Cram: Master Builder
Maginnis, Charles D.
CRAM: MASTER BUILDER By CHARLES D. MAGINNIS PROBABLY there is no more piquant personality in American art and letters than Ralph Adams Cram. The encounter of his name in five distinct...
...Provoked by the unsatisfactory standards then prevailing in the architecture of the Episcopal Church, he expressed in caustic vein the operation of that vapid and illiterate sentimentality out of which was fashioned the Gothic art of that day...
...Cram with a peculiar and enviable satisfaction...
...It is in the resources which may come to the unfettered enterprise of the architect from the full sweep of the tradition that we must find the largest hope for developing the Gothic idea in America...
...It is doubtful if any art in Christendom has reached a lower depth than that of the Catholic Church during the last hundred years, for to its ugliness and riotous bad taste was added a quality of dullness and barbarity that was enexampled...
...The distinguished part which religion has played in the general development is reflected in the jubilant temper of these new pages...
...But the advent of Cram was in time to arrest the drift of the churches into the Rennaissance movement...
...Proceeding to a detailed consideration of the principles which should shape the various types of ecclesiastical building, beginning with the simple mission chapel and dealing successively with the interests of the village church, the town church and the cathedral, he illustrated the process with a profusion of fine historical examples...
...One of his earliest volumes, Church Building, is regrettably far less known to the general laity than to architects and church committees...
...Boston: Marshall Jones Company...
...and, so long as they endured, just so long was good art out of question...
...Forms were copied after a fashion," says Dr...
...Even the arch-realist of our mechanical order is moved to the passionate possession of an ancient wayside inn hallowed by the tender fancy of a poet...
...The Episcopalian accomplishment must have been set down by Dr...
...Therefore, the alleged 'Gothic1 was an affectation without reality or truth...
...There is a wistful looking backward always to the days when life, whether so or not, seemed to hold more satisfaction for the spirit...
...The author has this to say of it— When we turn to the record of the Roman Catholic Church during the last twenty-five years, it is less with a sense of surprise than of relief...
...Nor does he give quite so much comfort as before to the limited Catholic souls to whom the Gothic aspect is the inevitable badge of artistic respectability...
...Despite the ingratiations of other architectural styles with which he had professionally to deal, and of need sympathetically, he has kept the Gothic faith...
...With all its felicities, history reveals that certain national temperaments, of present significance to us, have found no joy in Gothic...
...The past appears to us in the flat, robbed of its ancient perspective...
...It is safe to impute to this publication a very large share in the advancement of American church architecture to its present position...
...And the Catholic reader who found so little consoling in the earlier work is thrilled by the perception that the art of his own Church has emerged from the doldrums in which for so long it seemed content to remain...
...Today the tide has changed, and it is possible to say not only that the Roman Catholic Church is returning to good art but that at the present rate, she bids fair to outstrip all others in the race for supremacy...
...It is to be feared that Gothic has become the fashion, which would be rather a pity...
...Science of late has given us a new horizon and a new consciousness...
...Science provides but limited satisfactions and romance is yet potent with the modern imagination...
...Under the influence of new materials, new methods, new habits of thought, historical aspects inevitably suffer modification and now and then vanish altogether...
...More likely is it to be if we can cease to make a fetish of the purity of periods...
...Cram, more fortunately endowed, has the gift of vindicating his enthusiasms...
...His method of instruction was ingenious...
...By the expedient of contrasting illustrations, known as the "deadly parallel," he gratified those very reasonable but occasionally embarrassing curiosities which insist on knowing what it is precisely that constitutes good architecture and what bad, and how one may indubitably know the one from the other...
...In an age like ours when art with all its technical efficiency is almost utterly without conviction, the positiveness of his thesis would be impressive enough...
...But the mediaeval scene appeals with such a peculiar and irresistible potency as astonishingly to influence our most modern and secular aspects...
...Here he set forth his artistic creed in studiously simple and concrete terms...
...It was exotic as yet, with little spark of vitality...
...Happily inspired, there issues now, twenty-five years after the first edition, a new Church Building* so expanded as to take account of the measure of this development...
...But when its terms rise to audacious question of the spiritual claims of our confident civilization, it carries an air of high challenge and prophecy...
...It is notoriously the weakness of the artistic philosopher to be merely semi-articulate...
...Several illuminating chapters were devoted to sculpture, mural decorations and stained glass, with appreciation of the debased level to which commerce had brought these important interests...
...It may well be...
...Cram, "but principles were ignored...
...The false and deadly principles that obtained in church building during the bald eighteenth century persisted obstinately...
...And is there not amusement as well in the exuberant Gothic rendering of certain of our learned institutions that cultivate a haughty detachment from its implications...
...It is this felicitous fusion of intellectual and artistic capacities which has made him so pervasive an influence in our national life and the most interesting figure in American architecture...
...Raising the Gothic standard, he flung himself with burning zeal into the battle for the Gothic cause...
...It is no illusion of Dr...
...In this revelation affinities are to be detected in the parallel national currents of mediaeval art which suggest new opportunity...
...In superb fashion he has succeeded in translating an ingratiating philosophy into a concrete and convincing beauty...
...He rarely has the faculty of creation...
...Time has wrought no obvious change in the author's philosophy...
...He is quite aware of the archeological nature of many of our Gothic enterprises and is complacent over it, perceiving that they set a starting point for the demonstration of a favorite theory that the Gothic was still a vital tradition when political perversities arrested its development in the sixteenth century and that it holds the promise of still lovelier flowering in this gracious soil...
...A generation is a long time in the dynamic life of such a society as ours and few *-Church Building, by Ralph Adams Cram...
...Cram been possibly a little too successful...
...Cram that the Gothic tradition is mysteriously to escape this process...
...The great Church of this tradition has never quite turned its back upon it, and its renewed interest in it of late is to be remarked, but there is implication almost of heterodoxy in the fierce enthusiasm with which Evangelicalism has been clothing itself of late in the architectural vestment of Catholic mediaevalism...
...Of Catholic art he perceived then no glimmer of hope of its development to that respectable estate of which he w^s later to give generous recognition...
...He would not phrase it, perhaps, in such British terms as when originally he addressed himself to those who found it an agreeableness to accept artistic affinity with the English establishment...
...November ir, 1925 THE COMMONWEAL Up till a generation ago, the Gothic element, of any critical consequence in our building, was embodied in a few examples inspired by the English revival, and the work mostly of Upjohn and Renwick...
...Naturally enough it began in England where Bentley was its architectural protagonist, with wonders like the little Church of the Holy Rood at Watford and Westminster Cathedral...
...7*50...
...The encounter of his name in five distinct articles of a recent issue of an artistic journal points variously the provocativeness of his philosophy...
...A master of crisp and epigrammatic phrase, he has been a vivid figure on the rostrum for a generation, and his prolific pen has kept an avid constituency rarely wanting a new book...
...The art of America will for long continue to be reminiscent, but it must find its own symbols ultimately...
...Nor is it to be overlooked that a certain picturesqueness in his position is derived from the romantic nature of his cause and the passion with which he promotes it...
...Now, however, I think it may safely be said that it is in the United States that the leadership is to be found, and if the present progress continues there is no limit that may be set to future accomplishment...
...There was something abnormal in the long degradation of Catholic art, for all the Christian art we have was the product of Catholicism and it was monstrous that it should have fallen so low during the nineteenth century, particularly since it had not the excuse of Protestantism, that its genius was, from the beginning, aloof from art and inimical to it...
...Has Dr...
...things in it have been more notable than that a fine art should have so developed in this country as successfully to challenge the critical sanction of Europe...
Vol. 3 • November 1925 • No. 1
