SOURCE: “The Empty Cathedral: Lowell and Adams,” in The Markham Review, Vol. 9, Winter, 1980, pp. 29-32.

[In the following essay, Attebery views Lowell's The Cathedral as a significant transitional work thematically linked to the writings of Henry Adams and T. S. Eliot.]

James Russell Lowell dismissed himself in A Fable for Critics as a poet “who’s striving Parnassus to climb / With a whole bale of isms together with rhyme … / The top of the hill he will ne’re come nigh reaching / Till he learns the distinction ‘twixt singing and preaching.”¹ Lowell's self-criticism is accurate enough to have become the common critical view: excepting only the Fable and a few of the dialect poems, his work is passed over as amateurish, didactic, and dated. Yet one other important exception—“The Cathedral”—should be added to the list of Lowell's lasting poetic contributions. It deserves to be re-examined by the sympathetic twentieth-century reader for two reasons. First, it presents with imagination and insight many of the themes that typify twentieth-century literature. Second, it is linked historically with at least one of the great writers of the opening of the century, Henry Adams, and through him to others, notably T. S. Eliot.

Lowell's influence on late nineteenth-century American letters has been largely ignored. But, as a friend of Adams, Charles Eliot Norton, Francis James Child, and William and Henry James; as a noted editor and educator; and simply as what George Santayana called one of the “gentle lights really burning” in Boston,² Lowell was one of the major shapers of the Harvard environment from which were to emerge, around the turn of the century, Eliot, Frost, Stevens, and other founders of modern literature. The link with Adams is the clearest bridge between Lowell and the new century, and “The Cathedral,” of all his works, most demonstrably anticipates the new motifs. Showing both the anticipation and the direct succession should clarify Lowell's role as literary grandfather to a new age and to inspire a fresh reading of his most ambitious creation.

What are the typical motifs of Modern literature? To judge from the early Eliot they are the antitheses of Romantic dogma. There is an attempt to take an unromantic, “scientific” view of reality that leaves mankind “formulated, sprawling on a pin.”³ There is a sense of alienation and mistrust of the natural world that makes April “the cruelest month.”⁴ There is a feeling of loss—loss of love, of faith, of vitality—that directly counters the old belief in progress: the world is on its way to ending “not with a bang but a whimper.”⁵ There is a sense of man's, and particularly the artist's, impotence: “Our dried voices, when / We whisper together / Are quiet and meaningless / As wind in dry grass … / Paralyzed force, gesture without motion.”⁶ There is a fear of the common man, Eliot's “Sweeney,” and a questioning of the worth of democracy. There is the use of the past, not for its picturesque associations, but as a standard by which the present is measured and found wanting: this is one of the functions of the “mythic method.” There is, finally, a need to counter all these things and to find within the poet, through the medium of poetry, a personal solution to the problems that he sees. This solution may be Eliot's mystical Anglo-Catholicism, Wallace Stevens's “supreme fiction,” or Robert Frost's protective irony, but each poet must find it for himself. These are themes that pervade the literature of this century, with which all major writers must deal in one way or another. They are also the particular questions that form the substance and thought of “The Cathedral.”

“The Cathedral” was published simultaneously in the January, 1870, issue of the Atlantic and as a separate volume. Lowell made several revisions in subsequent editions of the poem, as described in Thomas Tanselle's article on “The Craftsmanship of Lowell: Revisions in The Cathedral.”⁷ The final version, as reprinted in Edwin Cady's The American Poets: 1800-1900 (Glenview, Illinois: Scott, Foresman and Company, 1966), differs from the first edition primarily in the omission of weak material caricaturing a group of English visitors to the cathedral. This uncharacteristic afterthought and this concern with technical polish are in keeping with the unusual (for Lowell) seriousness and complex ideas expressed within the poem.

Lowell's poem begins indirectly and abstractly, dealing not with his experiences at the cathedral of Chartres, or even with the memory of that experience, but with memory itself. Memory holds a glowing picture of the past, “cloudless of care, down-shod to every sense, / And simply perfect from its own resource.”⁸ The particular memories that Lowell is concerned with, the ones that “are present still,” forming “parts of myself,” concern the poet's first impressions of nature. Yet, though he has just established the importance of nature and memory, he begins, like Eliot, to undercut both. Nature, as vital to us as she is, “lets us mistake our longing for her love, / And mocks with various echoes of ourselves.” The same duplicity is found in the memories of natural things, the “first sweet frauds upon our consciousness,” which color the world ever afterward and rob later experience of its primal power: “Our own breath dims the mirror of the sense, / Looking too long and closely: at a flash / We snatch the essential grace of meaning out, / And that first passion beggars all behind … / So Memory cheats us, glimpsing half-revealed.” Because of memory, the poet says, he has known but one true spring, one summer, one autumn, one winter; “and later visions seem but copies pale / From those unfading frescoes of the past.” Two of the twentieth-century themes have already appeared: we begin to feel a sense of loss, of expulsion from the innocence of pure sensation, and connected with this loss is a growing mistrust of the natural world that promises and fails to fulfill. The opening of the poem is vague and rhetorical while it pursues the Romantic ideal of communion with memory and nature, but when doubt enters, the writing becomes more immediate and more richly metaphorical. It is precisely the doubt that vitalizes the poem and keeps it above the level of Lowell's more blithe, less interesting lyrics.

“The world's a woman to our shifting mood, / Feeling with us, or making due pretence; / To make all things our thought's confederates. …” The poem here expresses a disillusionment with nature directly counter to the common nineteenth-century view developed by Emerson. Emerson wrote confidently that “Nature never wears a mean appearance. Neither does the wisest man extort her secret, and lose his curiosity by finding out all her perfection. Nature never became a toy to wise spirit.”⁹ Yet the speaker in “The Cathedral” has discovered that nature's “secret” is merely the reflection of his own mind. She can offer him neither true sympathy nor new discoveries. All that is left to the poet is “feigned surprise”—a key concept in the poem. At this point the pronoun she shifts from Nature to the soul, and thence to the Muse, “Bringer of life, witching each sense to soul, / That sometimes almost gives me to believe / I might have been a poet. …” The rapid switching of referent is confusing but significant: the three shes are blurred because they share the same relationship to the poet. He woos all three unsuccessfully. Each promises to lift the poet above himself and then abandons him to his own meditation. Their mark is fickleness.

Here begins the main body of the poem. In an effort to win back muse, soul, or nature, he plans an experience that she will not find “a dish warmed over at the feast of life”: a trip to the cathedral of Chartres. That it will be only a “feigned surprise” is hinted from the first, when the poet, before approaching the cathedral itself, orders a dinner “with the Saxon's pious care.” There is no spontaneity in this solitary meal. The poet's character shows itself as Prufrockian, repressed and impotent, when compared with the simple Frenchmen whom he meets. They are at ease and open, “while we, each pore alert with consciousness, / Hide our best selves as we had stolen them. …” The poet ponders his character while he wanders down the equivalent of Prufrock's “streets that follow like a tedious argument / Of insidious intent”:¹⁰ these lead the poet suddenly to the looming cathedral. Its initial description is the most vivid passage thus far in the poem:

Silent and gray as forest-leaguered cliff
Left inland by the ocean's slow retreat,
That hears afar the breeze-borne rote and longs,
Remembering shocks of surf that clomb and fell,
Spume-sliding down the baffled decuman,
It rose before me, patiently remote
From the great tides of life it breasted once,
Hearing the noise of men as in a dream.

Tied in with the very strength of the cathedral is melancholy. We see that the poet's attempt at fresh experience is foredoomed: he has picked a place as bound by the lost past as himself. The extended ocean simile reminds us of Matthew Arnold's receding sea of faith at “Dover Beach” and also of “The Waste Land,” where there is “no water but only rock.”¹¹ The cathedral, like the poet, is unable to capture new experience; it can only remember. “She,” the muse or soul, cannot be won in this way, and so the feminine now disappears from the poem like the feminine sea that the cathedral once “breasted.” Yet the poet is led to a false hope by the building's “hazardous caprices … heavy as nightmare, airy-light as fern, / Imagination's very self in stone.” If this fantastic creation is Gothic, then he owns himself “a happy Goth.”

There follows a section on the vitality of the German tribes who replaced the dying Rome “of men invirile and disnatured dames / That poison sucked from the Attic bloom decayed.” Greece had fallen, and Rome after her, but red blood still flowed in the North, where such a monument could be built. The counter-argument is obvious: where are your powerful builders now? The poet realizes that he is no Goth, but the “child of an age that lectures, not creates, / Plastering our swallow-nests on the awful Past, / And twittering round the work of larger men, / As we had builded what we but deface.” Within the mighty edifice are no mighty Goths, only a few peasant women and “a sense of undefined regret, / Irreparable loss, uncertain what. …” The poet asks, “Was all this grandeur but anachronism, / A shell divorced of its informing life, / Where the priest housed him like a hermit crab … ?” Doubt once again brings forth one of the poem's stronger images.

The poet watches one of the praying women and is first scornful (“she told mechanic beads / Before some shrine of saintly womanhood, / Bribed intercessor with the far-off Judge”), then longing (“Blessed the natures shored on every side / With landmarks of hereditary thought!”), and then skeptical once again (“or was it not mere sympathy of brain? / A sweetness intellectually conceived / In simpler creeds to me impossible”). He toys with his own ideas of God and faith, desiring to believe but unable to find solace in the forms of religion, despite the cathedral's aesthetic appeal. “Let us be thankful when, as I do here, / We can read Bethel on a pile of stones, / And, seeing where God has been, trust in him.” The thought brings to his mind the contrasting present: “Fagot and stake were desperately sincere: / Our cooler martyrdoms are done in types; / And flames that shine in controversial eyes / Burn out no brains but his who kindles them. / This is no age to get cathedrals built. …” But, he asks, why does not Democracy, the ultimate in human progress, accomplish as much? Because of the “Western giant coarse” that it breeds. “What hope for those fine-nerved humanities / That made earth gracious once with gentler arts, / Now the rude hands have caught the trick of thought / And claim an equal suffrage with the brain?” The poet finds himself to be “the born disciple of an elder time,” as will Adams and Eliot after him. In the end, “I walked forth saddened; for all thought is sad, / And leaves a bitterish savor in the brain, / Tonic, it may be, not delectable. …” The carefully planned feast for the soul turns out to be a bitter medicine.

Outside the building, even the sparrows that fly about the spires, “irreverently happy,” like the earlier simple Frenchmen, are shadowed by a hawk. The poet realizes he must confront nature as she really is, “force conservative, / Indifferent to our noisy whims.” He no longer expects progress in the world, only change;

                                                                                                    No mortal ever dreams
That the scant isthmus he encamps upon
Between two oceans, one, the Stormy, passed,
And one, the Peaceful, yet to venture on,
Has been the future whereto prophets yearned
For the fulfilment of Earth's cheated hope,
Shall be that past which nerveless poets moan
As the lost opportunity of song.

Lowell ends the poem, not here with his dark discovery, but with a prayer—his attempt at a personal solution. The optimism of the prayer seems out of keeping with the conclusions reached above, yet it represents Lowell's honest and direct response. The soul reappears: she has not been lost, only “muffled from sight in formal robes of proof.” The ending is affirmative, but it attempts to hold in mind the lesson of the cathedral, that we have no logical proof of God and hope, no guarantee but the soul: “While she can only feel herself through Thee, / I fear not Thy withdrawal; more I fear, / Seeing, to know Thee not, hoodwinked with dreams / Of signs and wonders, while, unnoticed, Thou, / Walking Thy garden still, commun’st with men, / Missed in the commonplace of miracle.” Lowell comes down to his own belief, having rejected reason, tradition, nature, democracy, and progress as true signs of God or sources of meaning. Such a conclusion is closer in mood (though hardly comparable in technique) to the Four Quartets than to “Prufrock” or “The Waste Land”: it is to be read, like the Quartets, as the record of a search rather than as a moral lesson. Seen as hope rather than as homily, it provides an appropriate and valiant ending to a challenging poem.

The metaphor of the cathedral unifies the poem and establishes its several levels of meaning. It is, first, the object of a pilgrimage that fails. The poet comes seeking faith, renewal, and also, veiled in the triple “she” of soul, muse, and nature, lost love. He finds only a place where these things have been, the high water mark of the vanished flood. Second, the cathedral represents the noble past, which silently condemns the present. Lowell wrote elsewhere, “The age that produced those buildings was not barbarous. That which produces Trinity Church is, because it is an abortion, because the conception of the edifice was never clear in the mind of the builder. The Gothic style is just as fit for a church (meeting-house) as ever; the difficulty is that the Church has shrunk so as not to fill the ancient idea.”¹² And with the Church has shrunk mankind. This leads to a third meaning for the cathedral. As a creation of man it is a symbol for all art: the cathedral and “The Cathedral” are symbolically the same, and the limitations of the building imply the limitations of the poem. The poet can create a work of beauty and grandeur, but he cannot create by fiat a lasting faith. Lowell, in a letter to William Dean Howells, indicated the symbolic association, describing his poem in architectural terms: “There seems to be a bit of clean carving here and there, a solid buttress or two, and perhaps a gleam through painted glass. …”¹³ Art, memory, faith, love, progress, nature: all these are brought together in the idea of the great cathedral.

How did Lowell, the facile, cheerful poet of The Vision of Sir Launfal, come to write such a questioning poem? “The Cathedral” was written in 1869, twenty years after Sir Launfal: it is the work of a man of fifty and the product of years of experience, thought, and reading. In addition, the incident that inspired the poem, a day at Chartres, was in 1855, soon after the death of his wife Maria.¹⁴ Discussing an illness of Maria's in 1853, Lowell wrote, “Such a sorrow opens a door clear down into one's deepest nature that he had never suspected before.”¹⁵ When Maria died the door opened wider still, and Lowell's meditations at Chartres were profound enough to inspire a poem fourteen years later.

Lowell's pupil and friend, Henry Adams, also fused personal sorrow, historical skepticism, and philosophical inquiry into a work of art centered on the cathedral at Chartres. In Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres and its companion piece The Education of Henry Adams, Adams contrasts the cathedral, representing the unity of the thirteenth century, with his own life in the chaotic nineteenth century. It is not certain that Adams picked up the metaphor from Lowell: Robert Mane reports that “There is no copy of the book in Adams's library, and his letters bring no evidence that he ever read it.”¹⁶ Yet the lives of Lowell and Adams were too interconnected for Adams to have been unaware of “The Cathedral.” Lowell introduced Adams to European literature at Harvard and is the only one of Adams's professors to whom he acknowledges a debt in The Education. There Adams writes, “James Russell Lowell had brought back from Germany the only new and valuable part of its universities, the habit of allowing students to read with him privately in his study. Adams asked the privilege, and used it to read a little, and to talk a great deal.… Lowell was a new element in the boy's life.”¹⁷ Lowell represented “Concord”—“feeling, poetry or imagination”¹⁸—and Adams significantly says that he approached Concord “as he would have entered a Gothic Cathedral, for he knew that the priests regarded him as only a worm.”¹⁹

Adams left Harvard, having absorbed Lowell's method of teaching for his own future use,²⁰ and went, as had Lowell, to Germany. In Dresden Adams lived with the family Lowell had stayed with years before.²¹ When Adams returned to Harvard, the two men were colleagues in teaching and in successively editing the North American Review. In 1869 Adams wrote to an English friend listing the few things he considered worthwhile in American literature: he included Lowell's Biglow Papers and the nature descriptions of The Vision of Sir Launfal.²² In 1872, two years after the publication of “The Cathedral,” Adams sailed to Europe and was pleased to find on the same ship “my confrère, James Russell Lowell,”²³ and Lowell's latest work could have been discussed on board. When Lowell became Ambassador to England, he assumed a position once filled by Charles Francis Adams; the bond of friendship must have been strengthened by this association with Henry's father, who plays an important and admirable role in The Education. Adams seems to have looked on Lowell as his mentor long after leaving Harvard. In 1879, Lowell, in Spain, received a letter from him asking Lowell to “teach me to adore Spanish literature, for the more I read of it, the meaner my intelligence seems and the more abject becomes my dependence of English.”²⁴

A comparison of Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres and Lowell's poem supports the probability of influence. A sense of loss underlies Adams's work, an awareness that after the time of cathedrals, “the world grew cheap, as worlds must.”²⁵ The most important losses are those of love and faith. For Adams, the feminine principle is not scattered among nature, the muse, and the soul; it is gloriously figured by the Virgin of Chartres. Chartres is the palace of the Empress Mary, but “unfortunately she is gone, or comes here now so very rarely that we shall never see her. …” (144). Only her image remains, “with her three great prophets on either hand, as calm and confident in their great strength and in God's providence as they were when Saint Louis was born, but looking down from a deserted heaven, into an empty church, on a dead faith” (197).

Mont-Saint-Michel seems to represent the strength of man, Chartres the power of woman: Adams can find neither in his own century. Between the year 1200 and the present, “Unity turned itself into complexity, multiplicity, variety, and even contradiction” (381). The title of one of the chapters, “The Twelfth Century Glass,” indicates not only the colored windows, but also the role of the twelfth century's achievement as a looking-glass for the twentieth. “Our age has lost much of its ear for poetry, as it has lost its eye for color and line, and its taste for war and worship, wine and women” (29). Art is beyond us now, says Adams, nor can we expect help from the “bankruptcy of reason” (326). Equally impotent is modern democratic society: “An economic civilization troubles itself about the universe much as a hive of honey-bees troubles about the ocean, only as a region to be avoided” (350). Like Lowell, Adams takes from the cathedral no consolation, only the sense of distant beauty and once-significant emotion: “You can read out of it whatever else pleases your youth and confidence; to me, this is all” (353). Yet Adams does not end his statement here, with the end of the book. Like Lowell, he was compelled to add a prayer, the “Prayer to the Virgin of Chartres,” unpublished during his lifetime. In it he prays, like Lowell, for an understanding unclouded by reason: “Help me to know! not with my mocking art— / With you, who knew yourself unbound by laws. …”²⁶ The two prayers are codas in which the lost faith and Femininity are invoked. Adams's demonstrates the same blend of sincere appeal and self-irony as Lowell's, though it is stronger in language and more bitter, and contains a new element in the disturbing “Prayer to the Dynamo.”

Although Adams's work is a grander effort than Lowell's, at once more immediate in its detailed descriptions and more rigorously philosophical, the two clearly belong to the same tradition. The next and probably greatest heir to that tradition was T. S. Eliot. We have seen how Lowell anticipates Eliot's themes in his poem; now we can see the possibility of a chain of influence between the two. Eliot reviewed The Education of Henry Adams,²⁷ and was impressed by it enough to make it the primary source of his poem “Gerontion.”²⁸ The traits discussed at the beginning of this paper are clearly shared by all three writers: self-questioning, alienation, a sense of loss and longing, and an ultimate desire to cast away doubt and believe in the faith they saw in the past. Eliot made his pilgrimage to the past in “Little Gidding,” where he went, like Lowell and Adams, “to kneel / Where prayer has been valid.”²⁹

The weaknesses in “The Cathedral” are easy to see; though the thought is strong, the expression of it is often limited by outdated rhetoric and conventional imagery. There is a tension between the twentieth-century matter and the nineteenth-century method from which Lowell was unwilling to depart. He believed in the conventions he followed: to him they were “everlasting boundary-stones that mark the limits of a noble reserve and self-restraint, and seem to say, ‘Outside of us is Chaos—go there if you like—we knew better—it is a dreary realm where moan the ghosts of dead-born children, and where the ghost of mad old Lear is king.’”³⁰ Lowell's refusal to flirt with chaos and rage with Lear kept him from breaking into the modern mode, leaving his successors to make the leap. But now that the leap has been made, we can look back and try to bridge the gulf. “The Cathedral” is linked to both old and new. Our reading of Adams and Eliot has prepared us to find more meaning and unity in Lowell's poem than did his contemporaries. We are prepared to find artistic strength in ambiguity and hesitation, if they are justified. We can see “The Cathedral” as an important transitional work, in which the two-way pull of style and subject adds a certain paradoxical interest. Lowell casts light on the origins of Adams and Eliot, and they in turn illuminate his achievement. As Lowell noted, anticipating Eliot's “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” “men have their intellectual ancestry, and likeness of some one of them is forever unexpectedly flashing out in the features of a descendent.”³¹ The fitful gleams in Lowell's work forecast the brilliance of Adams's and Eliot's. “The Cathedral” is a flawed but living work, and its author was, in his way, a prophet.

Notes

1. James Russell Lowell, “A Fable for Critics,” The American Poets: 1800-1900, ed. Edwin H. Cady (Glenview, Illinois: Scott, Foresman and Company, 1966), p. 238.

2. George Santayana, Persons and Places: The Background of My Life (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1944), p. 49.

3. T. S. Eliot, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” Collected Poems: 1909-1962 (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc., 1963), p. 5.

4. T. S. Eliot, “The Waste Land,” Collected Poems, p. 53.

5. T. S. Eliot, “The Hollow Men,” Collected Poems, p. 82.

6. “The Hollow Men,” p. 79.

7. G. Thomas Tanselle, “The Craftsmanship of Lowell: Revisions in The Cathedral,” Bulletin of The New York Public Library, 70 (January, 1966), 50-63.

8. This and the following quotes are taken in sequence from “The Cathedral,” The American Poets: 1800-1900, pp. 253-269.

9. Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Nature,” Selected Prose and Poetry, 2nd Edition, ed. Reginald L. Cook (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1969), p. 5.

10. “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” p. 3.

11. “The Waste Land,” p. 66.

12. Edward Wagenknecht, James Russell Lowell: Portrait of a Many-Sided Man (New York: Oxford University Press, 1971), p. 60.

13. Lowell, Letters of James Russell Lowell, ed. Charles Eliot Norton (New York: Harper & Brothers Publishers, 1894), II, 35.

14. Robert LeClair, “Three American Travellers in England: James Russell Lowell, Henry Adams, Henry James,” Diss. University of Pennsylvania, 1945, p. 15.

15. Lowell, Letters, I, 204.

16. Robert Mane, Henry Adams on the Road to Chartres (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1971), p. 37.

17. Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams (1918; rpt. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1961), p. 62.

18. Ibid.

19. Ibid.

20. Ernest Samuels, The Young Henry Adams (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1948), p. 30.

21. Ibid., p. 65.

22. Henry Adams, Letters of Henry Adams: 1858-1891, ed. Worthington Chauncey Ford (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1930), pp. 167-68.

23. Ibid, p. 229.

24. Henry Adams, Henry Adams and His Friends: A Collection of His Unpublished Letters, comp. Harold Dean Cater (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1947), p. 91.

25. Henry Adams, Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1913), p. 9. Textual notes to this edition follow.

26. Henry Adams, “Prayer to the Virgin of Chartres,” The American Poets: 1800-1900, p. 494.

27. T. S. Eliot, “A Sceptical Patrician,” The Athenaeum, 23 May 1919, 361-62.

28. F. O. Matthiessen, The Achievement of T. S. Eliot (New York: Oxford University Press, 1959), p. 73.

29. T. S. Eliot, “Little Gidding,” from Four Quartets, in Collected Poems, p. 201.

30. Lowell, Letters, I, 242.

31. Herbert F. Smith, “Introduction” to Literary Criticism of James Russell Lowell (Lincoln, Nb.: University of Nebraska Press, 1969), p. xix.