansion. The first belonged to the pioneer in industry who opened up new areas for mechanical invention and applied science; the second, to the land pioneer; and between these two resourceful types the old ways, were they good or bad, were scrapped, and the new ways, were they good or bad, were adopted. Both land pioneering and industrial pioneering were essentially subdivisions of one occupation, mining; and, following the clue opened by Messrs. Geddes and Branford, one may say with Professor Adshead that the nineteenth centurywitnessed “the great attack of the miner on the peasant.”
Mechanical industry owes its great development and progress to the work of the woodman and the miner: the first type of worker takes the bent sapling and develops the lathe or “bodger” which is still to be found in the remote parts of the Chiltern Hills in England, while from the mine itself not merely comes the steam engine, first used for pumping out water, but likewise the railway. The perpetual débris amid which the miner lives forms a capital contrast with the ordered culture, the careful weeding and cutting, of field and orchard: almost any sort of habitation is an advance upon the squalor of the pithead; and it is not a mere chance that the era devoted to mining and all its accessory manufactures was throughout the western world the dingiest and dirtiest that has yet befouled the earth. Choked by his own débris, or stirred by the exhaustion of minerals, the miner’s community runs down—and he departs.
The name pioneer has a romantic color; but in America the land pioneer mined the forests and the soil, and the industry pioneer almost as ruthlessly mined the human resources, and when the pay-dirtgot sallow and thin, they both moved on. Longfellow’s allusion to the “bivouac of life” unconsciously points to the prevailing temper; for even those who remained in the older American centers were affected by the pioneer’s malaise and unsettlement; and they behaved as if at any moment they might be called to the colors and sent westward.
Beside the vivid promises of Mechanical Progress and Manifest Destiny the realities of an ordered society thinned into a pale vapor. In many little communities Mechanical Societies were formed for the propagation of the utilitarian faith: industrialism with its ascetic ritual of unsparing work, its practice of thrift, its renunciation of the arts, gathered to itself the religious zeal of Protestantism. The erection of factories, the digging of canals, the location of furnaces, the building of roads, the devising of inventions, not merely exhausted a great part of the available capital; even more, it occupied the energy and imagination of the more vigorous spirits. Two generations before, Thomas Jefferson could lay out and develop the estate of Monticello; now, with many of Jefferson’s capacities, Poe could only dream about the fantastic Domain of Arnheim. The society around Poe had no more use for anarchitectural imagination than the Puritans had for decorative images; the smoke of the factory-chimney was incense, the scars on the landscape were as the lacerations of a saint, and the mere multiplication of gaunt sheds and barracks was a sign of progress, and therefore an earnest of perfection.
Did ever so many elements of disintegration come together at one time and place before? The absence of tradition and example raised enough difficulties in Birmingham and Manchester and Lyons and Essen; but in America it was accentuated by the restless march of those pioneers who, in the words of a contemporary economist, “leave laws, education and the arts, all the essential elements of civilization, behind them.” What place could architecture fill in these squatter communities? It could diminish the hardships of living; it could grease the channels of gain; and it could demolish or “improve” so much of the old as it could not understand, as Bulfinch’s Court House in Newburyport was improved, and as many a fine city residence was swept away under the tide of traffic.
These were the days when the log cabin flourished; but it did not remain long enough in place to become the well-wrought and decorative piece of rusticarchitecture that the better sort of peasant hut, done with the same materials, became in Russia. A genuine architectural development might have led from a crude log cabin to a finished one, from a bare cabin to an enriched and garnished one, and so, perhaps, in the course of a century or so, to a fine country architecture and a great native art of wood carving comparable to that of the Russian sculptors today. In America, however, the pioneer jumped baldly from log cabin to White House, or its genteel and scroll-sawed equivalent; and the arts inherent in good building never had a chance to develop. With the animus of the miner in back of everything the pioneer attempted, the pioneer’s architecture was all false-work and scantling.
The first contribution to the pioneer’s comfort was Franklin’s ingenious stove (1745). After that came a number of material appliances. Central heating gave the American house a Roman standard of comfort, the astral-oil lamp captivated Edgar Poe; and cooking stoves, gas-lighting, permanent bathtubs, and water-closets made their way into thebetter sort of house in the Eastern cities before the middle of the nineteenth century. In the development of the city itself, the gridiron plan was added to the list of labor-saving devices. Although the gridiron plan had the same relation to natural conditions and fundamental social needs as a paper constitution has to the living customs of a people, the simplicity of the gridiron plan won the heart of the pioneer. Its rectangular blocks formed parcels of land which he could sell by the front foot and gamble with as easily as if he were playing cards, and deeds of transfer could be drawn up hastily with the same formula for each plot; moreover, the least competent surveyor, without thought or knowledge, could project the growth of New Eden’s streets and avenues into an interminable future. In nineteenth-century city planning the engineer was the willing servant of the land monopolist; and he provided a frame for the architect—a frame in which we still struggle today—where site-value counted for everything, and sight-value was not even an afterthought.
In street layout and land subdivision no attention was paid to the final use to which the land would be put; but the most meticulous efforts were made tosafeguard its immediate use, namely, land-speculation. In order to further this use hills were graded, swamps and ponds filled, and streets laid out before these expenditures could be borne by the people who, in the end, were to profit by or suffer from them. It was no wonder that the newer towns like Cincinnati, St. Louis, and Chicago by the middle of the century had forfeited to the gambler in real estate, to pay the cost of street improvements, generous tracts of land which the original planners had set aside as civic centers. Planned by men who still retained some of the civic vision of the early republic, the commercial city speedily drifted into the hands of people who had no more civic scruples than the keeper of a lottery.
The gridiron plan had one other defect which was accounted a virtue by the pioneer, and still is shared by those who have not profited by the intervening century’s experience. With its avenues that encompassed swamps and wildernesses, with its future growth forecast for at least a hundred years, the complete city plan captivated the imagination. Scarcely any American town was so mean that it did not attempt to grow faster than its neighbor, faster perhaps than New York. Only by the accumulationof more and more people could its colossal city plan and its inflated land values be realized. If the older cities of the seaboard were limited in their attempts to become metropolises by the fact that their downtown sections were originally laid out for villages, the villages of the middle west labored under just the opposite handicap; they had frequently acquired the framework of a metropolis before they had passed out of the physical state of a village. The gridiron plan was a sort of hand-me-down which the juvenile city was supposed to grow into and fill. That a city had any other purpose than to attract trade, to increase land values, and to grow is something that, if it uneasily entered the mind of an occasional Whitman, never exercised any hold upon the minds of the majority of our countrymen. For them, the place where the great city standsisthe place of stretched wharves, and markets, and ships bringing goods from the ends of the earth; that, and nothing else.
With business booming and vanishing, with people coming and going, with land continually changinghands, what encouragement was there for the stable achievements of architecture? In vain does the architect antic and grimace to conceal his despair; his business is to put on a front. If he is not a Pecksniff at heart, he will at any rate have to serve Mr. Veneering. A guide book of 1826 refers to a Masonic Hall “somewhat in the Gothic style”; and we can characterize all the buildings of the period by saying that they were “somewhat” like architecture—a little more than scenery, a little less than solids.
For a while it seemed as if the Gothic revival might give the prevailing cast to nineteenth-century building; for if this mode was adopted at first because it was picturesque and historic it was later reënforced by the conviction that it was a natural and scientific mode of construction, that it stood for growth and function, as against the arbitrary character of the classic work. The symbols of the organic world were rife in the thought of this period, for in the sphere of thought biology was supplanting physics, and Gothic architecture was supposed peculiarly to be in the line of growth, while that of the Renaissance cut across and, heretically, denied the principle of organic development. Unfortunatelythe process of disintegration had gone so far that no one current of thought had the power to dominate; and the Gothic style proved to be only the first of a number of discordant influences, derived from industry, from history, from archæology.
Indeed, the chief sign that bears witness to the disintegration of architecture during the formative days of the pioneer is eclecticism; but there is still another—the attempt to justify the industrial process by using solely the materials it had created in abundance. In discussing the plans for the Smithsonian Institution, Robert Dale Owen observed that “of late years a rival material, from the mine, seems encroaching on these [stone, clay, wood] and the next generation may see, arising on our continent, villages, or it may be cities, of iron.”
What Owen’s generation actually did see, apart from sheet-iron façades and zinc cornices, was the Crystal Palace, which was built in New York in 1853 in imitation of London’s exhibition hall of 1850. Ruskin described the original Crystal Palace, with sardonic justice, as a magnified conservatory; and that is about all that can be said for either building. As exercises in technique they doubtlesstaught many lessons to the iron masters and engineers; but they had scarcely anything to contribute to architecture. A later generation built the train sheds for their smoky railways on this pattern; but the precedent lingers today chiefly in subway kiosks and window-fronts, and even here it has created no fresh forms for itself—unless the blank expanse of a plate-glass window framed in metallic grilles can be called a fresh form.
The growth of eclecticism, on the other hand, had by the middle of the century given the American city the aspect of a museum and the American countryside a touch of the picture-book. Washington Irving’s Sunnyside and the first Smithsonian building were in the predominant Gothic mode; but Poe described the mansion of a not altogether imaginary Arnheim as semi-Gothic, semi-Saracenic; and the old Tombs prison in New York got its name from the Egyptian character of its façade. Who can doubt that the design for aByzantinecottage, shown in The American Cottage Builder (1854), was somewhere carried out?
Nettled by the criticism that America was not Europe, the pioneer determined to bring Europe to his doors. Relatively few American architectsduring the period, however, had been abroad, and still fewer had been there to any purpose; even men of culture and imagination like Hawthorne and Emerson were not at home in the physical environment of Europe, however intimate they were with its mind. The buildings that were erected under the inspiration of European tours only accentuated the barbarism of the American scene and the poverty of the architect’s imagination.
A good part of our architecture today still exhibits the parvenu’s uneasiness, and is by turns French, Italian, or more or less obsolete English; but we do not, perhaps, realize with what a difference; for photography and archæological research now make it possible to produce buildings which have all the virtues of the original except originality, whereas the earlier, illiterate development of foreign examples, rehearsed in memory, resulted in a conglomerate form which resembled nothing so much, perhaps, as P. T. Barnum’s mermaid.
If the Crystal Palace represents the extreme of industrial art, Colonel Colt’s Armsmear represents the opposite—untutored romanticism. Armsmear was built near Hartford, between 1855 and 1862. A writer in the Art Journal for 1876 calls this mansiona “characteristic type of the unique.” It was a “long, grand, impressive, contradictory, beautiful, strange thing.... An Italian villa in stone, massive, noble, refined, yet not carrying out any decided principles of architecture, it is like the mind of its originator, bold and unusual in its combinations.... There is no doubt it is a little Turkish among other things, on one side it has domes, pinnacles, and light, lavish ornamentation, such as Oriental taste delights in.... Yet, although the villa is Italian and cosmopolitan, the feeling is English. It is an English home in its substantiality, its home-like and comfortable aspects.”
It is, alas! impossible to illustrate in these pages this remarkable specimen of American architecture; but in a lecture on the Present and Future Prospects of Chicago (1846), I have discovered its exact literary equivalent, and it will sum up the crudity and cultural wistfulness of the period perhaps better than any overt description:
“I thank you [apologizes the lecturer] for the patience you have manifested on this occasion, and promise never more to offend in like manner, so long. I have now, as Cowper observes—‘Roved for fruit,Roved far, and gathered much....’“And can, I think with Scott, surely say that—‘To his promise justVich-Alpine has discharged his trust.’“I propose now, gentlemen, to leave you at Carlangtoghford,‘And thou must keep thee with thy sword.’“Let me say to you on this occasion, as Campbell does on another:‘Wave, Munich! all your banners wave!And charge with all your chivalry.’“And should you in the contest fall, remember with old Homer—‘Such honours Ilion to her hero paid,And peaceful slept the mighty Hector’s shade.’“Allow me now to close in one of Scott’s beautiful strains:‘Charge, Chester, charge! On, Stanley, on!Were the last words of Marmion.’”
“I thank you [apologizes the lecturer] for the patience you have manifested on this occasion, and promise never more to offend in like manner, so long. I have now, as Cowper observes—
‘Roved for fruit,Roved far, and gathered much....’
‘Roved for fruit,Roved far, and gathered much....’
‘Roved for fruit,Roved far, and gathered much....’
‘Roved for fruit,
Roved far, and gathered much....’
“And can, I think with Scott, surely say that—
‘To his promise justVich-Alpine has discharged his trust.’
‘To his promise justVich-Alpine has discharged his trust.’
‘To his promise justVich-Alpine has discharged his trust.’
‘To his promise just
Vich-Alpine has discharged his trust.’
“I propose now, gentlemen, to leave you at Carlangtoghford,
‘And thou must keep thee with thy sword.’
‘And thou must keep thee with thy sword.’
‘And thou must keep thee with thy sword.’
‘And thou must keep thee with thy sword.’
“Let me say to you on this occasion, as Campbell does on another:
‘Wave, Munich! all your banners wave!And charge with all your chivalry.’
‘Wave, Munich! all your banners wave!And charge with all your chivalry.’
‘Wave, Munich! all your banners wave!And charge with all your chivalry.’
‘Wave, Munich! all your banners wave!
And charge with all your chivalry.’
“And should you in the contest fall, remember with old Homer—
‘Such honours Ilion to her hero paid,And peaceful slept the mighty Hector’s shade.’
‘Such honours Ilion to her hero paid,And peaceful slept the mighty Hector’s shade.’
‘Such honours Ilion to her hero paid,And peaceful slept the mighty Hector’s shade.’
‘Such honours Ilion to her hero paid,
And peaceful slept the mighty Hector’s shade.’
“Allow me now to close in one of Scott’s beautiful strains:
‘Charge, Chester, charge! On, Stanley, on!Were the last words of Marmion.’”
‘Charge, Chester, charge! On, Stanley, on!Were the last words of Marmion.’”
‘Charge, Chester, charge! On, Stanley, on!Were the last words of Marmion.’”
‘Charge, Chester, charge! On, Stanley, on!
Were the last words of Marmion.’”
Thatwas American architecture between 1820 and the Civil War—a collection of tags, thrown at random against a building. Architectural forms were brought together by a mere juxtaposition ofmaterials, held in place by neither imagination nor logic. There are a number of honorable exceptions to this rule, for architects like Renwick, who designed St. Patrick’s Cathedral, and Upjohn, who built Trinity Church, had a more sincere understanding of the conventional task; and by any standard of esthetic decency the old Gothic building of New York University, on Washington Square, was a far finer structure than the bulky office building that has taken its place. Nevertheless, this saving remnant does not alter the character of the great mass of work, any more than the occasionally excellent cast-iron balconies, brought over from the London of the Regency, alter the depressing character of the great mass of domestic building. In elevation and interior treatment, these ante-bellum buildings were all what-nots. Souvenirs of architecture, their forms dimly recall the monuments of the past without in any sense taking their place.
To tell the truth, a pall had fallen over the industrial city: contemporary writers in the ’forties and ’fifties speak of the filth and smoke, and without doubt the chocolate brownstone front was introduced as a measure of protective coloration. In this dingy environment, men turned to nature as arefuge against the soiled and bedraggled works of man’s creation; and as the creeping factory and railroad train removed Nature farther from their doors, the park was introduced as a more convenient means of escape. The congested capitals of Europe had already learnt this lesson; traveled Americans, like William Cullen Bryant, brought it home; and Central Park, planned in 1853, was the first of the great landscape parks to serve as a people’s pleasance. Conceived in contrast to the deflowered landscape and the muddled city, the park alone re-created the traditions of civilization—of man naturalized, and therefore at home, of nature humanized, and therefore enriched. And even today our parks are what our cities should be, and are not.
By 1860 the halcyon day of American civilization was over; the spirit had lingered in letters and scholarship, in the work of Parkman and Motley and Emerson and Melville and Thoreau, but the sun had already sunk below the horizon, and what seemed a promise was in reality an afterglow. By the time the Civil War came, architecture had recorded faithfully the social transformation; it was sullen, grim, gauche, unstable. While in almost every age architecture has an independent value to the spirit, sothat we can rejoice in Chartres or Winchester even though we have abandoned the Roman faith, in the early industrial period architecture is reduced to a symptom. Romanticism had not restored the past, nor had industrialism made the future more welcome. Architecture wandered between two worlds, “one dead, the other powerless to be born.”