With the new forces that were at work on the American scene, with the disintegration of classical culture under the combined influence of pioneer enterprise, mechanical invention, overseas commerce, and the almost religious cult of utilitarianism, all this was indeed inevitable. What happened to the proud, Roman-patterned republic of 1789 is a matter of common knowledge. Benjamin Latrobe, the British architect who contributed so much to the Capitol at Washington--including a new order of corn stalks and tobacco leaves--was a witness to the disintegration of the age and the dissolution of its world of ideas; and there is a familiar ring to his commentary upon it: “I remember [he says in his autobiography] the time when I was over head and ears in love with Man in a State of Nature.... Social Compacts were my hobbies; the American Revolution--I ask its pardon, for it deserves better company--was a sort of dream of the Golden Age; and the French Revolution was the Golden Age itself. I should be ashamed to confess all this if I had not a thousand companions in my kaleidoscopic amusement, and those generally men of ardent, benevolent, and well-informed minds and excellent hearts. Alas! experience has destroyed the illusion, the kaleidoscope is broken, and all the tinsel of scenery that glittered so delightfully is translated and turned to raggedness. A dozen years’ residence at the Republican court of Washington had affected wonderfully the advance of riper years.” Major L’Enfant’s plan for Washington was the last gasp, it seems to me, of the classical order; Jefferson’s University of Virginia was perhaps its most perfect consummation, for Jefferson had planned for the life of the institution as well as for the shell which was to contain it. Before the nineteenth century was long under way men’s minds ceased to move freely within the classical idolum; and by 1860 the mood was obliterated and a large part of the work had been submerged or destroyed. The final ironic commentary upon the dignity and austerity of the earlier temples is illustrated in a house in Kennebunkport, Maine; for there the serene, pillared façade is broken up in the rear by a later, and alas! a necessary addition: a two-story bow-window projected far enough beyond the eaves to give a little light to the occupants of the rooms! In sum, there was a pathetic incompatibility in this architecture between need and achievement, between pretensions and matter-of-fact--a rigid opposition to common sense that a vernacular, however playful, would never countenance. These temples were built with the marmoreal gesture of eternity; they satisfied the desire and fashion of the moment; and today their ghosts parade before us, brave but incredible. CHAPTER FOUR THE DIASPORA OF THE PIONEER I