CHAPTER X

THE POST-COLONIAL PERIOD AND THE CLASSIC REVIVAL

After the close of the Revolutionary War came a period of comparatively rapid evolution in architecture. This phase of post-Colonial evolution reached its culminating point in the signal successes and almost ludicrous failures of the Greek or Classic Revival, successes and failures that occurred simultaneously, strange as it may seem, though caused by the same influences, and are still to be seen in the older cities of our land, oftentimes standing in close proximity.

Historically considered, this process of swift evolution is attributable to several causes of which the chief were the rapidly increasing affluence and prosperity of the new republic and the general approval with which French influences and fashions were regarded. In the era of vigorous mercantile and industrial reaction after the stress and strain of a long and exhausting war, it was but natural that not only merchants, manufacturers and other men of substance, but also whole communities as well, should seek to express in structures domestic and public the proper pride and confidence of their new-found political importance and freedom. New social and civic demands were to be met and architecture was quick to reflect the spirit of growth and progress. In a measure, too, there were the ravages of shot, shell and fire and the decay incident to a long financial depression to be repaired. With an access of material prosperity came also an access of economic elegancies and men of means and position demanded that their domestic surroundings should measure up to new standards of luxury. When they found themselves in circumstances to build anew, as they not infrequently did, their houses, while usually following much the old arrangement of plan and number of rooms, displayed new influences of ornamental detail and the alteration or addition of features in conformity to the new mode. Furthermore--and this was by no means the least factor affecting the new conditions--in the general social overturn, wrought by the event of war, the Loyalists, who represented a large portion of the wealth and refinement of the Colonial period, had been ruined, dispossessed of their estates, driven from the country or had withdrawn to England or some of the other Colonies and their places had oftentimes been taken by persons who had hitherto held a humbler state of life. These men of new wealth and standing, who owed their advancement to their warm espousal of the American cause, built themselves houses to accord with their recently acquired rank and sought by the fineness of their dwellings, as is the wont of _parvenus_, to make up for lack of birth and breeding. It was but natural, too, in all these cases just mentioned, that popular taste should incline toward an architectural vogue that was French in its immediate inspiration rather than toward any style whose precedents were to be found in the Mother Country whose recent political domination was still held in bitter remembrance.

Architecturally considered, this evolution that culminated in the full fruition of the Classic Revival shows three influences that are to be reckoned in any attempt at its analysis. In the first place, there was the Adam phase of the Georgian mode which had begun to find pronounced expression in the American Colonies from about 1770 onward. The greater refinements of this type, as analysed in preceding chapters, were strongly in evidence up to 1800 or shortly afterward and their Adam provenance was clearly distinguishable. In the second place, there were the carpenter-designed and built houses of plainly defined Georgian ancestry. During the eighteenth century, the public mind had become so thoroughly imbued with the Georgian spirit of architectural classicism, tempered and modified, to be sure, by conveyance through a British medium, but classicism all the same, that even the most unpretentious little houses gave evidence of the prevailing influence in one form or another. It might be a house door with pilasters and pediment or it might be a mantel. The pilasters flanking the doorway might have lost all traces of near kinship to any of the classic orders, so far as their details were concerned, and so might the pediment also, but the mere fact that they were there showed plainly the source whence they were derived. These carpenter-designed-and-built houses of the end of the eighteenth century may be regarded as a residuum of the architectural spirit of the epoch. Last of all, there was the pure classic influence, the circumstances of whose transplanting to America we shall examine in detail.

Both the architecture of the Georgian period and the architecture of the Classic Revival were essentially classic in spirit but there was a vast difference between their several manifestations of classicality and it is most important that we should grasp that fundamental difference. The classicism of Georgian architecture was free in its spirit and interpretation and was elastic in its adaptability to the requirements of domestic or public edifices. The architects who applied it were blessed with common sense and while they incorporated a distinct element of formal order in their work, they were not trammelled by so narrow a conventionalism that they feared to make such adaptations as their own original genius prompted, provided they were consistent with the source of general inspiration. In other words, the classicism of Georgian architecture was classicism humanised and rationalised by transmission through the channels of the Renaissance or the labours of such discriminating students of antiquity as the Brothers Adam. It was elastic and suited alike to public edifices and abodes of both high and low degree. It was also direct and simple and had the dignity and vitality that art unaffected and ingenuous always shows. For this very reason it was so convincing and so long retained its hold upon popular taste.

The classicism of the Classic Revival, on the other hand, was essentially and unalterably rigid in its adherence to the forms of antiquity and the archæological manner of applying those forms. It was not an adaptation, it was, in very truth, a _revival_ of the modes of two thousand years ago, a gigantic exhibition of architectural archæology. The strength of Georgian architecture lay in the freedom and elasticity of its classicism and its ready flexibility to adaptation. The weakness of the architecture of the Classic Revival was in its rigidity and inflexible resistance to efforts to adapt it to varied modern requirements. In the South, it is true, it showed a few traces of freer interpretation, perhaps because in some cases the artisans were incapable of rendering the accurate reproductions executed by better skilled Northern mechanics but, even with this slight allowance, the stamp of rigidity remained indelible.

Despite a degree of stiffness and pedantry, however, the architecture of the Classic Revival, in its more felicitous manifestations, displayed not a little real excellence, stateliness and grace. Many truly important structures were built during the period of classic ascendancy and to-day, after years of vicissitude in popular taste, their charm of grace and quiet dignity is still fresh and enduring and constantly reminds us of the courtliness of the generation that wisely planned and achieved them. In its less regulated forms, on the contrary, probably due to the ambitious contractor rather than to even an inferior architect, the architecture of the Classic Revival was often unsuitable in its application, uncomfortable and sometimes ridiculous. In the fore part of the nineteenth century, classicism became an obsession among builders whose sole aim seems to have been to transform each city in the land into a second Athens or Rome. Everywhere could be seen buildings that, if not planned on classic lines in their interior divisions or their side elevations, were at least adorned with Greek and Roman orders. This church or bank was embellished with a portico of Corinthian columns, that one across the street had a corresponding portico of severest Doric character while another, perhaps, around the corner rejoiced in graceful Ionic pillars and, doubtless, just beyond was a house whose owner took a proper pride in the impeccable purity of his Tuscan piazza. Sometimes all the orders got inextricably jumbled together on the same edifice and overrun with a veritable forest of acanthus leaves and anthemia, and yet the effect was not wholly bad, however much it might distress a purist, because the builders, in the exuberance and freshness of their vigour, could not help producing some vitality, although they were trying to be scrupulously accurate while expressing themselves in a medium they did not fully understand. These unseemly mix-ups of architectural botany or botanical architecture, whichever one prefers to call it, were not of common occurrence it is pleasant to record. They were the exception, and served to lend point to the really excellent and creditable things that were achieved at a time when a decorous formality went hand in hand with cultivated taste and not a little vigour of thought.

The mutation of architectural style from the Georgian mode to that of the Classic Revival was virtually synchronous and correspondent with the sway of the Empire styles in furniture, the decorative arts and personal attire. The Classic Revival style is altogether post-Colonial in date and its exotic impetus and inspiration, derived from the France of the First Napoleon and grafted upon a Georgian stock, cannot be regarded as essentially a part of the logical process of architectural evolution which had hitherto progressed by gradual and, for the most part, well nigh imperceptible steps from one traditional form to another.

The vigorous classicism of the Georgian period, thanks to its filtration through Renaissance channels, was elastic and appropriate in its application. Even the elegancies and refinements of the Adam school of Georgian expression, though drawn direct from the store of classic antiquity, were judiciously adapted to current needs by masters of the art of discrimination. But the type of classicism exemplified in the Classic Revival was deliberately transplanted bodily and _de novo_ from the ancient world by Napoleonic fiat, in like manner with the designs for furniture and the patterns to dominate the products of the other decorative arts. The transplanters sometimes showed a predilection for heavy Roman forms rather than for the delicacy of Greek refinements, and the transplanting was occasionally done in a clumsy way with little apparent regard for fitness or the principles of sane adaptation. With all the wealth of antiquity to draw from, it would have been strange indeed if the fautors of revived classicism had not produced much that was both exceedingly worthy and beautiful. As pointed out before, whatever defect or weakness characterised the expression of the Classic Revival style, viewed in the aggregate, is not to be attributed to the forms employed but to the manner in which those forms were sometimes misapplied and forced into uses or combinations to which they were ill suited.

This neo-classic inspiration of Napoleonic French contrivance found favour in America, thanks to the strong Francophile sentiment prevailing in the latter part of the eighteenth century and at the beginning of the nineteenth, which even dictated the colour and design of ladies’ gowns and their method of coiffure. In the able hands of such men as Charles Bulfinch, the neo-classic manifestation well merited all the popular approval accorded it. It is scarcely fair, however, to put Bulfinch forth, at least in his earlier period, as a typical exponent of Classic Revival architecture. He was, it is true, imbued with the new influences but he had too much creative instinct and too much sense of fitness ever to descend to mere copying or wholesale borrowing. Besides, he was, one might say, by date of birth and training, a product of the Adam age and, by native bias, in full sympathy with its delicate and refined methods of expression. Indeed, we may properly regard Bulfinch as marking the transition from the Adam or last phase of Georgian architecture to the modes of the Classic Revival for he combined in his work many of the best features of both. He knew how and when to employ Adam delicacy and refinement of detail or Adam exuberance of embellishment without falling into a surfeit of finicky and saccharine over-elaboration; he knew also when and where to use classic boldness and vigour and even classic austerity without sinking from classic grace into any of the heavy Roman forms of brutal vulgarity and military bombast that sometimes marred the work of later exponents of Classic Revival inspiration.

Bulfinch was possessed of consummate good taste, a fine sense of proportion and a genius for judicious adaptation. He was educated while the Adam influence was at its height, had broadened his field by observation and foreign travel and began to practise just before the first fresh impetus of direct classicism was launched. It was, therefore, quite natural that, with his trained perception and happy faculty of selection and combination, he should have picked out the best in each school, and peculiarly appropriate that his work should exemplify the transitional stage by which one was merged into the other for, in the evolutionary process, already alluded to, the purest form of neo-classic design found its analogue in the earlier Adam practice.

Along with Bulfinch, as a representative of the transition stage, must be classed Samuel McIntire, of Salem, whose work both public and domestic has always been justly esteemed. He, too, retained a large share of Adam elegance and wealth of detail which he successfully incorporated with motifs and methods of treatment inspired by the more recent impetus of classicism. To McIntire’s influence may be attributed much of the slender delicacy of proportion and the attenuation of pillars and pilasters--this attenuation had a counterpart in some of the contemporary New York Dutch design--so noticeable in a great deal of New England architecture of this period. He eliminated all grossness and pared down the dimensions of columns while he drew out their length to a degree that had no precedent in ancient practice and would have shocked the French purists under whose auspices the new movement

had been inaugurated. Despite these departures from architectural and archæological orthodoxy, however, McIntire’s work is replete with exquisite charm and is justified by applying to it the touchstone of good taste.

Latrobe, McComb, in his later work, L’Enfant, Hoban, Dr. Thornton, Thomas Jefferson, Strickland and other noted architects of the last years of the eighteenth century and the fore part of the nineteenth followed classic precedent somewhat more closely in the practice of their profession and may, therefore, be considered the most faithful and typical exponents of Classic Revival principles. Much of their work is noble in conception and peculiarly suited to the monumental character of the buildings they designed.

The influence of the Classic Revival was to be noted earliest in public edifices such as the Boston State House on Beacon Hill, the New Theatre or the Bank of the United States in Philadelphia or, most of all, in the Capitol at Washington in the design, erection and restoration or rebuilding of which so many of the most eminent architects of the day had a share. There the classic orders were reproduced with faithful accuracy in combinations that displayed their chaste beauty and noble proportions in the most dignified and impressive manner. Capitals of impeccable exactitude and fidelity to their prototypes, pediments and entablatures of due proportion, triglyphs, mutules, modillion brackets, acanthus leaves, egg and dart mouldings, dentils, anthemia and all the other structural and ornamental features characteristic of either Greek or Roman architecture became familiar objects to the public gaze and exercised their subtle but powerful agency in the education of a disciplined and elegant sense of architectural propriety.

The architecture of the Classic Revival was undoubtedly at its best in public edifices or in large and imposing mansions which afforded sufficient opportunity to display its ample characteristics. Such structures, moreover, did not require any great stretch of ingenuity in making adaptations. While columns might have to be lengthened out or features foreign to classic conception added, the task of accommodation rarely offered serious difficulties to be overcome. In the hands of such men as Bulfinch or McIntire, at the outset, or of Latrobe, Hoban, Strickland and their various able contemporaries, the Classic Revival gave us many truly admirable structures instinct with dignity and grace. In the hands of the too confident and insufficiently educated mechanic who ventured to try his hand at designing, it was a very different thing indeed and its remaining examples of this inferior type can scarcely be viewed with pleasure.

If one may trace an analogy between the Adam mode and the best manifestations of the Classic Revival with its stately structures full of breadth, dignity and repose, so may one also trace with ease an analogy between the carpenter-designed-and-built houses of the end of the Georgian period and much of the insignificant domestic work of the Classic Revival. In other words, the elegant Adam creations bore virtually the same relation to the contemporary carpenter-designed houses as did the larger and serenely chaste compositions of the Classic Revival to the small and inexpensive attempts on the part of ambitious builders to apply the same style to little, cramped structures for which it was manifestly unfit. There was this difference, however. The carpenter-architects of the end of the Georgian period were far superior in discrimination and taste to their successors, who tried to make up for their lack of knowledge by ill-judged essays that succeeded only in being ridiculous. Their tiny, temple-fronted houses were not domestic and were as unreal and architecturally unsatisfying as stage settings viewed from the rear. They were bombastic and pompous--one feels almost like saying “pompious”--and displayed no real merit or refinement to back up their preposterous pretensions to a dignity and state not at all in keeping with their true purpose. The so-called “carpenters’ classic” mode, which was really a chastened and restrained form of the debased Classic Revival style, was infinitely preferable because it was simple and did not pretend to be something it was not.

Among the thoroughly striking and important buildings erected in this era that ought to be mentioned, besides those already referred to, are the Sub-Treasury in New York, Girard College in Philadelphia, the Philadelphia Custom House, and the Cathedral in Baltimore. These are typical buildings and, for that reason, worthy of being kept in mind, but the list of creditable examples might be added to almost indefinitely.

As a direct result of the Classic Revival influence there was a certain amount of modest and agreeable adaptation which created a pleasant domestic episode in the annals of American architecture. Examples of this modified classic school are unpretentious and, for the reason that they mark no ambitious flights, commendable in their own field. For want of a better name we have been accustomed to call this architectural species “Carpenters’ Classic.” Whatever its shortcomings--and not much can be expected of it for it makes no pretence--it was infinitely better than much that followed it.

In contemplating the story of the Classic Revival one can find much to be thankful for.

Let its failures be what they may, it was in large measure due to the work done during the period of its ascendancy that we owe a certain tradition and precedent in public work that has wrought for good and is still working in our own day.