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Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres By: Henry Adams (1838-1918) |
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By Henry Adams With an introduction by Ralph Adams Cram Editor's Note From the moment when, through the courtesy of my friend Barrett
Wendell, I came first to know Mr. Henry Adams's book, Mont Saint
Michel and Chartres, I was profoundly convinced that this privately
printed, jealously guarded volume should be withdrawn from its
hiding place amongst the bibliographical treasures of collectors and
amateurs and given that wide publicity demanded alike by its
intrinsic nature and the cause it could so admirably serve. To say that the book was a revelation is inadequately to express a
fact; at once all the theology, philosophy, and mysticism, the
politics, sociology, and economics, the romance, literature, and art
of that greatest epoch of Christian civilization became fused in the
alembic of an unique insight and precipitated by the dynamic force
of a personal and distinguished style. A judgment that might well
have been biased by personal inclination received the endorsement of
many in two continents, more competent to pass judgment, better able
to speak with authority; and so fortified, I had the honour of
saying to Mr. Adams, in the autumn of 1912, that the American
Institute of Architects asked the distinguished privilege of
arranging for the publication of an edition for general sale, under
its own imprimatur. The result is the volume now made available for
public circulation. In justice to Mr. Adams, it should be said that such publication is,
in his opinion, unnecessary and uncalled for, a conclusion in which
neither the American Institute of Architects, the publishers, nor
the Editor concurs. Furthermore, the form in which the book is
presented is no affair of the author, who, in giving reluctant
consent to publication, expressly stipulated that he should have no
part or parcel in carrying out so mad a venture of faith, as he
estimated the project of giving his book to the public. In this, and for once, his judgment is at fault. Mont Saint Michel
and Chartres is one of the most distinguished contributions to
literature and one of the most valuable adjuncts to the study of
mediaevalism America thus far has produced. The rediscovery of this
great epoch of Christian civilization has had issue in many and
valuable works on its religion, its philosophy, its economics, its
politics, and its art, but in nearly every instance, whichever field
has been traversed has been considered almost as an isolated
phenomenon, with insufficient reference to the other aspects of an
era that was singularly united and at one with itself. Hugh of Saint
Victor and Saint Thomas Aquinas are fully comprehensible only in
their relationship to Saint Anselm, Saint Bernard, and the
development of Catholic dogma and life; feudalism, the crusades, the
guilds and communes weave themselves into this same religious
development and into the vicissitudes of crescent nationalities;
Dante, the cathedral builders, the painters, sculptors, and music
masters, all are closely knit into the warp and woof of philosophy,
statecraft, economics, and religious devotion; indeed, it may be
said that the Middle Ages, more than any other recorded epoch of
history, must be considered en bloc, as a period of consistent unity
as highly emphasized as was its dynamic force. It is unnecessary to say that Mr. Adams deals with the art of the
Middle Ages after this fashion: he is not of those who would
determine every element in art from its material antecedents. He
realizes very fully that its essential element, the thing that
differentiates it from the art that preceded and that which
followed, is its spiritual impulse; the manifestation may have been,
and probably was, more or less accidental, but that which makes
Chartres Cathedral and its glass, the sculptures of Rheims, the Dies
Irae, Aucassin and Nicolette, the Song of Roland, the Arthurian
Legends, great art and unique, is neither their technical mastery
nor their fidelity to the enduring laws of all great art, though
these are singular in their perfection, but rather the peculiar
spiritual impulse which informed the time, and by its intensity, its
penetrating power, and its dynamic force wrought a rounded and
complete civilization and manifested this through a thousand varied
channels... Continue reading book >>
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