Arts and Letters

Ralph Adams Cram was born in 1863 in Hampton Falls, New Hampshire. His father was a Unitarian clergyman. Mr. Cram was not a graduate of a university but during his life received more honorary degrees than most graduates. Those of you who have read his book Walled Towns may remember the picture he drew of his grandfather's farm. He describes it as completely self-sustaining: food and clothing were all produced on the land, and his grandfather's family and retainers formed a self-governing unit. This farm lacked nothing but the aesthetic qualities which Cram so vehemently fought for during his long architectural practice. In this book, he describes his conception of the walled town as an escape from the materialism of the day. As he conceived it, it was to be largely a return to the medieval life by groups of people who thought and felt alike. No machinery save that from water power was to be permitted. The guild system was to be restored in all its picturesqueness and a strong emphasis placed on the religious life, with its pomp and ceremonies. The book well expresses Cram and the cause he so eloquently advocated during a busy life. He loved beauty, and the years when the Church dominated the life of the people were to him those which produced the most perfect flower.

Unfortunately, I never knew Cram intimately, but on the occasions when we sat side by side at the long table at the Century I found him an engaging companion. He had a great zest for life; he loved good food, good wine, and, above all, good talk; in short, everything that added to the joy and beauty of life. He had a wonderful gift of words and much of his success as an architect was due to his powers of persuasion. If there was inconsistency in his beliefs, it lay in the fact that while he condemned vehemently the role of businessmen and industrialists he was not averse to accepting their contributions to achieve the results he strove for in his architecture. Cram was a John the Baptist "crying in the wilderness." He longed for those qualities which our day and generation do not supply. He wanted to turn back the hands of the clock or, at least, to make his clock keep time with the present. In his ecclesiastical architecture he was in a measure successful. One cannot enter the chapel at West Point or Princeton, done in collaboration with Goodhue, without receiving a great sensation; and his last and most ambitious work—the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, in New York—gives one the impression of great majesty. In one sense it is a "tour de force"—a grafting of a Gothic body on to a Romanesque head—but so were many of the great works of medieval architecture. He was especially proud of the Administration Building at the Rice Institute at Houston, Texas, which was an adaptation of traditional motives to present day needs.

From my talks with him and from what I have read in his published works, I feel that he was captivated by the beauty of High Church ceremonials and by the monastic life, in which he surely would have been irked if he had essayed it, for he was far too active a personality to have subjected himself to its rules and regulations.

No one can speak with more authority of Cram's career than Charles Maginnis, his fellow citizen and rival in the field of ecclesiastical architecture. Mr. Maginnis has kindly allowed me to quote a paragraph from an article he wrote for Liturgical Arts:

The cause of religious art in America lost its most brilliant advocate in the passing of Ralph Adams Cram. It was the passionate and dominating motive of his long professional career, but an interest whose fortunes were bound up with the vindication of his Gothic philosophy. He was impatient with the mere academic acknowledgment of the historical supremacy of Gothic art. Only the perversity of events had arrested the great tradition which still held a vitality which could be brought with solicitude to a new flowering. This romantic thesis effectively touched the national imagination so that Cram became to the American public the symbol of the medieval idea. To its support he brought not only an architectural translation of convincing quality but the persuasiveness of a marked literary gift. With such immense gusto did he publicize his credo that his books have been as influential as his buildings.

This, it seems to me, sums up Cram's achievements in few words. Whether what he advocated is to be a lasting trend I am not prophet enough to predict, but the monuments he has left will long bear testimony to his imagination and the sincerity of his beliefs.