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
[Illustration: SHIRLEY-ON-THE-JAMES. _See Chapter V._]
[Illustration: AMERICAN ROMANESQUE DWELLING, BY AN IMITATOR OF RICHARDSON.
“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.