3. Britain and the Making of the American Middle Ages
© 2018 Jan M. Ziolkowski, CC BY 4.0 https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0146.03
The Goth Side of Washington
On comparing the Architectural Works of the present Century with those of the Middle Ages, the wonderful superiority of the latter must strike every attentive observer; and the mind is naturally led to reflect on the causes which have wrought this mighty change.
Classicism held incontestable sway in Washington, DC. Even so, Henry Adams was far from alone among his countrymen in favoring late Romanesque and early Gothic, as he did in Mont Saint Michel and Chartres. In 1864, an American Pre-Raphaelite periodical published a remarkable piece that celebrated the construction of the National Academy of Design in New York City (see Fig. 3.1). The palatial building led a piteously foreshortened life, suffering dismantlement before the nineteenth century even concluded. Yet while still standing, the palazzo made an outsized impact. The first specimen of Venetian Gothic revival mode in the nation, it took as its principal architectural inspiration the Doge’s Palace in Venice (see Fig. 3.2).
Why would Americans of the Civil War era and beyond have gravitated toward medieval Italy as understood first by John Ruskin and later by Charles Eliot Norton? Beyond aesthetics, Venice was a state in which elected representatives of the people held power. In its art and architecture, it offered a model that could serve for a modern democracy. In a letter written to Ruskin in July of 1871, Norton detailed the bases on which he held the lagoon city in the highest regard. In the same year, Adams himself became imbued in the writings and thought of Ruskin and Viollet-le-Duc during his first year of undergraduate teaching. More narrowly, and less politically, the republic known as Serenissima constituted a plausible parallel to Boston as a seafaring capital with strong trading links to the East. Ruskin argued influentially that the Italian port took its distinctive form of arch, among other things, from Islamic architecture. In “The Nature of Gothic” he proffered his opinion: “The Ducal palace of Venice contains the three elements in exactly equal proportions—the Roman, Lombard, and Arab. It is the central building of the world.” He thus particularized the view, pervasive long before him, that the pointed arch came to Western Europe through contact with Eastern sophistication. In turn, this kind of vault propelled the transition from Romanesque to Gothic. He summed up: “In the eighteenth century no one doubted that all our Gothic art had been implanted by the Arabs!”
A poison-pen commentary of 1864 upon the Ruskinian National Academy of Design fulminated against the preferential treatment accorded to classicizing architecture elsewhere in the United States. Along the way, it took a hard swipe at the District of Columbia for making the Greek colonnade the default choice. As a clear alternative to the reigning Hellenism, American Pre-Raphaelites advocated Gothic. Writers preached this last option not just as one among many but as the sole architectural form of worth. As the different camps contended, Washington was not left untouched by the revival of medieval styles. In a skyscraper-less city full of low-rises, many of the tallest structures—apart from the iconic obelisk of the Washington Monument—are Gothic. Four deserve careful attention, since collectively they help to clarify how Gothicism became a transatlantic enterprise: the Smithsonian Institution Building at the heart of the National Mall; Healy Hall at Georgetown University and the National Cathedral to the northwest; and, to the north, the Post Office Building—as it was called back in the day.
In the heavily touristed central belt of the nation’s capital today, the buckle is the Smithsonian. The most visible edifice in a medieval manner, it is odd man out in the low-slung cityscape. The Greco-Roman architecture of antiquity was mostly horizontal. Although the Greeks and Romans could engineer marvels—the latter having left extraordinary aqueducts—they did not apply their skills in theory or practice to protoskyscrapers. In contrast, Gothic is all about height, sometimes hubristic.
James Smithson’s generosity funded construction of what is known popularly to this day as “The Castle.” The building was completed in 1855 after a design by James Renwick Jr. The museum and research complex in Washington was the first achievement of the Gothic revival in the United States that in magnitude stood on a par with the cathedrals of Europe. This fortress of science and culture, a veritable bastion of learning, is constructed of red sandstone. Evocative mainly of late Romanesque, it also incorporates traits drawn from early Gothic. Although its eclectic Gothicism fuses elements familiar from England, France, and Germany, its style is meant overall to be distinctively Norman. The edifice could hardly have escaped the notice of Henry Adams or any other Washingtonian. After all, it was built in precisely the manner of the time and place with which he identified most firmly. Furthermore, its architecture prompted furor, since it brought to the nucleus of the nation’s capital a towering mass that was ostentatiously nonclassical.
Completion of “The Castle” did not mark the end of construction at the site. A fire in 1865 destroyed the upper story as well as the north and south towers, which prompted the installation of fireproofing and firewalls. In addition, the east wing was enlarged in 1883, less than a decade after Adams’s arrival in Washington from Harvard (see Figs. 3.3 and 3.4). The reconstruction would have rekindled public consideration of the building and its style.
Robert Dale Owen, a social reformer active in American politics, had primary oversight of the original commission. Because of the fierce dissension surrounding the project, he published a treatise in 1849 to justify the choices of Renwick as architect and of Norman Romanesque as style (see Fig. 3.5). The title page of his screed is an elaborate Gothic fantasy. Its main structure is trelliswork composed of a stout vine that twists into a pointed arch and other shapes characteristic of the architecture, to hint at the intimate association between nature and Gothic. Owen closed the book by voicing confidence that the Smithsonian Building warranted special recognition as “the first edifice, in the style of the twelfth century and of a character not ecclesiastical, ever erected in this country.” Its Gothic was in the running to be designated the unofficial “National Style of Architecture for America.” For a brief while from this point onward, a medieval revival in the United States could be presented as authentically indigenous. The equivalent in the second half of the nineteenth century to the “midcentury modern” that dominated twentieth-century fashion, it could be tagged as late-century Middle Ages—but to be more precise, it was Gothic revival. This medieval modern sounded the bourdon note in a polyphony of styles, as a rainbow of historicizing manners competed over which would prevail as the main one for the whole nation.
In the architectural competition for the Smithsonian Building held in 1846, Renwick submitted to the selection committee two designs for consideration. The one accepted and erected was largely Norman; an alternative that hewed more closely to the typical Gothic revival architecture of the period was rejected, although soon enough the central section of this plan was adopted with only light modification for another imposing edifice soon erected in Washington, namely, Trinity Episcopal Church (see Figs. 3.6 and 3.7).
Right when Adams settled down in Washington, a gargantuan construction was underway across town at Georgetown University. Although the neighborhood is situated far to the northwest of downtown, its topography on steeply rising hills means that its tallest edifices hulk over the heart of the city leading down to the river. The massive Healy Hall was designed to signal the presence of the Catholic university in the city and to bring home its salience, to the political and managerial elite of the capital as to others. This monumental edifice, the flagship of the academic institution, was built from 1877 to 1879. Its two architects amalgamated elements that ran the gamut from Romanesque through early Renaissance, with Gothic at the core. The chief features include a soaring clock tower, which made the colossus at the time handily the tallest nonfederal building in the District of Columbia.
Two years after the completion of Healy Hall, a triumphal arch was erected for the 1881 inauguration of President James A. Garfield (see Fig. 3.8). Photography allows us to appreciate the timely singularity of the temporary structure. The curved shape stood perpendicular to the Renaissance revival style of the Corcoran office building. The two constructions butt heads stylistically, since the arc de triomphe is prevalently Victorian Gothic. At the same time, it is through-and-through American, with bales of banners and bunting complementing a flotilla of flags. Long gone, both are testimonials to the urgency that the United States felt over its relationship to European cultural history.
The Post Office Building was finished in 1899. Upon opening, it became the second highest construction in the District, after the Washington Monument (see Figs. 3.9 and 3.10). Its Romanesque revival style owes much to the architect Henry Hobson Richardson. The city’s first steel-frame structure, it relies heavily upon glass. The glassiness is particularly apparent in an atrium that belongs to the lineage of the Crystal Palace from 1851. The melding of medievalizing architecture with what was meant to be the newest thing in modern functionality left more than one viewer displeased. Many faultfinders found the structure disagreeable. Most memorably and colorfully, Senator Joseph Roswell Hawley disemboweled it as “a cross between a cathedral and a cotton mill.” Whatever the flaws of the hybrid, it must not be forgotten for its prominence within the attempts at the time to add a medievalesque backdrop to a city that had been predominantly Greek and Roman revival. Then again, backdrop may be a poor choice of words: overtop might serve better, since much of what is at issue here is the urban skyline. The medieval was not always intended as a spiritual countermeasure against the power and politics that have exercised perpetual dominion in the capital, but it often could serve such a function. The solidity of quarried stone can help to neutralize the fragility inherent in a house of cards.
The Washington National Cathedral received its charter from Congress in 1893 (see Fig. 3.11). At the time, it would have commanded an unbroken view of the Washington Monument. Visually, the Gothic architecture to come communicated directly with the pseudo-Egyptian obelisk. The church staked its claim as a cultural translation of European Christianity, to match the governmental one of Greco-Roman democracy and empire. The foundation stone was laid in 1907, with President Theodore Roosevelt in attendance to deliver an oration. The block is a composite, with American granite having embedded within it a small stone quarried from a field beside the Church of the Holy Nativity in Bethlehem. Such lithic insertions from elsewhere are apprehensible even in the stained glass within, one pane of which contains moon rock brought back to earth by an American space mission.
The house of prayer occupies a site on Mount Saint Albans that heightens its visibility. Its position makes it more readily viewable from many directions than the Monument itself. One tourist is reported to have bantered that he “would willingly visit a dozen modern Gothic cathedrals for the sake of getting one such view.” At the same time, the spot was chosen not only to achieve a goal in height but also to emanate the unworldly serenity and spirituality with which Gothic architecture has been judged so often to be invested. Almost the entire great church is built of Indiana limestone, but Bishop Henry Yates Satterlee secured from the ramshackle ruins of Glastonbury Abbey blocks from which to fashion the cathedra, the bishop’s seat. These stones gave the prelate a storied history on which to plant himself, since the English monastic foundation was legendarily associated with Joseph of Arimathea, King Arthur, and the Holy Grail. From “the quarries of Solomon” with their biblical weightiness, Satterlee acquired white limestone for a stone altar. Despite such touches, the good bishop’s mental image of the church-to-be was “a kind of American Westminster Abbey, yet to belong to no denomination.” Such was the highly circumscribed cultural diversity of the early twentieth century.
The place of worship would be resolutely Gothic, the equal of Canterbury Cathedral. For the task, the prelate outsourced by hiring two English architects who worked in the Gothic revival style. In correspondence, one of them made apparent the extent to which he shared Satterlee’s conviction about Gothic. With its closeness to nature and its inherent spirituality, the style could suit the ambitions of America to lead modernity. Go, Gothic!
The National Cathedral became the polestar in the quarter for architecture in this revival style, such as the adjacent Saint Alban’s School. A glimpse of a classroom brings home immediately the Gothic character of the building (see Fig. 3.12). The place of worship has also given its name to a neighborhood, Cathedral Heights. Diagonally across from both the church and educational institution stands the five-story Alban Towers, Washington’s largest apartment-hotel, constructed in 1928–1929 and completed in 1930 (see Fig. 3.13). The cluster of buildings in Gothic revival style helps to give the locale, at least remotely, the appearance of an Americanized, early twentieth-century medieval village, if such a concoction is not a contradiction in terms. Other bricks and mortar in the neighborhood were also spruced up with modest Gothicizing touches. It all came too late to have even the slightest impact on Adams, who focused adamantly upon France, especially Normandy. Understandably and rightly, even if romantically, he regarded the Norman French as contributors to the British stock from which his family traced its descent.
The Gothic revival was growing as Adams formed the germ of his thought, conducted his researches, and did his writing, and it was popularized well before Mont Saint Michel and Chartres came into print. Yet he concentrated the treatment of Gothic in his book upon the Middle Ages. Even so, he was too au courant of the developments swirling around him to remain insensible to the nineteenth-century revivals of medieval architecture. First Romanesque and then Gothic crazes swept the Washington of his time, as they did much of the rest of the country, even as they had carpeted Britain.
Goths and the Meanings of Gothic(k)
We have encountered the original Goths sporadically already, but thus far we have not owned up to a dirty secret. In medieval Europe, no architecture exists that would have been called Gothic at the time of its construction. To clarify, no person in the Middle Ages would have understood the application of the adjective to the architecture of any medieval century. Goths were an East Germanic people of ancient times. Among their different subgroupings, the Visigoths were long understood to mean “West Goths,” while the Ostrogoths were interpreted as “East Goths.” Both are associated with the barbarian invasions that led to the fall of Rome. The Visigoths famously sacked Rome in 410, while the Ostrogoths set up a kingdom that menaced at times both the Western Roman and Eastern Roman empires. The progenitors of both groups are remembered thanks to numerous histories, late antique as well as modern, and a multitude of place names in Scandinavia and elsewhere: Gotha, Gothenburg, Gotland, Jutland, and so forth. The Goths and the tribes that pullulated as descendants from them had distinctive languages and cultures. Still, their buildings did not have pointed arches, lancet windows, flying buttresses, spires, piers, ribs, stained glass, or any of the other features conventionally associated with what has been called Gothic architecture. In fact, the Goths lacked a masonry system in which structural elements are stabilized in thrust and counterthrust. At many times and in many places, these tribe members probably had little stonework of any sort.
Strictly speaking, therefore, the application of the adjective Gothic to literature and architecture, including the decorative arts, is always an anachronism and a mislabeling. The misfiling is now hallowed by nearly four centuries of currency, but that fact does not make it any less off-key. Yet there is no getting rid of the usage—and who on earth would want to, anyway? Words often carry many connotations. All we can do is to be as explicit as our own capacities allow in defining the denotations most germane to our needs.
Gothic was first employed in reference to architecture in the mid-seventeenth century. In that period it developed political associations, sometimes positive, in English. As an architectural and aesthetic term, it arrived from French with a penumbra of mainly pejorative overtones. Gothic was a vital part of the Dark Ages, to mark off what was medieval and romantic from what was classical. More generally it signified barbarity, rudeness, and uncouthness. These slurs are still leveled against the Middle Ages. Sometimes the offenders are experts who should know better than to bandy about such old inanities.
This Gothic was Gothick, to resort to the archaic spelling with a terminal k that can help to distinguish it from its multifarious namesakes, such as either the medieval Gothic or the sundry Gothics from the nineteenth century to the present day. Far later, a fascination with the medieval period manifested itself in Britain during the Victorian and Edwardian eras in the decorative arts. Gothic settees and chairs, tables and sideboards, lamps and candelabra, table settings and all manner of household items, and even andirons were all designed and manufactured in overabundance. Yet the style may well have achieved its most lasting, if not its most lustrous, impact architecturally. Many fine examples of domestic architecture have been destroyed by acts of God or by the malice or incompetence of human beings, but enough still exist for us to imagine how the Gothic revival in full operation would have made urban landscapes look. Beyond the buildings, texts survive aplenty that deepen our viewpoint through their descriptions and discussions of Gothic design.
The expression “Gothic revival” is attested by 1869—the formulation can throw us off the scent, since it encompasses a nearly boundless spectrum of different expressions—but the physical reality of nouveau Gothic began far before the wording was devised. Already in 1865, the phrase “Gothic mania” was in circulation. One major impetus for the British Gothic revival came from the Church Building Acts, which granted first one million pounds in 1818 and then an additional 500,000 in 1824 for raising up Anglican churches. These houses of worship are known as Commissioners’ churches, after the officials who were appointed to oversee them. Many such buildings were erected in Gothicizing styles. The legislation made for a heady brew, by propelling a spree of construction at precisely the moment when the romantics issued vociferous glorifications of the fashion for its sublimity. As is often the case later too, Gothic literature and architecture began to develop alongside each other. Horace Walpole’s novel The Castle of Otranto functioned as a hinge for the romantic swing to the sublime. Later, Samuel Taylor Coleridge remarked on the sublime actualities of Gothic art. The pronouncement of the English poet, literary critic, and philosopher was hardly to be unrepeated.
Gothic has been extraordinary in provoking its leading adherents to compose manifestoes. These templates have both created partisans for the fashion and forged collective identities among them. In effect, revivalism in this manner has often become a creed. Sometimes it has even tottered on the cusp of becoming a religion. Romanticism spliced the early nineteenth-century stage of the revival with picturesqueness and passion, particularly love. Should we be surprised that in due course Our Lady’s Tumbler became embedded again and again in a Gothic framework? The medieval poem too was associated with all the same numinous qualities and emotions. In short order, the sublimity of the style became interlaced with broader moral aspirations and civic virtues.
In the first of his lectures on European literature delivered in 1818, Coleridge urged his audience to contemplate the style, capping his exhortation with “a Gothic cathedral is the petrifaction of our religion.” The Englishman here plays on “stone-making” or “making into stone,” the etymological meaning of the elements in this Latinate term for the fossilization of organic matter. The sentence also alludes to the old pun in Greek and Latin, going back to Jesus as reported in the Gospel of Matthew, that the apostle Peter was the rock (petra) on which he founded his church. Being calcified could conjure up death and rigidity, but such a fate and fatality did not lie in store for Gothic as a mode in architecture, literature, and much else. On the contrary, by parsing the Latinate verbiage, people anticipated positively Bob Dylan’s later lyric, “Everybody must get stoned.” Not long after, on the continent, Victor Hugo discerned in the architecture a capacity for endlessly pliable recombination. The bones of Gothic may have been old, but they were anything but rigid and ossified.
In Britain, Gothic (or, once again, Gothick with a final k) prevailed within a few decades of Coleridge. A movement, named initially the Camden Society after the sixteenth-century historian William Camden, was founded in Cambridge in 1838. In 1845, rechristened the Ecclesiological Society, it was relocated to London. As the core of its mission it undertook to publish texts of interest to antiquarians. Yet the members of the group had a larger philo-Gothic ambition, declared in 1844, of promoting the revival of Gothic parish churches. They also sought to coordinate the design of ecclesiastic buildings with sacramentalism. The last concept was bound up in the necessities of the worship, with attention to both liturgy and symbolism. A fundamental tenet of the Ecclesiologists posited “Gothick is the only Christian architecture.” They also made the Coleridgean dictum on petrifaction one of their own mottoes. Their work forms a complement, and sometimes a contrast, to the architecture and polemics of Augustus Welby Northmore Pugin. In the New World or, to be more precise, in the United States of America, Gothic went through multiple stages before the final decade of the nineteenth century. In general, the revival must be set within the context of late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century revivalism in general. As the United States affirmed its self-awareness as a nation, it looped through a succession of revivals. In a kind of architectural and stylistic dress-up that befitted a nation in its adolescence, it tried on for size a few major phases through which European culture had passed long before.
The Gothic revival in the architecture of America may be split into subsections, from the late eighteenth century down to the present. Here four will be mentioned. First, the Federal period from 1776 to 1840, which saw classicizing revivals, especially Greek, alongside of which emerged the first chapter of Gothicism. This early American Gothic, as it has been dubbed, relates more to romanticism than classicism. In fact, it could be regarded with only a scintilla of overstatement as anticlassicism—that is, it expresses a reaction against the Enlightenment as well as against the unbending canons of Greek and Roman revivals. The appetite for Gothic swelled a little at a time into the second half of the nineteenth century, and a second phase, christened the mature Gothic revival, extended from 1840 to the Civil War.
The third episode of Gothic took the world (Old, New, and beyond) by storm for more than two decades. High Victorian Gothic, with its characteristic ebullience of turrets and pinnacles, preponderated from the postbellum period into the early 1890s. By its very nature, the style was at least in aspiration historicizing and medievalizing. At the same time, it was radically and self-consciously innovative, even deliberately modern. During the 1870s and early 1880s, this brand of the fashion overlapped with another distinct form of medievalism in architecture, namely, Romanesque revival. Both fell into dismal desuetude as rapidly as they had achieved bragging rights.
The effervescence for Gothic endured considerably longer in the United States than elsewhere around the globe. In America, it had a fourth phase, the most successful of all. Influenced by the much-admired rectilinearity of Saint Paul’s School chapel in Concord, New Hampshire (see Fig. 3.14), the vogue that acquired the name of collegiate Gothic became deep-seated in many colleges from the late 1890s through the 1930s. In some of them it persisted far beyond that terminus. Indeed, even down to the present day it has maintained a stony stranglehold within select American university campuses.
The architecture of the Gothic revival—in truth, multiple revivals—forms part of the backdrop to the tale of the juggler. The destiny of the story would have been altogether different in the twentieth century without its reception in the United States, and the treatment of the narrative in America would have been something else entirely had the continent not been mantled in Gothic architecture. Somewhat circularly, the architectonics that is encoded within the tale enhanced its appeal as it was received and retouched during this time. The interplay between the story and an architectural setting stands to reason. As we will notice again and again, in precious few cultural movements have literature and architecture interacted to mutual benefit as has been the case in the repeated recrudescences of Gothicism.
John Ruskin and William Morris
The middle ages are to me the only ages… That miracle-believing faith produced good fruit—the best yet in the world.
Henry Adams’s point of view in correlating the Middle Ages with his modern world had internal contradictions. In spite (or because?) of them, his outlook typifies in some ways how well the medieval period went over in general within the Anglo-American and especially the American ambit. Those responses were colored deeply and vividly by the fast-growing presence of medieval and sham-medieval buildings in culture. The medieval became normative and normalized in the United States.
His stint as a professor of history at Harvard in the 1870s coincided with the first sorties of scholars in America into the study of medieval architecture. When he was engaged in teaching, Gothic was abundantly represented in buildings in many locales in North America. The style insinuated itself into churches, residences, universities, prisons, and even a yacht clubhouse (see Fig. 3.15). Yet he arrived at his views largely independently and even idiosyncratically, not in reaction to any American manifestations of Gothic revival architecture. Although not under the domination of any one writer or another, Adams was fully alive to the first-line British revivalist thinkers. One force strongly present in his own ratiocination was John Ruskin. The Englishman discharged his chief writings and lectures on architecture in a five-year fusillade, from 1849 to 1854. His thought came to be entwined, not always to their author’s liking, with ideas advocated by his countryman, the artist and activist William Morris (see Fig. 3.16), and with the international Arts and Crafts movement. Ruskin, the foremost critic of the day on art and architecture, was credited in the British Empire as well as in the United States with two closely related contributions. One was to have given definitive voice to what could be called Victorian medievalism. The other was to have provided the conceptual basis for one colorful flavor of High Victorian Gothic revival in architecture. In his honor, this architectural style was soon christened Ruskinian Gothic.
During the first part of Ruskin’s career, an inexorable force in England for Gothicism was Augustus Pugin. His achievements crescendoed in the interior design of Westminster, which had been ravaged by fire in 1834. The British government stipulated that the destroyed building, commonly known as the Houses of Parliament, be replaced with one designed in Gothic style. Pugin satisfied this proviso and then some, most famously with the clock tower known by fond synecdoche as Big Ben. Whatever detractors may say, time has told how warmly people can feel about Gothic revival buildings, especially the towering ones. To corroborate nationhood and nationalism, the authorities drafted into service the medieval past, as mediated through romanticism. At the same time, the architect took part in a movement that stretched out far beyond Britain alone. This broader medievalism encoded Gothic as a mindful antidote to a world of storm-tossed changes, particularly in industrialization, scientific discovery, technological development, and imperialist expansion.
Pugin’s Contrasts, published in 1836, put the case for Gothic revival commandingly and colorfully before a public on both coastlines of the Atlantic Ocean (see Fig. 3.17). The American architect Ralph Adams Cram would later follow in his footsteps in advocating for building in the style: the two engaged in what could be called in the fullest sense constructive criticism. The Briton, in his book, first pitted the architecture of the Middle Ages against that of his own day. A key illustration contrasted the spire-laden urban landscape of a notional Catholic municipality in 1440 to the same town in 1840. After bringing his argument to a not-so-subtle (Gothic) point, Pugin then reached a not unexpected verdict that favored the fashion from four hundred years earlier. Finally, he extrapolated from the types of design to frame a judgment on the relative quality of the societies that teamed up to spawn the medieval as an alternative to then-modern construction style. The short form of his message could be encapsulated as “Gothic good, modern architecture bad.” In his portrayal, he implied that the present Protestant city inflicted ignominy, as much moral as architectural, upon the previous Catholic one. Aesthetically, Pugin’s exacting attention to detail made apparent the latent capacity within Gothic for decorative complexity. Subsequent proponents of the manner leveraged this potential.
In Contrasts, Pugin asserted that medieval architecture transcended other forms because of its consanguinity with religion and morality. As a Roman Catholic convert, he sighted paganism in classicism; in Gothic, he located the physical expression of his own fervent faith. Going further, he envisioned the style as alloying beauty and functionality. On the whole, he ratified the tendency of the Ecclesiologists and others to espouse a sacramental Gothic.
In one way or another, the convictions held most fervidly by Pugin would resurface in most subsequent renewals of Gothic architecture. Nonetheless, his polemics and aesthetics were not greeted with universal accolades. To take one major example, John Ruskin damned this much shorter-lived contemporary of his, who had died while his own volume, The Stones of Venice, was in press: “Employ him by all means, but on small work. Expect no cathedrals of him; but no one, at present, can design a better finial.” The witheringly faint and deliberately mordant praise carried even more weight for appearing in a book of extraordinary resonance.
Ruskinian ideas were also embroiled in the P.R.B., the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, which was founded in England in 1848 to proclaim the rejection of a mannerism that, it was maintained, had arisen from the art of Raphael. In taking this stand, the members stuck to Ruskin’s verdict that the Italian painter had been disloyal to the faith in which he had been raised and trained. They took especial umbrage at his midcareer volte-face in painting from natural vistas to artificial interiors. By their lights, the artists who had preceded Raphael sought out lofty topics and treated them with a heedful naturalism as well as with what the P.R.B. regarded as honest-to-goodness medieval sentiment.
In the words of an article on William Morris in an American journal, the Pre-Raphaelites “turned for aid and inspiration to mediaevalism, as to the rightful and common inheritance of the modern nations.” Apparently, the bloodline that entitled descendants to a share in the legacy of the Middle Ages stretched even across the Atlantic. At the same time, the Pre-Raphaelites in the United States took pains to emphasize that the relationship of their British exemplars to the art and culture of the medieval period was not cringingly and creepingly servile.
The saturation of Henry Adams in Ruskin can be readily verified. Already during his professorship at Harvard University, he bought for his wife Clover leather-bound second editions of many works by the English art critic, and read aloud from them. Date nights in the Adams homestead must have been memorable occasions. Writings of the same luminary from England perched atop the reading list of his novel Democracy’s book-devouring protagonist, Mrs. Madeleine Lee, a decade later. She mentioned Ruskin even before Darwin and Stuart Mill. As contemporaries would have recognized, the Englishman well deserved this high place on the scorecard in the thoughts of the fiction’s female protagonist. In introducing his printing of Ruskin’s “The Nature of Gothic,” William Morris singled out this very segment from The Stones of Venice as a landmark in nineteenth-century culture.
The Gothic revival was well underway in Britain before the French original of Our Lady’s Tumbler was first flushed out of hiding and printed in Gaston Paris and Paul Meyer’s Romania. In 1872 already, the British architect and furniture designer Charles Locke Eastlake published A History of the Gothic Revival. (Anyone predisposed to posit facilely an unchanging opposition between medievalism and modernity or even modernism should consider that this same designer was the first president of what would later evolve into the Royal Photographic Society.) The author’s phrase, Gothic revival, has stuck like glue as a descriptor for the resurgence since the late eighteenth century of interest in the culture of the Middle Ages. The operative noun in the last phrase means especially but not exclusively architecture, art, and literature. A year later, in 1873, the English architect Sir Thomas Graham Jackson followed his predecessor’s lead with the even more concisely titled Modern Gothic Architecture.
By the early 1870s, the style was already so entrenched as to warrant such books as Eastlake’s and Jackson’s. This fact may signal that the apogee of the Gothic upswing had already been passed by then. Yet a gap of more than one half century ensued before 1928, when the entire movement was assessed in Kenneth Clark’s Gothic Revival; its author himself pointed out the length of the interval. The further reality that all three of these studies on the Gothic comeback were by scholars from England is not inadvertent, since the revival originated in Britain. The art historian Clark hypothesized intriguingly that it was “perhaps the one purely English movement in the plastic arts.”
Medievalism was a word that Ruskin salvaged from deprecatory use, and he put the concept into action. All the movements connected with him medievalized, which is to say, all of them advanced medieval ideas and usages, and aimed to slap at least a quick and runny whitewash of the Middle Ages upon their contemporary world, perhaps especially in architecture and the decorative arts. To some degree, the trends rested on a belief that Gothic originated in a more devout and simpler Christian society. A corollary was a persuasion that renewing the style would facilitate a more engaged worship, imbued with deeper mystery and greater sincerity.
In England, the seeds for such perspectives had been sown already in the eighteenth century. In the late 1770s, John Carter stipulated that Gothic lent itself well to use in “religious structures.” It rates as child’s play, but at the same time deadly serious, to pick out among sundry styles “which has the greatest effect on the mind; which pile of buildings conveys the more devout ideas; which fills the senses with the greatest attention of the heaven above us; which leads us more to contemplate on the life to come.” In response, his one-word guttural was Gothic. This manner was regarded as a catalyst for godly feeling. Eventually, it would be seen to befit the spirituality that was expected of education.
Gothic bid fair to reign supreme. The most popular of the various stylistic reappearances in nineteenth-century Britain, it was regarded as top of the line for being indigenous and Christian. With the authority acquired by its many centuries of service to the Church, it was felt to deliver the most moral uplift amid the social downdrafts of the new urban existence. Of course, not all the attraction of the style lay in religion. Simultaneously, it crooked its finger seductively to both established and wannabe aristocrats because of its connections with family history and heraldry.
In the United States, the situation was both snarled and enriched by the upsurge in Catholicism through immigration. Further complications arose from changes within already established religions. The Gothic and Romanesque revivals coincided with developments that would have been unthinkable within Protestantism before the mid-nineteenth century. Protestant denominations adopted elements that until then would have been spurned for their Roman Catholic associations. These accessories included cross-shaped buildings, stained glass, crosses, candles, flowers, and choir vestments. Previously such unaustere features had been largely absent from the frippery-unfriendly American Protestant churches. Now the doors were flung open to Gothic. Even the most elemental wooden-box place of worship was likely to sport a pointed arch or two.
In North America, who gives a second thought today if a Baptist, Congregationalist, or Presbyterian church has the shape of a cross, or if its windows and portals take the form of pointed arches? Yet pause to reflect upon the oddity: branches of Christianity that arose to no small degree in reaction against the ornamentation of Catholicism evolved to accept much of it once again. If we brought forward from early eighteenth-century America almost any non-Catholic Christian, frog-marched the individual into one of these cruciform churches, and let his or her eyes alight upon the accouterments, shock would be the mildest reflex.
On both American continents, as well as in most other extra-European locations, all the historicist revivals instated fashions in places where the putative originals of those times had never existed. The United States had no fifth-century Athens, no ancient Rome, and no European Middle Ages. As a result, nowhere in the country could there be resuscitated what had never been there before—but that bump in the road did not stop anyone from trying. Yet the phrase “Gothic arrival” describes architecture that was implanted in the New World not as a conscious revival but rather as a continuance of a still-living tradition. The manner arrived early from Britain, before the coroners of seemingly dead-on-arrival building styles would declare the original legally deceased. Bits and pieces had never been forgotten in the construction techniques and architectural repertoire that had been handed down from the late medieval stages of Gothicism. These remnants leaked into the colonies in the first couple of centuries as Europeans settled in America.
The most convincing attestation of early Gothic arrival in colonial America is the Virginian church known unofficially as Saint Luke’s (see Fig. 3.18). Dated as early as 1632, the brickwork of this place of worship contains crow-stepped gables, lancet windows, and simple buttresses and turrets. Yet even when added together with such traces in other surviving buildings, the total hardly constitutes rousing evidence that a robust Gothic survival was transmitted to the American colonies of Britain. Furthermore, these features of construction give no sign of having been invested with any special religious valences that would have put viewers at the time in mind of the medieval Church. Thus, they abrogated no principles or policies of Protestantism in the New World at the time.
The seventeenth-century reform movement of Puritanism established bases for American life and attitudes that remain fixed in many locales and minds even today. Even so, the lock they imposed on ecclesiastical building style loosened everlastingly in the second half of the nineteenth century. In Britain, the Ecclesiological movement generated pressure for exact replication of genuine or supposedly Gothic features in architecture. In America, the turn toward imitation of medieval cathedrals and churches allowed for more fanciful architectural recombination. Along with the other changes, Gothic was suddenly disinfected of the taint it had carried. The fashion no longer needed to be denied and repudiated as a sullied trapping of Catholicism.
***
The distinct filaments of Ruskinian medievalism intertwine in the reception of Ruskin’s “The Nature of Gothic.” These pages, set in the so-called Golden type, were printed in 1892 by William Morris. They count among the first items he published at the Kelmscott Press (see Fig. 3.19). Flagging the importance of this chapter from Ruskin’s The Stones of Venice, the great designer recalled scintillatingly the power of its impact nearly forty years earlier when it appeared originally. From the vantage point of the fin de siècle, Morris extolled the essay as “one of the very few necessary and inevitable utterances of this century.”
Decades later, Kenneth Clark wrote: “The best spirits of the Revival—Pugin, Ruskin, William Morris—turned from the reform of art to the reform of society, from the advocacy of dead decorative forms to that of undying principles of social order.” The central person in this trinity detected in medieval society a consolidation of a “truly Christian and perfect system” and “freedom of thought” for “every workman who struck the stone” that accounted in turn for the perfection of the cathedrals. Similarly, Morris wished to preserve medieval architecture as an inspiration to the Victorian present. In consonance with that objective, he became in 1877 a founding member of the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings.
Morris embodied a potent blend of charisma, aesthetics, and social reform. Like Ruskin, he lashed out vehemently against the industrialism, laissez-faire free enterprise, and overall societal structure of the nineteenth century. Without a jot of fondness, he nicknamed his own days the “Age of Commercialism.” With nostalgia for imagined better times that had been discarded, he invoked the medieval period to criticize his own by way of contrast. Before arriving at his personal brand of “practical socialism,” he took Ruskin as the master from whom he “learned to give form to [his] discontent.” The disgruntlement that he nursed consisted in the friction between two emotions: a love of producing beautiful things and a “hatred of modern civilization.” His reaction against modernity led him to espouse simplicity. He countered the ills of a hands-off approach to market capitalism by implementing through artistry and artisanry his own form of a hands-on medievalism.
The great man’s antimodernism resulted in the self-contradictory inconsistency that he was an antimaterialist who loved things. He favored objects that attained technical rather than technological perfection. Far from being factory-made, they were fashioned by handicraft. Etymologically, manufacture implies crafting by hand, but as the nineteenth century wore on, the Latin derivative lost its original sense. The two processes of handicraft and manufacture drifted apart. The virtues of working manually were the paramount message of Morris’s “Art and Industry in the Fourteenth Century.” The Middle Ages provided the beauty and the society that the author failed to discern in the industrialism and Victorianism of his own times. Chivalry and courtliness had succumbed to crass commerce and what in the United States would be called Babbittry. In defense of the medieval era, the English designer and writer took a stand from the mid-1870s on against the restoration, or supposed restoration, of medieval buildings.
In 1890, Morris wrote a visionary novel entitled News from Nowhere: A Utopian Romance. His thinking in this volume followed hard on the heels of his lecture in 1889 on “Gothic Architecture.” In hindsight, the book could be considered a manifesto for the Arts and Crafts movement. The frontispiece flaunts a wood engraving that depicts Kelmscott Manor, Morris’s home (see Fig. 3.20). The designer first clapped eyes upon the house in 1871, and later leased it with the artist and author, Dante Gabriel Rossetti.
The fiction envisioned a society that would effectively constitute a new Middle Ages, at least as Morris pictured that time to have been. In this hypothetical universe, federated communes would fend for themselves through craftwork. These idealized communities would allow their inhabitants to cultivate manual skills alongside intellectual ones. The entire notion was unrealizably starry-eyed. All the same, it undeniably inspired his contemporaries on both seaboards of the Atlantic who were already or would soon become the craftsmen in the largely uncoordinated Arts and Crafts movement. Like the whole vogue, Morris’s influence penetrated deeply in the United States and particularly in Boston.
Adams was transformed and even transfigured much more by Ruskin than by Morris. Bear in mind that both Englishmen had died before Mont Saint Michel and Chartres came into print: Morris met his maker in 1896, Ruskin in 1900. The American was familiar with The Seven Lamps of Architecture, from 1849, and other screeds by the same author (see Fig. 3.21). He would have been especially drawn to Ruskin, since they shared a susceptibility for the same strain of Gothic. The architecture known specifically as Ruskinian owed much explicitly to the style as it evolved in Normandy, which Adams much admired. To look in a very different direction from medieval architecture, both Ruskin and Adams incorporated similarly into their “social prophecy” a smidgen or more of reaction to the science and technology of their day, especially thermodynamics.
On the topic of physics, Ruskin exerted no small force upon close friends in Adams’s inmost social circle. Clarence King was an early spokesman for the Englishman in the United States. In turn, the American mesmerized Ruskin. On one occasion, the world-famous art critic went so far as to offer the charismatic geologist from the New World the pick of his two finest paintings by J. M. W. Turner. Upon snapping up both canvases, King summed up his acquisition with the bon mot “one good Turner deserves another.” As one of the Five of Hearts, the undauntable geologist also served as a conduit to both Henry and Clover Adams for Pre-Raphaelitism, since he belonged to a group that transmitted ideas of the movement to the United States. Based in New York, the members of this society were designated popularly as the American Pre-Raphaelites. John La Farge, another intimate of Adams, also came under the influence of both Ruskin and the Pre-Raphaelites. In 1857 he studied the works of the Pre-Raphaelites, and in 1873 he became personally acquainted with such outstanding members of the P.R.B. as Ford Maddox Brown, Edward Burne-Jones, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and the sister of the last-mentioned, Christina Rossetti.
Richardsonian Romanesque
During Adams’s shift as a professor, Memorial Hall at Harvard University was under construction steadily (see Fig. 3.22). Its cornerstone was laid in 1870, its dining hall and vestibule were dedicated in 1874, the large portion of it known as Sanders Theater was opened in 1875, and its tower was completed in 1877. The structure is often credited as one of the foremost examples of Ruskinian or Victorian Gothic outside England. La Farge created stained glass windows for it. Still more importantly, this colossal edifice to honor the Unionists who died in the Civil War was designed by William R. Ware and Henry Van Brunt. Beyond the Ruskinian influences, Van Brunt was, significantly, a translator of Viollet-le-Duc. In fact, he published in English the Frenchman’s Discourses on Architecture. His translation came into print in 1875, during construction of the commemorative building. His presentation of Viollet-le-Duc’s views on architecture and architectural education became by way of being a bible for American architects of the time.
Memorial Hall honored Harvard students and graduates who were lost on the Union side in the ghastly civil war within the United States of America. It well repays the effort to pause and consider the style in which the edifice was built. The architects turned to medieval European cathedrals of one sort or another as their ultimate basis for inspiration in memorializing the dead in a consummately American war—one that defined the very nature of the United States as a federation. In design, the vast building is a great church, with nave, crossing, transepts, chancel, and choir. All these components are capped by a vertigo-inducing central tower. Remarkably, a structure that could have overpowered the rest of the campus by dictating the style of all future constructions in its vicinity had no such effect. For being a memorial, it was left standing as other Gothic constructions were systematically obliterated. In fact, Harvard eventually razed even the medieval fantasy that had been Gore Hall. At the same time, the house of prayer across Massachusetts Avenue that was heavily used by the University for formal ceremonies became de-Gothicized. The part of Cambridge that turned around the axis of the Yard was rendered much more classical Georgian and Colonial, as well as much more classically and Colonially New England-y, just as Yale and Princeton Universities were being unified through collegiate Gothic.
Between 1872 and 1877, at the same time as Memorial Hall was being erected, the Episcopal Trinity Church on Copley Square in Boston was built. Its designer was Henry Hobson Richardson. In 1874, this giant of American architecture moved from New York to Brookline, a municipality adjacent to the Hub. Thus, he was close geographically to Adams during the latter’s Cantabrigian years. The heavy-set Richardson, among medievalizers of his day, was larger than life in both physique and character (see Fig. 3.23). His extraordinary corpulence was due to a disease that contributed to his premature death. Winning the competition for the church caused him to rocket to national fame and to become the central player in a phase that was regarded as being an “American Renaissance” in architecture.
Trinity has been called “the most monumental expression of the nineteenth century’s search for a comprehensive Protestant church” (see Fig. 3.24). In its conception, alongside Byzantine influences Richardson drew upon French Romanesque of Auvergne and other sources. What emerged was the so-called Romanesque revival style, known more commonly in acknowledgment of its creator’s prominence as Richardsonian Romanesque. The adjective Romanesque was brought into English in 1819 as an architectural term, specifically in contradistinction to Gothic, by the English antiquarian William Gunn. It has been applied consistently to round-arched architecture of the postclassical period, but its usage has been narrowed to the medieval building style that preceded Gothic. In the case of Trinity Church, as of many other places of worship built in this fashion, the commitment to Romanesque revival signaled a deliberate effort to reach back to the origins of Christianity and to realize ideals of Christian cooperation associated with the early church. Richardson’s achievement was to demonstrate how successfully Romanesque could be adapted to the needs of modern buildings. By making this demonstration with brio, he paved the way for the Gothic revivals that followed in the United States.
The Richardsonian Romanesque of Trinity Church resembled the style in which the bulky architect designed and built the adjoining mansions of John Hay and Henry Adams (see Figs. 3.25 and 3.26). The double house was located on Lafayette Square in Washington, separated from the White House by little more than the north lawn. Both Hay and Adams would dwell in these residences until their deaths. For Adams, who assumed occupancy of his portion only on December 30, 1885, the new home was a refuge from the place where Clover had ended her days. Richardson himself died less than four months later.
Adams and the future designer had known each other as undergraduates at Harvard. Both were born in 1838, both graduated in the class of 1858. Yet they became fast friends only later. Whenever exactly we pinpoint the start of meaningful interchanges between the two men over the Middle Ages, Adams himself avowed, while researching Mont Saint Michel and Chartres, a direct debt to Richardson for his attachment to the eleventh and twelfth centuries.
Clover crafted a careful photographic portrait of Richardson, and she participated actively in conversations and negotiations with him. Her brother Ned Hooper had played a leading role in persuading the architect to build—in Richardsonian Romanesque, of course—Sever Hall for Harvard, from 1878 to 1880 (see Fig. 3.27). This beautiful instructional building has been seen to have loosely anticipated features of the Adams and Hay houses on Lafayette Square.
It would be very easy to miss the point (especially since it is rounded here) that thanks to Richardson’s design, Adams spent the Washington phases in his writing of Mont Saint Michel and Chartres snuggled within pseudo-twelfth-century architecture. He resided inside a bit of ersatz Middle Ages that had been erected opposite the White House. Was the medievalism of his home nothing but stylistic, or did it signify something grander and more special? Was the double house by way of being a Grail Castle, concretizing spiritual aspirations that the presidency had seemingly lost forevermore, the more so in the wake of two assassinations?
By no stretch of the imagination could Adams pass as an architect himself, although later in life he plunged into the development of medieval construction techniques. But at this stage, he was already well versed enough in building history to invoke Viollet-le-Duc knowledgeably in support of his preference not to have figural or symbolic carvings on the façade of his new residence. At the same time, Richardson, an old opponent of the Frenchman’s theories about medieval architecture and art, could still more eruditely refute the invocation of the foreign designer. His friend, a professional through and through, stiff-armed Adams: “Viollet-le-Duc has been warping your naturally well-balanced perceptions; the poor man never understood and was never able to create an architecture… It is a common saying in Paris that even well-bred horses shy at his buildings.” Architects have never been overly benevolent in their evaluations of each other—but what they have lacked in kindheartedness, they have often made up in wittiness.
The construction of Trinity Church in Boston was overseen by Phillips Brooks, a second cousin of Adams. The renowned sermonizer officiated as rector there from 1869 until his consecration as Episcopalian Bishop of Massachusetts in 1891. Alongside his many other distinctions, the man of the cloth worked hand in glove with Harvard University. In Adams’s Esther, the character of Stephen Hazard is modeled full on upon him. The fictitious minister is portrayed as championing interest in all sorts of exotic art, including both East Asian and medieval. A strange statue by August Saint-Gaudens to honor the real prelate holds court outside Trinity Church. The work contrasts starkly with the highly successful memorial to Clover in Washington by the same sculptor. The statuary grouping provoked the spleen of the former Harvard president Charles W. Eliot and the unreconstructed medievalizer Ralph Adams Cram. Its composition features a full-bloodedly male Christ, bearded and cowled, positioned behind Phillips Brooks. Now an Episcopal saint, the peerless preacher Brooks is represented to show to best effect his imposing height. Standing stalwartly with left hand on the pulpit and right hand aloft, he embodies a strain of Christianity—broad-shouldered, bull-necked, and burly almost to the point of seeming to be on steroids—that Henry Adams never sought or at least never found for himself (see Fig. 3.28). “Muscular Gothic” existed as a concept, if only tenuously, but not as an actuality he would ever have applauded.
Saint John the Divine and Trinity Church
It speaks to the close-knit worlds of American medievalism that both Christopher Grant La Farge, eldest son of Adams’s dear friend John, and Ralph Adams Cram, who supplied the introduction to Mont Saint Michel and Chartres when it was commercially printed in 1913, contributed separately as architects to the design of Saint John the Divine, the cathedral of the Episcopal diocese in New York (see Fig. 3.29). La Farge fils wove together Romanesque and Norman styles in work that began in 1892 and continued until 1911. At that point Cram took over with a French rayonnant Gothic design. Reconciling the two designs and constructions made for a hard row to hoe.
The timing of the groundbreaking looks very significant in retrospect. In a British context, the year 1892 could be seen as coinciding with a slippage in the cultural centrality of the Middle Ages with the death of Alfred, Lord Tennyson, a poet who drew much inspiration from medieval legends. Not so in the United States—ground was broken for Saint John the Divine on December 27, the feast day of the holy man, in the year that marked the quadricentennial anniversary of Christopher Columbus’s fateful landfall.
The rendering of the projected Saint John the Divine that was published in an issue in the first year of the Architectural Record shows a towering edifice, worthy of any that Adams would have seen on his cathedral tours of France (see Fig. 3.30). In its grandeur it was intended to be the largest Gothic structure on the face of the earth—and to make even New York City, for all its sky-high modernity, into a cathedral town, albeit on an American scale. Despite being uncompleted, the great church remains to this day the largest in the world.
The final blueprints for edifices such as Saint John the Divine emerged from long and often emotive negotiations. The debate was still more heated in this instance, since the church aspired to the status of a national cathedral. We must remember that contention over the design began in New York more than a century before the completion of what has since become officially the National Cathedral in the District of Columbia. The cornerstone of the house of prayer was laid only in 1907. At that point it was not dedicated as such, but rather as the Cathedral Church of Saint Peter and Saint Paul in the city and diocese of Washington.
In Henry Adams’s Esther from 1884, the artist Wharton criticizes the original scheme for an imagined cathedral to be put up in New York. The character, based on John La Farge, says, “I would like… to go back to the age of beauty and put a Madonna in the heart of their church. The place has no heart.” It sheds no small light on the consistency of Adams’s passions and insights across the decades of his life that already at this juncture, just over two decades before his Mont Saint Michel and Chartres, he equates an image of the Virgin Mary with the innermost essence of ecclesiastical architecture. But the building at issue in the novel published two decades earlier was modeled upon Trinity Church in Boston, which Henry and Clover Adams often visited during its construction when he taught at Harvard (see Fig. 3.31). Similar wars of words took place about Saint John the Divine in New York City, but only years after the publication of Esther.
Trinity Church belonged to a radically medievalizing makeover that Boston performed upon itself in the waning nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The largest urban conflagration ever to strike the City on a Hill was the Great Fire of 1872. In its immediate aftermath, the erection of edifices in revival fashion kicked into high gear. Many new medievalesque buildings that sprang up afterward were demolished less than one half century later. Take, for example, two that faced each other at the corners of Boylston and Tremont Streets. One was the Gothic Masonic Temple (see Fig. 3.32), which after being damaged by a blaze was torn down to make way for a fresh structure that was put up in 1898–1899. The other was called “the Italian-Gothic style” Hotel Boylston (see Fig. 3.33), which stood from 1871 to 1894.
For a few decades, the metropolis of Boston made its newfound and pervasive medievalishness a badge of honor, even or especially while publicizing itself as a lamp of liberty, learning, and culture in the New World (see Fig. 3.34). Yet most of Beantown’s modern Middle Ages was not to last long. One of the pride and joys of the Gothic past that have since disappeared from Boston is notably the original Museum of Fine Arts (see Figs. 3.35 and 3.36). This High Victorian Gothic edifice in Ruskinian style opened on July 4, 1876, a strangely medieval means of marking the hundredth birthday of the United States of America. The date fell during Adams’s tenure at Harvard. Before the first decade of the twentieth century had ended, the building had been dismantled to make way for the present-day Copley Plaza Hotel. The Museum of Fine Arts moved to its present location in 1909, the centennial of Abraham Lincoln’s birth.
Cathedral Culture
People in those old times had convictions; we moderns only have opinions. And it needs more than a mere opinion to erect such a Gothic cathedral.
By the end of the nineteenth century, Henry Adams was a recognized purveyor of cathedral culture to his fellow Americans. From Paris, he advised the formidable Isabella Stewart Gardner about books on such great churches as well as about purchases of art, including even thirteenth-century colored glass. Although he had direct contact with Auguste Rodin, Adams engaged with him as a client purchasing art objects rather than as a fellow admirer of Gothic architecture. The oeuvre of the French sculptor pays frequent tribute to his lifelong love for Gothic cathedrals and sculptural conventions, as well as to the images wrested from poets of the Gothic period such as Dante. Rodin’s stone sculpture La Cathédrale or The Cathedral represents the right hands of two different people (see Fig. 3.37). Although the fingertips do not make contact, the hands form an enclosure. The fingers resemble rib vaulting in a church; the palms, the sides of the nave; and the thumbs, a portal. The area within them is a sacred space of God and community. The composition has been interpreted as betokening hands raised in prayer and worship. Simultaneously, it fashions of the same body parts a shape generally suggestive of five Gothic arches.
In supremely dignified fashion, Rodin’s carving achieves the effect familiar to everyone who knows the child’s rhymed fingerplay in which the fingers are first knit together (“Here’s the church”), then both index fingers are raised (“and here’s the steeple”), the thumbs are pulled apart (“Open the doors”), and the fingertips of the still-knitted fingers are wriggled within (“and see all the people”).
Adams’s Mont Saint Michel and Chartres and Rodin’s The Cathedral have no direct connection. Rodin did not produce the object until 1908, four years after the initial printing of Adams’s tome. What is more, he originally called it The Arch of Alliance. But he made his preliminary foray into Gothic in an essay published in 1905, which would have caught Adams’s attention. Not until 1914 did the artist publish a book, his only one, on the Gothic cathedrals of France, with his impressions and sketches of more than a half dozen (see Fig. 3.38). The general parallels between the reactions of the scholar and the sculptor to Gothic architecture and the Virgin Mary run strikingly close. For all that, exactly as was the case with Henry Adams and Mark Twain, the resemblances speak far less to the pinioned relations of source and influence than to the common responses of two very different souls who were both conditioned by the atmosphere of their times.
The same could be said of the French novelist Joris-Karl Huysmans (see Fig. 3.39). Adams was intimately acquainted with at least some of his writings, and the two shared an engrossment in the Middle Ages. Without interruption, the Frenchman manifested for more than a quarter century a passion for medieval arts, including the Gothic architecture of cathedrals and monasteries, painting and manuscript illumination, and Gregorian chant. Like iron shavings to a magnet, he was drawn to medieval religious practice and theology, from mysticism through Satanism, and to iconography. Huysmans’s highly controversial and even scandalous Là-Bas was first printed in toto in 1891. Called in English Down There or, not at all literally, The Damned, the novel follows a fictitious writer as he turns at once toward worship of Satan and the study of the Middle Ages. This Durtal, debauched in ways typical of fin-de-siècle decadence, feels revulsion for the cratered crassness of contemporary France. The malcontent rake and roué within the fiction is modeled loosely upon the author himself. In the view of this (anti)hero, society has gone downhill steadily since the medieval period. In 1898, Huysmans published La Cathédrale, a bestseller set at Chartres and centered upon it, as the final volume in the novelistic trilogy dealing with Durtal. Adams quotes from it extensively more than once in Mont Saint Michel and Chartres. In 1900, the French author tackled writing the life of Saint Lydwine of Schiedam. Huysmans’s subsequent conversion to Catholicism and his entry as an oblate into a monastery of Trappists, a branch of the Order of Cistercians, were well known. Printed too late to influence Adams in his long disquisition on the Middle Ages and modernity, however, was Huysmans’s 1906 The Crowds of Lourdes, on the Marian cult based in that French town.
Kenneth Clark
Mont Saint Michel and Chartres was composed by a man whose family background invested him with threads of culture that led continuously back to the Enlightenment. At the same time, he was not deterred by his advanced years from looking penetratingly at the latest trend lines in technology, politics, international relations, and aesthetics in the specific reflex of modernity that was just beginning to jell around him. In this brave new world, Gothicism could look thoroughly outdated. Beyond hoary age, it had against it the even harder strike that some people found it flagrantly ugly. When the British art historian Kenneth Clark published his first book The Gothic Revival in 1928, he did not moderate his words in characterizing the architectural movement he studied as incongruent with the palette and standards of his own times. He took to task the Gothic revival in its earlier manifestations in Britain for relating poorly to its environs—to the street, as he put it. By the time Clark wrote, the fad was long over in Britain. His final stocktaking was essentially “good riddance.”
The clarion call to rally against Gothic blared early, even an ocean away. Henry Adams’s brother Brooks had already posited that the imaginative man of the Middle Ages had been dislodged by the economic man of his day. To his mind, the dislocation had detrimental consequences for all art, but perhaps especially architecture. Soulless patrons and unthinking architects took designs that should have been laden with spiritual weight and applied them to purely commercial functions. This invective against Gothic revival applied especially to the imposition of the movement upon commercial and municipal buildings, anticipating closely what Kenneth Clark wrote three decades later. The epilogue of The Gothic Revival offers a razor-sharp dissection of the vogue in England and concludes with the exclamation “What a wilderness of deplorable architecture!”
Brooks Adams’s hereditary impulse to dark doomsaying and Kenneth Clark’s drive to be droll may have induced them to exceed what is fair or true in assessing architecture contemporary with them. Not all of the Gothic revival was regrettable. To pursue a point relevant solely to Clark, not all Englishmen could afford an authentic medieval Gothic domicile of their own. An old legal doctrine holds that every man’s home is his castle, but not everyone can afford the sort of high-rent stronghold Clark himself owned in Saltwood Castle. Gothic revivals could not have succeeded in having mass appeal or present-day relevance if they had been restricted to bona fide medieval originals and if they had vetoed medievalizing that took the form of newly made medievalesque buildings, objects, art, music, and literature.
It would be ludicrous to go to the other extreme: far from all neo-Gothic architecture achieved a resounding success. Yet some of it did, much more than Brooks Adams could have foreseen when he put pen to paper or than Kenneth Clark would have understood to give credit years later. With the benefit of hindsight, it seems mistaken to frame the issue in bald terms of a singular revival, as the Englishman does in the title to his book. On the contrary, multiple renewals and renegotiations of the style took place. The last great resurgence may not have held much significance for England, but it mattered enormously elsewhere. Whether Clark was right or not in restricting the Gothic revival to his country, it bears noting that in his entire book he does not refer once to a single specimen of collegiate or skyscraper Gothic in the United States. In 1928, a sheerly Anglocentric standpoint on Gothicism in architecture could still be justified—but only in England. By then Gothic had long since gone global.
Gothic rebirths or restarts—with the plurals being very deliberate—have had many adversaries, although the opposition has been intransigent since modernism. It has been comparable to the rejection of representational art by many abstract artists, or of classical music by countless modern composers. Furthermore, when revivals have taken place in locations that lacked their own Middle Ages in a Western European sense, they have risked being disliked and disrespected by perfectionists who would rather not see the style exported for imitation. Yet in a climate of greater eclecticism, it would be intellectually foolhardy now not to look across the Channel to the European mainland and across the Atlantic to America, especially the United States. Even such a broadened purview may be too restricted. If time and space allowed, there would be sound reason for endeavoring to set the fashion in a world context. We could go so far as to think in terms of global Gothic. For centuries, the style has been freighted wherever European culture and commodities have been carried.
Much of Clark’s cannonade against the later Gothic revivals is fair, especially in application to the English environment in which he was writing, and on which he was focused. In addition, he found an echo in a countryman who vituperated the use of revival architecture to Gothicize universities, railing against what he regarded as the pseudolearning and over-refinement that led pedants to house their operations in a sham Gothic shell. Still, such belittlers miss the mark or even fail to see it at all where most collegiate Gothic in America is concerned. In fact, the style as it took shape in the United States had the express virtue of rebelling against the American manifestation of what Clark loathed. This manner of medievalism rejected the street as canyon between skyscrapers. By way of steel and glass, those lofty buildings translated the reach of lucre and power toward the open skies. Collegiate Gothic, with towers of stone, was meant to embody different perspectives on the heavens as well as on the relationship between humanity and habitat. Furthermore, it was intended to apply those outlooks not universally but within specific contexts of learning and spirituality.
The main feature held in common by all iterations of campus Gothic has been a sense, sometimes unarticulated, that institutions of higher learning deserved this medieval architecture as a reminder of their temporal origins and spiritual calling. Within those settings, the collegiate brand of this revival has persevered successfully and even thrived. It has been anything but a blind alley.