American Architecture: Studies. Montgomery Schuyler
“movement” has not, thus far, either in England or in the United States, produced a monument which anybody but its author would venture to pronounce very good. Not to go back to the times when Gothic architecture was vernacular in England, it has produced nothing which can be put in competition with the works either of the English classical revival, or with the works of the English Gothic revival—with St. Paul’s and the Radcliffe Library, on the one hand, or with Westminster Palace and the Manchester Town-hall, on the other. Before the “movement” began, the architects of Europe and America were divided into two camps. They professed themselves either Renaissance or Gothic architects. The mediævalists acknowledged a subjection to certain principles of design. The classicists accepted certain forms and formulæ as efficacious and final. They were both, therefore, under some restraint. But the new movement seems to mean that aspiring genius shall not be fettered by mechanical laws or academic rules, by reason or by revelation, but that every architect shall build what is right in his own eyes, even if analysis finds it absurd and Vitruvius condemns it as incorrect.
“Queen Anne” is a comprehensive name which has been made to cover a multitude of incongruities, including, indeed, the bulk of recent work which otherwise defies classification, and there is a convenient vagueness about the term which fits it for that use. But it is rather noteworthy that the effect of what is most specifically known as Queen Anne is to restrain the exuberances of design. Whoever recalls Viollet-le-Duc’s pregnant saying, that “only primitive sources supply the energy for a long career,” would scarcely select the reign of Queen Anne out of all English history for a point of departure in the history of any one of the plastic arts. The bloated Renaissance of Wren’s successors, such as is shown in Queen’s College and in Aldrich’s church architecture in Oxford, was its distinctive attainment in architecture. The minute and ingenious woodcarving of Grinling Gibbons was its distinctive attainment in decoration. Nothing could show more forcibly the degeneracy of art at the period which of late years has been represented as an æsthetic renascence than the acceptance of these wood-carvings, which in execution and all technical qualities are as complete, and in design and all imaginative qualities are as trivial and commonplace, as contemporary Italian sculpture, as works of art comparable to the graceful inventions of Jean Goujon, and clearly preferable to the sometimes rude but always purposeful decoration of mediæval churches.
The revivalists of Queen Anne have not confined their attentions to the reign of that sovereign. They have searched the Jacobean and the Georgian periods as well, and have sucked the dregs of the whole English Renaissance. Unhappily, nowhere in Europe was the Renaissance so unproductive as in the British Islands. It was so unproductive, indeed, that Continental historians of architecture have scarcely taken the trouble to look it up or to refer to it at all. Not merely since the beginning of the Gothic revival, but since the beginning of the Greek revival that was stimulated by the publication of Stuart’s work on Athens, in which for the first time uncorrupted Greek types could be studied, what contemporary architects have ransacked as a treasury was considered a mere lumber-room, and fell not so much into disesteem as into oblivion. During two generations nobody any more thought of studying the works of English architecture from Hawksmoor to “Capability” Brown, than anybody thought of studying the poetry of Blackmore and Hayley. The attempt within the past ten years to raise to the rank of inspirations the relics of this decadence, which for years had been regarded by everybody as rather ugly and ridiculous, is one of the strangest episodes in the strange history of modern architecture.
Mr. Norman Shaw has been the chief evangelist of this strange revival. Mr. Shaw is a very clever designer, with a special felicity in piquant and picturesque groupings, which he had shown in Gothic work, especially in country-houses, before the caprice seized him of uniting free composition with classic detail, and the attempt at this union is what is most distinctively known as Queen Anne. Whoever considers the elements of this combination would hardly hope that the result could be a chemical union, or more than a mechanical mixture. Classic detail is the outcome and accompaniment of the simplest construction possible, which was employed by the Greek architects in the simplest combination possible, and precisely because it was so simple and so primitive they were enabled to reduce it to an “order,” and to carry it to a pitch of purity, lucidity, and refinement to which the most enthusiastic mediævalist will scarcely maintain that more complicated constructions have ever attained. But this very perfection, which was only attainable when life was simple and the world was young, this necessary relation between the construction and the detail of Greek Doric, makes it forever impossible that Greek detail should be successfully “adapted” to modern buildings. A late writer on the theory of architecture has said of Greek architecture: “As partisans of its historical glory, we should desire that it remain forever in its historical shrine.” We laugh at the men of two generations ago who covered Europe and America with private and public buildings in reproduction as exact as they could contrive of Grecian temples. But, after all, if the Greek temple be the ultimate, consummate flower, not only of all actual but of all possible architectural art, were not these men wiser in their generation than their successors who have taken the Greek temple to pieces and tried to construct modern buildings out of its fragments? There is even something touching and admirable, in this view, in the readiness and completeness of the sacrifice to beauty which the reproducers of the Greek temples made of all their merely material comforts and conveniences, something that we miss in the adapters. The Romans can scarcely be said to have attempted this adaptation. They built Roman buildings for purposes and by methods which had never entered the minds of Greek architects to conceive, and they built them with no more thought of art than enters the mind of a modern railway engineer in designing a truss bridge. After they were designed according to their requirements it was that the Roman engineer overlaid them with an irrelevant trellis of Greek architecture, debasing and corrupting the Greek architecture in the process. And it is this hybrid architecture, which analysis would at once have dissolved into its component parts, that was accepted without analysis as the starting-point of “the new departure” of the fifteenth century, and the ultimate English debasement of which in the eighteenth is taken by the contemporary architects of England and America as the starting-point of the new departure in the nineteenth. It cannot be said that Mr. Norman Shaw and his followers have succeeded in the task of combining free composition with classic detail, which the Romans forbore to attempt, and in which the French architects of the sixteenth century failed. Every attempt to fit antique detail to a building faithfully designed to meet modern requirements shows that it cannot be so fitted without being transformed, and—since the sole excuse for the attempt is that it cannot be bettered—without being debased. What the Queen Anne men have done is virtually what the Romans did. They have shirked the impossible problem they unnecessarily imposed upon themselves, and have either overlaid or inlaid their buildings with their architecture. Of course the result of this process can no more be accepted as an architectural organism than if they had hung water-proof paper on the outer walls instead of decorating them with carving, or moulding, or what not, built in the walls, but no more architecturally related to them than the paper-hanging. But this is precisely what has been done in every “free classic” building, with more or less skill and dissimulation of the process. It is seldom done with the winning candor with which it has been done in the house of Mr. W. H. Vanderbilt in New York, which is officially described as a specimen of the “Greek Renaissance,” possibly because its architectural details are all Roman. In that edifice two bands of exquisite carving—exquisite in execution, that is to say—which girdle the building, simply occur on the wall at levels where they are quite meaningless in relation to the building; where, consequently, they would not help the expression of the building, if the building could be said to have any expression beyond that of settled gloom; and where the irrelevant carving, not being framed by itself, would contradict the expression of a structure which was architecturally, and not alone mechanically, a building. How much this carving would gain by being framed away, so that if it did not help, it should at least not injure, the architecture to which it is attached, may be seen by comparing these Vanderbilt houses with a brown-stone house, in formal Renaissance, in upper Fifth Avenue, near Sixty-ninth Street, where the carving is neither better cut nor more abundant than that of the Vanderbilt houses, but where its disposition at least appears to be premeditated, and not casual.
It would scarcely be worth while to point out the faults of designs, if they can even be described as such, so generally disesteemed as those of the