4. The Boston Bohemians
© 2018 Jan M. Ziolkowski, CC BY 4.0 https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0146.04
Cram and his followers breathed new life into the Gothic Revival, giving it a stature it had not enjoyed since the Middle Ages. Although the eclectic architectural spirit of the time created a welcoming climate, public reawakening toward the style was largely owed to a single, modest book, Mont Saint Michel and Chartres, by Henry Adams.
Our Lady’s Tumbler in Boston Bohemia
Collegiate Gothic architecture was meant, among other things, to renew a tradition that had been brought prematurely to a full stop “by the synchronizing of the Classical Renaissance and the Protestant Reformation,” to quote Ralph Adams Cram. The objective of this polemicist for Gothicism in the United States became to revive English Perpendicular Gothic as it existed at the critical moment when King Henry VIII turned England from the Catholic Church. Cram’s architectural style established a touchstone (with the pun entirely intended) for all later expressions of Gothic on American campuses.
Against such a backdrop, the rediscovery of Our Lady’s Tumbler and the ascendency of its thoroughgoing recasting by Anatole France could have or even would have seemed to offer the literary stuff for a small-scale Gothic revival. The tale had fantastic and storybook elements that rendered it compatible with the earliest Gothick novels, in which monks up to no good skulk down into underground vaults. It too depended upon movements and actions inside ecclesiastical architecture. Yet the narrative had traits that brought it into the same orbit with the more redemptive, medieval-historical, and historicizing novels of Sir Walter Scott. This modernized form subtracted the special k from Gothick. In the French poem from the Middle Ages, a lay brother slipped down into a crypt dutifully, for only the best of purposes.
Both the medieval story and its modern French prose adaptation began to cause a tectonic shift in Boston in the 1890s. At this juncture, the city found itself in a fleeting decade of exceptional fin-de-siècle vibrancy that followed what Cram termed “this youth movement of the eighties.” The last ten years of the nineteenth century swung between two poles. One is well known—the legacy of Puritanism lingered a long while. Captured in the phrase “banned in Boston,” prudery led, from the late nineteenth through the mid-twentieth centuries, to prohibitions against the distribution or display of risqué literature, plays, films, and songs. Bostonians had a reputation for priggishness. In fact, associating fleshpots with Beantown or bacchanals with Boston still seems oxymoronic. The metropolis has never been known for its pleasure palaces. Unlike Las Vegas, which vaunts the tag line “What happens here, stays here,” the New England municipality has not been known for facilitating seamy occurrences that would need to be kept hush-hush.
The other end of the spectrum from the killjoys received an oppositional push from “Bostonian bohemianism” or even Boston decadence. This countercultural faction steeped itself in what the nineteenth-century British essayist Walter Pater called “the mood of the cloister.” In Britain, the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood flaunted its embrace of the mood within scenes depicted in paintings. In contrast, the Beantown bohemians played precocious precursors of Medieval Times™. Forming a Club Med(ieval) all their own, they gathered to primp and preen for exercises in masquerade, reenactment, and dress-up. Gothic revivals and medievalism relate to donning the past as well as to putting on different identities as disguises. Nor was that all. The Bostonians also elevated publishing in their nation to heights it had not previously known. They demonstrated that American-made books and periodicals had the capacity to take wing from being mere commercial products to becoming true craft objects.
To promulgate his ideals, or rather those he claimed were medieval, Cram collaborated as a young man with like-minded friends to publish the Knight Errant. Despite appearing in a mere four issues in its brief life from 1892 to 1893, the magazine has been recognized as “a crucial element in the revival of book-making in America.” At the time, the decorative arts, including bookcraft, underwent the same sort of refinement in the United States and particularly in Boston as they had done already in England.
The periodical brought out by Cram’s mainly homosocial circle was avowedly under the shadow of English aesthetes, especially William Morris and exponents of the Arts and Crafts movement. The mission statement by the editors admitted freely that they were not in the vanguard, at least not internationally. Like the Knight Errant, Morris’s Kelmscott Press exercised an influence out of all proportion to its own relatively short existence. The effects resided partly in the quality of the fine books it produced in limited print runs, partly in the relationship that it posited between artists or artisans on the one hand and their craft and society on the other, and partly in the general attention to design that it inculcated. The very cover of the inaugural printing (see Fig. 4.1), conceived by Bertram Grosvenor Goodhue, in time to become a much-esteemed partner in Cram’s architectural firm, betrayed the long and lovely stylistic shadow of Morris. Another well-known intermediary for William Morris, particularly within the craft of bookmaking, was Fred Holland Day, who also had a hand in the journal. Before the conclusion of the decade, he would copublish the first American edition of Our Lady’s Tumbler.
In its quixotic and quick-dying fashion, the Knight Errant resembled the medieval revival with which it was associated, or even Cram’s much later The Gothic Quest. To be specific, it aimed to enter the scrum against realism, materialism, and mammonism. In this enterprise the architect’s nearest confederates, “the Knights of the Gothic Quest,” belonged to a minor and momentary movement which they called visionism. The ranks of the visionists extended far beyond Goodhue. Among these cronies, Cram developed the sclerotic paternalism he would espouse the rest of his life—even if the all-maleness of the fraternity has raised not only an eyebrow but also a question or two about what kind of daddy he would have grown up to be. Other more casual associates included various individuals who would have fearsome intellectual firepower in the future. All of them were likewise affiliated with Harvard.
Charles Eliot Norton
In the 1850s, Charles Eliot Norton engaged closely with both Ruskin and the Pre-Raphaelites, and corresponded with Dante Gabriel Rossetti. The Harvard professor received gifts of actual medieval manuscripts from Ruskin as well as from James Russell Lowell. Later, the art historian emerged from the Civil War with a strengthened conviction that the Middle Ages could constitute a model for the social and moral regeneration of the US as a nation. Norton’s turn to medievalism rested on an assumption or wishful projection that medieval society had essentially democratic impulses. Like Morris before him, he viewed guilds from a half millennium before as democracies in miniature. He further assumed that the protodemocratizers from five or so centuries earlier displayed those idealistic inclinations in the communal enterprise of erecting cathedrals. Owing to such presuppositions, his study of medieval church-building from 1880 is anything but ideologically anodyne. On the contrary, the book is loaded with lessons to be drawn by his countrymen.
Even before the Civil War, Norton must have intuited a likeness between the massive campaigns to construct great churches that studded the skyline of medieval Europe with spires and the frenetic urban expansion of the contemporary United States that would accelerate in the decades afterward. Furthermore, he detected in the cathedral-raising culture of the Middle Ages the same meritocratic openness to innovation by workers at all levels that has long formed part of America’s self-image. The art historian also showed precociously the hunger for a holistic cohesion in both architecture and society that led many after him to different iterations of Gothic revival. In espousing the view that the style was inherently organic, he calls to mind his fellow American and New Englander, Ralph Waldo Emerson. The transcendentalist held that “the Gothic cathedral is a blossoming in stone subdued by the insatiable demand of harmony in man.” In Norton, the unitary wholeness of the architectural style came hand in hand with simplicity and sincerity, qualities valued as intensely by American revivalists as they had been by the French, from Gaston Paris through Anatole France and beyond.
In a spirit of spreading respect for the Middle Ages in its anticipation of the democratic aspirations of modern America, Norton played a prominent role in promoting medievalism among the young in Cambridge and Boston (see Fig. 4.2). In 1875 he was appointed the first professor of art history at Harvard. In 1881, he inaugurated the Dante Society. Membership was not restricted to academics: for instance, he persuaded Isabella Stewart Gardner to join. She went still further in her interests as an amateur Dantist by purchasing several manuscripts of the Italian poet’s works. Nor was Norton’s commitment to medieval culture restricted to scholarly theory as opposed to artistic and artisanal practice. In 1897, he became the first president of the Boston Society of the Arts and Crafts. Cram and Goodhue participated in its founding.
At first blush the art historian’s positive disposition toward the medieval period may seem to blend into Adams’s, but ultimately the outlook of the older man toward the Middle Ages looks to have been even more optimistic than that of the author who wrote Mont Saint Michel and Chartres. The professor of art history sought to renew the United States and to reform its society by aligning the modern day with the Middle Ages, much as the medieval era had been mediated in Britain by Ruskin and the Pre-Raphaelites. The United States confronted its own social and economic challenges, and for obvious reasons it would be misguided to assimilate it facilely to British Victorianism. Yet certain slices of intellectual society in both nations sought to wield Gothic architecture as a means of solving crises in social values. Norton supposed the cathedrals of a half millennium earlier to embody democracy, but of a kind imbued with morality and virtue that were not evident in the politics and government of his own day.
Even the mere feat of uprooting Gothic architecture and replanting it in the modernity of both Great Britain and America was titanic. The transplantation constrained the medievalizers, in this case really the antimodernizers, to make what was intrinsically Catholic into something meet and right for primarily other Christian contexts. To achieve such legerdemain was no small feat. In Protestant environments, any magic touching upon Christianity incurred the risk of being considered mummery and mumbo jumbo.
The Knight Errant and Copeland & Day
To err on the side of underemphasis, the Middle Ages have been appropriated to many ends. One extreme is directed toward patriotism and the purposefulness of crusades. The Knight Errant, “the crowning achievement of bohemia,” belongs deliberately to the other terminus of the spectrum, which is largely apolitical, un-nationalist, and individualistic. The journal purveys fine art printing in the spirit of William Morris. Not unrelatedly, it medievalizes in imitation of manuscripts from the Middle Ages. At the same time it glamorizes, not too dogmatically, a short-lived decadence of mind-altering drugs and other experimentation. On the cover of the inaugural issue, an armored equestrian rides solitary through a thick forest toward a lofty castle. The image is supported by the programmatic statement that leads off the periodical. There too the editors struck a pose as “men against an epoch.” They were quixotically chivalrous, on a quest in an America they regarded as a cultural wasteland. A few fellows from within their closed ranks would become architects, stippling the landscape of the United States with neo-Gothic constructions like so many castles, cloisters, and cathedrals. The poet Louise Imogen Guiney, another intimate within the coterie that produced the review, contributed to its first installment a poem devoted to the title character (see Fig. 4.3). She characterized this romantic horseman in a letter as being “as mediaeval as possible, by way of representing the rebound from progress and science and agnosticism and general modernity.”
The knight errant had been in vogue so long that he had become a cardboard cut-out, ripe for parody. Only a few years later, a comic short story entitled “Modern Knight Errantry” was published in a British illustrated monthly. The tale revolves around two male suitors. They set out to engineer seeming crises in which they can satisfy their beloved’s yearning for them “to prove that chivalry is not quite dead” as a remedy against the “most degenerate days” in which they were living. These fabricated emergencies culminate in a boating accident in which the soggy swains come to blows with each other while floundering in the water. While they display anything but gentlemanly conduct, an old boatman is left to bring their soaked sweetheart ashore. Thus, the two wooers end up alienating the young lady they hope to win over. As has been the case since the Middle Ages, the line between a knight errant and an arrant knave is very fine.
The circle in Boston clung to the romantic image, perhaps not unlike the nearly life-sized painting entitled The Knight Errant that first went on display at the Royal Academy in 1870 (see Fig. 4.4). The creator, Sir John Everett Millais, explained: “The order of Knights errant was instituted to protect widows and orphans, and to succor maidens in distress.” In this case the alleged chivalric class furnishes a pretext to paint a young woman undraped—not so much distressed as undressed. Painters of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries who applied their brushes to compositions set in the Middle Ages often seized upon the otherness of the era as a ruse to reach this objective, much as other artists took advantage of the license allowed by primitivism and orientalism to portray the female natives of distant lands topless. The scene inverts the one in Our Lady’s Tumbler. In the medieval French poem, a scantily clothed man is comforted by a woman as heavily, although not as metallically, dressed as the armored warrior and wanderer in Millais’s canvas.
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In 1893 Herbert Copeland co-founded the publishing firm of Copeland & Day, which advanced inestimably the cause of fine printed books in the United States. His associate in the start-up was Fred Holland Day, another crony of Cram’s. The two business partners took as their device the flower and sharp-pointed rose parts that illustrated a Latin motto meaning “Just as a lily among thorns.” The accompanying design was a composite craftily formed from elements of marks from two sixteenth-century printers, who happened to be named Robert Copland and Richard Day. The image conveyed the challenges of achieving beauty and culture in an unreceptive and even antagonistic environment. Apparently, Boston was a veritable briar patch.
The firm offers a very early example of a small press and independent imprint in the American publishing market. Although commercial, it was dedicated to fine printing, in emulation of William Morris’s Kelmscott and other private presses in England. Morris’s politics, which tended toward social utopianism, could not have stood further from those of Cram, who nonetheless admired and even idolized the Englishman. Day had met Morris in 1890 and had even brokered an arrangement, plaintively unrealized, to copublish with Kelmscott. In content, the publishers were remarkable for the tight links they forged with The Yellow Book and with the still more notorious Irish writer Oscar Wilde, himself a follower of Morris and mainstay of the scandalously avant-garde periodical.
The years of Copeland & Day coincided with the zenith—or nadir?—of a specific cultural moment. An 1893 article by the British man of letters Arthur Symons referred to “The Decadent Movement in Literature.” This loose faction suffused both the Victorian fin de siècle in England and its equivalent in the United States. Even a personage as reputable, rich, and well connected as Henry Adams put on sportive airs as a member of this club. Copeland & Day made their ties to the faction overt in 1893 by printing as their first book a novel by the thirty-year-old Cram. A production for connoisseurs in the inner circle, it bears the title The Decadent (see Fig. 4.5). Like various others associated with Gothic revivals, the budding architect proved himself ambidextrous: he swanked about, showing off his talents in belles lettres as well as in architecture. Here he plays at hedonism and dissipation. The scene portrayed in the frontispiece is not clearly either Hellenizing or orientalizing. Yet it is anything but typically Bostonian. It depicts two contemplatively doped-up young men attended to by a vaguely geisha-like young woman. Along with the sinuous folds of fabric that enwrap them, coiling tubes and fumes of hookahs channel opium to them. Anyone looking for a lancet window into Cram’s soul will have a letdown, but this novel and its context do shed some stained-glass light.
Being associated with Wilde himself and decadence may have helped keep the firm of Copeland & Day afloat in its first couple of years. The Irish author scored a phenomenal success in his 1882 tour of the United States, and memories of that triumph lingered long. At the same time, being hitched closely to a controversial figure held the potential for creating unpredicted and unwanted nuisances. Initially, the Irishman’s trip through life took him down a primrose path. At first, he was highly publicized, the talk of the town wherever he went. Sure, he elicited a gale of lashing criticism for being a popinjay and poseur, proud as a peacock, but far worse lay in store. All too soon the notoriety curdled. Eventually the clamor over his two trials in 1895, conviction, and two-year prison sentence for sodomy may have contributed equally to the implosion of the movement. A backlash of social conservatism ensued.
In the late 1890s, F. Holland Day was seeking out youths of color, especially immigrants and African Americans, and taking their pictures. Sometimes he posed them in exotic attire, but often he had them wearing little clothing at all. Among the youths was a soulful, dark-skinned, Lebanese immigrant named Kahlil Gibran. The photographer made a friend of (or was the relationship more than just that?) the future writer and artist in 1896 when the boy was all of thirteen years old (see Fig. 4.6). Day’s attraction to decadence may have differed greatly from Cram’s. When viewed in hindsight, the future collegiate Gothicist gives the impression of having struck an attitude to which he had no intention of holding fast for very long. In contrast, Day looks firmly [sic] homoerotic and pederastic.
The books of Copeland & Day revolted against the shoddiness and commercialism of the publishing industry in America of the time. In six years of existence, the house brought out not quite one hundred volumes. In 1898, the heyday of the Arts and Crafts movement in Boston, the press published the first edition of Our Lady’s Tumbler, as translated into English by Isabel Butler. This printing (see Fig. 4.7) followed the model of their earlier This Is of Aucassin and Nicolette: A Song-Tale of True Lovers (see Fig. 4.8). Metaphorically, both books took a leaf or more out of the smaller Kelmscott printed works. Many reasons could be supposed for the appeal of the minstrel’s tale to Day; an unusual one is that his most cherished piece by one of his favorite authors was Maurice Maeterlinck’s The Treasure of the Humble, which opens with a chapter that investigates and glorifies silence.
The publishing house slammed shut its doors in 1899, when the two principals had a parting of the ways. Their venture had existed only slightly more than a half decade and failed to post a single profitable year, but it had stamped a mark of its own on America thanks to its amalgam of craftsmanship in form and charm in literary content. The New York Times bemoaned the demise of the business concern with an anonymous article entitled “Books Beautiful, but Not Dear.” Perhaps the beautification could have gone on longer had the cover prices been higher.
Despite the shutdown of Copeland & Day, Butler’s translation of the medieval poem had three subsequent editions printed in the Boston area. These reprints were produced by Small, Maynard & Co. The partnership had been founded in 1897. Herbert Small had been Copeland’s freshman-year roommate, although he did not graduate in the end: dropping out of college to go into business is nothing new. Another active visionist, he scooped up the unsold Copeland & Day stock when the firm was shuttered. The lamplight of Boston medievalizing was not quenched totally or eternally, but a moment of special vibrancy had passed: both decadence and a decade ended. Few, if any, of the camp followers in Boston turned out to be lifelong lotus-eaters. In fact, many of them went on to make further contributions to the rooting of medievalism in American culture in the twentieth century.
Fred Holland Day
The year of 1898 was a key time for Fred Holland Day, the privileged only child of a wealthy couple, as he redeployed his energies ever more from publication into photography. In the same months in which his press brought out Our Lady’s Tumbler, he kicked up a storm by teaming with a band of his friends to reenact for the camera tableaux vivants of Christ’s life, death, and resurrection (see Fig. 4.9). The reenactments staged by Day can be set within the context of a decade-long vogue of filming the Passion, which in most cases entailed representation of the Virgin Mary among those present for moments of the Crucifixion and its aftermath. Both still photography and silent movies frequently formed battlegrounds for contention between laymen and clerics. Whether the salience of religious topics protected filmmakers from controversy or fanned it instead may be unascertainable.
Day’s omnivorous fascination with religion at this stage in his life led him to assemble a raft of material that included Roman Catholic ritual and art objects. He took especial interest in figural representations such as icons, artworks that used a supposed likeness to make a sacred figure present before the observer. In turn, the complexity of the relationship between image and what was imaged or imagined fit with his engrossment in the interplay between photographs and their viewers. Prominent in Day’s holdings of religious paraphernalia was a wooden Madonna that he twice lent to exhibitions. As we have seen, the Virgin had been the object of attention for Ralph Adams Cram, who had contributed “Two Sonnets for Pictures of Our Lady” to the Knight Errant. With his parents, Day funded and oversaw the construction of the Gothic Chapel of Saint Gabriel the Archangel that stands at Highland Cemetery in Norwood, Massachusetts (see Fig. 4.10). The firm of Cram, Goodhue and Ferguson designed the little church in 1903. The completed building was dedicated not long after. Through his involvement in the propagation and appropriation of the Middle Ages in both literature (as a publisher) and architecture (as a patron), Day embodied the especially close acquaintance between these two arts that has often marked Gothic revivals.
Along with many others from America and Britain, Day made a cultural pilgrimage to Germany in 1890. The highlight of the expedition was the once-in-a-decade reenactment of the Passion play at Oberammergau. The performances there did not begin until 1634, and the medieval text had been rewritten completely by 1670. Even so, the recurrent event has been treated popularly as a theatrical tradition that leads in an unsevered continuum from the Middle Ages. The impact of the Oberammergau Passion play until World War I would be hard to overrate, and a strong sense of the events can be culled from the many postcards that survive across the decades (see Figs. 4.11, 4.12 and 4.13). Viewing the event helped plant the seed for Day’s later scheme to stage photographs of key scenes in Christ’s final days.
As a counterpoint to the enthusiasm of Day and other young pilgrims, we have the supercilious skewering of such mass appeal by Henry Adams. In a letter in which he presents himself as a teacher of teachers, Adams explicates his steadfast ambition not to achieve a broad audience. He quails at the notion of cultivating a popular following of his own, equating such a hypothetical cheering section to “a crowd of summer-tourists, vulgarising every thought known to artists. In fact, it is the Ober-Ammergau Passion-play as now run for Cook’s tourists.” Three decades later, the travel agency of the Englishman Thomas Cook was still hosting tours to Oberammergau (see Fig. 4.14).
Day breathed in his passion for the Middle Ages with the air that enveloped him in his youth. His preparatory school had been Chauncy Hall, which at his matriculation in 1880 occupied a massive, new Gothic revival building in the Back Bay neighborhood of Boston (see Fig. 4.15). The structure was designed with state-of-the-art features, especially to be fire-resistant and thus to avoid the fate of its predecessor, which had burned down in 1873. Gothic revival undeniably and consciously looked back many hundreds of years in some of its architectural features, but in other ways its American expression was made to be as modern as could be. The Middle Ages and progress were not set in opposition to each other. At Chauncy Hall, Day wrote “short treatises” on such topics as Martyrs and Martyrdom, Heraldry, and Insignia of the Order of the Garter. From a twenty-first-century vantage point, his education looks startlingly similar to Anatole France’s, but, of course, late nineteenth-century Beantown differed from earlier nineteenth-century Paris patently in many particulars.
From childhood, Day was fascinated by exotic apparel and fancy dress. In keeping with his romantic engrossment in the past, we have images from 1893 of him with his friends, assembled within the ampleness of the family mansion in Norwood, with its heavy and dark woodwork in Tudor Gothic style (see Fig. 4.16). The group has gathered for a pre-party before a festival of the Boston Art Students’ Association, with an organizing committee that counted Ralph Adams Cram, and are clad in clothing that was meant to hark back to the late Middle Ages (see Fig. 4.17). A photograph of Louise Imogen Guiney, Boston bohème, decked out as Saint Barbara complete with halo, likely survives from this very event or at least one like it (see Fig. 4.18). Day, Cram, and their cronies had the identical zest for remote earlier times, including ascetics and monks of late antiquity and the Middle Ages, that Anatole France, Félix Brun, and others displayed in the same fin de siècle.
From this same period emit the results of a great photo opportunity. One captures Day, posed formally in late medieval garb, before he held court with his fellow publisher Copeland over a costume party (see Fig. 4.19). That is meant literally: in newspaper accounts, the chivalric group they formed was described as “King René’s court.” The name refers to “Good King René” of Anjou, author of two richly illuminated allegorical works in the mixed form of prose and verse. The inspiration is likely to have been a reproduction of a miniature from the so-called Breviary of King René. Thus, their festivities reenacted, not quite in tableau vivant fashion, a manuscript painting (see Fig. 4.20). The notion was not revolutionary. In fact, the good king had been the object of fancy and fantasy among medievalizers at the latest since William Morris, whose King René’s Honeymoon series of 1862 encompassed both stained glass and cabinetry.
The participation of Ralph Adams Cram as a youth in the medievalism of play-acting left an imperishable imprint on him. Decades later, when promoting the Medieval Academy of America after its foundation in 1925, he advocated for the adoption of rituals and regalia that would conjure up the Middle Ages he adored—his Middle Ages. A photograph of him from about this time shows him at the door of the Gothic chapel he had built on his own estate in Sudbury, Massachusetts, as his own personal place of prayer and medievalness (see Fig. 4.21).
The designer’s most extreme and extravagant move to reinstitute the Middle Ages in his own times came when he was appointed to a blue-ribbon panel that was to advise the city of Boston on its urban planning. Acting like a czar of architecture, Cram argued fruitlessly for constructing a neo-Gothic atoll in the Charles River Basin. The idea would be to create a kind of Bostonian equivalent to the Île de la Cité, the island in Paris on which the cathedral of Notre-Dame is located. He envisaged having on this manmade Saint Botolph’s Island a city hall, a great church (to be called by the same name given to the island as a whole), and an open-air theater (see Fig. 4.22). After his initial promotion of this caprice fell flat, he rejiggered it in favor of an isle for MIT to be called (this is not a joke) Tech Island. The notion, for all its seeming arbitrariness, is at once startlingly modern and surreally anachronistic. At the time, the United States was still perceived as the shining city on a hill. In a weird way, Cram tried to move the hill to an islet.
To return to the turn of the century, it would be intriguing to know if Day chanced to discuss religion, the Middle Ages, or even medieval miracles during his conversations with Maurice Maeterlinck. Not incidentally, he collected the Belgian playwright’s works and photographed him in 1901. Day’s friend Richard Hovey, an American poet and passionate medievalizer, translated some of Maeterlinck’s plays into English (see Fig. 4.23).
The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were a time of hunger for integrative visions—for holism. In this sense, Cram had much in common with Frank Lloyd Wright, even though in the search for organic order the Gothicist turned in a very different direction from the modernist. In view of the dynamics between the tumbler and his art, the tumbler and Mary, the tumbler and the monastic order, and, last but not least, the tumbler and the Gothic church, it looks in hindsight to have been predetermined that those who belonged to Cram’s clique would have been impassioned by the medieval performer. Like Henry Adams before and G. K. Chesterton after, some of these men were in their quirky ways monastic entertainers après la lettre.
In a letter from 1898, the poet Louise Imogen Guiney backed Day as he teetered on the brink of breaking with Copeland. When the two publishers parted ways in the following year and liquidated their partnership, Guiney wrote to Day to sympathize with him. In a very revealing turn of phrase, she expressed herself with all the intimacy that their close friendship enabled: “You’ve got to live your own life, after all, even if you wind up as sacristan of a Benedictine Abbey.” What made Guiney imagine Day in a monastic role? Her motivation could have been nothing more than his well-documented engrossment in both Christian religion and medieval reenactment. Then again, she could have sensed other less spiritual proclivities in his attraction to all-male environments and to the male body. His poet friend makes no explicit observation on this other score, but some of Day’s pictures are worth a thousand words.
Ralph Adams Cram, Great Goth Almighty
While Cram’s model for art was the Gothic cathedral, his model for society
was the monastery.
An admirer of Henry Adams, Ralph Adams Cram engineered (or architected) the first trade edition of Mont Saint Michel and Chartres as a reprint under the auspices of the American Institute of Architects. In his own account of his life, the Gothic designer and activist took pride in having orchestrated the arrangement for two main reasons. First, because of the book’s excellence as “one of the most distinguished works of literature ever produced in the United States,” and second, because of its value as “unique interpretation of the very heart and soul of the Middle Ages.” He realized astutely that despite the fact that Adams did not come out in favor of medieval revivalism, the volume could still serve tacitly as a platform for the collegiate style.
The sentence that scores this pair of points is vintage Cram. It manages at once to be Anglophile and to strike an “America first” attitude. In it, he gives the lead to the United States, referring only afterward to the medieval period, and not even mentioning Europe. More than anyone else of his generation, this architect Americanized the Middle Ages and endeavored correspondingly to medievalize America. He believed that the American and medieval souls were closely akin. According to him, both were “liberating, innovative, and democratic.” The indelibility of his inborn Americanism may be what recuses him from being dubbed the American Pugin.
In an “Editor’s Note” to the reprint, Cram prescribed Adams’s portrayal of Chartres as an antitoxin to grimier aspects of then-present-day Britain and the United States. In discussion of time travel, many people may have heard the phrase “back to the future.” The yearning to re-create remote and bygone times by progressing “forward to the past” is probably less run-of-the-mill. Even so, this expression would seem to describe the sort of motion that the architect, ever the fire-breathing polemicist, intended here to accomplish. He was just the man to do it, as a hard-liner who contrived simultaneously to be a headliner.
Much of the nineteenth-century turn to the Middle Ages had taken place after a rejection of Greece and Rome. No one stole from Gibbons the conception of decline and fall in reference to the Middle Ages, but the most factional of the medievalizers and medievalists definitely had a sense that Western Europe had lived through a steady deterioration from its earlier glory. Cram was by no means alone in his certainty that the Middle Ages could save people who had become estranged from beauty and nature. Ruskin had laid the groundwork for egalitarianism, and he had implied that the connector between Gothic and nature resembled that between humanity and nation. The American architect could quote his Ruskin chapter and verse, from having read the Englishman’s books with voracity in his formative years. Louis Sullivan, a founding father of skyscraper design in Chicago and elsewhere in the Midwest of the United States, likewise detected a relationship between Gothic and nature. This realization inspired him in experiments that helped prepare the way for what would eventually become—drumroll, please—skyscraper Gothic.
A more obvious link between Gothic and nature would be the close interaction between collegiate Gothic architecture and the scrupulous landscaping and gardening of Beatrix Farrand, the Olmsted Brothers, and others. Although the names just mentioned pertain to the United States, the affinity has been found on both sides of the Atlantic. The emphasis on surrounding Gothic architecture with carefully built landscape, especially gardens, originated long before Horace Walpole. At that stage, the designers had in mind properties (and property owners) that were imposing enough for commensurately grand gazebos and pavilions. Sometimes these edifices looked like crosses between castles and churches, with pinnacled turrets, crenellation, ogives, lancets, and quatrefoils (see Fig. 4.24). Through books, examples of such designs were broadcast rapidly across the ocean to North America.
In the nineteenth century, the nexus between Gothic architecture and landscape gardening was maintained and extended with greatest effect by William Morris. In 1874, the great man wrote to Louisa Baldwin, one of the four extraordinary Macdonald sisters, asking her to “suppose people lived in little communities among gardens and green fields.” In the New World, fantasies of such utopias sustained a vision that would be actualized eventually in both campuses and suburbs. In sum, Gothic design and landscape gardening had a strong impact on each other from the very beginning of the revival. The renewal took root early in the landscapes of gardens, and Gothic has retained to this very day an abiding alliance and intimacy with the built landscape that may well exceed that of most other architectural styles.
In his autobiography, Cram plumed himself proudly that when his very first publication was printed, it was assigned the heading “Have We a Ruskin among Us?” This is not the place for appraising the degree to which the comparison between the two luminaries was warranted and apt. More consequential is what the American came to do with Gothic. Transposed into his own terms, the style would be suitable for both the National Cathedral and the house that forms the backdrop to Grant Wood’s American Gothic, dated 1930. Of course, the architect and his comrades had in mind to steer their navy of naves in a very different direction, by imposing the medieval manner of design as the standard idiom within the academy of higher learning.
In the United States, Cram reigned without question as the foremost exponent of collegiate Gothic. This architectural fashion is not at all identical with Gothic revivals of earlier sorts. On the contrary, it delivers energy, light and lightness, and, beyond all else, verticality—but it does so through the Americanized anachronism of stone, at a time when steel and glass held promise of attaining supremacy. Furthermore, it expresses within the context of universities many impulses that in the urban settings of the business world manifested themselves in Art Deco skyscrapers.
For more than thirty years, Cram could not be stopped. Like a rock himself, he could be neither blocked nor stonewalled. He was the powerhouse for the final iteration of the Gothic revival. Shaped by Ruskin, Morris, Rossetti, the other Pre-Raphaelites, and Wagner, he spearheaded a reprise in America of the style that had held sway in Britain through much of the nineteenth century. Nothing lasts forever. The replay in the United States ended, but it left marks that endure—and that differ from the traces still evident in the British Isles. In Cram’s youth, much of his homeland had been at an undeveloped stage in the collection of European art and in the construction of buildings that ran the full gamut of European architectural modes. By his maturity, the situation had changed radically. In 1926, the architect and polemicist was featured on the cover of the weekly news magazine Time (see Fig. 4.25). For his staunch advocacy of Gothic as an architectural fashion for straight arrows, he has earned for himself the epithet of “the American Goth.” Decades earlier, he had commented upon the redemption of the word Gothic. Largely thanks to his own achievements, his wish had been fulfilled.
Cram was paramount in more than three decades during which Thomas Jefferson’s notion of the university as an “academical village” (see Fig. 4.26) was recast radically to become what could be styled the “Gothical cloister.” The college town is distinctive to the United States. In other nations, universities are situated mainly in major cities. In America, such institutions, largely under the influence of idealized images of Oxford and Cambridge, were often established at a distance from urban settings. Even when they were located in urban settings, they were walled off in quadrangles. Put together enough of the four-sided courts and the outcome would be in its own right what Woodrow Wilson of Princeton called “a little town.” Such municipalities of professors and students suited well the associations with cloisters that prevailed by the end of the nineteenth century. Monasteries were seen as generative hives where monks engaged communally in performing sacramental work. What better role models could have been found for enabling higher education to fulfill the loftiness implied by its name? The medieval tumbler or juggler would have been very much at home.
How did the Gothicizing architect come to have a heart of stone, if we allow that its rockiness was only slightly cooler than magma? In his view, all of history in the anno Domini era demonstrated an inverse correlation between civilization and monasticism. In a line graph that would make a statistician today chortle, he set forth how the highs and lows of the one could be mapped readily against the peaks and valleys of the other (see Fig. 4.27). Then again, the true comedy may lie in ever exaggerating the utility of statistics in representing and analyzing human experience.
More than all the others who flocked toward collegiate Gothic, Cram promoted it—always trenchantly, sometimes misleadingly, but usually successfully. With him as bellwether, the style became a counterweight to modernism. Thanks in part to his accomplishments, many architects felt comfortable operating in and praising both modes. The perception of Gothic as antimodernist, and an antagonism between Gothicism and modernism, developed only relatively belatedly.
Then again, the argument could be made that the dichotomy between Gothic and modernism replayed a clash that had taken place at least once before. From this perspective, the head-butting of Gothicists and modernists transposed into the twentieth century an antinomy that had been elaborated one hundred years earlier. Wittingly or not, the nineteenth-century gusto for Gothic arose out of a tension with Hellenism that went back to early romanticism. The German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer contrasted Gothic as the negative pole of architecture with Greek. He went on to characterize the medieval style as “a mere appearance, a fiction accredited by illusion” and as “promising eternal security” that it failed to deliver in reality. The English thinker Samuel Taylor Coleridge, seeing the relationship between the two fashions as less antithetical, struck a more pro-Gothic stance. Greek and Gothic were sometimes regarded as having common elements, since both were outliers. Even Karl Marx enters the rumpus by juxtaposing “Greek museums and Gothic steeples.”
In the United States, the Gothic revival constituted, in the growing basket of historicizing revivals, an alternative to the classical and especially Greek revival. An old creed held that medieval style is unforced and natural in contrast to the ordered artificiality of ancient Greek architecture. Put differently, Gothic may be taken as instantiating regular irregularity. That is, the fashion permits a compass for newness that some felt was disallowed by the Greek revival. The medieval manner geometricized, but with an endless flexibility and modularity that the classicizing forms did not sanction. The polarity between Greek and Gothic is discussed self-consciously even as late as the supremely modern American architect Frank Lloyd Wright.
In a similar spirit at the turn of the century, Cram posited Gothic in the architecture of his day to be something innovative. From his vantage point, it reared up against other fashions that had played out. The revival (or, more accurately, reimagining) of various earlier historical periods and cultures allowed sometimes for different and even discordant elements to congeal. Yet such syncretism often took second place to bare-knuckle rivalry. In many cases, and Cram belongs among them, strong lines were drawn that determined the chronological and geographical boundaries of the style or styles deemed worthy of emulating. He sang the swan song for Gothicizing of the oppositional sort that held this fashion, in contrast to the other historicizing ones, to be not old and stale but new and fresh, and that exalted it over all other revivals.
In sum, the contrastive approach between Gothic and other manners manifested itself most obviously in—note the title—Contrasts, Augustus Pugin’s work from 1836. No less opinionatedly, the predisposition toward dichotomizing is equally present in the 1848 Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, which took an Italian painter as the primary constituent in its name. The brothers set up Raphael as the onset of a classicism that corrupted subsequent art. Cram takes this kind of stark division to new heights, from which the only way out was downward. Yes, Newton’s third law of motion instructs that what goes up must come down. But culture operates according to different principles—just as in haute couture hemlines go up, drop down, and ascend again. Ultimately, Gothicism belongs to a much larger systole and diastole that have marked Western culture since antiquity, when Atticism and Asianism were set at cross purposes. By these lights Gothic revival would be aligned with the latter, in contradistinction to the symmetry and economy of more classical styles.
The question of Gothic has great relevance in the earliest of all so-called modern times. The Renaissance framed itself self-consciously against the medieval. Its rejection of the Middle Ages sometimes took the form of smears that we should set in their historical context, but that we should be most gingerly about perpetuating today. We hardly do better to repeat unfounded slurs against earlier times than to make them in our own day against different religions, races, national origins, creeds, sexes, sexual orientations, gender identities, and all other such categories. Prejudice is prejudice, even if the victims are long dead, and studious ignorance can be plied across time as well as space.
Deeper into modernity came the Enlightenment and classicism, which were countered in turn by romanticism. This last-mentioned movement set the stage for many forms of medieval historicizing, including both Gothic novels and Gothick architecture. The romantics initiated the nearly nonstop vogues of medievalism that permeated the nineteenth and much of the twentieth centuries. When juxtaposed with more modern styles, the Gothic and Renaissance revivals may seem to have more in common than not, but they were often viewed as competitors—and until the twentieth century, Gothic held the lead in the contest (see Fig. 4.28).
Politically, collegiate Gothic did not repudiate and still less disregarded the image and ambition that the United States projected abroad as a new leader on the world stage. Becoming an ever more major player, the nation strode from the cocky confidence of the Columbia exposition of 1893 to the pushy imperialism of the Spanish-American War, the victory of World War I, and the economic growth of the 1920s. As this transformation took place, collegiate Gothic sought to endow the elite youth of America with an elegantly peaceful feedlot that intervened between the cozy pastures of childhood and the grueling racetrack of adulthood. With the breathing space given there, the cream of the crop could nurture their minds, bodies, and souls before entering service to their nation.
Although Cram was a survivalist, he was not one in the present-day mode, out to fill subterranean bunkers with ammo, tinned goods, dry-cell batteries, and all the rest. He believed that society stood in harm’s way, but in his view its rescue depended upon returning to the best of the Middle Ages—the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. He helped to ready the ground not only for hundreds of churches, cathedrals, and college buildings across the continent, but also for the American public that embraced Our Lady’s Tumbler in all its many guises in the first half of the twentieth century. The fate of the medieval French poem was tied to the strength of interest in the Middle Ages, as evidenced particularly in revivals.
The vision behind collegiate Gothic may be, and has been, presented as a flop. Even so, the style has endured. Its conscious unworldliness is unfairly caricatured if understood simply as mere mooning and escapism. College is figuratively a mother that stands in place of a parent. The Latin phrase in loco parentis has this literal meaning in English. The metaphor of motherhood underpins the equally Latinate image of alma mater, a bounteous mother. More circuitously, the entrance of students into a university is matriculation. By metaphoric extension, the walled enclosure (and often the additional arcading) of a stone courtyard is an enclosing matrix, not from which to flee the world but in which to take form before entrance into it. All these terms derive from the word for “mother” in the learned language.
The quadrangle purveys cloistered seclusion and asceticism, but the separation from worldliness that it facilitates is not meant to be permanent. Rather, the college as so envisaged is directed toward preparation for active life within society. The institution is not designed to lead to sempiternal spurning of secular existence, as may have been the case with Christians of late antiquity or the early Middle Ages. Cram lacked a college education of his own, and indeed resisted the idea of formal education altogether. At the same time, he viewed architecture itself as inherently educative, although mainly in the service of religion, and the faith in question was a sacramental Christianity. He wrote, “A true school of architecture should be half college and half monastery, set in the midst of beautiful surroundings and beautiful in itself,” a creed both pluralist and inclusive, considering the times. The qualification in the closing clause is admittedly a major one—but do we have so much more on which to pride ourselves today by way of contrast? After a conversion experience in Rome, Cram himself became a high-church Episcopalian. For much of his career he approached being a Catholic fellow-traveler. That affiliation raised no impediment to his designing buildings for the full range of Christian denominations, including Episcopalians, Presbyterians, Baptists, and even Swedenborgians. The ever-expanding universe of religions in the United States extends much further today, but for his period, this reach across confessions looks remarkable.
The adoption of the cloister played a central role in campus planning. The Gothic rectangle, especially as still observable at Oxford and Cambridge, became one of the chief articulations, or even the predominant module, of college architecture in the United States. It rebelled against large universities and their explosion in size. At the same time, it demonstrated alignment with the English collegiate tradition of close relationships, and of shared values developed from living in shared residences, between undergraduate students and their tutors or dons. Finally, it may also have given concrete (or actually stone) form to a pivot away from a Teutonic model of higher education. Whereas the Germanizing universities in the United States emphasized the scholarly apprenticeship of advanced graduate students, the Anglicizing ones put the accent upon earlier-stage predecessors.
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The great American Goth designed buildings prolifically and persuaded by example all sorts of other architects to jump on his neo-Gothic bandwagon. His style for colleges and universities responded to specific trends in the architecture of the Middle Ages as he understood it. Cram’s collegiate Gothic also embodied a reaction against many tendencies in the earlier Gothic revival in Britain and the United States. To take but one notable instance, his manner stands a world apart from the Ruskinian Gothic at the University of Pennsylvania, where College Hall was completed in 1873 on the West Philadelphia campus (see Fig. 4.29). Also in High Victorian Gothic style was the structure of buildings known as the Long Walk at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut (see Fig. 4.30). Never one to swallow back his words, Cram had no commendatory pronouncement to make about Victorian Gothic. In fact, he railed against it. In his factoring, the decades from 1830 through the end of the century had seen abject failure, especially in Carpenter Gothic. This uniquely American idiom was made imaginable through technological innovation. To be precise, this style was enabled by the invention of new devices such as steam-powered scroll saws. Such equipment accorded the builders unhindered freedom in the creation of sawn and carved wooden ornament—the fretwork and scrollwork that lend this form of Gothic its distinctive character. Not much better than Carpenter Gothic in Cram’s view was the Ruskinian iteration, about which he was also unmercifully bruising.
The firm of Cram, Goodhue & Ferguson won its earliest major commission in 1902 for the campus of the United States Military Academy, called most often simply West Point after its location on a headland above the Hudson River in New York. In an Americanization of romanticism, the valley of this great waterway gave rise in the mid-nineteenth century to the artistic movement in painting known as the Hudson River School. Although its painters focused upon landscape and nature, the river vale elicited from architects their own heightened sensitivity to the picturesque, in Gothic villas. The Gothic revival of the Hudson is epitomized in domestic architecture by Lyndhurst, a mansion overlooking the waters cutting through the lowlands in Tarrytown, New York (see Fig. 4.31). The turreted villa occupies the center of a park-like estate. The whole design embodies the painstaking interaction of architecture and landscape design that has been a hallmark of most Gothic revivals. Alexander Jackson Davis, who designed Lyndhurst in 1838, also exemplifies the close connection between Gothic literature and architecture at this stage in American culture. His architectural designs were conditioned by his literary readings.
West Point Academy should not be viewed in isolation from Lyndhurst and other such domestic architecture. On the contrary, the Academy must be fitted within a framework of Gothic rivalry and emulation. The military college had itself already received a strong Gothic imprint during the superintendence of Major Richard Delafield, who had imposed what was considered a Tudor Gothic style on the library, barracks, and ordnance compound. The library contained towers with parapets and crenellation that typify this stage in the castellated architecture of West Point (see Fig. 4.32). In fashioning a special Gothic for the bastion, Cram seemed to aspire consciously to a fusion between castle and college. His amalgamation of the two is in one sense all medieval, in another all American. In creating this style, he had to toe a careful line. He wanted to repudiate the Gothic that preceded him there, but without alienating those who had grown inured to it. The resultant Crammian compromise (if the architect’s name may be uttered plausibly in one breath with a word for give-and-take) has been aptly termed military Gothic. West Point has been described as “a rustic, masculine, militaristic Gothic campus.” The towers, walls, and revetments all exude muscularity and might.
The history of military Gothic merits further investigation, as does its connection with the concept of the college and university campus. The very noun, although Latin in origin and form, is American in its collegiate application. The first attestation refers to the grounds of Princeton University, in 1774. Eventually the term won out over the Anglo-Saxon “yard,” which became fossilized at Harvard alone. As often applied, the designation takes the name of the landscape to denote the totality of buildings and other facilities upon it.
The word pulls in two directions. Its general meaning is “field,” in a literal rather than figurative sense. In many ways, the outdoor heart of the Princeton campus is the Revolutionary War-era “Big Cannon.” Since 1840, it has been buried muzzle-down in the center of the quadrangle behind Nassau Hall. Does campus in a collegiate sense relate in any way to the Roman Campus Martius, with its meaning of “Field of Mars,” and to other drilling grounds for soldiers named after it, most momentously the Champ de Mars in Paris, where a few of the famous Expositions were held?
As soon as the construction of West Point was completed, the buildings became a point of pride that was promoted to the public (see Fig. 4.33). The match of date and project is not irrelevant, since the role of the United States military and indeed the overall orientation of the nation as a force in the world changed in the aftermath of the Spanish-American War of 1898. American international expansionism and collegiate Gothic may not have been directly related as reciprocal causation: they did not aggravate each other in a vicious circle or even in a vicious ogive. Yet their coincidence deserves to be remarked upon. At the same time, pointing it out is not to damn collegiate Gothic as inherently imperialist.
Americanized Middle Ages
A polemical denunciation of Adams’s Mont Saint Michel and Chartres professes that it has value only as “an emblem of an artificial neo-romanticism in early-twentieth-century Boston culture.” Although no support is supplied for this acid-penned attack, justification could be gleaned from when the book finally made its belated entrance into the commercial market and the hands of potential buyers. Until 1913, it had been available only to those to whom it had been presented, or to anyone who could cadge a copy out of the author’s personal cache from the two private printings.
In that later year, Adams became deeply invested in collaborating with a musician named Aileen Tone. In the twilight after the stroke he suffered in 1912, he threw his weight behind her in a project to reconstruct the songs of the Middle Ages and to re-create them in performance. To all intents and purposes, Tone (what a name for a person with her profession!) was an early music performer before her time. If the thought is not too outlandish, she could even be regarded in a retro way as an avant-gardist. In describing their musicological undertaking, Adams revealed his recognition that his book had served as a sort of bible for medievalizers—and that he had been made “a leader of a popular movement.” Now he prepared to rally his followers, by costuming Tone to act out Aucassin et Nicolette in the guise of its medieval romantic heroine. As luck would have it, this anonymous medieval French “song-tale” told a story with which Our Lady’s Tumbler had often been associated.
Mont Saint Michel and Chartres presents itself not as a work of fiction, but as a study written by a professional historian (although perhaps on the balance sheet of many present-day medievalists not a professional medieval historian). Yet viewed historiographically, the volume is also surprisingly ahistorical and perhaps even antihistorical. Then again, maybe Henry Adams was word-perfect in denying it to be a book at all and describing it instead as a “conversation.” He called it a guide directed intentionally not to other certified members of his guild but to his harem of admiring and attentive young women, those so-called nieces of his, some blood relatives and others not.
When juxtaposed to his chief writings in history, this other title looks less like a conventional nonfiction than like an excerpt from an autobiography, a full-blown novel, or even an extended prose poem. This failure to be conventional would warrant vitriol, if the author had meant his pages to be historical; but he did not have that objective. Nor does the difference end there, with a disclaimer about what could be called positivism. In an even greater divergence, the blunt-speaking Adams gave the edge to his own times in the negotiation between past and present that any scrutiny of the Middle Ages presupposes. In one memorable description (not his own choice of words), he saw the medieval period as “the most foreign of worlds to the American soul.” In his years at Harvard, he had grappled as a medievalist professor with the otherness of the epoch. Accordingly, when nativizing the era for his compatriots, he made, with full consciousness, his Middle Ages the Middle Ages of the twentieth century.
To go one step further, we could say that Adams constructed not just the twentieth-century Middle Ages in general but specifically the twentieth-century American Middle Ages. If those of us in the twenty-first-century expression of the nation think that we have left the preceding rendering behind, we deceive ourselves, hook, line, and sinker. In so doing, we also forfeit opportunities to learn from the past and enjoy a deepened self-understanding.
However laser-sharp the chiaroscuro may be in which the historiographic quirks and foibles of Adams’s pages stand out nowadays, Mont Saint Michel and Chartres ranked as a high-status bestseller in its own time. All its peculiarities notwithstanding, and maybe even because of them, the piece remained ensconced in American intellectual culture for decades thereafter. Published only a few years before construction of Washington’s National Cathedral began in 1907 (that stone leviathan was completed only in 1990), the volume was as monumental a presence among books in the twentieth century as the Episcopalian cathedral has become among buildings in the nation’s capital (see Fig. 4.34).
The main reason for the special place of Adams’s meditation goes almost without saying. Mont Saint Michel and Chartres surveyed the Middle Ages from the vantage point of an American who sensed that European culture was in a downdraft or at least in disintegration. Countrymen of his have often reached the same verdict or succumbed to the same misapprehension, over the centuries, more often wrongly than rightly. Like others of his day, Adams found in the medieval past solace (tinged with escapism?) and a model for renewal. But the supposedly historical old times that he mediated to his countrymen were at once as true to the Middle Ages and as anachronistically fanciful, both intentionally and not so, as the collegiate Gothic edifices that Cram and others helped to erect on campuses across the land.
In the end Adams admitted that his view of the medieval epoch was too self-centered. Such appropriation of the period characterized the spell in which he lived. At all costs to both sides of the equation, Victorians and Edwardians, along with their American and French equivalents, often chose to connect the Middle Ages with their own age, and medieval lives with their own. When they could not find exactly what they wanted, they made it up. But did Adams twist long-ago centuries to achieve self-serving aims of this sort? Not necessarily—or not nearly so much as he made them serve his own personal needs. In this latter case, his self-absorption was the polysyllable omphaloskepsis, navel-gazing. Perhaps we owe ourselves the right to riff on it: the neologism of omphaloskepticism would well describe his distinctive self-awareness, which was marked by a decided self-doubt.
Overall, was Henry Adams’s outlook on the Middle Ages as mistaken as some of his other political and social viewpoints? It has been concluded that his “Mont Saint Michel and Chartres is the culminating work of the medieval revival; it is also the bitterest proof of its failure.” This take seems not to reflect the vantage of the writer under discussion, so much as that of the later critic. The author’s wry nostalgia for unity lost in place of multiplicity gained marked him as a creature of his times. Being a nineteenth-century man may have branded him worthless in the twentieth, even as a product of the twentieth century may be so regarded in the twenty-first. Yet such acrid judgments may not be warranted. In either case, the person in question is not here now to wheel around on the backstabbers, straight-arm them, and defend himself in a fair fight.
Even if we accept the argument that Henry Adams led medievalism to a dead end in this book, the impasse he hit may indict the society that changed around him as much as it does his own lushly imbricated mind and psychology. Within the purview of the present study, more than enough that is good and germinal in medievalism, and the Middle Ages, may still linger on to justify our delving back into them and discovering how much we can bring forward to our own times. The medieval revivals, particularly Gothic, deserve inclusion, even as a primary color, on the chromatic spectrum of past architectural and ornamental styles.
The people responsible for collegiate Gothic covered a wide range. At one end can be pegged the administrators, who could in most cases be fairly called educational reformers. They opted for the architectural style, so long as they could defray the costs. In the middle stood the donors who funded the construction. Finally, and maybe above all, came the architects and builders who made into lapidary realities the aspirations of the university presidents and the ambitions of the moneyed alumni. All three of these parties to the great Gothicization that was attempted in the United States made the manner in many regards more authentically American than other movements such as Beaux-Arts, Art Deco, or Bauhaus. The nation had had no “original” Middle Ages, but for more than a quarter century it made Gothic native American in a “new and improved” style that is not attested in identical form in Europe or for that matter anywhere else in the world.
The Americanization of collegiate Gothic rested upon a substrate of the authentic brands of Gothic found in both France, especially Normandy and the region known as Île-de-France, and England, especially Oxford and Cambridge. It owed something to the studies of architectonics by Viollet-le-Duc. But it remained largely independent of traces of the earlier Gothic revival in the Ruskinian and Victorian molds. The diffusion of both public and private institutions of post-secondary education is one of the most remarkable achievements in the rise of the United States of America. Perhaps this pronouncement states the case backward, since rather than a result of what has been designated the American century, the proliferation of higher learning could equally well be considered a cause. The colleges and universities spread in tandem with various medieval revivals. The most impressive among those, collegiate Gothic, was central in the American Middle Ages and in its conception of advanced education. Its centrality abides.