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.
II
Modern industrialism began to take root in America after the War of Independence, and its effect was twofold: it started up new villages which centered about the waterfall or the iron mine and had scarcely any other concern than industry; at the same time, by cutting canals which tapped the interior, it drew life away from the smaller provincial ports and concentrated commerce and population in great towns like Boston, Philadelphia, and New York. In New England, as in the English Cotswolds from Whitney to Chalford, the mechanical regime was humanized by the presence of an older civilization, and the first generation of factory hands were farmers’ lads and lasses who neither lost nor endangered their independence; but where the factory depended upon paupers or immigrants, as it did in the big towns and in some of the unsettled parts of the country, the community relapsed into a barbarism which affected the masters as well as the hands. There was more than a difference in literary taste between the Corinths and Bethels named by an earlier generation and the Mechanicsvilles that followed them.
The chief watchwords of the time were progress and expansion. The first belonged to the pioneer in industry who opened up new areas for mechanical invention and applied science; the second, to the land pioneer; and between these two resourceful types the old ways, were they good or bad,
