The middle ages are to me the only ages…
That miracle-believing faith produced good fruit—the best yet in the world.
—John Ruskin 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.
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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.
Fig. 3.15 Postcard depicting Station No. 10 of the New York Yacht Club, Glen Cove, NY (Glen Cove, NY: R. W. Harrold, ca. 1910).
Fig. 3.16 William Morris, age 53. Photograph by Frederick Hollyer, 1887. Reproduced in J. W.
Mackail, The Life of William Morris, vol. 1 (London: Longmans, Green, 1899), frontispiece, https://
commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:William_Morris_age_53.jpg
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Fig. 3.17 Pugin’s comparison of an industrial town in 1840 and a “Catholic town” in 1440.
Illustration, ca. 1841. Published in Augustus Welby Northmore Pugin, Contrasts; or, A Parallel between the Noble Edifices of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries and Similar Buildings of the Present
Day: Shewing the Present Decay of Taste, 2nd ed. (London: Charles Dolman, 1841), first figure after p. 104.
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
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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
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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.
Fig. 3.18 Newport Parish Church (“St. Luke’s Church”), Benns Church, VA. Photograph by David King, 2008, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Newport_parish_west_facade.jpg
***
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.
Fig. 3.19 John Ruskin, The Nature of Gothic: A Chapter of The Stones of Venice, with a preface by William Morris (London: George Allen, printed at the Kelmscott Press, 1892), 1.
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