III
The dominant designs of the early republican period proceeded directly or indirectly from such books as Stuart’s Antiquities of Athens, and from such well-known examples of temple architecture in southern Europe as the Maison Carrée at Nîmes. In one sense, there was a certain fitness in adapting the Greek methods of building to America. Originally, the Greek temple had probably been a wooden building. Its columns were trees, its cornices exposed beams; and the fact that in America one could again build mightily in wood may have furnished an extra incentive to the erection of these colossal buildings. The fact that the Greek mode in America was well under way before the first example of it had appeared in Edinburgh, London, or Paris, shows perhaps that time and place both favored its introduction on this side of the Atlantic: for the availability of certain materials often, no doubt, directs the imagination to certain forms.
On the whole, however, the Greek temple precedent was a bad one. For one thing, since the Greek cella had no source of light except the doorway, it was necessary to introduce modifications in the elevation, and to break up the interior; and it was only in the South that the vast shadowed retreats formed by porches and second-story balconies proved a happy adaptation to the climate. Again: Greek architecture was an architecture of exteriors, designed for people who spent the greater part of the year out of doors. With no temple ritual comparable to the services of the church or cathedral, the Greeks lavished their attention upon externals, and as a great admirer of the Greeks, Sir Reginald Blomfield well says, “may have been more successful with the outside of their buildings than with the inside.” To fail with the interior in a northern climate is to fail with the essentials of a habitation; and these vast rooms, for all their ornament, too often remained bleak.
Even on the esthetic side, the Greek style of building was not a full-blown success. With all their strict arrangement of the classic orders, with all their nice proportions, the muted white exteriors resembled a genuine Greek temple in the way that a sepia photograph would represent a sunrise—the warm tones, the colors, the dancing procession of sculptures were absent; it was a thinned and watered Greece that they called to mind. Indeed, the disciples of the Age of Reason and white perukes would have been horrified, I have no doubt, at the “barbarism” of the original Greek temples, as they would doubtless also have been at the meanness of the dwellings in which Pericles or Thucydides must have lived. Once the temple-house ceased to be a stage upon which the myth of classicism could be enacted, it ceased also to be a home. For who wishes to live in a temple? That is a spiritual exercise we do not demand even of a priest. Small wonder that the temple lingered longest in the South, where, down to the Civil War, gangs of slaves supported the dignity of the masters and a large household diminished the chilly sense of solitude.
It was in public architecture that the early republic succeeded best, and it was here that its influence lingered longest, for down to 1840 well-designed buildings in the classic mode, like the Subtreasury building in New York, were still put up. The work of McComb in New York, Hoadley in Connecticut, Latrobe in Pennsylvania and Maryland, to mention only a few of the leading architects, represents the high-water mark of professional design in America; and the fact that in spite of the many hands that worked upon it the Capitol at Washington is still a fairly coherent structure is a witness to the strength of their tradition. For all its minor felicities, however, we must not make the mistake of the modern revivalists, like Mr. Fiske Kimball, who urge the acceptance of the classic tradition in America as a foundation for a general modern style. Form and function are too far divorced in the classic mode to permit the growth of an architecture which will proceed on all fours in houses and public buildings, and factories and barns; moreover, there are too many new structures in the modern world which the builders of Rome or the Renaissance have not even dimly anticipated. In medieval building the town hall is a different sort of building from the cathedral: using the same elements, perhaps, it nevertheless contrives an altogether different effect. In the architecture of the early republic, on the other hand, the treasury building might be a church, and the church might be a mansion, for any external differentiation one can observe—in fact, the only ecclesiastical feeling that goes with the churches of the time is a cold deism, or an equally cold Protestant faith which has lost entirely the memories and associations of the intervening centuries. This sort of architecture achieves order and dignity, not by composing differences, but by canceling them. Its standards do not
