Page:The Continental Monthly, Volume 5.djvu/477

Rh out of the quaintly gabled streets, with their richly wrought transepts and their pinnacled spires. Not trailing along the ground like the Greek temple or the Arab mosque—of the earth, earthy—but leading the soul heavenward with their upward flow of harmony. Vast Bibles of stone, bearing on lofty facade and on buttressed flank the sculptured details of Holy Writ—silent lessons, but not lost upon the rude though reverent men who dwelt within their shadow. It is sad to think that there can never be any more cathedrals. For they grew in those times: now they would have to be built.

But we are following a tangent. Our idea is, that architecture, to be good, must be appropriate—expressive of the spirit of the age. It should be an epitome of the nation's progress, an abstract of its guiding principles, condensed, as it were, and crystallized into an art. Of what use would a garment be, though ever so elaborate, if it did not fit? Just so our houses, which are but a broader kind of clothing, should be fitted to their purpose, or they will never yield us any pleasure.

Suppose that, in searching the ruins of ancient Greece, we found nothing but pusillanimous, sham imitations of Egyptian art. Would we not despise such a paltry method of making matter serve for mind—such a miserable make-shift to save the labor of invention? And yet it is this same servile imitation of classical and foreign models that is fettering the progress of art in America. Instead of honestly constructing what we want, and then decorating it with a style of ornament that should assist, explain, and intensify it, we go wandering off to the ends of the earth, building Grecian temples and Veronese palaces, some entire and some in slices, dreary, indefinite-looking objects, devoid of all constructive principles within, and ornamented with falsified gew-gaws without, stuck on in the hope of hiding rather than helping out the flimsy design. Our 'national style' we are sure can never be born of any such travesties. Borrowed architecture never fits well.

The fact is, we ignore the first great principle—the essence and sine qua non of the art—. By construction is meant that mechanical arrangement of parts which is best suited to convenience and most conducive to stability. It is what the French would call the motif, the end in view, while decoration is only the means. And the moment we lose sight of it, in our anxiety to make room for some pet ornament, that very ornament becomes an eyesore, and will persist in spoiling the design, for the simple reason that the end is sacrificed to the means. Set it down, then, at the start, that ornament must be dependent upon construction, and not construction upon ornament. The useful begets the beautiful, and the order cannot be reversed.

But before proceeding to what American architecture might be, we must, in all fairness, examine it as it is.

Our great cities, of course, claim our attention first, for these centres of wealth and intellect must necessarily be centres of art, and there, if at all, are we to discover our prospects for a national style. As a single example of what it has attained to so far, nothing can be better suited to our purpose than Broadway, New York, our best-known and most essentially American thoroughfare. But what to compare it to we know not. Neither history nor geography affords a parallel. It resembles neither the London Strand nor the Parisian Boulevard, nor is it like the Ludwig Strasse of Munich, nor the Grand Canal of Venice; and yet it has something or other in common with all of these. There is all the incongruity of the English thoroughfare and the brilliancy of the French, while the frequent succession of vast palatial structures allies it still closer to the last-named examples. Perhaps, after all, the Grand Canal—the silent highway of the City of the Sea—is more like it in