In essentials, however, both the life and the architecture of the first
provincial period are sound. While agriculture is the mainstay of
life, and the medieval tradition flourishes, the New England village
reaches a pretty fair pitch of worldly perfection; and beneath all the
superficial changes that affected it in the next century and a half,
its sturdy framework held together remarkably well.
Consider the village itself. In the center is a common, a little
to one side will be the meeting-house, perhaps a square barnlike
structure, with a hipped roof and a cupola, like that at Hingham; and
adjacent or across the way will be the grammar school. Along the roads
where the houses are set at regular intervals is a great columnar
arcade of elm trees. All these elements are essential to our early
provincial architecture, and without them it would be a little bare and
forbidding. The trees, above all, are an important part of New England
architecture: in summer they absorb the moisture and cool the air,
besides giving shade; in the winter their huge boles serve as a partial
windbrake; even the humus from their leaves keeps the soil of the lawns
in better order. The apple trees that cling to the warmer side of
the house are not less essential. Would it be an exaggeration to say
that there has never been a more complete and intelligent partnership
between the earth and man than existed, for a little while, in the
old New England village? In what other part of the world has such a
harmonious balance between the natural and the social environment been
preserved?
Nowadays we have begun to talk about garden cities, and we realize that
the essential elements in a garden-city are the common holding of land
by the community, and the coöperative ownership and direction of the
community itself. We refer to all these things as if they represented a
distinct achievement of modern thought; but the fact of the matter is
that the New England village up to the middle of the eighteenth century
was a garden-city in every sense that we now apply to that term, and
happily its gardens and its harmonious framework have frequently
lingered on, even though the economic foundations have long been
overthrown.
This is a medieval tradition in American architecture which should
be of some use to our architects and city planners; for it is a much
more substantial matter than the building of perpendicular churches or
Tudor country-houses in painfully archæological adaptations. If we wish
to tie up with our colonial tradition we must recover more than the
architectural forms: we must recover the interests, the standards, the
institutions that gave to the villages and buildings of early times
their appropriate shapes. To do much less than this is merely to bring
back a fad which might as well be Egyptian as “colonial” for all the
sincerity that it exhibits.