Art: VISIONARIES’ CAPITAL

In fancy now, beneath the twilight gloom, Come, let me lead thee o’er this ‘second Rome’ . . . This embryo capital, where fancy sees Squares in morasses, obelisks in trees; Which second-sighted seers e-v’n now adorn With shrines unbuilt and heroes yet unborn Though naught but woods and Jefferson they see, Where streets should run and sages ought to be.

IRISH Poet Thomas Moore composed this rhymed raspberry on a visit to Washington in 1804. During the century and a half since then, the seers Moore sneered at have been vindicated. Washington is still a long way from the condition of Imperial Rome—where the inanimate populace came at last to exceed the animate—but it does have a kind of grandeur. Some 5,000,000 U.S. tourists look their capital over each summer, and have reason to come away content.

George Washington himself picked the site of the city, not far upriver from his own estate. He appointed a French-born hero of the American Revolution, Major Pierre Charles l’Enfant, to draw up the plans, and L’Enfant, luckily, was a visionary. The major conceived a city of “magnificent vistas” laid out “on such a scale as to leave room for that aggrandizement and embellishment which the increase of wealth of the nation will permit it to pursue to any period, however remote.”

Most of the city remained malarial swampland for close to a century. As recently as 1910, Speaker “Uncle Joe” Cannon protested against putting the Lincoln Memorial where it now stands, on the grounds that it would surely collapse of loneliness and ague-fever. Only in the past 50 years has the capital begun to live up to L’Enfant’s plans.

With some 700 monuments and public buildings now in use, Washington is still deep in the process of “aggrandizement and embellishment,” and, in a way, Washington is still selfconscious. Monuments do not seem to fit naturally into American cities, whose real monuments, perhaps, are their practical, restlessly growing buildings; the capital’s deliberate bronze and marble grandeur is not part of American life in the same sense that St. Peter’s Square with its gossiping Roman housewives or Paris’ Luxembourg Gardens with its baby carriages are part of Europe’s. Most of Washington’s open-air sculptures, such as Begni del Piatta’s baroque memorial on the Potomac (opposite), are just handsome. A handful, such as Augustus Saint-Gaudens’ quiet Grief (p. 72), merit long study. What Saint-Gaudens meant to express, according to recent research, was not grief at all but “the intellectual acceptance of the inevitable.” The capital as a whole attests the fact that Washington, L’Enfant, and a host of later men foresaw the inevitable greatness of the U.S., accepted it, and planned accordingly.