I
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, an incentive 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 ancient forms, 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 the outcome 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 its way 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, men who 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 their Tory 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.