[Illustration: CANTERBURY KEYS, WYOMING, N. J.]
To cry out against adaptation is nothing new, peculiar to our day. It was ever thus from history’s early hour. Popular criticism in France during the seventeenth century was against the Louvre, Fontainebleau and Versailles as being Italian palaces without significance in France, save that of national vacuity in the creative faculty. Saint-Simon, in his memoirs of the epoch, makes out Louis XIV. and his principal architect, Hardouin-Mansart, to have been unskilful bunglers. But to us, the splendid monuments are French Renaissance without dissent, thoroughly French and historically correct because they coincide with the legitimate, historic development of that nation’s art. They have become part of the French landscape, Italian no longer, just as the now familiar town house of W. K. Vanderbilt, at Fifth Avenue and Fifty-second Street, which in 1883 (see Plate LXX) was so intensely French as to seem entirely out of its element in New York, has gradually grown to look to us what it really always was, i. e., good American Renaissance adapted from the Valois propaganda of architectural composition. In the more recent day of Ruskin it was the fashion to belittle the work of Inigo Jones and Sir Christopher Wren as work of no inspiration; and I have no doubt there were architects, once upon a time, envious of the talents of Michelangelo, who did not hesitate to say the great Italian simply copied.
In lieu of further recurrence to all that has since transpired, and is transpiring to-day with the same moral, I should say without qualification that adaptation--let us call it so until we discover a better term--is the soul of architecture, presupposing the highest kind of talent, most extended education, and artistic susceptibility.
How would it fare with an author who coined words habitually in preference to using those given in the dictionary, or who invented a syntax of his own? But, of course, nobody in his right mind would do this. The object of literature is simply to adapt the words and sentences to express our thoughts original so far as we know. In architecture we have the analogy. An architect is bound to adapt in spite of himself; and conversely, the poorest adapters are the poorest architects in whose hands the art of adaptation falls into