Architecture and Modern Literature by David Spurr

Author:David Spurr
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The University of Michigan Press
Published: 2018-05-15T00:00:00+00:00

So ends our excursion. This chapter began with the observation of a tension between two strains in nineteenth-century responses to Gothic architecture: the aesthetic, which celebrates architectural form independent of its originally sacred function; and the ethical, in which the writer attempts to come to terms with the significance of Gothic architecture for his own time. The first two sections have sought to show how the essential conflict between aesthetic transcendence and ethical value is manifested in three key literary figures of the early and mid-nineteenth century: Goethe, Wordsworth, and Ruskin. In all three, the tension between the aesthetic and the ethical is combined, according to the temperament of the individual writer, with the more subjective discourse of personal impression, experience, perception, and memory. It is this discourse that becomes more pronounced in the writers treated in the third section, which registers the twilight of the influence of Gothic architecture as reflected in late-century literary sensibilities: James's ironies, Pater's insistent questioning, and Adams's sense of incomprehension and of the radical otherness of the medieval world that built these monuments to a kind of faith his generation can no longer experience.

What unites the several writers studied here is the sense of spiritual, cultural, and personal loss inspired by the survival of Gothic architecture; Page 140 →their works constitute, collectively, a series of negotiations with that loss that leads to a more modern accommodation of it. Adams registers that loss as definitively as it is possible to do, his sense of loss extending from personal experience to the aesthetic and historical realms. But for this loss there is something gained : “abundant recompense,” as Wordsworth writes in the “Intimations” ode, or Pater's “just equivalent.” Having complained that the Gothic gets away, it turns out that Adams has, after all, discovered a way to speak of the Gothic: it is for him the architectural embodiment of the feminine principle in its irregular, multiform, and fragmentary nature, its organic relation to the people, its disruption of hierarchical relations, its elusiveness, and its appeal to feeling, emotion, and the sense of the miraculous. In these ways Gothic architecture opposed the Romanesque tradition with its origins in the monasteries, just as women stood symbolically in opposition to the male institutions of the Church. In all of these qualities, combined with Adams's emphasis on the emotional effects of hard-cut images, we may discern the early signs of a modernist aesthetic, one that can come into being only with the conscious abandonment of romantic mythologies and the clear-eyed vision of a deserted heaven, an empty church, and a dead faith. Adams's treatment of the Gothic is a swan song, made at a time of waning literary interest in the subject; it seems to acknowledge that the great questions of what medieval religious architecture means to the nineteenth century have been played out if not fully answered, and that they now must give way to other, more urgent questions and ways of seeing.

With these questions in mind, the development

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