2. Our Lady’s Tumbler in Mont Saint Michel and Chartres
© 2018 Jan M. Ziolkowski, CC BY 4.0 https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0146.02
The Nature of the Book
Mont Saint Michel and Chartres is most unusual. It could be taken as a guidebook to a different place and time. If so, is it meant as a manual for armchair or actual travel? Then again, it is no documentary or travelogue on traipsing from abbeys to cathedrals in France. Rather, the volume comprises as much melancholic mysticism as objective science, as much personal meditation as detached scholarship. It is a paean, but it leaves the reader to puzzle out to what—to the long-lost worlds of the Middle Ages, to the more recently vanished ones of the nineteenth century, or to both as one?
In creating the distinctive fabric of his publication, Adams interwove reflections upon a few major topics. One was the evolution from Romanesque to Gothic architecture. Far more than fully developed Gothic, this cardinal moment of transition seized his heart. Another was the swivel from military ideals associated with Saint Michael to Marianism of the twelfth century and beyond. A third was Thomistic theology, that is, the nature of God as studied by Thomas Aquinas, the thirteenth-century Italian Dominican. Last, but not least, came medieval French verse, as presented in the American’s own translations. Strikingly, more than one quarter of his whole study concentrates upon the literature of France in the Middle Ages.
In the twelfth chapter, Adams lavishes especial time and care upon two texts. One is a late thirteenth-century poem by Adam de la Halle, which contains Picard dialect. Customarily entitled today Jeu de Robin et Marion (The play of Robin and Marion), it is generally regarded as the earliest piece of French secular theater with music. It is often designated as a proto-comic opera. The other is the early thirteenth-century Aucassin et Nicolette. In alternating sections of verse and prose, this self-proclaimed chantefable or “song-tale” is extant in a single manuscript with Picard dialectal features. The work unfolds an elaborate narrative about the love of Aucassin, a French nobleman, for Nicolette, a Saracen maiden. The cross-cultural tale enjoyed a vogue in the fin de siècle. It was translated first into modern French in a version illustrated with plates, accompanied by the original text as revised and introduced by Gaston Paris, and subsequently, it was put into English repeatedly in the 1880s and 1890s.
Adams’s crown jewel of a book was not published until 1904. Fascinatingly, the anonymous preface to Thomas B. Mosher’s 1900 pirated printing of Our Lady’s Tumbler draws a substantial contrast between it and Aucassin et Nicolette. The comparison has the effect of disfavoring the story about the jongleur. All the same, the foreword concludes with the backhanded compliment that the “lack of human passion… is made up by the spiritual fervor of the poor mirth-maker who after all was perhaps nearer and dearer to the Middle Age heart than the more celebrated old-time lovers.”
The tale of the tumbler has no explicit connection with either of the sites spelled out in the title of Mont Saint Michel and Chartres. Nonetheless, Adams sees the poem as a monument to “the majesty of Chartres.” For him, the keynote of the Middle Ages consisted in the stretch from the eleventh through the thirteenth centuries. In his reading of the epoch, these three hundred years or so witnessed an evolution from the soft-spoken simplicity and strength of Romanesque, through the dapper refinement of the transitional style, all the way to the rational modernity of Gothic. Although the quondam professor of medieval history has been presented as an antimodernist, or rather as an antimodern modernist, his medievalism actually rested upon a conviction that the Middle Ages as embodied in Gothic culture in general and architecture in particular possessed a modernity all of its own.
Finding the verse story of the minstrel infallibly consonant with the achievements of Chartres cathedral, Adams lards his investigation with long swatches from the original French that he put into English. He also freely rewords the portions that he omitted from word-for-word translation. His thirteenth chapter, with the title “Les Miracles de Notre Dame,” is dedicated to the depiction of Marian miracles in the literature of France in the Middle Ages. It reaches a crescendo in his retelling of Our Lady’s Tumbler. He even allows the piece of poetry to have nearly the last word in this division of his book. Once Mont Saint Michel and Chartres matured into a must-read bestseller in the United States, the salience of the medieval poem in it would have brought the tale to the notice of many prospective readers.
In the summation of the thirteenth chapter, Adams connects the French verse with Gothic architecture. In fact, he sets the stage for drawing this equivalency earlier in the study, when he characterizes the great church of Chartres as a toy house for the Queen of Heaven. The novelist and architect Horace Walpole had conceived of the Gothic style in similarly ludic terms, and the convention of likening products in it to playthings had not evaporated in the meantime. We have seen it in the nineteenth-century vogue for bric-a-brac and bibelots. The whole cathedral is tantamount to the routine offered by the tumbler, just as Mont Saint Michel concretized in architecture what the Song of Roland voiced in poetry. Adams does not extend the similitude, by likening the taut energy of the columns within a vast Gothic church or the solid but soaring quality of the buttresses outside such a structure to the controlled dynamism of an acrobat’s performance—but he might well have done so.
How had Adams become aware of Our Lady’s Tumbler? To say nothing of printings in London, English versions of the medieval French were issued repeatedly at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries in Boston, Massachusetts, and Portland, Maine. In New England and beyond, the tale earned unmistakable approval among a much larger readership than merely scholars. On both sides of the Atlantic, Gaston Paris was known as broadly as the poem he had extolled. The noted French philologist enjoyed no small esteem among educated Americans. Indeed, his stature was so eminent among English speakers that his next sketch of the medieval literature of France was translated in 1903, the year of his death. By a curious turn of events, the English came into print four years before the French itself was published.
Adams shared fully the high estimation of the French savant, whom he considered “the greatest academic authority in the world.” The American was particularly well acquainted with the literary historian’s French Literature in the Middle Ages. He refers glowingly to it in Mont Saint Michel and Chartres and in his correspondence. A heavily scored copy in the original language is still extant from his personal library. Even in the unlikely event that Adams had not happened upon an exemplar of Our Lady’s Tumbler in one or another translation, he would have had exposure to the medieval poem from an epigrammatic mention of it in Gaston Paris’s sounding of medieval literature.
The “philological items” in Adams’s library comprehended various editions of Marian miracles in French that remain fundamental even today. That said, his holdings do not extend to complete journals or offprints from them with the articles, such as especially the edition by Foerster in Romania, that presented the actual medieval text of Our Lady’s Tumbler. For most such specialized materials, Adams could have consulted major libraries in Paris or the United States. Although various other research collections would have contained most of them too, occasionally he had items dispatched to him on loan from Harvard to Washington. The university library was growing by leaps and bounds, a circumstance particularly congenial to Our Lady’s Tumbler.
Harry Elkins Widener (see Fig. 2.1), a Harvard alumnus (class of 1907) and avid book collector, perished in the wee hours of April 14, 1912, along with more than 1,500 women, men, and children—passengers and crew members—when the liner RMS Titanic, on its maiden voyage en route from Liverpool to New York, struck an iceberg and sank four hundred miles off the coast of Newfoundland. The notoriously tragic shipwreck seems to have precipitated, or at least contributed to, the apoplexy that Henry Adams suffered ten days later. The dead in the catastrophe included many “noted names” with whom he was connected (see Fig. 2.2). Beyond that fact, for the outbound portion of his annual expedition to Paris, he had booked a cabin on what was to have been the vessel’s return voyage back across the Atlantic. With his blood pressure no doubt spiking, he contemplated what his fate would have been if he had lain in his berth that night. He exclaimed to his frequent correspondent Elizabeth Cameron: “By my blessed Virgin, it is awful. This Titanic blow shatters one’s nerves. We can’t grapple it.” The loss of the vessel and its people jolted Adams’s very worldview. To him, the power of the dynamo, steel, and coal compensated for a world without faith in Mary. Yet a floating crag of ice exposed the fatal weakness of trusting in such potential when it buckled the hull plates of a supposedly unsinkable ocean liner. In other words, the accident brought home the hubris and the limits of modern technology.
Since the Titanic had not yet sunk to the seabed when Henry Adams wrote Mont Saint Michel and Chartres, Harvard College had not yet erected the edifice to commemorate its lost alumnus and bibliophile. The Memorial Library, funded by a bequest from his grief-stricken mother, was dedicated in honor of Harry Elkins Widener only in 1915. Even so, in Adams’s time the library in Gore Hall already held the English translation as well as the original of Gaston Paris’s book, alongside all the abstruse philological journals in which editions and proposed textual improvements of the medieval text had appeared.
In Mont Saint Michel and Chartres, Adams opines that the recently printed Our Lady’s Tumbler has met with more success in his day than it did in the Middle Ages “for it appeals to a quiet sense of humor that pleases modern French taste as much as it pleased the Virgin.” Though he leaves his contemporary from across the Atlantic unnamed, he diagnoses in the medieval poem a gentle irony that accounted for much of the popularity from which Anatole France benefited at the time. Adams’s wife Clover had become attuned early to the fiction writer and had read his novel The Crime of Silvestre Bonnard. Although the American historian makes in his letters no specific reference to Le jongleur de Notre Dame, in correspondence he betrays an easy familiarity with France’s oeuvre in general. For all these reasons, Adams’s observation about the appeals of a tale from the Middle Ages surely alludes obliquely to the affectionate wit of the late nineteenth-century retelling in which the French author adapted the gist of the medieval story into one very much his own.
Madonna of Medieval France, La Dona of Washington
Adams drafted much of Mont Saint Michel and Chartres in Paris, a European cultural capital at more than an ocean’s remove from Boston, Cambridge, and Washington, in the closing years of the nineteenth and opening ones of the twentieth century. When plying his scholarly trade in the City of Light for extended periods of time, he was often ensconced there in an apartment that belonged to the woman most important to him in the last three decades of his life.
Née Elizabeth Sherman, “Lizzie” Cameron was the niece of William Tecumseh Sherman, a famed general in the Union Army during the American Civil War. In other notable family connections, she was the daughter of a judge in Ohio and a niece of a secretary of the Treasury. A belle, she was widely regarded as the most seductive and cerebral woman of her day in Washington. Sultriness in both beauty and character come through in the portrait of her made in 1900 by the Swedish artist Anders Zorn, as well as in photographs (see Fig. 2.3). As a very young woman, she was steered by her parents into an alliance of their design. Her life partner in this arranged marriage, Senator James Donald (“Don”) Cameron (see Fig. 2.4), was a widower with six children. The couple was anything but a match made in heaven. She was by all accounts stunning and vivacious, in those regards an ideal trophy wife. And the legislator? Could the perquisites of wealth and power, sometimes overvalued in men, have outweighed his well-earned reputation for being uncouth and an alcoholic? He was much older than she, and the disparity in age might have played a role. Whatever the reason, the husband and wife did not love each other.
Through her appearance and personality, Elizabeth Cameron could and did wrap men around her finger. She was a serial heartbreaker. After becoming estranged from her spouse, she trifled with many admirers, both married and not. Still, she never went so far as to conduct public dalliances that would sully her reputation. She was not about to take the scandalous and financially chancy leap of leaving the Senator: an amicable separation and a no-fault divorce were not a viable option. Even if she ever had the faintest feelings of amorous attraction to Adams, she held back from allowing her entanglement with him to flower into full-fledged romance, let alone sexual coupling. This was despite her encouraging him coquettishly for a while to expect that they might have a liaison. He had warmed to her as soon as they met, but any hopes of enjoying intimacies with her were ultimately dashed after he had fallen or had been pulled definitively into love with her in 1890. At that juncture, he hied halfway around the globe, going so far as to charter a steamship on his own for part of the itinerary, to have a tryst with her that then failed to happen. He was not exactly jilted, but a line was drawn. The continued asexuality of being friends without benefits was not at all of his volition. To his bitter chagrin, his interactions with her seem to have been irreproachable. After years of pussyfooting, Adams professed to despise the role of “tame cat” that his unromantic relationship with her seemed to constrain him to assume. Refusing to back down, he instead struck a pose as a big cat—but no longer one ranging in the wild. He paced, a would-be lion, aging pent-up within the loveless cage that the terms of their relations wrought for him.
Although assignations and sex with the bewitching Elizabeth Cameron lay beyond reach for Henry Adams, the two had forged a close emotional link. Their affair was one of the heart. They tailored their attachment largely of words. These tiny puffs of air or squirts of ink always have the potential to seduce. The underlying reality of their power helps to explain why etymologically “charm” derives from the Latin carmen for “song” or “poem,” “glamour” from the Latin grammatica for knowledge of Latin grammar. For him, the viva voce of small talk, and perhaps even more the literate one of letters, stood out as essential components of mutual attraction and love. When romance with La Dona eluded him, he made what he could of the syllables and sentences that he might have preferred to deploy in wooing of a less exclusively intellectual sort. He could never possess her physically: she was forbidden fruit or made herself into it. Yet he became wedded to her verbally. Despite his ardor to be far more than a mere pen pal, they engaged in a prolific and deeply personal correspondence over the decades. He penned her missives on nearly a daily basis. Ultimately, this turn in their relationship may have suited him. Although not emotionless, he seems to have had an easier go in written disquisitions about the most powerful emotions than in experiencing or expressing them. Like Henry James, he may have committed himself more readily to writing about the strongest forces in life than to living them.
In the long gestation of Mont Saint Michel and Chartres, Henry Adams sent for her vetting his translations from medieval French. When circumstances permitted, he read aloud to her, sometimes along with her daughter and other women, swatches of his prose. If writing was his gymnastics, she extracted from him a degree of rapt attention that rivaled what the tumbler dispensed sweatily for Mary. There is an onomastic basis for connecting Elizabeth Cameron with the Virgin and for construing Adams’s devotion to her as almost automatically a punning sort of Marianism. Like others among her confidants, he addressed her often as La Dona. The nickname was obviously constructed as a bit of wordplay upon the shortened form of her husband’s personal name. At the same time the moniker came unmistakably close to another term. She was his Madonna.
In Esther, Henry Adams includes a twenty-one-year-old enchantress from Colorado named Catherine Brooke whom he models minutely upon Cameron. The seductive young siren in his fiction is out of step with her times and more at ease in older ones. In fact, she
would hardly have felt surprised at finding herself turned into an Italian peasant-girl, and at seeing Michael Angelo and Raphael… walk in at the side door, and proceed to paint her in celestial grandeur and beauty, as the new Madonna of the prairie, over the high altar.
Was Adams overlaying on Cameron his own attraction to the past, or did he turn to Mary on the rebound from her? To look at the situation through different optics, two years after the publication of the novel, Cameron acquired an additional resemblance to the Virgin and Child. She would cradle in her arms a babe, her young Martha. Adams, who doted on the two, could easily have superimposed his mental image of mother and daughter upon the Virgin and Child. If he did so, the conflation was hardly unwitting. In an 1891 letter to La Dona, he drew a comparison between the Madonna in this role and Cameron in maternal mode.
The invocation of Italian art here in the novel probably refers cunningly to Raphael’s Madonna del Prato (1506), that is, “Madonna of the Meadow” (see Fig. 2.5). The Italian painter was the gold standard in the Golden Age of collecting. His Madonnas were prized. In fact, the association between the artist and this subject ran so strong that he has been described as “born to paint Madonnas.” The Madonna of the Chair in the Pitti Gallery in Florence had international renown (see Fig. 2.6); it was as widely known then as the Mona Lisa or Venus de Milo are today. Henry James described how “people stand in worshipful silence before it, as they would before a taper-studded shrine.” To take another Mother and Child, one stop that impressed Clover deeply on her honeymoon trip with Henry Adams to Europe and Egypt was the German town of Dresden, where she was struck by the oil painting by Raphael known as the Sistine Madonna (see Fig. 2.7).
During what has been called the “buying craze” between 1870 and World War II, American merchant princes and captains of industry coveted this early standout of the Italian Renaissance and his Madonnas. In 1897, the art historian Bernard Berenson compiled a list of Raphael paintings with their locations. At that point the United States had none. By 1909 the nation could boast two, by 1932 nine. What had been a conspicuous absence in American art collections throughout the nineteenth century was soon remedied many times over. The continent became saturated, even oversaturated, with depictions of the Virgin Mary genuinely or supposedly by the Italian painter. For all that, the craving to own a Raphael Madonna would not recede until well into the twentieth century. The topic of American acquisition of Italian Madonnas demands a mention of two items displayed in the Washington home adjoining that of the Adamses. In the front hall of Hay’s mansion hung a Madonna attributed then to Botticelli and now to his school. In the library, pride of place was assigned to a Madonna and Child by the seventeenth-century painter Giovanni Battista Salvi da Sassoferrato. The oil on canvas, round in format, hung over the fireplace in a frame of highly decorated gold.
As mentioned, Adams had the loan of Elizabeth Cameron’s quarters in Paris each year while she traveled in the United States. When he occupied the apartment, it became what he regarded as his hermitage. In the summer of 1899, he lauded the City of Light to John Hay, his bosom friend, singling out as praiseworthy qualities of the metropolis “the religious rest that it diffuses, and the cloister-like peace that it brings to the closing years of life.” An involuntary celibate at the time, he returned repeatedly to the image of monasteries, with monks devoted to the Virgin, in correspondence with both Hay and others.
More than once in The Education of Henry Adams, this man of letters would strike a monastic pose. In it, the author looked back at a visit he had paid in 1867, four decades earlier, to a former medieval English monastery. With the wisdom of hindsight, he claimed that on the previous occasion he had “yearned for nothing so keenly as to feel at home in a thirteenth-century Abbey.” Then, after describing the fluster and turmoil in Paris one half decade afterward during the Franco-Prussian war, he told how “he fled to England and once more took refuge in the profound peace of Wenlock Abbey” (see Fig. 2.8). He suppressed the inconveniently unmonkish circumstance that he was traveling with his newlywed wife.
Adams’s much later recollection of the attitudes that he espoused during this earlier stage in his life coincides with what he described back in the day. In the thick of the Civil War, he wrote to his brother, Charles Francis Adams Jr.: “If we lived a thousand years ago instead of now, I should have become a monk and would have got hold as Abbot of one of those lovely little monasteries which I used to admire so much among the hills in Italy.” This is prime Henry Adams. He imagines being a monk in a beautiful abbey. Yet in his fantasy, he assumes that he will be at the helm. The obligations of having to obey higher-ups or even simply of existing within a rule-driven community go conveniently unconsidered. And how would he have been as a manager of direct reports?
Wenlock Abbey or Priory was a broken-down twelfth-century Cluniac monastery (see Figs. 2.9, 2.10, 2.11 and 2.12). It belonged to an Englishman whom Adams befriended while in England during the Civil War. This Charles Milnes Gaskell led the active career in law and politics that his American intimate failed to achieve—or managed to avoid (see Fig. 2.13). Adams’s new acquaintance took breaks from the vita activa for the recreation of the contemplative life in his monastic ruins. Wenlock captivated the interest first of Adams and later of other Boston Goths as well. Thanks to Gaskell, Adams could play in a real-life setting at being a medieval monk. Even when he visited with Clover for the first time in the summer of 1872, Wenlock persisted in being for him a dreamy place for feigning time travel back to a monastery of the Middle Ages. His changed marital status did not hamper his imagining. His bride’s role-playing followed a different lead: as the couple sojourned in a bedchamber in the eight-hundred-year-old Norman wing of the estate, she too felt transported into the past “as if I were a fifteenth-century dame and newspapers, reform, and bustle nowhere.”
During their stay in the abbey, the sense of being carried away came along with a healthy dose of scholarly scrutiny. Their host presented them with books on medieval architecture by Viollet-le-Duc as a wedding present for them to take on their subsequent itinerary. The immersion in research became a family habit. Nearly a decade later, when husband and wife toiled shoulder to shoulder in the French archives on his multivolume history of the presidencies of Jefferson and Madison, she described their routine as “an existence of Trappist monks.” By the purest stroke of good fortune, the couple wended their way back to the monastic order of white monks with which the humbler hero of Our Lady’s Tumbler had been affiliated. The Cistercians would not have been happy with their setup.
Henry Adams’s play-acting in the early 1870s stood him in good stead a quarter century later in life. As a longstanding widower and unrequited wooer, he adopted the imperturbable abstinence of a medieval monk. Yet he took unmonkish measures to ensure that his wifeless existence would not be utterly womanless. Should we call this approach sublimation? Whatever terminology or conceptual framework to which we subscribe, he threw himself into his idiosyncratic pretense of being wedded to the idea of the Virgin. He slipped no gold band around the ring finger of a Madonna, but he made many other gestures to signify his loving commitment to Mary. His conception of Our Lady, if that collocation of words is admissible, managed to be at once deeply spiritual but ultimately wholly un-Christian. By being an agnostic Mariolater, he remained to life’s end a paradox. His Mother of God was feminine, sensuous, unselfconscious, and either irrational or at least nonrational. She incarnated the very qualities he judged, in his stereotyping, to inhere in all women of all times as well as in mother goddesses of all places. In his Education, Adams generalized: “No woman had ever driven him wrong; no man ever driven him right.” This attachment of his resembled the type of medieval devotion known as courtly love: he put unobtainable women in his life upon pedestals by idolizing them. His wife Clover lay not far from an actual slab by 1891, when the shrouded figure to memorialize her was erected. The bronze stood mere feet from the otherwise unmarked grave where her mortal remains were interred. By that time, she had been dead for six years. His definitive plinth for idolization of both Mary and Marian became his book on Mont Saint Michel and Chartres, in which he declared: “the proper study of mankind is woman.”
Henry Adams took flight into the past and translocated to a Middle Ages tinged by romanticism. Beyond its special personal significance to him because of his honeymoon, Wenlock came to occupy in his imagination a place loosely akin to the one Tintern had held for William Wordsworth (see Fig. 2.14). The English romantic poet immortalized his response to the decrepitude in his famous “Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey.” Ruins, sham and real, had formed a part of the Gothic revival since the days of Gothick spelt with a k. This evocation of the Middle Ages in architectural decoration and household furnishings, as well as in literature, is associated especially with the Georgian period from 1714 through 1830, when the British kings George I through IV reigned.
For a long while, the Middle Ages have functioned as an oasis, a destination for escapists, to which to retreat from political or personal dissatisfaction with or alienation from the present day. The period signified for Adams a place of repose that he hoped somehow to import into the noisy newness of the incipient twentieth century. Like many others of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, he cultivated a yearning for medieval times.
In Mont Saint Michel and Chartres Adams pigeonholed Romanesque as being too “serious and simple to excess” for the liking of young people who were partial to Gothic. In general, he endeavored to dispel notions of the later style as embodying “religious gloom” or “age and decrepitude.” Instead, he cherished this fashion as representing idealism and “exuberant youth, the eternal child of Wordsworth.” The equation that made beauty and youth equal the Gothic pointed arch and the Middle Ages can be discerned in a postcard from 1899 (see Fig. 2.15).
Adams pretended to be long in the tooth. In this stance, he was an old man whose life in architectural terms had been “a broken arch.” He wanted at one and the same time for his portrayal of the earlier manner to embody his own talents as well as tempt his readers, both older friends and the younger women he styled nieces “in-wish.” As we have seen, as narrator of Mont Saint Michel and Chartres, he plays at being an aged uncle in conversation with these real and honorary relatives. They were the fan club he collected around him, whose wonderment he sought to stir through his writings. Like Gaston Paris before him, the American historian regarded the Middle Ages, or at least the early Gothic slice of them, as simple. As such, they corresponded to the youthful phase in a human life. What could have been more appropriate than dishing them out to young ladies?
Adams’s absorption in the medieval worship of the Virgin, whom he extolled as “the greatest force the Western world has ever felt,” verged on obsession. His Marian passion constitutes a common element between Mont Saint Michel and Chartres and The Education of Henry Adams. Mary can be termed the protagonist of the former work. In both it and personal correspondence, the author described the book as Miracles of the Virgin. From his perspective, Our Lady underpins the entire thirteenth century. He gave no alms in her name and made no donations to her shrines that have been recorded, but he did shower upon the Mother of God considerable resources in conducting his researches and publishing their results.
In Mont Saint Michel and Chartres Adams contrasts the spiritual barrenness of his times with the belief that once prevailed. He accepts that the religion of preceding centuries has lost its hegemony, and yet personally he holds fast still to a Christianocentric worldview. Though from his viewpoint the true faith has long since died, contemplation of it can conjure up Mary with a power that abides even to his day. Not a wisp of non-Eurocentric cultural relativism is detectable here—nor would it be fair to expect it. The adjective does not yet exist, but he is unapologetically a Euro-American.
For all that, Henry Adams clings to the Mother of God as a cultural phenomenon, not to the religion in which she was embedded. He was a secular-minded sophisticate, while not inconsistently American and at least aspiringly spiritual. Yet in the final analysis, any spirituality on his part was directed toward a personal cult of women rather than toward any strain of Christianity. As he submitted to Henry Osborn Taylor: “Dear brother in the thirteenth century: I think you even believe a little, or sometimes, in human reason or intelligence which I try to do in vain. You respect the Church, I adore the Virgin.”
Despite all the words we have from Henry Adams, many still elude us. One fascinating transcription would document whatever discussion took place at the west front of Amiens. Alas, we have no record of the words that flew between Augustus Saint-Gaudens and him, when together at this locus they inspected the so-called Virgin Portal of the cathedral. Yet sometimes it may be a blessing to be left with the necessity and opportunity to exercise our imaginations.
Adams formulated a long poem in honor of Our Lady, or at least of her as a vehicle for impressing another woman. In it, he aired his trust in the continued presence of Mary in the modern world. In February of 1901, at what was in those days the advanced age of sixty-three, he tendered the verses to La Dona as his own sort of votive offering. But let us not get ahead of ourselves: first things first. He wrote the hymn one year earlier, while drafting Mont Saint Michel and Chartres. For other reasons too, 1900 is too important to be leapfrogged. In more than one way, it is history in the making.
Universal Exposition of 1900
The Universal Exposition of Paris in 1900 succeeded that of 1889 for which the Eiffel Tower had been built. It turned out to be the last in a cycle of such world’s fairs that had been staged in the French capital at eleven-year intervals from 1867. From visits to its exhibition spaces, Henry Adams emerged both awed and filled with unease by technological advances. He lacked the unruffled certainty of the art critic John Ruskin, who by chance died in that numerically memorable year, retaining a confidence in the staying power of the Middle Ages. In the Englishman’s estimation, the medieval period could hold its own, especially where cathedrals were concerned, against modern technology. In contrast, the American’s whole sense of past and present, never complacent, was first shaken and then altered by the spectacles he witnessed in the nearly two hundred and fifty acres of the display. Nowhere was he more keyed up than in the Gallery of Machines.
In Mont Saint Michel and Chartres, Adams even avowed that shows such as the Parisian ones had replaced the great churches. He flipped this same conceit on its head in a letter, labeling a thirteenth-century cathedral “a Chicago Exposition for God’s Profit.” His correlations of Gothic places of worship and World’s Fairs merit serious consideration. Especially from the mid-nineteenth century through the mid-twentieth century, nations and cities set out in displays of themselves to project concomitantly their utmost modernity and the medieval, or at a minimum imagined medieval, roots of their collective identities. The American writer’s insight could be probed and extended, with attention to the two visits he paid to the exhibition of 1893 in the Windy City. The Middle Ages were only a bit player in the Midway Plaisance, but they had a presence. As we have seen previously, the medieval was grouped with the oriental, chrono-exotic with topo-exotic.
Adams described his reactions in a chapter of his autobiography entitled “The Dynamo and the Virgin.” In turn, this twenty-fifth chapter set the stage for the thirty-third, “A Dynamic Theory of History.” The symbolism of the dynamo and the Virgin has spellbound many readers, although the fascination may not always have rested on a clear-sighted and even-keeled understanding of the early twentieth-century context for the author’s juxtaposition of the two concepts or principles. Over the large public green space known as the Champs de Mars towered the cavernous Palace of Electricity, which itself was topped by a statue that represented “the Genius” of this form of energy (see Figs. 2.16 and 2.17). To Adams, the heart of this centerpiece to the whole Exposition was the Great Hall of Dynamos. This space housed forty-foot steam-driven electric turbines, generators that produced 15,000 horsepower (see Fig. 2.18). Where an earlier generation had contrasted the cathedral of Notre-Dame and the Eiffel Tower, he presented as complements or contrasts Mary, inspirer of the Gothic house of prayer, who embodied the ongoing might of the feminine in history, and the shed where the machinery whirred: it was a match between great church and great hall.
Alongside Adams’s reverence and gusto for leading-edge science and technology ran a deep fear of apocalypse. He had lived through most of the second scientific revolution in which a concatenation of discoveries had ushered in better comprehension of electromagnetism and light. In 1895 he made the ten-day tour of French cathedrals that pushed him on the road toward Mont Saint Michel and Chartres. Unbeknownst to him, around the same time Alexander Stepanovich Popov in Russia demonstrated the applicability of radio waves for communication, Rudolf Diesel in Germany invented a high-compression and thermally efficient engine, and Wilhelm Röntgen in Germany discovered the basis for X-rays. To say that human scientific mastery of the world and universe was evolving with almost indescribable rapidity would be an understatement, even an anticlimax. The American historian would have grasped few if any particulars of the latest developments, but he understood the general features enough to crave the equivalent of a general theory for his own field. He endeavored especially to subject history to the second law of thermodynamics, that of entropy. Things fall apart.
An even more remarkable evolution was at hand. The third stage in the emergence of modern science was poised to begin in the early twentieth century with the relativity and quantum theories of Albert Einstein, Max Planck, and others. Adams had no foreknowledge of the insights into physics that would make nuclear fission first imaginable and then achievable. All the same, he sensed that the command of physical powers at the disposal of his fellow human beings already surpassed their level of spiritual civility. Were people witnessing progress or the mere phantom of it? He had his qualms that the potentials of technology had outdistanced its capacity to advance civilization. Have times changed very much—or gotten even worse?
Already in the thick of the Civil War, Henry Adams pronounced to his sibling Charles his anxiety that human science had outstripped the capacities of the species and that it would enable humankind to cut off its own existence. Much later in life, he adumbrated a similarly alarmist view to his other brother Brooks. A pregnant passage on powerful machinery appears in Democracy, as the novelist characterizes the widowed Madeleine Lee and her zeal to fathom the rough-and-tumble of politics in the United States. The steam engine energized the industrial revolution and industrialization. He had no way of intuiting that this age of vaporized water would cede before long to other types of industrial-strength energy and engines—that soon the era of internal combustion would usher in new fossil fuels and oil derricks.
The Paris Exposition of 1900 was exuberantly and vigorously schizophrenic. In its split personality, it utterly typified its times. Among other things, it celebrated in French culture the unexpected counterpoint between cutting-edge modernness and romanticized medievalism. It took place in a city that had doubled in population in fifty years, that had been remade in its urban planning, and that concretized new political, economic, and technological realities. But the old was ineluctably present too, at least as processed through the retinas of the new. The bygone too came with the territory. In the World’s Fair of 1889, the consummate modernity of the Eiffel Tower had been accorded an opposite pole to the Middle Ages epitomized in Notre-Dame. A chronological otherness of culture was promoted alongside the geographical one of aboriginal peoples from regions under the thumb of colonialism around the globe. The shows, particularly that of 1900, were concerned with the reconstruction and even regeneration of the medieval period, as well as with the display of its artifacts as unearthed through archaeology. The spirit was anything but “in with the new, out with the old.” On the contrary, the Middle Ages were back, with a vengeance. The new millennium was greeted with a reenactment of times deep within the one being left behind.
Old Paris
So poor Elias Wildmanstadius, with a fifteenth-century soul in the midst of the nineteenth century, beliefs and love for another age in the midst of a selfish and prosaic civilisation, found himself as utterly out of place as a savage from the banks of the Orinoco transplanted into a fashionable Parisian club.
The counterbalance to the twentieth-century technology enshrined in the Great Hall of Dynamos was on display in the Middle Ages as re-created in the exhibition called Le Vieux Paris. Old Paris, to put the French into English, celebrated “Townspeople of the Medieval Quarter” and “Paris in 1400,” and supplemented the “Court of Miracles.” These presentations helped to offset the industrialization that was on show among the equipment. In contrast to the dehumanization implicit in smooth-running machinery and well-oiled turbines, these alternatives showcased humanity and human achievement: chivalry of knights and damsels, courtliness of troubadours, and splendor of Gothic architecture (see Fig. 2.19). During the three decades since the Franco-Prussian War, the French had pored over medieval literature and art. Now, craving still closer contact with those olden times, they poured themselves into a wide-ranging reenactment of the Middle Ages.
Henry Adams is unforthcoming about his experiences of Old Paris. In his letters he does not even reveal whether he set foot in the temporary living history museum. As hard a time as we may have picturing him shouldering his way through throngs of fairgoers, he could hardly have missed the site. Like its 1889 predecessor, the Exposition of 1900 contained a retrospective of medieval art. At the same time, it exceeded the preceding event in the magnitude of its ambition to conjure up the life and culture of Paris in the Middle Ages. It furnished visitors a neighborhood from slightly more than one half millennium earlier that was not only reconstructed but also reenacted—it not merely rediscovered but even fabricated what was supposedly medieval. Adepts then and now may sneer at such cooption of bygone days, but exercises of this sort have helped to keep the present from tyrannizing our consciousness more than would otherwise have been the case. The past needs advocates who can bring it back to life, and that revivification comes not just in learned disquisitions but also in re-creations.
One of three quarters, the fifteenth-century medieval one, dominated. The complex was situated on the right bank of the Seine at the Alma Bridge, a short hop from the area known as the Trocadéro. Opposite it on the left bank were the international pavilions. In other words, the spectrum of time faced that of space. By night the picturesque skyline, studded with towers and turrets, blazed with electric floodlights. When open to the public, the half-timbered edifices of the zone included thronged restaurants, watering holes decked out as old-time taverns, and shops. All of them were well appointed to facilitate sales of goods and services, all of them had waitstaff in medieval costume. There was as well a chapel where performances were staged.
The buildings were only part of the effect. Equal emphasis rested upon living human beings, in the person of reenactors wearing costumes deemed to be true to the Middle Ages. These pseudomedieval individuals were removed by time rather than space from the France of 1900, but otherwise they were comparable with the colonialized natives put on display elsewhere in the exposition as simulacra of the exotic. Likewise, their exoticism or otherness formed a chronological counterpart to the geographical distance that was bridged by the importation and exhibition of people and things from colonies in Africa and the orient.
In Old Paris, for-hire actors spoke what aspired or pretended to be medieval French, strummed old-fashioned instruments, sang songs from the Middle Ages, and so forth. Minstrels, tantamount to jongleurs, were notable among the reenactors. Such entertainment in the context of what were essentially chronologically determined amusement parks was nothing out of the ordinary at the time. In fact, it attracted strong and largely commendatory note from the press. For instance, we have detailed accounts of a parade and street fair modeled after the Feast of Fools in Victor Hugo’s Notre-Dame de Paris. These happenings were staged by students of law and other disciplines in 1898 (see Fig. 2.20). It featured stalls in which tradespeople demonstrated their proficiency in their different forms of artisanry and hawked their wares (see Fig. 2.21). Such reenactments were at least for a while an annual event around the turn of the century (see Fig. 2.22). Another example was a page taken from Victor Hugo’s “Court of the Miracles” (see Fig. 2.23). Twice daily, a three-hour show reenacted chivalric tournaments, royal processions, mystery places, and more. This particular theme park on “Paris in 1400” was meant to profit from the interest in the 1900 Exposition, but the distance of the location from the main fairgrounds caused it to pale in contrast with the bigger re-creations (and recreations) of the Middle Ages nearer the Seine (see Fig. 2.24). Though the promoters put their activities into rivalry with the Eiffel Tower, they could not stand up to that kind of competition.
Nowadays the prolific Albert Robida is remembered mostly for a profusion of travel guides, popular history, book illustration, caricatures of his contemporaries, children’s literature, and science fiction. Yet he was a wholehearted devotee of the medieval period, and the mastermind behind the reconstruction of the French capital as it was dreamt to have existed in the Middle Ages. The architecture of Old Paris simulated buildings and neighborhoods that had been dismantled since the Revolution. The temporary exhibition resuscitated medieval architecture that had been obliterated in the modernization and urban renewal of Paris conducted between 1853 and 1870 by the prefect of the Seine Georges-Eugène Haussmann. This farsighted planner remade the city during the Second Empire of Napoleon III. Wheeler-dealer of the big-city landscape, he foisted upon the metropolis a scheme that favored the classical architectural orders and imposed geometric symmetry and axial patterns through the institution of boulevards and places. While modernizing, Haussmann expunged through eminent domain the warren that had formed the cobblestones core of medieval Paris. An architecture that had been like many millennium-old manuscripts, requiring expertise to navigate and decipher, emerged much more like a large-print book, so pin-sharp as to be nearly legible to an illiterate. At the same time, Viollet-le-Duc repaired the cathedral of Notre-Dame to erase painful memories of damage caused by the passage of centuries, especially during the Reign of Terror, when the Middle Ages had been less than beloved.
Robida’s plans look extravagant, no more reflective of reality than were his fantasy writings. He wished to re-create in miniature a medieval center that had been effectively bulldozed decades earlier (see Fig. 2.25). From his feverish imaginings, would it be fair to consider him a French predecessor to Walt Disney? The comparison may not be invidious. The dreamer toiled overtime to realize his visions, and he managed to bring them to fruition not just in art works and publications, but also in a physical reality that was the harbinger of a theme park. As photographs from the time document, the grand schemer’s made-up reconstruction of Paris from the Middle Ages was fabricated on a life-size scale out of real materials in three dimensions (see Fig. 2.26).
The quarter was a popular destination for visitors—and subject for postcards, posters and other advertisements, stamps, and a wealth of other ephemera and souvenirs (see Fig. 2.27). Vendors even peddled cutout mock-ups, so that enthusiasts could replicate the neighborhood on a small scale at home. The exposition and shopping went hand in hand. Robida churned out not only detailed guidebooks in conventional format (see Figs. 2.28 and 2.29), but also a printed book in imitation of an incunabulum or manuscript, which gave a nodding acquaintance with medieval history (see Fig. 2.30). The guide contains a page very much in the vein of Le jongleur de Notre Dame, depicting musicians clustered around a statue of the Madonna and Child (see Fig. 2.31).
Robida’s wildly creative enterprise cries out to be contextualized within the sweep of international movements that were often meant to capture realities of disappearing rural and peasant culture as ballast to industrialization. The Middle Ages elicited similar preservationist and reconstructionist efforts and energies, since the medieval period was viewed as constituting both collectively Europe’s indigenous primitive cultures and the wellspring for regionally distinguishable folk practices and characteristics that defined the continent’s constituent nations and ethnic groups.
To be specific, Robida’s project of Old Paris anticipated one subclass of museums throughout the world that have been designated by a variety of names: living-history museums or simply living museums, outdoor museums, folk museums, and living farm museums. After a few rough-and-tumble trial runs in the first half of the nineteenth century, the concept of such institutions was articulated and realized fully for the first time in Scandinavia in its last two decades. Near Oslo in 1881 was established what evolved eventually into the Norwegian Museum of Cultural History, which in turn inspired an open-air museum known as Skansen in Stockholm in 1891 (see Fig. 2.32). All these initiatives furnished the public with opportunities to experience al fresco, lifesize, and living dioramas of exotic and disappearing peoples and cultures, both domestic and foreign.
Within Old Paris, the replica of Saint Julian of the Minstrels marked the start of the medieval quarter (see Figs. 2.33, 2.34 and 2.35). Robida himself singled out the original on which it was modeled as “one of the most curious of the countless churches of bygone days.” Historical documents hold that the church was commissioned to be built in the thirteenth century by “jongleurs, minstrels, and masters of the art of minstrelsy relating to the knowledge and craft of music, who then resided in this city of Paris.” The house of prayer was destroyed during the ruckus of the French Revolution.
Robida’s large portfolio of studies and designs for Old Paris includes one for a colored window of Saint Julian that portrays “The Dawn Song and Prayer of Poor Jongleurs-Minstrels Passing before the Image of Our Lady the Virgin” (see Fig. 2.36). One half of the stained glass depicts three buskers, with old-style instruments in hand and a medievalesque cityscape behind them. The other shows a trained monkey and costumed goat. The ruminant is reminiscent of the pet that belonged to the gypsy heroine of Hugo’s Notre-Dame de Paris. The two circus-type animals stand before a Madonna and Child, with large lilies noticeable in the foreground. Another illustration by the author and artist depicts a couple of instrumentalists, one a bagpiper and the other a woodwind player, posed near a statue of King David on the same church (see Fig. 2.37). The ties to the French writer went beyond possible allusions in iconography. In the chapel, the bell-ringer from Notre-Dame presented demonstrations of his ding-dong dexterity (see Fig. 2.38).
Could Henry Adams have refrained altogether from paying a visit to Old Paris? Dubious. Would he have paid lip service or even approved? Once again, the answer is likely to be negative. He was not one either to sniff or to harrumph. Then again, he would not have reacted with ebullient positivity either. If he took surreptitious pleasure in posturing as a “historical tramp,” his objective was to travel as the “Virgin’s pilgrim” to the “World’s Fairs of thirteenth-century forces that turned Chicago and St. Louis pale.” He thirsted unquenchably for unmediated access to medieval times as he imagined them. In contrast, Robida’s exuberant reconstruction belongs thoroughly to the image of the Middle Ages as purveyed in France in 1900. His medievalism would have been a far cry from what Ruskin sold until his death in that same year. The pseudomedieval quarter would not have been a hindrance, and may even have been a boon, to Adams as he assumed an attitude as a survivor of the twelfth century who had prayed with Bernard of Clairvaux and debated with Peter Abelard.
To look beyond Adams, Old Paris helped to solidify the stature of the Middle Ages as an object of desire. The most affluent who fancied keepsakes could still seek out actual or at least purported medieval artifacts for their collections. Those of more limited means could instead acquire mass-produced items that reproduced objets d’art from many centuries earlier or re-created them without seeking to replicate them exactly. Rich and poor alike had opportunities to bury themselves in reenactments—plein-air in expositions and exhibitions, indoors in plays and operas. The occasions for such exposure were only growing. The event left many disconcerted and disillusioned, as well as surfeited with World’s Fairs. At the same time, as viewers mulled their own times and prophesied the future, the loss of idealism may have fed into an even sharper wistfulness for an imagined Middle Ages. Thus, the stretch from the Crystal Palace Exhibition of 1851 to the Universal Exposition of Paris in 1900 did not mark the end of either medievalizing or the juggler-jongleur. Far from it.
Dynamo and Virgin Suicide
Despite multifarious quirks and unique distinctions, Adams does not cease to be very much a man of his day. In his own mature stage of life, he hones his ability, like the Roman god Janus, to gaze at one and the same time backward and forward. He overviews both history and the future. Hawk-eyed, he looks back at two periods, the earlier covering his young manhood from 1840 to 1870, and the later one spanning three decades from 1870 to 1900. At the same time, he gapes slack-jawed from the present forward.
Mont Saint Michel and Chartres was published in the thick of what has been flagged as the machine age, a late phase of the industrial age, dated approximately between 1880 and 1945. Adams evidences an almost boastful ambivalence, because advances in modern technology at once attract and repel him. As a result, he is put in a mind to sprint from his new century for the Middle Ages—but by tooling about seatbelt-less among cathedral towns in an eighteen-horsepower Mercedes Benz. Nor does he have the slightest blind spot about the incongruity between his means of transportation and the objective of the motion. Rather, he relishes it with open-eyed and wide-mouthed wryness. Picture a carful of sporty Boston Brahmins, eyes shielded by goggles, hair protected in silk hairnets, as they whiz from Gothic monument to monument, shifting into overdrive to travel back into the medieval period.
Putt-putting cars, as opposed to whinnying horses, were only one of many changes transforming life at a rate to make the head reel. Before the onslaught, Adams was hard put to maintain his aplomb. In French art, postimpressionism would soon cave to cubism. Under similar pressure to impose upon the world a new or at least a renewed geometry, the author turned to the Middle Ages—or rather brought his reconception of them into the early twentieth century. The paradox of this view is anticipated already in January 1841, when the hypomanic Gothic revivalist Pugin described himself as “such a locomotive being always flying about.” Adams rejected technology for his counterintuitively agnostic Mariodulia—or does it even slip into Mariolatry? Yet his pirouette away from modernity toward Mary and the medieval period is thus not complete. In fact, it subverts itself somewhat. Then again, we should perhaps conclude that the hypnotic power residing in whirring dynamos and purring automobiles was in his view only illusory, nothing next to the Virgin-driven strength of the medieval West.
When Elizabeth Cameron’s apartment was unavailable to him, Adams took lodging in quarters not far from the Exposition. From this redoubt, he could sally forth to surround himself with the gadgetry in the Great Hall. At the same time, he accumulated hillocks of books, from which he built what he called “a gay library of twelfth century architecture” and “a school of Romanesque literature.” Among the volumes was a collection of Marian miracles composed in the second half of the twelfth century. The French title may be rendered roughly into English as “The Book of Grace.” Another item in this depository was a study of Peter Abelard. A third tome explored the philosophy of Thomas Aquinas, the Dominican theologian and philosopher. Submerging himself in scholastic philosophy, Adams annotated publications on this last topic more heavily than any others with which he busied himself during this period.
In this state, midway between the twelfth and the early twentieth centuries, Henry Adams drafted his “Prayer to the Virgin of Chartres” (1901). The poem was inspired by the “prayer to the Virgin” by Adam of Saint Victor. It contains as one subsection a “Prayer to the Dynamo” with a dialogue between man and the atom. In this case the last two syllables recall the first man Adam as well as the family name of the author himself. This poetry offers in many ways a foretaste of Mont Saint Michel and Chartres. As so often with Adams, his text is grounded in searing personal circumstances. Aged sixty-three, he remained deeply smitten with the far younger Elizabeth Cameron. To her he wrote about the piece. To her alone he sent the first fair copy. The prayerful verses retained significance to him until the end of his life. The final version was discovered in a packet of special papers after his death. Let us be clear: the lines express belief not in the religion surrounding the Blessed Virgin, but in the idea that womanhood could function as a counterweight to the modernity, on the outskirts of modernism, from which Adams sprang back. Mary is counterpoise or alter ego to both the modern and the masculine.
Ambivalence in the face of his contemporary world pervades his classic autobiography, The Education of Henry Adams. He was both drawn to and repelled by the hurly-burly life of his day. In contemplating the United States, he was not obtuse about the exhaustive transformations that the society and culture in which he had been raised were undergoing. To the same effect, he held strong views on the roles being played by the new rich whose wallets had been fattened by the technological and economic developments of the post-Civil War years. He perceived the spiritual energy that in his opinion had once derived from the Virgin now being replaced by physical power emanating from mechanical devices. But the new resource suffered from stark limitations. The dynamos were mesmerizing, but to him they held no promise of ushering in salvation.
To Adams, redemption was vested in females alone, as incarnated in Mary as mother. Only Our Lady could repair the anomie he saw encircling him. Childless, he glorified maternalism. The procreativity of motherhood dwarfed the rational energy of man-made apparatuses. Machines could produce, while women could reproduce; dynamos could generate, while mothers could regenerate. The Mother of God was the archetypal woman and mother. Though Adams was not Catholic, and in fact not a believer despite his professed longing to arrive at belief, he manifested a fixation that exalted faith as tantamount to culture. His attraction had a cultural basis in the vogue for religion that was fostered by what has been labeled the “Catholic Renaissance.” To go further, he cherished a devotion to the Virgin that bordered upon Mariolatry. This attachment developed only after his wife took her own life on December 6, 1885. Her given name of Marian prompted their close friend John Hay to the double meaning of calling her “Our Lady of Lafayette Square.”
Even as a newlywed Clover revealed depressive tendencies, perhaps inherited. Much later she drained a vial of potassium cyanide, a chemical employed in developing photos, and killed herself. Such decease by self-poisoning (a not always inadvertent photo finish) had become entrenched already as a staple of the photographic profession and hobby. She had steeped herself deeply in picture-taking over the preceding two years, especially since acquiring a camera of her own in 1883.
Despite the torturously unhappy ending to his wife’s life, Adams counted his thirteen years of marriage (or at least the first dozen of them, before she sank into despondency) with Clover as the happiest of his life. Double-checking his calculations is impossible: marital bliss can resist quantification by any outsider, let alone one who blunders along more than a century after both members of the couple have passed away. We are on surer ground in assessing his reactions to his spouse’s suicide. Out of hurt, anger, guilt, shame, embarrassment, or some mix of these and other emotions, he imposed upon himself a sustained and rigorous silence about her. This resolute wordlessness extended even to his shredding all her letters to him. Going further, he refrained for decades afterward from uttering her name or discussing her. His autobiography is pointed in omitting all mention of her. In at least this one regard, he lived up to the most self-denying soundlessness of Cistercian standards. Among the white monks, speechlessness can be the highest form of compliment. But did he mean to be complimentary?
The other response, of enigmatic memorialization, came in the construction in 1890 and 1891 of a monument in Rock Creek Cemetery in Washington, DC (see Fig. 2.39). The Adams Memorial, as it tends to be called officially, features a remarkable six-foot-high bronze sculpture that rests on a rough-hewn stone. The image is by Augustus Saint-Gaudens, an American sculptor of note and, eventually, a close associate of Adams. The bronze and stone are in turn situated within a frame fabricated from two monoliths of buffed granite. This setting was designed by Stanford White (see Fig. 2.40), flamboyant partner in the renowned American architectural firm McKim, Mead and White.
The statue represents a seated person, whose entire body is shrouded in a full-length cloak. Its androgynous face is recessed within a cowl, and its chin rests upon a partly open upturned hand. The pose befits a shrine near which Henry was buried himself thirty-three years after Clover’s death. There is no headstone for the mortal remains of either husband or wife. The artist called the figure The Mystery of the Hereafter, Adams The Peace of God That Passeth Understanding. After viewing the composition in 1906, Mark Twain observed that it personified all human grief. The American writer’s words contributed to its being known popularly as Grief. The representation can in fact be interpreted as heartache—the one that weighed down Adams’s wife and induced her to kill herself, the one that took hold of her distraught widower afterward, and others at which we can only guess. Yet construing the statue as standing for sorrow incarnate may be too easy.
Twain’s appellation for the cast was much to Henry Adams’s displeasure. The emotion of grief was not the significance Saint-Gaudens and he meant to evoke. They described the being at the memorial as a Buddha, to embody nonchalant composure and equanimous calmness. On his journeys to what was then the Far East, the widower had admired representations of the sage. In his own spiritual development, he paired Brahma with Buddha. What a coincidence: a Boston Brahmin was in quest of Brahman, a principle that he discerned in both Hinduism and Buddhism. He was influenced deeply by the East Asian goddess of Mercy known nowadays as Guanyin, whom he encountered in statues in Japan, and by discussions of nirvana with his friend and travel companion John La Farge. Beyond Adams’s supposed personal aspiration to achieve qualities vested in the Buddha, we have seen that in the Gilded Age viewers traced parallels between a twelfth-century Virgin and Child, such as the Morgan Madonna (see Vol. 2, Fig. 1.3), and Chinese sculpture, such as a medieval Buddha (see Vol. 2, Fig. 1.4). The memorial lends itself to interpretation as medieval and monastic, eastern and Buddhistic, or all these things at once.
As an embodiment of undismayed reflection or withdrawn grief, the statue could imply a divinity or intercessor to which a mourner could repair for solace. It is poker-faced, but expressionlessness does not necessarily equate to affectlessness. Among many other things, the sculpture may have been a Mary meant for a miracle of reconciliation. A connection with the Virgin would not be far-fetched. As Saint-Gaudens reconnoitered for inspirations to guide him in crafting the work of art, Adams cited to the sculptor two portrayals that Clover and he had esteemed, one of which was the Sistine Madonna. The multivalence of The Peace of God is very much in keeping with the desires of its patron. To the qualities of universality and anonymity that its commissioner saw in it, we could add a string of others, such as ecumenicism and asexuality. Henry Adams being Henry Adams, he surely had his own readings of the statue. Yet he succeeded in his aspiration to keep his own views close to his chest and to let the bronze become a Rorschach test for all who happened to see it, just as the tale of Our Lady’s Tumbler has become for everyone who reads it and rewrites it.
A photograph of the writer captures his likeness in 1891 (see Fig. 2.41), around when the memorial to his deceased wife was completed. He visited the casting in situ not much later. Spookily (given his wife’s mode of taking her own life), the self-portrait is the product of amateur photography. He took it in the library of his Washington home with a box camera that he activated by a rubber tube connected to a squeezable bulb held in his hand. There he sits, mustachioed and meditative, posed like a male equivalent of Whistler’s mother.
An intense attachment to the Virgin, not religious belief but conceptual attraction, took hold of Adams during his subsequent relationship with Elizabeth Cameron. In Mont Saint Michel and Chartres he explicated devotion to the Mother of God as having a sexual basis. To be specific, he fitted Mary within a view of history that traced a wave pattern on male-and-female axes. His glorification of Our Lady in such a sexualized context has stoked, understandably and not unconvincingly, psychoanalytic readings of his personal life. Massive doses of vaporous fantasy are not required to suspect that his Mother of God comprehended aspects of the two major women in his adult life: Marian Adams, the spouse who sundered herself from him when she took her own life, and the married Elizabeth Cameron, who eventually was ready to have affairs, but not with him.
The chapters of Mont Saint Michel and Chartres on the Virgin of Chartres have been called astutely “a consolation-gift that Henry Adams gave to himself to compensate for Marian’s absence and Elizabeth’s unattainability.” He idealized and idolized both females. The onetime and once again medieval historian found himself a Dante who pined for two Beatrices, one dead and the other living. The unreachability of both afforded him every reason to channel his passions toward a flawless Virgin he located in a remote past. By way of a time machine in his imagination, he traveled centuries back in search of the eternal woman. Like the tumbler in the medieval poem, he was all too versed in the heartbreak of unrequited love.
Adams’s growing attraction to Elizabeth Cameron later bubbled into what could be fairly called obsession. Whether the early stages of this infatuation contributed to his wife’s year-long slough and suicide is a question that has been much explored, with judgments varying considerably. Did he even recognize that he was falling for the younger woman? Is love in fact the right label to describe his susceptibility at that point? Regardless of his own perceptions or imperception, did his helpmate notice? She imbibed the poison two days after making her last social call—a visit to Cameron. Did he feel any subsequent and consequent culpability about Clover’s death by her own hand?
Many other explanations for why she poisoned herself are conceivable. The Hooper family tree has boughs that broke off abruptly because of lunacy and suicide. Long before Clover killed herself, Charles Francis Adams Jr. spluttered once tactlessly that Henry could not marry her because her relations were “all crazy as coots.” Or, a predisposition toward deep depression could have been exacerbated by any of numerous contributing factors—for example, the direct outcome of recently losing her father. She had been strongly, even immoderately, devoted to him, since losing her mother when she was only five years old. In fact, she imbibed the fatal draft of developing fluid on a Sunday, the day of the week on which she had habitually written the old man when he was still alive and well. The timing may have spoken to the unfilled void of loneliness that yawned within her when he passed out of her existence. Then again, Clover could have resorted to the lethal chemicals at least partly out of despair at her childlessness (and would that state have owed to her infertility or his—and would knowing one way or the other even have mattered?), in an age when most women who could bear children did so. Indeed, the younger woman with whom she spent time socially just prior to her act of despair was in the first trimester of pregnancy. After delivering on June 25, 1886, the new mother wanted to call her daughter after Clover’s given name. Unable because of Henry Adams’s travels to secure permission from him to do so, she called the baby girl not Marian but Martha.
To look for a very different sort of root cause, her husband’s failure to take seriously and ratify her passion for photography could have stalemated her. After she was solicited to publish a photo of hers in a high-circulation magazine, he scuttled the idea. His flat-out refusal to grant her permission could have been stinging. It would have brought home how much she lacked an outlet for her creativity and intellect, independent of Adams’s ambitions. If in her truncated life she left behind a lasting testament beyond the impact she had on the people who met her, the legacy she bequeathed consisted in her pictures. They evidence aptitude in the technical skills that the new craft required, as well as prowess in applying them to bring out the character of her subjects.
Whatever answers we fashion to the speculations that the death of Adams’s wife may arouse, La Dona came in the years afterward to occupy a figurative plinth where he adored and adulated her, though never having the fullness he sought for their relationship. Much later, World War I contributed to the loss of the daughter in the La Dona-and-Child pairing toward which he transferred his desire and sublimated his longing. Elizabeth Cameron’s Martha died young in 1918. Her death came partly as a consequence of the body- and soul-trying conditions to which she had been subjected as a nurse to wounded combatants in World War I.
Although Adams engages in constant dialogue with generic young ladies in Mont Saint Michel and Chartres, he leaves unnamed the most important two. His panegyric of Woman is meant to resound to Marian beyond the grave and to La Dona across oceans of time, space, and sexual distance. Clover was gone everlastingly, but Grief by Saint-Gaudens endures in perpetuity. That is the way of art. As for the Middle Ages and medievalism in the nineteenth century, Mont Saint Michel and Chartres may be read less now than formerly, but it still retains the clout of a valued curiosity. Medieval times themselves refuse to die, a site sometimes of nostalgia, sometimes of melancholy. Cut to the quick by his unfulfillment both personal and professional, Adams made the Middle Ages both sorrow and its redress. The Christianity and Marianism at the fore of Our Lady’s Tumbler presented two strong grounds on which his supposedly uncle-like but equally husbandly and romantic imagination would have been gripped by the piece of medieval French poetry. Among other incitements, the profession of the protagonist in the poem may have been the greatest.
Henry Adams as Jongleur
In the Mont-Saint-Michel, whatever Adams translated, either the poetry of the court, or the chanson de geste, or the cathedral arch, or the miracles of Our Lady, he rendered not only the spirit of an age, but his own portrait. It may be grotesque to imagine him, like her tombeor, capering naked before the image of the Virgin in the shadow of the monastery of Clairvaux. But he was there exposed before the image.
A very obvious question that confronts the reader of Mont Saint Michel and Chartres is whether to judge Henry Adams as an academician, a man of letters, both, or neither. A subtler conundrum is whether or not he passes muster as a jongleur, since he identified, or at least professed to identify, with him. At first blush, an interrogation along these lines would seem unbelievable. Socially, Adams was the near opposite of the man that this far-fetched hypothesis would posit to be his counterpart. Whereas the medieval French tumbler frequented the fringes of society, the American speculated of himself: “probably no child, born in the year [of 1838], held better cards than he.”
On the face of it, the two had little in common. Short and unathletic, Adams was anything but a champion. Yet he was a hard worker who could have empathized with both the stamina of the tumbler and the overtiredness to which the lay brother drove himself through his feats of devotion. The collapses that the medieval performer is described as undergoing could have resonated with him. The erstwhile educator suffered from what was diagnosed by the late nineteenth-century American medical establishment as the catchall national ailment of neurasthenia. This condition brought with it a susceptibility to anemia, spells of lightheadedness, and blackouts. To physical limitations could be added personal qualities and circumstances. Both the ignorant tumbler and the erudite Adams claimed to regard their choices and trade-offs in life and career as fiascos. Both elected to draw a shroud of protective silence over themselves, as they lived in solitude among their respective communities. Although in very different ways, both the man of letters and the jongleur qualified as outsiders. They lacked or chose to forfeit a solid place in the social hierarchy.
The Harvard professorship formed a brief intermission between Adams’s service abroad during the Civil War as a private secretary to his father and his years planted in Washington, DC, where he was a prominent but pointedly a private citizen. He gave up the one métier for which he was hired. He seemed to crave laurels as a writer, but he concealed his authorship of his two novels and severely hobbled the circulation of his two most popular nonfiction works. He never competed for elective office or was detailed to a political one.
In the chapter of Mont Saint Michel and Chartres on miracles, Adams quotes nearly ninety lines from Our Lady’s Tumbler in both the original French and his own English translation. After the first long quotation, he describes the traveling acrobat in terms that whisper at self-awareness of his own position: “Tormented by the sense of his uselessness to the society whose bread he ate without giving a return in service, and afraid of being expelled as a useless member.” In many regards, this characterization of the long-ago entertainer as a nullity having nothing but nuisance value could have applied equally well to the plight of the writer in his later life. He subsisted on income from inherited wealth, most of it from his wife. The passing years put him ever further from the university position from which he had resigned. Time had rendered him ever unlikelier to be summoned as counselor to the president or any other national potentate, if he even aspired to such an appointment. For all his wisdom, he was no Solon. All the same, he took steps to transcend the defeats in his personal and professional life. In his solitude, he composed words of prose and verse about the Middle Ages and Virgin as well as about modernity and dynamos, to be released deliberately to a preselected claque of so-called nieces and other intimates. Henry Adams soliloquized, much as the tumbler danced.
Beyond any corporeal infirmity or personality traits he shared with the thirteenth-century entertainer, Adams convinced himself that his values as an individual matched those of jongleurs as a social class. If the Blessed Virgin embodied the vanished faith of the medieval past, then the writer’s self-imposed role in his book was to escort or chaperone his readers as pilgrims back into the Middle Ages. By so doing, he rescued them from what he regarded as the bleak modernity of the early twentieth century. In his guise as companion on such peregrinations, Adams had another inducement to be drawn to Our Lady’s Tumbler. He postured himself as a minstrel who mediated between his public and Mary as well as between his days and those of yore.
To broaden the last assertion slightly, Adams portrayed himself as a tumbler who tripped the light fantastic between the present and past. In this regard, a letter of his to Henry Osborn Taylor in 1905 has pertinence. Adams described his former colleague’s aim as an occupationally credentialed historian to conduct readers back to the Middle Ages as those times had actually been; to this goal he contrasted his own mission, more amateurish or less pedantic, of relating the medieval period to what was then the present. Taylor’s objective demanded the power of pulling forward the minutiae of the past, while Adams’s called out for nothing less than the dexterity of the jongleur of Notre Dame.
Similarly, in earlier correspondence with Taylor, Adams differentiates between on the one hand the English historian William Stubbs, Bishop of Oxford (see Fig. 2.42), and on the other his own close friend, the American artist John La Farge. By setting up the two men as the opposing sides of an abyss, Adams points to the gap between professional history based on the rigorous establishment and interpretation of texts, and what would now be called cultural history. In this case, he gives a generous dose of attention to the artistic products of the culture under examination. Who can decree that one approach outreaches the other, since both have their constraints? Everyone knows that the past is irrevocable and unrepeatable, which rules out full success for Taylor’s method—but Adams’s mode has, alongside all the beauty of its artistry, all its limitations.
Adams retained enough vestiges of being an Enlightenment man in the mold of his grandfather and great-grandfather to recognize that he lacked the faith to perform truly for the Virgin Mary. He had taken his own measure well enough to realize that his true audience comprised women he could not possess as he wished—the wife he had not saved but had lost, the beloved he had sought but never won, and the nieces who mostly were not nieces after all. At least for sexual abstinence, it was all too fitting for him to pretend to be a hermit. In Mont Saint Michel and Chartres, he played the additional role of a jongleur.
The parallels between the writer of the early twentieth century and the street-acrobat of the medieval French poem do not trail off with their like-minded desire to cloister themselves. Adams lived if not in the shadow, then at least outside the brightly lit arenas of public service, politics, and commerce that most of his relatives haunted, and he forsook the academic post that he had taken as an alternative. In effect, he retreated from the spheres of both active and contemplative life to a zone of custom-made disunion. He set up shop a block from the White House, but there too he felt out of place. He had then every reason to identify with the tumbler, who began out of despair to frisk before the altar of Mary as an offering to her. As has been the case for all manner of writers since him, Adams’s words were the dances and leaps that he did in her honor. Like the medieval entertainer before him, he danced a pas de deux with the Virgin.
In writing of Mont Saint Michel, Henry Adams struck the pose of a Norman juggler. His closest equivalent was Taillefer. In an old legend, this supposed personage belonged to the entourage that accompanied William the Conqueror in the Norman invasion and occupation of 1066. The story goes that this jongleur performed the Song of Roland for the Norman troops before the Battle of Hastings while juggling his sword (see Fig. 2.43). The professional performer drew special attention in the aftermath of the eight-hundredth anniversary of the Norman Conquest, and at the time of the Franco-Prussian War.
When dealing with the cathedral of Chartres, Adams made a casual effort in role-playing as the tumbler. In both cases his own book was tantamount to his song or, to deploy his own word, his libretto. He recounts in a letter written to Elizabeth Cameron how as an “act of piety to the memory of [my] revered grandfather” he repaired in 1891 to the Opéra Comique in Paris to attend Richard Coeur-de-lion. What constituted the pietas? John Quincy Adams had first heard this foundational comic opera on King Richard I of England while a young diplomat in The Hague a century earlier.
The musical drama relates a legend about Richard Lionheart. On his way home from the Third Crusade, the monarch is first captured in Austria and then rescued by his faithful squire Blondel de Nesle in the guise of a blind troubadour. Henry tells Elizabeth how his ancestor, after losing the presidency, became obsessed with Blondel’s solo “O Richard, O my king, the universe abandons you.” This identification was not without its irony, since this aria had been popular during the French Revolution as a rallying point for royalists. Be that as it may, identifying himself purposely (and name-droppingly?) with his forefather, the late nineteenth-century letter writer levitates himself in his imagination back not to the Reign of Terror but to The Hague in that earlier fin de siècle. At the same time, the music enjoyed a new lease on life toward the turn of the century through which Adams himself would live (see Fig. 2.44).
Henry Adams was a man of untrammeled but unmet ambition. For all of it, he lacked a single vocation. He camped out in Washington just across a park from the White House, and he watched. He may also have dallied to be called upon for a role that did not exist. Did he expect to be named sage laureate? Did he have his sights set on a secretariat, in the event that a future president should establish a federal department of intellect and culture?
From his closest friends, Adams earned the tenderly insightful Latin byname of Porcupinus Angelicus. The nickname, “angelic porcupine” in English, hints simultaneously at two countervailing qualities. One is ethereality. The adjective may recall specifically the Angelic Doctor himself, Saint Thomas Aquinas. Another is anti-cuddliness, a characteristic could even have been described as crustiness or crankiness. Adams was often moody, sometimes cantankerous, not outgoing by any stretch of the imagination. His intimates could not help but recognize in him a morose tetchiness that could slip into peevishness. They saw how unready he was to suffer fools gladly. The same coterie of intimates who knew and employed this byword arranged for Saint-Gaudens to manufacture a medallion. It portrayed their friend in the guise of a winged rodent with defensive spines (see Fig. 2.45).
In 1880 and 1884 Adams produced two novels of well-maintained anonymity. He cultivated the habit of releasing his major works through publication that was private, at least initially. The focus on privacy intensified after the deaths of his wife, father, and mother. For most of a decade, he gave only to his inner circle copies of both Mont Saint Michel and Chartres and The Education of Henry Adams. This manner of circulating (or not) the books was at once self-effacing and ingeniously self-promoting: in most markets, restricted supply can be parlayed into stepped-up demand. Through his peculiarly heterogeneous oeuvre and his nonconformist supply chain, Henry Adams positioned himself to have better name recognition in the twentieth century than anyone else among his friends, including at times even John Hay.
Unity and Multiplicity
In the autobiography Adams teases out in his crystalline prose at least two major relationships. One runs between Mont Saint Michel and Chartres and The Education of Henry Adams. The other overarches themes of unity and multiplicity. The thematic contrast in turn governs the comparison he draws between the thirteenth and twentieth centuries. He conceived of the two projects as “Mont Saint Michel and Chartres: A Study of Thirteenth-Century Unity” and “The Education of Henry Adams: A Study of Twentieth-Century Multiplicity” respectively. The subtitles remained only notional and do not grace the title pages of either book as eventually printed. Though they reflect a deeply personal perspective, at the same time they bespeak the sense of piercing loss or fracturing that intellectuals felt in the early days of modernism. They also speak to the yearning for an imagined past of greater unity—unity of man, nature, and God. To substitute for unity a word that in its construction represents a neater antithesis to multiplicity, they were wistful for greater simplicity. Antimodernism has been encapsulated as “the recoil from an ‘over civilized’ modern existence to more intense forms of physical or spiritual existence.” By this token, the tumbler himself is antimodern avant la lettre. He embodies the unity and simplicity that the modern character left behind.
The unity of Gothic, rooted in nature, had been noticed and commented upon at the latest by the time of romantics in Germany. In On German Architecture (1772), Johann Wolfgang von Goethe confessed to having been stunned upon seeing and studying the cathedral of Strasbourg. The sudden revelation shattered all his preconceptions against this style and placated his previous hostility to it. Where the polymath had been predisposed to find turbid confusion, pell-mell disorder, and rank unnaturalism, he descried instead organic oneness, wholeness, and greatness. Putting together all these qualities, he discerned authentic Germanness.
A unity seen, or thought to be seen, receding into the past behind him, and a multiplicity around him and ever noisier on the horizon—this was Henry Adams’s life, at least as he chose to frame and present it. The unlikeness between the two phrases “Thirteenth-Century Unity” and “Twentieth-Century Multiplicity” offers testimony to the oddly contorted sentimental longing Adams and others nurtured for the medieval period. They constructed for themselves a fantastical Middle Ages, including an imagined Virgin Mary. They fashioned this background from more than one half millennium earlier not in their own image, but as a remedy for the perceptions and misperceptions they had of their own day. Adams felt that over time the spiritual anchor of medieval faith had been replaced by the kinetic energy of modern science.
Because of his family background, Henry Adams grew up in a prolongation of the American Enlightenment values and aspirations with which the Revolution and its aftermath had been imbued. Subsequently he experienced, if only from afar, the ghastliness of a Civil War that seemed to put to the lie all pretenses of an Age of Reason. As he narrowed his eyes to look back at his earlier days with all the benefit of aging hindsight, he described, with deliberate anachronism, how he had approached the transcendentalism of the church in Concord, Massachusetts, “in much the same spirit as he would have entered a Gothic Cathedral.” He compounded the sense of distance by continuing “for he well knew that the priests regarded him as only a worm.” By this juxtaposition he seems to equate the utopianism of both the transcendentalism that enveloped him in his youth, and the Shangri-La of medieval Gothic Europe that he learned to appreciate intimately later in life. When he penned this retrospective, he was a widower, and nearing old age in a world that had become a radically different place from what it had been in his boyhood. The optimism of his younger years about the education, political institutions, and laws of a youthful nation had given way to what has been styled “anarchical skepticism.” Such a state would brush close to nihilism.
While discharging his postbellum cataract of books, Adams lived in the day of the conflicting but also somehow complementary Gothic revival and Gilded Age. He carried within him two opposed and disproportionate refractions of the Middle Ages, through Enlightenment contempt and romantic glorification—but at least he was immune to the far greater misrepresentation that can emerge from apathy and ignorance, twin dangers in times when cultures lose track of their histories.
The dichotomy between simplicity and multiplicity was irresolvable. Adams struck a pose of nostalgic hankering for collectivity. Yet of all people he would have been the most disinclined to waive his individuality, if doing so had been the prerequisite to achieving unity by converging into such belonging. It would not have been possible to pick and choose what was preferable from each of the two eras. The cloisters of the Middle Ages boasted far more of the law-abiding monks than of the rebellious tumblers. The medieval dancer was the exception that proved the rule, in this case the Benedictine rule, as interpreted reductively by the Cistercians for laymen.
Medievalist Dream of a Dying DC Dynasty?
To treat Henry Adams as the usual fin-de-siècle, slowly dying scion of a defunct American dynasty, à la ‘Marxian’ interpretation of literature, is obviously a mistake. The great regret is that Adams did not live ten years more than eighty to write down such a force as Lenin.
The nineteenth century saw a succession of historicizing revivals, of which the assorted Gothic ones were only a few. Adams’s embrace of the Middle Ages represented a conscious turn from the neoclassicism, born of the Enlightenment, that cocooned him in Washington. The city around him had already advanced far on its way to being the theme park of pseudoancient architecture that it remains today. A crux of the age was to straighten out whether the antiquity was that of republican or imperial Rome. Government buildings demanded authorization through association with the epochs in which the institutions they embodied had supposedly been invented. Hence the Federal-period architecture, in which torchbearers such as Thomas Jefferson sought inspiration from the classical ages of Greece and Rome for creating and authenticating an identity for the republic that they had founded and endeavored to perpetuate. To take only three examples, consider the domed Capitol that was expanded periodically, from 1793 through the mid-nineteenth century; the dagger-pointed Washington Monument to honor the founding president, begun in 1848 and completed in 1884; and the classical Doric temple to commemorate another head of state, the Lincoln Memorial, initiated in 1914 and dedicated in 1922. This threesome helped to define the capital as it took shape during Adams’s time of residence there.
Like John Ruskin and William Morris before him, but in his own distinctive fashion, Adams prospected in the Middle Ages for difference. In it he sought a different past, a different set of values, and a different architecture to inspire and guide him. His choice of a period upon which to model his present may seem paradoxical, and he took a likewise contrarian approach to publication. Bucking the process of commoditization by which the medieval era was being purveyed to mass audiences, he clung instead, with the impracticality of a knight on a quest, or a jongleur in an abbey, to self-financing a limited edition for distribution without charge. In forswearing notoriety, he once again feigned that he was a medieval monk. Like Gautier de Coinci or the anonymous poet of Our Lady’s Tumbler, he worked unpaid for the Virgin.
Adams’s response to the transition from Romanesque to Gothic was colored by his atavism. In imagining the builders of the medieval churches and the folk who had once worshiped in them, he fantasized that he could detect his forebears. In the process, he played at being a Norman of the twelfth century. Ruskin too had flashes of pride in the architectural past of his nation or region. The Englishman enjoined his readers to look within, where they could find the Middle Ages, by “tracing out this grey, shadowy, many-pinnacled image of the Gothic spirit within us; and discerning what fellowship there is between it and our Northern hearts.” Adams transplanted Ruskin’s identification with the Gothic past into the radically different soil and society of his own country.
Adams’s moony identification with the English and Normans of old is at once romantic and right wing. It rests upon historical misconceptions that may have appeared ill-considered already in his time and that certainly look that way today. His conception of feudalism fails to spot everything that is not benign about that system. Even uglier is the relationship between his ethnic nostalgia about the past and his racial and religious blinders about the present. The high-principled qualities that he ascribed to Englishness and Normanness are all well and good. Yet his gusto for these supposed past races grew in direct proportion to his dyspeptic distrust of actual modern-day outsiders. Looking at his own nation, he succumbed to nativism. In his doomsaying, he expressed the opinion that recent immigrants, such as Irish and Jewish ones, posed a threat to the integrity of the United States. He aired his anti-Semitism more overtly as he aged. At least once he drew a likeness between aspects of the high Gothic style that he disliked and qualities of financial cupidity and speculation that he ascribed to Jews.
If Mont Saint Michel and Chartres foundered, it capsized owing to the peculiarities of Adams’s circumstances. He came by his disposition naturally and perhaps even hereditarily. Whatever the cause, his character combined an ambition for proximity to the highest political offices with a predisposition to take inherently impolitic stands. He moved to Washington less like a white knight than like a hermit or anchorite, who set up house across from what would be regarded later fleetingly as Camelot. He had the tragic misfortune to lose his wife to depression-driven suicide, and subsequently to become lovesick for a woman who despite coyly disingenuous signals to the contrary would never accept him as lover or husband. Then again, he found the means within himself to channel the initial loss and the subsequent deprivation into meditations. The resultant ruminations can enthrall us more than one century afterward. I, for one, hesitate to consider such a payoff as promise unfulfilled.
Adams had inherited personal characteristics and undergone unique vicissitudes that rendered him too idiosyncratic to typify his times or represent his contemporaries. For all that, he had a lucidity of insight, breadth of knowledge and experience, and intensity of expression that enabled him to draw penetrating comparisons between his own days and those of seven or eight centuries earlier. He regarded all societies as resting upon fictions that ultimately came up short. Yet he numbered the figments upon which twelfth-century France was built among the best that humanity has ever devised.
Let us comb through the cultural forces that led to the making of the American Middle Ages in which Henry Adams participated. Boston had seen the start of a revolution once already, and now its Gothic revivalists made it the seedbed for a medievalizing revolt. In their rebellion, literature and architecture went hand in hand. From the days of romanticism down to the present, the fates of literature and architecture have seldom if ever intertwined as they have done in Gothicism. The Gothic arrival in the first three decades of the twentieth century may have been flawed sometimes in its motivation, but the buildings remain an important component in the landscapes of cities and campuses through the North American continent. The story deserves a fuller telling.