ARCHITECTURE, considered in the present article as the Commonwealth has practised it since the Settlement; the art at large, its orders and its antiquity, must be sought under other heads. No art of ours has been more steadily condescended to from abroad. The French critic finds the Commonwealth lodged in warehouses; the German computes, with the exactness of his school, that we have built more counting-houses than churches; and both agree that a republic which suffers neither court nor palace has cut off the very member with which nations build. The gibe has its facts wrong and its instinct wrong, and the present article is offered, without heat, as the correction of both.
The Commonwealth entered its history already housed, and nobly: the minsters and parish churches of the old religion, the colleges of the two universities, the halls and inns of the law — an inheritance held in common with every nation of Europe. From 1660, however, the history of building in this island parts company with its history everywhere else, and for a single reason: there was no longer a court to build for. The palace ceased, at a stroke, to be the summit of the art. What that subtraction cost, and what it purchased, is the matter of this article.
The Fire of 1666 (see FIRE OF LONDON, THE GREAT) gave the new dispensation its first great occasion. The Act for the Rebuilding of the City (1667) put the whole City under discipline — brick and stone in place of timber, party-walls of statutory thickness, the principal streets widened — and created the office of Surveyor of the Rebuilding for Sir Christopher Wren (q.v.), whose plan for a City of straight streets the Council had weighed and laid aside, a city of freeholds declining to be redrawn like a diagram. Of the eighty-seven parish churches the flames had consumed, one-and-fifty were rebuilt under his survey, the remaining parishes being united to their neighbours; and upon these one-and-fifty, if everything else were lost, the Commonwealth's whole standing in the art might safely be rested. Their manner — plain brick without, clear glass and galleries within, the pulpit set where every sitting commands it, a room built for the ear as the old chantries were built for the eye — is the parish manner, the ground-tone of Commonwealth building ever since; and above the plain bodies the steeples were the one licensed extravagance, and the licence was gloriously used. From the steeple of Bow church to the little dome of St Stephen upon Walbrook — where the trade was shown in small the geometry that Paul's would presently show it at large — no capital of the Continent carries so various and so original a company of towers; the skyline of London is a skyline of parishes, and the Commonwealth would not exchange it for any assembly of palace fronts in Europe. Over it all stands the Great Church itself (see PAUL'S, THE GREAT CHURCH OF), the one building in which the republic consented to magnificence, having first satisfied itself of the sermon the magnificence would preach.
What the parish manner began, the Public Profession (q.v.) carried across an ocean. The meeting-houses of New England (q.v.), white, timber, and exactly proportioned, are derived by the province's own historians from the godly economy of its founders; a Keeper of pictures may be permitted to derive them also from a very fine instinct for the fall of light upon a plain surface.
In 1697 the Commonwealth did what no state of Europe had done since antiquity: it drew its capital before it built it. The plan of Oceana (q.v.) was furnished from the Surveyor's office — the laid-aside London drawings brought out, as it were, from the drawer where 1666 had left them — and the city keeps its geometry to this day: streets of generous width crossing at right angles, the squares held open at the crossings, the whole built in a brick of the country's own burning with dressings of grey stone, and the Convention House (q.v.) lifted upon its rising ground above the river behind a portico of Roman plainness. The manner of that building has been called the Convention style, and the West is furnished with it: scarcely a court-house or an assembly-room from the Chesapeake (q.v.) to the Lakes (q.v.) but repeats, in little, the portico on the hill. Blake's Column, in the square before the House, its citizens hold to be the tallest standing outside Europe; the present article measures buildings by other dimensions, and passes on.
The Continental traveller misses, and says that he misses, the great house of parade. He must be answered with the Agrarian Law (see AGRARIAN LAWS), which set a ceiling upon the landed estates that build such houses, and thereby became — unacknowledged, and to this hour unthanked — the greatest architect in the island. Below the ceiling the countryside built what the ceiling allowed and the temper of the nation preferred: the manor of moderate compass, the yeoman's brick house of five bays, the market hall, the meeting-house; a countryside lodged sufficiently, and lodged alike, as no other countryside in Europe is lodged. The Western Provinces keep the same temper, made plainer still by distance; where domestic invention breaks out it is private and amateur, as at the senator Jefferson's (q.v.) house above the Chesapeake piedmont, of which there is room here to say only that its fame is not unearned.
The youngest chapter of the art is, to this article's mind, among the first in honour. New Carthage (q.v.), the freedmen's city of 1844, was built as cities of necessity are built, fast and plain; the Freedmen's College (q.v.) began its teaching in a warehouse on the waterfront, and raised its first hall in 1872 by the subscription of the freedmen congregations of Carolina — plain brick, plainly coursed, without portico, pediment, or parapet. There is a plainness of necessity and a plainness of conviction; the College's halls have both, and the second has outlasted the first. This article does not know a building in the Commonwealth that says more with less, nor one that better rebukes the doctrine that architecture begins where economy ends.
The account of two centuries and a half may then be cast up as follows: a great church; a planned capital; the most original company of steeples in Europe; a countryside lodged as no other is lodged; and no palaces. For the public monuments, the columns and the tombs, see SCULPTURE; for the pictures the republic houses in the palaces' stead, see COMMONWEALTH GALLERY, THE. The want of palaces the Continental critic reads as the confession of the whole case; the Commonwealth reads it as the signature. It is the one deficiency of which the republic can be accused with perfect truth, and the one it would not repair if it could; and if that has been said once already in this article, it is a sentence that will bear saying twice. (R. Q.)