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-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
186 The Juggler of Notre Dame and the Medievalizing of Modernity: Volume 3
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.
Fig. 4.34 Washington National Cathedral, Washington, DC. Photograph by Wikimedia user NoClip, 2007, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Washington_National_Cathedral_Twilight.jpg
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.