Nearing sixty and increasingly interested in what statistics and the hard sciences might make of modern industry and empire, Henry could be excused for assuming the expiration of his carnal education. Widowed now for a decade and stoically reconciled to his tame cat status in the Cameron court, he thought himself perhaps beyond the point of passion, surprise, or hunger. He often performed as a kind of wizened H Street Buddhist, oblivious to the appetites and ambitions that excited the less enlightened. But in truth, he wished very much to be moved again, to be “rescued, as often before,” he wrote, “by a woman” who might calm the engines of cultural disorder and bring form to his world. Such unlikely salvation came about through an unexpected invitation in the summer of 1895 to accompany the Lodges to London and from there to Normandy, Touraine, and Paris on a journey of several sites—many of which he had seen but never before felt.1
It was Henry Cabot Lodge’s wife, Anna (“Sister Anne” to Henry), who asked Adams to spend several weeks abroad with them and their two sons, George and John. The small party toured the northern cathedral towns of France: Amiens, Rouen, Bayeux, Mont-Saint-Michel, Le Mans, and Chartres. And in these active Gothic haunts Henry suddenly discovered a medieval counterpoint to the turmoil of the modern condition.
In Normandy, a “paradise,” he called it, “of outward austerity and inward refinement,” Adams realized a world that had completely escaped his eye on earlier excursions. He had visited Amiens twice, taught an advanced course at Harvard on medieval institutions, and intellectualized the period in years of glancing study and reflection. He now realized, however, that the feudal theme constituted “a chapter [he] never opened before.” Once again Brooks seems to have stolen a march on his older brother. As Henry had massaged Law of Civilization and Decay’s twilight mood into his own work, so he appears to have emulated Brooks’s reaction to Europe’s ancient cathedral culture. Six years earlier Henry and Brooks’s mother, Abigail, died and a then forty-one-year-old Brooks, following Abigail’s deathbed concern, determined to marry. Working quickly, he asked Anna Cabot Mills Lodge to suggest a partner, preferably someone like herself, and she sensibly recommended her spinster sister, Evelyn (Daisy) Davis, whom Brooks then wed in September. A few months later the couple embarked for Normandy. There, in the vast scaffolded silences of naves, bays, and transepts, Brooks experienced an intense pleasure in his surroundings. “Everything pales before my discovery of the meaning of Gothic,” he subsequently wrote to Henry, “which was to me a revelation. My intense excitement when I first began to read Chartres, and Le Mans, and all the rest, could never be equaled again by anything.”2
Brooks communicated his infatuation with the Gothic into Law of Civilization and Decay, arguing that after the year 1300 the pace of history quickened as the development of European economies, militaries, and manufacturing became more pronounced. Henry readily absorbed Brooks’s perspective while reading the manuscript and it began to shape his own writing and historical outlook. In time and with only the slightest emendation of his brother’s calendar analysis, he too came to regard the end of high medievalism as the critical break that demarcated the premodern from the modern. “Behind the year 1400,” he later noted, “the process certainly went on, but the progress became so slight as to be hardly measurable.”3
Brooks’s influence goes only so far, however, in explaining Henry’s sudden and strong response to Normandy’s architectural treasures. Something internal, rather, a deepening of perspective and an enlargement of experiences, perhaps, prepared him for such an epiphany. Travel in Asia, the South Seas, and Latin America had introduced him to other cultures, references, and practices. Situated, so he insisted, on “the edges of life,” these civilizations lacked the progressive underpinnings and the capitalist economies of the liberal Atlantic world.4 Drilled in youth to live within Boston’s constricted emotional scope, Henry began his mature education abroad.
Rejecting the rational, Enlightenment side of the recent European past, Adams once more picked a persona that met certain psychical needs. As he had “become” Tauraatua in Tahiti, a silent Buddha in Japan, and a wishful seigniorial lord of a Cuban coffee plantation, he now identified as a Norman—or at least a Norman-of-the-heart. He reported to Hay of rediscovering “my respectable… ancestors” amid the proud cool stone structures “I helped to build, when I lived in a world I liked.” Taken particularly by Coutances, he exalted, “My soul is still built into it.” Other countries could, of course, also point to a medieval heritage, but Henry never liked any so well as he liked France, which embodied for him a valiant resistance to the commercial-mechanical complex that was the pride and joy of the Anglo-Saxon peoples. “In spite of all its drawbacks,” he wrote to one niece during this time, “France has, still, more to give one than any other country has, that I know. Outside of Paris and the manufacturing cities, life seems still quite possible. The French… do not get on my nerves as the Germans and English do.”5
Eager to set aside the industrial regime, Adams came to the great artifacts of Gothic civilization eager for a sensory experience. The word “felt” suddenly and conspicuously entered his correspondence. In a letter to Elizabeth Cameron he wrote, “Though it is the third time I have seen Amiens, I never thoroughly felt it before,” and two weeks later he informed her that Coutances’s “innate nobility and grace and infinite tenderness… can only be felt by a finished life.” To Brooks he confessed, “I have rarely felt New England at its highest ideal power as it appeared to me, beatified and glorified, in the Cathedral of Coutances.” He considered the American Puritan personality type conspicuously deficient of imagination, artistry, and religious inspiration. Banks and insurance houses, rather, held the high ground and reduced “success” to a mad scramble for material comfort. “Our ancestors have steadily declined,” he wrote in Coutances’s golden glow, “so we get Boston.”6
Detesting the eternal Anglo-Saxon gave Henry license to lament his dear Normandy’s penetration by the latest wave of invaders. He spurned the “wretched plats du jour” prepared in restaurants for the hordes of tourists, claiming that “where the American, Englishman, or German, goes, there life has no longer an interest except for market-values.” The Norman pose permitted Adams to couch his acidic observations as valid cultural criticism. As usual, his lettered reflections were pungent and provoking, though not a little boorish. His fellow Cathedral seekers constituted a “mob,” the streets throbbed with “harmless and feeble” American art students, and “odious Frenchwomen, gross, shapeless, bare-armed, eating and drinking with demonstrative satisfaction,” annoyed him. He was intrigued, however, by “ladies in bicycle costumes.”7
In correspondence Henry explained his own appearance among the tourist trade as that of a simple seeker. An incessant scholar, he had read, thought, and written of feudalism but not really appreciated it. He observed to one niece that experiencing the cathedrals “was something quite new to me, and humbled my proud spirit a good bit. I had not thought myself so ignorant or so stupid as to have remained blind to such things, being more or less within sight of them now for nearly forty years. I thought I knew Gothic.”8 The grace Adams discovered, however, did little to increase his fund of compassion, sympathy, or liberality. Instead it amplified the process of distancing him from the main trends of democratic-industrial development. Henry’s “humility,” it seems, extended only to those private Gothic preferences that drew Brooks in as well. To make his stand with the feudal past meant refusing to support the “plat du jour” world that had settled in its place; this Norman-of-the-heart sought seclusion rather than inclusion, solemnizing thirteenth-century poetry, sculpture, and stained glass as aesthetic instruments to elevate his divine alienation.
Despite finding a “felt” peace in the summer of 1895, Henry soon turned cerebral. Newly initiated in the Gothic, he collected books, music, and photographs, explored every nave in Normandy, and commenced the long process of making the things he read, saw, and admired a part of his intellectual purview. Four years later, while in Paris, he wrote Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres, an imaginative journey into the heart of the medieval mind. There is evidence that Henry regarded this project as a kind of cognitive palate-cleansing, a final throwing off of the Teutonic historical model that had so impressed him as a young scholar. Following his impressionable cathedral journey, he later wrote in the Education, “Adams drifted back to Washington with a new sense of history.”9 One might also say that he returned with yet another anti-Anglo identity—and with it this presumptive child of Norman glory wandered still a bit deeper into the archaic.