ART AND COMMERCIALISM
Not very long ago two enterprising architects in a Western State
succeeded in inventing a characteristic style of architecture of some
merit. I do not know its name. I am not sure that it has any. But as it
is likely to be somewhat in vogue for several years to come, I may as
well print herewith a simple recipe for combining its essential
elements:
Recipe: First, you must endeavor to find some valuable fragment of
ancient Greece or Rome, preferably a pedestal for a statue, base of a
column, or even the shaft itself and capital, which should not be too
attenuated, however, and is to be translated, if necessary, from a
cylindrical form into a rectangular one. Now, here is the scheme:
Punch your elevations full of rectangular holes in seemly rows, divide
them into latitudinal sections by
PLATE VI.
[Illustration: DOORWAY, BRISTOL, R. I.]
several belt courses of East Indian flat-carving, and bore a
semi-circular opening or a series of them (they may be semi-ellipses if
preferred) upon the ground line or the projected edifice to afford a
mode of ingress and egress corresponding, proportionately, to the same
convenience designed for bees in a bee-hive. Next, pour in Alice in
Wonderland’s “Drink me” elixir to make it grow, and await results of the
magic drug. This is the critical moment. All must work harmoniously,
and, having reached the height limit imposed by the elevator
manufacturer, perhaps, quickly cap the building with some red,
corrugated tiles, if you choose, in the form of a Moresque roof,
ornament with lantern and flagstaff, and, behold!--the charm
operates!--the great American “sky-scraper” of a commercial city has
been achieved.
It is not within the province of this review to enter into a discussion
of the problem of housing commercialism. It is odd that nobody hints how
posterity is going to laugh at us, censure our cupidity, and eventually
raze every one of our hideous “sky-scrapers” that shall be left
standing. It is odd that the present congestion of Manhattan as a crime
against decency, with all the idle land that is adjacent and available,
is not painfully manifest in this so-called year of grace MCMIV. But it
is within the province of this review to say that whenever the soaring
kind of architecture precipitated itself upon the Anglo-Saxon
dwelling-house there was a tremendous crash and revolution. It was
telescoped, it was flattened--grotesquely flattened, but still it was
remarkable for ingenuity, for cleverness, and, above everything, for
novelty, as would be a dwelling-house loaned by another planet. So
strange, indeed, this newly-invented architecture grew that it became
simply impossible to prevail upon ancestral ghosts, legends and
folk-lore, that habitually are part and parcel of the habitation of man,
to have anything to do with a device _à la mode_ that appeared to be in
every way so very much better suited to the needs of a Roman bath-house
after the manner of Alma Tadema. The following lines from Edgar Allan
Poe’s “Ulalume” may aptly express the injured feelings of those
sentimental amenities:
“Oh, hasten!--oh, let us not linger!
Oh, fly!--let us fly!--for we must.”
PLATE VII.
[Illustration: AMERICAN RENAISSANCE.
ANALYSIS.
Moresque Spain 0 per cent.
Moresque Algiers 0 “
Moresque California Mission 0 “
East Indian 0 “
Newly reclaimed land 0 “
Chinese ornament 0 “
Modern invention 0 “
Anglo-Saxon home atmosphere 100 “]
PLATE VIII.
[Illustration: THE NEWLY INVENTED ARCHITECTURE.
ANALYSIS.
Moresque Spain 10 per cent.
Moresque Algiers 10 “
Moresque California Mission 10 “
East Indian 5 “
Newly reclaimed land 10 “
Chinese ornament 5 “
Modern invention, pure 50 “
Anglo-Saxon home atmosphere 00 “]
[Illustration: EASTOVER TERRACE AND PERISTYLE.]
For convenient reference of the reader a sample of this newly-invented
architecture is respectfully submitted (Plate VIII), and a very clever
sample it is. The inventors of the style themselves could have done no
better; only the irresistible melancholy in the rhyming of Poe’s poem is
not easily put out of the head, especially when, as in this case, it
happens to be extremely appropriate. So let us continue:
“And we passed to the end of a vista,
But were stopped by the door of a tomb--
By the door of a legended tomb.”
Certainly it is unfamiliar environment from which one’s mind naturally
reverts to his childhood (you must have had a childhood)--reverts to the
wondrous houses we visited in the impressionable days of long ago. Ah,
they were a very different kind of houses, were they not?--houses with
significance, houses with personality, if building material may ever be
said to incorporate that. They had a history to tell. They had legends,
too. As we think of them they seem to have been literally covered with
legends, some of them cut with the jack-knife deep in the attic
timbers. But they were all legends that appeal to happiness. They were
not the legends of tombs. And the old sensations come back to us again.
Perhaps it is just as the afternoon light begins to fail so that we can
no longer read, and the sunset is very beautiful.
No, no, the vagaries of geometrical invention will never supplant those
first loves!
For you, then, when your lamp is lighted--I hope it is not the dazzling,
16-candle-power electric bulb of commercialism, made still further
terrifying by a gorgeous glass globe--for you I have a treat in store to
soothe the nerves the newly-invented architecture has indescribably
rasped. It is a “sure enough” old-fashioned house. To borrow the style
of Ik Marvel in his “Reveries of a Bachelor,” I can see how you will
carefully put this book where you will not miss it to show your
architect in the morning. You will remember the number of the page that
you do not waste the time of a busy professional man in finding the
place; and this is about what you will say to him: “I do not know how
good the architecture is, that
PLATE IX.
[Illustration: EASTOVER.
The Garden Front.
A modern development of Annapolitan architecture under the Colonial
régime in Anne Arundel County, Maryland. Time of George II.]
the old house on Benefit Street in Providence represents (Plate VII);
but I do know it has just the atmosphere that reaches the inner man, and
that is the atmosphere I want.”
But not every architect is able to give you this atmosphere (Plate X).
None of the architectural schools teach it, and commercialism in some
form usually doles out the architect’s bread and butter, so that he is
accustomed in his work to reduce your proposition to a cold calculation
of so much house for so much money. He is made to _smile grimly_ (with
Mr. R. H. Davis’s kind permission) over what he considers your
sentimental impracticality, then says: “We build houses by the cubic
foot, you know.” And after the size, position, number of rooms, etc.,
are determined, then, whatsoever art may be applied just as well as not
without materially adding to the cost is made to serve as the meek
handmaid of commercialism; and I must say of this applied art as we see
it every day, exemplified in America, it certainly looks the part.
All through the Berkshires, wherever a commanding eminence rises in the
midst of natural loveliness, the bristling odd conceits--they are not
art--of the prodigious captain of industry who has made his money by
always “driving three in a buggy,” testifies that even in his
dwelling-place he calculates to get the worth of every dollar, and every
dollar is made to show--a veritable monument to his commercial sagacity.
But to my mind, Sharon in Connecticut, which lies some fifty miles,
perhaps, to the southward of the Berkshires, is the most beautiful
inland village we have in New England. Architecturally, it is not
remarkable either for good or bad work; but toward the lower end of the
main street there is one startling beauty in the fabric of the John
Cotton Smith manse. (See illustrations, Plates X and XXXIV.) As an
appreciative tenant is about vacating, I suppose the envious eyes of
commercialism will soon light upon this charming exemplar of Colonial
days with an idea of adding extensions, verandas or what not to make it
“real stylish like.” But for once, commercialism will be disappointed,
for I am told that money will not buy the Cotton Smith house.
The despoiler of beautiful landmarks, however, is
PLATE X.
[Illustration: NOT EVERY ARCHITECT IS ABLE TO GIVE YOU THIS ATMOSPHERE.]
[Illustration: MONEY WILL NOT BUY THE COTTON SMITH HOUSE.]
rarely idle. He knocks first at one door, and then at the next. New
houses or old, it makes no difference so long as the design be good, and
worth spoiling. The Cotton Smith mansion is one bright particular
exception that goes to prove the rule, for, ordinarily, commercialism
suffers no rebuke, and especially is this true of New York City. Here,
whatever commercialism wants it takes without more ado. A “sky-scraper”
would pay the owners of the northeast corner of Fifth Avenue and
Eighteenth Street much better than the admirable and famous twin
mansions (Plate XI), that until lately occupied the site, so this good
architecture was promptly sacrificed to an object which is sordid and
mean.
But into what absurdities will the all-worshipful rate per cent. theory,
which is conducive of such splendid quantity and such meagre quality,
not eventually lead us? Already, we have a “flat-iron building” which I
have seen measured by art standards in a contemporary review. I mean to
say that such a thing was, in all good faith, attempted. We find the
opinion expressed that the “flat-iron building” was a necessity, and as
a necessity we should endeavor to make art harmonize with it somehow.
In all the hardness of our hearts we accept the greedy commercial
theory, as the people of Moses accepted the divorce bill, that
“sky-scrapers” are a necessity; but they are not. We should be
unquestionably better off without them. They are only the lame device of
the epoch in which we live to facilitate business until such time as we
shall interfere with our neighbor’s daylight beyond all endurance, and
here we must perforce desist. Well, one may toady to commercialism
himself, if he likes--if he conceives that such a course is really going
to be to his advantage; but he cannot make art do it.
To the contrary, art is itself a very jealous god, and does not permit
the serving of two masters, at least, two such antithetical masters as
itself and commercialism. Art demands that there shall be, first, a
sinking fund absolutely within its own control, irrevocable, and forever
charged off the commercial ledger. Commercialism has no adequate sum of
money that is available for the purpose. Because we define art as
dexterity and as cunning, we have been determined to make it fit the
exigencies of commercialism; but we
PLATE XI.
[Illustration: VICTIMS OF COMMERCIALISM.
The Belmont Houses, Fifth Ave. and 18th St.]
[Illustration: CHIMNEY-PIECE, AMERICAN RENAISSANCE, MODERN.
Designed by T. HENRY RANDALL, Architect.]
PLATE XII.
[Illustration: THE SIMPLICITY OF ART.
The Wadsworth House, Middletown, Conn.]
[Illustration: EFFLORESCENCE OF COMMERCIALISM.]
have not succeeded. It is, indeed, a grand misfit, because we do not
define art rightly. Yet people appear not to want to divine the true
definition, no doubt on account of a well-founded premonition that it is
going to be an unequivocal rebuke to the selfishness that exacts a
certain rate per cent. of return out of everything. Commercialism may
defer, but cannot defeat, the enevitable. Art means charity. Now if it
were only that kind of charity which the lexicon of commercialism
defines as the giving of tithes of whatever a man possesses to the poor,
we could still manage as did a certain rich young man we have read about
in the lesson. And like him, not being entirely satisfied in our
consciences nor with results, we could demand, as did he, what we yet
lack, what latent phase of cunning we have overlooked? And it will then
become our turn to be the exceeding sorrowful party, for there is no
cunning about it. What this generation yet lacks--we have quite
everything else--is a sufficiency of the vast, comprehensive form of
charity that was intended to be the end and object of every life. That
is the synonym of art.