I
From the standpoint of architecture, the early part of the nineteenth
century was a period of disintegration. The gap between sheer utility
and art, which the Renaissance had emphasized, was widened with the
coming of machinery. That part of architecture which was touched by
industrialism became crude beyond belief: the new mills and factories
were usually packing boxes, lacking in light and ventilation, and the
homes of the factory workers, when they were not the emptied houses
of merchants and tradesmen, made to serve a dozen families instead of
the original one, were little more than covered pens, as crowded as
a cattle market. At the same time that the old forms were undermined
by the new methods of mechanical production, a sentimental longing to
retain those forms, just because they were old, seized men’s minds;
and so industrialism and romanticism divided the field of architecture
between them.
It was no accident that caused romanticism and industrialism to
appear at the same time. They were rather the two faces of the new
civilization, one looking towards the past, and the other towards
the future; one glorifying the new, the other clinging to the old;
industrialism intent on increasing the physical means of subsistence,
romanticism living in a sickly fashion on the hollow glamour of the
past. The age not merely presented these two aspects; it sought to
enjoy each of them. Where industrialism took root, the traditions
of architecture were disregarded; where romanticism flourished, on
the other hand, in the mansions, public buildings, and churches,
architecture became capricious and absurd, and it returned to a past
that had never existed. Against the gross callousness which a Bounderby
exhibited toward beauty and amenity, there was only the bland piety of
a Pecksniff.
The dream that is dying and the dream that is coming to birth do not
stand in sequence, but mingle as do the images in a dissolving view;
and during the very years that the architecture of the Renaissance,
both in Europe and America, achieved new heights of formal design, the
first factories were being planted in Staffordshire and Yorkshire,
the Duke of Bridgewater built his famous canal, and Horace Walpole
designed his “Gothic” mansion on Strawberry Hill. The coincidence of
industrialism and romanticism is just as emphatic in America as in
England; and it is not without historic justice that the architect who
in 1807 designed the chapel of St. Mary’s Seminary in Baltimore, after
the Gothic fashion, successfully introduced a steam pumping system in
Philadelphia’s waterworks. While the industrial buildings of the period
represented nothing but a lapse from the current vernacular, due to
haste and insufficient resources, romantic architecture was a positive
influence; and it will perhaps best serve our purpose to examine the
romantic heritage in its pristine form, rather than in the work of
disciples like Latrobe, whose American practice is dated about two
generations later.
The author of The Castle of Otranto had a perverse and wayward
interest in the past; and the spirit he exhibited in both his novel
and his country home was typical of the romantic attitude everywhere.
What attracted Walpole to the Gothic style was little more than the
phosphorescence of decay: he summoned up the ghosts of the Middle
Ages but not the guilds; and instead of admiring the soundness of
medieval masonry, those who followed directly in his path were
affected rather by the spectacle of its dilapidation, so that the
production of authentic ruins became one of the chief efforts of the
eighteenth-century landscape gardener.
It is not a great step from building a ruin to building a mansion that
is little better than a ruin. While Walpole defended Strawberry Hill
by saying he did not aim to make his house so Gothic as to exclude
convenience, it happened again and again that the picturesque was the
enemy of simple honesty and necessity; and just as Walpole himself
in his refectory used wall paper that imitated stucco, so did other
owners and builders use plaster and hangings and wall paper and carpet
to cover up defects of construction. Towers that no one ever climbed,
turrets that no one could enter, and battlements that no one rose to
defend, took the place of the classic orders. The drawbridge-and-moat
that embellished Mr. Wemmick’s villa in Great Expectations was not a
wild conceit of Dickens but a relic of Walpole and his successors.
As a disguise for mean or thoughtless workmanship, the application of
antique “style” was the romantic contribution to architecture; and
it served very handily during the period of speculative building and
selling that accompanied the growth of the new industrial towns. Even
where style did not conceal commercial disingenuousness, it covered
up a poverty of imagination in handling the elements of a building.
Gothic touches about doors and the exterior of windows, and a heap
of bric-a-brac and curios on the inside, softened the gauntness and
bareness of this architecture, or rather, distracted attention from
them. Curiosity was the dominant mood of the time, acquisitiveness its
principal impulse, and comfort its end. Many good things doubtless came
out of this situation; but architecture was not one of them.