CHAPTER THREETHE CLASSICAL MYTH
The transformation of European society and its material shell that took place during the period we call the Renaissance is associated with the break-up of the town economy and its replacement by a mercantile economy devoted to the advantage of the State. Along with this goes the destruction of the village community, and the predominance in social affairs of a landholding oligarchy who have thrown off feudal responsibilities while they have retained most of the feudal privileges, and a merchant class, buttressed by riches derived from war, piracy, and sharp trade.
America reproduced in miniature the changes that were taking place in Europe. Because of its isolation and the absence of an established social order, it showed these changes without the blur and confusion that attended them abroad.
It is sometimes a little difficult to tell whether the classical modes of building were a result of these changes in society or, among other things, anincentive to them; whether the classical frame fitted the needs of the time, or whether men’s activities expanded to occupy the idolum that had seized their imagination. At any rate, the notion that the classical taste in architecture developed mainly through technical interests in design will not hold; for the severely classical shell arose only in regions where the social conditions had laid a foundation for the classical myth.
The first development of the grand style in the American renaissance was in the manors of Virginia and Maryland. It came originally through an imitation of the country houses of England, and then, after the Revolutionary War, it led to a direct adaptation of the Roman villa and the Greek temple. One does not have to go very deep to fetch up the obvious parallel between the land-monopoly and slavery that prevailed in the American manors and the conditions that permitted the Roman villa itself to assume its stately proportions; nor need one dwell too long upon the natural subordination, in this regime, of the carpenter-builder to the gentleman-architect. “In the town palaces and churches,” as Mr. Fiske Kimball justly says, “there was a strong contradiction between modern conditions and ancientforms, so that it was only in the country that Palladio’s ideas of domestic architecture could come to a clear and successful expression. These monuments, since so much neglected, served in Palladio’s book expressly to represent the ‘Antients’ designs of country-houses....’”
At his death, Robert Carter, who had been Rector of the College, Speaker of the Burgesses, President of the Council, Acting Governor of Virginia, and Proprietor of the Northern Neck, was described in the Gentleman’s Magazine of 1732 as the possessor of an estate of 300,000 acres of land, about 1,000 slaves, and ten thousand pounds. Pliny the Younger might well have been proud of such an estate. On a substantial basis like this, a Palladian mansion was possible; and up and down the land, wherever the means justified the end, Palladian mansions were built.
The really striking thing about the architecture of Manorial America with its great dignity and its sometimes striking beauty of detail or originality of design—as in the staircase at Berry Hill which creates a flaring pattern like butterfly’s wings—the striking thing is the fact that the work is not the product of a specialized education; it is rather theoutcome of a warm, loving, and above all intelligent commerce with the past, in the days before Horseback Hall had become as aimless and empty as Heartbreak House. Mr. Arthur T. Bolton, the biographer of the brothers Adam, has exhibited letters from Robert Adam’s patrons in England which mark their avid and precise interest in classical forms; and without doubt a little digging would uncover similar examples in America.
These educated eighteenth-century gentlemen, these contemporaries of “Junius” and Gibbon, who had read Horace and Livy and Plutarch, had one foot in their own age, and the other in the grave of Rome. In America, Thomas Jefferson exemplified this whole culture at its best and gave it a definite stamp: he combined in almost equal degrees the statesman, the student, and the artist. Not merely did Jefferson design his own Monticello; he executed a number of other houses for the surrounding gentry—Shadwell, Edgehill, Farrington—to say nothing of the Virginia State Capitol and the church and university at Charlottesville. It was Jefferson who in America first gave a strict interpretation to classicism; for he had nothing but contempt for the free, Georgian vernacular which was making itsway among those who regarded the classical past as little more than a useful embellishment.
The contrast between the classical and the vernacular, between the architecture of the plantation and the architecture of the village, between the work of the craftsman, and the work of the gentleman and the professional architect, became even more marked after the Revolutionary War. As a result of that re-crystallization of American society, the conditions of classical culture and classical civilization were for a short time fused in the activities of the community, even in the town. One may express the transformation in a crude way by saying that the carpenter-builder had been content with a classical finish; the architects of the early republic worked upon a classical foundation. It was the Revolution itself, I believe, that turned the classical taste into a myth which had the power to move men and mold their actions.
The merchant who has spent his hours in the counting house and on the quay cannot with the most lofty effort convert himself into a classical hero. It is different with men who have spent long nights and days wrangling in the State House, men who have ridden on horseback through a campaign, menwho have plotted like Catiline and denounced like Cicero, men whose daily actions are governed with the fine resolution of a Roman general or dictator. Unconsciously, such men want a stage to set off and magnify their actions. King Alfred can perhaps remain a king, though he stays in a cottage and minds the cakes on the griddle; but most of us need a little scenery and ritual to confirm these high convictions. If the tailors had not produced the frock-coat, Daniel Webster would have had to invent one. The merchant wants his little comforts and conveniences; at most, he desires the architect to make his gains conspicuous; but the hero who has drawn his sword or addressed an assembly wants elbow room for gestures. His parlor must be big enough for a public meeting, his dining room for a banquet. So it follows that whereas under pre-Revolutionary conventions even civic buildings like Independence Hall in Philadelphia are built on a domestic scale, the early republican architecture is marked by the practice of building its domestic dwellings on a public scale. The fine houses of the early republic all have an official appearance; almost any house might be the White House.
Even when Dickens made his first visit to America,the classical myth and the classical hero had not altogether disappeared: one has a painful memory of the “mother of the modern Gracchi,” and one sees how the republican hero had been vulgarized into a Jacksonian caricature like General Cyrus Choke. For a whole generation the classical myth held men in its thrall; the notion of returning to a pagan polity, quaintly modified by deism, was a weapon of the radical forces in both America and France. Jean Jacques himself preached the virtues of Sparta and Rome in Le Contrat Social, as well as the state of nature which he praised in Emile; and, in general, “radicalism” associated itself with the worship of rule and reason, as opposed to the caprice, the irrationality, the brute traditionalism of what the children of that age then characterized as “Gothic superstition.” Almost within his lifetime Washington became Divus Cæsar, and if a monument was not built to him immediately, a city was named after him, as Alexandria had been named after Alexander. Did not the very war-veterans become the Society of the Cincinnati; did not the first pioneers on the westward march sprinkle names like Utica and Ithaca and Syracuse over the Mohawk trail; and did not a few ex-soldiers go back to theirTory neighbor’s plow? As Rome and Greece embodied the political interests of the age, so did classical architecture provide the appropriate shell. Even those who were not vitally touched by the dominant interests of the period were not immune to the fashion, once it had been set.
In New England, not unnaturally, the influence of the merchant prevailed in architecture for a longer time, perhaps, than it did elsewhere. Samuel McIntire, a carver of figureheads for ships and moldings for cabins, provided an interior setting in the fashion of Robert Adam, which enabled the merchant of Salem to live like a lord in Berkeley Square; and Bulfinch, a merchant’s son, began by repairing his father’s house, went on a grand tour of Europe, and returned to a lucrative practice which included the first monument on Bunker Hill, and the first theater opened in Boston. Under McIntire’s assiduous and scholarly hands, the low-lying traditional farmhouse was converted into the bulky square house with its hipped roof, its classical pilasters, its frequently ill-proportioned cupola, its “captain’swalk,” or “widow’s walk.” The merchant with his eye for magnitude lords it over the farmer with his homely interest in the wind and the weather; and so McIntire, the last great figure in a dying line of craftsmen-artists, is compelled to make up by wealth of ornament a beauty which the earlier provincial houses had achieved by adaptation to the site without, and to subtlety of proportion within. The standard of conspicuous waste, as Mr. Thorstein Veblen would call it, spread from the manor to the city mansion.
Throughout the rest of the country, the pure classical myth created the mold of American architecture, and buildings that were not informed by this myth attempted some sort of mimicry, like the mansion Squire Jones built for Marmaduke Temple in Cooper’s The Pioneers. There are churches standing in New Jersey and New York, for example, built as late as 1850, which at a distance have the outlines and proportions of classic buildings, either in the earlier style of Wren, or in the more severe and stilted Greek manner favored by a later generation. It is only on closer inspection that one discovers that the ornament has become an illiterate reminiscence; that the windows are bare openings; thatthe orders have lost their proportions, and that, unlike the wandering mechanic, who “with a few soiled plates of English architecture” helped Squire Jones, the builder could no longer pretend to talk learnedly “of friezes, entablatures, and particularly of the composite order.” Alas for a bookish architecture when the taste for reading disappears!
The dominant designs of the early republican period proceeded directly or indirectly from such books as Stuart’s Antiquities of Athens, and from such well-known examples of temple architecture in southern Europe as the Maison Carrée at Nîmes. In one sense, there was a certain fitness in adapting the Greek methods of building to America. Originally, the Greek temple had probably been a wooden building. Its columns were trees, its cornices exposed beams; and the fact that in America one could again build mightily in wood may have furnished an extra incentive to the erection of these colossal buildings. The fact that the Greek mode in America was well under way before the first example of ithad appeared in Edinburgh, London, or Paris, shows perhaps that time and place both favored its introduction on this side of the Atlantic: for the availability of certain materials often, no doubt, directs the imagination to certain forms.
On the whole, however, the Greek temple precedent was a bad one. For one thing, since the Greekcellahad no source of light except the doorway, it was necessary to introduce modifications in the elevation, and to break up the interior; and it was only in the South that the vast shadowed retreats formed by porches and second-story balconies proved a happy adaptation to the climate. Again: Greek architecture was an architecture of exteriors, designed for people who spent the greater part of the year out of doors. With no temple ritual comparable to the services of the church or cathedral, the Greeks lavished their attention upon externals, and as a great admirer of the Greeks, Sir Reginald Blomfield well says, “may have been more successful with the outside of their buildings than with the inside.” To fail with the interior in a northern climate is to fail with the essentials of a habitation; and these vast rooms, for all their ornament, too often remained bleak.
Even on the esthetic side, the Greek style of building was not a full-blown success. With all their strict arrangement of the classic orders, with all their nice proportions, the muted white exteriors resembled a genuine Greek temple in the way that a sepia photograph would represent a sunrise—the warm tones, the colors, the dancing procession of sculptures were absent; it was a thinned and watered Greece that they called to mind. Indeed, the disciples of the Age of Reason and white perukes would have been horrified, I have no doubt, at the “barbarism” of the original Greek temples, as they would doubtless also have been at the meanness of the dwellings in which Pericles or Thucydides must have lived. Once the temple-house ceased to be a stage upon which the myth of classicism could be enacted, it ceased also to be a home. For who wishes to live in a temple? That is a spiritual exercise we do not demand even of a priest. Small wonder that the temple lingered longest in the South, where, down to the Civil War, gangs of slaves supported the dignity of the masters and a large household diminished the chilly sense of solitude.
It was in public architecture that the early republic succeeded best, and it was here that itsinfluence lingered longest, for down to 1840 well-designed buildings in the classic mode, like the Sub-Treasury building in New York, were still put up. The work of McComb in New York, Hoadley in Connecticut, Latrobe in Pennsylvania and Maryland, to mention only a few of the leading architects, represents the high-water mark of professional design in America; and the fact that in spite of the many hands that worked upon it the Capitol at Washington is still a fairly coherent structure is a witness to the strength of their tradition. For all its minor felicities, however, we must not make the mistake of the modern revivalists, like Mr. Fiske Kimball, who urge the acceptance of the classic tradition in America as a foundation for a general modern style. Form and function are too far divorced in the classic mode to permit the growth of an architecture which will proceed on all fours in houses and public buildings, and factories and barns; moreover, there are too many new structures in the modern world which the builders of Rome or the Renaissance have not even dimly anticipated. In medieval building the town hall is a different sort of building from the cathedral: using the same elements, perhaps, it nevertheless contrives an altogether different effect. In thearchitecture of the early republic, on the other hand, the treasury building might be a church, and the church might be a mansion, for any external differentiation one can observe—in fact, the only ecclesiastical feeling that goes with the churches of the time is a cold deism, or an equally cold Protestant faith which has lost entirely the memories and associations of the intervening centuries. This sort of architecture achieves order and dignity, not by composing differences, but by canceling them. Its standards do not inhere in the building, but are laid on outside of it. When the purpose of the structure happens to conform to the style, the result may be admirable in every way. When it does not happen to conform the result is tedious and banal; and, to tell the truth, a great deal of the architecture of the early republic is tedious and banal.
One further effect of the classic mode has still to be noted: the introduction of formal city design, by the French engineer, Major L’Enfant, in the laying out of Washington. Stirred by the memory ofthe grand design of Paris under Louis XIV, with its radiating avenues that cut through the city in the way that riding lanes cut through the hunting forest, L’Enfant sought to superimpose a dignified pattern upon the rectangular plan provided by the commissioners of Washington. By putting the major public buildings in key positions, by providing for a proper physical relation between the various departments of the government, by planning spacious avenues of approach, culminating in squares, triangles, and round-points, Major L’Enfant gave great dignity to the new capital city, and even though in the years that followed his plan was often ignored and overridden, it still maintained a monumental framework for the administrative buildings of the American State.
Unfortunately, if Washington has the coherence of a formal plan, it also has its abstractness: contrived to set off and serve the buildings of the government, it exercised no control over domestic building, over business, over the manifold economic functions of the developing city. The framework was excellent, if cities could live by government alone. By laying too much stress on formal order, the exponents of classic taste paved the way for the alltoo formal order of the gridiron plan, and since the gridiron development was suited to hasty commercial exploitation, while the mode of Washington was not, it was in this mold that the architecture of the nineteenth century was cast.
Within a short while after its introduction in New York in 1811 the effects of the rectangular streets and rectangular lots became evident; whereas the prints of New York before 1825 show a constant variety in the elevation and layout of houses, those after this date resemble more and more standardized boxes. Long monotonous streets that terminated nowhere, filled by rows of monotonous houses—this was the net contribution of the formal plan. Classical taste was not responsible for these enormities—but on the whole it did nothing to check them, and since the thrifty merchants of New York could not understand L’Enfant’s plan for Washington, they seized upon that part of it which was intelligible: its regularity, its appearance of order.
With the new forces that were at work on the American scene, with the disintegration of classical culture under the combined influence of pioneer enterprise, mechanical invention, overseas commerce, and the almost religious cult of utilitarianism, allthis was indeed inevitable. What happened to the proud, Roman-patterned republic of 1789 is a matter of common knowledge. Benjamin Latrobe, the British architect who contributed so much to the Capitol at Washington—including a new order of corn stalks and tobacco leaves—was a witness to the disintegration of the age and the dissolution of its world of ideas; and there is a familiar ring to his commentary upon it:
“I remember [he says in his autobiography] the time when I was over head and ears in love with Man in a State of Nature.... Social Compacts were my hobbies; the American Revolution—I ask its pardon, for it deserves better company—was a sort of dream of the Golden Age; and the French Revolution was the Golden Age itself. I should be ashamed to confess all this if I had not a thousand companions in my kaleidoscopic amusement, and those generally men of ardent, benevolent, and well-informed minds and excellent hearts. Alas! experience has destroyed the illusion, the kaleidoscope is broken, and all the tinsel of scenery that glittered so delightfully is translated and turned to raggedness. A dozen years’ residence at the Republican court ofWashington had affected wonderfully the advance of riper years.”
“I remember [he says in his autobiography] the time when I was over head and ears in love with Man in a State of Nature.... Social Compacts were my hobbies; the American Revolution—I ask its pardon, for it deserves better company—was a sort of dream of the Golden Age; and the French Revolution was the Golden Age itself. I should be ashamed to confess all this if I had not a thousand companions in my kaleidoscopic amusement, and those generally men of ardent, benevolent, and well-informed minds and excellent hearts. Alas! experience has destroyed the illusion, the kaleidoscope is broken, and all the tinsel of scenery that glittered so delightfully is translated and turned to raggedness. A dozen years’ residence at the Republican court ofWashington had affected wonderfully the advance of riper years.”
Major L’Enfant’s plan for Washington was the last gasp, it seems to me, of the classical order; Jefferson’s University of Virginia was perhaps its most perfect consummation, for Jefferson had planned for the life of the institution as well as for the shell which was to contain it. Before the nineteenth century was long under way men’s minds ceased to move freely within the classical idolum; and by 1860 the mood was obliterated and a large part of the work had been submerged or destroyed. The final ironic commentary upon the dignity and austerity of the earlier temples is illustrated in a house in Kennebunkport, Maine; for there the serene, pillared façade is broken up in the rear by a later, and alas! a necessary addition: a two-story bow-window projected far enough beyond the eaves to give a little light to the occupants of the rooms!
In sum, there was a pathetic incompatibility in this architecture between need and achievement, between pretensions and matter-of-fact—a rigid opposition to common sense that a vernacular, however playful, would never countenance. These templeswere built with the marmoreal gesture of eternity; they satisfied the desire and fashion of the moment; and today their ghosts parade before us, brave but incredible.