Nettled by the criticism that America was not Europe, the pioneer determined to bring Europe to his doors. Relatively few American architects during the period, however, had been abroad, and still fewer had been there to any purpose; even men of culture and imagination like Hawthorne and Emerson were not at home in the physical environment of Europe, however intimate they were with its mind. The buildings that were erected under the inspiration of European tours only accentuated the barbarism of the American scene and the poverty of the architect’s imagination.
A good part of our architecture today still exhibits the parvenu’s uneasiness, and is by turns French, Italian, or more or less obsolete English; but we do not, perhaps, realize with what a difference; for photography and archaeological research now make it possible to produce buildings which have all the virtues of the original except originality, whereas the earlier, illiterate development of foreign examples, rehearsed in memory, resulted in a conglomerate form which resembled nothing so much, perhaps, as P. T. Barnum’s mermaid.
If the Crystal Palace represents the extreme of industrial art, Colonel Colt’s Armsmear represents the opposite—untutored romanticism. Armsmear was built near Hartford, between 1855 and 1862. A writer in the Art Journal for 1876 calls this mansion a “characteristic type of the unique.” It was a “long, grand, impressive, contradictory, beautiful, strange thing. … An Italian villa in stone, massive, noble, refined, yet not carrying out any decided principles of architecture, it is like the mind of its originator, bold and unusual in its combinations. … There is no doubt it is a little Turkish among other things, on one side it has domes, pinnacles, and light, lavish ornamentation, such as Oriental taste delights in. … Yet, although the villa is Italian and cosmopolitan, the feeling is English. It is an English home in its substantiality, its homelike and comfortable aspects.”
It is, alas! impossible to illustrate in these pages this remarkable specimen of American architecture; but in a lecture on the “Present and Future Prospects of Chicago” (1846), I have discovered its exact literary equivalent, and it will sum up the crudity and cultural wistfulness of the period perhaps better than any overt description:
“I thank you [apologizes the lecturer] for the patience you have manifested on this occasion, and promise never more to offend in like manner, so long. I have now, as Cowper observes—
‘Roved for fruit,
Roved far, and gathered much. …’“And can, I think with Scott, surely say that—
‘To his promise just
Vich-Alpine has discharged his trust.’“I propose now, gentlemen, to leave you at Carlangtoghford,
‘And thou must keep thee with thy sword.’
“Let me say to you on this occasion, as Campbell does on another:
‘Wave, Munich! all your banners wave!
And charge with all your chivalry.’“And should you in the contest fall, remember with old Homer—
‘Such honours Ilion to her hero paid,
And peaceful slept the mighty Hector’s shade.’“Allow me now to close in one of Scott’s beautiful strains:
‘Charge, Chester, charge! On, Stanley, on!
Were the last words of Marmion.’ ”
That was American architecture between 1820 and the Civil War—a collection of tags, thrown at random against a building. Architectural forms were brought together by a mere juxtaposition of materials, held in place by neither imagination nor logic. There are a number of honorable exceptions to this rule, for architects like Renwick, who designed St. Patrick’s Cathedral, and Upjohn, who built Trinity Church, had a more sincere understanding of the conventional task; and by any standard of esthetic decency the old Gothic building of New York University, on Washington Square, was a far finer structure than the bulky office building that has taken its place. Nevertheless, this saving remnant does not alter the character of the great mass of work, any more than the occasionally excellent cast-iron balconies, brought over from the London of the Regency, alter the depressing character of the great mass of domestic building. In elevation and interior treatment, these antebellum buildings were all what-nots. Souvenirs of architecture, their forms dimly recall the monuments of the past without in any sense taking their place.
To tell the truth, a pall had fallen over the industrial city: contemporary writers in the ’forties and ’fifties speak of the filth and smoke, and without doubt the chocolate brownstone front was introduced as a measure of protective coloration. In this dingy environment, men turned to nature as a refuge against the soiled and bedraggled works of man’s creation; and as the creeping factory and railroad train removed Nature farther from their doors, the park was introduced as a more convenient means of escape. The congested capitals of Europe had already learnt this lesson; traveled Americans, like William Cullen Bryant, brought it home; and Central Park, planned in 1853, was the first of the great landscape parks to serve as a people’s pleasance. Conceived in contrast to the deflowered landscape and the muddled city, the park alone recreated the traditions of civilization—of man naturalized, and therefore at home, of nature humanized, and therefore enriched. And even today our parks are what our cities should be, and are not.
By 1860 the halcyon day of American civilization was over; the spirit had lingered in letters and scholarship, in the work of Parkman and Motley and Emerson and Melville and Thoreau, but the sun had already sunk below the horizon, and what seemed a promise was in reality an afterglow. By the time the Civil War came, architecture had recorded faithfully the social transformation; it was sullen, grim, gauche, unstable. While in almost every age architecture has an independent value to the spirit, so that we can rejoice in Chartres or Winchester even though we have abandoned the Roman faith, in the early industrial period architecture is reduced to a symptom. Romanticism had not restored the past, nor had industrialism made the future more welcome. Architecture wandered between two worlds, “one dead, the other powerless to be born.”
V
The Defeat of Romanticism
