Once we have genuinely appreciated the influence that created early colonial architecture, we see that it is irrecoverable: what we call a revival is really a second burial. All the king’s horses and all the king’s men have been hauling and tugging vigorously during the last fifty years to bring back the simple beauties and graces of the colonial dwelling, and the collectors’ hunt for the products of the Salem, Newburyport and Philadelphia cabinetmakers is a long and merry one; but the only beneficent effect of this movement has been the preservation of a handful of antiquities, which would otherwise have been impiously torn down. What we have built in the colonial mode is all very well in its way: unfortunately, it bears the same relation to the work of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries that the Woolworth Building bears to the cathedrals of the Middle Age, or the patriotism of the National Security League to the principles of Franklin and Jefferson. Photographic accuracy, neatly touched up—this is its capital virtue, and plainly, it has precious little to do with a living architecture. Like the ruined chapel in The Pirates of Penzance, our modern colonial houses are often attached to ancestral estates that were established—a year ago; and if their occupants are “descendants by purchase,” what shall we say of their architects?
III
The Classical Myth
I
The transformation of European society and its material shell that took place during the period we call the Renaissance is associated with the breakup of the town economy and its replacement by a mercantile economy devoted to the advantage of the State. Along with this goes the destruction of the village community, and the predominance in social affairs of a landholding oligarchy who have thrown off feudal responsibilities while they have retained most of the feudal privileges, and a merchant class, buttressed by riches derived from war, piracy, and sharp trade.
America reproduced in miniature the changes that were taking place in Europe. Because of its isolation and the absence of an established social order, it showed these changes without the blur and confusion that attended them abroad.
It is sometimes a little difficult to tell whether the classical modes of building were a result of these changes in society or, among other things, an incentive to them; whether the classical frame fitted the needs of the time, or whether men’s activities expanded to occupy the idolum that had seized their imagination. At any rate, the notion that the classical taste in architecture developed mainly through technical interests in design will not hold; for the severely classical shell arose only in regions where the social conditions had laid a foundation for the classical myth.
The first development of the grand style in the American renaissance was in the manors of Virginia and Maryland. It came originally through an imitation of the country houses of England, and then, after the Revolutionary War, it led to a direct adaptation of the Roman villa and the Greek temple. One does not have to go very deep to fetch up the obvious parallel between the land-monopoly and slavery that prevailed in the American manors and the conditions that permitted the Roman villa itself to assume its stately proportions; nor need one dwell too long upon the natural subordination, in this regime, of the carpenter-builder to the gentleman-architect. “In the town palaces and churches,” as Mr. Fiske Kimball justly says, “there was a strong contradiction between modern conditions and ancient forms, so that it was only in the country that Palladio’s ideas of domestic architecture could come to a clear and successful expression. These monuments, since so much neglected, served in Palladio’s book expressly to represent the ‘Ancients’ designs of country-houses. …’ ”
At his death, Robert Carter, who had been Rector of the College, Speaker of the Burgesses, President of the Council, Acting Governor of Virginia, and Proprietor of the Northern Neck, was described in the Gentleman’s Magazine of 1732 as the possessor of an estate of 300,000 acres of land, about 1,000 slaves, and ten thousand pounds. Pliny the Younger might well have been proud of such an estate. On a substantial basis like this, a Palladian mansion was possible; and up and down the land, wherever the means justified the end, Palladian mansions were built.
The really striking thing about the architecture of Manorial America with its great dignity and its sometimes striking beauty of detail or originality of design—as in the staircase at Berry Hill which creates a flaring pattern like butterfly’s wings—the striking thing is the fact that the work is not the product of a specialized education; it is rather the outcome of a warm, loving, and above all intelligent commerce with the past, in the days before Horseback Hall had become as aimless and empty as Heartbreak House. Mr. Arthur T. Bolton, the biographer of the brothers Adam, has exhibited letters from Robert Adam’s patrons in England which mark their avid and precise interest in classical forms; and without doubt a little digging would uncover similar examples in America.
These educated eighteenth-century gentlemen, these contemporaries of “Junius” and Gibbon, who had read Horace and Livy and Plutarch, had one foot in their own age, and the other in
