New England Gothic

Tuesday marked the birthday of the architect Ralph Adams Cram, the pride of Hampton Falls, New Hampshire, born in 1863. When we think of American college campuses, the image of gothic-style buildings, wrapped in ivy, often comes to mind. In large part, we have Cram to thank for that. An anti-modern medievalist (architecture's version of Henry Adams), horrified at the "impulse toward individualism" he detected in post-1500 Western Civilization, he helped design many of the buildings at Princeton, West Point, and Sweet Briar College. He wrote in The Gothic Quest (1907) that since 1500, history has been a record of just principles driven to excess; of liberty changing into license; of license changing into anarchy; of revolution and counter-revolution; and through it all has run the slow but determined success of the less worthy cause, until at last the old tendencies have won their goal, and life has become a riot of individualism.

In the end, Cram turned against democracy itself, becoming that oddity of oddities, an American monarchist more at home in Catholic cathedrals than the meeting house of his youth. The high gods we had revered and before whom we had made sacrifice of so much of the best we had, show thin and impotent, or vanish in the flame of disaster, he wrote in 1936. Political and social democracy, with their plausible devices and panaceas; popular sovereignty, the Protestant religion of the masses; the technological triumphs that were to emancipate labor and redeem the world; all the multiple manifestations of a free and democratic society fail of their predicted issue, and we find ourselves lapped in confusion and numb with disappointment and chagrin.

Yesterday was the birthday of the oft forgotten Quaker poet, John Greenleaf Whittier. Pick up an American literature textbook from 1920 and Whittier figures prominently; try today and Whittier is seldom there. His abolitionist politics made him an anathema to many, North and South, prior to the Civil War. But time soothes all wounds, and he became a figure of nostalgic affection for many postbellum Americans hungering after a simpler (if largely imaginary) antebellum life. Snowbound sealed his fame, and few poems read better on a cold, snowy winter's night, corgi at your feet, wine at your side (the Quaker might disapprove), sitting in front of a fire.

Shut in from all the world without,
We sat the clean-winged hearth about,
Content to let the north-wind roar
In baffled rage at pane and door,
While the red logs before us beat
The frost-line back with tropic heat;
And ever, when a louder blast
Shook beam and rafter as it passed,
The merrier up its roaring draught
The great throat of the chimney laughed;
The house-dog on his paws outspread
Laid to the fire his drowsy head,
The cat's dark silhouette on the wall
A couchant tiger's seemed to fall;
And, for the winter fireside meet,
Between the andirons' straddling feet,
The mug of cider simmered slow,
The apples sputtered in a row,
And, close at hand, the basket stood
With nuts from brown October's wood.

He died in 1892, in Hampton Falls, the town of Cram's birth.