In the Mont-Saint-Michel, whatever Adams translated, either the poetry of the court, or the chanson de geste, or the cathedral arch, or the miracles of Our Lady, he rendered not only the spirit of an age, but his own portrait. It may be grotesque to imagine him, like her tombeor, capering naked before the image of the Virgin in the shadow of the monastery of Clairvaux.
But he was there exposed before the image.
—Louis Zukofsky A very obvious question that confronts the reader of Mont Saint Michel and Chartres is whether to judge Henry Adams as an academician, a man of letters, both, or neither. A subtler conundrum is whether or not he passes muster as a jongleur, since he identified, or at least professed to identify, with him. At first blush, an interrogation along these lines would seem unbelievable. Socially, Adams was the near opposite of the man that this far-fetched hypothesis would posit to be his counterpart. Whereas the medieval French tumbler frequented the fringes of society, the American speculated of himself:
“probably no child, born in the year [of 1838], held better cards than he.”
On the face of it, the two had little in common. Short and unathletic, Adams was anything but a champion. Yet he was a hard worker who could have empathized with both the stamina of the tumbler and the overtiredness to which the lay brother drove himself through his feats of devotion. The collapses that the medieval performer is described as undergoing could have resonated with him. The erstwhile educator suffered from what was diagnosed by the late nineteenth-century American medical establishment as the catchall national ailment of neurasthenia. This condition brought with it a susceptibility to anemia, spells of lightheadedness, and blackouts. To physical limitations could be added personal qualities and circumstances. Both the ignorant tumbler and the erudite Adams claimed to regard their choices and trade-offs in life and career as fiascos. Both elected to draw a shroud of protective silence over themselves, as they lived in solitude among their respective communities. Although
in very different ways, both the man of letters and the jongleur qualified as outsiders.
They lacked or chose to forfeit a solid place in the social hierarchy.
The Harvard professorship formed a brief intermission between Adams’s service abroad during the Civil War as a private secretary to his father and his years planted in Washington, DC, where he was a prominent but pointedly a private citizen. He gave up the one métier for which he was hired. He seemed to crave laurels as a writer, but he concealed his authorship of his two novels and severely hobbled the circulation of his two most popular nonfiction works. He never competed for elective office or was detailed to a political one.
In the chapter of Mont Saint Michel and Chartres on miracles, Adams quotes nearly ninety lines from Our Lady’s Tumbler in both the original French and his own English translation. After the first long quotation, he describes the traveling acrobat in terms that whisper at self-awareness of his own position: “Tormented by the sense of his uselessness to the society whose bread he ate without giving a return in service, and afraid of being expelled as a useless member.” In many regards, this characterization of the long-ago entertainer as a nullity having nothing but nuisance value could have applied equally well to the plight of the writer in his later life. He subsisted on income from inherited wealth, most of it from his wife. The passing years put him ever further from the university position from which he had resigned. Time had rendered him ever unlikelier to be summoned as counselor to the president or any other national potentate, if he even aspired to such an appointment. For all his wisdom, he was no Solon. All the same, he took steps to transcend the defeats in his personal and professional life. In his solitude, he composed words of prose and verse about the Middle Ages and Virgin as well as about modernity and dynamos, to be released deliberately to a preselected claque of so-called nieces and other intimates. Henry Adams soliloquized, much as the tumbler danced.
Beyond any corporeal infirmity or personality traits he shared with the thirteenth-century entertainer, Adams convinced himself that his values as an individual matched those of jongleurs as a social class. If the Blessed Virgin embodied the vanished faith of the medieval past, then the writer’s self-imposed role in his book was to escort or chaperone his readers as pilgrims back into the Middle Ages. By so doing, he rescued them from what he regarded as the bleak modernity of the early twentieth century.
In his guise as companion on such peregrinations, Adams had another inducement to be drawn to Our Lady’s Tumbler. He postured himself as a minstrel who mediated between his public and Mary as well as between his days and those of yore.
To broaden the last assertion slightly, Adams portrayed himself as a tumbler who tripped the light fantastic between the present and past. In this regard, a letter of his to Henry Osborn Taylor in 1905 has pertinence. Adams described his former colleague’s aim as an occupationally credentialed historian to conduct readers back to the Middle Ages as those times had actually been; to this goal he contrasted his own mission,
98 The Juggler of Notre Dame and the Medievalizing of Modernity: Volume 3
more amateurish or less pedantic, of relating the medieval period to what was then the present. Taylor’s objective demanded the power of pulling forward the minutiae of the past, while Adams’s called out for nothing less than the dexterity of the jongleur of Notre Dame.
Similarly, in earlier correspondence with Taylor, Adams differentiates between on the one hand the English historian William Stubbs, Bishop of Oxford (see Fig. 2.42), and on the other his own close friend, the American artist John La Farge. By setting up the two men as the opposing sides of an abyss, Adams points to the gap between professional history based on the rigorous establishment and interpretation of texts, and what would now be called cultural history. In this case, he gives a generous dose of attention to the artistic products of the culture under examination. Who can decree that one approach outreaches the other, since both have their constraints? Everyone knows that the past is irrevocable and unrepeatable, which rules out full success for Taylor’s method—but Adams’s mode has, alongside all the beauty of its artistry, all its limitations.
Adams retained enough vestiges of being an Enlightenment man in the mold of his grandfather and great-grandfather to recognize that he lacked the faith to perform truly for the Virgin Mary. He had taken his own measure well enough to realize that his true audience comprised women he could not possess as he wished—the wife he had not saved but had lost, the beloved he had sought but never won, and the nieces who mostly were not nieces after all. At least for sexual abstinence, it was all too fitting for him to pretend to be a hermit. In Mont Saint Michel and Chartres, he played the additional role of a jongleur.
The parallels between the writer of the early twentieth century and the street-acrobat of the medieval French poem do not trail off with their like-minded desire to cloister themselves. Adams lived if not in the shadow, then at least outside the brightly lit arenas of public service, politics, and commerce that most of his relatives haunted, and he forsook the academic post that he had taken as an alternative. In effect, he retreated from the spheres of both active and contemplative life to a zone of custom-made disunion. He set up shop a block from the White House, but there too he felt out of place. He had then every reason to identify with the tumbler, who began out of despair to frisk before the altar of Mary as an offering to her. As has been the case for all manner of writers since him, Adams’s words were the dances and leaps that he did in her honor. Like the medieval entertainer before him, he danced a pas de deux with the Virgin.
In writing of Mont Saint Michel, Henry Adams struck the pose of a Norman juggler. His closest equivalent was Taillefer. In an old legend, this supposed personage belonged to the entourage that accompanied William the Conqueror in the Norman invasion and occupation of 1066. The story goes that this jongleur performed the Song of Roland for the Norman troops before the Battle of Hastings while juggling his sword (see Fig. 2.43). The professional performer drew special attention in the aftermath of the eight-hundredth anniversary of the Norman Conquest, and at the time of the Franco-Prussian War.
Fig. 2.42 Hubert von Herkomer, Portrait of William Stubbs, before 1885. Oil on canvas, 89 × 74.5 cm.
Oxford, Oxford University, Bodleian Library, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Portrait_
of_William_Stubbs_by_Hubert_von_Herkomer.jpeg
Fig. 2.43 “The Song of Taillefer at the Battle of Hastings.” Engraving by Edward Henry Corbould, 1872. Published in Supplement to the Illustrated London News, October 12, 1872.
When dealing with the cathedral of Chartres, Adams made a casual effort in role-playing as the tumbler. In both cases his own book was tantamount to his song or, to deploy his own word, his libretto. He recounts in a letter written to Elizabeth Cameron how as an “act of piety to the memory of [my] revered grandfather” he repaired in 1891 to the Opéra Comique in Paris to attend Richard Coeur-de-lion. What constituted
100 The Juggler of Notre Dame and the Medievalizing of Modernity: Volume 3
the pietas? John Quincy Adams had first heard this foundational comic opera on King Richard I of England while a young diplomat in The Hague a century earlier.
The musical drama relates a legend about Richard Lionheart. On his way home from the Third Crusade, the monarch is first captured in Austria and then rescued by his faithful squire Blondel de Nesle in the guise of a blind troubadour. Henry tells Elizabeth how his ancestor, after losing the presidency, became obsessed with Blondel’s solo “O Richard, O my king, the universe abandons you.” This identification was not without its irony, since this aria had been popular during the French Revolution as a rallying point for royalists. Be that as it may, identifying himself purposely (and name-droppingly?) with his forefather, the late nineteenth-century letter writer levitates himself in his imagination back not to the Reign of Terror but to The Hague in that earlier fin de siècle. At the same time, the music enjoyed a new lease on life toward the turn of the century through which Adams himself would live (see Fig. 2.44).
Henry Adams was a man of untrammeled but unmet ambition. For all of it, he lacked a single vocation. He camped out in Washington just across a park from the White House, and he watched. He may also have dallied to be called upon for a role that did not exist. Did he expect to be named sage laureate? Did he have his sights set on a secretariat, in the event that a future president should establish a federal department of intellect and culture?
From his closest friends, Adams earned the tenderly insightful Latin byname of Porcupinus Angelicus. The nickname, “angelic porcupine” in English, hints simultaneously at two countervailing qualities. One is ethereality. The adjective may recall specifically the Angelic Doctor himself, Saint Thomas Aquinas. Another is anti-cuddliness, a characteristic could even have been described as crustiness or crankiness.
Adams was often moody, sometimes cantankerous, not outgoing by any stretch of the imagination. His intimates could not help but recognize in him a morose tetchiness that could slip into peevishness. They saw how unready he was to suffer fools gladly.
The same coterie of intimates who knew and employed this byword arranged for Saint-Gaudens to manufacture a medallion. It portrayed their friend in the guise of a winged rodent with defensive spines (see Fig. 2.45).
In 1880 and 1884 Adams produced two novels of well-maintained anonymity. He cultivated the habit of releasing his major works through publication that was private, at least initially. The focus on privacy intensified after the deaths of his wife, father, and mother. For most of a decade, he gave only to his inner circle copies of both Mont Saint Michel and Chartres and The Education of Henry Adams. This manner of circulating (or not) the books was at once self-effacing and ingeniously self-promoting: in most markets, restricted supply can be parlayed into stepped-up demand. Through his peculiarly heterogeneous oeuvre and his nonconformist supply chain, Henry Adams positioned himself to have better name recognition in the twentieth century than anyone else among his friends, including at times even John Hay.
Fig. 2.44 André Grétry’s opera Richard Cœur-de-Lion played at the turn of the century in the Théâtre de la Monnaie in Brussels. Commemorative trade card, date unknown.
Paris, Compagnie Liebig.
Fig. 2.45 Caricature of Henry Adams as
“Porcupinus Angelicus.” Bronze medallion by Augustus Saint-Gaudens, 1904. Quincy, MA, Adams National Historical Park. Image
courtesy of Patty Smith. All rights reserved.
102 The Juggler of Notre Dame and the Medievalizing of Modernity: Volume 3