EWIS MUMFORD has won recognition | Just Published as a philosopher, sociolo- . gist, and as a critic of art | and literature. ‘Though T H EK G () N D U C ff not an architect himscelf, Mr. Mumford has had a world-wide influence on design, planning, and ur- | ban development. He firm- | ly established himself as a . writer of the highest rank with the publication, in _ —r—rt—‘“N 1926, of THE GOLDEN Photo By Frances Kelsey Day. Other works include Sticks ANp Stones, Tur Srory oF Utorias, HERMAN MELVILLE, Ciry DevELOPMENT, VALUES FOR SURVIVAL, FAITH FOR Livinc, and GREEN MEMORIES. OF LIFE _ By LEWIS MUMFORD The long-awaited final volume in the series that includes ‘TECHNICS AND CIVILIZATION, THE CULTURE OF CITIES, and ‘THE CONDITION OF MAN. ta SE wewweeweeeee~Qrder Form <~++eeeeeeeett ; : ERE is the crowning achievement of Lewis Mumford’s career, the book that sums up his . life work as a critic and philosopher. With the world on the brink of disaster, Lewis Mumford here brings forth a clear and vital program for a New Humanism — and provides a solid frame- work for faith and hope in the future renewal of Man. WITTENBORN & CO. 38 E. 57th St.. New York 22, N. Y. Please send me... cop(...) of THE CONDUCT OF LIFE @ $5.00 per copy. I would also like copies of: come Technics and Civilization @ $6.00 Wess The Culture of Cities @ 6.50 see The Condition of Man @ $6.00 In THE ConpucT oF Lire, Lewis Mumford at- | tains his full stature as America’s outstanding social philosopher. This is a profound and timely [] Charge my account [] Remittance enclosed book that matches Schweitzer and Toynbee in its richness and depth — and promises to be the Coes eS Ra author’s most significant contribution to contem- porary thought. Sg I Ss ) ‘oz St ti Zone 2. State 220 nae ) WITTENBORN AND COMPANY Books of the Fine Arts BA A BS AR A ES @ @ E EB BS ES B@ EB B |S SB @ B@ B@ BS EB GS BS B@ OB BSE EB |B BE Please add any local sales tax ~ A A AB A A B B AB EB @ AB BE EB BS B EB SB @ EB SB B SB BS BSB SE BEBE SE EB SE SE Ppreeweseeeeeeeeeeweeee Enea tie N DUCT OF LIFE ‘THE Conpuct or Lire deals with the ultimate problems of man’s existence, and shows how our present attitudes and ideologies must be changed to meet the challenge of our time. Lewis Mumford examines those timeless but crucial questions that lie behind the issues of the day. What is the nature of Man? What is his role as interpreter and transformer of Nature? To what purpose does he fabricate his many historic selves? Of what use are the unanswerable questions of classic religions? And what part does Myth play in the development of personality? These questions introduce a cogent and provocative philos- ophy in which man’s meanings, values, and purposes play a cen- tral role. It is a philosophy aimed at creating a person capable of mastering the nihilism of our age and making use of the tremen- dous energies at modern man’s command. Lewis Mumford draws on the teachings of the great thinkers of all ages in shaping this dynamic world-view. "THE CONDUCT OF Lire is perhaps the first work to do full justice to what was sound in the traditional formulations as well as what is creative in the newer approaches. In this searching diagnosis of our times, Lewis Mumford gets to the root causes of the modern dilemma. He shows that the current threat of world disintegration is matched by a promise, equally great, of balance, self-mastery, and world unity. Here is no ready-made formula for a vicarious salvation; Mumford insists that each of us must bear personal responsibility for the whole. The final chapter, coming down to the individual, gives a con- crete answer in terms of daily practice, to the ancient query: What shall we do to be saved? “ne e - e The Complete Series @ I TECHNICS and CIVILIZATION The first comprehensive history of the machine, and an interpretation of its effects upon our civilization. $6.00 “The most lucid and persuasive expo- sition of the promise of technics in human terms that it has been my good fortune to read. A broad, fine, search- ing book.” —STUART CHASE II THE CULTURE OF CITIES A sweeping, colorful account of the growth of the city from the simple medieval town to the complex metrop- olis of the twentieth century. $6.50 “For distinction, for entertainment and scholarship, and general human inter- est, THE CULTURE OF CITIES is one of the most distinguished books of many years. It is a liberal education to read a book like this.” —Mary M. CoLum I THE CONDITION OF MAN A study of the personality and the com- munity that unites the historic knowl- edge, scientific discipline, philosophic insight, and aesthetic perception needed for the coming age of renewal. $6.00 “One of the most important books of our day ...a great contribution to the spiritual and historical reorientation of modern man.” —REINHOLD NIEBUHR IV THE CONDUCT OF LIFE Just Published $5.00 é . CKS AND STONES = SLICKS AND STONES A STUDY OF AMERICAN ARCHITECTURE AND CIVILIZATION LEWIS MUMFORD a BONI AND LIVERIGHT PUBLISHERS ee as NEw YORK Copyright, 1924, by Boni and Liveright, Ino FS wy First printing, August, 1924 Second printing, February, 1925 Third printing, October, 1925 Fourth printing, October, 1926 Fifth printing, June, 1927 Sixth printing, December, 1927 PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA Architecture, properly understood, is civilization itself. —W. R. LetHasy What is civilization? It is the humani- zation of man in society. —MatTrHew ARNOLD. CONTENTS CHAPTER PAGE I. THE MEDIEVAL TRADITION eee ees 13 II. THE HERITAGE OF THE RENAISSANCE . 35 Tite @ee CLASSICAL MYTH . . . . .- 53 IV. THE DIASPORA OF THE PIONEER . . 5 VY. THE DEFEAT OF ROMANTICISM Feil 99 WieeTHO IMPERIAL FACADE. . . . . 128 VII. THE AGE OF THE MACHINE... 155 VIII. aRCHITECTURE AND CIVILIZATION . . 193 PIR ee gi Hoy QT NOTES ON BOOKS CS lok Pane ig to eon aL ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Tuis is an attempt to evaluate architecture in America in terms of our civilization. I have not sought to criti- cize particular buildings or tendencies: I have tried, rather, by approaching our modern problems from their historic side, to criticize the forces that from one age to another have conditioned our architecture, and altered its forms Lest my purpose be misunderstood, I have left out illustrations; for a building is not merely a sight; it is an experience: and one who knows architecture only by photographs does not know it at all. If the omission of pictures lead the reader occasionally to break away from the orbit of his daily walks, and ex- amine our development in cities and buildings for him- self, it will be sufficiently justified. This book would not have been put together but for the persistent encouragement and kindly interest of Mr. Albert Jay Nock: and it was in The Freeman that the first five chapters, in somewhat briefer form, ap- peared. My hearty thanks are likewise due to Mr. Charles Harris Whitaker, whose private help and whose admirable public work as editor of the Journal of the American Institute of Architects have both laid me under a heavy obligation. My intellectual debt to Messrs. Victor Branford and Patrick Geddes will be apparent to those who have followed their work. In the concluding chapters I have been stimulated and guided in many places by unpublished reports and memoranda written by Mr. Clarence Stein, Mr. Benton Mackaye, and Mr. Henry Wright. My friendly thanks are also due to Mr. James Henderson, Mr. Geroid Penquary Robinson, and Miss Sophia Wittenberg. Besides the essays in The Freeman, some of the material in Sticks and Stones has appeared in the Journal of the American Institute of Architects (Chap- ter Six), in The New Republic, and in The American Mercury. I thank the editors for their permission to draw on these articles. Lewis Mumrorp. CHAPTER ONE THE MEDIEVAL TRADITION For a hundred years or so after its settlement, there lived and flourished in America a type of com- munity which was rapidly disappearing in Europe. This community was embodied in villages and towns whose mummified remains even today have a rooted dignity that the most gigantic metropolises do not often possess. If we would understand the architec- ture of America in a period when good building was almost universal, we must understand something of the kind of life that this community fostered. The capital example of the medieval tradition lies in the New England village. There are two or three things that stand in the way of our seeing the life of a New England village; _ and one of them is the myth of the pioneer, the con- ception of the first settlers as a free band of “Americans” throwing off the bedraggled garments of Europe and starting life afresh in the wilderness. So far from giving birth to a new life, the settlement [13 J Sticks and Stones of the northern American seaboard prolonged for a little while the social habits and economic institutions which were fast crumbling away in Europe, particu- larly in England. In the villages of the New World there flickered up the last dying embers of the medi- eval order. Whereas in England the common lands were being confiscated for the benefit of an aristocracy, and the arable turned into sheep-runs for the profit of the great proprietors, in New England the common lands were re-established with the founding of a new set- tlement. In England the depauperate peasants and yeomen were driven into the large towns to become the casual workers, menials, and soldiers; in New England, on the other hand, it was at first only with threats of punishment and conscription that the town workers were kept from going out into the coun- tryside to seek a more independent living from the soil. Just as the archaic speech of the Elizabethans has lingered in the Kentucky Mountains, so the Middle Ages at their best lingered along the coast of Appalachia; and in the organization of our New England villages one sees a greater resemblance to the medieval Utopia of Sir Thomas More than to the classic republic in the style of Montesquieu, [14] The Medieval Tradition which was actually founded in the eighteenth cen- tury. The colonists who sought to establish permanent communities—as distinct from those who erected only trading posts—were not a little like those whom the cities of Greece used to plant about the Mediter- ranean and the Black Sea littoral. Like the founders of the “Ancient City,” the Puritans first concerned themselves to erect an altar, or rather, to lay the foundations for an edifice which denied the religious value of altars. In the crudest of “smoaky wigwams,” an early observer notes, the Puritans remember to “sing psalms, pray, and praise their God”; and although we of today may regard their religion as harsh and nay-saying, we cannot forget that it was a central point of their existence and not an after- thought piled as it were on material prosperity for the sake of a good appearance. Material goods formed the basis, but not the end, of their life. The meeting-house determined the character and limits of the community. As Weeden says in his excellent Economic and Social History of New Eng- land, the settlers “laid out the village in the best order to attain two objects: first, the tillage and culture of the soil; second, the maintenance of a [15] Sticks and Stones ‘civil and religious society.’”” Around the meeting- house the rest of the community crystallized in a definite pattern, tight and homogeneous. The early provincial village bears another resem- blance to the early Greek city: it does not continue to grow at such a pace that it either becomes over- crowded within or spills beyond its limits into de- jected suburbs; still less does it seek what we iron- ically call greatness by increasing the number of its inhabitants. When the corporation has a sufficient number of members, that is to say, when the land is fairly occupied, and when the addition of more land would unduly increase the hardship of working it from the town, or would spread out the farmers, and make it difficult for them to attend to their religious and civil duties, the original settlement throws out a new shoot. So Charlestown threw off Woburn; so Dedham colonized Medfield; so Lynn founded Nahant. The Puritans knew and applied a principle that Plato had long ago pointed out in The Republic, namely, that an intelligent and socialized community will continue to grow only as long as it can remain a unit and keep up its common institutions. Beyond that point growth must cease, or the community will [16] The Medieval Tradition disintegrate and cease to be an organic thing. Economically, this method of community-develop- ment kept land values at a properly low level, and prevented the engrossing of land for the sake of a speculative rise. The advantage of the Puritan method of settlement comes out plainly when one contrasts it with the trader’s paradise of Man- hattan; for by the middle of the seventeenth century all the land on Manhattan Island was privately owned, although only a small part of it was culti- vated, and so eagerly had the teeth of monopoly bitten into this fine morsel that there was already a housing-shortage. One more point of resemblance: all the inhabitants of an early New England village were co-partners in a corporation; they admitted into the community _ only as many members as they could assimilate. This co-partnership was based upon a common sense as to the purpose of the community, and upon a roughly equal divison of the land into individual plots taken in freehold, and a share of the common fields, of which there might be half a dozen or more. There are various local differences in the appor- tionment of the land. In many cases, the minister [17] Sticks and Stones and deacons have a larger share than the rest of the community; but in Charlestown, for example, the poorest had six or seven acres of meadow and twen- ty-five or thereabouts of upland; and this would hold pretty well throughout the settlements. Not merely is membership in the community guarded: the right of occupying and transferring the land is also restricted, and again and again, in the face of the General Assembly, the little villages make provisions to keep the land from changing hands without the consent of the corporation; “it being our real in- tent,” as the burghers of Watertown put it, to “sitt down there close togither.” These regulations have a positive side as well; for in some cases the towns helped the poorer mem- bers of the corporation to build houses, and as a new member was voted into the community, lots were assigned immediately, without further ado. A friend of mine has called this system “Yankee communism,” and I cheerfully bring the institution to the attention of those who do not realize upon what subversive principles Americanism, historically, rests. What is true of the seventeenth century in New England holds good for the eighteenth century in the [18] The Medieval Tradition Moravian settlements of Pennsylvania; and it 1s doubtless true for many another obscure colony; for the same spirit lingered, with a parallel result in architecture and industry, in the utopian communi- ties of the nineteenth century. It is pretty plain that this type of pioneering, this definite search for the good life, was conducted on an altogether differ- ent level from the ruthless exploitation of the indi- vidual muckers and scavengers who hit the trail west of the Alleghanies. Such renewals of the earlier Kuropean culture as the Bach Festival at Bethlehem give us a notion of the cultural values which the me- dieval community carried over from the Old World to the New. There is some of this spirit left even in the architecture of the Shaker community at Mount Lebanon, New York, which was built as late as the nineteenth century. In contrast to the New England village-commu- nity was the trading post. Of this nature were the little towns in the New Netherlands which were planted there by the Dutch West India Company: the settlers were for the most part either harassed individuals who were lured to the New World by the prospects of a good living, or people of estab- lished rank who were tempted to leave the walks of [19] Sticks and Stones commerce for the dignities and affluences that were attached to the feudal tenure of the large estates that lined the Hudson. The germs of town life came over with these people, and sheer necessity turned part of their energies to agriculture, but they did not develop the close village-community we find in New England; and though New Amsterdam was a replica of the Old World port, with its gabled brick houses, and its well- banked canals and fine gardens, it left no decided pattern on the American scene. It is only the coun- try architecture of the Dutch which survives as either a relic or a memory. These trading posts like Manhattan and Fort Orange were, as Messrs. Petersen and Edwards have shown in their study of New York as an Eighteenth Century Municipal- ity, medieval in their economy: numerous guild and civic regulations which provided for honest weight and measure and workmanship continued in force within the town. In their external dealings, on the other hand, the practice of the traders was sharp, and every man was for himself. Beginning its life by bargaining in necessities, the trading post ends by making a necessity of bargaining; and it was the impetus from its original commercial habits which [ 20 ] The Medieval Tradition determined the characteristics of the abortive city plan that was laid down for Manhattan Island in 1811. Rich as the Dutch precedent is in individual farmhouses, it brings us no pattern, such as we find in New England, for the community as a whole. II Since we are accustomed to look upon the vil- lage as a quaint primitive relic of a bygone age, we do not readily see that its form was dictated by social and economic conditions. Where the village had to defend itself against Indians, it was necessary to lay it out completely, so that it might be surrounded by a stockade, and so that the meeting-house might be such a rallying center as the bell-tower or the castle was in Europe, or as the high temple site was in classic times. But in the eighteenth century the Indian figured less in the scheme of colonial life, and along the seacoast and river—as at Wells Beach in Maine or Litchfield in Connecticut—the village became a long strip upon a highroad, and the arable land stretched in narrow plots from the house to the water, so that the farmer might better protect his crops and his livestock from the fox, [21] Sticks and Stones the wolf, the woodchuck, the hawk, the skunk, and the deer. I emphasize these points of structure because of the silly notion superficial observers sometimes carry away from the villages of Europe or New England; namely, that their irregularity is altogether capri- cious and uneconomical, associated only with the vagaries of the straying cow. It would be more correct to say that the precise reverse was true. The inequality in size and shape of plots shows al- ways that attention was paid to the function the land was to perform, rather than to the mere pos- session of property. Thus, there was a difference in size between home lots, which were always seated in the village, and purely agricultural tracts of land, which were usually on the outskirts; and in Dedham, for example, married men had home lots of twelve acres, while bachelors received only eight. Another reason for the compactness of the village was a decree of the General Court in Massachusetts, in 1635, that no dwelling should be placed more than half a mile from the meeting-house in any new plantation. Even irregularities in the layout and placement of houses, which cannot be referred to such obvious points as these, very often derive [22] The Medieval Tradition from an attempt to break the path of the wind, to get a good exposure in summer, or to profit by a view. All this was genuine community planning. It did not go by this name, perhaps, but it achieved the result. It We have learned in recent years to appreciate the felicities of eighteenth-century colonial architecture, and even the earlier seventeenth-century style is now coming into its own, in the sense that it is being imitated by architects who have an eye for pictur- esque effects; but we lose our perspective altogether if we think that the charm of an old New England house can be recaptured by designing overhanging second stories or panelled interiors. The just de- sign, the careful execution, the fine style that brings all the houses into harmony no matter how diverse the purposes they served—for the farmhouse shares its characteristics with the mill, and the mill with the meeting-house—was the outcome of a common spirit, nourished by men who had divided the land fairly and who shared adversity and good fortune together. When the frame of the house is to be [28 ] Sticks and Stones raised, a man’s neighbors will lend him a hand; if the harvest is in danger, every man goes out into the fields, even if his own crop is not at stake; if a whale founders on the beach, even the smallest boy bears a hand, and gets a share of the reward. All these practices were not without their subtle effect upon craftsmanship. Schooled in the traditions of his guild, the medieval carpenter pours his all into the work. Since sale does not enter into the bargain, it is both to his patron’s advantage to give him the best materials, and to his own advantage to make the most of them. If at first, in the haste of settlement, the colonists are content with makeshifts, they are nevertheless done in the traditional fashion—not the log cabins of later days, but, more probably, wattle and daub huts like those of the charcoal burners in the English forests. In some points, the prevailing English tra- dition does not fit the raw climate of the north, and presently the half-timbered houses of some of the earlier settlers would be covered by clapboards for greater warmth, as in the eighteenth century their interiors were lined with panelled pine or oak, in- stead of the rough plaster. No matter what the material or mode, the carpenter works not simply [ 24] The Medieval Tradition for hire, but for dear life’s sake, and as a baker’s dozen numbers thirteen, so a piece of handicraft contains not merely the workmanship itself, but a bit of the worker’s soul, for good measure. The new invention of the gambrel roof, which gave ad- ditional room to the second story without raising the roof-tree, is a product of this system; and the variation in its length and pitch in New Eng- land, New Jersey, and New York is a witness to the freedom of design that prevailed throughout the work. -These seventeenth-century houses, built at first with one or two rooms, and then as luxury increased and family needs multiplied with as many as four, would doubtless seem unspeakably crude and mean to the resident of Floral Heights; indeed, if our present requirements for housing were so simple it would not be quite so difficult to meet our perpetual shortage. As a matter of fact, however, these early provincial houses were well up to the standards for _a similar homestead in England; and in some ways were a distinct advance. Just as all the separate courses on a restaurant menu were a few hundred years ago cooked in the same pot, so the different subdivisions of the modern house were originally [25 ] Sticks and Stones : combined into a single room, which was not merely kitchen, workroom, and living quarters, but which also, at least in winter, served as a stable for the more delicate members of the barnyard. By the time America was settled the division into rooms had just commenced among the better sort of farmer: the barn had split off from the rest of the house, and the bedchamber was becoming a separate apart- ment. As the seventeenth century lengthened, this division of functions became more familiar in the provincial house. Let us take a brief look at one of these seventeenth- century buildings; let us say, the John Ward house in Salem which still survives as a relic. As one ap- proaches the village on some November day, when the leaves are no longer on the trees to obscure the vista, one feels the dynamic quality of medieval architecture—a quality altogether different from the prudent regularities of the later Georgian mode. It is not merely a matter of painted gables, leaded, diamond-paned windows, overhanging second stories, much as these would perhaps remind us of a medieval European town. What would attract one is the feeling, not of formal abstract design, but of growth: the house has developed as the family within it has [ 26 ] The Medieval Tradition prospered, and brought forth children; as sons and daughters have married, as children have become more numerous, there have been additions: by a lean-to at one end the kitchen has achieved a separate existence, for instance; and these unpainted, weath- ered oaken masses pile up with a cumulative rich- ness of effect. Every step that brings one nearer to the house alters the relation of the planes formed by the gable ends; and so one must have got the same effect in these old village streets as one gets today when one skirts around, let us say, Notre Dame in Paris, now overwhelmed by the towers at the front, and now seeing them reduced to nothing by the tall spire in the rear. So the building seems in motion, as well as the spectator; and this quality delights the eye quite as much as formal decoration, which the archi- tecture of the seventeenth century in America al- most completely lacked. The Puritan had his failings; and this lack of decoration was perhaps the most important one in architecture. In his devotion to books and in his love for music, even psalm-music, the Puritan was not immune to art; but he was suspicious of the image, and one is tempted to read into his idol- [27 ] Sticks and Stones breaking a positive visual defect, akin to the Dal- tonism or color blindness of the Quakers. Whereas medieval architecture had cherished the sculptor and the painter, even in the commonest vernacular work, the Puritans looked upon every diversion of the eye as a diversion from the Lord, and, by for- bidding a respectable union between the artist and the useful arts, they finally turned the artist out on the streets, to pander to the first fine gentleman who would give him a kind word or a coin. Whereas Puritan buildings in the seventeenth century were straightforward and honestly bent to fulfill their functions, the Puritan did not see that ornament itself may be functional, too, when it expresses some positive gesture of the spirit. The bareness of the seventeenth century paved the way for the finicking graces of the eighteenth, Iv In essentials, however, both the life and the archi- tecture of the first provincial period are sound. While agriculture is the mainstay of life, and the medieval tradition flourishes, the New England village reaches a pretty fair pitch of worldly [ 28 ] The Medieval Tradition perfection; and beneath all the superficial changes that affected it in the next century and a half, its sturdy framework held together remarkably well. Consider the village itself. In the center is a common, a little to one side will be the meeting- house, perhaps a square barnlike structure, with a hipped roof and a cupola, like that at Hingham; and adjacent or across the way will be the grammar school. Along the roads where the houses are set at regular intervals is a great columnar arcade of elm trees. All these elements are essential to our early provincial architecture, and without them it would be a little bare and forbidding. The trees, above all, are an important part of New England architecture: in summer they absorb the moisture and cool the air, besides giving shade; in the winter their huge boles serve as a partial windbrake; even the humus from their leaves keeps the soil of the _ lawns in better order. The apple trees that cling - to the warmer side of the house are not less essen- tial. Would it be an exaggeration to say that there has never been a more complete and intelligent part- nership between the earth and man than existed, for a little while, in the old New England village? In [29 ] Sticks and Stones what other part of the world has such a harmoni- ous balance between the natural and the social en- vironment been preserved? Nowadays we have begun to talk about garden cities, and we realize that the essential elements in a garden-city are the common holding of land by the community, and the codperative ownership and direction of the community itself. We refer to all these things as if they represented a distinct achieve- ment of modern thought; but the fact of the matter is that the New England village up to the middle of the eighteenth century was a garden-city in every sense that we now apply to that term, and happily its gardens and its harmonious framework have fre- quently lingered on, even though the economic foun- dations have long been overthrown. This is a medieval tradition in American archi- tecture which should be of some use to our architects and city planners; for it is a much more substantial matter than the building of perpendicular churches or Tudor country-houses in painfully archeological adaptations. If we wish to tie up with our colonial tradition we must recover more than the architec- tural forms: we must recover the interests, the stand- ards, the institutions that gave to the villages and [ 30 ] The Medieval Tradition buildings of early times their appropriate shapes. To do much less than this is merely to bring back a fad which might as well be Egyptian as “colonial” for all the sincerity that it exhibits. [31] "| A ae A he ae . CHAPTER TWO THE HERITAGE OF THE RENAISSANCE I Tue forces that undermined the medieval civiliza- tion of Europe sapped the vitality from the little centers it had deposited in America. What happened in the course of three or four centuries in Europe took scarcely a hundred years on this side of the Atlantic. Economically and culturally, the village commu- nity had been pretty well self-contained; it scraped along on its immediate resources, and if it could not purchase for itself the “best of everything” it at least made the most of what it had. In every de- tail of house construction, from the setting of fire- places to the slope of the roof, there were local pe- culiarities which distinguished not merely the Dutch settlements from the English, but which even charac- terized several settlements in Rhode Island that were scarcely a day’s tramp apart. The limitation of materials, and the carpenter’s profound ignorance of ‘‘style’ made for freedom and diversity. It re- [ 35 |] Sticks and Stones mained for the eighteenth century to erect a single canon of taste. With the end of the seventeenth century the eco- nomic basis of provincial life shifted from the farm to the sea. This change had the same effect upon New England, where the village-community proper alone had flourished, that fur-trading had had upon New York: it broke up the internal unity of the village by giving separate individuals the oppor- tunity by what was literally a “lucky haul,” to achieve a position of financial superiority. Fisher- men are the miners of the water. Instead of the long, watchful care that the farmer must exercise from planting time to harvest, fishing demands a sharp eye and a quick, hard stroke of work; and since what the Germans call Sitzfleisch is not one of the primary qualities of a free lad, it is no wonder that the sea weaned the young folks of New Eng- land away from the drudgeries of its boulder-strewn farms. With fishing, trading, and building wooden vessels for sale in foreign ports, riches poured into maritime New England; and what followed scarcely needs an explanation. These villages ceased to be communities of farm- ers, working the land and standing squarely on their [36 J The Heritage of the Renaissance own soil: they became commercial towns which, in- stead of trading for a living, simply lived for trade, With this change, castes arose; first, the division between the poor and the rich, and then between craftsmen and merchants, between the independent workers and the menials. The common concerns of all the townsfolk took second rank: the privileges of the great landlords and merchants warped the development of the community. Boston, by the middle of the eighteenth century, was rich in public buildings, including four schoolhouses, seventeen churches, a Town House, a Province House, and Faneuil Hall—a pretty large collection for a town whose twenty thousand inhabitants would scarcely fill a single block of tenements in the Bronx. But by this time a thousand inhabitants were set down as poor, and an almshouse and a workhouse had been provided for them. With the rise of the merchant class, the indus- trial guild began to weaken, as it had weakened in Europe during the Renaissance. For about a hun- dred years the carpenter-builder continued to re- main on the scene, and work in his forthright and painstaking and honest manner; but in the middle of the eighteenth century he was joined, for the [ 37] Sticks and Stones first time, by the professional architect, the first one being probably Peter Harrison, who designed the Redwood Library, which still stands in Newport. Under competition with architects and amateurs of taste, the carpenter-builder lost his position as an independent craftsman, building intelligently for his equals: he was forced to meet the swift, corrosive influences brought in from foreign lands by men who had visited the ports of the world; and he must set his sails in order to catch the new winds of fashion. What were these winds, and what effect did they have upon the architecture of the time? Most of the influences that came by way of trade affected only the accent of architecture; the lan- guage remained a homely vernacular. In the middle of the eighteenth century China sent over wall- paper; and in the Metropolitan Museum there is an American lacquered cabinet dated as early as 1700, decorated with obscure little Chinese figures in gilded gesso. “China” itself came in to take the place of pewter and earthenware in the finer houses; while in the gardens of the great manors, pavilions and pagodas, done more or less in the Chinese manner, were fashionable. Even Thomas [ 38 J The Heritage of the Renaissance Jefferson, with his impeccably classical taste, de- signed such a pavilion for Monticello before the Revolution. This specific Chinese influence was part of that large, eclectic Oriental influence of the eighteenth century. The cultural spirit that produced Mon- tesquieu’s Lettres Persanes also led to the transla- tion of the Chinese and Persian and Sanskrit clas- sics, and by a more direct route brought home Turk- ish dressing-gowns, turbans, and slippers to Boston merchants. In Copley’s painting of Nicholas Boyl- ston, in 1767, these Turkish ornaments rise comic- ally against the suggestion of a Corinthian pillar in the background; and this pillar recalls to us the principal influence of the time—that of classic civ- ilization. This influence entered America first as a motif in decoration, and passed out only after it had become a dominating motive in life. 0 The Renaissance was an orientation of the Euro- pean mind towards the forms of Roman and Greek civilization, and towards the meaning of classical culture, On the latter side its impulse was plainly [39] Sticks and Stones a liberating one: it delivered the human soul from a cell of torments in which there were no modulat- ing interests or activities between the base satisfac- tions of the temporal life and the beatitudes of heaven. With the Renaissance the god-beast be- came, once again, a man. Moreover, just when the Catholic culture of Christendom was breaking down under the influence of heresy and skepticism, the classics brought to the educated men of Europe a common theme which saved them from complete in- tellectual vagrancy. The effect of classical civiliza- tion, on the other hand, was not an unmixed good: for it served all too quickly to stereotype in old forms a spirit which had been freshly reborn, and it set up a servile principle in the arts which has in part been responsible for the wreck of both taste and craftsmanship. The first builders of the Renaissance, in Italy, were not primarily architects; they were rather supreme artists in the minor crafts; and their chief failing was, perhaps, that they wished to stamp with their personal imprint all the thousand details of sculp- ture, painting, and carving which had hitherto been left to the humble craftsman. Presently, the tech- nical knowledge of the outward treatment of a build- [40] | The Heritage of the Renaissance ing became a touchstone to success; and a literal understanding of the products of antiquity took the place in lesser men of personal inspiration. The result was that architecture became more and more a thing of paper designs and exact archeological measurements ; the workman was condemned to carry out in a faithful, slavish way the details which the architect himself had acquired in similar fashion. So the architect ceased to be a master-builder work- ing among comrades of wide experience and travel: he became a Renaissance gentleman who merely gave orders to his servants. Victor Hugo said in Notre Dame that the print- ing-press destroyed architecture, which had hitherto been the stone record of mankind. The real mis- demeanor of the printing-press, however, was not that it took literary values away from architec- ture, but that it caused architecture to derive its value from literature. With the Renaissance the great modern distinction between the literate and the illiterate extends even to building; the master mason who knew his stone and his workmen and his tools and the tradition of his art gave way to the architect who knew his Palladio and his Vignola and his Vitruvius. Architecture, instead of striving to [41] Sticks and Stones leave the imprint of a happy spirit on the super- ficies of a building, became a mere matter of gram- matical accuracy and pronunciation; and the seven- teenth-century architects who revolted from this regime and created the baroque were at home only in the pleasure gardens and theaters of princes. For the common run of architects, particularly in the northern countries, the Five Orders became as un- challengeable as the eighty-one rules of Latin syn- tax. To build with a pointed arch was barbarous, to build with disregard for formal symmetry was barbarous, to permit the common workman to carry out his individual taste in carving was to risk vul- garity and pander to an obsolete sense of democracy. The classics had, it is true, united Europe anew in a catholic culture; but alas! it was only the leisured upper classes who could fully take possession of the new kingdom of the mind. The Five Orders re- mained firmly entrenched on one side, the “lower orders” on the other. Hereafter, architecture lives by the book. First it is Palladio and Vignola; then it is Burlington and Chambers; then, after the middle of the eighteenth century, the brothers Adam and Stuart’s Antiqui- ties of Athens. Simpler works with detailed pre- [ 42 ] The Heritage of the Renaissance scriptions for building in the fashionable mode made their way in the late seventeenth century among the smaller fry of carpenters and builders; and they were widely used in America, as a guide to taste and technique, right down to the middle of the nineteenth century. It was by means of the book that the architecture of the eighteenth century from St. Petersburg to Philadelphia seemed cast by a single mind. We call the mode Georgian because vast quantities of such building was done in England, as a result of the general commercial prosperity of that country; but it was common wherever European civilization had any fresh architectural effort to make, and if we call this style “‘colonial” in America it is not to mark any particular lapse or lack of distinction. 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, himself a dutiful Augustan, to sum up the situation with classic precision to Lord Burlington, who had pub- lished Palladio’s Antiquities of Rome: [43] Sticks and Stones “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 con- tinued to ply his craft without the overlordship of the architect. Ti The first effect of the Renaissance forms in Amer- ica was not to destroy the vernacular but to perfect it; for it provided the carpenter-builder, whose dis- tance from Europe kept him from profiting by the spirited work of his forbears, with a series of orna- mental 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 deco- rative aspects medievalism had left but a trace in [44] The Heritage of the Renaissance 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 provin- cial 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 jig-saw overwhelms a mechanically hypnotized age; and even through the jig-saw 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 [45] Sticks and Stones 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 appear- ance, 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 satis- factory. Paint was no doubt introduced to keep the torrid summer sun from charring the exposed clap- boards; and white paint was used, despite the ex- pense 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 [ 46 J The Heritage of the Renaissance 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 any- thing 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. lit If the architecture of the early eighteenth cen- tury 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 build- ings, though it is overshadowed by the great utili- tarian hulks that line the streets about it. By study- ing 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 box-like naves and their series of superimposed orders for [47 ] Sticks and Stones 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 dis- cipleship 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 the eighteenth cen- tury style do not, perhaps, see is that an accident cannot be recovered. However painstakingly we may cut the waistcoat, the stock, the knee-breeches of an eighteenth-century costume, it is now only a fancy dress: its “moment” in history is over. The same principle holds true for Georgian or colonial architecture, even more than it does for that of the seventeenth century; for one might, indeed, con- [48 ] The Heritage of the Renaissance ceive of a breakdown in the transportation system or the credit system which would force a builder to rely for a while upon the products of his own region; whereas, while our civilization remains intact there are a hundred handbooks, measured drawings, and photographs which make a naive recovery of an- tiquity impossible. 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, New- buryport and Philadelphia cabinetmakers is a long and merry one; but the only beneficent effect of this movement has been the preservation of a hand- ful 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: unfortu- nately, it bears the same relation to the work of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries that the Woolworth Building bears to the guild halls of the Middle Age, or the patriotism of the Nationai [49] Sticks and Stones 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 an- cestral estates that were established—a year ago; and if their occupants are “descendants by pur- chase,” what shall we say of their architects? [ 50] CHAPTER THREE THE CLASSICAL MYTH I Tue transformation of European society and its material shell that took place during the period we call the Renaissance is associated with the break-up of the town economy and its replacement by a mer- cantile 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 isola- tion and the absence of an established social order, it showed: these changes without the blur and con- fusion 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 [ 53 J Sticks and Stones 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 Vir- ginia 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 an- [ 54] The Classical Myth cient 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 monu- ments, since so much neglected, served in Palladio’s book expressly to represent the ‘Antients’ 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 prodtct of a specialized education; it is rather the [ 55 J Sticks and Stones outcome of a warm, loving, and above all intelligent commerce with the past, in the days before Horse- back 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 classi- cal 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 the grave of Rome. In America, Thomas Jefferson exemplified this whole culture at its best and gave it a definite stamp: he combined in almost equal degrees the statesman, the student, and the artist. Not merely did Jefferson design his own Monticello; he executed a number of other houses for the surrounding gentry —Shadwell, Edgehill, Farrington—to say nothing of the Virginia State Capitol and the church and university at Charlottesville. It was Jefferson who in America first gave a strict interpretation to classicism; for he had nothing but contempt for the free, Georgian vernacular which was making its [ 56 J The Classical Myth way among those who regarded the classical past as little more than a useful embellishment. The contrast between the classical and the ver- nacular, 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 re-crystallization of American society, the conditions of classical culture and classical civiliza- tion 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 classi- cal 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 [ 57 ] Sticks and Stones 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 per- haps 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, [ 58 | The Classical Myth 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 life- time Washington became Divus Cesar, and if a mon- ument 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 be- come 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 [59 J Sticks and Stones Tory neighbor’s plow? As Rome and Greece em- bodied the political interests of the age, so did classi- cal 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 Mc- Intire, a carver of figureheads for ships and mold- ings for cabins, provided an interior setting in the fashion of Robert Adam, which enabled the mer- chant 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 assidu- ous and scholarly hands, the low-lying traditional farmhouse was converted into the bulky square house with its hipped roof, its classical pilasters, its fre- quently ill-proportioned cupola, its ‘“‘captain’s [ 60 ] The Classical Myth 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 with- out, 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 the mold of American archi- tecture, and buildings that were not informed by this myth attempted some sort of mimicry, like the mansion Squire Jones built for Marmaduke Temple in Cooper’s The Pioneers. There are churches stand- ing in New Jersey and New York, for example, built as late as 1850, which at a distance have the out- lines and proportions of classic buildings, either in the earlier style of Wren, or in the more severe and stilted Greek manner favored by a later generation. It is only on closer inspection that one discovers that the ornament has become an illiterate reminis- cence; that the windows are bare openings; that [ 61 J Sticks and Stones the orders have lost their proportions, and that, unlike the wandering mechanic, who “with a few soiled plates of English architecture” helped Squire Jones, the builder could no longer pretend to talk learnedly “of friezes, entablatures, and par- ticularly of the composite order.” Alas for a bookish architecture when the taste for reading disappears! Ii The dominant designs of the early republican period proceeded directly or indirectly from such books as Stuart’s Antiquities of Athens, and from such well-known examples of temple architecture in southern Europe as the Maison Carrée at Nimes. In one sense, there was a certain fitness in adapting the Greek methods of building to America. Origi- nally, the Greek temple had probably been a wooden building. Its columns were trees, its cornices ex- posed beams; and the architect’s new opportunity to fabricate mightily in wood may have furnished an extra incentive to the erection of these colossal buildings. The fact that the Greek mode in America was well under way before the first example of it [ 62 ] The Classical Myth had appeared in Edinburgh, London, or Paris, shows perhaps that time and place both favored its in- troduction on this side of the Atlantic: for the availability of certain materials often, no doubt, directs the imagination to certain forms. On the whole, however, the Greek temple precedent was a bad one. For one thing, since the Greek cella had no source of light except the doorway, it was necessary to introduce modifications in the elevation, and to break up the interior; and it was only in the South that the vast shadowed retreats formed by porches and second-story balconies proved a happy adaptation to the climate. Again: Greek archi- tecture was an architecture of exteriors, designed for people who spent the greater part of the year out of doors. With no temple ritual comparable to the services of the church or cathedral, the Greeks lavished their attention upon externals, and as a great admirer of the Greeks, Sir Reginald Blom- field well says, “may have been more successful with the outside of their buildings than with the inside.” To fail with the interior in a northern climate is to fail with the essentials of a habitation; and these vast rooms, for all their ornament, too often re- mained bleak. [ 63 |] Sticks and Stones Even on the esthetic side, the Greek style of build- ing was not a full-blown success. With all their strict arrangement of the classic orders, with all their nice proportions, the muted white exteriors resembled a genuine Greek temple in the way that a sepia photograph would represent a sunrise—the warm tones, the colors, the dancing procession of sculptures were absent ; it was a thinned and watered Greece that they called to mind. Indeed, the dis- ciples of the Age of Reason and white perukes would have been horrified, I have no doubt, at the “bar- barism” of the original Greek temples, as they would doubtless also have been at the meanness of the dwellings in which Pericles or Thucydides must have lived. Once the temple-house ceased to be a stage upon which the myth of classicism could be enacted, it ceased also to be a home. For who wishes to live in a temple? ‘That is a spiritual exercise we do not demand even of a priest. Small wonder that the temple lingered longest in the South, where, down to the Civil War, gangs of slaves supported the dignity of the masters and a large household dimin- ished the chilly sense of solitude. It was in public architecture that the early republic succceded best, and it was here that its [ 64 ] The Classical Myth influence lingered longest, for down to 1840 well- designed buildings in the classic mode, like the Sub- Treasury building in New York, were still put up. The work of McComb in New York, Hoadley in Con- necticut, Latrobe in Pennsylvania and Maryland, to mention only a few of the leading architects, repre- sents the high-water mark of professional design in America ; and the fact that in spite of the many hands that worked upon it the Capitol at Washington is still a fairly coherent structure is a witness to the strength of their tradition. For all its minor felici- ties, however, we must not make the mistake of the modern revivalists, like Mr. Fiske Kimball, who urge the acceptance of the classic tradition in America as a foundation for a general modern style. Form and function are too far divorced in the classic mode to permit the growth of an architecture which will proceed on all fours in houses and public buildings and factories and barns; moreover, there are too many new structures in the modern world which the builders of Rome or the Renaissance have not even dimly anticipated. In medieval building the town hall is a different sort of building from the cathedral: using the same elements, perhaps, it nevertheless contrives an altogether different effect. In the [ 65 J Sticks and Stones architecture of the early republic, on the other hand, the treasury building might be a church, and the church might be a mansion, for any external differ- entiation one can observe—in fact, the only ecclesias- tical feeling that goes with the churches of the time is a cold deism, or an equally cold Protestant faith which has lost entirely the memories and associa- tions of the intervening centuries. This sort of architecture achieves order and dignity, not by com- posing differences, but by canceling them. Its standards do not inhere in the building, but are laid on outside of it. When the purpose of the struc- ture happens to conform to the style, the result may be admirable in every way. When it does not happen to conform the result is tedious and banal; and, to tell the truth, a great deal of the architecture of the early republic is tedious and banal. IV One further effect of the classic mode has still to be noted: the introduction of formal city design, by the French engineer, Major L’Enfant, in the lay- ing out of Washington. Stirred by the memory of [ 66 J The Classical Myth the grand design of Paris under Louis XIV, with its radiating avenues that cut through the city in the way that riding lanes cut through the hunt- ing forest, L’Enfant sought to superimpose a digni- fied pattern upon the rectangular plan provided by the commissioners of Washington. By putting the major public buildings in key positions, by pre- viding for a proper physical relation between the various departments of the government, by plan- ning spacious avenues of approach, culminating in squares, triangles, and round-points, Major L’En- fant gave great dignity to the new capital city, and even though in the years that followed his plan was often ignored and overridden, it still maintained a monumental framework for the administrative build- ings of the American State. Unfortunately, if Washington has the coherence of a formal plan, it also has its abstractness: con- trived to set off and serve the buildings of the government, it exercised no control over domestic building, over business, over the manifold economic functions of the developing city. The framework was excellent, if cities could live by government alone. By laying too much stress on formal order, the exponents of classic taste paved the way for the all [ 67 J Sticks and Stones too formal order of the gridiron plan, and since the gridiron development was suited to hasty commer- cial exploitation, while the mode of Washington was not, it was in this mold that the architecture of the nineteenth century was cast. Within a short while after its introduction in New York in 1811 the effects of the rectangular streets and rectangular lots became evident; whereas the prints of New York before 1825 show a constant variety in the elevation and layout of houses, those after this date resemble more and more standardized boxes. Long monotonous streets that terminated nowhere, filled by rows of monotonous houses—this was the net contribution of the formal plan. Classi- cal taste was not responsible for these enormities— but on the whole it did nothing to check them, and since the thrifty merchants of New York could not understand L’Enfant’s plan for Washington, they seized upon that part of it which was intelligible: its regularity, its appearance of order. With the new forces that were at work on the American scene, with the disintegration of classical culture under the combined influence of pioneer en- terprise, mechanical invention, overseas commerce, and the almost religious cult of utilitarianism, all [ 68 | The Classical Myth this was indeed inevitable. What happened to the proud, Roman-patterned republic of 1789 is a matter of common knowledge. Benjamin Latrobe, the British architect who contributed so much to the Capitol at Washington—including a new order of corn stalks and tobacco leaves—was a witness to the disintegration of the age and the dissolution of its world of ideas; and there ig a familiar ring to his commentary upon it: “I remember [he says in his autobiography] the time when I was over head and ears in love with Man in a State of Nature. . . . Social Compacts were my hobbies ; the American Revolution—TI ask its par- don, for it deserves better company—was a sort of dream of the Golden Age; and the French Revolu- tion was the Golden Age itself. I should be ashamed to confess all this if I had not a thousand compan- ions in my kaleidoscopic amusement, and those gen- erally men of ardent, benevolent, and well-informed minds and excellent hearts. Alas! experience has destroyed the illusion, the kaleidoscope is broken, and all the tinsel of scenery that glittered so de- lightfully is translated and turned to raggedness. A dozen years’ residence at the Republican court of [ 69 J Sticks and Stones Washington had affected wonderfully the advance of riper years.” Major L’Enfant’s plan for Washington was the last gasp, it seems to me, of the classical order; Jefferson’s University of Virginia was perhaps its most perfect consummation, for Jefferson had planned for the life of the institution as well as for the shell which was to contain it. Before the nine- teenth century was long under way men’s minds ceased to move freely within the classical idolum; and by 1860 the mood was obliterated and a large part of the work had been submerged or destroyed. The final ironic commentary upon the dignity and austerity of the earlier temples is illustrated in a house in Kennebunkport, Maine; for there the se rene, pillared facade is broken up in the rear by a later, and alas! a necessary addition: a two-story bow-window projected far enough beyond the eaves ta give a little light to the occupants of the rooms! In sum, there was a pathetic incompatibility in this architecture between need and achievement, be- tween pretensions and matter-of-fact—a rigid oppo- sition to common sense that a vernacular, however playful, would never countenance. These temples [ 70 ] The Classical Myth were built with the marmoreal gesture of eternity; they satisfied the desire and fashion of the moment; and today their ghosts parade before us, brave but incredible. Tv] z From the standpoint of architecture, the early part of the nineteenth century was a period of dis- integration. The gap between sheer utility and art, which the Renaissance had emphasized, was widened with the coming of machinery. That part of archi- tecture which was touched by industrialism became crude beyond belief: the new mills and factories were usually packing boxes, lacking in light and ventila- tion, and the homes of the factory workers, when they were not the emptied houses of merchants and tradesmen, made to serve a dozen families instead of the original one, were little more than covered pens, as crowded as a cattle market. At the same time that the old forms were undermined by the new methods of mechanical production, a sentimental longing to retain those forms, just because they were old, seized men’s minds; and so industrialism and romanticism divided the field of architecture between them. It was no accident that caused romanticism and industrialism to appear at the same time. They [75 J Sticks and Stones 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 physi- «al 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 disre- garded; where romanticism flourished, on the other hand, in the mansions, public buildings, and churches, architecture became capricious and ab- surd, 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 Straw- [76] The Diaspora of the Pioneer berry 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 noth- ing but a lapse from the current vernacular, due to haste and insufficient resources, romantic architec- ture 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 dis- ciples like Latrobe, whose American practice is dated about two generations later. The author of The Castle of Otranto had a per- verse 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 every- where. 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 sound- ness of medieval masonry, those who followed directly in his path were affected rather by the spectacle of [77] Sticks and Stones 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 hang- ings 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 elassic orders. The drawbridge-and-moat that em- bellished Mr. Wemmick’s villa in Great Expectations was not a wild conceit of Dickens but a relic of Wal- pole and his successors. As a disguise for mean or thoughtless workman- ship, the application of antique “style” was the romantic contribution to architecture; and it served very handily during the period of speculative build- ing and selling that accompanied the growth of the [78] | The Diaspora of the Pioneer new industrial towns. Even where style did not con- ceal commercial disingenuousness, it covered up a poverty of imagination in handling the elements of a building. Gothic touches about doors and the ex- terior 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 im- pulse, and comfort its end. Many good things doubtless came out of this situation; but architec- ture was not one of them. II Modern industrialism began to take root in Amer- ica after the War of Independence, and its effect was twofold: it started up new villages which cen- tered 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 pro- vincial ports and concentrated commerce and popu- lation in great towns like Boston, Philadelphia, and New York. In New England, as in the English [79 J Sticks and Stones Cotswolds from Whitney to Chalford, the mechani- cal 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, were scrapped, and the new ways, were they good or bad, were adopted. Both land pioneering and industrial pioneering were essentially subdivisions of one occu- pation, mining; and, following the clue opened by Messrs. Geddes and Branford, one may say with Professor Adshead that the :nineteenth century ; [ 80 J The Diaspora of the Pioneer witnessed “the great attack of the miner on the peasant.” Mechanical industry owes its great development and progress to the work of the woodman and the miner: the first type of worker takes the bent sapling and develops the lathe or “bodger” which is still to be found in the remote parts of the Chil- tern Hills in England, while from the mine itself not merely comes the steam engine, first used for pumping out water, but likewise the railway. The perpetual débris amid which the miner lives forms a capital contrast with the ordered culture, the care- ful weeding and cutting, of field and orchard: almost any sort of habitation is an advance upon the squalor of the pithead; and it is not a mere chance that the era devoted to mining and all its accessory manufactures was throughout the western world the dingiest and dirtiest that has yet befouled the earth. Choked by his own débris, or stirred by the exhaustion of minerals, the miner’s community runs down—and he departs. The name pioneer has a romantic color; but in America the land pioneer mined the forests and the soil, and the industry pioneer almost as ruthlessly mined the human resources, and when the pay-dirt [ 81 J Sticks and Stones got sallow and thin, they both moved on. Long- fellow’s allusion to the “bivouac of life” uncon- sciously points to the prevailing temper; for even those who remained in the older American centers were affected by the pioneer’s malaise and unsettle- ment; and they behaved as if at any moment they might be called to the colors and sent westward. Beside the vivid promises of Mechanical Progress and Manifest Destiny the realities of an ordered society thinned into a pale vapor. In many little communities Mechanical Societies were formed for the propagation of the utilitarian faith: industrial- ism with its ascetic ritual of unsparing work, its practice of thrift, its renunciation of the arts, gathered to itself the religious zeal of Protestantism. The erection of factories, the digging of canals, the location of furnaces, the building of roads, the devis- ing of inventions, not merely exhausted a great part of the available capital; even more, it occupied the energy and imagination of the more vigorous spirits. Two generations before, Thomas Jefferson could lay out and develop the estate of Monticello; now, with many of Jefferson’s capacities, Poe could only dream about the fantastic Domain of Arnheim. ~The society around Poe had no more use for an i 82 J The Diaspora of the Pioneer architectural imagination than the Puritans had for decorative images; the smoke of the factory-chimney was incense, the scars on the landscape were as the lacerations of a saint, and the mere multiplication of gaunt sheds and barracks was a sign of progress, and therefore an earnest of perfection. Did ever so many elements of disintegration come together at one time and place before? The ab- sence of tradition and example raised enough diffi- culties in Birmingham and Manchester and Lyons and Essen; but in America it was accentuated by the restless march of those pioneers who, in the words of a contemporary economist, “leave laws, education and the arts, all the essential elements of civilization, behind them.” What place could archi- tecture fill in these squatter communities? It could diminish the hardships of living; it could grease the channels of gain; and it could demolish or “improve” so much of the old as it could not understand, as -Bulfinch’s Court House in Newburyport was im- proved, and as many a fine city residence was swept away under the tide of traffic. These were the days when the log cabin flourished ; but it did not remain long enough in place to become the well-wrought and decorative piece of rustic [ 83 | Sticks and Stones architecture that the better sort of peasant hut, done with the same materials, became in Russia. A genuine architectural development might have led from a crude log cabin to a finished one, from a bare cabin to an enriched and garnished one, and so, perhaps, in the course of a century or so, to a fine country architecture and a great native art of wood carving comparable to that of the Russian sculptors today. In America, however, the pioneer jumped baldly from log cabin to White House, or its genteel and scroll-sawed equivalent; and the arts inherent in good building never had a chance to develop. With the animus of the miner in back of everything the pioneer attempted, the pioneer’s architecture was all false-work and scantling. Til The first contribution to the pioneer’s comfort was Franklin’s ingenious stove (1745). After that came a number of material appliances. Central heating gave the American house a Roman stand- ard of comfort, the astral-oil lamp captivated Edgar Poe; and cooking stoves, gas-lighting, permanent bathtubs, and water-closets made their way into the [ 84] The Diaspora of the Pioneer better sort of house in the Eastern cities before the middle of the nineteenth century. In the develop- ment of the city itself, the gridiron plan was added to the list of labor-saving devices. Although the gridiron plan had the same relation to natural con- ditions and fundamental social needs as a paper constitution has to the living customs of a people, the simplicity of the gridiron plan won the heart of the pioneer. Its rectangular blocks formed parcels of land which he could sell by the front foot and gamble with as easily as if he were playing cards, and deeds of transfer could be drawn up hastily with the same formula for each plot; moreover, the least competent surveyor, without thought or knowl- edge, could project the growth of New Eden’s streets and avenues into an interminable future. In nine- teenth-century city planning the engineer was the willing servant of the land monopolist; and he pro- vided a frame for the architect—a frame in which _we still struggle today—where site-value counted for everything, and sight-value was not even an after- thought. In street layout and land subdivision no attention was paid to the final use to which the land would be put; but the most meticulous efforts were made to [ 85 |] Sticks and Stones safeguard its immediate use, namely, land-specula- tion. In order to further this use hills were graded, swamps and ponds filled, and streets laid out before these expenditures could be borne by the people who, in the end, were to profit by or suffer from them. It was no wonder that the newer towns like Cincinnati, St. Louis, and Chicago by the middle of the century had forfeited to the gambler in real estate, to pay the cost of street improvements, gen- erous tracts of land which the original planners had set aside as civic centers. Planned by men who still retained some of the civic vision of the early re- public, the commercial city speedily drifted into the hands of people who had no more civic scruples than the keeper of a lottery. The gridiron plan had one other defect which was accounted a virtue by the pioneer, and still is shared by those who have not profited by the inter- vening century’s experience. With its avenues that encompassed swamps and wildernesses, with its future growth forecast for at least a hundred years, the complete city plan captivated the imagination. Scarcely any American town was so mean that it did not attempt to grow faster than its neighbor, faster perhaps than New York. Only by the accu- [ 86 |] The Diaspora of the Pioneer mulation of more and more people could its colossal city plan and its inflated land values be realized. If the older cities of the seaboard were limited in their attempts to become metropolises by the fact that their downtown sections were originally laid out for villages, the villages of the middle west labored under just the opposite handicap; they had frequently ac- quired the framework of a metropolis before they had passed out of the physical state of a village. The gridiron plan was a sort of hand-me-down which the juvenile city was supposed to grow into and fill. That a city had any other purpose than to attract trade, to increase land values, and to grow is some- thing that, if it uneasily entered the mind of an occasional Whitman, never exercised any hold upon the minds of the majority of our countrymen. For them, the place where the great city stands 1s the place of stretched wharves, and markets, and ships bringing goods from the ends of the earth; that, and nothing else. IV. With business booming and vanishing, with people coming and going, with land continually changing [ 87 J Sticks and Stones hands, what encouragement was there for the stable achievements of architecture? In vain does the architect antic and grimace to conceal his despair; his business is to put on a front. If he is not a Pecksniff at heart, he will at any rate have to serve Mr. Veneering. , - - ; ; Ce a WAR Rt oe - Se a, {= . WL Tie RN st .