Joy Wheeler Dow

“ This amplification of the backyard—the dignity afforded it by an independent gateway upon a street of its own, the pair of doors with a transom opening into it from the staircase hall recessed by the rounded corner of the back building, and the disposition of the back building itself, all present dazzling opportunities to the architect not only for effects but for comfort and convenience. The mezzanine dining-room with windows upon two sides has unlimited possibilities which they seem never to have fully grasped or appreciated in Philadelphia. ”

“ If you have not sense enough to listen to your own muse, to study the history of art for yourself, to speak the language of architecture as all your honored predecessors have spoken it, following religiously the splendid historical chart that is ever at your service for reference while leaving your style to take care of itself—I am sorry for you. ”

“ Clever as were the architects of the Jacobin houses—and I consider some of them to have been very clever—clever as are the inventors of our newest type of building expression, there are no inherent qualities in the work of either school of design that will serve historical succession. Invented architecture has no more atmosphere than exists upon the surface of the moon. It may divert popular fancy for a time. ”

“ By American Renaissance I allude to no “American eclectic style.” That term “eclectic style,” which so frequently crops out in treatises upon architecture, were you to follow it up, would be found to signify, as a rule, merely American nonsense and aberration. And I suppose there is no nation which may show such an imposing array of architectural nonsense as the United States during the last fifty years of their independence. Certainly no nation has evolved a national style of architecture, intentionally, as is constantly urged upon American enterprise. ”

“ Young America was not emancipated at all. Another master was set over him, and that master was unrelenting expediency, who forthwith usurped the throne of deposed art. Perhaps we are just beginning to suspect the ruse after seventy-five years of license and anarchy in art matters. What we did was simply to exchange a legitimate sovereign for a coarse, unlettered and brutal demagogue, of whom every American, young and old, by this time, should be heartily ashamed. ”

“ Talmage called the Queen Anne style the most abominable of all styles of architecture. But when legitimately developed there is nothing the matter with the Queen Anne style at all. It was the Jacobin and bastard features without antecedents and raison d’être that brought it into ridicule, and caused a composite style of American dwelling-house, Queen Anne in motive but Romanesque in detail, to make the necessary apologies to the public in the guise of an improved substitute. ”

“ Besides, in no other style of building that I have seen could a dollar be made to make more show than in the cupola-house of our Reign of Terror. The art of pretentiousness was never better understood, and no art has responded more quickly to a popular demand.
The photograph of a house, which I have not the heart to publish, recalls to memory the story of an old gentleman, now some years deceased, who at the height of his career started out to build the most fanciful house that anybody could possibly imagine. ”

“ There is a pleasure for most temperaments in art—a certain happiness that it contributes in a mild way. The average temperament experiences through art a sensation akin to that produced by music, and like music to the average temperament, art is by no means a necessity. It is merely the graceful accomplishment to be cultivated after the serious business of life is off the stage for the day, and we turn to playthings; whereas in the case of the artist, it is his whole existence. ”

“ Style in architecture and literature alike is something which shapes itself unconsciously to the mind{150}—something which will neither be coerced nor cajoled, but obeyed. Style selects its craftsman rather than craftsmen their style. Style is the master, and we are the students ever observing, listening, trying to understand, waiting for our cue, and finally speaking our lines according to the histrionic ability there is in each of us, for style is eminently dramatic. ”

“ AMERICAN RENAISSANCE CHAPTER I
ETHICS
The magnificence of this subject, even of a single branch—the domestic phase—is disproportionate to a review in one volume, in the scope of which, I fear, I cannot achieve much more than a respectable introduction. But even an introduction, like the overture to an opera, is better begun at the beginning.
Civilized man, and especially one of Anglo-Saxon descent, is a home-loving creature. To him the dwelling-place stands for his most important institution. ”

“ Still, granted for the moment that these two antithetical schools of design, both palpable products of the modern brain enfranchised from all considerations of precedent, are equal measured by the laws of harmony and logic alone, it does seem almost beyond belief that the newly invented architecture of this epoch, for which such fine promises are made in all good faith by representative architects, is destined to acquire quite the discreditable reputation of the Reign of Terror, and by the inconstancy of fashion. ”

“ We should be unquestionably better off without them. They are only the lame device of the epoch in which we live to facilitate business until such time as we shall interfere with our neighbor’s daylight beyond all endurance, and here we must perforce desist. Well, one may toady to commercialism himself, if he likes—if he conceives that such a course is really going to be to his advantage; but he cannot make art do it.
To the contrary, art is itself a very jealous god, and does not permit the serving of two masters, at least, two such antithetical masters as itself and commercialism. ”

“ The school of design which has proved the greatest attraction to the blossoming genius of America is, of course, French Renaissance, preëminently at the time I write. To say that an architect is a Beaux Arts man is equivalent to speaking of a certain much advertised brand of whiskey, in that compliments are superfluous. ”

“ Of course, these Colonial houses are Renaissance, because Renaissance, since Mediæval times, has been the connecting link history has found convenient to unite the present with the past. Yet there is not a building in either England or France or Italy like any of them. They are intensely American in every line, and express as much American history as George Bancroft was able to express in his great literary work. Architecture is not architecture which does not express history. ”

“ A modern house-builder requested to supply some unique shelter for the doorway would understand you to mean that you wished him to invent something which, by the way, is a task infinitely agreeable to the modern practitioner. It is safe to aver that the adviser of Miles Merwin, whoever he was, had never invented anything in his life. He would not have dared to try the experiment in architecture, at any rate, more than had he been the indentured apprentice of a Florentine architect. ”

“ Let me say to you that you have something already so much ahead of average modern Colonial—“as she is spoke”—that it would be a sin against the decalogue of art to alter or, indeed, do other with it than religiously to guard. Just keep your Transitional exemplar in the same admirable state of repair in which you see the de Zeng house at Middletown—and enjoy it. You will thereby have fulfilled your duty to art and to the future generations who will rise up and call you blessed. ”

“ Whether we build our columns up of stone or wooden sections—latitudinal in the one case, longitudinal in the other—to support a cornice also constructed in sections according to the convenient sizes of commerce for the particular material, makes no difference to the canons of art so long as we are not trying to deceive or to imitate one material with another simply with that end in view. It is extremely doubtful if our American ancestors were ever guilty of premeditated deception. ”

“ Michelangelo requested that all the plans of his illustrious predecessor, Bramante, the original designer of the cathedral, be brought to him: and fully appreciating the responsibility of the complex work that had descended to him by the rightful heirship of true art, Michelangelo emphatically declared he conceived it to be his duty to carry forward Bramante’s design, and, moreover, that wherever the intercedent tinkers had departed from this design, just so much had they erred. How strange this policy sounds placed in contrast to the ethics of American expediency! ”

“ In lieu of further recurrence to all that has since transpired, and is transpiring to-day with the same moral, I should say without qualification that adaptation—let us call it so until we discover a better term—is the soul of architecture, presupposing the highest kind of talent, most extended education, and artistic susceptibility. ”

“ I have selected a Tudor castle because the field is practically untouched in American Renaissance and modern architecture generally. If there be fashion in adaptation, the fashion has been for Elizabethan and Jacobean adaptations rather than Tudor; but the real reason why we have no creditable offspring of that delightful old rambler—Haddon Hall (see Plate LXXII) , in America is to be found in the fact that no American architect capable of exploiting the thing has thought about it or else he has lacked the opportunity, more probably the latter. ”

“ Centuries have elapsed, and the province of the architect now is to make the castle perform its whole process of evolution noiselessly in his brain, and come down to date so as to meet the problem of a twentieth century home without disturbing the illusion of its history, a process entailing concerted tension of heart and brain to which the conditions imposed by mere abstract architectural design are puerile. ”

“ Then there came a time when the legitimate development and prosperity of the colonies produced, not what the forcing box of commercialism has produced—a moneyed class under obligations to no one—but an aristocracy whose noblesse oblige vouchsafed the encouragement of architecture in common with other arts and refinements. ”

“ For it may be that I do these wholesalers of printed plans a great injustice—it may be they realize, as do other architects, only too keenly, that architecture is the cubic measure of art, and requires an artist of the third power to fuss with it successfully, in which case I fancy I recognize even greater method in their madness. ”

“ Fortunately for American architecture, Sir Christopher Wren was what we would call in our vernacular “all right.” He had a good thing, an inexhaustible mine for supplying ideas for all manner of buildings, and he worked it for the best interests of all concerned. His reputation and success have fired many a modern, would-be Wren to dare to try the experiment of some rival kind of architecture. Such is the aspect we have now of the late H. H. Richardson and his Romanesque style (Plate V) .
Trinity Church in Boston was a superb design when it was finished, and continues to be so to-day. ”

“ No true artist could be entirely happy to look at the world from the financier’s standpoint. He may listen attentively to the cunning of expediency fascinatingly unfolded, for his own good, for the good of his family, and the assurance of the future, he may heartily wish to exchange temperaments with that financier, temporarily, till he shall have gained independence of the world commercial, in vain. ”

“ The art prophet which this bourgeois epoch produced corresponded exactly to it—just such a one as might be naturally expected—John Ruskin, old fogy with ideas of no practical value to communicate to the world, but, like Browning and Emerson, full of words, rhymes and sentences. Ruskin conceived a violent passion à la Plato for the Gothic mode of building. He affected to deplore the “foul flood of the Renaissance.” And his great theory was that as the leaves of plants nearly always terminate in a point, it was intended by nature that man should take pattern therefrom for his architecture. ”

“ If he be fair, sincere with himself, while caviling at adaptation, how can he make use of such a class of architecture as we have exemplified in every-day acquaintances like Trinity Church by Upjohn and Grace Church by Renwick, two intensely American designs, yet gauged by the standard of modern criticism, out and out adaptations of mediæval Gothic! ”

“ The result of the best adaptation is the gradual formation of a national style of architecture. The closest adaptation that has been exploited in America both in recent and what we call our ancient work, compared with its separable prototypes, who shall say is not unmistakably modern and American? Style is never evolved by the empirical architecture of irrepressible inventors. Invention belongs to science. ”

“ The house with the cupola in America was, in effect, a newly-invented style or architecture of its era, no doubt suggested by the sumptuous villas of the Italian Renaissance, since they have always suggested prodigious opulence, and would naturally attract a people who had suddenly become rich. ”