If the architecture of the early eighteenth century in America is
a little prim and angular, if it never rises far above a sturdy
provincialism, it is not without its own kind of interest; and Faneuil
Hall, for example, is not the worst of Boston’s buildings, though it
is overshadowed by the great utilitarian hulks that line the streets
about it. By studying the classical forms at one remove, the builders
of the eighteenth century in America had the same kind of advantage
that Wren had in England. Wren’s “Renaissance” churches, with their
box-like naves and their series of superimposed orders for steeples,
had no parallel, so far as I am aware, in Italy, and certainly had
no likeness to anything that had been built in classic times: they
were the products of a playful and original fancy, like the mermaid.
Mere knowledge, mere imitation, would never have achieved Renaissance
architecture; it was the very imperfection of the knowledge and
discipleship that made it the appropriate shell of its age. Coming
to America in handbooks and prints, chastely rendered, the models of
antiquity were, down to the Revolution, followed just so far as they
conveniently served. Instead of curbing invention, they gave it a more
definite problem to work upon.
It was a happy accident that made the carpenter-builders and cabinet
makers of America see their China, their Paris, their Rome through a
distance, dimly. What those who admire the eighteenth century style
do not, perhaps, see is that an accident cannot be recovered. However
painstakingly we may cut the waistcoat, the stock, the knee-breeches
of an eighteenth-century costume, it is now only a fancy dress: its
“moment” in history is over. The same principle holds true for Georgian
or colonial architecture, even more than it does for that of the
seventeenth century; for one might, indeed, conceive of a breakdown
in the transportation system or the credit system which would force
a builder to rely for a while upon the products of his own region;
whereas, while our civilization remains intact there are a hundred
handbooks, measured drawings, and photographs which make a naïve
recovery of antiquity impossible.
Once we have genuinely appreciated the influence that created early
colonial architecture, we see that it is irrecoverable: what we call
a revival is really a second burial. All the king’s horses and all
the king’s men have been hauling and tugging vigorously during the
last fifty years to bring back the simple beauties and graces of the
colonial dwelling, and the collectors’ hunt for the products of the
Salem, Newburyport and Philadelphia cabinetmakers is a long and merry
one; but the only beneficent effect of this movement has been the
preservation of a handful of antiquities, which would otherwise have
been impiously torn down. What we have built in the colonial mode is
all very well in its way: unfortunately, it bears the same relation to
the work of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries that
the Woolworth Building bears to the cathedrals of the Middle Age, or
the patriotism of the National Security League to the principles of
Franklin and Jefferson. Photographic accuracy, neatly touched up--this
is its capital virtue, and plainly, it has precious little to do with a
living architecture. Like the ruined chapel in The Pirates of Penzance,
our modern colonial houses are often attached to ancestral estates that
were established--a year ago; and if their occupants are “descendants
by purchase,” what shall we say of their architects?