PATRIOTISM   AND   NATIONALISM         405
sisted in the harmony of materials and lines to use or function. We had built Gothic temples of wood and omitted all ornament for economy^ forgetful of the fact that material and ornament were essentials of the Gothic style. We had sought to bring the Parthenon to our streets by shearing the Greek temple, designed for worship, of its lateral colonnades, piercing its walls for light, and setting a chimney on its top! If Americans would create beauty in building, Greenough went on, let them learn from the animals, proportioned as they were for the type of activity that characterized them. Or let them leam from the majestic clipper ships, whose every line, spar, rigging, and sail was beautiful because proportioned to speed and safety.
American architecture, save in the clipper ship itself and in the traditional story-and-a-half house rooted in New England's hills, failed to develop as Greenough would have had it. Even his own colossal statue of Washington was garbed in a Roman toga! Nor were the comparable classic-inspired statues of Jefferson and Patrick Henry which Thomas Patrick cawed, and those that Hiram Powers made of Adams, Jackson, and Webster, any more American than Greenough's. Even in painting there was little that could be called truly American. The Hudson River School did indeed capture some of the romantic loveliness of the Catskills, but in both technique and spirit these paintings by Cole, Durand, Kensett, and Doughty were derivative. Emanuel Leutze's "Washington Crossing the Delaware" was American and patriotic in theme to be sure, and so too were Bierstadt's panoramas of American scenery and Catiin's paintings of the Indians. But the American art that probably best exemplified American needs and American ideas consisted of the figureheads of sailing ships, utensils hewn of wood, and homemade furniture, rugs, and quilts and similar objects of folk craft. The rapid disintegration of craftsmanship, however, was a blow to any hope that a people's art might provide background and inspiration for a truly national school.
Cultural nationalists dared to hope that music, no less than art, might find inspiration in the American spirit. But however patriotic the words of "America" \vere, the air, of course, belonged to Germany. The music of the Italian and French opera in New York and New Orleans, the adaptations which Lowell Mason made of Handel, Haydn, and Beethoven for church services, and the impressive festivals of German immigrants all bore witness to the derivative character of music in America.