SENTIMENTAL REFORMER IN ARCHITECTURE? –NOT. The issue in this thumbnail biography will be whether or not Henry Thoreau can be said to have, in WALDEN; OR. LIFE IN THE WOODS, implicitly derogated Horatio Greenough as a “sentimental reformer in architecture.” My conclusion will be that although PEOPLE OF Thoreau did indeed make implicit mention of an unnamed architect, this was not at all a reference to the sculptor WALDEN Greenough as presumed by Professor Harding (Greenough never constructed any building), but instead needs to be considered to have been a mention of some much more likely and more proper and more probable target — a target such as the very productive but very conventional New England architect Asher Benjamin (q.v.). HDT WHAT? INDEX HORATIO GREENOUGH WALDEN: True, there are architects so called in this country, and I have heard of one at least possessed with the idea of making architectural ornaments have a core of truth, a necessity, and hence a beauty, as if it were a revelation to him. All very well perhaps from his point of view, but only a little better than the common dilettantism. A sentimental reformer in architecture, he began at the cornice, not at the foundation. It was only how to put a core of truth within the ornaments, that every sugar plum in fact might have an almond or caraway seed in it –though I hold that almonds are most wholesome without the sugar,– and not how the inhabitant, the indweller, might build truly within and without, and let the ornaments take care of themselves. What reasonable man ever supposed that ornaments were something outward and in the skin merely, –that the tortoise got his spotted shell, or the shellfish its mother-o’-pearl tints, by such a contract as the inhabitants of Broadway their Trinity Church? But a man has no more to do with the style of architecture of his house than a tortoise with that of its shell, nor need the soldier be so idle as to try to paint the precise color of his virtue on his standard. The enemy will find it out. He may turn pale when the trial comes. This man seemed to me to lean over the cornice and timidly whisper his half truth to the rude occupants who really knew it better than he. What of architectural beauty I now see, I know has gradually grown from within outward, out of the necessities and character of the indweller, who is the only builder, – out of some unconscious truthfulness, and nobleness, without ever a thought for the appearance; and whatever additional beauty of this kind is destined to be produced will be preceded by a like unconscious beauty of life. The most interesting dwellings in this country, as the painter knows, are the most unpretending, humble log huts and cottages of the poor commonly; it is the life of the inhabitants whose shells they are, and not any peculiarity in their surfaces merely, which makes them picturesque; and equally interesting will be the citizen’s suburban box, when his life shall be as simple and as agreeable to the imagination, and there is as little straining after effect in the style of his dwelling. A great proportion of architectural ornaments are literally hollow, and a September gale would strip them off, like borrowed plumes, without injury to the substantials. They can do without architecture who have no olives nor wines in the cellar. What if an equal ado were made about the ornaments of style in literature, and the architects of our bibles spent as much time about their cornices as the architects of our churches do? So are made the belles-lettres and the beaux-arts and their professors. Much it concerns a man, forsooth, how a few sticks are slanted over him or under him, and what colors are daubed upon his box. It would signify somewhat, if, in any earnest sense, he slanted them and daubed it; but the spirit having departed out of the tenant, it is of a piece with constructing his own coffin, –the architecture of the grave, and “carpenter” is but another name for “coffin-maker.” One man says, in his despair or indifference to life, take up a handful of the earth at your feet, and paint your house that color. Is he thinking of his last and narrow house? Toss up a copper for it as well. What an abundance of leisure he must have! Why do you take up a handful of dirt? Better paint your house your own complexion; let it turn pale or blush for you. An enterprise to improve the style of cottage architecture! When you have got my ornaments ready I will wear them. HDT WHAT? INDEX HORATIO GREENOUGH 1805 September 6, Friday: Horatio Greenough was born in Boston in a wealthy family. HDT WHAT? INDEX HORATIO GREENOUGH 1825 Horatio Greenough graduated from Harvard College and went to Italy for two years. Augustus Addison Gould graduated and (after a period as a private tutor in Maryland) would study at that institution’s school of medicine at the Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston. NEW “HARVARD MEN” Professor George Ticknor issued REMARKS ON CHANGES LATELY PROPOSED OR ADOPTED IN HARVARD UNIVERSITY (Boston: Hilliard). HDT WHAT? INDEX HORATIO GREENOUGH “A Review From Professor Ross’s Seminar” George Ticknor campaigned to turn Harvard College from a socialization school for Boston’s elites to a quality European university. Although his own modern languages department established an elective curriculum, he was largely unsuccessful. His REMARKS ON CHANGES remains a readable thesis on why Harvard should adopt a more professional curriculum and makes for some interesting comparisons with Emerson’s ideas on education and Thoreau’s later experiences at the college. Essentially, Ticknor argues that since Harvard has rapidly become a leading US institution, it should now take responsibility for that role through the improvement of several key areas of Harvard life. The first and most central —and this relates directly to Emerson— is teaching. The most a typical Harvard instructor, Ticknor writes, undertakes “is to ascertain from day to day, whether the young men who are assembled in his presence, have probably studied the lesson prescribed to them” and there “his duty stops.” The idea, Ticknor continues, “of a thorough commentary on the lesson; the idea of making explanations and illustrations of the teacher, of as much consequence as the recitation of the book, or even of more, is substantially unknown in our school.” It is hard to imagine Emerson or Thoreau disagreeing with Ticknor’s vision of a college instructor, but they would and Emerson does explicitly disagree with Ticknor’s more controversial ideas about professional scholarship, specialization and research. [Shawn Gillen, February 1992] HDT WHAT? INDEX HORATIO GREENOUGH 1827 William Cullen Bryant became an editor of the New-York Evening Post. While working at the Evening Post, Parke Godwin would become associated with Bryant, and eventually he and Bryant’s daughter would marry. The Andrew Jackson campaign for the Presidency was being advanced by the poets William Leggett and William Cullen Bryant, the poet George Bancroft, the sculptor Horatio Greenough, the authors James Fenimore Cooper and Nathaniel Hawthorne, and in general by every careerist man of genius, each careerist humanitarian, and all the careerist underprivilegeds who were seeking privilege. And why not? There were 1,972 men in debtor’s prison, subsisting upon a daily ration of a quart of soup — and that was in the State of New York alone.1 1. As reported in the National Gazette of November 15, 1827. The national estimate, for the population of debtors’ prisons in the USA in the second half of the 1820s, is 75,000 souls. For a debt as low as $3.00 you could find your ass in jail, and you’d stay in the slammer in debt too, maybe for the rest of your life unless you could provide someone with some money with some good reason to buy you out of the place. What, did you suppose that having a society based upon human bondage would have no ramifications? HDT WHAT? INDEX HORATIO GREENOUGH 1828 The wealthy sculptor Horatio Greenough went to Italy again, this time (almost) for good. A 3rd volume of Walter Savage Landor’s IMAGINARY CONVERSATIONS OF LITERARY MEN AND STATESMEN, ETC. (London: Colburn). HDT WHAT? INDEX HORATIO GREENOUGH 1829 Thomas Cole would spend an extended period abroad, until 1832 and then again in 1841 and 1842, mainly in Italy. He would live in Florence with Horatio Greenough, painting “The Subsiding of the Waters of the Deluge,” an oil on canvas now at the National Museum of American Art. HDT WHAT? INDEX HORATIO GREENOUGH HDT WHAT? INDEX HORATIO GREENOUGH 1830 At Villa Gherardesca in Fiesole, Walter Savage Landor was visited by John Robert Kenyon, establishing a long friendship. From the 1830s through the 1840s, the wealthy Massachusetts sculptor Horatio Greenough would be becoming the “leader” of the American artists’ colony in Rome, Italy. HDT WHAT? INDEX HORATIO GREENOUGH 1832 The US Congress commissioned Horatio Greenough to do a larger-than-life statue of George Washington, prince of our national liberty, for its rotunda — of course, at that time nobody had the slightest inkling that the sculptor, off there in Rome messing around with his 20 tons of Carrera marble, would be depicting the big daddy of this country attired but in sandals and a short sheet, exposed from the waist up.2 It’s obviously intended to represent a white guy. HDT WHAT? INDEX HORATIO GREENOUGH 1840 Horatio Greenough’s larger-than-life statue of George Washington, prince of our national liberty, clad in sandals and toga, with bare upper torso, which had been intended for the rotunda of the US capital building, found itself housed instead at the Smithsonian Institution.