Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres
By Henry Adams
With an introduction by Ralph Adams Cram
Editor's Note
From the moment when, through the courtesy of my friend BarrettWendell, I came first to know Mr. Henry Adams's book, Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres, I was profoundly convinced that this privatelyprinted, jealously guarded volume should be withdrawn from itshiding-place amongst the bibliographical treasures of collectors andamateurs and given that wide publicity demanded alike by itsintrinsic nature and the cause it could so admirably serve.
To say that the book was a revelation is inadequately to express afact; at once all the theology, philosophy, and mysticism, thepolitics, sociology, and economics, the romance, literature, and artof that greatest epoch of Christian civilization became fused in thealembic of an unique insight and precipitated by the dynamic forceof a personal and distinguished style. A judgment that might wellhave been biased by personal inclination received the endorsement ofmany in two continents, more competent to pass judgment, better ableto speak with authority; and so fortified, I had the honour ofsaying to Mr. Adams, in the autumn of 1912, that the AmericanInstitute of Architects asked the distinguished privilege ofarranging for the publication of an edition for general sale, underits own imprimatur. The result is the volume now made available forpublic circulation.
In justice to Mr. Adams, it should be said that such publication is,in his opinion, unnecessary and uncalled-for, a conclusion in whichneither the American Institute of Architects, the publishers, northe Editor concurs. Furthermore, the form in which the book ispresented is no affair of the author, who, in giving reluctantconsent to publication, expressly stipulated that he should have nopart or parcel in carrying out so mad a venture of faith,—as heestimated the project of giving his book to the public.
In this, and for once, his judgment is at fault. Mont-Saint-Micheland Chartres is one of the most distinguished contributions toliterature and one of the most valuable adjuncts to the study ofmediaevalism America thus far has produced. The rediscovery of thisgreat epoch of Christian civilization has had issue in many andvaluable works on its religion, its philosophy, its economics, itspolitics, and its art, but in nearly every instance, whichever fieldhas been traversed has been considered almost as an isolatedphenomenon, with insufficient reference to the other aspects of anera that was singularly united and at one with itself. Hugh of SaintVictor and Saint Thomas Aquinas are fully comprehensible only intheir relationship to Saint Anselm, Saint Bernard, and thedevelopment of Catholic dogma and life; feudalism, the crusades, theguilds and communes weave themselves into this same religiousdevelopment and into the vicissitudes of crescent nationalities;Dante, the cathedral builders, the painters, sculptors, and musicmasters, all are closely knit into the warp and woof of philosophy,statecraft, economics, and religious devotion;—indeed, it may besaid that the Middle Ages, more than any other recorded epoch ofhistory, must be considered en bloc, as a period of consistent unityas highly emphasized as was its dynamic force.
It is unnecessary to say that Mr. Adams deals with the art of theMiddle Ages after this fashion: he is not of those who woulddetermine every element in art from its material antecedents. Herealizes very fully that its essential element, the thing thatdifferentiates it from the art that preceded and that whichfollowed, is its spiritual impulse; the manifestation may have been,and pr