The contrast between the classical and the vernacular, between the architecture of the plantation and the architecture of the village, between the work of the craftsman, and the work of the gentleman and the professional architect, became even more marked after the Revolutionary War. As a result of that recrystallization of American society, the conditions of classical culture and classical civilization were for a short time fused in the activities of the community, even in the town. One may express the transformation in a crude way by saying that the carpenter-builder had been content with a classical finish; the architects of the early republic worked upon a classical foundation. It was the Revolution itself, I believe, that turned the classical taste into a myth which had the power to move men and mold their actions.
The merchant who has spent his hours in the counting house and on the quay cannot with the most lofty effort convert himself into a classical hero. It is different with men who have spent long nights and days wrangling in the State House, men who have ridden on horseback through a campaign, men who have plotted like Catiline and denounced like Cicero, men whose daily actions are governed with the fine resolution of a Roman general or dictator. Unconsciously, such men want a stage to set off and magnify their actions. King Alfred can perhaps remain a king, though he stays in a cottage and minds the cakes on the griddle; but most of us need a little scenery and ritual to confirm these high convictions. If the tailors had not produced the frock-coat, Daniel Webster would have had to invent one. The merchant wants his little comforts and conveniences; at most, he desires the architect to make his gains conspicuous; but the hero who has drawn his sword or addressed an assembly wants elbow room for gestures. His parlor must be big enough for a public meeting, his dining room for a banquet. So it follows that whereas under pre-Revolutionary conventions even civic buildings like Independence Hall in Philadelphia are built on a domestic scale, the early republican architecture is marked by the practice of building its domestic dwellings on a public scale. The fine houses of the early republic all have an official appearance; almost any house might be the White House.
Even when Dickens made his first visit to America, the classical myth and the classical hero had not altogether disappeared: one has a painful memory of the “mother of the modern Gracchi,” and one sees how the republican hero had been vulgarized into a Jacksonian caricature like General Cyrus Choke. For a whole generation the classical myth held men in its thrall; the notion of returning to a pagan polity, quaintly modified by deism, was a weapon of the radical forces in both America and France. Jean Jacques himself preached the virtues of Sparta and Rome in Le Contrat Social, as well as the state of nature which he praised in Emile; and, in general, “radicalism” associated itself with the worship of rule and reason, as opposed to the caprice, the irrationality, the brute traditionalism of what the children of that age then characterized as “Gothic superstition.” Almost within his lifetime Washington became Divus Caesar, and if a monument was not built to him immediately, a city was named after him, as Alexandria had been named after Alexander. Did not the very war-veterans become the Society of the Cincinnati; did not the first pioneers on the westward march sprinkle names like Utica and Ithaca and Syracuse over the Mohawk trail; and did not a few ex-soldiers go back to their Tory neighbor’s plow? As Rome and Greece embodied the political interests of the age, so did classical architecture provide the appropriate shell. Even those who were not vitally touched by the dominant interests of the period were not immune to the fashion, once it had been set.
II
In New England, not unnaturally, the influence of the merchant prevailed in architecture for a longer time, perhaps, than it did elsewhere. Samuel McIntire, a carver of figureheads for ships and moldings for cabins, provided an interior setting in the fashion of Robert Adam, which enabled the merchant of Salem to live like a lord in Berkeley Square; and Bulfinch, a merchant’s son, began by repairing his father’s house, went on a grand tour of Europe, and returned to a lucrative practice which included the first monument on Bunker Hill, and the first theater opened in Boston. Under McIntire’s assiduous and scholarly hands, the low-lying traditional farmhouse was converted into the bulky square house with its hipped roof, its classical pilasters, its frequently ill-proportioned cupola, its “captain’s walk,” or “widow’s walk.” The merchant with his eye for magnitude lords it over the farmer with his homely interest in the wind and the weather; and so McIntire, the last great figure in a dying line of craftsmen-artists, is compelled to make up by wealth of ornament a beauty which the earlier provincial houses had achieved by adaptation to the site without, and to subtlety of proportion within. The standard of conspicuous waste, as Mr. Thorstein Veblen would call it, spread from the manor to the city mansion.
Throughout the rest of the country, the pure classical myth created
