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PLATE III.

PICKERING HOUSE, SALEM.

Erected AD 1649.

COLE HOUSE, FARMINGTON, CONN.

and with great advantage, for it permitted the Colonist to elaborate the elevations of his dwelling, gaining thereby warmth, cheerfulness and grace, and all easily within his means. Without the slightest danger of bankruptcy he could proceed to embellish the curtilage with arched gateways, ornamental fences, terrace rails and summer-houses ad lib. I have selected, to suggest such amplification, the photograph of an old-time Renaissance garden in the rear of the Watkinson house at Middletown, Connecticut (Plate I), also the photograph of an ancient house at Farmington (Plate III). The latter has a beautiful Renaissance gateway which would be an impossibility in stone. I believe it is called the “Cole house,” and that its owner is a cousin of President Roosevelt. It serves my purpose, too, on another count—its color scheme. I am not prepared to say just why two particular shades of common brown paint should be so effective for certain kinds of Colonial houses. Certainly, this one frankly disavows any allegiance to architectural stonework. It fairly proclaims itself to be a wooden building, while all we can say is that those unerring sensibilities within us by which we distinguish right from wrong are satisfied beyond the shadow of doubt, and so we have no great need to question the whys and wherefores upon a purely ethical point. In Salem, Massachusetts, there are numerous examples of brown Colonial houses. Extremely effective in themselves, they make the most beautiful photographs imaginable (see Plate IV). Within the radius of a few squares you may obtain half a dozen equally charming glimpses of Colonial scenery. Indeed, if you want atmosphere, and plenty of it—go to Salem.

Had America been settled and colonized two centuries earlier, under a Tudor king, most likely there would have been a Gothic influence in the early work. It is difficult to know in our day how it could possibly have been exploited in wood, and there is no excuse for our attempting anything of the kind at this time of unlimited resources in the building trade. Battlements, keeps and moats were Feudal protectory measures, and would have been worse than useless constructed of anything inflammable. About the only legitimate Gothic architecture expressed in wood which

PLATE IV.

IF YOU WANT ATMOSPHERE AND PLENTY OF IT, GO TO SALEM.

HISTORIC ATMOSPHERE IN A MODERN DWELLING.

“Silvergate,” Summit, N. J. (1901.)

has stood the test of time, is represented by the 17th and 18th century châlets of Switzerland, and I doubt if even Yankee ingenuity could have evolved anything half so good. As a matter of fact we have no ancient Gothic exemplars. It is said that the old Pickering house on Broad Street in Salem, built A.D. 1649 (see Plate III), was a replica in wood of a Jacobean tavern in England, namely, the Peacock Inn, Derbyshire. The venerable dwelling at Salem has passed through many vicissitudes, and in 1842, when the influence of John Ruskin was so misused in America, the Pickering house was largely remodeled, so that it is impossible to say, to-day, how successful an adaptation of Jacobean work this was. But even Jacobean architecture is scarcely Gothic architecture since England incorporates it with all the rest of her Renaissance.

Sir Christopher Wren was supreme upon the architectural stage of England when the prosperity of the American colonies was sufficient to warrant the academic study of domestic architecture upon this side of the Atlantic, and Sir Christopher was the very life of the English Renaissance in its stricter sense. During this great history-making epoch, the giant forests of America came into excellent play for following out—if often in a crude and kind of miniature way—whatever the prodigious architect executed in stone. There was no bit of classic detail from either Athens or Rome, transmitted to London through what I may call the “Florentine Clearing-house” presided over by Palladio, Sansovino, Scammozzi and their contemporaries, but what could be carved more readily in wood; and time and history have thrown a glamour over all this wooden development of ours, and established its right of succession with a hall-mark.

But the main point in favor of Renaissance architecture, it must be remembered, was that it lent itself extremely well to the Anglo-Saxon home-feeling. It emanated from a land that had reached the pinnacle of attainment in the arts of peace—Italy—and it was so easy to fashion and make minister to most Anglo-Saxon home requirements. Luckily, the Colonial builders were conservative artificers, neither so clever nor so restless as this generation, or they, certainly, could not have resisted the eloquence of false prophets and knavish architectural promoters and fakirs who came their way. And we should have been deprived of our illustrious inheritance, which, happily, cannot be taken from us now.

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. But its best influence, I fear, has been perverted forever. A quarter of a century ago Richardson was hailed as an apostle equal with Wren, and America went mad, not in a Romanesque revival, but in a carnival of it, by which I mean to say it was burlesqued. It is sad to reflect that such a genius as the man who designed the church in Boston should have allowed himself to succumb to the wiles of the flatterers enough to be drawn into the disgraceful saturnalia which followed so close upon his brilliant début.

Now the home of the Romanesque was not Florence. It pretended to nothing of the court of Lorenzo the Magnificent, which, if it stood for anything, was elegant living. Mediæval, benighted south of France was the home proper of the Romanesque, and its proper medium of expression—churches, cloisters, and monasteries. What could such a style of architecture contribute to the Anglo-Saxon home? Absolutely nothing. And when Trinity Church was finally completed, Richardson had practically exhausted everything there was in the newly borrowed style. He could have gone on, probably, raising ecclesiastic edifices, designing an occasional library or two in good form, without directly cribbing from his masterpiece; but neither he nor his imitators—and they were legion—cared a fig for the ethics or proprieties of architecture. They appear to have been actuated alone by the same principles of expediency which govern the

PLATE V.

SHIRLEY-ON-THE-JAMES. See Chapter V.

AMERICAN ROMANESQUE DWELLING, BY AN IMITATOR OF RICHARDSON.

Date about 1890.

“New Art” movement. They invented an exaggerated architectural grammar, without doubt derived from the old mediæval cathedrals in the south of France, but so vulgarized as to establish a clear case of libel for those eminently respectable prototypes. This grammar the rabid reformers proceeded to apply to every kind of secular building in America, finally to American dwelling-houses themselves. They did not reckon with their grandparents for an instant, not they. They apparently took the keenest delight in walking rough-shod over every sacred home memory. They openly insulted the very ancestors to whom they owed existence. But the balance of good and evil there is in the world cannot be disturbed so suddenly or arbitrarily. Outraged history was not slow to assert itself, and after a while would have no more of the dwelling-house Romanesque. I regret to say that Richardson’s imitators were not the last of their race, and that there have been other and as rabid architectural reformers, of whom I shall speak in the next chapter.