The Renaissance in architecture had reached England at about the time of the Great Fire (1666), fully two generations after the Italian influence had made its way into English literature; and it came to America, as one might guess, about a generation later. It was left for Alexander Pope, who himself was a dutiful Augustan, to sum up the situation with classic precision to Lord Burlington, who had published Palladio’s Antiquities of Rome:
“You show us Rome was glorious, not profuse,
And pompous buildings once were things of use.
Yet shall, my lord, your just and noble rules
Fill half the land with imitation fools;
Who random drawings from your sheets shall take
And of one beauty many blunders make.”
These lines were a warning and a prophecy. The warning was timely; and the prophecy came true, except in those districts in which the carpenter continued to ply his craft without the overlordship of the architect.
III
The first effect of the Renaissance forms in America was not to destroy the vernacular but to perfect it; for it provided the carpenter-builder, whose distance from Europe kept him from profiting by the spirited work of his forbears, with a series of ornamental motifs. New England, under the influence of an idol-breaking Puritanism, had been singularly poor in decoration, as I have already observed: its modest architectural effects relied solely on mass, color, and a nice disposition of parts. In its decorative aspects medievalism had left but a trace in America: the carved grotesque heads on the face of the Van Cortlandt Mansion in New York, and the painted decorations in some of the older houses and barns among the Pennsylvania Dutch pretty well complete the tally.
Classical motifs served to fill the blank in provincial architecture. As long as the carpenter worked by himself, the classic influence was confined to little details like the fanlights, the moldings, the pillars of the portico, and so on. In the rural districts of New England, from Maine to Connecticut, and in certain parts of New York and New Jersey and Pennsylvania, the carpenter keeps on building in his solid, traditional manner down to the time that the jigsaw overwhelms a mechanically hypnotized age; and even through the jigsaw period in the older regions, the proportions and the plan remained close to tradition. The classical did not in fact supplant the vernacular until the last vestiges of the guild and the village-community had passed away, and the economic conditions appropriate to the Renaissance culture had made their appearance.
The dwelling house slowly became more habitable during this period: the skill in shipbuilding which every sheltered inlet gave evidence of was carried back into the home, and in the paneling of the walls and the general tidiness and compactness of the apartments, a shipshape order comes more and more to prevail. The plastered ceiling makes its appearance, and the papered wall; above all, white paint is introduced on the inside and outside of the house.
Besides giving more light, this innovation surely indicates that chimney flues had become more satisfactory. Paint was no doubt introduced to keep the torrid summer sun from charring the exposed clapboards; and white paint was used, despite the expense of white lead, for the reason that it accorded with the chaste effect which was inseparable in the eighteenth-century mind from classic precedent.
Indeed, the whiteness of our colonial architecture is an essential characteristic; it dazzled Dickens on his first visit to America, and made him think that all the houses had been built only yesterday. The esthetic reason for delighting in these white colonial farmhouses is simple: white and white alone fully reflects the surrounding lights; white and white alone gives a pure blue or lavender shadow against the sunlight. At dawn, a white house is pale pink and turquoise; at high noon it is clear yellow and lavender-blue; in a ripe sunset it is orange and purple; in short, except on a gray day it is anything but white. These old white houses, if they seem a little sudden and sharp in the landscape, are at least part of the sky: one finds them stretched on a slight rise above the highroad like a seagull with poised wings, or a cloud above the treetops. Were anything needed to make visible the deterioration of American life which the nineteenth century brought with it, the habit of painting both wood and brick gray should perhaps be sufficient.
IV
If the architecture of the early eighteenth century in America is a little prim and angular, if it never rises far above a sturdy provincialism, it is not without its own kind of interest; and Faneuil Hall, for example, is not the worst of Boston’s buildings, though it is overshadowed by the great utilitarian hulks that line the streets about it. By studying the classical forms at one remove, the builders of the eighteenth century in America had the same kind of advantage that Wren had in England. Wren’s “Renaissance” churches, with their boxlike naves and their series of superimposed orders for steeples, had no parallel, so far as I am aware, in Italy, and certainly had no likeness to anything that had been built in classic times: they were the products of a playful and original fancy, like the mermaid. Mere knowledge, mere imitation, would never have achieved Renaissance architecture; it was the very imperfection of the knowledge and discipleship that made it the appropriate shell of its age. Coming to America in handbooks and prints, chastely rendered, the models of antiquity were, down to the Revolution, followed just so far as they conveniently served. Instead of curbing invention, they gave it a more definite problem to work upon.
It was a happy accident that made the carpenter-builders and cabinet makers of America see their China, their Paris, their Rome through a distance, dimly. What those who admire
