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’s
walk,” 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; that the
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!