"Ordeal by Beauty" by Ralph Adams Cram

Ralph Adams Cram (1863-1942) is a name familiar to readers of older weird fiction primarily for his single volume of ghostly stories, Black Spirits and White (1895), published early in his career, after which he abandoned the writing of fiction for his profession as an architect, specifically of the gothic type. He still wrote, and Darkly Bright Press has just reprinted his 1921 lecture (the Phi Beta Kappa Oration at Harvard University) titled "Ordeal of Beauty"--which was published in a volume of lectures and essays, Convictions and Controversies (1935). 

Cram's lecture begins:

Staggered by the shattering of our hopes for the civilization in which we had taken such pride of ownership, and bewildered by its failure to avoid the old pitfalls of war and its apparent inability to lift itself from the chaos that followed thereon, we fall to a searching of conscience for the finding of the reason of it all, and to a scanning of history in the hope that there we may discover some assurance against its happening again. 

The sentiment expressed still reverberates today. From there Cram narrows his consideration and turns anti-modernist and spiritual:

Gothic is not a passing phase of the building art already completed and dead, it is the voicing of an eternal spirit in man, that may now and then withdraw into silence, but must reappear with power when, after long disuse, the energy emerges again. Gothic is the fully developed expression of Christianity, but it is even more the manifestation of Christianity applied to life, that is to say Christian civilization.  

One suspects Cram's contemporary, Arthur Machen, would agree with a lot of this. Today, however, some of these views seem long out of fashion.

The lecture makes for a slim book, and as with many Darkly Bright Press titles, it has a small limitation. Interested readers should act quickly. Details here.