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.”
Fig. 4.3 Louise Imogen Guiney. Photograph, 1887. Photographer unknown. Published in E. M.
Tenison, Louise Imogen Guiney: Her Life and Works, 1861–1920 (London: Macmillan, 1923), frontispiece.
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.
156 The Juggler of Notre Dame and the Medievalizing of Modernity: Volume 3
Fig. 4.4 John Everett Millais, The Knight Errant, 1870. Oil on canvas, 184.1 × 135.3 cm.
London, Tate Britain. Image courtesy of Tate Britain, London. All rights reserved.
***
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.
158 The Juggler of Notre Dame and the Medievalizing of Modernity: Volume 3
Fig. 4.5 Decadence on display: reclining men smoke hookah as they are attended by a female servant. Drawing, 1893. Woodcut by John Sample, Jr., after a design by Bertram Grosvenor Goodhue. Published in Ralph Adams Cram, The Decadent: Being the Gospel of Inaction: Wherein are
Set Forth in Romance Form Certain Reflections Touching the Curious Characteristics of these Ultimate Years, and the Divers Causes Thereof (Boston: Privately issued for the author by
Copeland & Day, 1893), frontispiece.
Fig. 4.6 Kahlil Gibran, age 16. Photograph by Fred Holland Day, ca. 1898.
Washington, DC, Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.
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.
Fig. 4.7 Isabel Butler, trans., Our Lady’s Tumbler:
A Tale of Mediaeval France (Boston: Copeland
& Day, 1898), https://catalog.hathitrust.org/
Record/006003843, 1.
Fig. 4.8 M. S. Henry and Edward W. Thomson, trans. This Is of Aucassin and Nicolette: A Song-Tale
of True Lovers (Boston: Copeland & Day, 1896), https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/100249107, 1.
160 The Juggler of Notre Dame and the Medievalizing of Modernity: Volume 3