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Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres

by Henry Adams · English · Gutenberg #4584 · 842,162 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres

Author: Henry Adams


        
Release date: October 1, 2003 [eBook #4584]
                Most recently updated: January 17, 2024

Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK MONT-SAINT-MICHEL AND CHARTRES ***


Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres

By Henry Adams

With an introduction by Ralph Adams Cram



Editor's Note

From the moment when, through the courtesy of my friend Barrett
Wendell, I came first to know Mr. Henry Adams's book, Mont-Saint-
Michel and Chartres, I was profoundly convinced that this privately
printed, jealously guarded volume should be withdrawn from its
hiding-place amongst the bibliographical treasures of collectors and
amateurs and given that wide publicity demanded alike by its
intrinsic nature and the cause it could so admirably serve.

To say that the book was a revelation is inadequately to express a
fact; at once all the theology, philosophy, and mysticism, the
politics, sociology, and economics, the romance, literature, and art
of that greatest epoch of Christian civilization became fused in the
alembic of an unique insight and precipitated by the dynamic force
of a personal and distinguished style. A judgment that might well
have been biased by personal inclination received the endorsement of
many in two continents, more competent to pass judgment, better able
to speak with authority; and so fortified, I had the honour of
saying to Mr. Adams, in the autumn of 1912, that the American
Institute of Architects asked the distinguished privilege of
arranging for the publication of an edition for general sale, under
its own imprimatur. The result is the volume now made available for
public circulation.

In justice to Mr. Adams, it should be said that such publication is,
in his opinion, unnecessary and uncalled-for, a conclusion in which
neither the American Institute of Architects, the publishers, nor
the Editor concurs. Furthermore, the form in which the book is
presented is no affair of the author, who, in giving reluctant
consent to publication, expressly stipulated that he should have no
part or parcel in carrying out so mad a venture of faith,--as he
estimated the project of giving his book to the public.

In this, and for once, his judgment is at fault. Mont-Saint-Michel
and Chartres is one of the most distinguished contributions to
literature and one of the most valuable adjuncts to the study of
mediaevalism America thus far has produced. The rediscovery of this
great epoch of Christian civilization has had issue in many and
valuable works on its religion, its philosophy, its economics, its
politics, and its art, but in nearly every instance, whichever field
has been traversed has been considered almost as an isolated
phenomenon, with insufficient reference to the other aspects of an
era that was singularly united and at one with itself. Hugh of Saint
Victor and Saint Thomas Aquinas are fully comprehensible only in
their relationship to Saint Anselm, Saint Bernard, and the
development of Catholic dogma and life; feudalism, the crusades, the
guilds and communes weave themselves into this same religious
development and into the vicissitudes of crescent nationalities;
Dante, the cathedral builders, the painters, sculptors, and music
masters, all are closely knit into the warp and woof of philosophy,
statecraft, economics, and religious devotion;--indeed, it may be
said that the Middle Ages, more than any other recorded epoch of
history, must be considered en bloc, as a period of consistent unity
as highly emphasized as was its dynamic force.

It is unnecessary to say that Mr. Adams deals with the art of the
Middle Ages after this fashion: he is not of those who would
determine every element in art from its material antecedents. He
realizes very fully that its essential element, the thing that
differentiates it from the art that preceded and that which
followed, is its spiritual impulse; the manifestation may have been,
and probably was, more or less accidental, but that which makes
Chartres Cathedral and its glass, the sculptures of Rheims, the Dies
Irae, Aucassin and Nicolette, the Song of Roland, the Arthurian
Legends, great art and unique, is neither their technical mastery
nor their fidelity to the enduring laws of all great art,--though
these are singular in their perfection,--but rather the peculiar
spiritual impulse which informed the time, and by its intensity, its
penetrating power, and its dynamic force wrought a rounded and
complete civilization and manifested this through a thousand varied
channels.

Greater, perhaps, even than his grasp of the singular entirety of
mediaeval civilization, is Mr. Adams's power of merging himself in a
long dead time, of thinking and feeling with the men and women
thereof, and so breathing on the dead bones of antiquity that again
they clothe themselves with flesh and vesture, call back their
severed souls, and live again, not only to the consciousness of the
reader, but before his very eyes. And it is not a thin simulacrum he
raises by some doubtful alchemy: it is no phantasm of the past that
shines dimly before us in these magical pages; it is the very time
itself in which we are merged. We forgather with the Abbot and his
monks, and the crusaders and pilgrims in the Shrine of the
Archangel: we pay our devoirs to the fair French Queens,--Blanche of
Castile, Eleanor of Aquitaine, Mary of Champagne,--fighting their
battles for them as liege servants: we dispute with Abelard, Thomas
of Aquino, Duns the Scotsman: we take our parts in the Court of
Love, or sing the sublime and sounding praises of God with the
Canons of Saint Victor: our eyes opened at last, and after many days
we kneel before Our Lady of Pity, asking her intercession for her
lax but loyal devotees. Seven centuries dissolve and vanish away,
being as they were not, and the thirteenth century lives less for us
than we live in it and are a part of its gaiety and light-
heartedness, its youthful ardour and abounding action, its childlike
simplicity and frankness, its normal and healthy and all-embracing
devotion.

And it is well for us to have this experience. Apart from the
desirable transformation it effects in preconceived and curiously
erroneous superstitions as to one of the greatest eras in all
history, it is vastly heartening and exhilarating. If it gives new
and not always flattering standards for the judgment of contemporary
men and things, so does it establish new ideals, new goals for
attainment. To live for a day in a world that built Chartres
Cathedral, even if it makes the living in a world that creates the
"Black Country" of England or an Iron City of America less a thing
of joy and gladness than before, equally opens up the far prospect
of another thirteenth century in the times that are to come and
urges to ardent action toward its attainment.

But apart from this, the deepest value of Mont-Saint-Michel and
Chartres, its importance as a revelation of the eternal glory of
mediaeval art and the elements that brought it into being is not
lightly to be expressed. To every artist, whatever his chosen form
of expression, it must appear unique and invaluable, and to none
more than the architect, who, familiar at last with its beauties,
its power, and its teaching force, can only applaud the action of
the American Institute of Architects in making Mr. Adams an Honorary
Member, as one who has rendered distinguished services to the art,
and voice his gratitude that it has brought the book within his
reach and given it publicity before the world.

Whitehall, Sudbury, Massachusetts, June, 1913.




CONTENTS

PREFACE

   I. SAINT MICHIEL DE LA MER DEL PERIL
  II. LA CHANSON DE ROLAND
 III. THE MERVEILLE
  IV. NORMANDY AND THE ILE DE FRANCE
   V. TOWERS AND PORTALS
  VI. THE VIRGIN OF CHARTRES
 VII. ROSES AND APSES
VIII. THE TWELFTH-CENTURY GLASS
  IX. THE LEGENDARY WINDOWS
   X. THE COURT OF THE QUEEN OF HEAVEN
  XI. THE THREE QUEENS
 XII. NICOLETTE AND MARION
XIII. LES MIRACLES DE NOTRE DAME
 XIV. ABELARD
  XV. THE MYSTICS
 XVI. SAINT THOMAS AQUINAS




Preface

[December, 1904.]

Some old Elizabethan play or poem contains the lines:--

     . . . Who reads me, when I am ashes,
     Is my son in wishes . . . . . . . . .

The relationship, between reader and writer, of son and father, may
have existed in Queen Elizabeth's time, but is much too close to be
true for ours. The utmost that any writer could hope of his readers
now is that they should consent to regard themselves as nephews, and
even then he would expect only a more or less civil refusal from
most of them. Indeed, if he had reached a certain age, he would have
observed that nephews, as a social class, no longer read at all, and
that there is only one familiar instance recorded of a nephew who
read his uncle. The exception tends rather to support the rule,
since it needed a Macaulay to produce, and two volumes to record it.
Finally, the metre does not permit it. One may not say: "Who reads
me, when I am ashes, is my nephew in wishes."

The same objections do not apply to the word "niece." The change
restores the verse, and, to a very great degree, the fact. Nieces
have been known to read in early youth, and in some cases may have
read their uncles. The relationship, too, is convenient and easy,
capable of being anything or nothing, at the will of either party,
like a Mohammedan or Polynesian or American marriage. No valid
objection can be offered to this choice in the verse. Niece let it
be!

The following lines, then, are written for nieces, or for those who
are willing, for those, to be nieces in wish. For convenience of
travel in France, where hotels, in out-of-the-way places, are
sometimes wanting in space as well as luxury, the nieces shall count
as one only. As many more may come as like, but one niece is enough
for the uncle to talk to, and one niece is much more likely than two
to listen. One niece is also more likely than two to carry a kodak
and take interest in it, since she has nothing else, except her
uncle, to interest her, and instances occur when she takes interest
neither in the uncle nor in the journey. One cannot assume, even in
a niece, too emotional a nature, but one may assume a kodak.

The party, then, with such variations of detail as may suit its
tastes, has sailed from New York, let us say, early in June for an
entire summer in France. One pleasant June morning it has landed at
Cherbourg or Havre and takes the train across Normandy to Pontorson,
where, with the evening light, the tourists drive along the
chaussee, over the sands or through the tide, till they stop at
Madame Poulard's famous hotel within the Gate of the Mount.

The uncle talks:--



CHAPTER I

SAINT MICHIEL DE LA MER DEL PERIL

The Archangel loved heights. Standing on the summit of the tower
that crowned his church, wings upspread, sword uplifted, the devil
crawling beneath, and the cock, symbol of eternal vigilance, perched
on his mailed foot, Saint Michael held a place of his own in heaven
and on earth which seems, in the eleventh century, to leave hardly
room for the Virgin of the Crypt at Chartres, still less for the
Beau Christ of the thirteenth century at Amiens. The Archangel
stands for Church and State, and both militant. He is the conqueror
of Satan, the mightiest of all created spirits, the nearest to God.
His place was where the danger was greatest; therefore you find him
here. For the same reason he was, while the pagan danger lasted, the
patron saint of France. So the Normans, when they were converted to
Christianity, put themselves under his powerful protection. So he
stood for centuries on his Mount in Peril of the Sea, watching
across the tremor of the immense ocean,-immensi tremor oceani,-as
Louis XI, inspired for once to poetry, inscribed on the collar of
the Order of Saint Michael which he created. So soldiers, nobles,
and monarchs went on pilgrimage to his shrine; so the common people
followed, and still follow, like ourselves.

The church stands high on the summit of this granite rock, and on
its west front is the platform, to which the tourist ought first to
climb. From the edge of this platform, the eye plunges down, two
hundred and thirty-five feet, to the wide sands or the wider ocean,
as the tides recede or advance, under an infinite sky, over a
restless sea, which even we tourists can understand and feel without
books or guides; but when we turn from the western view, and look at
the church door, thirty or forty yards from the parapet where we
stand, one needs to be eight centuries old to know what this mass of
encrusted architecture meant to its builders, and even then one must
still learn to feel it. The man who wanders into the twelfth century
is lost, unless he can grow prematurely young.

One can do it, as one can play with children. Wordsworth, whose
practical sense equalled his intuitive genius, carefully limited us
to "a season of calm weather," which is certainly best; but granting
a fair frame of mind, one can still "have sight of that immortal
sea" which brought us hither from the twelfth century; one can even
travel thither and see the children sporting on the shore. Our sense
is partially atrophied from disuse, but it is still alive, at least
in old people, who alone, as a class, have the time to be young.

One needs only to be old enough in order to be as young as one will.
From the top of this Abbey Church one looks across the bay to
Avranches, and towards Coutances and the Cotentin,--the Constantinus
pagus,--whose shore, facing us, recalls the coast of New England.
The relation between the granite of one coast and that of the
other may be fanciful, but the relation between the people who live
on each is as hard and practical a fact as the granite itself. When
one enters the church, one notes first the four great triumphal
piers or columns, at the intersection of the nave and transepts, and
on looking into M. Corroyer's architectural study which is the chief
source of all one's acquaintance with the Mount, one learns that
these piers were constructed in 1058. Four out of five American
tourists will instantly recall the only date of mediaeval history
they ever knew, the date of the Norman Conquest. Eight years after
these piers were built, in 1066, Duke William of Normandy raised an
army of forty thousand men in these parts, and in northern France,
whom he took to England, where they mostly stayed. For a hundred and
fifty years, until 1204, Normandy and England were united; the
Norman peasant went freely to England with his lord, spiritual or
temporal; the Norman woman, a very capable person, followed her
husband or her parents; Normans held nearly all the English fiefs;
filled the English Church; crowded the English Court; created the
English law; and we know that French was still currently spoken in
England as late as 1400, or thereabouts, "After the scole of
Stratford atte bowe." The aristocratic Norman names still survive in
part, and if we look up their origin here we shall generally find
them in villages so remote and insignificant that their place can
hardly be found on any ordinary map; but the common people had no
surnames, and cannot be traced, although for every noble whose name
or blood survived in England or in Normandy, we must reckon hundreds
of peasants. Since the generation which followed William to England
in 1066, we can reckon twenty-eight or thirty from father to son,
and, if you care to figure up the sum, you will find that you had
about two hundred and fifty million arithmetical ancestors living in
the middle of the eleventh century. The whole population of England
and northern France may then have numbered five million, but if it
were fifty it would not much affect the certainty that, if you have
any English blood at all, you have also Norman. If we could go back
and live again in all our two hundred and fifty million arithmetical
ancestors of the eleventh century, we should find ourselves doing
many surprising things, but among the rest we should pretty
certainly be ploughing most of the fields of the Cotentin and
Calvados; going to mass in every parish church in Normandy;
rendering military service to every lord, spiritual or temporal, in
all this region; and helping to build the Abbey Church at Mont-
Saint-Michel. From the roof of the Cathedral of Coutances over
yonder, one may look away over the hills and woods, the farms and
fields of Normandy, and so familiar, so homelike are they, one can
almost take oath that in this, or the other, or in all, one knew
life once and has never so fully known it since.

Never so fully known it since! For we of the eleventh century, hard-
headed, close-fisted, grasping, shrewd, as we were, and as Normans
are still said to be, stood more fully in the centre of the world's
movement than our English descendants ever did. We were a part, and
a great part, of the Church, of France, and of Europe. The Leos and
Gregories of the tenth and eleventh centuries leaned on us in their
great struggle for reform. Our Duke Richard-Sans-Peur, in 966,
turned the old canons out of the Mount in order to bring here the
highest influence of the time, the Benedictine monks of Monte
Cassino. Richard II, grandfather of William the Conqueror, began
this Abbey Church in 1020, and helped Abbot Hildebert to build it.
When William the Conqueror in 1066 set out to conquer England, Pope
Alexander II stood behind him and blessed his banner. From that
moment our Norman Dukes cast the Kings of France into the shade. Our
activity was not limited to northern Europe, or even confined by
Anjou and Gascony. When we stop at Coutances, we will drive out to
Hauteville to see where Tancred came from, whose sons Robert and
Roger were conquering Naples and Sicily at the time when the Abbey
Church was building on the Mount. Normans were everywhere in 1066,
and everywhere in the lead of their age. We were a serious race. If
you want other proof of it, besides our record in war and in
politics, you have only to look at our art. Religious art is the
measure of human depth and sincerity; any triviality, any weakness,
cries aloud. If this church on the Mount is not proof enough of
Norman character, we will stop at Coutances for a wider view. Then
we will go to Caen and Bayeux. From there, it would almost be worth
our while to leap at once to Palermo. It was in the year 1131 or
thereabouts that Roger began the Cathedral at Cefalu and the Chapel
Royal at Palermo; it was about the year 1174 that his grandson
William began the Cathedral of Monreale. No art--either Greek or
Byzantine, Italian or Arab--has ever created two religious types so
beautiful, so serious, so impressive, and yet so different, as Mont-
Saint-Michel watching over its northern ocean, and Monreale, looking
down over its forests of orange and lemon, on Palermo and the
Sicilian seas.

Down nearly to the end of the twelfth century the Norman was fairly
master of the world in architecture as in arms, although the
thirteenth century belonged to France, and we must look for its
glories on the Seine and Marne and Loire; but for the present we are
in the eleventh century,--tenants of the Duke or of the Church or of
small feudal lords who take their names from the neighbourhood,--
Beaumont, Carteret, Greville, Percy, Pierpont,--who, at the Duke's
bidding, will each call out his tenants, perhaps ten men-at-arms
with their attendants, to fight in Brittany, or in the Vexin toward
Paris, or on the great campaign for the conquest of England which is
to come within ten years,--the greatest military effort that has
been made in western Europe since Charlemagne and Roland were
defeated at Roncesvalles three hundred years ago. For the moment, we
are helping to quarry granite for the Abbey Church, and to haul it
to the Mount, or load it on our boat. We never fail to make our
annual pilgrimage to the Mount on the Archangel's Day, October 16.
We expect to be called out for a new campaign which Duke William
threatens against Brittany, and we hear stories that Harold the
Saxon, the powerful Earl of Wessex in England, is a guest, or, as
some say, a prisoner or a hostage, at the Duke's Court, and will go
with us on the campaign. The year is 1058.

All this time we have been standing on the parvis, looking out over
the sea and sands which are as good eleventh-century landscape as
they ever were; or turning at times towards the church door which is
the pons seclorum, the bridge of ages, between us and our ancestors.
Now that we have made an attempt, such as it is, to get our minds
into a condition to cross the bridge without breaking down in the
effort, we enter the church and stand face to face with eleventh-
century architecture; a ground-plan which dates from 1020; a central
tower, or its piers, dating from 1058; and a church completed in
1135. France can offer few buildings of this importance equally old,
with dates so exact. Perhaps the closest parallel to Mont-Saint-
Michel is Saint-Benoit-sur-Loire, above Orleans, which seems to have
been a shrine almost as popular as the Mount, at the same time.
Chartres was also a famous shrine, but of the Virgin, and the west
porch of Chartres, which is to be our peculiar pilgrimage, was a
hundred years later than the ground-plan of Mont-Saint-Michel,
although Chartres porch is the usual starting-point of northern
French art. Queen Matilda's Abbaye-aux-Dames, now the Church of the
Trinity, at Caen, dates from 1066. Saint Sernin at Toulouse, the
porch of the Abbey Church at Moissac, Notre-Dame-du-Port at
Clermont, the Abbey Church at Vezelay, are all said to be twelfth-
century. Even San Marco at Venice was new in 1020.

Yet in 1020 Norman art was already too ambitious. Certainly nine
hundred years leave their traces on granite as well as on other
material, but the granite of Abbot Hildebert would have stood
securely enough, if the Abbot had not asked too much from it.
Perhaps he asked too much from the Archangel, for the thought of the
Archangel's superiority was clearly the inspiration of his plan. The
apex of the granite rock rose like a sugar-loaf two hundred and
forty feet (73.6 metres) above mean sea-level. Instead of cutting
the summit away to give his church a secure rock foundation, which
would have sacrificed about thirty feet of height, the Abbot took
the apex of the rock for his level, and on all sides built out
foundations of masonry to support the walls of his church. The apex
of the rock is the floor of the croisee, the intersection of nave
and transept. On this solid foundation the Abbot rested the chief
weight of the church, which was the central tower, supported by the
four great piers which still stand; but from the croisee in the
centre westward to the parapet of the platform, the Abbot filled the
whole space with masonry, and his successors built out still
farther, until some two hundred feet of stonework ends now in a
perpendicular wall of eighty feet or more. In this space are several
ranges of chambers, but the structure might perhaps have proved
strong enough to support the light Romanesque front which was usual
in the eleventh century, had not fashions in architecture changed in
the great epoch of building, a hundred and fifty years later, when
Abbot Robert de Torigny thought proper to reconstruct the west
front, and build out two towers on its flanks. The towers were no
doubt beautiful, if one may judge from the towers of Bayeux and
Coutances, but their weight broke down the vaulting beneath, and one
of them fell in 1300. In 1618 the whole facade began to give way,
and in 1776 not only the facade but also three of the seven spans of
the nave were pulled down. Of Abbot Hildebert's nave, only four
arches remain.

Still, the overmastering strength of the eleventh century is stamped
on a great scale here, not only in the four spans of the nave, and
in the transepts, but chiefly in the triumphal columns of the
croisee. No one is likely to forget what Norman architecture was,
who takes the trouble to pass once through this fragment of its
earliest bloom. The dimensions are not great, though greater than
safe construction warranted. Abbot Hildebert's whole church did not
exceed two hundred and thirty feet in length in the interior, and
the span of the triumphal arch was only about twenty-three feet, if
the books can be trusted. The nave of the Abbaye-aux-Dames appears
to have about the same width, and probably neither of them was meant
to be vaulted. The roof was of timber, and about sixty-three feet
high at its apex. Compared with the great churches of the thirteenth
century, this building is modest, but its size is not what matters
to us. Its style is the starting-point of all our future travels.
Here is your first eleventh-century church! How does it affect you?

Serious and simple to excess! is it not? Young people rarely enjoy
it. They prefer the Gothic, even as you see it here, looking at us
from the choir, through the great Norman arch. No doubt they are
right, since they are young: but men and women who have lived long
and are tired,--who want rest,--who have done with aspirations and
ambition,--whose life has been a broken arch,--feel this repose and
self-restraint as they feel nothing else. The quiet strength of
these curved lines, the solid support of these heavy columns, the
moderate proportions, even the modified lights, the absence of
display, of effort, of self-consciousness, satisfy them as no other
art does. They come back to it to rest, after a long circle of
pilgrimage,--the cradle of rest from which their ancestors started.
Even here they find the repose none too deep.

Indeed, when you look longer at it, you begin to doubt whether there
is any repose in it at all,--whether it is not the most unreposeful
thought ever put into architectural form. Perched on the extreme
point of this abrupt rock, the Church Militant with its aspirant
Archangel stands high above the world, and seems to threaten heaven
itself. The idea is the stronger and more restless because the
Church of Saint Michael is surrounded and protected by the world and
the society over which it rises, as Duke William rested on his
barons and their men. Neither the Saint nor the Duke was troubled by
doubts about his mission. Church and State, Soul and Body, God and
Man, are all one at Mont-Saint-Michel, and the business of all is to
fight, each in his own way, or to stand guard for each other.
Neither Church nor State is intellectual, or learned, or even strict
in dogma. Here we do not feel the Trinity at all; the Virgin but
little; Christ hardly more; we feel only the Archangel and the Unity
of God. We have little logic here, and simple faith, but we have
energy. We cannot do many things which are done in the centre of
civilization, at Byzantium, but we can fight, and we can build a
church. No doubt we think first of the church, and next of our
temporal lord; only in the last instance do we think of our private
affairs, and our private affairs sometimes suffer for it; but we
reckon the affairs of Church and State to be ours, too, and we carry
this idea very far. Our church on the Mount is ambitious, restless,
striving for effect; our conquest of England, with which the Duke is
infatuated, is more ambitious still; but all this is a trifle to the
outburst which is coming in the next generation; and Saint Michael
on his Mount expresses it all.

Taking architecture as an expression of energy, we can some day
compare Mont-Saint-Michel with Beauvais, and draw from the
comparison whatever moral suits our frame of mind; but you should
first note that here, in the eleventh century, the Church, however
simple-minded or unschooled, was not cheap. Its self-respect is
worth noticing, because it was short-lived in its art. Mont-Saint-
Michel, throughout, even up to the delicate and intricate stonework
of its cloisters, is built of granite. The crypts and substructures
are as well constructed as the surfaces most exposed to view. When
we get to Chartres, which is largely a twelfth-century work, you
will see that the cathedral there, too, is superbly built, of the
hardest and heaviest stone within reach, which has nowhere settled
or given way; while, beneath, you will find a crypt that rivals the
church above. The thirteenth century did not build so. The great
cathedrals after 1200 show economy, and sometimes worse. The world
grew cheap, as worlds must.

You may like it all the better for being less serious, less heroic,
less militant, and more what the French call bourgeois, just as you
may like the style of Louis XV better than that of Louis XIV,--
Madame du Barry better than Madame de Montespan,--for taste is free,
and all styles are good which amuse; but since we are now beginning
with the earliest, in order to step down gracefully to the stage,
whatever it is, where you prefer to stop, we must try to understand
a little of the kind of energy which Norman art expressed, or would
have expressed if it had thought in our modes. The only word which
describes the Norman style is the French word naif. Littre says that
naif comes from natif, as vulgar comes from vulgus, as though native
traits must be simple, and commonness must be vulgar. Both these
derivative meanings were strange to the eleventh century. Naivete
was simply natural and vulgarity was merely coarse. Norman naivete
was not different in kind from the naivete of Burgundy or Gascony or
Lombardy, but it was slightly different in expression, as you will
see when you travel south. Here at Mont-Saint-Michel we have only a
mutilated trunk of an eleventh-century church to judge by. We have
not even a facade, and shall have to stop at some Norman village--at
Thaon or Ouistreham--to find a west front which might suit the Abbey
here, but wherever we find it we shall find something a little more
serious, more military, and more practical than you will meet in
other Romanesque work, farther south. So, too, the central tower or
lantern--the most striking feature of Norman churches--has fallen
here at Mont-Saint-Michel, and we shall have to replace it from
Cerisy-la-Foret, and Lessay, and Falaise. We shall find much to say
about the value of the lantern on a Norman church, and the singular
power it expresses. We shall have still more to say of the towers
which flank the west front of Norman churches, but these are mostly
twelfth-century, and will lead us far beyond Coutances and Bayeux,
from fleche to fleche, till we come to the fleche of all fleches, at
Chartres.

We shall have a whole chapter of study, too, over the eleventh-
century apse, but here at Mont-Saint-Michel, Abbot Hildebert's choir
went the way of his nave and tower. He built out even more boldly to
the east than to the west, and although the choir stood for some
four hundred years, which is a sufficient life for most
architecture, the foundations gave way at last, and it fell in 1421,
in the midst of the English wars, and remained a ruin until 1450.
Then it was rebuilt, a monument of the last days of the Gothic, so
that now, standing at the western door, you can look down the
church, and see the two limits of mediaeval architecture married
together,--the earliest Norman and the latest French. Through the
Romanesque arches of 1058, you look into the exuberant choir of
latest Gothic, finished in 1521. Although the two structures are
some five hundred years apart, they live pleasantly together. The
Gothic died gracefully in France. The choir is charming,--far more
charming than the nave, as the beautiful woman is more charming than
the elderly man. One need not quarrel about styles of beauty, as
long as the man and woman are evidently satisfied and love and
admire each other still, with all the solidity of faith to hold them
up; but, at least, one cannot help seeing, as one looks from the
older to the younger style, that whatever the woman's sixteenth-
century charm may be, it is not the man's eleventh-century trait of
naivete;--far from it! The simple, serious, silent dignity and
energy of the eleventh century have gone. Something more complicated
stands in their place; graceful, self-conscious, rhetorical, and
beautiful as perfect rhetoric, with its clearness, light, and line,
and the wealth of tracery that verges on the florid.

The crypt of the same period, beneath, is almost finer still, and
even in seriousness stands up boldly by the side of the Romanesque;
but we have no time to run off into the sixteenth century: we have
still to learn the alphabet of art in France. One must live deep
into the eleventh century in order to understand the twelfth, and
even after passing years in the twelfth, we shall find the
thirteenth in many ways a world of its own, with a beauty not always
inherited, and sometimes not bequeathed. At the Mount we can go no
farther into the eleventh as far as concerns architecture. We shall
have to follow the Romanesque to Caen and so up the Seine to the Ile
de France, and across to the Loire and the Rhone, far to the South
where its home lay. All the other eleventh-century work has been
destroyed here or built over, except at one point, on the level of
the splendid crypt we just turned from, called the Gros Piliers,
beneath the choir.

There, according to M. Corroyer, in a corner between great
constructions of the twelfth century and the vast Merveille of the
thirteenth, the old refectory of the eleventh was left as a passage
from one group of buildings to the other. Below it is the kitchen of
Hildebert. Above, on the level of the church, was the dormitory.
These eleventh-century abbatial buildings faced north and west, and
are close to the present parvis, opposite the last arch of the nave.
The lower levels of Hildebert's plan served as supports or
buttresses to the church above, and must therefore be older than the
nave; probably older than the triumphal piers of 1058.

Hildebert planned them in 1020, and died after carrying his plans
out so far that they could be completed by Abbot Ralph de Beaumont,
who was especially selected by Duke William in 1048, "more for his
high birth than for his merits." Ralph de Beaumont died in 1060, and
was succeeded by Abbot Ranulph, an especial favourite of Duchess
Matilda, and held in high esteem by Duke William. The list of names
shows how much social importance was attributed to the place. The
Abbot's duties included that of entertainment on a great scale. The
Mount was one of the most famous shrines of northern Europe. We are
free to take for granted that all the great people of Normandy slept
at the Mount and, supposing M. Corroyer to be right, that they dined
in this room, between 1050, when the building must have been in use,
down to 1122 when the new abbatial quarters were built.

How far the monastic rules restricted social habits is a matter for
antiquaries to settle if they can, and how far those rules were
observed in the case of great secular princes; but the eleventh
century was not very strict, and the rule of the Benedictines was
always mild, until the Cistercians and Saint Bernard stiffened its
discipline toward 1120. Even then the Church showed strong leanings
toward secular poetry and popular tastes. The drama belonged to it
almost exclusively, and the Mysteries and Miracle plays which were
acted under its patronage often contained nothing of religion except
the miracle. The greatest poem of the eleventh century was the
"Chanson de Roland," and of that the Church took a sort of
possession. At Chartres we shall find Charlemagne and Roland dear to
the Virgin, and at about the same time, as far away as at Assisi in
the Perugian country, Saint Francis himself--the nearest approach
the Western world ever made to an Oriental incarnation of the divine
essence--loved the French romans, and typified himself in the
"Chanson de Roland." With Mont-Saint-Michel, the "Chanson de Roland"
is almost one. The "Chanson" is in poetry what the Mount is in
architecture. Without the "Chanson," one cannot approach the feeling
which the eleventh century built into the Archangel's church.
Probably there was never a day, certainly never a week, during
several centuries, when portions of the "Chanson" were not sung, or
recited, at the Mount, and if there was one room where it was most
at home, this one, supposing it to be the old refectory, claims to
be the place.



CHAPTER II

LA CHANSON DE ROLAND

Molz pelerins qui vunt al Munt
 Enquierent molt e grant dreit unt
 Comment l'igliese fut fundee
 Premierement et estoree.
 Cil qui lor dient de l'estoire
 Que cil demandent en memoire
 Ne l'unt pas bien ainz vunt faillant
 En plusors leus e mespernant.
 Por faire la apertement
 Entendre a cels qui escient
 N'unt de clerzie l'a tornee
 De latin tote et ordenee
 Pars veirs romieus novelement
 Molt en segrei por son convent
 Uns jovencels moine est del Munt
 Deus en son reigne part li dunt.
 Guillaume a non de Saint Paier
 Cen vei escrit en cest quaier.
 El tens Robeirt de Torignie
 Fut cil romanz fait e trove.


Most pilgrims who come to the Mount
 Enquire much and are quite right,
 How the church was founded
 At first, and established.
 Those who tell them the story
 That they ask, in memory
 Have it not well, but fall in error
 In many places, and misapprehension.
 In order to make it clearly
 Intelligible to those who have
 No knowledge of letters, it has been turned
 From the Latin, and wholly rendered
 In Romanesque verses, newly,
 Much in secret, for his convent,
 By a youth; a monk he is of the Mount.
 God in his kingdom grant him part!
 William is his name, of Saint Pair
 As is seen written in this book.
 In the time of Robert of Torigny
 Was this roman made and invented.


These verses begin the "Roman du Mont-Saint-Michel," and if the
spelling is corrected, they still read almost as easily as Voltaire;
more easily than Verlaine; and much like a nursery rhyme; but as
tourists cannot stop to clear their path, or smooth away the
pebbles, they must be lifted over the rough spots, even when
roughness is beauty. Translation is an evil, chiefly because every
one who cares for mediaeval architecture cares for mediaeval French,
and ought to care still more for mediaeval English. The language of
this "Roman" was the literary language of England. William of Saint-
Pair was a subject of Henry II, King of England and Normandy; his
verses, like those of Richard Coeur-de-Lion, are monuments of
English literature. To this day their ballad measure is better
suited to English than to French; even the words and idioms are more
English than French. Any one who attacks them boldly will find that
the "vers romieus" run along like a ballad, singing their own
meaning, and troubling themselves very little whether the meaning is
exact or not. One's translation is sure to be full of gross
blunders, but the supreme blunder is that of translating at all when
one is trying to catch not a fact but a feeling. If translate one
must, we had best begin by trying to be literal, under protest that
it matters not a straw whether we succeed. Twelfth-century art was
not precise; still less "precieuse," like Moliere's famous
seventeenth-century prudes.

The verses of the young monk, William, who came from the little
Norman village of Saint-Pair, near Granville, within sight of the
Mount, were verses not meant to be brilliant. Simple human beings
like rhyme better than prose, though both may say the same thing, as
they like a curved line better than a straight one, or a blue better
than a grey; but, apart from the sensual appetite, they chose rhyme
in creating their literature for the practical reason that they
remembered it better than prose. Men had to carry their libraries in
their heads.

These lines of William, beginning his story, are valuable because
for once they give a name and a date. Abbot Robert of Torigny ruled
at the Mount from 1154 to 1186. We have got to travel again and
again between Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres during these years, but
for the moment we must hurry to get back to William the Conqueror
and the "Chanson de Roland." William of Saint-Pair comes in here,
out of place, only on account of a pretty description he gave of the
annual pilgrimage to the Mount, which is commonly taken to be more
or less like what he saw every year on the Archangel's Day, and what
had existed ever since the Normans became Christian in 912:--

Li jorz iert clers e sanz grant vent.
 Les meschines e les vallez
 Chascuns d'els dist verz ou sonnez.
 Neis li viellart revunt chantant


De leece funt tuit semblant.
 Qui plus ne seit si chante outree
 E Dex aie u Asusee.
 Cil jugleor la u il vunt
 Tuit lor vieles traites unt
 Laiz et sonnez vunt vielant.


Li tens est beals la joie est grant.
 Cil palefrei e cil destrier
 E cil roncin e cil sommier
 Qui errouent par le chemin
 Que menouent cil pelerin
 De totes parz henissant vunt
 Por la grant joie que il unt.
 Neis par les bois chantouent tuit
 Li oiselet grant et petit.


Li buef les vaches vunt muant
 Par les forez e repaissant.
 Cors e boisines e fresteals
 E fleutes e chalemeals
 Sonnoent si que les montaignes
 En retintoent et les pleignes.
 Que esteit dont les plaiseiz
 E des forez e des larriz.
 En cels par a tel sonneiz
 Com si ce fust cers acolliz.


Entor le mont el bois follu
 Cil travetier unt tres tendu
 Rues unt fait par les chemins.
 Plentei i out de divers vins
 Pain e pastez fruit e poissons
 Oisels obleies veneisons
 De totes parz aveit a vendre
 Assez en out qui ad que tendre.


The day was clear, without much wind.
 The maidens and the varlets
 Each of them said verse or song;
 Even the old people go singing;


All have a look of joy.
 Who knows no more sings HURRAH,
 Or GOD HELP, or UP AND ON!
 The minstrels there where they go
 Have all brought their viols;
 Lays and songs playing as they go.


The weather is fine; the joy is great;
 The palfreys and the chargers,
 And the hackneys and the packhorses
 Which wander along the road
 That the pilgrims follow,
 On all sides neighing go,
 For the great joy they feel.
 Even in the woods sing all
 The little birds, big and small.


The oxen and the cows go lowing
 Through the forests as they feed.
 Horns and trumpets and shepherd's pipes
 And flutes and pipes of reed
 Sound so that the mountains
 Echo to them, and the plains.
 How was it then with the glades
 And with the forests and the pastures?
 In these there was such sound
 As though it were a stag at bay.


About the Mount, in the leafy wood,
 The workmen have tents set up;
 Streets have made along the roads.
 Plenty there was of divers wines,
 Bread and pasties, fruit and fish,
 Birds, cakes, venison,
 Everywhere there was for sale.
 Enough he had who has the means to pay.


If you are not satisfied with this translation, any scholar of
French will easily help to make a better, for we are not studying
grammar or archaeology, and would rather be inaccurate in such
matters than not, if, at that price, a freer feeling of the art
could be caught. Better still, you can turn to Chaucer, who wrote
his Canterbury Pilgrimage two hundred years afterwards:--

Whanne that April with his shoures sote
 The droughte of March hath perced to the rote...
 Than longen folk to gon on pilgrimages
 And palmeres for to seken strange strondes...
 And especially, from every shires ende
 Of Englelonde, to Canterbury they wende
 The holy blisful martyr for to seke,
 That hem hath holpen whan that they were seke.


The passion for pilgrimages was universal among our ancestors as far
back as we can trace them. For at least a thousand years it was
their chief delight, and is not yet extinct. To feel the art of
Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres we have got to become pilgrims again:
but, just now, the point of most interest is not the pilgrim so much
as the minstrel who sang to amuse him,--the jugleor or jongleur,--
who was at home in every abbey, castle or cottage, as well as at
every shrine. The jugleor became a jongleur and degenerated into the
street-juggler; the minstrel, or menestrier, became very early a
word of abuse, equivalent to blackguard; and from the beginning the
profession seems to have been socially decried, like that of a
music-hall singer or dancer in later times; but in the eleventh
century, or perhaps earlier still, the jongleur seems to have been a
poet, and to have composed the songs he sang. The immense mass of
poetry known as the "Chansons de Geste" seems to have been composed
as well as sung by the unnamed Homers of France, and of all spots in
the many provinces where the French language in its many dialects
prevailed, Mont-Saint-Michel should have been the favourite with the
jongleur, not only because the swarms of pilgrims assured him food
and an occasional small piece of silver, but also because Saint
Michael was the saint militant of all the warriors whose exploits in
war were the subject of the "Chansons de Geste." William of Saint-
Pair was a priest-poet; he was not a minstrel, and his "Roman" was
not a chanson; it was made to read, not to recite; but the "Chanson
de Roland" was a different affair.

So it was, too, with William's contemporaries and rivals or
predecessors, the monumental poets of Norman-English literature.
Wace, whose rhymed history of the Norman dukes, which he called the
"Roman de Rou," or "Rollo," is an English classic of the first rank,
was a canon of Bayeux when William of Saint-Pair was writing at
Mont-Saint-Michel. His rival Benoist, who wrote another famous
chronicle on the same subject, was also a historian, and not a
singer. In that day literature meant verse; elegance in French prose
did not yet exist; but the elegancies of poetry in the twelfth
century were as different, in kind, from the grand style of the
eleventh, as Virgil was different from Homer.

William of Saint-Pair introduces us to the pilgrimage and to the
jongleur, as they had existed at least two hundred years before his
time, and were to exist two hundred years after him. Of all our two
hundred and fifty million arithmetical ancestors who were going on
pilgrimages in the middle of the eleventh century, the two who would
probably most interest every one, after eight hundred years have
passed, would be William the Norman and Harold the Saxon. Through
William of Saint-Pair and Wace and Benoist, and the most charming
literary monument of all, the Bayeux tapestry of Queen Matilda, we
can build up the story of such a pilgrimage which shall be as
historically exact as the battle of Hastings, and as artistically
true as the Abbey Church.

According to Wace's "Roman de Rou," when Harold's father, Earl
Godwin, died, April 15, 1053, Harold wished to obtain the release of
certain hostages, a brother and a cousin, whom Godwin had given to
Edward the Confessor as security for his good behaviour, and whom
Edward had sent to Duke William for safe-keeping. Wace took the
story from other and older sources, and its accuracy is much
disputed, but the fact that Harold went to Normandy seems to be
certain, and you will see at Bayeux the picture of Harold asking
permission of King Edward to make the journey, and departing on
horseback, with his hawk and hounds and followers, to take ship at
Bosham, near Chichester and Portsmouth. The date alone is doubtful.
Common sense seems to suggest that the earliest possible date could
not be too early to explain the rash youth of the aspirant to a
throne who put himself in the power of a rival in the eleventh
century. When that rival chanced to be William the Bastard, not even
boyhood could excuse the folly; but Mr. Freeman, the chief authority
on this delicate subject, inclined to think that Harold was forty
years old when he committed his blunder, and that the year was about
1064. Between 1054 and 1064 the historian is free to choose what
year he likes, and the tourist is still freer. To save trouble for
the memory, the year 1058 will serve, since this is the date of the
triumphal arches of the Abbey Church on the Mount. Harold, in
sailing from the neighbourhood of Portsmouth, must have been bound
for Caen or Rouen, but the usual west winds drove him eastward till
he was thrown ashore on the coast of Ponthieu, between Abbeville and
Boulogne, where he fell into the hands of the Count of Ponthieu,
from whom he was rescued or ransomed by Duke William of Normandy and
taken to Rouen. According to Wace and the "Roman de Rou":--

Guillaume tint Heraut maint jour
 Si com il dut a grant enor.
 A maint riche torneiement
 Le fist aller mult noblement.
 Chevals e armes li dona
 Et en Bretaigne le mena
 Ne sai de veir treiz faiz ou quatre
 Quant as Bretons se dut combattre.


William kept Harold many a day,
 As was his due in great honour.
 To many a rich tournament
 Made him go very nobly.
 Horses and arms gave him
 And into Brittany led him
 I know not truly whether three or four times
 When he had to make war on the Bretons.


Perhaps the allusion to rich tournaments belongs to the time of Wace
rather than to that of Harold a century earlier, before the first
crusade, but certainly Harold did go with William on at least one
raid into Brittany, and the charming tapestry of Bayeux, which
tradition calls by the name of Queen Matilda, shows William's men-
at-arms crossing the sands beneath Mont-Saint-Michel, with the Latin
legend:--"Et venerunt ad Montem Michaelis. Hic Harold dux trahebat
eos de arena. Venerunt ad flumen Cononis." They came to Mont-Saint-
Michel, and Harold dragged them out of the quicksands.

They came to the river Couesnon. Harold must have got great fame by
saving life on the sands, to be remembered and recorded by the
Normans themselves after they had killed him; but this is the affair
of historians. Tourists note only that Harold and William came to
the Mount:--"Venerunt ad Montem." They would never have dared to
pass it, on such an errand, without stopping to ask the help of
Saint Michael.

If William and Harold came to the Mount, they certainly dined or
supped in the old refectory, which is where we have lain in wait for
them. Where Duke William was, his jongleur--jugleor--was not far,
and Wace knew, as every one in Normandy seemed to know, who this
favourite was,--his name, his character, and his song. To him Wace
owed one of the most famous passages in his story of the assault at
Hastings, where Duke William and his battle began their advance
against the English lines:--

Taillefer qui mult bien chantout
 Sor un cheval qui tost alout
 Devant le duc alout chantant
 De Karlemaigne e de Rollant
 E d'Oliver e des vassals
 Qui morurent en Rencevals.
 Quant il orent chevalchie tant
 Qu'as Engleis vindrent apreismant:
 "Sire," dist Taillefer, "merci!
 Io vos ai longuement servi.
 Tot mon servise me devez.
 Hui se vos plaist le me rendez.
 Por tot guerredon vos require
 E si vos veil forment preier
 Otreiez mei que io ni faille
 Le premier colp de la bataille."
 Li dus respondi: "Io l'otrei."


Taillefer who was famed for song,
 Mounted on a charger strong,
 Rode on before the Duke, and sang
 Of Roland and of Charlemagne,
 Oliver and the vassals all
 Who fell in fight at Roncesvals.
 When they had ridden till they saw
 The English battle close before:
 "Sire," said Taillefer, "a grace!
 I have served you long and well;
 All reward you owe me still;
 To-day repay me if you please.
 For all guerdon I require,
 And ask of you in formal prayer,
 Grant to me as mine of right
 The first blow struck in the fight."
 The Duke answered: "I grant."


Of course, critics doubt the story, as they very properly doubt
everything. They maintain that the "Chanson de Roland" was not as
old as the battle of Hastings, and certainly Wace gave no sufficient
proof of it. Poetry was not usually written to prove facts. Wace
wrote a hundred years after the battle of Hastings. One is not
morally required to be pedantic to the point of knowing more than
Wace knew, but the feeling of scepticism, before so serious a
monument as Mont-Saint-Michel, is annoying. The "Chanson de Roland"
ought not to be trifled with, at least by tourists in search of art.
One is shocked at the possibility of being deceived about the
starting-point of American genealogy. Taillefer and the song rest on
the same evidence that Duke William and Harold and the battle itself
rest upon, and to doubt the "Chanson" is to call the very roll of
Battle Abbey in question. The whole fabric of society totters; the
British peerage turns pale.

Wace did not invent all his facts. William of Malmesbury is supposed
to have written his prose chronicle about 1120 when many of the men
who fought at Hastings must have been alive, and William expressly
said: "Tune cantilena Rollandi inchoata ut martium viri exemplum
pugnaturos accenderet, inclamatoque dei auxilio, praelium
consertum." Starting the "Chanson de Roland" to inflame the fighting
temper of the men, battle was joined. This seems enough proof to
satisfy any sceptic, yet critics still suggest that the "cantilena
Rollandi" must have been a Norman "Chanson de Rou," or "Rollo," or
at best an earlier version of the "Chanson de Roland"; but no Norman
chanson would have inflamed the martial spirit of William's army,
which was largely French; and as for the age of the version, it is
quite immaterial for Mont-Saint-Michel; the actual version is old
enough.

Taillefer himself is more vital to the interest of the dinner in the
refectory, and his name was not mentioned by William of Malmesbury.
If the song was started by the Duke's order, it was certainly
started by the Duke's jongleur, and the name of this jongleur
happens to be known on still better authority than that of William
of Malmesbury. Guy of Amiens went to England in 1068 as almoner of
Queen Matilda, and there wrote a Latin poem on the battle of
Hastings which must have been complete within ten years after the
battle was fought, for Guy died in 1076. Taillefer, he said, led the
Duke's battle:--

Incisor-ferri mimus cognomine dictus.


"Taillefer, a jongleur known by that name." A mime was a singer, but
Taillefer was also an actor:--

Histrio cor audax nimium quem nobilitabat.


"A jongleur whom a very brave heart ennobled." The jongleur was not
noble by birth, but was ennobled by his bravery.

Hortatur Gallos verbis et territat Anglos
 Alte projiciens ludit et ense suo.


Like a drum-major with his staff, he threw his sword high in the air
and caught it, while he chanted his song to the French, and
terrified the English. The rhymed chronicle of Geoffrey Gaimer who
wrote about 1150, and that of Benoist who was Wace's rival, added
the story that Taillefer died in the melee.

The most unlikely part of the tale was, after all, not the singing
of the "Chanson," but the prayer of Taillefer to the Duke:--

"Otreiez mei que io ni faille
 Le premier colp de la bataille."


Legally translated, Taillefer asked to be ennobled, and offered to
pay for it with his life. The request of a jongleur to lead the
Duke's battle seems incredible. In early French "bataille" meant
battalion,--the column of attack. The Duke's grant: "Io l'otrei!"
seems still more fanciful. Yet Guy of Amiens distinctly confirmed
the story: "Histrio cor audax nimium quem nobilitabat"; a stage-
player--a juggler--the Duke's singer--whose bravery ennobled him.
The Duke granted him--octroya--his patent of nobility on the field.

All this preamble leads only to unite the "Chanson" with the
architecture of the Mount, by means of Duke William and his Breton
campaign of 1058. The poem and the church are akin; they go
together, and explain each other. Their common trait is their
military character, peculiar to the eleventh century. The round arch
is masculine. The "Chanson" is so masculine that, in all its four
thousand lines, the only Christian woman so much as mentioned was
Alda, the sister of Oliver and the betrothed of Roland, to whom one
stanza, exceedingly like a later insertion, was given, toward the
end. Never after the first crusade did any great poem rise to such
heroism as to sustain itself without a heroine. Even Dante attempted
no such feat.

Duke William's party, then, is to be considered as assembled at
supper in the old refectory, in the year 1058, while the triumphal
piers of the church above are rising. The Abbot, Ralph of Beaumont,
is host; Duke William sits with him on a dais; Harold is by his side
"a grant enor"; the Duke's brother, Odo, Bishop of Bayeux, with the
other chief vassals, are present; and the Duke's jongleur Taillefer
is at his elbow. The room is crowded with soldiers and monks, but
all are equally anxious to hear Taillefer sing. As soon as dinner is
over, at a nod from the Duke, Taillefer begins:--

Carles li reis nostre emperere magnes
 Set anz tuz pleins ad estet en Espaigne
 Cunquist la tere tresque en la mer altaigne
 Ni ad castel ki devant lui remaigne
 Murs ne citez ni est remes a fraindre.


Charles the king, our emperor, the great,
 Seven years complete has been in Spain,
 Conquered the land as far as the high seas,
 Nor is there castle that holds against him,
 Nor wall or city left to capture.


The "Chanson" opened with these lines, which had such a direct and
personal bearing on every one who heard them as to sound like
prophecy. Within ten years William was to stand in England where
Charlemagne stood in Spain. His mind was full of it, and of the
means to attain it; and Harold was even more absorbed than he by the
anxiety of the position. Harold had been obliged to take oath that
he would support William's claim to the English throne, but he was
still undecided, and William knew men too well to feel much
confidence in an oath. As Taillefer sang on, he reached the part of
Ganelon, the typical traitor, the invariable figure of mediaeval
society. No feudal lord was without a Ganelon. Duke William saw them
all about him.

He might have felt that Harold would play the part, but if Harold
should choose rather to be Roland, Duke William could have foretold
that his own brother, Bishop Odo, after gorging himself on the
plunder of half England, would turn into a Ganelon so dangerous as
to require a prison for life. When Taillefer reached the battle-
scenes, there was no further need of imagination to realize them.
They were scenes of yesterday and to-morrow. For that matter,
Charlemagne or his successor was still at Aix, and the Moors were
still in Spain. Archbishop Turpin of Rheims had fought with sword
and mace in Spain, while Bishop Odo of Bayeux was to marshal his men
at Hastings, like a modern general, with a staff, but both were
equally at home on the field of battle. Verse by verse, the song was
a literal mirror of the Mount. The battle of Hastings was to be
fought on the Archangel's Day. What happened to Roland at
Roncesvalles was to happen to Harold at Hastings, and Harold, as he
was dying like Roland, was to see his brother Gyrth die like Oliver.
Even Taillefer was to be a part, and a distinguished part, of his
chanson. Sooner or later, all were to die in the large and simple
way of the eleventh century. Duke William himself, twenty years
later, was to meet a violent death at Mantes in the same spirit, and
if Bishop Odo did not die in battle, he died, at least, like an
eleventh-century hero, on the first crusade. First or last, the
whole company died in fight, or in prison, or on crusade, while the
monks shrived them and prayed.

Then Taillefer certainly sang the great death-scenes. Even to this
day every French school-boy, if he knows no other poetry, knows
these verses by heart. In the eleventh century they wrung the heart
of every man-at-arms in Europe, whose school was the field of battle
and the hand-to-hand fight. No modern singer ever enjoys such power
over an audience as Taillefer exercised over these men who were
actors as well as listeners. In the melee at Roncesvalles, overborne
by innumerable Saracens, Oliver at last calls for help:--

Munjoie escriet e haltement e cler.
 Rollant apelet sun ami e sun per;
 "Sire compainz a mei kar vus justez.
 A grant dulur ermes hoi deserveret." Aoi.


"Montjoie!" he cries, loud and clear,
 Roland he calls, his friend and peer;
 "Sir Friend! ride now to help me here!
 Parted today, great pity were."


Of course the full value of the verse cannot be regained. One knows
neither how it was sung nor even how it was pronounced. The
assonances are beyond recovering; the "laisse" or leash of verses or
assonances with the concluding cry, "Aoi," has long ago vanished
from verse or song. The sense is as simple as the "Ballad of Chevy
Chase," but one must imagine the voice and acting. Doubtless
Taillefer acted each motive; when Oliver called loud and clear,
Taillefer's voice rose; when Roland spoke "doulcement et suef," the
singer must have sung gently and soft; and when the two friends,
with the singular courtesy of knighthood and dignity of soldiers,
bowed to each other in parting and turned to face their deaths,
Taillefer may have indicated the movement as he sang. The verses
gave room for great acting. Hearing Oliver's cry for help, Roland
rode up, and at sight of the desperate field, lost for a moment his
consciousness:--

As vus Rollant sur sun cheval pasmet
 E Olivier ki est a mort nafrez!
 Tant ad sainiet li oil li sunt trublet
 Ne luinz ne pres ne poet veeir si cler
 Que reconuisset nisun hume mortel.
 Sun cumpaignun cum il l'ad encuntret
 Sil fiert amunt sur l'elme a or gemmet
 Tut li detrenchet d'ici que al nasel
 Mais en la teste ne l'ad mie adeset.
 A icel colp l'ad Rollanz reguardet
 Si li demandet dulcement et suef
 "Sire cumpainz, faites le vus de gred?
 Ja est co Rollanz ki tant vus soelt amer.
 Par nule guise ne m'aviez desfiet,"
 Dist Oliviers: "Or vus oi jo parler
 Io ne vus vei. Veied vus damnedeus!
 Ferut vus ai. Kar le me pardunez!"
 Rollanz respunt: "Jo n'ai nient de mel.
 Jol vus parduins ici e devant deu."
 A icel mot l'uns al altre ad clinet.
 Par tel amur as les vus desevrez!


There Roland sits unconscious on his horse,
 And Oliver who wounded is to death,
 So much has bled, his eyes grow dark to him,
 Nor far nor near can see so clear
 As to recognize any mortal man.
 His friend, when he has encountered him,
 He strikes upon the helmet of gemmed gold,
 splits it from the crown to the nose-piece,
 But to the head he has not reached at all.
 At this blow Roland looks at him,
 Asks him gently and softly:
 "Sir Friend, do you it in earnest?
 You know 't is Roland who has so loved you.
 In no way have you sent to me defiance."
 Says Oliver: "Indeed I hear you speak,
 I do not see you. May God see and save you!
 Strike you I did. I pray you pardon me."
 Roland replies: "I have no harm at all.
 I pardon you here and before God!"
 At this word, one to the other bends himself.
 With such affection, there they separate.


No one should try to render this into English--or, indeed, into
modern French--verse, but any one who will take the trouble to catch
the metre and will remember that each verse in the "leash" ends in
the same sound,--aimer, parler, cler, mortel, damnede, mel, deu,
suef, nasel,--however the terminal syllables may be spelled, can
follow the feeling of the poetry as well as though it were Greek
hexameter. He will feel the simple force of the words and action, as
he feels Homer. It is the grand style,--the eleventh century:--

Ferut vus ai! Kar le me pardunez!


Not a syllable is lost, and always the strongest syllable is chosen.
Even the sentiment is monosyllabic and curt:--

Ja est co Rollanz ki tant vus soelt amer!


Taillefer had, in such a libretto, the means of producing dramatic
effects that the French comedy or the grand opera never approached,
and such as made Bayreuth seem thin and feeble. Duke William's
barons must have clung to his voice and action as though they were
in the very melee, striking at the helmets of gemmed gold. They had
all been there, and were to be there again. As the climax
approached, they saw the scene itself; probably they had seen it
every year, more or less, since they could swing a sword. Taillefer
chanted the death of Oliver and of Archbishop Turpin and all the
other barons of the rear guard, except Roland, who was left for dead
by the Saracens when they fled on hearing the horns of Charlemagne's
returning host. Roland came back to consciousness on feeling a
Saracen marauder tugging at his sword Durendal. With a blow of his
ivory horn--oliphant--he killed the pagan; then feeling death near,
he prepared for it. His first thought was for Durendal, his sword,
which he could not leave to infidels. In the singular triple
repetition which gives more of the same solidity and architectural
weight to the verse, he made three attempts to break the sword, with
a lament--a plaint--for each. Three times he struck with all his
force against the rock; each time the sword rebounded without
breaking. The third time--

Rollanz ferit en une pierre bise
 Plus en abat que jo ne vus sai dire.
 L'espee cruist ne fruisset ne ne briset
 Cuntre le ciel amunt est resortie.
 Quant veit li quens que ne la fraindrat mie
 Mult dulcement la plainst a sei meisme.
 "E! Durendal cum ies bele e saintisme!
 En l'oret punt asez i ad reliques.
 La dent saint Pierre e del sanc seint Basilie
 E des chevels mun seignur seint Denisie
 Del vestment i ad seinte Marie.
 Il nen est dreiz que paien te baillisent.
 De chrestiens devez estre servie.
 Ne vus ait hum ki facet cuardie!
 Mult larges terres de vus averai cunquises
 Que Carles tient ki la barbe ad flurie.
 E li emperere en est e ber e riches."


Roland strikes on a grey stone,
 More of it cuts off than I can tell you.
 The sword grinds, but shatters not nor breaks,
 Upward against the sky it rebounds.
 When the Count sees that he can never break it,
 Very gently he mourns it to himself:
 "Ah, Durendal, how fair you are and sacred!
 In your golden guard are many relics,
 The tooth of Saint Peter and blood of Saint Basil,
 And hair of my seigneur Saint-Denis,
 Of the garment too of Saint Mary.
 It is not right that pagans should own you.
 By Christians you should be served,
 Nor should man have you who does cowardice.
 Many wide lands by you I have conquered
 That Charles holds, who has the white beard,
 And emperor of them is noble and rich."


This "laisse" is even more eleventh-century than the other, but it
appealed no longer to the warriors; it spoke rather to the monks. To
the warriors, the sword itself was the religion, and the relics were
details of ornament or strength. To the priest, the list of relics
was more eloquent than the Regent diamond on the hilt and the
Kohinoor on the scabbard. Even to us it is interesting if it is
understood. Roland had gone on pilgrimage to the Holy Land. He had
stopped at Rome and won the friendship of Saint Peter, as the tooth
proved; he had passed through Constantinople and secured the help of
Saint Basil; he had reached Jerusalem and gained the affection of
the Virgin; he had come home to France and secured the support of
his "seigneur" Saint Denis; for Roland, like Hugh Capet, was a
liege-man of Saint Denis and French to the heart. France, to him,
was Saint Denis, and at most the Ile de France, but not Anjou or
even Maine. These were countries he had conquered with Durendal:--

Jo l'en cunquis e Anjou e Bretaigne
 Si l'en cunquis e Peitou e le Maine
 Jo l'en cunquis Normendie la franche
 Si l'en cunquis Provence e Equitaigne.


He had conquered these for his emperor Charlemagne with the help of
his immediate spiritual lord or seigneur Saint Denis, but the monks
knew that he could never have done these feats without the help of
Saint Peter, Saint Basil, and Saint Mary the Blessed Virgin, whose
relics, in the hilt of his sword, were worth more than any king's
ransom. To this day a tunic of the Virgin is the most precious
property of the cathedral at Chartres. Either one of Roland's relics
would have made the glory of any shrine in Europe, and every monk
knew their enormous value and power better than he knew the value of
Roland's conquests.

Yet even the religion is martial, as though it were meant for the
fighting Archangel and Odo of Bayeux. The relics serve the sword;
the sword is not in service of the relics. As the death-scene
approaches, the song becomes even more military:--

Co sent Rollanz que la mort le tresprent
 Devers la teste sur le quer li descent.
 Desuz un pin i est alez curanz
 Sur l'erbe verte si est culchiez adenz
 Desuz lui met s'espee e l'olifant
 Turnat sa teste vers la paiene gent.
 Pur co l'ad fait que il voelt veirement
 Que Carles diet et trestute sa gent
 Li gentils quens quil fut morz cunqueranz.


Then Roland feels that death is taking him;
 Down from the head upon the heart it falls.
 Beneath a pine he hastens running;
 On the green grass he throws himself down;
 Beneath him puts his sword and oliphant,
 Turns his face toward the pagan army.
 For this he does it, that he wishes greatly
 That Charles should say and all his men,
 The gentle Count has died a conqueror.


Thus far, not a thought or a word strays from the field of war. With
a childlike intensity, every syllable bends toward the single idea--

Li gentils quens quil fut morz cunqueranz.


Only then the singer allowed the Church to assert some of its
rights:-

Co sent Rollanz de sun tens ni ad plus
 Devers Espaigne gist en un pui agut
 A l'une main si ad sun piz batut.
 "Deus meie culpe vers les tues vertuz
 De mes pecchiez des granz e des menuz
 Que jo ai fait des l'ure que nez fui
 Tresqu'a cest jur que ci sui consouz."
 Sun destre guant en ad vers deu tendut
 Angle del ciel i descendent a lui. Aoi.


Then Roland feels that his last hour has come
 Facing toward Spain he lies on a steep hill,
 While with one hand he beats upon his breast:
 "Mea culpa, God! through force of thy miracles
 Pardon my sins, the great as well as small,
 That I have done from the hour I was born
 Down to this day that I have now attained."
 His right glove toward God he lifted up.
 Angels from heaven descend on him. Aoi.
 Li quens Rollanz se jut desuz un pin
 Envers Espaigne en ad turnet sun vis
 De plusurs choses a remembrer li prist
 De tantes terres cume li bers cunquist
 De dulce France des humes de sun lign
 De Carlemagne sun seignur kil nurrit
 Ne poet muer men plurt e ne suspirt
 Mais lui meisme ne voelt metre en ubli
 Claimet sa culpe si priet deu mercit.
 "Veire paterne ki unkes ne mentis
 Seint Lazarun de mort resurrexis
 E Daniel des liuns guaresis
 Guaris de mei l'anme de tuz perils
 Pur les pecchiez que en ma vie fis."


Sun destre guant a deu en puroffrit
 E de sa main seinz Gabriel lad pris
 Desur sun braz teneit le chief enclin
 Juintes ses mains est alez a sa fin.
 Deus li tramist sun angle cherubin
 E Seint Michiel de la mer del peril
 Ensemble od els Seinz Gabriels i vint
 L' anme del cunte portent en pareis.


Count Roland throws himself beneath a pine
 And toward Spain has turned his face away.
 Of many things he called the memory back,
 Of many lands that he, the brave, had conquered,
 Of gentle France, the men of his lineage,
 Of Charlemagne his lord, who nurtured him;
 He cannot help but weep and sigh for these,
 But for himself will not forget to care;
 He cries his Culpe, he prays to God for grace.
 "O God the Father who has never lied,
 Who raised up Saint Lazarus from death,
 And Daniel from the lions saved,
 Save my soul from all the perils
 For the sins that in my life I did!"


His right-hand glove to God he proffered;
 Saint Gabriel from his hand took it;
 Upon his arm he held his head inclined,
 Folding his hands he passed to his end.
 God sent to him his angel cherubim
 And Saint Michael of the Sea in Peril,
 Together with them came Saint Gabriel.
 The soul of the Count they bear to Paradise.


Our age has lost much of its ear for poetry, as it has its eye for
colour and line, and its taste for war and worship, wine and women.
Not one man in a hundred thousand could now feel what the eleventh
century felt in these verses of the "Chanson," and there is no
reason for trying to do so, but there is a certain use in trying for
once to understand not so much the feeling as the meaning. The
naivete of the poetry is that of the society. God the Father was the
feudal seigneur, who raised Lazarus--his baron or vassal--from the
grave, and freed Daniel, as an evidence of his power and loyalty; a
seigneur who never lied, or was false to his word. God the Father,
as feudal seigneur, absorbs the Trinity, and, what is more
significant, absorbs or excludes also the Virgin, who is not
mentioned in the prayer. To this seigneur, Roland in dying,
proffered (puroffrit) his right-hand gauntlet. Death was an act of
homage. God sent down his Archangel Gabriel as his representative to
accept the homage and receive the glove. To Duke William and his
barons nothing could seem more natural and correct. God was not
farther away than Charlemagne.

Correct as the law may have been, the religion even at that time
must have seemed to the monks to need professional advice. Roland's
life was not exemplary. The "Chanson" had taken pains to show that
the disaster at Roncesvalles was due to Roland's headstrong folly
and temper. In dying, Roland had not once thought of these faults,
or repented of his worldly ambitions, or mentioned the name of Alda,
his betrothed. He had clung to the memory of his wars and conquests,
his lineage, his earthly seigneur Charlemagne, and of "douce
France." He had forgotten to give so much as an allusion to Christ.
The poet regarded all these matters as the affair of the Church; all
the warrior cared for was courage, loyalty, and prowess.

The interest of these details lies not in the scholarship or the
historical truth or even the local colour, so much as in the art.
The naivete of the thought is repeated by the simplicity of the
verse. Word and thought are equally monosyllabic. Nothing ever
matched it. The words bubble like a stream in the woods:--

Co sent Rollanz de sun tens ni ad plus.


Try and put them into modern French, and see what will happen:--

Que jo ai fait des l'ure que nez fui.


The words may remain exactly the same, but the poetry will have gone
out of them. Five hundred years later, even the English critics had
so far lost their sense for military poetry that they professed to
be shocked by Milton's monosyllables:--

Whereat he inly raged, and, as they talked,
 Smote him into the midriff with a stone
 That beat out life.


Milton's language was indeed more or less archaic and Biblical; it
was a Puritan affectation; but the "Chanson" in the refectory
actually reflected, repeated, echoed, the piers and arches of the
Abbey Church just rising above. The verse is built up. The qualities
of the architecture reproduce themselves in the song: the same
directness, simplicity, absence of self-consciousness; the same
intensity of purpose; even the same material; the prayer is
granite:--

Guaris de mei l'anme de tuz perils Pur les pecchiez que en ma vie
fisi


The action of dying is felt, like the dropping of a keystone into
the vault, and if the Romanesque arches in the church, which are
within hearing, could speak, they would describe what they are doing
in the precise words of the poem:--

Desur sun braz teneit Ie chief enclin Juintes ses mains est alez a
sa fin.

Upon their shoulders have their heads inclined,
 Folded their hands, and sunken to their rest.


Many thousands of times these verses must have been sung at the
Mount and echoed in every castle and on every battle-field from the
Welsh Marches to the shores of the Dead Sea. No modern opera or play
ever approached the popularity of the "Chanson." None has ever
expressed with anything like the same completeness the society that
produced it. Chanted by every minstrel,--known by heart, from
beginning to end, by every man and woman and child, lay or
clerical,--translated into every tongue,--more intensely felt, if
possible, in Italy and Spain than in Normandy and England,--perhaps
most effective, as a work of art, when sung by the Templars in their
great castles in the Holy Land,--it is now best felt at Mont-Saint-
Michel, and from the first must have been there at home. The proof
is the line, evidently inserted for the sake of its local effect,
which invoked Saint Michael in Peril of the Sea at the climax of
Roland's death, and one needs no original documents or contemporary
authorities to prove that, when Taillefer came to this invocation,
not only Duke William and his barons, but still more Abbot Ranulf
and his monks, broke into a frenzy of sympathy which expressed the
masculine and military passions of the Archangel better than it
accorded with the rules of Saint Benedict.



CHAPTER III

THE MERVEILLE

The nineteenth century moved fast and furious, so that one who moved
in it felt sometimes giddy, watching it spin; but the eleventh moved
faster and more furiously still. The Norman conquest of England was
an immense effort, and its consequences were far-reaching, but the
first crusade was altogether the most interesting event in European
history. Never has the Western world shown anything like the energy
and unity with which she then flung herself on the East, and for the
moment made the East recoil. Barring her family quarrels, Europe was
a unity then, in thought, will, and object. Christianity was the
unit. Mont-Saint-Michel and Byzantium were near each other. The
Emperor Constantine and the Emperor Charlemagne were figured as
allies and friends in the popular legend. The East was the common
enemy, always superior in wealth and numbers, frequently in energy,
and sometimes in thought and art. The outburst of the first crusade
was splendid even in a military sense, but it was great beyond
comparison in its reflection in architecture, ornament, poetry,
colour, religion, and philosophy. Its men were astonishing, and its
women were worth all the rest.

Mont-Saint-Michel, better than any other spot in the world, keeps
the architectural record of that ferment, much as the Sicilian
temples keep the record of the similar outburst of Greek energy,
art, poetry, and thought, fifteen hundred years before. Of the
eleventh century, it is true, nothing but the church remains at the
Mount, and, if studied further, the century has got to be sought
elsewhere, which is not difficult, since it is preserved in any
number of churches in every path of tourist travel. Normandy is full
of it; Bayeux and Caen contain little else. At the Mount, the
eleventh-century work was antiquated before it was finished. In the
year 1112, Abbot Roger II was obliged to plan and construct a new
group in such haste that it is said to have been finished in 1122.
It extends from what we have supposed to be the old refectory to the
parvis, and abuts on the three lost spans of the church, covering
about one hundred and twenty feet. As usual there were three levels;
a crypt or gallery beneath, known as the Aquilon; a cloister or
promenoir above; and on the level of the church a dormitory, now
lost. The group is one of the most interesting in France, another
pons seclorum, an antechamber to the west portal of Chartres, which
bears the same date (i 110-25). It is the famous period of
Transition, the glory of the twelfth century, the object of our
pilgrimage.

Art is a fairly large field where no one need jostle his neighbour,
and no one need shut himself up in a corner; but, if one insists on
taking a corner of preference, one might offer some excuse for
choosing the Gothic Transition. The quiet, restrained strength of
the Romanesque married to the graceful curves and vaulting
imagination of the Gothic makes a union nearer the ideal than is
often allowed in marriage. The French, in their best days, loved it
with a constancy that has thrown a sort of aureole over their
fickleness since. They never tired of its possibilities. Sometimes
they put the pointed arch within the round, or above it; sometimes
they put the round within the pointed. Sometimes a Roman arch
covered a cluster of pointed windows, as though protecting and
caressing its children; sometimes a huge pointed arch covered a
great rose-window spreading across the whole front of an enormous
cathedral, with an arcade of Romanesque windows beneath. The French
architects felt no discord, and there was none. Even the pure Gothic
was put side by side with the pure Roman. You will see no later
Gothic than the choir of the Abbey Church above (1450-1521), unless
it is the north fleche of Chartres Cathedral (1507-13); and if you
will look down the nave, through the triumphal arches, into the
pointed choir four hundred years more modern, you can judge whether
there is any real discord. For those who feel the art, there is
none; the strength and the grace join hands; the man and woman love
each other still.

The difference of sex is not imaginary. In 1058, when the triumphal
columns were building, and Taillefer sang to William the Bastard and
Harold the Saxon, Roland still prayed his "mea culpa" to God the
Father and gave not a thought to Alda his betrothed. In the twelfth
century Saint Bernard recited "Ave Stella Marts" in an ecstasy of
miracle before the image of the Virgin, and the armies of France in
battle cried, "Notre-Dame-Saint-Denis-Montjoie." What the Roman
could not express flowered into the Gothic; what the masculine mind
could not idealize in the warrior, it idealized in the woman; no
architecture that ever grew on earth, except the Gothic, gave this
effect of flinging its passion against the sky.

When men no longer felt the passion, they fell back on themselves,
or lower. The architect returned to the round arch, and even further
to the flatness of the Greek colonnade; but this was not the fault
of the twelfth or thirteenth centuries. What they had to say they
said; what they felt they expressed; and if the seventeenth century
forgot it, the twentieth in turn has forgotten the seventeenth.
History is only a catalogue of the forgotten. The eleventh century
is no worse off than its neighbours. The twelfth is, in
architecture, rather better off than the nineteenth. These two
rooms, the Aquilon and promenoir, which mark the beginning of the
Transition, are, on the whole, more modern than Saint-Sulpice, or Il
Gesu at Rome. In the same situation, for the same purposes, any
architect would be proud to repeat them to-day.

The Aquilon, though a hall or gallery of importance in its day,
seems to be classed among crypts. M. Camille Enlart, in his "Manual
of French Archaeology" (p. 252) gives a list of Romanesque and
Transition crypts, about one hundred and twenty, to serve as
examples for the study. The Aquilon is not one of them, but the
crypt of Saint-Denis and that of Chartres Cathedral would serve to
teach any over-curious tourist all that he should want to know about
such matters.

Photographs such as those of the Monuments Historiques answer all
the just purposes of underground travel. The Aquilon is one's first
lesson in Transition architecture because it is dated (1112); and
the crypt of Saint-Denis serves almost equally well because the Abbe
Suger must have begun his plans for it about 1122. Both have the
same arcs doubleaux and arcs-formerets, though in opposite
arrangement. Both show the first heavy hint at the broken arch.
There are no nervures--no rib-vaulting,--and hardly a suggestion of
the Gothic as one sees it in the splendid crypt of the Gros Fillers
close at hand, except the elaborately intersecting vaults and the
heavy columns; but the promenoir above is an astonishing leap in
time and art. The promenoir has the same arrangement and columns as
the Aquilon, but the vaults are beautifully arched and pointed, with
ribs rising directly from the square capitals and intersecting the
central spacings, in a spirit which neither you nor I know how to
distinguish from the pure Gothic of the thirteenth century, unless
it is that the arches are hardly pointed enough; they seem to the
eye almost round. The height appears to be about fourteen feet.

The promenoir of Abbot Roger II has an interest to pilgrims who are
going on to the shrine of the Virgin, because the date of the
promenoir seems to be exactly the same as the date which the Abbe
Bulteau assigns for the western portal of Chartres. Ordinarily a
date is no great matter, but when one has to run forward and back,
with the agility of an electric tram, between two or three fixed
points, it is convenient to fix them once for all. The Transition is
complete here in the promenoir, which was planned as early as 1115.
The subject of vaulting is far too ambitious for summer travel; it
is none too easy for a graduate of the Beaux Arts; and few
architectural fields have been so earnestly discussed and disputed.
We must not touch it. The age of the "Chanson de Roland" itself is
not so dangerous a topic. Our vital needs are met, more or less
sufficiently, by taking the promenoir at the Mount, the crypt at
Saint-Denis, and the western portal at Chartres, as the trinity of
our Transition, and roughly calling their date the years 1115-20, To
overload the memory with dates is the vice of every schoolmaster and
the passion of every second-rate scholar. Tourists want as few dates
as possible; what they want is poetry. Yet a singular coincidence,
with which every classroom is only too familiar, has made of the
years--15 a curiously convenient group, and the year 1115 is as
convenient as any for the beginning of the century of Transition.
That was the year when Saint Bernard laid the foundations of his
Abbey of Clairvaux. Perhaps 1115, or at latest 1117, was the year
when Abelard sang love-songs to Heloise in Canon Fulbert's house in
the Rue des Chantres, beside the cloister of Notre Dame in Paris.
The Abbe Suger, the Abbe Bernard, and the Abbe Abelard are the three
interesting men of the French Transition.

The promenoir, then, shall pass for the year 1115, and, as such, is
an exceedingly beautiful hall, uniting the splendid calm and
seriousness of the Romanesque with the exquisite lines of the
Gothic. You will hardly see its equal in the twelfth century. At
Angers the great hall of the Bishop's Palace survives to give a
point of comparison, but commonly the halls of that date were not
vaulted; they had timber roofs, and have perished. The promenoir is
about sixty feet long, and divided into two aisles, ten feet wide,
by a row of columns. If it were used on great occasions as a
refectory, eighty or a hundred persons could have been seated at
table, and perhaps this may have been about the scale of the Abbey's
needs, at that time. Whatever effort of fancy was needed to place
Duke William and Harold in the old refectory of 1058, none whatever
is required in order to see his successors in the halls of Roger II.
With one exception they were not interesting persons. The exception
was Henry II of England and Anjou, and his wife Eleanor of Guienne,
who was for a while Regent of Normandy. One of their children was
born at Domfront, just beyond Avranches, and the Abbot was asked to
be godfather. In 1158, just one hundred years after Duke William's
visit, King Henry and his whole suite came to the Abbey, heard mass,
and dined in the refectory. "Rex venit ad Montem Sancti Michaelis,
audita missa ad magis altare, comedit in Refec-torio cum baronibus
suis." Abbot Robert of Torigny was his host, and very possibly
William of Saint-Pair looked on. Perhaps he recited parts of his
"Roman" before the King. One may be quite sure that when Queen
Eleanor came to the Mount she asked the poet to recite his verses,
for Eleanor gave law to poets.

One might linger over Abbot Robert of Torigny, who was a very great
man in his day, and an especially great architect, but too
ambitious. All his work, including the two towers, crumbled and fell
for want of proper support. What would correspond to the cathedrals
of Noyon and Soissons and the old clocher and fleche of Chartres is
lost. We have no choice but to step down into the next century at
once, and into the full and perfect Gothic of the great age when the
new Chartres was building.

In the year 1203, Philip Augustus expelled the English from Normandy
and conquered the province; but, in the course of the war the Duke
of Brittany, who was naturally a party to any war that took place
under his eyes, happened to burn the town beneath the Abbey, and in
doing so, set fire unintentionally to the Abbey itself. The
sacrilege shocked Philip Augustus, and the wish to conciliate so
powerful a vassal as Saint Michel, or his abbot, led the King of
France to give a large sum of money for repairing the buildings. The
Abbot Jordan (1191-1212) at once undertook to outdo all his
predecessors, and, with an immense ambition, planned the huge pile
which covers the whole north face of the Mount, and which has always
borne the expressive name of the Merveille.

The general motive of abbatial building was common to them all.
Abbeys were large households. The church was the centre, and at
Mont-Saint-Michel the summit, for the situation compelled the abbots
there to pile one building on another instead of arranging them on a
level in squares or parallelograms. The dormitory in any case had to
be near a door of the church, because the Rule required constant
services, day and night. The cloister was also hard-by the church
door, and, at the Mount, had to be on the same level in order to be
in open air. Naturally the refectory must be immediately beneath one
or the other of these two principal structures, and the hall, or
place of meeting for business with the outside world, or for
internal administration, or for guests of importance, must be next
the refectory. The kitchen and offices would be placed on the lowest
stage, if for no other reason, because the magazines were two
hundred feet below at the landing-place, and all supplies, including
water, had to be hauled up an inclined plane by windlass. To
administer such a society required the most efficient management. An
abbot on this scale was a very great man, indeed, who enjoyed an
establishment of his own, close by, with officers in no small
number; for the monks alone numbered sixty, and even these were not
enough for the regular church services at seasons of pilgrimage. The
Abbot was obliged to entertain scores and hundreds of guests, and
these, too, of the highest importance, with large suites. Every
ounce of food must be brought from the mainland, or fished from the
sea. All the tenants and their farms, their rents and contributions,
must be looked after. No secular prince had a more serious task of
administration, and none did it so well. Tenants always preferred an
abbot or bishop for landlord. The Abbey was the highest
administrative creation of the Middle Ages, and when one has made
one's pilgrimage to Chartres, one might well devote another summer
to visiting what is left of Clairvaux, Citeaux, Cluny, and the other
famous monasteries, with Viollet-le-Duc to guide, in order to
satisfy one's mind whether, on the whole, such a life may not have
had activity as well as idleness.

This is a matter of economics, to be settled with the keepers of
more modern hotels, but the art had to suit the conditions, and when
Abbot Jordan decided to plaster this huge structure against the side
of the Mount, the architect had a relatively simple task to handle.
The engineering difficulties alone were very serious; The
architectural plan was plain enough. As the Abbot laid his
requirements before the architect, he seems to have begun by fixing
the scale for a refectory capable of seating two hundred guests at
table. Probably no king in Europe fed more persons at his table than
this. According to M. Corroyer's plan, the length of the new
refectory is one hundred and twenty-three feet (37.5 metres). A row
of columns down the centre divides it into two aisles, measuring
twelve feet clear, from column to column, across the room. If tables
were set the whole length of the two aisles, forty persons could
have been easily seated, in four rows, or one hundred and sixty
persons. Without crowding, the same space would give room for fifty
guests, or two hundred in all.

Once the scale was fixed, the arrangement was easy. Beginning at the
lowest possible level, one plain, very solidly built, vaulted room
served as foundation for another, loftier and more delicately
vaulted; and this again bore another which stood on the level of the
church, and opened directly into the north transept. This
arrangement was then doubled; and the second set of rooms, at the
west end, contained the cellar on the lower level, another great
room or hall above it, and the cloister at the church door, also
entering into the north transept. Doorways, passages, and stairs
unite them all. The two heavy halls on the lowest level are now
called the almonry and the cellar, which is a distinction between
administrative arrangements that does not concern us.

Architecturally the rooms might, to our untrained eyes, be of the
same age with the Aquilon. They are earliest Transition, as far as a
tourist can see, or at least they belong to the class of crypts
which has an architecture of its own. The rooms that concern us are
those immediately above: the so-called Salle des Chevaliers at the
west end; and the so-called refectory at the east. Every writer
gives these rooms different names, and assigns them different
purposes, but whatever they were meant for, they are, as halls, the
finest in France; the purest in thirteenth-century perfection.

The Salle des Chevaliers of the Order of Saint Michael created by
Louis XI in 1469 was, or shall be for tourist purposes, the great
hall that every palace and castle contained, and in which the life
of the chateau centred. Planned at about the same time with the
Cathedral of Chartres (1195-1210), and before the Abbey Church of
Saint-Denis, this hall and its neighbour the refectory, studied
together with the cathedral and the abbey, are an exceedingly
liberal education for anybody, tourist or engineer or architect, and
would make the fortune of an intelligent historian, if such should
happen to exist; but the last thing we ask from them is education or
instruction. We want only their poetry, and shall have to look for
it elsewhere. Here is only the shell--the dead art--and silence. The
hall is about ninety feet long, and sixty feet in its greatest
width. It has three ranges of columns making four vaulted aisles
which seem to rise about twenty-two feet in height. It is warmed by
two huge and heavy cheminees or fireplaces in the outside wall,
between the windows. It is lighted beautifully, but mostly from
above through round windows in the arching of the vaults. The
vaulting is a study for wiser men than we can ever be. More than
twenty strong round columns, free or engaged, with Romanesque
capitals, support heavy ribs, or nervures, and while the two central
aisles are eighteen feet wide, the outside aisle, into which the
windows open, measures only ten feet in width, and has consequently
one of the most sharply pointed vaults we shall ever meet. The whole
design is as beautiful a bit of early Gothic as exists, but what
would take most time to study, if time were to spare, would be the
instinct of the Archangel's presence which has animated his
architecture. The masculine, military energy of Saint Michael lives
still in every stone. The genius that realized this warlike emotion
has stamped his power everywhere, on every centimetre of his work;
in every ray of light; on the mass of every shadow; wherever the eye
falls; still more strongly on all that the eye divines, and in the
shadows that are felt like the lights. The architect intended it
all. Any one who doubts has only to step through the doorway in the
corner into the refectory. There the architect has undertaken to
express the thirteenth-century idea of the Archangel; he has left
the twelfth century behind him.

The refectory, which has already served for a measure of the Abbot's
scale, is, in feeling, as different as possible from the hall. Six
charming columns run down the centre, dividing the room into two
vaulted aisles, apparently about twenty-seven feet in height.
Wherever the hall was heavy and serious, the refectory was made
light and graceful. Hardly a trace of the Romanesque remains. Only
the slight, round columns are not yet grooved or fluted, and their
round capitals are still slightly severe. Every detail is lightened.
The great fireplaces are removed to each end of the room. The most
interesting change is in the windows. When you reach Chartres, the
great book of architecture will open on the word "Fenestration,"--
Fenestre,--a word as ugly as the thing was beautiful; and then, with
pain and sorrow, you will have to toil till you see how the
architects of 1200 subordinated every other problem to that of
lighting their spaces. Without feeling their lights, you can never
feel their shadows. These two halls at Mont-Saint-Michel are
antechambers to the nave of Chartres; their fenestration, inside and
out, controls the whole design. The lighting of the refectory is
superb, but one feels its value in art only when it is taken in
relation to the lighting of the hall, and both serve as a simple
preamble to the romance of the Chartres windows.

The refectory shows what the architect did when, to lighten his
effects, he wanted to use every possible square centimetre of light.
He has made nine windows; six on the north, two on the east, and one
on the south. They are nearly five feet wide, and about twenty feet
high. They flood the room. Probably they were intended for glass,
and M. Corroyer's volume contains wood-cuts of a few fragments of
thirteenth-century glass discovered in his various excavations; but
one may take for granted that with so much light, colour was the
object intended. The floors would be tiled in colour; the walls
would be hung with colour; probably the vaults were painted in
colour; one can see it all in scores of illuminated manuscripts. The
thirteenth century had a passion for colour, and made a colour-world
of its own which we have got to explore.

The two halls remain almost the only monuments of what must be
called secular architecture of the early and perfect period of
Gothic art (1200-10). Churches enough remain, with Chartres at their
head, but all the great abbeys, palaces and chateaux of that day are
ruins. Arques, Gaillard, Montargis, Coucy, the old Louvre, Chinon,
Angers, as well as Cluny, Clairvaux, Citeaux, Jumieges, Vezelay,
Saint-Denis, Poissy, Fontevrault, and a score of other residences,
royal or semi-royal, have disappeared wholly, or have lost their
residential buildings. When Viollet-le-Duc, under the Second Empire,
was allowed to restore one great chateau, he chose the latest,
Pierrefonds, built by Louis d'Orleans in 1390. Vestiges of Saint
Louis's palace remain at the Conciergerie, but the first great royal
residence to be compared with the Merveille is Amboise, dating from
about 1500, three centuries later. Civilization made almost a clean
sweep of art. Only here, at Mont-Saint-Michel, one may still sit at
ease on the stone benches in; the embrasures of the refectory
windows, looking over the thirteenth-century ocean and watching the
architect as he worked out the details which were to produce or
accent his contrasts or harmonies, heighten his effects, or hide his
show of effort, and all by means so true, simpler and apparently
easy that one seems almost competent to follow him. One learns
better in time. One gets to feel that these things were due in part
to an instinct that the architect himself might not have been able
to explain. The instinct vanishes as time creeps on. The halls at
Rouen or at Blois are more easily understood; the Salle des
Caryatides of Pierre Lescot at the Louvre, charming as it is, is
simpler still; and one feels entirely at home in the Salle des
Glaces which filled the ambition of Louis XIV at Versailles.

If any lingering doubt remains in regard to the professional
cleverness of the architect and the thoroughness of his study, we
had best return to the great hall, and pass through a low door in
its extreme outer angle, up a few steps into a little room some
thirteen feet square, beautifully vaulted, lighted, warmed by a
large stone fireplace, and in the corner, a spiral staircase leading
up to another square room above opening directly into the cloister.
It is a little library or charter-house. The arrangement is almost
too clever for gravity, as is the case with more than one
arrangement in the Merveille. From the outside one can see that at
this corner the architect had to provide a heavy buttress against a
double strain, and he built up from the rock below a square corner
tower as support, into which he worked a spiral staircase leading
from the cellar up to the cloisters. Just above the level of the
great hall he managed to construct this little room, a gem. The
place was near and far; it was quiet and central; William of Saint-
Pair, had he been still alive, might have written his "Roman" there;
monks might have illuminated missals there. A few steps upward
brought them to the cloisters for meditation; a few more brought
them to the church for prayer. A few steps downward brought them to
the great hall, for business, a few steps more led them into the
refectory, for dinner. To contemplate the goodness of God was a
simple joy when one had such a room to work in; such a spot as the
great hall to walk in, when the storms blew; or the cloisters in
which to meditate, when the sun shone; such a dining-room as the
refectory; and such a view from one's windows over the infinite
ocean and the guiles of Satan's quicksands. From the battlements of
Heaven, William of Saint-Pair looked down on it with envy.

Of all parts of the Merveille, in summer, the most charming must
always have been the cloisters. Only the Abbey of the Mount was rich
and splendid enough to build a cloister like this, all in granite,
carved in forms as light as though it were wood; with columns
arranged in a peculiar triangular order that excited the admiration
of Viollet-le-Duc. "One of the most curious and complete cloisters
that we have in France," he said; although in France there are many
beautiful and curious cloisters. For another reason it has value.
The architect meant it to reassert, with all the art and grace he
could command, the mastery of love, of thought and poetry, in
religion, over the masculine, military energy of the great hall
below. The thirteenth century rarely let slip a chance to insist on
this moral that love is law. Saint Francis was preaching to the
birds in 1215 at Assisi, and the architect built this cloister in
1226 at Mont-Saint-Michel. Both sermons were saturated with the
feeling of the time, and both are about equally worth noting, if one
aspires to feel the art.

A conscientious student has yet to climb down the many steps, on the
outside, and look up at the Merveille from below. Few buildings in
France are better worth the trouble. The horizontal line at the roof
measures two hundred and thirty-five feet. The vertical line of the
buttresses measures in round numbers one hundred feet. To make walls
of that height and length stand up at all was no easy matter, as
Robert de Torigny had shown; and so the architect buttressed them
from bottom to top with twelve long buttresses against the thrust of
the interior arches, and three more, bearing against the interior
walls. This gives, on the north front, fifteen strong vertical lines
in a space of two hundred and thirty-five feet. Between these lines
the windows tell their story; the seven long windows of the
refectory on one side; the seven rounded windows of the hall on the
other. Even the corner tower with the charter-house becomes as
simple as the rest. The sum of this impossible wall, and its
exaggerated vertical lines, is strength and intelligence at rest.

The whole Mount still kept the grand style; it expressed the unity
of Church and State, God and Man, Peace and War, Life and Death,
Good and Bad; it solved the whole problem of the universe. The
priest and the soldier were both at home here, in 1215 as in 1115 or
in 1058; the politician was not outside of it; the sinner was
welcome; the poet was made happy in his own spirit, with a sympathy,
almost an affection, that suggests a habit of verse in the Abbot as
well as in the architect. God reconciles all. The world is an
evident, obvious, sacred harmony. Even the discord of war is a
detail on which the Abbey refuses to insist. Not till two centuries
afterwards did the Mount take on the modern expression of war as a
discord in God's providence. Then, in the early years of the
fifteenth century, Abbot Pierre le Roy plastered the gate of the
chatelet, as you now see it, over the sunny thirteenth-century
entrance called Belle Chaise, which had treated mere military
construction with a sort of quiet contempt. You will know what a
chatelet is when you meet another; it frowns in a spirit quite alien
to the twelfth century; it jars on the religion of the place; it
forebodes wars of religion; dissolution of society; loss of unity;
the end of a world. Nothing is sadder than the catastrophe of Gothic
art, religion, and hope.

One looks back on it all as a picture; a symbol of unity; an
assertion of God and Man in a bolder, stronger, closer union than
ever was expressed by other art; and when the idea is absorbed,
accepted, and perhaps partially understood, one may move on.



CHAPTER IV

NORMANDY AND THE ILE DE FRANCE

From Mont-Saint-Michel, the architectural road leads across
Normandy, up the Seine to Paris, and not directly through Chartres,
which lies a little to the south. In the empire of architecture,
Normandy was one kingdom, Brittany another; the Ile de France, with
Paris, was a third; Touraine and the valley of the Loire were a
fourth and in the centre, the fighting-ground between them all, lay
the counties of Chartres and Dreux. Before going to Chartres one
should go up the Seine and down the Loire, from Angers to Le Mans,
and so enter Chartres from Brittany after a complete circle; but if
we set out to do our pleasure on that scale, we must start from the
Pyramid of Cheops. We have set out from Mont-Saint-Michel; we will
go next to Paris.

The architectural highway lies through Coutances, Bayeux, Caen,
Rouen, and Mantes. Every great artistic kingdom solved its
architectural problems in its own way, as it did its religious,
political, and social problems, and no two solutions were ever quite
the same; but among them the Norman was commonly the most practical,
and sometimes the most dignified. We can test this rule by the
standard of the first town we stop at--Coutances. We can test it
equally well at Bayeux or Caen, but Coutances comes first after
Mont-Saint-Michel let us begin with it, and state the problems with
their Norman solution, so that it may be ready at hand to compare
with the French solution, before coming to the solution at Chartres.

The cathedral at Coutances is said to be about the age of the
Merveille (1200-50), but the exact dates are unknown, and the work
is so Norman as to stand by itself; yet the architect has grappled
with more problems than one need hope to see solved in any single
church in the tie de France. Even at Chartres, although the two
stone fleches are, by exception, completed, they are not of the same
age, as they are here. Neither at Chartres nor at Paris, nor at Laon
or Amiens or Rheims or Bourges, will you see a central tower to
compare with the enormous pile at Coutances. Indeed the architects
of France failed to solve this particular church problem, and we-
shall leave it behind us in leaving Normandy, although it is the
most effective feature of any possible church. "A clocher of that
period (circa 1200), built over the croisee of a cathedral,
following lines so happy, should be a monument of the greatest
beauty; unfortunately we possess not a single one in France. Fire,
and the hand of man more than time, have destroyed them all, and we
find on our greatest religious edifices no more than bases and
fragments of these beautiful constructions. The cathedral of
Coutances alone has preserved its central clocher of the thirteenth
century, and even there it is not complete; its stone fleche is
wanting. As for its style, it belongs to Norman architecture, and
diverges widely from the character of French architecture." So says
Viollet-le-Duc; but although the great churches for the most part
never had central clochers, which, on the scale of Amiens, Bourges,
or Beauvais, would have required an impossible mass, the smaller
churches frequently carry them still, and they are, like the dome,
the most effective features they can carry. They were made to
dominate the whole.

No doubt the fleche is wanting at Coutances, but you can supply it
in imagination from the two fleches of the western tower, which are
as simple and severe as the spear of a man-at-arms. Supply the
fleche, and the meaning of the tower cannot be mistaken; it is as
military as the "Chanson de Roland"; it is the man-at-arms himself,
mounted and ready for battle, spear in rest. The mere seat of the
central tower astride of the church, so firm, so fixed, so serious,
so defiant, is Norman, like the seat of the Abbey Church on the
Mount; and at Falaise, where William the Bastard was born, we shall
see a central tower on the church which is William himself, in
armour, on horseback, ready to fight for the Church, and perhaps, in
his bad moods, against it. Such militant churches were capable of
forcing Heaven itself; all of them look as though they had fought at
Hastings or stormed Jerusalem. Wherever the Norman central clocher
stands, the Church Militant of the eleventh century survives;--not
the Church of Mary Queen, but of Michael the Archangel;--not the
Church of Christ, but of God the Father--Who never lied!

Taken together with the fleches of the facade, this clocher of
Coutances forms a group such as one very seldom sees. The two towers
of the facade are something apart, quite by themselves among the
innumerable church-towers of the Gothic time. We have got a happy
summer before us, merely in looking for these church-towers. There
is no livelier amusement for fine weather than in hunting them as
though they were mushrooms, and no study in architecture nearly so
delightful. No work of man has life like the fleche. One sees it for
a greater distance and feels it for a longer time than is possible
with any other human structure, unless it be the dome. There is more
play of light on the octagonal faces of the fleche as the sun moves
around them than can be got out of the square or the cone or any
other combination of surfaces. For some reason, the facets of the
hexagon or octagon are more pleasing than the rounded surfaces of
the cone, and Normandy is said to be peculiarly the home of this
particularly Gothic church ornament; yet clochers and fleches are
scattered all over France until one gets to look for them on the
horizon as though every church in every hamlet were an architectural
monument. Hundreds of them literally are so,--Monuments Historiques,
-protected by the Government; but when you undertake to compare
them, or to decide whether they are more beautiful in Normandy than
in the Ile de France, or in Burgundy, or on the Loire or the
Charente, you are lost, Even the superiority of the octagon is not
evident to every one. Over the little church at Fenioux on the
Charente, not very far from La Rochelle, is a conical steeple that
an infidel might adore; and if you have to decide between provinces,
you must reckon with the decision of architects and amateurs, who
seem to be agreed that the first of all filches is at Chartres, the
second at Vendome, not far from Blois in Touraine, and the third at
Auxerre in Burgundy. The towers of Coutances are not in the list,
nor are those at Bayeux nor those at Caen. France is rich in art.
Yet the towers of Coutances are in some ways as interesting, if not
as beautiful, as the best.

The two stone fleches here, with their octagon faces, do not
descend, as in other churches, to their resting-place on a square
tower, with the plan of junction more or less disguised; they throw
out nests of smaller fleches, and these cover buttressing corner
towers, with lines that go directly to the ground. Whether the
artist consciously intended it or not, the effect is to broaden the
facade and lift it into the air. The facade itself has a distinctly
military look, as though a fortress had been altered into a church.
A charming arcade at the top has the air of being thrown across in
order to disguise the alteration, and perhaps owes much of its charm
to the contrast it makes with the severity of military lines. Even
the great west window looks like an afterthought; one's instinct
asks for a blank wall. Yet, from the ground up to the cross on the
spire, one feels the Norman nature throughout, animating the whole,
uniting it all, and crowding into it an intelligent variety of
original motives that would build a dozen churches of late Gothic.
Nothing about it is stereotyped or conventional,--not even the
conventionality.

If you have any doubts about this, you have only to compare the
photograph of Coutances with the photograph of Chartres; and yet,
surely, the facade of Chartres is severe enough to satisfy Saint
Bernard himself. With the later fronts of Rheims and Amiens, there
is no field for comparison; they have next to nothing in common; yet
Coutances is said to be of the same date with Rheims, or nearly so,
and one can believe it when one enters the interior. The Normans, as
they slowly reveal themselves, disclose most unexpected qualities;
one seems to sound subterranean caverns of feeling hidden behind
their iron nasals. No other cathedral in France or in Europe has an
interior more refined--one is tempted to use even the hard-worn
adjective, more tender--or more carefully studied. One test is
crucial here and everywhere. The treatment of the apse and choir is
the architect's severest standard. This is a subject not to be
touched lightly; one to which we shall have to come back in a humble
spirit, prepared for patient study, at Chartres; but the choir of
Coutances is a cousin to that of Chartres, as the facades are
cousins; Coutances like Chartres belongs to Notre Dame and is felt
in the same spirit; the church is built for the choir and apse,
rather than for the nave and transepts; for the Virgin rather than
for the public. In one respect Coutances is even more delicate in
the feminine charm of the Virgin's peculiar grace than Chartres, but
this was an afterthought of the fourteenth century. The system of
chapels radiating about the apse was extended down the nave, in an
arrangement "so beautiful and so rare," according to Viollet-le-Duc,
that one shall seek far before finding its equal. Among the
unexpected revelations of human nature that suddenly astonish
historians, one of the least reasonable was the passionate outbreak
of religious devotion to the ideal of feminine grace, charity, and
love that took place here in Normandy while it was still a part of
the English kingdom, and flamed up into almost fanatical frenzy
among the most hard-hearted and hard-headed race in Europe.

So in this church, in the centre of this arrangement of apse and
chapels with their quite unusual--perhaps quite singular--grace, the
four huge piers which support the enormous central tower, offer a
tour de force almost as exceptional as the refinement of the
chapels. At Mont-Saint-Michel, among the monks, the union of
strength and grace was striking, but at Coutances it is exaggerated,
like Tristram and Iseult,--a roman of chivalry. The four "enormous"
columns of the croisee, carry, as Viollet-le-Duc says, the "enormous
octagonal tower,"--like Saint Christopher supporting the Christ-
child, before the image of the Virgin, in her honour. Nothing like
this can be seen at Chartres, or at any of the later palaces which
France built for the pleasure of the Queen of Heaven. We are
slipping into the thirteenth century again; the temptation is
terrible to feeble minds and tourist natures; but a great mass of
twelfth and eleventh-century work remains to be seen and felt. To go
back is not so easy as to begin with it; the heavy round arch is
like old cognac compared with the champagne of the pointed and
fretted spire; one must not quit Coutances without making an
excursion to Lessayon the road to Cherbourg, where is a church of
the twelfth century, with a square tower and almost untouched Norman
interior, that closely repeats the Abbey Church at Mont-Saint-
Michel. "One of the most complete models of Romanesque architecture
to be found in Normandy," says M. de Caumont. The central clocher
will begin a photographic collection of square towers, to replace
that which was lost on the Mount; and a second example is near
Bayeux, at a small place called Cerisy-la-Foret, where the church
matches that on the Mount, according to M. Corroyer; for Cerisy-la-
Foret was also an abbey, and the church, built by Richard II, Duke
of Normandy, at the beginning of the eleventh century, was larger
than that on the Mount. It still keeps its central tower.

All this is intensely Norman, and is going to help very little in
France; it would be more useful in England; but at Bayeux is a
great: cathedral much more to the purpose, with two superb western
towers crowned by stone fleches, cousins of those at Coutances, and
distinctly related to the twelfth-century fleche at Chartres. "The
Normans," says Viollet-le-Duc, "had not that instinct of proportion
which the architects of the Ile de France, Beauvais, and Soissons
possessed to a high degree; yet the boldness of their constructions,
their perfect execution, the elevation of the fleches, had evident
influence on the French school properly called, and that influence
is felt in the old spire of Chartres." The Norman seemed to show
distinction in another respect which the French were less quick to
imitate. What they began, they completed. Not one of the great
French churches has two stone spires complete, of the same age,
while each of the little towns of Coutances, Bayeux, and Caen
contains its twin towers and fleches of stone, as solid and perfect
now as they were seven hundred years ago. Still another Norman
character is worth noting, because this is one part of the influence
felt at Chartres. If you look carefully at the two western towers of
the Bayeux Cathedral, perhaps you will feel what is said to be the
strength of the way they are built up. They rise from their
foundation with a quiet confidence of line and support, which passes
directly up to the weather-cock on the summit of the fleches. At the
plane where the square tower is changed into the octagon spire, you
will see the corner turrets and the long intermediate windows which
effect the change without disguising it. One can hardly call it a
device; it is so simple and evident a piece of construction that it
does not need to be explained; yet you will have to carry a
photograph of this fleche to Chartres, and from there to Vendome,
for there is to be a great battle of fleches about this point of
junction, and the Norman scheme is a sort of standing reproach to
the French.

Coutances and Bayeux are interesting, but Caen is a Romanesque
Mecca. There William the Conqueror dealt with the same architectural
problems, and put his solution in his Abbaye-aux-Hommes, which bears
the name of Saint Stephen. Queen Matilda put her solution into her
Abbaye-aux-Femmes, the Church of the Trinity. One ought particularly
to look at the beautiful central clocher of the church at Vaucelles
in the suburbs; and one must drive out to Thaon to see its eleventh-
century church, with a charming Romanesque blind arcade on the
outside, and a little clocher, "the more interesting to us,"
according to Viollet-le-Duc, "because it bears the stamp of the
traditions of defence of the primitive towers which were built over
the porches." Even "a sort of chemin de ronde" remains around the
clocher, perhaps once provided with a parapet of defence. "C'est la,
du reste, un charmant edifice." A tower with stone fleche, which
actually served for defence in a famous recorded instance, is that
of the church at Secqueville, not far off; this beautiful tower, as
charming as anything in Norman art, is known to have served as a
fortress in 1105, which gives a valuable date. The pretty old
Romanesque front of the little church at Ouistreham, with its portal
that seems to come fresh from Poitiers and Moissac, can be taken in,
while driving past; but we must on no account fail to make a serious
pilgrimage to Saint-Pierre-sur-Dives, where the church-tower and
fleche are not only classed among the best in Normandy, but have an
exact date, 1145, and a very close relation with Chartres, as will
appear. Finally, if for no other reason, at least for interest in
Arlette, the tanner's daughter, one must go to Falaise, and look at
the superb clocher of Saint-Gervais, which was finished and
consecrated by 1135.

Some day, if you like, we can follow this Romanesque style to the
south, and on even to Italy where it may be supposed to have been
born; but France had an architectural life fully a thousand years
old when these twelfth-century churches were built, and was long
since artistically, as she was politically, independent. The Normans
were new in France, but not the Romanesque architecture; they only
took the forms and stamped on them their own character. It is the
stamp we want to distinguish, in order to trace up our lines of
artistic ancestry. The Norman twelfth-century stamp was not easily
effaced. If we have not seen enough of it at Mont-Saint-Michel,
Coutances, Bayeux, and Caen, we can go to Rouen, and drive out to
Boscherville, and visit the ruined Abbey of Jumieges. Wherever there
is a church-tower with a tall fleche, as at Boscherville,
Secqueville, Saint-Pierre-sur-Dives, Caen, and Bayeux, Viollet-le-
Duc bids notice how the octagonal steeple is fitted on to the square
tower. Always the passage from the octagon to the square seems to be
quite simply made. The Gothic or Romanesque spire had the advantage
that a wooden fleche was as reasonable a covering for it as a stone
one, and the Normans might have indulged in freaks of form very
easily, if they chose, but they seem never to have thought of it.
The nearest approach to the freedom of wooden roofs is not in the
lofty fleches, but in the covering of the great square central
towers, like Falaise or Vaucelles, a huge four-sided roof which
tries to be a fleche, and is as massive as the heavy structure it
covers.

The last of the Norman towers that Viollet-le-Duc insists upon is
the so-called Clocher de Saint-Romain, the northern tower on the
west front of the Cathedral of Rouen. Unfortunately it has lost its
primitive octagon fleche if it ever had one, but "the tower remains
entire, and," according to Viollet-le-Duc, "is certainly one of the
most beautiful in this part of France; it offers a mixture of the
two styles of the Ile de France and of Normandy, in which the former
element dominates"; it is of the same date as the old tower of
Chartres (1140-60), and follows the same interior arrangement; "but
here the petty, confused disposition of the Norman towers, with
their division into stories of equal height, has been adopted by the
French master builder, although in submitting to these local customs
he has still thrown over his work the grace and finesse, the study
of detail, the sobriety in projections, the perfect harmony between
the profiles, sculpture, and the general effect of the whole, which
belong to the school he came from. He has managed his voids and
solids with especial cleverness, giving the more importance to the
voids, and enlarging the scale of his details, as the tower rose in
height. These details have great beauty; the construction is
executed in materials of small dimensions with the care that the
twelfth-century architects put into their building; the profiles
project little, and, in spite of their extreme finesse, produce much
effect; the buttresses are skilfully planted and profiled. The
staircase, which, on the east side, deranges the arrangement of the
bays, is a chef-d'oeuvre of architecture." This long panegyric, by
Viollet-le-Duc, on French taste at the expense of Norman temper,
ought to be read, book in hand, before the Cathedral of Rouen, with
photographs of Bayeux to compare. Certain it is that the Normans and
the French never talked quite the same language, but it is equally
certain that the Norman language, to the English ear, expressed
itself quite as clearly as the French, and sometimes seemed to have
more to express.

The complaint of the French artist against the Norman is the
"mesquin" treatment of dividing his tower into storeys of equal
height. Even in the twelfth century and in religious architecture,
artists already struggled over the best solution of this
particularly American problem of the twentieth century, and when
tourists return to New York, they may look at the twenty-storey
towers which decorate the city, to see whether the Norman or the
French plan has won; but this, at least, will be sure in advance:--
the Norman will be the practical scheme which states the facts, and
stops; while the French will be the graceful one, which states the
beauties, and more or less fits the facts to suit them. Both styles
are great: both can sometimes be tiresome.

Here we must take leave of Normandy; a small place, but one which,
like Attica or Tuscany, has said a great deal to the world, and even
goes on saying things--not often in the famous genre ennuyeux--to
this day; for Gustave Flaubert's style is singularly like that of
the Tour Saint-Romain and the Abbaye-aux-Hommes. Going up the Seine
one might read a few pages of his letters, or of "Madame de Bovary,"
to see how an old art transmutes itself into a new one, without
changing its methods. Some critics have thought that at times
Flaubert was mesquin like the Norman tower, but these are, as the
French say, the defects of his qualities; we can pass over them, and
let our eyes rest on the simplicity of the Norman fleche which
pierces the line of our horizon.

The last of Norman art is seen at Mantes, where there is a little
church of Gassicourt that marks the farthest reach of the style. In
arms as in architecture, Mantes barred the path of Norman conquest;
William the Conqueror met his death here in 1087. Geographically
Mantes is in the Ile de France, less than forty miles from Paris.
Architecturally, it is Paris itself; while, forty miles to the
southward, is Chartres, an independent or only feudally dependent
country. No matter how hurried the architectural tourist may be, the
boundary-line of the Ile de France is not to be crossed without
stopping. If he came down from the north or east, he would have
equally to stop,--either at Beauvais, or at Laon, or Noyon, or
Soissons,--because there is an architectural douane to pass, and
one's architectural baggage must be opened. Neither Notre Dame de
Paris nor Notre Dame de Chartres is quite intelligible unless one
has first seen Notre Dame de Mantes, and studied it in the sacred
sources of M. Viollet-le-Duc.

Notre Dame de Mantes is a sister to the Cathedral of Paris, "built
at the same time, perhaps by the same architect, and reproducing its
general dispositions, its mode of structure, and some of its
details"; but the Cathedral of Paris has been greatly altered, so
that its original arrangement is quite changed, while the church at
Mantes remains practically as it was, when both were new, about the
year 1200. As nearly as the dates can be guessed, the cathedral was
finished, up to its vaulting, in 1170, and was soon afterwards
imitated on a smaller scale at Mantes. The scheme seems to have been
unsatisfactory because of defects in the lighting, for the whole
system of fenestration had been changed at Paris before 1230,
naturally at great cost, since the alterations, according to
Viollet-le-Duc (articles "Cathedral" and "Rose," and allusions
"Triforium"), left little except the ground-plan unchanged. To
understand the Paris design of 1160-70, which was a long advance
from the older plans, one must come to Mantes; and, reflecting that
the great triumph of Chartres was its fenestration, which must have
been designed immediately after 1195, one can understand how, in
this triangle of churches only forty or fifty miles apart, the
architects, watching each other's experiments, were influenced,
almost from day to day, by the failures or successes which they saw
The fenestration which the Paris architect planned in 1160-70, and
repeated at Mantes, 1190-1200, was wholly abandoned, and a new
system introduced, immediately after the success of Chartres in
1210.

As they now stand, Mantes is the oldest. While conscientiously
trying to keep as far away as we can from technique, about which we
know nothing and should care if possible still less if only
ignorance would help us to feel what we do not understand, still the
conscience is happier if it gains a little conviction, founded on
what it thinks a fact. Even theologians--even the great theologians
of the thirteenth century--even Saint Thomas Aquinas himself--did
not trust to faith alone, or assume the existence of God; and what
Saint Thomas found necessary in philosophy may also be a sure source
of consolation in the difficulties of art. The church at Mantes is a
very early fact in Gothic art; indeed, it is one of the earliest;
for our purposes it will serve as the very earliest of pure Gothic
churches, after the Transition, and this we are told to study in its
windows.

Before one can get near enough fairly to mark the details of the
facade, one sees the great rose window which fills a space nearly
twenty-seven feet in width. Gothic fanatics commonly reckon the
great rose windows of the thirteenth century as the most beautiful
creation of their art, among the details of ornament; and this
particular rose is the direct parent of that at Chartres, which is
classic like the Parthenon, while both of them served as models or
guides for that at Paris which dates from 1220, those in the north
and south transepts at Rheims, about 1230, and so on, from parent to
child, till the rose faded forever. No doubt there were Romanesque
roses before 1200, and we shall see them, but this rose of Mantes is
the first Gothic rose of great dimensions, and that from which the
others grew; in its simplicity, its honesty, its large liberality of
plan, it is also one of the best, if M. Viollet-le-Duc is a true
guide; but you will see a hundred roses, first or last, and can
choose as you would among the flowers.

More interesting than even the great rose of the portal is the
remark that the same rose-motive is carried round the church
throughout its entire system of fenestration. As one follows it, on
the outside, one sees that all the windows are constructed on the
same rose-scheme; but the most curious arrangement is in the choir
inside the church. You look up to each of the windows through a sort
of tunnel or telescope: an arch enlarging outwards, the roses at the
end resembling "oeil-de-boeufs," "oculi." So curious is this
arrangement that Viollet-le-Duc has shown it, under the head
"Triforium," in drawings and sections which any one can study who
likes; its interest to us is that this arrangement in the choir was
probably the experiment which proved a failure in Notre Dame at
Paris, and led to the tearing-out the old windows and substituting
those which still stand. Perhaps the rose did not give enough light,
although the church at Mantes seems well lighted, and even at Paris
the rose windows remain in the transepts and in one bay of the nave.

All this is introduction to the windows of Chartres, but these three
churches open another conundrum as one learns, bit by bit, a few of
the questions to be asked of the forgotten Middle Ages. The church
towers at Mantes are very interesting, inside and out; they are
evidently studied with love and labour by their designer; yet they
have no fleches. How happens it that Notre Dame at Paris also has no
fleches, although the towers, according to Viollet-le-Duc, are
finished in full preparation for them? This double omission on the
part of the French architect seems exceedingly strange, because his
rival at Chartres finished his fleche just when the architect of
Paris and Mantes was finishing his towers (1175-1200). The Frenchman
was certainly consumed by jealousy at the triumph never attained on
anything like the same scale by any architect of the Ile de France;
and he was actually engaged at the time on at least two fleches,
close to Paris, one at Saint-Denis, another of Saint-Leu-d'Esserent,
which proved the active interest he took in the difficulties
conquered at Chartres, and his perfect competence to deal with them.

Indeed, one is tempted to say that these twin churches, Paris and
Mantes, are the only French churches of the time (1200) which were
left without a fleche. As we go from Mantes to Paris, we pass, about
half-way, at Poissy, under the towers of a very ancient and
interesting church which has the additional merit of having
witnessed the baptism of Saint Louis in 1215. Parts of the church at
Poissy go back to the seventh and ninth centuries. The square base
of the tower dates back before the time of Hugh Capet, to the
Carolingian age, and belongs, like the square tower of Saint-
Germain-des-Pres at Paris, to the old defensive military
architecture; but it has a later, stone fleche and it has, too, by
exception a central octagonal clocher, with a timber fleche which
dates from near 1100. Paris itself has not much to show, but in the
immediate neighbourhood are a score of early churches with charming
fleches, and at Etampes, about thirty-five miles to the south, is an
extremely interesting church with an exquisite fleche, which may
claim an afternoon to visit. That at Saint-Leu-d'Esserent is a still
easier excursion, for one need only drive over from Chantilly a
couple of miles. The fascinating old Abbey Church of Saint-Leu looks
down over the valley of the Oise, and is a sort of antechamber to
Chartres, as far as concerns architecture. Its fleche, built towards
1160,--when that at Chartres was rising,--is unlike any other, and
shows how much the French architects valued their lovely French
creation. On its octagonal faces, it carries upright batons, or
lances, as a device for relieving the severity of the outlines; a
device both intelligent and amusing, though it was never imitated. A
little farther from Paris, at Senlis, is another fleche, which shows
still more plainly the effort of the French architects to vary and
elaborate the Chartres scheme. As for Laon, which is interesting
throughout, and altogether the most delightful building in the Ile
de France, the fleches are gone, but the towers are there, and you
will have to study them, before studying those at Chartres, with all
the intelligence you have to spare. They were the chef-d'oeuvre of
the mediaeval architect, in his own opinion.

All this makes the absence of fleches at Paris and Mantes the more
strange. Want of money was certainly not the cause, since the
Parisians had money enough to pull their whole cathedral to pieces
at the very time when fleches were rising in half the towns within
sight of them. Possibly they were too ambitious, and could find no
design that seemed to satisfy their ambition. They took pride in
their cathedral, and they tried hard to make their shrine of Our
Lady rival the great shrine at Chartres. Of course, one must study
their beautiful church, but this can be done at leisure, for, as it
stands, it is later than Chartres and more conventional. Saint-
Germain-des-Pres leads more directly to Chartres; but perhaps the
church most useful to know is no longer a church at all, but a part
of the Museum of Arts et Metiers,--the desecrated Saint-Martin-des-
Champs, a name which shows that it dates from a time when the
present Porte-Saint-Martin was far out among fields. The choir of
Saint-Martin, which is all that needs noting, is said by M. Enlart
to date from about 1150. Hidden in a remnant of old Paris near the
Pont Notre Dame, where the student life of the Middle Ages was to be
most turbulent and the Latin Quarter most renowned, is the little
church of Saint-Julien-le-Pauvre, towards 1170. On the whole,
further search in Paris would not greatly help us. If one is to
pursue the early centuries, one must go farther afield, for the
schools of Normandy and the Ile de France were only two among half a
dozen which flourished in the various provinces that were to be
united in the kingdom of Saint Louis and his successors. We have not
even looked to the south and east, whence the impulse came. The old
Carolingian school, with its centre at Aix-la-Chapelle, is quite
beyond our horizon. The Rhine had a great Romanesque architecture of
its own. One broad architectural tide swept up the Rhone and filled
the Burgundian provinces as far as the watershed of the Seine.
Another lined the Mediterranean, with a centre at Arles. Another
spread up the western rivers, the Charente and the Loire, reaching
to Le Mans and touching Chartres. Two more lay in the centre of
France, spreading from Perigord and Clermont in Auvergne. All these
schools had individual character, and all have charm; but we have
set out to go from Mont-Saint-Michel to Chartres in three centuries,
the eleventh, twelfth, and thirteenth, trying to get, on the way,
not technical knowledge; not accurate information; not correct views
either on history, art, or religion; not anything that can possibly
be useful or instructive; but only a sense of what those centuries
had to say, and a sympathy with their ways of saying it. Let us go
straight to Chartres!



CHAPTER V

TOWERS AND PORTALS

For a first visit to Chartres, choose some pleasant morning when the
lights are soft, for one wants to be welcome, and the cathedral has
moods, at times severe. At best, the Beauce is a country none too
gay.

The first glimpse that is caught, and the first that was meant to be
caught, is that of the two spires. With all the education that
Normandy and the Ile de France can give, one is still ignorant. The
spire is the simplest part of the Romanesque or Gothic architecture,
and needs least study in order to be felt. It is a bit of sentiment
almost pure of practical purpose. It tells the whole of its story at
a glance, and its story is the best that architecture had to tell,
for it typified the aspirations of man at the moment when man's
aspirations were highest. Yet nine persons out of ten--perhaps
ninety-nine in a hundred--who come within sight of the two spires of
Chartres will think it a jest if they are told that the smaller of
the two, the simpler, the one that impresses them least, is the one
which they are expected to recognize as the most perfect piece of
architecture in the world. Perhaps the French critics might deny
that they make any such absolute claim; in that case you can ask
them what their exact claim is; it will always be high enough to
astonish the tourist.

Astonished or not, we have got to take this southern spire of the
Chartres Cathedral as the object of serious study, and before taking
it as art, must take it as history. The foundations of this tower--
always to be known as the "old tower"--are supposed to have been
laid in 1091, before the first crusade. The fleche was probably half
a century later (1145-70). The foundations of the new tower,
opposite, were laid not before 1110, when also the portal which
stands between them, was begun with the three lancet windows above
it, but not the rose. For convenience, this old facade--including
the portal and the two towers, but not the fleches, and the three
lancet windows, but not the rose--may be dated as complete about
1150.

Originally the whole portal--the three doors and the three lancets--
stood nearly forty feet back, on the line of the interior
foundation, or rear wall of the towers. This arrangement threw the
towers forward, free on three sides, as at Poitiers, and gave room
for a parvis, before the portal,--a porch, roofed over, to protect
the pilgrims who always stopped there to pray before entering the
church. When the church was rebuilt after the great fire of 1194,
and the architect was required to enlarge the interior, the old
portal and lancets were moved bodily forward, to be flush with the
front walls of the two towers, as you see the facade to-day; and the
facade itself was heightened, to give room for the rose, and to
cover the loftier pignon and vaulting behind. Finally, the wooden
roof, above the stone vault, was masked by the Arcade of Kings and
its railing, completed in the taste of Philip the Hardy, who reigned
from 1270 to 1285.

These changes have, of course, altered the values of all the parts.
The portal is injured by being thrown into a glare of light, when it
was intended to stand in shadow, as you will see in the north and
south porches over the transept portals. The towers are hurt by
losing relief and shadow; but the old fleche is obliged to suffer
the cruellest wrong of all by having its right shoulder hunched up
by half of a huge rose and the whole of a row of kings, when it was
built to stand free, and to soar above the whole facade from the top
of its second storey. One can easily figure it so and replace the
lost parts of the old facade, more or less at haphazard, from the
front of Noyon.

What an outrage it was you can see by a single glance at the new
fleche opposite. The architect of 1500 has flatly refused to submit
to such conditions, and has insisted, with very proper self-respect,
on starting from the balustrade of the Arcade of Kings as his level.
Not even content with that, he has carried up his square tower
another lofty storey before he would consent to touch the heart of
his problem, the conversion of the square tower into the octagon
fleche. In doing this, he has sacrificed once more the old fleche;
but his own tower stands free as it should.

At Vendome, when you go there, you will be in a way to appreciate
still better what happened to the Chartres fleche; for the clocher
at Vendome, which is of the same date,--Viollet-le-Duc says earlier,
and Enlart, "after 1130,"--stood and still stands free, like an
Italian campanile, which gives it a vast advantage. The tower of
Saint-Leu-d'Esserent, also after 1130, stands free, above the second
storey. Indeed, you will hardly find, in the long list of famous
French spires, another which has been treated with so much indignity
as this, the greatest and most famous of all; and perhaps the most
annoying part of it is that you must be grateful to the architect of
1195 for doing no worse. He has, on the contrary, done his best to
show respect for the work of his predecessor, and has done so well
that, handicapped as it is, the old tower still defies rivalry.
Nearly three hundred and fifty feet high, or, to be exact, 106.5
metres from the church floor, it is built up with an amount of
intelligence and refinement that leaves to unprofessional visitors
no chance to think a criticism--much less to express one. Perhaps--
when we have seen more--and feel less--who knows?--but certainly not
now!

"The greatest and surely the most beautiful monument of this kind
that we possess in France," says Viollet-le-Duc; but although an
ignorant spectator must accept the architect's decision on a point
of relative merit, no one is compelled to accept his reasons, as
final. "There is no need to dwell," he continues, "upon the beauty
and the grandeur of composition in which the artist has given proof
of rare sobriety, where all the effects are obtained, not by
ornaments, but by the just and skilful proportion of the different
parts. The transition, so hard to adjust, between the square base
and the octagon of the fleche, is managed and carried out with an
address which has not been surpassed in similar monuments." One
stumbles a little at the word "adresse." One never caught one's self
using the word in Norman churches. Your photographs of Bayeux or
Boscherville or Secqueville will show you at a glance whether the
term "adresse" applies to them. Even Vendome would rather be praised
for "droiture" than for "adresse."--Whether the word "adresse" means
cleverness, dexterity, adroitness, or simple technical skill, the
thing itself is something which the French have always admired more
than the Normans ever did. Viollet-le-Duc himself seems to be a
little uncertain whether to lay most stress on the one or the other
quality: "If one tries to appreciate the conception of this tower,"
quotes the Abbe Bulteau (11,84), "one will see that it is as frank
as the execution is simple and skilful. Starting from the bottom,
one reaches the summit of the fleche without marked break; without
anything to interrupt the general form of the building. This
clocher, whose base is broad (pleine), massive, and free from
ornament, transforms itself, as it springs, into a sharp spire with
eight faces, without its being possible to say where the massive
construction ends and the light construction begins."

Granting, as one must, that this concealment of the transition is a
beauty, one would still like to be quite sure that the Chartres
scheme is the best. The Norman clochers being thrown out, and that
at Vendome being admittedly simple, the Clocher de Saint-Jean on the
Church of Saint-Germain at Auxerre seems to be thought among the
next in importance, although it is only about one hundred and sixty
feet in height (forty-nine metres), and therefore hardly in the same
class with Chartres. Any photograph shows that the Auxerre spire is
also simple; and that at Etampes you have seen already to be of the
Vendome rather than of the Chartres type. The clocher at Senlis is
more "habile"; it shows an effort to be clever, and offers a
standard of comparison; but the mediaeval architects seem to have
thought that none of them bore rivalry with Laon for technical
skill. One of these professional experts, named Villard de
Honnecourt, who lived between 1200 and 1250, left a notebook which
you can see in the vitrines of the Bibliotheque Nationale in the Rue
Richelieu, and which is the source of most that is known about the
practical ideas of mediaeval architects. He came to Chartres, and,
standing here before the doors, where we are standing, he made a
rough drawing, not of the tower, but of the rose, which was then
probably new, since it must have been planned between 1195 and 1200.
Apparently the tower did not impress him strongly, for he made no
note of it; but on the other hand, when he went to Laon, he became
vehement in praise of the cathedral tower there, which must have
been then quite new: "I have been in many countries, as you can find
in this book. In no place have I ever such a tower seen as that of
Laon.--J'ai este en mult de tieres, si cum vus pores trover en cest
livre. En aucun liu onques tel tor ne vi com est cele de Loon." The
reason for this admiration is the same that Viollet-le-Duc gives for
admiring the tower of Chartres--the "adresse" with which the square
is changed into the octagon. Not only is the tower itself changed
into the fleche without visible junction, under cover of four corner
tourelles, of open work, on slender columns, which start as squares;
but the tourelles also convert themselves into octagons in the very
act of rising, and end in octagon fleches that carry up--or once
carried up--the lines of profile to the central fleche that soared
above them. Clearly this device far surpassed in cleverness the
scheme of Chartres, which was comparatively heavy and structural,
the weights being adjusted for their intended work, while the
transformation at Laon takes place in the air, and challenges
discovery in defiance of one's keenest eyesight. "Regard... how the
tourelles pass from one disposition to another, in rising! Meditate
on it!"

The fleche of Laon is gone, but the tower and tourelles are still
there to show what the architects of the thirteenth century thought
their most brilliant achievement. One cannot compare Chartres
directly with any of its contemporary rivals, but one can at least
compare the old spire with the new one which stands opposite and
rises above it. Perhaps you will like the new best. Built at a time
which is commonly agreed to have had the highest standard of taste,
it does not encourage tourist or artist to insist on setting up
standards of his own against it. Begun in 1507, it was finished in
1517. The dome of Saint Peter's at Rome, over which Bramante and
Raphael and Michael Angelo toiled, was building at the same time;
Leonardo da Vinci was working at Amboise; Jean Bullant, Pierre
Lescot, and their patron, Francis I, were beginning their
architectural careers. Four hundred years, or thereabouts, separated
the old spire from the new one; and four hundred more separate the
new one from us. If Viollet-le-Duc, who himself built Gothic spires,
had cared to compare his fleches at Clermont-Ferrand with the new
fleche at Chartres, he might perhaps have given us a rule where
"adresse" ceases to have charm, and where detail becomes tiresome;
but in the want of a schoolmaster to lay down a law of taste, you
can admire the new fleche as much as you please. Of course, one sees
that the lines of the new tower are not clean, like those of the
old; the devices that cover the transition from the square to the
octagon are rather too obvious; the proportion of the fleche to the
tower quite alters the values of the parts; a rigid classical taste
might even go so far as to hint that the new tower, in comparison
with the old, showed signs of a certain tendency toward a dim and
distant vulgarity. There can be no harm in admitting that the new
tower is a little wanting in repose for a tower whose business is to
counterpoise the very classic lines of the old one; but no law
compels you to insist on absolute repose in any form of art; if such
a law existed, it would have to deal with Michael Angelo before it
dealt with us. The new tower has many faults, but it has great
beauties, as you can prove by comparing it with other late Gothic
spires, including those of Viollet-le-Duc. Its chief fault is to be
where it is. As a companion to the crusades and to Saint Bernard, it
lacks austerity. As a companion to the Virgin of Chartres, it
recalls Diane de Poitiers.

In fact, the new tower, which in years is four centuries younger
than its neighbour, is in feeling fully four hundred years older. It
is self-conscious if not vain; its coiffure is elaborately arranged
to cover the effects of age, and its neck and shoulders are covered
with lace and jewels to hide a certain sharpness of skeleton. Yet it
may be beautiful, still; the poets derided the wrinkles of Diane de
Poitiers at the very moment when King Henry II idealized her with
the homage of a Don Quixote; an atmosphere of physical beauty and
decay hangs about the whole Renaissance.

One cannot push these resemblances too far, even for the twelfth
century and the old tower. Exactly what date the old tower
represents, as a social symbol, is a question that might be as much
disputed as the beauty of Diane de Poitiers, and yet half the
interest of architecture consists in the sincerity of its reflection
of the society that builds. In mere time, by actual date, the old
tower represents the second crusade, and when, in 1150, Saint
Bernard was elected chief of that crusade in this very cathedral,--
or rather, in the cathedral of 1120, which was burned,--the workmen
were probably setting in mortar the stones of the fleche as we now
see them; yet the fleche does not represent Saint Bernard in
feeling, for Saint Bernard held the whole array of church-towers in
horror as signs merely of display, wealth and pride. The fleche
rather represents Abbot Suger of Saint-Denis, Abbot Peter the
Venerable of Cluny, Abbot Abelard of Saint-Gildas-de-Rhuys, and
Queen Eleanor of Guienne, who had married Louis-le-Jeune in 1137;
who had taken the cross from Saint Bernard in 1147; who returned
from the Holy Land in 1149; and who compelled Saint Bernard to
approve her divorce in 1152. Eleanor and Saint Bernard were
centuries apart, yet they lived at the same time and in the same
church. Speaking exactly, the old tower represents neither of them;
the new tower itself is hardly more florid than Eleanor was; perhaps
less so, if one can judge from the fashions of the court-dress of
her time. The old tower is almost Norman, while Eleanor was wholly
Gascon, and Gascony was always florid without being always correct.
The new tower, if it had been built in 1150, like the old one, would
have expressed Eleanor perfectly, even in height and apparent effort
to dwarf its mate, except that Eleanor dwarfed her husband without
an effort, and both in art and in history the result lacked harmony.

Be the contrast what it may, it does not affect the fact that no
other church in France has two spires that need be discussed in
comparison with these. Indeed, no other cathedral of the same class
has any spires at all, and this superiority of Chartres gave most of
its point to a saying that "with the spires of Chartres, the choir
of Beauvais, the nave of Amiens, and the facade of Rheims," one
could make a perfect church--for us tourists.

The towers have taken much time, though they are the least religious
and least complicated part of church architecture, and in no way
essential to the church; indeed, Saint Bernard thought them an
excrescence due to pride and worldliness, and this is merely Saint
Bernard's way of saying that they were an ornament created to
gratify the artistic sense of beauty. Beautiful as they are, one's
eyes must drop at last down to the church itself. If the spire
symbolizes aspiration, the door symbolizes the way; and the portal
of Chartres is the type of French doors; it stands first in the
history of Gothic art; and, in the opinion of most Gothic artists,
first in the interest of all art, though this is no concern of ours.
Here is the Way to Eternal Life as it was seen by the Church and the
Art of the first crusade!

The fortune of this monument has been the best attested Miracle de
la Vierge in the long list of the Virgin's miracles, for it comes
down, practically unharmed, through what may with literal accuracy
be called the jaws of destruction and the flames of hell. Built some
time in the first half of the twelfth century, it passed, apparently
unscathed, through the great fire of 1194 which burnt out the church
behind, and even the timber interior of the towers in front of it.
Owing to the enormous mass of timber employed in the structure of
the great churches, these recurrent fires were as destructive as
fire can be made, yet not only the portals with their statuary and
carving, but also the lancet windows with their glass, escaped the
flames; and, what is almost equally strange, escaped also the hand
of the builder afterwards, who, if he had resembled other
architects, would have made a new front of his own, but who, with
piety unexampled, tenderly took the old stones down, one by one, and
replaced them forty feet in advance of their old position. The
English wars and the wars of religion brought new dangers, sieges,
and miseries; the revolution of 1792 brought actual rapine and
waste; boys have flung stones at the saints; architects have wreaked
their taste within and without; fire after fire has calcined the
church vaults; the worst wrecker of all, the restorer of the
nineteenth century, has prowled about it; yet the porch still
stands, mutilated but not restored, burned but not consumed, as
eloquent a witness to the power and perfections of Our Lady as it
was seven hundred years ago, and perhaps more impressive.

You will see portals and porches more or less of the same period
elsewhere in many different places,--at Paris, Le Mans, Sens, Autun,
Vezelay, Clermont-Ferrand, Moissac, Arles,--a score of them; for the
same piety has protected them more than once; but you will see no
other so complete or so instructive, and you may search far before
you will find another equally good in workmanship. Study of the
Chartres portal covers all the rest. The feeling and motive of all
are nearly the same, or vary only to suit the character of the
patron saint; and the point of all is that this feeling is the
architectural child of the first crusade. At Chartres one can read
the first crusade in the portal, as at Mont-Saint-Michel in the
Aquilon and the promenoir.

The Abbe Bulteau gives reason for assuming the year 1117 as the
approximate date of the sculpture about the west portal, and you saw
at Mont-Saint-Michel, in the promenoir of Abbot Roger II, an
accurately dated work of the same decade; but whatever the date of
the plan, the actual work and its spirit belong to 1145 or
thereabouts, Some fifty years had passed since the crusaders
streamed through Constantinople to Antioch and Jerusalem, and they
were daily going and returning. You can see the ideas they brought
back with the relics and missals and enamels they bought in
Byzantium. Over the central door is the Christ, which might be
sculptured after a Byzantine enamel, with its long nimbus or aureole
or glory enclosing the whole figure. Over the left door is an
Ascension, bearing the same stamp; and over the right door, the
seated Virgin, with her crown and her two attendant archangels, is
an empress. Here is the Church, the Way, and the Life of the twelfth
century that we have undertaken to feel, if not to understand!

First comes the central doorway, and above it is the glory of
Christ, as the church at Chartres understood Christ in the year
1150; for the glories of Christ were many, and the Chartres Christ
is one. Whatever Christ may have been in other churches, here, on
this portal, he offers himself to his flock as the herald of
salvation alone. Among all the imagery of these three doorways,
there is no hint of fear, punishment, or damnation, and this is the
note of the whole time. Before 1200, the Church seems not to have
felt the need of appealing habitually to terror; the promise of hope
and happiness was enough; even the portal at Autun, which displays a
Last Judgment, belonged to Saint Lazarus the proof and symbol of
resurrection. A hundred years later, every church portal showed
Christ not as Saviour but as Judge, and He presided over a Last
Judgment at Bourges and Amiens, and here on the south portal, where
the despair of the damned is the evident joy of the artist, if it is
not even sometimes a little his jest, which is worse. At Chartres
Christ is identified with His Mother, the spirit of love and grace,
and His Church is the Church Triumphant.

Not only is fear absent; there is not even a suggestion of pain;
there is not a martyr with the symbol of his martyrdom; and what is
still more striking, in the sculptured life of Christ, from the
Nativity to the Ascension, which adorns the capitals of the columns,
the single scene that has been omitted is the Crucifixion. There, as
everywhere in this portal, the artists seem actually to have gone
out of their way in order to avoid a suggestion of suffering. They
have pictured Christ and His Mother in all the other events of their
lives; they have represented evangelists; apostles; the twenty-four
old men of the Apocalypse; saints, prophets, kings, queens, and
princes, by the score; the signs of the zodiac, and even the seven
liberal arts: grammar, rhetoric, dialectics, arithmetic, geometry,
astronomy, and music; everything is there except misery.

Perhaps Our Lady of Chartres was known to be peculiarly gracious and
gentle, and this may partially account also for the extreme
popularity of her shrine; but whatever the reason, her church was
clearly intended to show only this side of her nature, and to
impress it on her Son. You can see it in the grave and gracious face
and attitude of the Christ, raising His hand to bless you as you
enter His kingdom; in the array of long figures which line the
entrance to greet you as you pass; in the expression of majesty and
mercy of the Virgin herself on her throne above the southern
doorway; never once are you regarded as a possible rebel, or
traitor, or a stranger to be treated with suspicion, or as a child
to be impressed by fear.  Equally distinct, perhaps even more
emphatic, is the sculptor's earnestness to make you feel, without
direct insistence, that you are entering the Court of the Queen of
Heaven who is one with her Son and His Church. The central door
always bore the name of the "Royal Door," because it belonged to the
celestial majesty of Christ, and naturally bears the stamp of
royalty; but the south door belongs to the Virgin and to us. Stop a
moment to see how she receives us, remembering, or trying to
remember, that to the priests and artists who designed the portal,
and to the generations that went on the first and second crusades,
the Virgin in her shrine was at least as living, as real, as
personal an empress as the Basilissa at Constantinople!

On the lintel immediately above the doorway is a succession of small
groups: first, the Annunciation; Mary stands to receive the
Archangel Gabriel, who comes to announce to her that she is chosen
to be the Mother of God. The second is the Visitation, and in this
scene also Mary stands, but she already wears a crown; at least, the
Abbe Bulteau says so, although time has dealt harshly with it. Then,
in the centre, follows the Nativity; Mary lies on a low bed,
beneath, or before, a sort of table or cradle on which lies the
Infant, while Saint Joseph stands at the bed's head. Then the angel
appears, directing three shepherds to the spot, filling the rest of
the space.

In correct theology, the Virgin ought not to be represented in bed,
for she could not suffer like ordinary women, but her palace at
Chartres is not much troubled by theology, and to her, as empress-
mother, the pain of child-birth was a pleasure which she wanted her
people to share. The Virgin of Chartres was the greatest of all
queens, but the most womanly of women, as we shall see; and her
double character is sustained throughout her palace. She was also
intellectually gifted in the highest degree. In the upper zone you
see her again, at the Presentation in the Temple, supporting the
Child Jesus on the altar, while Simeon aids. Other figures bring
offerings. The voussures of the arch above contain six archangels,
with curious wings, offering worship to the Infant and His Imperial
Mother. Below are the signs of the zodiac; the Fishes and the Twins.
The rest of the arch is filled by the seven liberal arts, with
Pythagoras, Aristotle, Cicero, Euclid, Nicomachus, Ptolemy, and
Priscian as their representatives, testifying to the Queen's
intellectual superiority.

In the centre sits Mary, with her crown on her head and her Son in
her lap, enthroned, receiving the homage of heaven and earth; of all
time, ancient and modern; of all thought, Christian and Pagan; of
all men, and all women; including, if you please, your homage and
mine, which she receives without question, as her due; which she
cannot be said to claim, because she is above making claims; she is
empress. Her left hand bore a sceptre; her right supported the
Child, Who looks directly forward, repeating the Mother's attitude,
and raises His right hand to bless, while His left rests on the orb
of empire. She and her Child are one.

All this was noble beyond the nobility of man, but its earthly form
was inspired by the Empire rather than by the petty royalty of
Louis-le-Gros or his pious queen Alix of Savoy. One mark of the
period is the long, oval nimbus; another is the imperial character
of the Virgin; a third is her unity with the Christ which is the
Church. To us, the mark that will distinguish the Virgin of
Chartres, or, if you prefer, the Virgin of the Crusades, is her
crown and robes and throne. According to M. Rohault de Fleury's
"Iconographie de la Sainte Vierge" (11, 62), the Virgin's headdress
and ornaments had been for long ages borrowed from the costume of
the Empresses of the East in honour of the Queen of Heaven. No doubt
the Virgin of Chartres was the Virgin recognized by the Empress
Helena, mother of Constantine, and was at least as old as Helena's
pilgrimage to Jerusalem in 326. She was not a Western, feudal queen,
nor was her Son a feudal king; she typified an authority which the
people wanted, and the fiefs feared; the Pax Romana; the omnipotence
of God in government. In all Europe, at that time, there was no
power able to enforce justice or to maintain order, and no symbol of
such a power except Christ and His Mother and the Imperial Crown.

This idea is very different from that which was the object of our
pilgrimage to Mont-Saint-Michel; but since all Chartres is to be one
long comment upon it, you can lay the history of the matter on the
shelf for study at your leisure, if you ever care to study into the
weary details of human illusions and disappointments, while here we
pray to the Virgin, and absorb ourselves in the art, which is your
pleasure and which shall not teach either a moral or a useful
lesson. The Empress Mary is receiving you at her portal, and whether
you are an impertinent child, or a foolish old peasant-woman, or an
insolent prince, or a more insolent tourist, she receives you with
the same dignity; in fact, she probably sees very little difference
between you. An empress of Russia to-day would probably feel little
difference in the relative rank of her subjects, and the Virgin was
empress over emperors, patriarchs, and popes. Any one, however
ignorant, can feel the sustained dignity of the sculptor's work,
which is asserted with all the emphasis he could put into it. Not
one of these long figures which line the three doorways but is an
officer or official in attendance on the Empress or her Son, and
bears the stamp of the Imperial Court. They are mutilated, but, if
they have been treated with indignity, so were often their temporal
rivals, torn to pieces, trampled on, to say nothing of being merely
beheaded or poisoned, in the Sacred Palace and the Hippodrome,
without losing that peculiar Oriental dignity of style which seems
to drape the least dignified attitudes. The grand air of the twelfth
century is something like that of a Greek temple; you can, if you
like, hammer every separate stone to pieces, but you cannot hammer
out the Greek style. There were originally twenty-four of these
statues, and nineteen remain. Beginning at the north end, and
passing over the first figure, which carries a head that does not
belong to it, notice the second, a king with a long sceptre of
empire, a book of law, and robes of Byzantine official splendour.
Beneath his feet is a curious woman's head with heavy braids of
hair, and a crown. The third figure is a queen, charming as a woman,
but particularly well-dressed, and with details of ornament and
person elaborately wrought; worth drawing, if one could only draw;
worth photographing with utmost care to include the strange support
on which she stands: a monkey, two dragons, a dog, a basilisk with a
dog's head. Two prophets follow--not so interesting;--prophets
rarely interest. Then comes the central bay: two queens who claim
particular attention, then a prophet, then a saint next the doorway;
then on the southern jamb-shafts, another saint, a king, a queen,
and another king. Last comes the southern bay, the Virgin's own, and
there stands first a figure said to be a youthful king; then a
strongly sculptured saint; next the door a figure called also a
king, but so charmingly delicate in expression that the robes alone
betray his sex; and who this exquisite young aureoled king may have
been who stands so close to the Virgin, at her right hand, no one
can now reveal. Opposite him is a saint who may be, or should be,
the Prince of the Apostles; then a bearded king with a broken
sceptre, standing on two dragons; and, at last, a badly mutilated
queen.

These statues are the Eginetan marbles of French art; from them all
modern French sculpture dates, or ought to date. They are singularly
interesting; as naif as the smile on the faces of the Greek
warriors, but no more grotesque than they. You will see Gothic
grotesques in plenty, and you cannot mistake the two intentions; the
twelfth century would sooner have tempted the tortures of every
feudal dungeon in Europe than have put before the Virgin's eyes any
figure that could be conceived as displeasing to her. These figures
are full of feeling, and saturated with worship; but what is most to
our purpose is the feminine side which they proclaim and insist
upon. Not only the number of the female figures, and their beauty,
but also the singularly youthful beauty of several of the males; the
superb robes they wear; the expression of their faces and their
figures; the details of hair, stuffs, ornaments, jewels; the
refinement and feminine taste of the whole, are enough to startle
our interest if we recognize what meaning they had to the twelfth
century.

These figures looked stiff and long and thin and ridiculous to
enlightened citizens of the eighteenth century, but they were made
to fit the architecture; if you want to know what an enthusiast
thinks of them, listen to M. Huysmans's "Cathedral." "Beyond a
doubt, the most beautiful sculpture in the world is in this place."
He can hardly find words to express his admiration for the queens,
and particularly for the one on the right of the central doorway.
"Never in any period has a more expressive figure been thus wrought
by the genius of man; it is the chef-d'oeuvre of infantile grace and
holy candour .... She is the elder sister of the Prodigal Son, the
one of whom Saint Luke does not speak, but who, if she existed,
would have pleaded the cause of the absent, and insisted, with the
father, that he should kill the fatted calf at his son's return."
The idea is charming if you are the returning son, as many twelfth-
century pilgrims must have thought themselves; but, in truth, the
figure is that of a queen; an Eleanor of Guienne; her position there
is due to her majesty, which bears witness to the celestial majesty
of the Court in which she is only a lady-in-waiting: and she is
hardly more humanly fascinating than her brother, the youthful king
at the Virgin's right hand, who has nothing of the Prodigal Son, but
who certainly has much of Lohengrin, or even--almost--Tristan.

The Abbe Bulteau has done his best to name these statues, but the
names would be only in your way. That the sculptor meant them for a
Queen of Sheba or a King of Israel has little to do with their
meaning in the twelfth century, when the people were much more
likely to have named them after the queens and kings they knew. The
whole charm lies for us in the twelfth-century humanity of Mary and
her Court; not in the scriptural names under which it was made
orthodox. Here, in this western portal, it stands as the crusaders
of 1100-50 imagined it; but by walking round the church to the porch
over the entrance to the north transept, you shall see it again as
Blanche of Castile and Saint Louis imagined it, a hundred years
later, so that you will know better whether the earthly attributes
are exaggerated or untrue.

Porches, like steeples, were rather a peculiarity of French
churches, and were studied, varied, one might even say petted, by
French architects to an extent hardly attempted elsewhere; but among
all the French porches, those of Chartres are the most famous. There
are two: one on the north side, devoted to the Virgin; the other, on
the south, devoted to the Son, "The mass of intelligence, knowledge,
acquaintance with effects, practical experience, expended on these
two porches of Chartres," says Viollet-le-Duc, "would be enough to
establish the glory of a whole generation of artists." We begin with
the north porch because it belonged to the Virgin; and it belonged
to the Virgin because the north was cold, bleak, sunless, windy, and
needed warmth, peace, affection, and power to protect against the
assaults of Satan and his swarming devils. There the all-suffering
but the all-powerful Mother received other mothers who suffered like
her, but who, as a rule, were not powerful. Traditionally in the
primitive church, the northern porch belonged to the women. When
they needed help, they came here, because it was the only place in
this world or in any other where they had much hope of finding even
a reception. See how Mary received them!

The porch extends the whole width of the transept, about one hundred
and twenty feet (37.65 metres), divided into three bays some twenty
feet deep, and covered with a stone vaulted roof supported on piers
outside. Begun toward 1215 under Philip Augustus, the architectural
part was finished toward 1225 under Louis VIII; and after his death
in 1226, the decorative work and statuary were carried on under the
regency of his widow, Blanche of Castile, and through the reign of
her son, Saint Louis (1235-70), until about 1275, when the work was
completed by Philip the Hardy. A gift of the royal family of France,
all the members of the family seem to have had a share in building
it, and several of their statues have been supposed to adorn it. The
walls are lined--the porch, in a religious sense, is inhabited--by
more than seven hundred figures, great and small, all, in one way or
another, devoted to the glory of the Queen of Heaven. You will see
that a hundred years have converted the Byzantine Empress into a
French Queen, as the same years had converted Alix of Savoy into
Blanche of Castile; but the note of majesty is the same, and the
assertion of power is, if possible, more emphatic.

The highest note is struck at once, in the central bay, over the
door, where you see the Coronation of Mary as Queen of Heaven, a
favourite subject in art from very early times, and the dominant
idea of Mary's church. You see Mary on the left, seated on her
throne; on the right, seated on a precisely similar throne, is
Christ, Who holds up His right hand apparently to bless, since Mary
already bears the crown. Mary bends forward, with her hands raised
toward her Son, as though in gratitude or adoration or prayer, but
certainly not in an attitude of feudal homage. On either side, an
archangel swings a censer.

On the lintel below, on the left, is represented the death of Mary;
on the right, Christ carries, in the folds of His mantle, the soul
of Mary in the form of a little child, and at the same time blesses
the body which is carried away by angels--The Resurrection of Mary.

Below the lintel, supporting it, and dividing the doorway in halves,
is the trumeau,--the central pier,--a new part of the portal which
was unknown to the western door. Usually in the Virgin's churches,
as at Rheims, or Amiens or Paris, the Virgin herself, with her Son
in her arms, stands against this pier, trampling on the dragon with
the woman's head. Here, not the Virgin with the Christ, but her
mother Saint Anne stands, with the infant Virgin in her arms; while
beneath is, or was, Saint Joachim, her husband, among his flocks,
receiving from the Archangel Gabriel the annunciation.

So at the entrance the Virgin declares herself divinely Queen in her
own right; divinely born; divinely resurrected from death, on the
third day; seated by divine right on the throne of Heaven, at the
right hand of God, the Son, with Whom she is one.

Unless we feel this assertion of divine right in the Queen of
Heaven, apart from the Trinity, yet one with It, Chartres is
unintelligible. The extreme emphasis laid upon it at the church door
shows what the church means within. Of course, the assertion was not
strictly orthodox; perhaps, since we are not members of the Church,
we might be unnoticed and unrebuked if we start by suspecting that
the worship of the Virgin never was strictly orthodox; but Chartres
was hers before it ever belonged to the Church, and, like Lourdes in
our own time, was a shrine peculiarly favoured by her presence. The
mere fact that it was a bishopric had little share in its sanctity.
The bishop was much more afraid of Mary than he was of any Church
Council ever held.

Critics are doing their best to destroy the peculiar personal
interest of this porch, but tourists and pilgrims may be excused for
insisting on their traditional rights here, since the porch is
singular, even in the thirteenth century, for belonging entirely to
them and the royal family of France, subject only to the Virgin.
True artists, turned critics, think also less of rules than of
values, and no ignorant public can be trusted to join the critics in
losing temper judiciously over the date or correctness of a portrait
until they knew something of its motives and merits. The public has
always felt certain that some of the statues which stand against the
outer piers of this porch are portraits, and they see no force in
the objection that such decoration was not customary in the Church.
Many things at Chartres were not customary in the Church, although
the Church now prefers not to dwell on them. Therefore the student
returns to Viollet-le-Duc with his usual delight at finding at least
one critic whose sense of values is stronger than his sense of rule:
"Each statue," he says in his "Dictionary" (111, 166), "possesses
its personal character which remains graven on the memory like the
recollection of a living being whom one has known .... A large part
of the statues in the porches of Notre Dame de Chartres, as well as
of the portals of the Cathedrals of Amiens and Rheims, possess these
individual qualities, and this it is which explains why these
statues produce on the crowd so vivid an impression that it names
them, knows them, and attaches to each of them an idea, often a
legend."

Probably the crowd did so from the first moment they saw the
statues, and with good reason. At all events, they have attached to
two of the most individual figures on the north porch, two names,
perhaps the best known in France in the year 1226, but which since
the year 1300 can have conveyed only the most shadowy meaning to any
but pure antiquarians. The group is so beautiful as to be given a
plate to itself in the "Monographie" (number 26), as representing
Philip Hurepel and his wife Mahaut de Boulogne. So little could any
crowd, or even any antiquarian, at any time within six hundred years
have been likely to pitch on just these persons to associate with
Blanche of Castile in any kind of family unity, that the mere
suggestion seems wild; yet Blanche outlived Pierre by nearly twenty
years, and her power over this transept and porch ended only with
her death as regent in 1252.

Philippe, nicknamed Hurepel,--Boarskin,--was a "fils deFrance,"
whose father, Philip Augustus, had serious, not to say fatal,
difficulties with the Church about the legality of his marriage,
and was forced to abandon his wife, who died in 1201, after giving
birth to Hurepel in 1200. The child was recognized as legitimate,
and stood next to the throne, after his half-brother Louis, who was
thirteen years older. Almost at his birth he was affianced to
Mahaut, Countess of Boulogne, and the marriage was celebrated in
1216. Rich and strongly connected, Hurepel naturally thought
himself--and was--head of the royal family next to the King, and
when his half-brother, Louis VIII, died in 1226, leaving only a son,
afterwards Saint Louis, a ten-year-old boy, to succeed, Hurepel very
properly claimed the guardianship of his infant nephew, and deeply
resented being excluded by Queen Blanche from what he regarded--
perhaps with justice--as his right. Nearly all the great lords and
the members of the royal family sided with him, and entered into a
civil war against Blanche, at the moment when these two porches of
Chartres were building, between 1228 and 1230. The two greatest
leaders of the conspiracy were Hurepel, whom we are expected to
recognize on the pier of this porch, and Pierre Mauclerc, of
Brittany and Dreux, whom we have no choice but to admit on the
trumeau of the other. In those days every great feudal lord was more
or less related by blood to the Crown, and although Blanche of
Castile was also a cousin as well as queen-mother, they hated her as
a Spanish intruder with such hatred as men felt in an age when
passions were real.

That these two men should be found here, associated with Blanche in
the same work, at the same time, under the same roof, is a fantastic
idea, and students can feel in this political difficulty a much
stronger objection to admitting Hurepel to Queen Blanche's porch
than any supposed rule of Church custom; yet the first privilege of
tourist ignorance is the right to see, or try to see, their
thirteenth century with thirteenth-century eyes. Passing by the
statues of Philip and Mahaut, and stepping inside the church door,
almost the first figure that the visitor sees on lifting his eyes to
the upper windows of the transept is another figure of Philippe
Hurepel, in glass, on his knees, with clasped hands, before an
altar; and to prevent possibility of mistake his blazoned coat bears
the words: "Phi: Conte de Bolone." Apparently he is the donor, for,
in the rose above, he sits in arms on a white horse with a shield
bearing the blazon of France. Obliged to make his peace with the
Queen in 1230, Hurepel died in 1233 or 1234, while Blanche was still
regent, and instantly took his place as of right side by side with
Blanche's castles of Castile among the great benefactors of the
church.

Beneath the next rose is Mahaut herself, as donor, bearing her
husband's arms of France, suggesting that the windows must have been
given together, probably before Philip's death in 1233, since Mahaut
was married again in 1238, this time to Alfonso of Portugal, who
repudiated her in 1249, and left her to die in her own town of
Boulogne in 1258. Lastly, in the third window of the series, is her
daughter Jeanne,--"Iehenne,"--who was probably born before 1220, and
who was married in 1236 to Gaucher de Chatillon, one of the greatest
warriors of his time. Jeanne also--according to the Abbe Bulteau
(111, 225)--bears the arms of her father and mother; which seems to
suggest that she gave this window before her marriage. These three
windows, therefore, have the air of dating at least as early as 1233
when Philip Hurepel died, while next them follow two more roses, and
the great rose of France, presumably of the same date, all scattered
over with the castles of Queen Blanche. The motive of the porch
outside is repeated in the glass, as it should be, and as the Saint
Anne of the Rose of France, within, repeats the Saint Anne on the
trumeau of the portal. The personal stamp of the royal family is
intense, but the stamp of the Virgin's personality is intenser
still. In the presence of Mary, not only did princes hide their
quarrels, but they also put on their most courteous manners and the
most refined and even austere address. The Byzantine display of
luxury and adornment had vanished. All the figures suggest the
sanctity of the King and his sister Isabel; the court has the air of
a convent; but the idea of Mary's majesty is asserted through it
all. The artists and donors and priests forgot nothing which, in
their judgment, could set off the authority, elegance, and
refinement of the Queen of Heaven; even the young ladies-in-waiting
are there, figured by the twelve Virtues and the fourteen
Beatitudes; and, indeed, though men are plenty and some of them are
handsome, women give the tone, the charm, and mostly the
intelligence. The Court of Mary is feminine, and its charms are
Grace and Love; perhaps even more grace than love, in a social
sense, if you look at Beauty and Friendship among Beatitudes.

M. Huysmans insists that this sculpture is poor in comparison with
his twelfth-century Prodigal Daughter, and I hope you can enter into
the spirit of his enthusiasm; but other people prefer the
thirteenth-century work, and think it equals the best Greek.
Approaching, or surpassing this,--as you like,--is the sculpture you
will see at Rheims, of the same period, and perhaps the same hands;
but, for our purpose, the Queen of Sheba, here in the right-hand
bay, is enough, because you can compare it on the spot with M.
Huysmans's figure on the western portal, which may also be a Queen
of Sheba, who, as spouse of Solomon, typified the Church, and
therefore prefigured Mary herself. Both are types of Court beauty
and grace, one from the twelfth century, the other from the
thirteenth, and you can prefer which you please; but you want to
bear in mind that each, in her time, pleased the Virgin. You can
even take for a settled fact that these were the types of feminine
beauty and grace which pleased the Virgin beyond all others.

The purity of taste, feeling, and manners which stamps the art of
these centuries, as it did the Court of Saint Louis and his mother,
is something you will not wholly appreciate till you reach the
depravity of the Valois; but still you can see how exquisite the
Virgin's taste was, and how pure. You can also see how she shrank
from the sight of pain. Here, in the central bay, next to King
David, who stands at her right hand, is the great figure of Abraham
about to sacrifice Isaac. If there is one subject more revolting
than another to a woman who typifies the Mother, it is this subject
of Abraham and Isaac, with its compound horror of masculine
stupidity and brutality. The sculptor has tried to make even this
motive a pleasing one. He has placed Abraham against the column in
the correct harshness of attitude, with his face turned aside and
up, listening for his orders; but the little Isaac, with hands and
feet tied, leans like a bundle of sticks against his father's knee
with an expression of perfect faith and confidence, while Abraham's
left hand quiets him and caresses the boy's face, with a movement
that must have gone straight to Mary's heart, for Isaac always
prefigured Christ.

The glory of Mary was not one of terror, and her porch contains no
appeal to any emotion but those of her perfect grace. If we were to
stay here for weeks, we should find only this idea worked into every
detail. The Virgin of the thirteenth century is no longer an
Empress; she is Queen Mother,--an idealized Blanche of Castile;--too
high to want, or suffer, or to revenge, or to aspire, but not too
high to pity, to punish, or to pardon. The women went to her porch
for help as naturally as babies to their mother; and the men, in her
presence, fell on their knees because they feared her intelligence
and her anger.

Not that all the men showed equal docility! We must go next, round
the church, to the south porch, which was the gift of Pierre
Mauclerc, Comte de Dreux, another member of the royal family, great-
grandson of Louis VI, and therefore second cousin to Louis VIII and
Philip Hurepel. Philip Augustus, his father's first cousin, married
the young man, in 1212, to Alix, heiress of the Duchy of Brittany,
and this marriage made him one of the most powerful vassals of the
Crown. He joined Philip Hurepel in resisting the regency of Queen
Blanche in 1227, and Blanche, after a long struggle, caused him to
be deposed in 1230. Pierre was obliged to submit, and was pardoned.
Until 1236, he remained in control of the Duchy of Brittany, but
then was obliged to surrender his power to his son, and turned his
turbulent activity against the infidels in Syria and Egypt, dying in
1250, on his return from Saint Louis's disastrous crusade. Pierre de
Dreux was a masculine character,--a bad cleric, as his nickname
Mauclerc testified, but a gentleman, a soldier, and a scholar, and,
what is more to our purpose, a man of taste. He built the south
porch at Chartres, apparently as a memorial of his marriage with
Alix in 1212, and the statuary is of the same date with that of the
north porch, but, like that, it was not finished when Pierre died in
1250.

One would like to know whether Pierre preferred to take the southern
entrance, or whether he was driven there by the royal claim to the
Virgin's favour. The southern porch belongs to the Son, as the
northern belongs to the Mother. Pierre never showed much deference
to women, and probably felt more at his ease under the protection of
the Son than of Mary; but in any case he showed as clearly as
possible what he thought on this question of persons. To Pierre,
Christ was first, and he asserted his opinion as emphatically as
Blanche asserted hers.

Which porch is the more beautiful is a question for artists to
discuss and decide, if they can. Either is good enough for us, whose
pose is ignorance, and whose pose is strictly correct; but apart
from its beauty or its art, there is also the question of feeling,
of motive, which puts the Porche de Dreux in contrast with the
Porche de France, and this is wholly within our competence. At the
outset, the central bay displays, above the doorway, Christ, on a
throne, raising His hands to show the stigmata, the wounds which
were the proof of man's salvation. At His right hand sits the
Mother,--without her crown; on His left, in equal rank with the
Mother, sits Saint John the Evangelist. Both are in the same
attitude of supplication as intercessors; there is no distinction in
rank or power between Mary and John, since neither has any power
except what Christ gives them. Pierre did not, indeed, put the
Mother on her knees before the Son, as you can see her at Amiens and
in later churches,--certainly bad taste in Mary's own palace; but he
allowed her no distinction which is not her strict right. The angels
above and around bear the symbols of the Passion; they are
unconscious of Mary's presence; they are absorbed in the perfections
of the Son. On the lintel just below is the Last Judgment, where
Saint Michael reappears, weighing the souls of the dead which Mary
and John above are trying to save from the strict justice of Christ.
The whole melodrama of Church terrors appears after the manner of
the thirteenth century, on this church door, without regard to
Mary's feelings; and below, against the trumeau, stands the great
figure of Christ,--the whole Church,--trampling on the lion and
dragon. On either side of the doorway stand six great figures of the
Apostles asserting themselves as the columns of the Church, and
looking down at us with an expression no longer calculated to calm
our fears or encourage extravagant hopes. No figure on this porch
suggests a portrait or recalls a memory.

Very grand, indeed, is this doorway; dignified, impressive, and
masculine to a degree seldom if ever equalled in art; and the left
bay rivals it. There, in the tympanum, Christ appears again;
standing; bearing on His head the crown royal; alone, except for the
two angels who adore, and surrounded only by the martyrs, His
witnesses. The right bay is devoted to Saint Nicholas and the Saints
Confessors who bear witness to the authority of Christ in faith. Of
the twenty-eight great figures, the officers of the royal court, who
make thus the strength of the Church beneath Christ, not one is a
woman. The masculine orthodoxy of Pierre Mauclerc has spared neither
sex nor youth; all are of a maturity which chills the blood,
excepting two, whose youthful beauty is heightened by the severity
of their surroundings, so that the Abbe Bulteau makes bold even to
say that "the two statues of Saint George and of Saint Theodore may
be regarded as the most beautiful of our cathedral, perhaps even as
the two masterpieces of statuary at the end of the thirteenth
century." On that point, let every one follow his taste; but one
reflection at least seems to force itself on the mind in comparing
these twenty-eight figures. Certainly the sword, however it may
compare with the pen in other directions, is in art more powerful
than all the pens, or volumes, or crosiers ever made. Your "Golden
Legend" and Roman Breviary are here the only guide-books worth
consulting, and the stories of young George and Theodore stand there
recorded; as their miracle under the walls of Antioch, during the
first crusade, is matter of history; but among these magnificent
figures one detects at a glance that it is not the religion or
sacred purity of the subject, or even the miracles or the
sufferings, which inspire passion for Saint George and Saint
Theodore, under the Abbe's robe; it is with him, as with the plain
boy and girl, simply youth, with lance and sword and shield.

These two figures stand in the outer embrasures of the left bay,
where they can be best admired, and perhaps this arrangement shows
what Perron de Dreux, as he was commonly called, loved most, in his
heart of hearts; but elsewhere, even in this porch, he relaxed his
severity, and became at times almost gracious to women. Good judges
have, indeed, preferred this porch to the northern one; but, be that
as you please, it contains seven hundred and eighty-three figures,
large and small, to serve for comparison. Among these, the female
element has its share, though not a conspicuous one; and even the
Virgin gets her rights, though not beside her Son. To see her, you
must stand outside in the square and, with a glass, look at the
central pignon, or gable, of the porch. There, just above the point
of the arch, you will see Mary on her throne, crowned, wearing her
royal robes, and holding the Child on her knees, with the two
archangels on either side offering incense. Pierre de Dreux, or some
one else, admitted at last that she was Queen Regent, although
evidently not eager to do so; and if you turn your glass up to the
gable of the transept itself, above the great rose and the colonnade
over it, you can see another and a colossal statue of the Virgin,
but standing, with the Child on her left arm. She seems to be
crowned, and to hold the globe in her right hand; but the Abbe
Bulteau says it is a flower. The two archangels are still there.
This figure is thought to have been a part of the finishing
decoration added by Philip the Fair in 1304.

In theology, Pierre de Dreux seems to show himself a more learned
clerk than his cousins of France, and, as an expression of the
meaning the church of Mary should externally display, the Porche de
Dreux, if not as personal, is as energetic as the Porche de France,
or the western portal. As we pass into the Cathedral, under the
great Christ, on the trumeau, you must stop to look at Pierre
himself. A bridegroom, crowned with flowers on his wedding-day, he
kneels in prayer, while two servants distribute bread to the poor.
Below, you see him again, seated with his wife Alix before a table
with one loaf, assisting at the meal they give to the poor. Pierre
kneels to God; he and his wife bow before the Virgin and the poor;--
but not to Queen Blanche!

Now let us enter!--



CHAPTER VI

THE VIRGIN OF CHARTRES

We must take ten minutes to accustom our eyes to the light, and we
had better use them to seek the reason why we come to Chartres
rather than to Rheims or Amiens or Bourges, for the cathedral that
fills our ideal. The truth is, there are several reasons; there
generally are, for doing the things we like; and after you have
studied Chartres to the ground, and got your reasons settled, you
will never find an antiquarian to agree with you; the architects
will probably listen to you with contempt; and even these excellent
priests, whose kindness is great, whose patience is heavenly, and
whose good opinion you would so gladly gain, will turn from you with
pain, if not with horror. The Gothic is singular in this; one seems
easily at home in the Renaissance; one is not too strange in the
Byzantine; as for the Roman, it is ourselves; and we could walk
blindfolded through every chink and cranny of the Greek mind; all
these styles seem modern, when we come close to them; but the Gothic
gets away. No two men think alike about it, and no woman agrees with
either man. The Church itself never agreed about it, and the
architects agree even less than the priests. To most minds it casts
too many shadows; it wraps itself in mystery; and when people talk
of mystery, they commonly mean fear. To others, the Gothic seems
hoary with age and decrepitude, and its shadows mean death. What is
curious to watch is the fanatical conviction of the Gothic
enthusiast, to whom the twelfth century means exuberant youth, the
eternal child of Wordsworth, over whom its immortality broods like
the day; it is so simple and yet so complicated; it sees so much and
so little; it loves so many toys and cares for so few necessities;
its youth is so young, its age so old, and its youthful yearning for
old thought is so disconcerting, like the mysterious senility of the
baby that--

    Deaf and silent, reads the eternal deep,
     Haunted forever by the eternal mind.


One need not take it more seriously than one takes the baby itself.
Our amusement is to play with it, and to catch its meaning in its
smile; and whatever Chartres maybe now, when young it was a smile.
To the Church, no doubt, its cathedral here has a fixed and
administrative meaning, which is the same as that of every other
bishop's seat and with which we have nothing whatever to do. To us,
it is a child's fancy; a toy-house to please the Queen of Heaven,--
to please her so much that she would be happy in it,--to charm her
till she smiled.

The Queen Mother was as majestic as you like; she was absolute; she
could be stern; she was not above being angry; but she was still a
woman, who loved grace, beauty, ornament,--her toilette, robes,
jewels;--who considered the arrangements of her palace with
attention, and liked both light and colour; who kept a keen eye on
her Court, and exacted prompt and willing obedience from king and
archbishops as well as from beggars and drunken priests. She
protected her friends and punished her enemies. She required space,
beyond what was known in the Courts of kings, because she was liable
at all times to have ten thousand people begging her for favours--
mostly inconsistent with law--and deaf to refusal. She was extremely
sensitive to neglect, to disagreeable impressions, to want of
intelligence in her surroundings. She was the greatest artist, as
she was the greatest philosopher and musician and theologist, that
ever lived on earth, except her Son, Who, at Chartres, is still an
Infant under her guardianship. Her taste was infallible; her
sentence eternally final. This church was built for her in this
spirit of simple-minded, practical, utilitarian faith,--in this
singleness of thought, exactly as a little girl sets up a doll-house
for her favourite blonde doll. Unless you can go back to your dolls,
you are out of place here. If you can go back to them, and get rid
for one small hour of the weight of custom, you shall see Chartres
in glory.

The palaces of earthly queens were hovels compared with these
palaces of the Queen of Heaven at Chartres, Paris, Laon, Noyon,
Rheim

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