In early 1903 Adams put the finishing touches on Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres, his idiosyncratic homage to high medievalism. A candidly subjective reckoning of the past, the book materialized from a number of its author’s private concerns and interests. Doubtful of booming America’s ability to match the cultured achievements of feudal Europe, Henry framed the Western mind in the contrasting “racial” categories of Norman mysticism and Anglo-Saxon empiricism. He further employed gendered categories when thinking architecturally about the era, interpreting Mont-Saint-Michel, the island fortress a half-mile off France’s Normandy coast near Avranches, as a “masculine” statement of the Middle Ages; looking for a “feminine” counterpoint, he adopted the Virgin, palpably residing, so he swore, in the stunning Chartres Cathedral, earthly seat of the Virgin Mary and indicative of the poetic mind in a prescientific age.1
Aside from passing as an ancient Norman narrator, Henry drew upon a host of more contemporary concerns while drafting the Chartres. Perhaps most obviously, the financial Panic of 1893 and recent scramble for colonies called the country’s republican identity into question. More broadly the long post–Civil War “incorporation of America” encapsulated decades of labor unrest, westward expansion, and urban-industrial development that cohered in a new regime of manufacturing monopolies and middle-class consumers.2 Adams, we know, remained a restless critic of this ascendant order. His resistance came largely through irony and deflection and in his satiric preference for more traditional civilizations, be they in Asia, in Hispanic America’s Latin diaspora, or in the religio-cultural setting of feudal Europe. Accordingly, his spacious conception of the Virgin exceeds by far its presumptive Franco-medieval roots.
The same might just as easily be said of Adams’s tender impression of Chartres Cathedral, which also emerged from multiple origins. As a young man Henry discovered James Russell Lowell’s poem “A Day at Chartres,” later published in the Atlantic Monthly as “The Cathedral.” While a Harvard undergraduate, he gravitated to Lowell’s opinions and preferences, describing him affectionately as “a new element in the boy’s life.” Embracing what he took to be a kindred spirit, Adams claimed in the Education that Lowell had “revolted against the yoke of coming capitalism, its money-lenders, its bank directors, and its railway magnates.”3
Several of the themes addressed by Adams in his own work on Chartres—communion with a higher power, architecture as a cultural language, and preference for an ordered civilization innocent of the erratic gyrations embedded in democratic capitalism—are anticipated in Lowell’s verse. “The Cathedral” describes the pre-Renaissance world as “so strangely beautiful,” and Lowell, as if to prod Henry into adopting his Norse mien, describes himself as “a happy Goth.” He distrusts the technical-mechanical age with its predisposition for the rational, the secular, and the controlled:
Lowell concludes that the nineteenth century lacks something vital, moral, and aesthetic. Its scientific achievements may dazzle the mind, but these can scarcely conceal the era’s evident deficit of higher insight and spiritual faith. “This is no age to get cathedrals built,” he quailed in a ringing line that finds new life in the Education: “All the steam in the world could not, like the Virgin, build Chartres.”4
Other men in Henry’s milieu almost certainly influenced his thinking on the Virgin. Brooks’s provocative Law of Civilization and Decay undoubtedly drew his brother’s attention to Chartres’s splendid stained glass:
In France the churches long were miracles; the chronicles are filled with the revelations vouchsafed the monks; and none can cross the threshold of one of these noble monuments and fail to grasp its meaning. They are the most vigorous of all expressions of fear of the unseen. The Gothic architect heeded no living potentate; he held kings in contempt, and oftener represented them thrust down into hell than seated on their thrones. With the enemy who lurked in darkness none but the saint could cope, and them he idealized. No sculpture is more terrible than the demons on the walls of Rheims, none more majestic and pathetic than that over the door of the Virgin at Paris, while no colour ever equalled the windows of Saint Denis and Chartres.5
And beyond Brooks’s romantic reflections it is further possible that Clarence King, to Henry a “natural” man unencumbered by overcivilization, suggested the Dionysian virtues of a sensual, spontaneous existence. “It was not the modern woman that interested him,” Adams wrote of King, a year after completing the first draft of the Chartres, “it was the archaic female, with instincts and without intellect. At best King had but a poor opinion of intellect, chiefly because he found it so defective an instrument, but he admitted that it was all the male had to live upon; while the female was rich in the inheritance of every animated energy back to the polyps and the crystals.”6 The separate spheres of male intellect and female instinct, as enlisted by King, are replete in the Chartres. If unoriginal to Adams, he nevertheless amplifies and extends their categorical possibilities in the interest of reducing empiricism to a decidedly lesser virtue.
The appearance of the Chartres began a new phase in Adams’s writing. Much of his previous work had borne the unmistakable imprint of the era’s self-conscious scientific training. But the Chartres is by turns literary, suggestive, and subjective—it is the work of an author unapologetically imposing his personality on his material. Unlike the orthodox History, with its political personalities and implied masculine audience, the Chartres assumes an avuncular voice gently instructing a sociable circle of interested females. In its preface Adams promises readers an imaginative journey: “The following pages, then, are written for nieces, or for those who are willing, for the time, to be nieces in wish.… The party, then, with such variations of detail as may suit its tastes, has sailed from New York, let us say, early in June for an entire summer in France.” Docking at Cherbourg, or perhaps Le Havre, the troupe will travel by rail and motorcar to Mont-Saint-Michel and there take rooms at La Mère Poulard, a hotel and restaurant founded in 1888 by Victor and Annette Poulard. Frequented by Adams as well as many notable guests over the years, including Ernest Hemingway, Yves Saint Laurent, and Leopold II, king of the Belgians, the establishment continues in operation to this day.7
The Chartres differs further from the History in its near avoidance of conventional chronology. Henry interpreted the American story as a relentless progression of markets, migrations, and popular politics. His study of the Gothic period, by contrast, is a thematic enterprise emphasizing continuity over uncertainty, craft over economy. In 1911, while preparing a revised printing of the volume, he wrote to Ward Thoron, his sometime research assistant and later nephew-in-law, acknowledging the book’s limitations: “In reprinting my volume, I am struck with its inadequacy. When I think that it leaves out the Crusades, and the whole of politics, I wonder how to make it stand up.”8
Another and perhaps more serious shortcoming of the book is its French-centric view of the Middle Ages. Aside from briefly assaying a smattering of Italian saints and making a reference to Robin Hood, Adams offers readers a geographically and thus artistically and religiously constrained Gothic era. There are no discussions of English monasteries, German cathedrals, the Old Norse sagas, or the long Iberian Reconquista (711–1492) from its Islamic rulers. One finds, rather, wonderfully descriptive reflections on sparkling high rose windows, an informative disquisition on the conceptualist ideas of Abelard, and a concise sermon cum seminar on the epic poem La Chanson de Roland. All are important to understanding medieval civilization, but they tell only a truncated tale. Feudalism’s impact is neither the story of a country nor even that of a continent; its dimensions are international, as Adams, a Goth of the heart by way of Boston, surely knew.
One might, therefore, justly criticize Henry’s stress on the putative unity of medieval civilization. The period suffered through an abundance of panics, plagues, and papal disputes, including the Great Famine (1315–17), the devastating Black Death that soon followed, and the Investiture Controversy, a church-state conflict that led to decades of civil war in Germany. His discussion of church affairs, cursorily presented as a harmonious history, concludes before the Western Schism (1378–1417) paired off multiple popes vying for parishioner loyalty. Adams erred further in presuming a kind of solid Catholic phalanx in Europe. Pockets of paganism were a vital feature of Gothic peasant civilization and influenced the early medieval church.
To be fair, however, Adams sought not to write a definitive study but rather to produce a selective interpretation of a sensibility. Accordingly, he wrote against prevailing opinion. America’s most popular treatment of feudalism was perhaps at that time Mark Twain’s satiric A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1889), which, among its many targets, poked fun at both priestcraft and divine-right kingdoms. The novel’s protagonist, Hank Morgan, a time-traveling Yankee, winds up in sixth-century England, where he manages to briefly modernize and democratize the people. Morgan is a symbol of reason (his science is greater than Merlin’s mysticism), a booster of industrialization (his loyalists wipe out the old knight class with dynamite and a few Gatling guns), and a champion of republicanism (he aims to turn England against aristocracy). But for all of his advanced ideas, Twain’s Yankee is defeated in the end. True, “slavery was dead and gone; all men were equal before the law; taxation had been equalized,” though the very peasants he wished to elevate missed their old worship, rites, and rituals. Morgan’s astute lieutenant informs him that the weight of the past works assuredly against his success: “Did you think you had educated the superstition out of those people?” Twain and Adams agree on the potency of a medieval mentality, but on little else. Twain disdains the peasants’ devotion and has little doubt that remnants of feudalism continue to (negatively) impact modern life; Adams, of course, mourns feudalism as a spent historical force. He writes wistfully of the Virgin’s cessation as a source of authority, to be replaced by the rising Puritan, the thrifty merchant, and the dynamic industrialist—in a word, by Twain’s inevitable, indestructible Yankee.9
But Henry knew that even the Yankee’s latest deity, the scientist, appealed to faith, producing reports, experiments, and data unintelligible to most people. In struggling over the arcane language of physicists and chemists, lay audiences reprised the experience of sitting through a Latin mass. “The atomic theory; the correlation and conservation of energy; the mechanical theory of the universe; the kinetic theory of gases, and Darwin’s law of Natural Selection, were examples of what a young man had to take on trust,” Adams wrote. “Neither he nor anyone else knew enough to verify them.”10 Henry’s trust ran only surface deep, however, and he doubted science’s confident promises to reveal the universe’s secrets. Like the most myopically written history, he argued, it simply posited a false sense of order and structure that ignored humanity’s long and bloody record of violence, ignorance, and upheaval. Preferring to invent his own myths, he rallied to the Virgin.
In December 1904 Adams had privately printed one hundred copies of the Chartres, what he called his book of “Miracles.” Inevitably some of the copies found their way into the hands of readers beyond Henry’s elect, many of whom pressed its author for a wider distribution. In 1912 he revised the study and authorized a second edition of five hundred, which he again quietly dispersed. The following year Ralph Adams Cram (no relation), a leading figure in Gothic revival architecture, convinced Adams to let the American Institute of Architects sponsor the sale of the manuscript by the Boston publisher Houghton Mifflin. “Ever since I first became acquainted with this book,” he wrote Henry, “I have talked about it without cessation. There are hundreds of people who want it, and who should have it.” Henry played coy—“No one wants to read the book, don’t be foolish”—before happily giving way: “Oh, very well, be it on your own head; I give you the book. You may do what you like with it.”11
The new edition of the Chartres appeared in November 1913, much to Henry’s amusement. “Here am I, telling everyone that I am quite dotty and bed-ridden,” he laughed to Gaskell, “and the papers reviewing me as a youthful beginner.”12 The book’s polite reception seemed a validation of its author’s distinctive historical outlook. Mere presidents and gold-bugs invariably came and went, but the Virgin offered something more vital to the human condition. Her maternal touch grew increasingly important to Henry as he faced in the new century the inexorable cycle of diminishing years, waning strength, and the irreplaceable loss of old friends.