The Project Gutenberg Etext of Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres
by Henry Adams
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Title: Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres
Author: Henry Adams
Release Date: October, 2003 [Etext #4584]
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The Project Gutenberg Etext of Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres
by Henry Adams
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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printed, jealously guarded volume should be withdrawn from its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,
Rheims, Amiens, Rouen, Bayeux, Coutances,--a list that might be
stretched into a volume. The nearest approach we have made to a
palace was the Merveille at Mont-Saint-Michel, but no Queen had a
palace equal to that. The Merveille was built, or designed, about
the year 1200; toward the year 1500, Louis XI built a great castle
at Loches in Touraine, and there Queen Anne de Bretagne had
apartments which still exist, and which we will visit. At Blois you
shall see the residence which served for Catherine de Medicis till
her death in 1589. Anne de Bretagne was trebly queen, and Catherine
de Medicis took her standard of comfort from the luxury of Florence.
At Versailles you can see the apartments which the queens of the
Bourbon line occupied through their century of magnificence. All put
together, and then trebled in importance, could not rival the
splendour of any single cathedral dedicated to Queen Mary in the
thirteenth century; and of them all, Chartres was built to be
peculiarly and exceptionally her delight.
One has grown so used to this sort of loose comparison, this
reckless waste of words, that one no longer adopts an idea unless it
is driven in with hammers of statistics and columns of figures. With
the irritating demand for literal exactness and perfectly straight
lines which lights up every truly American eye, you will certainly
ask when this exaltation of Mary began, and unless you get the
dates, you will doubt the facts. It is your own fault if they are
tiresome; you might easily read them all in the "Iconographie de la
Sainte Vierge," by M. Rohault de Fleury, published in 1878. You can
start at Byzantium with the Empress Helena in 326, or with the
Council of Ephesus in 431. You will find the Virgin acting as the
patron saint of Constantinople and of the Imperial residence, under
as many names as Artemis or Aphrodite had borne. As Godmother [word
in Greek] Deipara [word in Greek], Pathfinder [word in Greek],
afterwards gave to Murillo the subject of a famous painting, told
that once, when he was reciting before her statue the "Ave Maris
Stella," and came to the words, "Monstra te esse Matrem," the image,
pressing its breast, dropped on the lips of her servant three drops
of the milk which had nourished the Saviour. The same miracle, in
various forms, was told of many other persons, both saints and
sinners; but it made so much impression on the mind of the age that,
in the fourteenth century, Dante, seeking in Paradise for some
official introduction to the foot of the Throne, found no
intercessor with the Queen of Heaven more potent than Saint Bernard.
You can still read Bernard's hymns to the Virgin, and even his
sermons, if you like. To him she was the great mediator. In the eyes
of a culpable humanity, Christ was too sublime, too terrible, too
just, but not even the weakest human frailty could fear to approach
his Mother. Her attribute was humility; her love and pity were
infinite. "Let him deny your mercy who can say that he has ever
asked it in vain."
Saint Bernard was emotional and to a certain degree mystical, like
Adam de Saint-Victor, whose hymns were equally famous, but the
emotional saints and mystical poets were not by any means allowed to
establish exclusive rights to the Virgin's favour. Abelard was as
devoted as they were, and wrote hymns as well. Philosophy claimed
her, and Albert the Great, the head of scholasticism, the teacher of
Thomas Aquinas, decided in her favour the question: "Whether the
Blessed Virgin possessed perfectly the seven liberal arts." The
Church at Chartres had decided it a hundred years before by putting
the seven liberal arts next her throne, with Aristotle himself to
witness; but Albertus gave the reason: "I hold that she did, for it
is written, 'Wisdom has built herself a house, and has sculptured
seven columns.' That house is the blessed Virgin; the seven columns
are the seven liberal arts. Mary, therefore, had perfect mastery of
science." Naturally she had also perfect mastery of economics, and
most of her great churches were built in economic centres. The
guilds were, if possible, more devoted to her than the monks; the
bourgeoisie of Paris, Rouen, Amiens, Laon, spend money by millions
to gain her favour. Most surprising of all, the great military class
was perhaps the most vociferous. Of all inappropriate haunts for the
gentle, courteous, pitying Mary, a field of battle seems to be the
worst, if not distinctly blasphemous; yet the greatest French
warriors insisted on her leading them into battle, and in the actual
melee when men were killing each other, on every battle-field in
Europe, for at least five hundred years, Mary was present, leading
both sides. The battle-cry of the famous Constable du Guesclin was
"Notre-Dame-Guesclin"; "Notre-Dame-Coucy" was the cry of the great
Sires de Coucy; "Notre-Dame-Auxerre"; "Notre-Dame-Sancerre"; "Notre-
Dame-Hainault"; "Notre-Dame-Gueldres"; "Notre-Dame-Bourbon"; "Notre-
Dame-Bearn";--all well-known battle-cries. The King's own battle at
one time cried, "Notre-Dame-Saint-Denis-Montjoie"; the Dukes of
Burgundy cried, "Notre-Dame-Bourgogne"; and even the soldiers of the
Pope were said to cry, "Notre-Dame-Saint-Pierre."
The measure of this devotion, which proves to any religious American
mind, beyond possible cavil, its serious and practical reality, is
the money it cost. According to statistics, in the single century
between 1170 and 1270, the French built eighty cathedrals and nearly
five hundred churches of the cathedral class, which would have cost,
according to an estimate made in 1840, more than five thousand
millions to replace. Five thousand million francs is a thousand
million dollars, and this covered only the great churches of a
single century. The same scale of expenditure had been going on
since the year 1000, and almost every parish in France had rebuilt
its church in stone; to this day France is strewn with the ruins of
this architecture, and yet the still preserved churches of the
eleventh and twelfth centuries, among the churches that belong to
the Romanesque and Transition period, are numbered by hundreds until
they reach well into the thousands. The share of this capital which
was--if one may use a commercial figure--invested in the Virgin
cannot be fixed, any more than the total sum given to religious
objects between 1000 and 1300; but in a spiritual and artistic
sense, it was almost the whole, and expressed an intensity of
conviction never again reached by any passion, whether of religion,
of loyalty, of patriotism, or of wealth; perhaps never even
parallelled by any single economic effort, except in war. Nearly
every great church of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries belonged
to Mary, until in France one asks for the church of Notre Dame as
though it meant cathedral; but, not satisfied with this, she
contracted the habit of requiring in all churches a chapel of her
own, called in English the "Lady Chapel," which was apt to be as
large as the church but was always meant to be handsomer; and there,
behind the high altar, in her own private apartment, Mary sat,
receiving her innumerable suppliants, and ready at any moment to
step up upon the high altar itself to support the tottering
authority of the local saint.
Expenditure like this rests invariably on an economic idea. Just as
the French of the nineteenth century invested their surplus capital
in a railway system in the belief that they would make money by it
in this life, in the thirteenth they trusted their money to the
Queen of Heaven because of their belief in her power to repay it
with interest in the life to come. The investment was based on the
power of Mary as Queen rather than on any orthodox Church conception
of the Virgin's legitimate station. Papal Rome never greatly loved
Byzantine empresses or French queens. The Virgin of Chartres was
never wholly sympathetic to the Roman Curia. To this day the Church
writers--like the Abbe Bulteau or M. Rohault de Fleury--are
singularly shy of the true Virgin of majesty, whether at Chartres or
at Byzantium or wherever she is seen. The fathers Martin and Cahier
at Bourges alone left her true value. Had the Church controlled her,
the Virgin would perhaps have remained prostrate at the foot of the
Cross. Dragged by a Byzantine Court, backed by popular insistence
and impelled by overpowering self-interest, the Church accepted the
Virgin throned and crowned, seated by Christ, the Judge throned and
crowned; but even this did not wholly satisfy the French of the
thirteenth century who seemed bent on absorbing Christ in His
Mother, and making the Mother the Church, and Christ the Symbol.
The Church had crowned and enthroned her almost from the beginning,
and could not have dethroned her if it would. In all Christian art--
sculpture or mosaic, painting or poetry--the Virgin's rank was
expressly asserted. Saint Bernard, like John Comnenus, and probably
at the same time (1120-40), chanted hymns to the Virgin as Queen:--
O salutaris Virgo Stella Maris
Generans prolem, Aequitatis solem,
Lucis auctorem, Retinens pudorem,
Suscipe laudem!
Celi Regina Per quam medicina
Datur aegretis, Gratia devotis,
Gaudium moestis, Mundo lux coelestis,
Spesque salutis;
Aula regalis, Virgo specialis,
Posce medelam Nobis et tutelam,
Suscipe vota, Precibusque cuncta
Pelle molesta!
O Saviour Virgin, Star of Sea,
Who bore for child the Son of Justice,
The source of Light, Virgin always
Hear our praise!
Queen of Heaven who have given
Medicine to the sick, Grace to the devout,
Joy to the sad, Heaven's light to the world
And hope of salvation;
Court royal, Virgin typical,
Grant us cure and guard,
Accept our vows, and by prayers
Drive all griefs away!
As the lyrical poet of the twelfth century, Adam de Saint-Victor
seems to have held rank higher if possible than that of Saint
Bernard, and his hymns on the Virgin are certainly quite as emphatic
an assertion of her majesty:--
Imperatrix supernorum!
Superatrix infernorum!
Eligenda via coeli,
Retinenda spe fideli,
Separatos a te longe
Revocatos ad te junge
Tuorum collegio!
Empress of the highest,
Mistress over the lowest,
Chosen path of Heaven,
Held fast by faithful hope,
Those separated from you far,
Recalled to you, unite
In your fold!
To delight in the childish jingle of the mediaeval Latin is a sign
of a futile mind, no doubt, and I beg pardon of you and of the
Church for wasting your precious summer day on poetry which was
regarded as mystical in its age and which now sounds like a nursery
rhyme; but a verse or two of Adam's hymn on the Assumption of the
Virgin completes the record of her rank, and goes to complete also
the documentary proof of her majesty at Chartres:--
Salve, Mater Salvatoris!
Vas electum! Vas honoris!
Vas coelestis Gratiae!
Ab aeterno Vas provisum!
Vas insigne! Vas excisum
Manu sapientiae!
Salve, Mater pietatis,
Et totius Trinitatis
Nobile Triclinium!
Verbi tamen incarnati
Speciale majestati
Praeparans hospitium!
O Maria! Stella maris!
Dignitate singularis,
Super omnes ordinaries
Ordines coelestium!
In supremo sita poli
Nos commenda tuae proli,
Ne terrores sive doli
Nos supplantent hostium!
Mother of our Saviour, hail!
Chosen vessel! Sacred Grail!
Font of celestial grace!
From eternity forethought!
By the hand of Wisdom wrought!
Precious, faultless Vase!
Hail, Mother of Divinity!
Hail, Temple of the Trinity!
Home of the Triune God!
In whom the Incarnate Word had birth,
The King! to whom you gave on earth
Imperial abode.
Oh, Maria! Constellation!
Inspiration! Elevation!
Rule and Law and Ordination
Of the angels' host!
Highest height of God's Creation,
Pray your Son's commiseration,
Lest, by fear or fraud, salvation
For our souls be lost!
Constantly--one might better say at once, officially, she was
addressed in these terms of supreme majesty: "Imperatrix
supernorum!" "Coeli Regina!" "Aula regalis!" but the twelfth century
seemed determined to carry the idea out to its logical conclusion
in defiance of dogma. Not only was the Son absorbed in the Mother, or
represented as under her guardianship, but the Father fared no
better, and the Holy Ghost followed. The poets regarded the Virgin
as the "Templum Trinitatis"; "totius Trinitatis nobile Triclinium."
She was the refectory of the Trinity--the "Triclinium"--because the
refectory was the largest room and contained the whole of the
members, and was divided in three parts by two rows of columns. She
was the "Templum Trinitatis," the Church itself, with its triple
aisle. The Trinity was absorbed in her.
This is a delicate subject in the Church, and you must feel it with
delicacy, without brutally insisting on its necessary
contradictions. All theology and all philosophy are full of
contradictions quite as flagrant and far less sympathetic. This
particular variety of religious faith is simply human, and has made
its appearance in one form or another in nearly all religions; but
though the twelfth century carried it to an extreme, and at Chartres
you see it in its most charming expression, we have got always to
make allowances for what was going on beneath the surface in men's
minds, consciously or unconsciously, and for the latent scepticism
which lurks behind all faith. The Church itself never quite accepted
the full claims of what was called Mariolatry. One may be sure, too,
that the bourgeois capitalist and the student of the schools, each
from his own point of view, watched the Virgin with anxious
interest. The bourgeois had put an enormous share of, his capital
into what was in fact an economical speculation, not unlike the
South Sea Scheme, or the railway system of our own time; except that
in one case the energy was devoted to shortening the road to Heaven;
in the other, to shortening the road to Paris; but no serious
schoolman could have felt entirely convinced that God would enter
into a business partnership with man, to establish a sort of joint-
stock society for altering the operation of divine and universal
laws. The bourgeois cared little for the philosophical doubt if the
economical result proved to be good, but he watched this result with
his usual practical sagacity, and required an experience of only
about three generations (1200-1300) to satisfy himself that relics
were not certain in their effects; that the Saints were not always
able or willing to help; that Mary herself could not certainly be
bought or bribed; that prayer without money seemed to be quite as
efficacious as prayer with money; and that neither the road to
Heaven nor Heaven itself had been made surer or brought nearer by an
investment of capital which amounted to the best part of the wealth
of France. Economically speaking, he became satisfied that his
enormous money-investment had proved to be an almost total loss, and
the reaction on his mind was as violent as the emotion. For three
hundred years it prostrated France. The efforts of the bourgeoisie
and the peasantry to recover their property, so far as it was
recoverable, have lasted to the present day and we had best take
care not to get mixed in those passions.
If you are to get the full enjoyment of Chartres, you must, for the
time, believe in Mary as Bernard and Adam did, and feel her presence
as the architects did, in every stone they placed, and every touch
they chiselled. You must try first to rid your mind of the
traditional idea that the Gothic is an intentional expression of
religious gloom. The necessity for light was the motive of the
Gothic architects. They needed light and always more light, until
they sacrificed safety and common sense in trying to get it. They
converted their walls into windows, raised their vaults, diminished
their piers, until their churches could no longer stand. You will
see the limits at Beauvais; at Chartres we have not got so far, but
even here, in places where the Virgin wanted it,--as above the high
altar,--the architect has taken all the light there was to take. For
the same reason, fenestration became the most important part of the
Gothic architect's work, and at Chartres was uncommonly interesting
because the architect was obliged to design a new system, which
should at the same time satisfy the laws of construction and the
taste and imagination of Mary. No doubt the first command of the
Queen of Heaven was for light, but the second, at least equally
imperative, was for colour. Any earthly queen, even though she were
not Byzantine in taste, loved colour; and the truest of queens--the
only true Queen of Queens--had richer and finer taste in colour than
the queens of fifty earthly kingdoms, as you will see when we come
to the immense effort to gratify her in the glass of her windows.
Illusion for illusion,--granting for the moment that Mary was an
illusion,--the Virgin Mother in this instance repaid to her
worshippers a larger return for their money than the capitalist has
ever been able to get, at least in this world, from any other
illusion of wealth which he has tried to make a source of pleasure
and profit.
The next point on which Mary evidently insisted was the arrangement
for her private apartments, the apse, as distinguished from her
throne-room, the choir; both being quite distinct from the hall, or
reception-room of the public, which was the nave with its
enlargements in the transepts. This arrangement marks the
distinction between churches built as shrines for the deity and
churches built as halls of worship for the public. The difference is
chiefly in the apse, and the apse of Chartres is the most
interesting of all apses from this point of view.
The Virgin required chiefly these three things, or, if you like,
these four: space, light, convenience; and colour decoration to
unite and harmonize the whole. This concerns the interior; on the
exterior she required statuary, and the only complete system of
decorative sculpture that existed seems to belong to her churches:--
Paris, Rheims, Amiens, and Chartres. Mary required all this
magnificence at Chartres for herself alone, not for the public. As
far as one can see into the spirit of the builders, Chartres was
exclusively intended for the Virgin, as the Temple of Abydos was
intended for Osiris. The wants of man, beyond a mere roof-cover, and
perhaps space to some degree, enter to no very great extent into the
problem of Chartres. Man came to render homage or to ask favours.
The Queen received him in her palace, where she alone was at home,
and alone gave commands.
The artist's second thought was to exclude from his work everything
that could displease Mary; and since Mary differed from living
queens only in infinitely greater majesty and refinement, the artist
could admit only what pleased the actual taste of the great ladies
who dictated taste at the Courts of France and England, which
surrounded the little Court of the Counts of Chartres. What they
were--these women of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries--we shall
have to see or seek in other directions; but Chartres is perhaps the
most magnificent and permanent monument they left of their taste,
and we can begin here with learning certain things which they were
not.
In the first place, they were not in the least vague, dreamy, or
mystical in a modern sense;--far from it! They seemed anxious only
to throw the mysteries into a blaze of light; not so much physical,
perhaps,--since they, like all women, liked moderate shadow for
their toilettes,--but luminous in the sense of faith. There is
nothing about Chartres that you would think mystical, who know your
Lohengrin, Siegfried, and Parsifal. If you care to make a study of
the whole literature of the subject, read M. Male's "Art Religieux
du XIIIe Siecle en France," and use it for a guide-book. Here you
need only note how symbolic and how simple the sculpture is, on the
portals and porches. Even what seems a grotesque or an abstract idea
is no more than the simplest child's personification. On the walls
you may have noticed the Ane qui vielle,--the ass playing the lyre;
and on all the old churches you can see "bestiaries," as they were
called, of fabulous animals, symbolic or not; but the symbolism is
as simple as the realism of the oxen at Laon. It gave play to the
artist in his effort for variety of decoration, and it amused the
people,--probably the Virgin also was not above being amused;--now
and then it seems about to suggest what you would call an esoteric
meaning, that is to say, a meaning which each one of us can consider
private property reserved for our own amusement, and from which the
public is excluded; yet, in truth, in the Virgin's churches the
public is never excluded, but invited. The Virgin even had the
additional charm to the public that she was popularly supposed to
have no very marked fancy for priests as such; she was a queen, a
woman, and a mother, functions, all, which priests could not
perform. Accordingly, she seems to have had little taste for
mysteries of any sort, and even the symbols that seem most
mysterious were clear to every old peasant-woman in her church. The
most pleasing and promising of them all is the woman's figure you
saw on the front of the cathedral in Paris; her eyes bandaged; her
head bent down; her crown falling; without cloak or royal robe;
holding in her hand a guidon or banner with its staff broken in more
than one place. On the opposite pier stands another woman, with
royal mantle, erect and commanding. The symbol is so graceful that
one is quite eager to know its meaning; but every child in the
Middle Ages would have instantly told you that the woman with the
falling crown meant only the Jewish Synagogue, as the one with the
royal robe meant the Church of Christ.
Another matter for which the female taste seemed not much to care
was theology in the metaphysical sense. Mary troubled herself little
about theology except when she retired into the south transept with
Pierre de Dreux. Even there one finds little said about the Trinity,
always the most metaphysical subtlety of the Church. Indeed, you
might find much amusement here in searching the cathedral for any
distinct expression at all of the Trinity as a dogma recognized by
Mary.
One cannot take seriously the idea that the three doors, the three
portals, and the three aisles express the Trinity, because, in the
first place, there was no rule about it; churches might have what
portals and aisles they pleased; both Paris and Bourges have five;
the doors themselves are not allotted to the three members of the
Trinity, nor are the portals; while another more serious objection
is that the side doors and aisles are not of equal importance with
the central, but mere adjuncts and dependencies, so that the
architect who had misled the ignorant public into accepting so black
a heresy would have deserved the stake, and would probably have gone
to it. Even this suggestion of trinity is wanting in the transepts,
which have only one aisle, and in the choir, which has five, as well
as five or seven chapels, and, as far as an ignorant mind can
penetrate, no triplets whatever. Occasionally, no doubt, you will
discover in some sculpture or window, a symbol of the Trinity, but
this discovery itself amounts to an admission of its absence as a
controlling idea, for the ordinary worshipper must have been at
least as blind as we are, and to him, as to us, it would have seemed
a wholly subordinate detail. Even if the Trinity, too, is anywhere
expressed, you will hardly find here an attempt to explain its
metaphysical meaning--not even a mystic triangle.
The church is wholly given up to the Mother and the Son. The Father
seldom appears; the Holy Ghost still more rarely. At least, this is
the impression made on an ordinary visitor who has no motive to be
orthodox; and it must have been the same with the thirteenth-century
worshipper who came here with his mind absorbed in the perfections
of Mary. Chartres represents, not the Trinity, but the identity of
the Mother and Son. The Son represents the Trinity, which is thus
absorbed in the Mother. The idea is not orthodox, but this is no
affair of ours. The Church watches over its own.
The Virgin's wants and tastes, positive and negative, ought now to
be clear enough to enable you to feel the artist's sincerity in
trying to satisfy them; but first you have still to convince
yourselves of the people's sincerity in employing the artists. This
point is the easiest of all, for the evidence is express. In the
year 1145 when the old fleche was begun,--the year before Saint
Bernard preached the second crusade at Vezelay,--Abbot Haimon, of
Saint-Pierre-sur-Dives in Normandy, wrote to the monks of Tutbury
Abbey in England a famous letter to tell of the great work which the
Virgin was doing in France and which began at the Church of
Chartres. "Hujus sacrae institutionis ritus apud Carnotensem
ecclesiam est inchoatus." From Chartres it had spread through
Normandy, where it produced among other things the beautiful spire
which we saw at Saint-Pierre-sur-Dives. "Postremo per totam fere
Normanniam longe lateque convaluit ac loca per singula Matri
misericordiae dicata praecipue occupavit." The movement affected
especially the places devoted to Mary, but ran through all Normandy,
far and wide. Of all Mary's miracles, the best attested, next to the
preservation of her church, is the building of it; not so much
because it surprises us as because it surprised even more the people
of the time and the men who were its instruments. Such deep popular
movements are always surprising, and at Chartres the miracle seems
to have occurred three times, coinciding more or less with the dates
of the crusades, and taking the organization of a crusade, as
Archbishop Hugo of Rouen described it in a letter to Bishop Thierry
of Amiens. The most interesting part of this letter is the evident
astonishment of the writer, who might be talking to us to-day, so
modern is he:--
The inhabitants of Chartres have combined to aid in the construction
of their church by transporting the materials; our Lord has rewarded
their humble zeal by miracles which have roused the Normans to
imitate the piety of their neighbours ... Since then the faithful of
our diocese and of other neighbouring regions have formed
associations for the same object; they admit no one into their
company unless he has been to confession, has renounced enmities and
revenges, and has reconciled himself with his enemies. That done,
they elect a chief, under whose direction they conduct their waggons
in silence and with humility.
The quarries at Bercheres-l'Eveque are about five miles from
Chartres. The stone is excessively hard, and was cut in blocks of
considerable size, as you can see for yourselves; blocks which
required great effort to transport and lay in place. The work was
done with feverish rapidity, as it still shows, but it is the
solidest building of the age, and without a sign of weakness yet.
The Abbot told, with more surprise than pride, of the spirit which
was built into the cathedral with the stone:--Who has ever seen!--
Who has ever heard tell, in times past, that powerful princes of the
world, that men brought up in honour and in wealth, that nobles, men
and women, have bent their proud and haughty necks to the harness of
carts, and that, like beasts of burden, they have dragged to the
abode of Christ these waggons, loaded with wines, grains, oil,
stone, wood, and all that is necessary for the wants of life, or for
the construction of the church? But while they draw these burdens,
there is one thing admirable to observe; it is that often when a
thousand persons and more are attached to the chariots,--so great is
the difficulty,--yet they march in such silence that not a murmur is
heard, and truly if one did not see the thing with one's eyes, one
might believe that among such a multitude there was hardly a person
present. When they halt on the road, nothing is heard but the
confession of sins, and pure and suppliant prayer to God to obtain
pardon. At the voice of the priests who exhort their hearts to
peace, they forget all hatred, discord is thrown far aside, debts
are remitted, the unity of hearts is established.
But if any one is so far advanced in evil as to be unwilling to
pardon an offender, or if he rejects the counsel of the priest who
has piously advised him, his offering is instantly thrown from the
wagon as impure, and he himself ignominiously and shamefully
excluded from the society of the holy. There one sees the priests
who preside over each chariot exhort every one to penitence, to
confession of faults, to the resolution of better life! There one
sees old people, young people, little children, calling on the Lord
with a suppliant voice, and uttering to Him, from the depth of the
heart, sobs and sighs with words of glory and praise! After the
people, warned by the sound of trumpets and the sight of banners,
have resumed their road, the march is made with such ease that no
obstacle can retard it ... When they have reached the church they
arrange the wagons about it like a spiritual camp, and during the
whole night they celebrate the watch by hymns and canticles. On each
waggon they light tapers and lamps; they place there the infirm and
sick, and bring them the precious relics of the Saints for their
relief. Afterwards the priests and clerics close the ceremony by
processions which the people follow with devout heart, imploring the
clemency of the Lord and of his Blessed Mother for the recovery of
the sick.
Of course, the Virgin was actually and constantly present during all
this labour, and gave her assistance to it, but you would get no
light on the architecture from listening to an account of her
miracles, nor do they heighten the effect of popular faith. Without
the conviction of her personal presence, men would not have been
inspired; but, to us, it is rather the inspiration of the art which
proves the Virgin's presence, and we can better see the conviction
of it in the work than in the words. Every day, as the work went on,
the Virgin was present, directing the architects, and it is this
direction that we are going to study, if you have now got a
realizing sense of what it meant. Without this sense, the church is
dead. Most persons of a deeply religious nature would tell you
emphatically that nine churches out of ten actually were dead-born,
after the thirteenth century, and that church architecture became a
pure matter of mechanism and mathematics; but that is a question for
you to decide when you come to it; and the pleasure consists not in
seeing the death, but in feeling the life.
Now let us look about!
CHAPTER VII
ROSES AND APSES
Like all great churches, that are not mere storehouses of theology,
Chartres expressed, besides whatever else it meant, an emotion, the
deepest man ever felt,--the struggle of his own littleness to grasp
the infinite. You may, if you like, figure in it a mathematic
formula of infinity,--the broken arch, our finite idea of space; the
spire, pointing, with its converging lines, to unity beyond space;
the sleepless, restless thrust of the vaults, telling the
unsatisfied, incomplete, overstrained effort of man to rival the
energy, intelligence, and purpose of God. Thomas Aquinas and the
schoolmen tried to put it in words, but their Church is another
chapter. In act, all man's work ends there;--mathematics, physics,
chemistry, dynamics, optics, every sort of machinery science may
invent,--to this favour come at last, as religion and philosophy did
before science was born. All that the centuries can do is to express
the idea differently:--a miracle or a dynamo; a dome or a coal-pit;
a cathedral or a world's fair; and sometimes to confuse the two
expressions together. The world's fair tends more and more
vigorously to express the thought of infinite energy; the great
cathedrals of the Middle Ages always reflected the industries and
interests of a world's fair. Chartres showed it less than Laon or
Paris, for Chartres was never a manufacturing town, but a shrine,
such as Lourdes, where the Virgin was known to have done miracles,
and had been seen in person; but still the shrine turned itself into
a market and created valuable industries. Indeed, this was the chief
objection which Saint Paul made to Ephesus and Saint Bernard to the
cathedrals. They were in some ways more industrial than religious.
The mere masonry and structure made a vast market for labour; the
fixed metalwork and woodwork were another; but the decoration was by
far the greatest. The wood-carving, the glass windows, the
sculpture, inside and out, were done mostly in workshops on the
spot, but besides these fixed objects, precious works of the highest
perfection filled the church treasuries. Their money value was great
then; it is greater now. No world's fair is likely to do better to-
day. After five hundred years of spoliation, these objects fill
museums still, and are bought with avidity at every auction, at
prices continually rising and quality steadily falling, until a bit
of twelfth-century glass would be a trouvaille like an emerald; a
tapestry earlier than 1600 is not for mere tourists to hope; an
enamel, a missal, a crystal, a cup, an embroidery of the Middle Ages
belongs only to our betters, and almost invariably, if not to the
State, to the rich Jews, whose instinctive taste has seized the
whole field of art which rested on their degradation. Royalty and
feudality spent their money rather on arms and clothes. The Church
alone was universal patron, and the Virgin was the dictator of
taste.
With the Virgin's taste, during her regency, critics never find
fault. One cannot know its whole magnificence, but one can accept it
as a matter of faith and trust, as one accepts all her other
miracles without cavilling over small details of fact. The period of
eighteenth-century scepticism about such matters and the bourgeois
taste of Voltaire and Diderot have long since passed, with the
advent of a scientific taste still more miraculous; the whole world
of the Virgin's art, catalogued in the "Dictionnaire du Mobilier
Francais" in six volumes by Viollet-le-Duc; narrated as history by
M. Labarte, M. Molinier, M. Paul Lacroix; catalogued in museums by
M. du Sommerard and a score of others, in works almost as costly as
the subjects,--all the vast variety of bric-a-brac, useful or
ornamental, belonging to the Church, increased enormously by the
insatiable, universal, private demands for imagery, in ivory, wood,
metal, stone, for every room in every house, or hung about every
neck, or stuck on every hat, made a market such as artists never
knew before or since, and such as instantly explains to the
practical American not only the reason for the Church's tenacity of
life, but also the inducements for its plunder. The Virgin
especially required all the resources of art, and the highest. Notre
Dame of Chartres would have laughed at Notre Dame of Paris if she
had detected an economy in her robes; Notre Dame of Rheims or Rouen
would have derided Notre Dame of Amiens if she had shown a feminine,
domestic, maternal turn toward cheapness. The Virgin was never
cheap. Her great ceremonies were as splendid as her rank of Queen in
Heaven and on Earth required; and as her procession wound its way
along the aisles, through the crowd of her subjects, up to the high
altar, it was impossible then, and not altogether easy now, to
resist the rapture of her radiant presence. Many a young person, and
now and then one who is not in first youth, witnessing the sight in
the religious atmosphere of such a church as this, without a
suspicion of susceptibility, has suddenly seen what Paul saw on the
road to Damascus, and has fallen on his face with the crowd,
grovelling at the foot of the Cross, which, for the first time in
his life, he feels.
If you want to know what churches were made for, come down here on
some great festival of the Virgin, and give yourself up to it; but
come alone! That kind of knowledge cannot be taught and can seldom
be shared. We are not now seeking religion; indeed, true religion
generally comes unsought. We are trying only to feel Gothic art. For
us, the world is not a schoolroom or a pulpit, but a stage, and the
stage is the highest yet seen on earth. In this church the old
Romanesque leaps into the Gothic under our eyes; of a sudden,
between the portal and the shrine, the infinite rises into a new
expression, always a rare and excellent miracle in thought. The two
expressions are nowhere far apart; not further than the Mother from
the Son. The new artist drops unwillingly the hand of his father or
his grandfather; he looks back, from every corner of his own work,
to see whether it goes with the old. He will not part with the
western portal or the lancet windows; he holds close to the round
columns of the choir; he would have kept the round arch if he could,
but the round arch was unable to do the work; it could not rise; so
he broke it, lifted the vaulting, threw out flying buttresses, and
satisfied the Virgin's wish.
The matter of Gothic vaulting, with its two weak points, the flying
buttress and the false, wooden shelter-roof, is the bete noire of
the Beaux Arts. The duty of defence does not lie on tourists, who
are at best hardly able to understand what it matters whether a wall
is buttressed without or within, and whether a roof is single or
double. No one objects to the dome of Saint Peter's. No one finds
fault with the Pont Neuf. Yet it is true that the Gothic architect
showed contempt for facts. Since he could not support a heavy stone
vault on his light columns, he built the lightest possible stone
vault and protected it with a wooden shelter-roof which constantly
burned. The lightened vaults were still too heavy for the walls and
columns, so the architect threw out buttress beyond buttress resting
on separate foundations, exposed to extreme inequalities of weather,
and liable to multiplied chances of accident. The results were
certainly disastrous. The roofs burned; the walls yielded.
Flying buttresses were not a necessity. The Merveille had none; the
Angevin school rather affected to do without them; Albi had none;
Assisi stands up independent; but they did give support wherever the
architect wanted it and nowhere else; they were probably cheap; and
they were graceful. Whatever expression they gave to a church, at
least it was not that of a fortress. Amiens and Albi are different
religions. The expression concerns us; the construction concerns the
Beaux Arts. The problem of permanent equilibrium which distresses
the builder of arches is a technical matter which does not worry,
but only amuses, us who sit in the audience and look with delight at
the theatrical stage-decoration of the Gothic vault; the astonishing
feat of building up a skeleton of stone ribs and vertebrae, on which
every pound of weight is adjusted, divided, and carried down from
level to level till it touches ground at a distance as a bird would
alight. If any stone in any part, from apex to foundation, weathers
or gives way, the whole must yield, and the charge for repairs is
probably great, but, on the best building the Ecole des Beaux Arts
can build, the charge for repairs is not to be wholly ignored, and
at least the Cathedral of Chartres, in spite of terribly hard usage,
is as solid to-day as when it was built, and as plumb, without crack
or crevice. Even the towering fragment at Beauvais, poorly built
from the first, which has broken down oftener than most Gothic
structures, and seems ready to crumble again whenever the wind blows
over its windy plains, has managed to survive, after a fashion, six
or seven hundred years, which is all that our generation had a right
to ask.
The vault of Beauvais is nearly one hundred and sixty feet high (48
metres), and was cheaply built. The vault of Saint Peter's at Rome
is nearly one hundred and fifty feet (45 metres). That of Amiens is
one hundred and forty-four feet (44 metres). Rheims, Bourges, and
Chartres are nearly the same height; at the entrance, one hundred
and twenty-two feet. Paris is one hundred and ten feet. The Abbe
Bulteau is responsible for these measurements; but at Chartres, as
in several very old churches, the nave slopes down to the entrance,
because--as is said--pilgrims came in such swarms that they were
obliged to sleep in the church, and the nave had to be sluiced with
water to clean it. The true height of Chartres, at the croisee of
nave and transept, is as near as possible one hundred and twenty
feet (36.55 metres).
The measured height is the least interest of a church. The
architect's business is to make a small building look large, and his
failures are in large buildings which he makes to look small. One
chief beauty of the Gothic is to exaggerate height, and one of its
most curious qualities is its success in imposing an illusion of
size. Without leaving the heart of Paris any one can study this
illusion in the two great churches of Notre Dame and Saint-Sulpice;
for Saint-Sulpice is as lofty as Notre Dame in vaulting, and larger
in its other dimensions, besides being, in its style, a fine
building; yet its Roman arches show, as if they were of the eleventh
century, why the long, clean, unbroken, refined lines of the Gothic,
curving to points, and leading the eye with a sort of compulsion to
the culminating point above, should have made an architectural
triumph that carried all Europe off its feet with delight. The world
had seen nothing to approach it except, perhaps, in the dome of
Sancta Sophia in Constantinople; and the discovery came at a moment
when Europe was making its most united and desperate struggle to
attain the kingdom of Heaven.
According to Viollet-le-Duc, Chartres was the final triumph of the
experiment on a very great scale, for Chartres has never been
altered and never needed to be strengthened. The flying buttresses
of Chartres answered their purpose, and if it were not a matter of
pure construction it would be worth while to read what Viollet-le-
Duc says about them (article, "Arcs-boutants"). The vaulting above
is heavy, about fifteen inches thick; the buttressing had also to be
heavy; and to lighten it, the architect devised an amusing sort of
arcades, applied on his outside buttresses. Throughout the church,
everything was solid beyond all later custom, so that architects
would have to begin by a study of the crypt which came down from the
eleventh century so strongly built that it still carries the church
without a crack in its walls; but if we went down into it, we should
understand nothing; so we will begin, as we did outside, at the
front.
A single glance shows what trouble the architect had with the old
facade and towers, and what temptation to pull them all down. One
cannot quite say that he has spoiled his own church in trying to
save what he could of the old, but if he did not quite spoil it, he
saved it only by the exercise of an amount of intelligence that we
shall never learn enough to feel our incapacity to understand. True
ignorance approaches the infinite more nearly than any amount of
knowledge can do, and, in our case, ignorance is fortified by a
certain element of nineteenth-century indifference which refuses to
be interested in what it cannot understand; a violent reaction from
the thirteenth century which cared little to comprehend anything
except the incomprehensible. The architect at Chartres was required
by the Virgin to provide more space for her worshippers within the
church, without destroying the old portal and fleche which she
loved. That this order came directly from the Virgin, may be taken
for granted. At Chartres, one sees everywhere the Virgin, and
nowhere any rival authority; one sees her give orders, and
architects obey them; but very rarely a hesitation as though the
architect were deciding for himself. In his western front, the
architect has obeyed orders so literally that he has not even taken
the trouble to apologize for leaving unfinished the details which,
if he had been responsible for them, would have been his anxious
care. He has gone to the trouble of moving the heavy doorways
forward, so that the chapels in the towers, which were meant to open
on a porch, now open into the nave, and the nave itself has, in
appearance, two more spans than in the old church; but the work
shows blind obedience, as though he were doing his best to please
the Virgin without trying to please himself. Probably he could in no
case have done much to help the side aisles in their abrupt
collision with the solid walls of the two towers, but he might at
least have brought the vaulting of his two new bays, in the nave,
down to the ground, and finished it. The vaulting is awkward in
these two bays, and yet he has taken great trouble to effect what
seems at first a small matter. Whether the great rose window was an
afterthought or not can never be known, but any one can see with a
glass, and better on the architectural plan, that the vaulting of
the main church was not high enough to admit the great rose, and
that the architect has had to slope his two tower-spans upward. So
great is the height that you cannot see this difference of level
very plainly even with a glass, but on the plans it seems to amount
to several feet; perhaps a metre. The architect has managed to
deceive our eyes, in order to enlarge the rose; but you can see as
plainly as though he were here to tell you, that, like a great
general, he has concentrated his whole energy on the rose, because
the Virgin has told him that the rose symbolized herself, and that
the light and splendour of her appearance in the west were to redeem
all his awkwardnesses.
Of course this idea of the Virgin's interference sounds to you a
mere bit of fancy, and that is an account which may be settled
between the Virgin and you; but even twentieth-century eyes can see
that the rose redeems everything, dominates everything, and gives
character to the whole church.
In view of the difficulties which faced the artist, the rose is
inspired genius,--the kind of genius which Shakespeare showed when
he took some other man's play, and adapted it. Thus far, it shows
its power chiefly by the way it comes forward and takes possession
of the west front, but if you want a foot-rule to measure by, you
may mark that the old, twelfth-century lancet-windows below it are
not exactly in its axis. At the outset, in the original plan of
1090, or thereabouts, the old tower--the southern tower--was given
greater width than the northern. Such inequalities were common in
the early churches, and so is a great deal of dispute in modern
books whether they were accidental or intentional, while no one
denies that they are amusing. In these towers the difference is not
great,--perhaps fourteen or fifteen inches,--but it caused the
architect to correct it, in order to fit his front to the axis of
the church, by throwing his entrance six or seven inches to the
south, and narrowing to that extent the south door and south lancet.
The effect was bad, even then, and went far to ruin the south
window; but when, after the fire of 1194, the architect inserted his
great rose, filling every inch of possible space between the lancet
and the arch of the vault, he made another correction which threw
his rose six or seven inches out of axis with the lancets. Not one
person in a hundred thousand would notice it, here in the interior,
so completely are we under the control of the artist and the Virgin;
but it is a measure of the power of the rose.
Looking farther, one sees that the rose-motive, which so dominates
the west front, is carried round the church, and comes to another
outburst of splendour in the transepts. This leads back to
fenestration on a great scale, which is a terribly ambitious flight
for tourists; all the more, because here the tourist gets little
help from the architect, who, in modern times, has seldom the
opportunity to study the subject at all, and accepts as solved the
problems of early Gothic fenestration. One becomes pedantic and
pretentious at the very sound of the word, which is an intolerable
piece of pedantry in itself; but Chartres is all windows, and its
windows were as triumphant as its Virgin, and were one of her
miracles. One can no more overlook the windows of Chartres than the
glass which is in them. We have already looked at the windows of
Mantes; we have seen what happened to the windows at Paris. Paris
had at one leap risen twenty-five feet higher than Noyon, and even
at Noyon, the architect, about 1150, had been obliged to invent new
fenestration. Paris and Mantes, twenty years later, made another
effort, which proved a failure. Then the architect of Chartres, in
1195, added ten feet more to his vault, and undertook, once for all,
to show how a great cathedral should be lighted. As an architectural
problem, it passes far beyond our powers of understanding, even when
solved; but we can always turn to see what the inevitable Viollet-
le-Duc says about its solution at Chartres:--
Toward the beginning of the thirteenth century, the architect of the
Cathedral of Chartres sought out entirely new window combinations to
light the nave from above. Below, in the side aisles he kept to the
customs of the times; that is, he opened pointed windows which did
not wholly fill the spaces between the piers; he wanted, or was
willing to leave here below, the effect of a wall. But in the upper
part of his building we see that he changed the system; he throws a
round arch directly across from one pier to the next; then, in the
enormous space which remains within each span, he inserts two large
pointed windows surmounted by a great rose ... We recognize in this
construction of Notre Dame de Chartres a boldness, a force, which
contrast with the fumbling of the architects in the Ile de France
and Champagne. For the first time one sees at Chartres the builder
deal frankly with the clerestory, or upper fenestration, occupying
the whole width of the arches, and taking the arch of the vault as
the arch of the window. Simplicity of construction, beauty in form,
strong workmanship, structure true and solid, judicious choice of
material, all the characteristics of good work, unite in this
magnificent specimen of architecture at the beginning of the
thirteenth century.
Viollet-le-Duc does not call attention to a score of other matters
which the architect must have had in his mind, such as the
distribution of light, and the relations of one arrangement with
another: the nave with the aisles, and both with the transepts, and
all with the choir. Following him, we must take the choir
separately, and the aisles and chapels of the apse also. One cannot
hope to understand all the experiments and refinements of the
artist, either in their successes or their failures, but, with
diffidence, one may ask one's self whether the beauty of the
arrangement, as compared with the original arrangement in Paris, did
not consist in retaining the rose-motive throughout, while throwing
the whole upper wall into window. Triumphant as the clerestory
windows are, they owe their charm largely to their roses, as you see
by looking at the same scheme applied on a larger scale on the
transept fronts; and then, by taking stand under the croisee, and
looking at all in succession as a whole.
The rose window was not Gothic but Romanesque, and needed a great
deal of coaxing to feel at home within the pointed arch. At first,
the architects felt the awkwardness so strongly that they avoided it
wherever they could. In the beautiful facade of Laon, one of the
chief beauties is the setting of the rose under a deep round arch.
The western roses of Mantes and Paris are treated in the same way,
although a captious critic might complain that their treatment is
not so effective or so logical. Rheims boldly imprisoned the roses
within the pointed arch; but Amiens, toward 1240, took refuge in the
same square exterior setting that was preferred, in 1200, here at
Chartres; and in the interior of Amiens the round arch of the rose
is the last vault of the nave, seen through a vista of pointed
vaults, as it is here. All these are supposed to be among the chief
beauties of the Gothic facade, although the Gothic architect, if he
had been a man of logic, would have clung to his lines, and put a
pointed window in his front, as in fact he did at Coutances. He felt
the value of the rose in art, and perhaps still more in religion,
for the rose was Mary's emblem. One is fairly sure that the great
Chartres rose of the west front was put there to please her, since
it was to be always before her eyes, the most conspicuous object she
would see from the high altar, and therefore the most carefully
considered ornament in the whole church, outside the choir. The mere
size proves the importance she gave it. The exterior diameter is
nearly forty-four feet (13.36 metres). The nave of Chartres is, next
perhaps to the nave of Angers, the widest of all Gothic naves; about
fifty-three feet (16.31 metres); and the rose takes every inch it
can get of this enormous span. The value of the rose, among
architects of the time, was great, since it was the only part of the
church that Villard de Honnecourt sketched; and since his time, it
has been drawn and redrawn, described and commented by generations
of architects till it has become as classic as the Parthenon.
Yet this Chartres rose is solid, serious, sedate, to a degree
unusual in its own age; it is even more Romanesque than the pure
Romanesque roses. At Beauvais you must stop a moment to look at a
Romanesque rose on the transept of the Church of Saint-Etienne;
Viollet-le-Duc mentions it, with a drawing (article, "Pignon"), as
not earlier than the year 1100, therefore about a century earlier
than the rose of Chartres; it is not properly a rose, but a wheel of
fortune, with figures climbing up and falling over. Another supposed
twelfth-century rose is at Etampes, which goes with that of Laon and
Saint-Leu-d'Esserent and Mantes. The rose of Chartres is so much the
most serious of them all that Viollet-le-Duc has explained it by its
material,--the heavy stone of Bercheres;--but the material was not
allowed to affect the great transept roses, and the architect made
his material yield to his object wherever he thought it worth while.
Standing under the central croisee, you can see all three roses by
simply turning your head. That on the north, the Rose de France, was
built, or planned, between 1200 and 1210, in the reign of Philip
Augustus, since the porch outside, which would be a later
construction, was begun by 1212. The Rose de France is the same in
diameter as the western rose, but lighter, and built of lighter
stone. Opposite the Rose de France stands, on the south front,
Pierre Mauclerc's Rose de Dreux, of the same date, with the same
motive, but even lighter; more like a rose and less like a wheel.
All three roses must have been planned at about the same time,
perhaps by the same architect, within the same workshop; yet the
western rose stands quite apart, as though it had been especially
designed to suit the twelfth-century facade and portal which it
rules. Whether this was really the artist's idea is a question that
needs the artist to answer; but that this is the effect, needs no
expert to prove; it stares one in the face. Within and without, one
feels that the twelfth-century spirit is respected and preserved
with the same religious feeling which obliged the architect to
injure his own work by sparing that of his grandfathers.
Conspicuous, then, in the west front are two feelings:--respect for
the twelfth-century work, and passion for the rose fenestration;
both subordinated to the demand for light. If it worries you to have
to believe that these three things are in fact one; that the
architect is listening, like the stone Abraham, for orders from the
Virgin, while he caresses and sacrifices his child; that Mary and
not her architects built this facade; if the divine intention seems
to you a needless impertinence, you can soon get free from it by
going to any of the later churches, where you will not be forced to
see any work but that of the architect's compasses. According to
Viollet-le-Duc, the inspiration ceased about 1250, or, as the Virgin
would have dated it, on the death of Blanche of Castile in 1252. The
work of Chartres, where her own hand is plainly shown, belongs in
feeling, if not in execution, to the last years of the twelfth
century (1195-1200). The great western rose which gives the motive
for the whole decoration and is repeated in the great roses of the
transepts, marks the Virgin's will,--the taste and knowledge of
"cele qui la rose est des roses," or, if you prefer the Latin of
Adam de Saint-Victor, the hand of her who is "Super rosam rosida."
All this is easy; but if you really cannot see the hand of Mary
herself in these broad and public courts, which were intended, not
for her personal presence, but for the use of her common people, you
had better stop here, and not venture into the choir. Great halls
seem to have been easy architecture. Naves and transepts were not
often failures; facades and even towers and fleches are invariably
more or less successful because they are more or less balanced,
mathematical, calculable products of reason and thought. The most
serious difficulties began only with the choir, and even then did
not become desperate until the architect reached the curve of the
apse, with its impossible vaultings, its complicated lines, its
cross-thrusts, its double problems, internal and external, its
defective roofing and unequal lighting. A perfect Gothic apse was
impossible; an apse that satisfied perfectly its principal objects
was rare; the simplest and cheapest solution was to have no apse at
all, and that was the English scheme, which was tried also at Laon;
a square, flat wall and window. If the hunt for Norman towers
offered a summer's amusement, a hunt for apses would offer an
education, but it would lead far out of France. Indeed, it would be
simpler to begin at once with Sancta Sophia at Constantinople, San
Vitale at Ravenna and Monreale at Palermo, and the churches at
Torcello and Murano, and San Marco at Venice; and admit that no
device has ever equalled the startling and mystical majesty of the
Byzantine half-dome, with its marvellous mosaic Madonna dominating
the church, from the entrance, with her imperial and divine
presence. Unfortunately, the northern churches needed light, and the
northern architects turned their minds to a desperate effort for a
new apse.
The scheme of the cathedral at Laon seems to have been rejected
unanimously; the bare, flat wall at the end of the choir was an
eyesore; it was quite bad enough at the end of the nave, and became
annoying at the end of the transepts, so that at Noyon and Soissons
the architect, with a keen sense of interior form, had rounded the
transept ends; but, though external needs might require a square
transept, the unintelligence of the flat wall became insufferable at
the east end. Neither did the square choir suit the church
ceremonies and processions, or offer the same advantages of
arrangement, as the French understood them. With one voice, the
French architects seem to have rejected the Laon experiment, and
turned back to a solution taken directly from the Romanesque.
[Illustration with caption: SAINT-MARTIN-DES-CHAMPS]
Quite early--in the eleventh century--a whole group of churches had
been built in Auvergne,--at Clermont and Issoire, for example,--
possibly by one architect, with a circular apse, breaking out into
five apsidal chapels. Tourists who get down as far south as Toulouse
see another example of this Romanesque apse in the famous Church of
Saint Sernin, of the twelfth century; and few critics take offence
at one's liking it. Indeed, as far as concerns the exterior, one
might even risk thinking it more charming than the exterior of any
Gothic apse ever built. Many of these Romanesque apses of the
eleventh and twelfth centuries still remain in France, showing
themselves in unsuspected parish churches, here and there, but
always a surprise for their quiet, unobtrusive grace, making a
harmony with the Romanesque tower, if there is one, into which they
rise, as at Saint Sernin; but all these churches had only one aisle,
and, in the interior, there came invariable trouble when the vaults
rose in height. The architect of Chartres, in 1200, could get no
direct help from these, or even from Paris which was a beautifully
perfect apse, but had no apsidal chapels. The earliest apse that
could have served as a suggestion for Chartres--or, at least, as a
point of observation for us--was that of the Abbey Church of Saint-
Martin-des-Champs, which we went to see in Paris, and which is said
to date from about 1150.
Here is a circular choir, surrounded by two rows of columns,
irregularly spaced, with circular chapels outside, which seems to
have been more or less what the architect of Chartres, for the
Virgin's purposes, had set his heart on obtaining. Closely following
the scheme of Saint-Martin-des-Champs came the scheme of the Abbey
Church at Vezelay, built about 1160-80. Here the vaulting sprang
directly from the last arch of the choir, as is shown on the plan,
and bearing first on the light columns of the choir, which were
evenly spaced, then fell on a row of heavier columns outside, which
were also evenly spaced, and came to rest at last on massive piers,
between which were five circular chapels. The plan shows at a glance
that this arrangement stretched the second row of columns far apart,
and that a church much larger than Vezelay would need to space them
so much farther apart that the arch uniting them would have to rise
indefinitely; while, if beyond this, another aisle were added
outside, the piers finally would require impossible vaulting.
[Illustration with caption: VEZELAY]
The problem stood thus when the great cathedrals were undertaken,
and the architect of Paris boldly grappled with the double aisle on
a scale requiring a new scheme. Here, in spite of the most virtuous
resolutions not to be technical, we must attempt a technicality,
because without it, one of the most interesting eccentricities of
Chartres would be lost. Once more, Viollet-le-Duc:--
As the architect did not want to give the interior bays of the apse
spaces between the columns (AA) less than that of the parallel bays
(BB), it followed that the first radiating bay gave a first space
(LMGH) which was difficult to vault, and a second space (HGEF) which
was impossible; for how establish an arch from F to E? Even if
round, its key would have risen much higher than the key of the
pointed archivolt LM. As the second radiating bay opened out still
wider, the difficulty was increased. The builder therefore inserted
the two intermediate pillars O and P between the columns of the
second aisle (H, G, and I); which he supported, in the outside wall
of the church, by one corresponding pier (Q) in the first bay of the
apse, and by two similar piers (R and S) in the second bay.
[Illustration with caption: NOTRE DAME DE PARIS]
"There is no need to point out," continued Viollet-le-Duc, as though
he much suspected that there might be need of pointing out, "what
skill this system showed and how much the art of architecture had
already been developed in the Ile de France toward the end of the
twelfth century; to what an extent the unity of arrangement and
style preoccupied the artists of that province."
In fact, the arrangement seems mathematically and technically
perfect. At all events, we know too little to criticize it. Yet one
would much like to be told why it was not repeated by any other
architect or in any other church. Apparently the Parisians
themselves were not quite satisfied with it, since they altered it a
hundred years later, in 1296, in order to build out chapels between
the piers. As the architects of each new cathedral had, in the
interval, insisted on apsidal chapels, one may venture to guess that
the Paris scheme hampered the services.
At Chartres the church services are Mary's own tastes; the church is
Mary; and the chapels are her private rooms. She was not pleased
with the arrangements made for her in her palace at Paris; they were
too architectural; too regular and mathematical; too popular; too
impersonal; and she rather abruptly ordered her architect at
Chartres to go back to the old arrangement. The apse at Paris was
hardly covered with its leading before the architect of Chartres
adopted a totally new plan, which, according to Viollet-le-Duc, does
him little credit, but which was plainly imposed on him, like the
twelfth-century portal. Not only had it nothing of the mathematical
correctness and precision of the Paris scheme, easy to understand
and imitate, but it carried even a sort of violence--a wrench--in
its system, as though the Virgin had said, with her grand Byzantine
air:--I will it!
[Illustration with caption: CHARTRES]
"At Chartres," said Viollet-le-Duc, "the choir of the Cathedral
presents a plan which does no great honour to its architect. There
is want of accord between the circular apse and the parallel sides
of the sanctuary; the spacings of the columns of the second
collateral are loose (laches); the vaults quite poorly combined; and
in spite of the great width of the spaces between the columns of the
second aisle, the architect had still to narrow those between the
interior columns."
The plan shows that, from the first, the architect must have
deliberately rejected the Paris scheme; he must have begun by
narrowing the spaces between his inner columns; then, with a sort of
violence, he fitted on his second row of columns; and, finally, he
showed his motive by constructing an outer wall of an original or
unusual shape. Any woman would see at once the secret of all this
ingenuity and effort. The Chartres apse, enormous in size and width,
is exquisitely lighted. Here, as everywhere throughout the church,
the windows give the law, but here they actually take place of law.
The Virgin herself saw to the lighting of her own boudoir. According
to Viollet-le-Duc, Chartres differs from all the other great
cathedrals by being built not for its nave or even for its choir,
but for its apse; it was planned not for the people or the court,
but for the Queen; not a church but a shrine; and the shrine is the
apse where the Queen arranged her light to please herself and not
her architect, who had already been sacrificed at the western portal
and who had a free hand only in the nave and transepts where the
Queen never went, and which, from her own apartment, she did not
even see.
[Illustration with caption: LAON]
This is, in effect, what Viollet-le-Duc says in his professional
language, which is perhaps--or sounds--more reasonable to tourists,
whose imaginations are hardly equal to the effort of fancying a real
deity. Perhaps, indeed, one might get so high as to imagine a real
Bishop of Laon, who should have ordered his architect to build an
enormous hall of religion, to rival the immense abbeys of the day,
and to attract the people, as though it were a clubroom. There they
were to see all the great sights; church ceremonies; theatricals;
political functions; there they were to do business, and frequent
society. They were to feel at home in their church because it was
theirs, and did not belong to a priesthood or to Rome. Jealousy of
Rome was a leading motive of Gothic architecture, and Rome repaid it
in full. The Bishop of Laon conceded at least a transept to custom
or tradition, but the Archbishop of Bourges abolished even the
transept, and the great hall had no special religious expression
except in the circular apse with its chapels which Laon had
abandoned. One can hardly decide whether Laon or Bourges is the more
popular, industrial, political, or, in other words, the less
religious; but the Parisians, as the plan of Viollet-le-Duc has
shown, were quite as advanced as either, and only later altered
their scheme into one that provided chapels for religious service.
[Illustration with caption: BOURGES]
[Illustration with caption: AMIENS]
Amiens and Beauvais have each seven chapels, but only one aisle, so
that they do not belong in the same class with the apses of Paris,
Bourges, and Chartres, though the plans are worth studying for
comparison, since they show how many-sided the problem was, and how
far from satisfied the architects were with their own schemes. The
most interesting of all, for comparison with Chartres, is Le Mans,
where the apsidal chapels are carried to fanaticism, while the
vaulting seems to be reasonable enough, and the double aisle
successfully managed, if Viollet-le-Duc permits ignorant people to
form an opinion on architectural dogma. For our purposes, the
architectural dogma may stand, and the Paris scheme may be taken for
granted, as alone correct and orthodox; all that Viollet-le-Duc
teaches is that the Chartres scheme is unorthodox, not to say
heretical; and this is the point on which his words are most
interesting.
[Illustration with caption: BEAUVAIS]
The church at Chartres belonged not to the people, not to the
priesthood, and not even to Rome; it belonged to the Virgin. "Here
the religious influence appears wholly; three large chapels in the
apse; four others less pronounced; double aisles of great width
round the choir; vast transepts! Here the church ceremonial could
display all its pomp; the choir, more than at Paris, more than at
Bourges, more than at Soissons, and especially more than at Laon, is
the principal object; for it, the church is built."
[Illustration with caption: LE MANS]
One who is painfully conscious of ignorance, and who never would
dream of suggesting a correction to anybody, may not venture to
suggest an idea of any sort to an architect; but if it were allowed
to paraphrase Viollet-le-Duc's words into a more or less emotional
or twelfth-century form, one might say, after him, that, compared
with Paris or Laon, the Chartres apse shows the same genius that is
shown in the Chartres rose; the same large mind that overrules,--the
same strong will that defies difficulties. The Chartres apse is as
entertaining as all the other Gothic apses together, because it
overrides the architect. You may, if you really have no imagination
whatever, reject the idea that the Virgin herself made the plan; the
feebleness of our fancy is now congenital, organic, beyond stimulant
or strychnine, and we shrink like sensitive-plants from the touch of
a vision or spirit; but at least one can still sometimes feel a
woman's taste, and in the apse of Chartres one feels nothing else.
[Illustration with caption: CHARTRES]
CHAPTER VIII
THE TWELFTH-CENTURY GLASS
At last we are face to face with the crowning glory of Chartres.
Other churches have glass,--quantities of it, and very fine,--but we
have been trying to catch a glimpse of the glory which stands behind
the glass of Chartres, and gives it quality and feeling of its own.
For once the architect is useless and his explanations are pitiable;
the painter helps still less; and the decorator, unless he works in
glass, is the poorest guide of all, while, if he works in glass, he
is sure to lead wrong; and all of them may toil until Pierre
Mauclerc's stone Christ comes to life, and condemns them among the
unpardonable sinners on the southern portal, but neither they nor
any other artist will ever create another Chartres. You had better
stop here, once for all, unless you are willing to feel that
Chartres was made what it is, not by artist, but by the Virgin.
If this imperial presence is stamped on the architecture and the
sculpture with an energy not to be mistaken, it radiates through the
glass with a light and colour that actually blind the true servant
of Mary. One becomes, sometimes, a little incoherent in talking
about it; one is ashamed to be as extravagant as one wants to be;
one has no business to labour painfully to explain and prove to
one's self what is as clear as the sun in the sky; one loses temper
in reasoning about what can only be felt, and what ought to be felt
instantly, as it was in the twelfth century, even by the truie qui
file and the ane qui vielle. Any one should feel it that wishes; any
one who does not wish to feel it can let it alone. Still, it may be
that not one tourist in a hundred--perhaps not one in a thousand of
the English-speaking race--does feel it, or can feel it even when
explained to him, for we have lost many senses.
Therefore, let us plod on, laboriously proving God, although, even
to Saint Bernard and Pascal, God was incapable of proof; and using
such material as the books furnish for help. It is not much. The
French have been shockingly negligent of their greatest artistic
glory. One knows not even where to seek. One must go to the National
Library and beg as a special favour permission to look at the
monumental work of M. Lasteyrie, if one wishes to make even a
beginning of the study of French glass. Fortunately there exists a
fragment of a great work which the Government began, but never
completed, upon Chartres; and another, quite indispensable, but not
official, upon Bourges; while Viollet-le-Duc's article "Vitrail"
serves as guide to the whole. Ottin's book "Le Vitrail" is
convenient. Male's volume "L'Art Religieux" is essential. In
English, Westlake's "History of Design" is helpful. Perhaps, after
reading all that is readable, the best hope will be to provide the
best glasses with the largest possible field; and, choosing an hour
when the church is empty, take seat about halfway up the nave,
facing toward the western entrance with a morning light, so that the
glass of the western windows shall not stand in direct sun.
The glass of the three lancets is the oldest in the cathedral. If
the portal beneath it, with the sculpture, was built in the twenty
or thirty years before 1150, the glass could not be much later. It
goes with the Abbe Suger's glass at Saint-Denis, which was surely
made as early as 1140-50, since the Abbe was a long time at work on
it, before he died in 1152. Their perfection proves, what his
biographer asserted, that the Abbe Suger spent many years as well as
much money on his windows at Saint-Denis, and the specialists affirm
that the three lancets at Chartres are quite as good as what remains
of Suger's work. Viollet-le-Duc and M. Paul Durand, the Government
expert, are positive that this glass is the finest ever made, as far
as record exists; and that the northern lancet representing the Tree
of Jesse stands at the head of all glasswork whatever. The windows
claim, therefore, to be the most splendid colour decoration the
world ever saw, since no other material, neither silk nor gold, and
no opaque colour laid on with a brush, can compare with translucent
glass, and even the Ravenna mosaics or Chinese porcelains are
darkness beside them.
The claim may not be modest, but it is none of ours. Viollet-le-Duc
must answer for his own sins, and he chose the lancet window of the
Tree of Jesse for the subject of his lecture on glass in general, as
the most complete and perfect example of this greatest decorative
art. Once more, in following him, one is dragged, in spite of one's
self, into technique, and, what is worse, into a colour world whose
technique was forgotten five hundred years ago. Viollet-le-Duc tried
to recover it. "After studying our best French windows," he
cautiously suggests that "one might maintain," as their secret of
harmony, that "the first condition for an artist in glass is to know
how to manage blue. The blue is the light in windows, and light has
value only by opposition." The radiating power of blue is,
therefore, the starting-point, and on this matter Viollet-le-Duc has
much to say which a student would need to master; but a tourist
never should study, or he ceases to be a tourist; and it is enough
for us if we know that, to get the value they wanted, the artists
hatched their blues with lines, covered their surface with figures
as though with screens, and tied their blue within its own field
with narrow circlets of white or yellow, which, in their turn, were
beaded to fasten the blue still more firmly in its place. We have
chiefly to remember the law that blue is light:--
But also it is that luminous colour which gives value to all others.
If you compose a window in which there shall be no blue, you will
get a dirty or dull (blafard) or crude surface which the eye will
instantly avoid; but if you put a few touches of blue among all
these tones, you will immediately get striking effects if not
skilfully conceived harmony. So the composition of blue glass
singularly preoccupied the glassworkers of the twelfth and
thirteenth centuries. If there is only one red, two yellows, two or
three purples, and two or three greens at the most, there are
infinite shades of blue, ... and these blues are placed with a very
delicate observation of the effects they should produce on other
tones, and other tones on them.
Viollet-le-Duc took the window of the Tree of Jesse as his first
illustration of the rule, for the reason that its blue ground is one
continuous strip from top to bottom, with the subordinate red on
either side, and a border uniting the whole so plainly that no one
can fail to see its object or its method.
The blue tone of the principal subject [that is to say, the ground
of the Tree of Jesse] has commanded the tonality of all the rest.
This medium was necessary to enable the luminous splendour to
display its energy. This primary condition had dictated the red
ground for the prophets, and the return to the blue on reaching the
outside semicircular band. To give full value both to the vigour of
the red, and to the radiating transparency of the blue, the ground
of the corners is put in emerald green; but then, in the corners
themselves, the blue is recalled and is given an additional solidity
of value by the delicate ornamentation of the squares.
This translation is very free, but one who wants to know these
windows must read the whole article, and read it here in the church,
the Dictionary in one hand, and binocle in the other, for the
binocle is more important than the Dictionary when it reaches the
complicated border which repeats in detail the colour-scheme of the
centre:--
The border repeats all the tones allotted to the principal subjects,
but by small fragments, so that this border, with an effect both
solid and powerful, shall not enter into rivalry with the large
arrangements of the central parts.
One would think this simple enough; easily tested on any illuminated
manuscript, Arab, Persian, or Byzantine; verified by any Oriental
rug, old or new; freely illustrated by any Chinese pattern on a Ming
jar, or cloisonne vase; and offering a kind of alphabet for the
shop-window of a Paris modiste. A strong red; a strong and a weak
yellow; a strong and a weak purple; a strong and a weak green, are
all to be tied together, given their values, and held in their
places by blue. The thing seems simpler still when it appears that
perspective is forbidden, and that these glass windows of the
twelfth and thirteenth centuries, like Oriental rugs, imply a flat
surface, a wall which must not be treated as open. The twelfth-
century glassworker would sooner have worn a landscape on his back
than have costumed his church with it; he would as soon have
decorated his floors with painted holes as his walls. He wanted to
keep the coloured window flat, like a rug hung on the wall.
The radiation of translucent colours in windows cannot be modified
by the artist; all his talent consists in profiting by it, according
to a given harmonic scheme on a single plane, like a rug, but not
according to an effect of aerial perspective. Do what you like, a
glass window never does and never can represent anything but a plane
surface; its real virtues even exist only on that condition. Every
attempt to present several planes to the eye is fatal to the harmony
of colour, without producing any illusion in the spectator ...
Translucid painting can propose as its object only a design
supporting as energetically as possible a harmony of colours.
Whether this law is absolute you can tell best by looking at modern
glass which is mostly perspective; but, whether you like it or not,
the matter of perspective does not enter into a twelfth-century
window more than into a Japanese picture, and may be ignored. The
decoration of the twelfth century, as far as concerns us, was
intended only for one plane, and a window was another form of rug or
embroidery or mosaic, hung on the wall for colour,--simple
decoration to be seen as a whole. If the Tree of Jesse teaches
anything at all, it is that the artist thought first of controlling
his light, but he wanted to do it not in order to dim the colours;
on the contrary, he toiled, like a jeweller setting diamonds and
rubies, to increase their splendour. If his use of blue teaches this
lesson, his use of green proves it. The outside border of the Tree
of Jesse is a sort of sample which our schoolmaster Viollet-le-Duc
sets, from which he requires us to study out the scheme, beginning
with the treatment of light, and ending with the value of the
emerald green ground in the corners.
Complicated as the border of the Tree of Jesse is, it has its mates
in the borders of the two other twelfth-century windows, and a few
of the thirteenth-century in the side aisles; but the southern of
the three lancets shows how the artists dealt with a difficulty that
upset their rule. The border of the southern window does not count
as it should; something is wrong with it and a little study shows
that the builder, and not the glassworker, was to blame. Owing to
his miscalculation--if it was really a miscalculation--in the width
of the southern tower, the builder economized six or eight inches in
the southern door and lancet, which was enough to destroy the
balance between the colour-values, as masses, of the south and north
windows. The artist was obliged to choose whether he would sacrifice
the centre or the border of his southern window, and decided that
the windows could not be made to balance if he narrowed the centre,
but that he must balance them by enriching the centre, and
sacrificing the border. He has filled the centre with medallions as
rich as he could make them, and these he has surrounded with
borders, which are also enriched to the utmost; but these medallions
with their borders spread across the whole window, and when you
search with the binocle for the outside border, you see its pattern
clearly only at the top and bottom. On the sides, at intervals of
about two feet, the medallions cover and interrupt it; but this is
partly corrected by making the border, where it is seen, so rich as
to surpass any other in the cathedral, even that of the Tree of
Jesse. Whether the artist has succeeded or not is a question for
other artists--or for you, if you please--to decide; but apparently
he did succeed, since no one has ever noticed the difficulty or the
device.
The southern lancet represents the Passion of Christ. Granting to
Viollet-le-Duc that the unbroken vertical colour-scheme of the Tree
of Jesse made the more effective window, one might still ask whether
the medallion-scheme is not the more interesting. Once past the
workshop, there can be no question about it; the Tree of Jesse has
the least interest of all the three windows. A genealogical tree has
little value, artistic or other, except to those who belong in its
branches, and the Tree of Jesse was put there, not to please us, but
to please the Virgin. The Passion window was also put there to
please her, but it tells a story, and does it in a way that has more
novelty than the subject. The draughtsman who chalked out the design
on the whitened table that served for his sketch-board was either a
Greek, or had before him a Byzantine missal, or enamel or ivory. The
first medallion on these legendary windows is the lower left-hand
one, which begins the story or legend; here it represents Christ
after the manner of the Greek Church. In the next medallion is the
Last Supper; the fish on the dish is Greek. In the middle of the
window, with the help of the binocle, you will see a Crucifixion, or
even two, for on the left is Christ on the Cross, and on the right a
Descent from the Cross; in this is the figure of man pulling out
with pincers the nails which fasten Christ's feet; a figure unknown
to Western religious art. The Noli Me Tangere, on the right, near
the top, has a sort of Greek character. All the critics, especially
M. Paul Durand, have noticed this Byzantine look, which is even more
marked in the Suger window at Saint-Denis, so as to suggest that
both are by the same hand, and that the hand of a Greek. If the
artist was really a Greek, he has done work more beautiful than any
left at Byzantium, and very far finer than anything in the beautiful
work at Cairo, but although the figures and subjects are more or
less Greek, like the sculptures on the portal, the art seems to be
French.
Look at the central window! Naturally, there sits the Virgin, with
her genealogical tree on her left, and her Son's testimony on her
right to prove her double divinity. She is seated in the long halo;
as, on the western portal, directly beneath her, her Son is
represented in stone, Her crown and head, as well as that of the
Child, are fourteenth-century restorations more or less like the
original; but her cushioned throne and her robes of imperial state,
as well as the flowered sceptre in either hand, are as old as the
sculpture of the portal, and redolent of the first crusade. On
either side of her, the Sun and the Moon offer praise; her two
Archangels, Michael and Gabriel, with resplendent wings, offer not
incense as in later times, but the two sceptres of spiritual and
temporal power; while the Child in her lap repeats His Mother's
action and even her features and expression. At first sight, one
would take for granted that all this was pure Byzantium, and perhaps
it is; but it has rather the look of Byzantium gallicized, and
carried up to a poetic French ideal. At Saint-Denis the little
figure of the Abbe Suger at the feet of the Virgin has a very
Oriental look, and in the twin medallion the Virgin resembles
greatly the Virgin of Chartres, yet, for us, until some specialist
shows us the Byzantine original, the work is as thoroughly French as
the fleches of the churches.
Byzantine art is altogether another chapter, and, if we could but
take a season to study it in Byzantium, we might get great
amusement; but the art of Chartres, even in 1100, was French and
perfectly French, as the architecture shows, and the glass is even
more French than the architecture, as you can detect in many other
ways. Perhaps the surest evidence is the glass itself. The men who
made it were not professionals but amateurs, who may have had some
knowledge of enamelling, but who worked like jewellers, unused to
glass, and with the refinement that a reliquary or a crozier
required. The cost of these windows must have been extravagant; one
is almost surprised that they are not set in gold rather than in
lead. The Abbe Suger shirked neither trouble nor expense, and the
only serious piece of evidence that this artist was a Greek is given
by his biographer who unconsciously shows that the artist cheated
him: "He sought carefully for makers of windows and workmen in glass
of exquisite quality, especially in that made of sapphires in great
abundance that were pulverized and melted up in the glass to give it
the blue colour which he delighted to admire." The "materia
saphirorum" was evidently something precious,--as precious as crude
sapphires would have been,--and the words imply beyond question that
the artist asked for sapphires and that Suger paid for them; yet all
specialists agree that the stone known as sapphire, if ground, could
not produce translucent colour at all. The blue which Suger loved,
and which is probably the same as that of these Chartres windows,
cannot be made out of sapphires. Probably the "materia saphirorum"
means cobalt only, but whatever it was, the glassmakers seem to
agree that this glass of 1140-50 is the best ever made. M. Paul
Durand in his official report of 1881 said that these windows, both
artistically and mechanically, were of the highest class: "I will
also call attention to the fact that the glass and the execution of
the painting are, materially speaking, of a quality much superior to
windows of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Having passed
several months in contact with these precious works when I copied
them, I was able to convince myself of their superiority in every
particular, especially in the upper parts of the three windows." He
said that they were perfect and irreproachable. The true enthusiast
in glass would in the depths of his heart like to say outright that
these three windows are worth more than all that the French have
since done in colour, from that day to this; but the matter concerns
us chiefly because it shows how French the experiment was, and how
Suger's taste and wealth made it possible.
Certain it is, too, that the southern window--the Passion--was made
on the spot, or near by, and fitted for the particular space with
care proportionate to its cost. All are marked by the hand of the
Chartres Virgin. They are executed not merely for her, but by her.
At Saint-Denis the Abbe Suger appeared,--it is true that he was
prostrate at her feet, but still he appeared. At Chartres no one--no
suggestion of a human agency--was allowed to appear; the Virgin
permitted no one to approach her, even to adore. She is enthroned
above, as Queen and Empress and Mother, with the symbols of
exclusive and universal power. Below her, she permitted the world to
see the glories of her earthly life;--the Annunciation, Visitation,
and Nativity; the Magi; King Herod; the Journey to Egypt; and the
single medallion, which shows the gods of Egypt falling from their
pedestals at her coming, is more entertaining than a whole picture-
gallery of oil paintings.
In all France there exist barely a dozen good specimens of twelfth-
century glass. Besides these windows at Chartres and the fragments
at Saint-Denis, there are windows at Le Mans and Angers and bits at
Vendome, Chalons, Poitiers, Rheims, and Bourges; here and there one
happens on other pieces, but the earliest is the best, because the
glass-makers were new at the work and spent on it an infinite amount
of trouble and money which they found to be unnecessary as they
gained experience. Even in 1200 the value of these windows was so
well understood, relatively to new ones, that they were preserved
with the greatest care. The effort to make such windows was never
repeated. Their jewelled perfection did not suit the scale of the
vast churches of the thirteenth century. By turning your head toward
the windows of the side aisles, you can see the criticism which the
later artists passed on the old work. They found it too refined, too
brilliant, too jewel-like for the size of the new cathedral; the
play of light and colour allowed the eye too little repose; indeed,
the eye could not see their whole beauty, and half their value was
thrown away in this huge stone setting. At best they must have
seemed astray on the bleak, cold, windy plain of Beauce,--homesick
for Palestine or Cairo,--yearning for Monreale or Venice,--but this
is not our affair, and, under the protection of the Empress Virgin,
Saint Bernard himself could have afforded to sin even to drunkenness
of colour. With trifling expense of imagination one can still catch
a glimpse of the crusades in the glory of the glass. The longer one
looks into it, the more overpowering it becomes, until one begins
almost to feel an echo of what our two hundred and fifty million
arithmetical ancestors, drunk with the passion of youth and the
splendour of the Virgin, have been calling to us from Mont-Saint-
Michel and Chartres. No words and no wine could revive their
emotions so vividly as they glow in the purity of the colours; the
limpidity of the blues; the depth of the red; the intensity of the
green; the complicated harmonies; the sparkle and splendour of the
light; and the quiet and certain strength of the mass.
With too strong direct sun the windows are said to suffer, and
become a cluster of jewels--a delirium of coloured light. The lines,
too, have different degrees of merit. These criticisms seldom strike
a chance traveller, but he invariably makes the discovery that the
designs within the medallions are childish. He may easily correct
them, if he likes, and see what would happen to the window; but
although this is the alphabet of art, and we are past spelling words
of one syllable, the criticism teaches at least one lesson.
Primitive man seems to have had a natural colour-sense, instinctive
like the scent of a dog. Society has no right to feel it as a moral
reproach to be told that it has reached an age when it can no longer
depend, as in childhood, on its taste, or smell, or sight, or
hearing, or memory; the fact seems likely enough, and in no way
sinful; yet society always denies it, and is invariably angry about
it; and, therefore, one had better not say it. On the other hand, we
can leave Delacroix and his school to fight out the battle they
began against Ingres and his school, in French art, nearly a hundred
years ago, which turned in substance on the same point. Ingres held
that the first motive in colour-decoration was line, and that a
picture which was well drawn was well enough coloured. Society
seemed, on the whole, to agree with him. Society in the twelfth
century agreed with Delacroix. The French held then that the first
point in colour-decoration was colour, and they never hesitated to
put their colour where they wanted it, or cared whether a green
camel or a pink lion looked like a dog or a donkey provided they got
their harmony or value. Everything except colour was sacrificed to
line in the large sense, but details of drawing were conventional
and subordinate. So we laugh to see a knight with a blue face, on a
green horse, that looks as though drawn by a four-year-old child,
and probably the artist laughed, too; but he was a colourist, and
never sacrificed his colour for a laugh.
We tourists assume commonly that he knew no better. In our simple
faith in ourselves, great hope abides, for it shows an earnestness
hardly less than that of the crusaders; but in the matter of colour
one is perhaps less convinced, or more open to curiosity. No school
of colour exists in our world to-day, while the Middle Ages had a
dozen; but it is certainly true that these twelfth-century windows
break the French tradition. They had no antecedent, and no fit
succession. All the authorities dwell on their exceptional
character. One is sorely tempted to suspect that they were in some
way an accident; that such an art could not have sprung, in such
perfection, out of nothing, had it been really French; that it must
have had its home elsewhere--on the Rhine--in Italy--in Byzantium--
or in Bagdad.
The same controversy has raged for near two hundred years over the
Gothic arch, and everything else mediaeval, down to the philosophy
of the schools. The generation that lived during the first and
second crusades tried a number of original experiments, besides
capturing Jerusalem. Among other things, it produced the western
portal of Chartres, with its statuary, its glass, and its fleche, as
a by-play; as it produced Abelard, Saint Bernard, and Christian of
Troyes, whose acquaintance we have still to make. It took ideas
wherever it found them;--from Germany, Italy, Spain, Constantinople,
Palestine, or from the source which has always attracted the French
mind like a magnet--from ancient Greece. That it actually did take
the ideas, no one disputes, except perhaps patriots who hold that
even the ideas were original; but to most students the ideas need to
be accounted for less than the taste with which they were handled,
and the quickness with which they were developed. That the taste was
French, you can see in the architecture, or you will see if ever you
meet the Gothic elsewhere; that it seized and developed an idea
quickly, you have seen in the arch, the fleche, the porch, and the
windows, as well as in the glass; but what we do not comprehend, and
never shall, is the appetite behind all this; the greed for novelty:
the fun of life. Every one who has lived since the sixteenth century
has felt deep distrust of every one who lived before it, and of
every one who believed in the Middle Ages. True it is that the last
thirteenth-century artist died a long time before our planet began
its present rate of revolution; it had to come to rest, and begin
again; but this does not prevent astonishment that the twelfth-
century planet revolved so fast. The pointed arch not only came as
an idea into France, but it was developed into a system of
architecture and covered the country with buildings on a scale of
height never before attempted except by the dome, with an
expenditure of wealth that would make a railway system look cheap,
all in a space of about fifty years; the glass came with it, and
went with it, at least as far as concerns us; but, if you need other
evidence, you can consult Renan, who is the highest authority: "One
of the most singular phenomena of the literary history of the Middle
Ages," says Renan of Averroes, "is the activity of the intellectual
commerce, and the rapidity with which books were spread from one end
of Europe to the other. The philosophy of Abelard during his
lifetime (1100-42) had penetrated to the ends of Italy. The French
poetry of the trouveres counted within less than a century
translations into German, Swedish, Norwegian, Icelandic, Flemish,
Dutch, Bohemian, Italian, Spanish"; and he might have added that
England needed no translation, but helped to compose the poetry, not
being at that time so insular as she afterwards became. "Such or
such a work, composed in Morocco or in Cairo, was known at Paris and
at Cologne in less time than it would need in our days for a German
book of capital importance to pass the Rhine"; and Renan wrote this
in 1852 when German books of capital importance were revolutionizing
the literary world.
One is apt to forget the smallness of Europe, and how quickly it
could always be crossed. In summer weather, with fair winds, one can
sail from Alexandria or from Syria, to Sicily, or even to Spain and
France, in perfect safety and with ample room for freight, as easily
now as one could do it then, without the aid of steam; but one does
not now carry freight of philosophy, poetry, or art. The world still
struggles for unity, but by different methods, weapons, and thought.
The mercantile exchanges which surprised Renan, and which have
puzzled historians, were in ideas. The twelfth century was as greedy
for them in one shape as the nineteenth century in another. France
paid for them dearly, and repented for centuries; but what creates
surprise to the point of incredulity is her hunger for them, the
youthful gluttony with which she devoured them, the infallible taste
with which she dressed them out. The restless appetite that snatched
at the pointed arch, the stone fleche, the coloured glass, the
illuminated missal, the chanson and roman and pastorelle, the
fragments of Aristotle, the glosses of Avicenne, was nothing
compared with the genius which instantly gave form and flower to
them all.
This episode merely means that the French twelfth-century artist may
be supposed to have known his business, and if he produced a
grotesque, or a green-faced Saint, or a blue castle, or a syllogism,
or a song, that he did it with a notion of the effect he had in
mind. The glass window was to him a whole,--a mass,--and its details
were his amusement; for the twelfth-century Frenchman enjoyed his
fun, though it was sometimes rather heavy for modern French taste,
and less refined than the Church liked. These three twelfth-century
windows, like their contemporary portal outside, and the fleche that
goes with them, are the ideals of enthusiasts of mediaeval art; they
are above the level of all known art, in religious form; they are
inspired; they are divine! This is the claim of Chartres and its
Virgin. Actually, the French artist, whether architect, sculptor, or
painter in glass, did rise here above his usual level. He knew it
when he did it, and probably he attributed it, as we do, to the
Virgin; for these works of his were hardly fifty years old when the
rest of the old church was burned; and already the artist felt the
virtue gone out of him. He could not do so well in 1200 as he did in
1150; and the Virgin was not so near.
The proof of it--or, if you prefer to think so, the proof against
it--is before our eyes on the wall above the lancet windows. When
Villard de Honnecourt came to Chartres, he seized at once on the
western rose as his study, although the two other roses were
probably there, in all their beauty and lightness. He saw in the
western rose some quality of construction which interested him; and,
in fact, the western rose is one of the flowers of architecture
which reveals its beauties slowly without end; but its chief beauty
is the feeling which unites it with the portal, the lancets, and the
fleche. The glassworker here in the interior had the same task to
perform. The glass of the lancets was fifty years old when the glass
for the rose was planned; perhaps it was seventy, for the exact
dates are unknown, but it does not matter, for the greater the
interval, the more interesting is the treatment. Whatever the date,
the glass of the western rose cannot be much earlier or much later
than that of the other roses, or that of the choir, and yet you see
at a glance that it is quite differently treated. On such matters
one must, of course, submit to the opinion of artists, which one
does the more readily because they always disagree; but until the
artists tell us better, we may please ourselves by fancying that the
glass of the rose was intended to harmonize with that of the
lancets, and unite it with the thirteenth-century glass of the nave
and transepts. Among all the thirteenth-century windows the western
rose alone seems to affect a rivalry in brilliancy with the lancets,
and carries it so far that the separate medallions and pictures are
quite lost,--especially in direct sunshine,--blending in a confused
effect of opals, in a delirium of colour and light, with a result
like a cluster of stones in jewelry. Assuming as one must, in want
of the artist's instruction, that he knew what he wanted to do, and
did it, one must take for granted that he treated the rose as a
whole, and aimed at giving it harmony with the three precious
windows beneath. The effect is that of a single large ornament; a
round breastpin, or what is now called a sunburst, of jewels, with
three large pendants beneath.
We are ignorant tourists, liable to much error in trying to seek
motives in artists who worked seven hundred years ago for a society
which thought and felt in forms quite unlike ours, but the medieval
pilgrim was more ignorant than we, and much simpler in mind; if the
idea of an ornament occurs to us, it certainly occurred to him, and
still more to the glassworker whose business was to excite his
illusions. An artist, if good for anything, foresees what his public
will see; and what his public will see is what he ought to have
intended--the measure of his genius. If the public sees more than he
himself did, this is his credit; if less, this is his fault. No
matter how simple or ignorant we are, we ought to feel a discord or
a harmony where the artist meant us to feel it, and when we see a
motive, we conclude that other people have seen it before us, and
that it must, therefore, have been intended. Neither of the transept
roses is treated like this one; neither has the effect of a personal
ornament; neither is treated as a jewel. No one knew so well as the
artist that such treatment must give the effect of a jewel. The
Roses of France and of Dreux bear indelibly and flagrantly the
character of France and Dreux; on the western rose is stamped with
greater refinement but equal decision the character of a much
greater power than either of them.
No artist would have ventured to put up, before the eyes of Mary in
Majesty, above the windows so dear to her, any object that she had
not herself commanded. Whether a miracle was necessary, or whether
genius was enough, is a point of casuistry which you can settle with
Albertus Magnus or Saint Bernard, and which you will understand as
little when settled as before; but for us, beyond the futilities of
unnecessary doubt, the Virgin designed this rose; not perhaps in
quite the same perfect spirit in which she designed the lancets, but
still wholly for her own pleasure and as her own idea. She placed
upon the breast of her Church--which symbolized herself--a jewel so
gorgeous that no earthly majesty could bear comparison with it, and
which no other heavenly majesty has rivalled. As one watches the
light play on it, one is still overcome by the glories of the
jewelled rose and its three gemmed pendants; one feels a little of
the effect she meant it to produce even on infidels, Moors, and
heretics, but infinitely more on the men who feared and the women
who adored her;--not to dwell too long upon it, one admits that hers
is the only Church. One would admit anything that she should
require. If you had only the soul of a shrimp, you would crawl, like
the Abbe Suger, to kiss her feet.
Unfortunately she is gone, or comes here now so very rarely that we
never shall see her; but her genius remains as individual here as
the genius of Blanche of Castile and Pierre de Dreux in the
transepts. That the three lancets were her own taste, as distinctly
as the Trianon was the taste of Louis XIV, is self-evident. They
represent all that was dearest to her; her Son's glory on her right;
her own beautiful life in the middle; her royal ancestry on her
left: the story of her divine right, thrice-told. The pictures are
all personal, like family portraits. Above them the man who worked
in 1200 to carry out the harmony, and to satisfy the Virgin's
wishes, has filled his rose with a dozen or two little compositions
in glass, which reveal their subjects only to the best powers of a
binocle. Looking carefully, one discovers at last that this gorgeous
combination of all the hues of Paradise contains or hides a Last
Judgment--the one subject carefully excluded from the old work, and
probably not existing on the south portal for another twenty years.
If the scheme of the western rose dates from 1200, as is reasonable
to suppose, this Last Judgment is the oldest in the church, and
makes a link between the theology of the first crusade, beneath, and
the theology of Pierre Mauclerc in the south porch. The churchman is
the only true and final judge on his own doctrine, and we neither
know nor care to know the facts; but we are as good judges as he of
the feeling, and we are at full liberty to feel that such a Last
Judgment as this was never seen before or since by churchman or
heretic, unless by virtue of the heresy which held that the true
Christian must be happy in being damned since such is the will of
God. That this blaze of heavenly light was intended, either by the
Virgin or by her workmen, to convey ideas of terror or pain, is a
notion which the Church might possibly preach, but which we sinners
knew to be false in the thirteenth century as well as we know it
now. Never in all these seven hundred years has one of us looked up
at this rose without feeling it to be Our Lady's promise of
Paradise.
Here as everywhere else throughout the church, one feels the
Virgin's presence, with no other thought than her majesty and grace.
To the Virgin and to her suppliants, as to us, who though outcasts
in other churches can still hope in hers, the Last Judgment was not
a symbol of God's justice or man's corruption, but of her own
infinite mercy. The Trinity judged, through Christ;--Christ loved
and pardoned, through her. She wielded the last and highest power on
earth and in hell. In the glow and beauty of her nature, the light
of her Son's infinite love shone as the sunlight through the glass,
turning the Last Judgment itself into the highest proof of her
divine and supreme authority. The rudest ruffian of the Middle Ages,
when he looked at this Last Judgment, laughed; for what was the Last
Judgment to her! An ornament, a plaything, a pleasure! a jewelled
decoration which she wore on her breast! Her chief joy was to
pardon; her eternal instinct was to love; her deepest passion was
pity! On her imperial heart the flames of hell showed only the
opaline colours of heaven. Christ the Trinity might judge as much as
He pleased, but Christ the Mother would rescue; and her servants
could look boldly into the flames.
If you, or even our friends the priests who still serve Mary's
shrine, suspect that there is some exaggeration in this language, it
will only oblige you to admit presently that there is none; but for
the moment we are busy with glass rather than with faith, and there
is a world of glass here still to study. Technically, we are done
with it. The technique of the thirteenth century comes naturally and
only too easily out of that of the twelfth. Artistically, the motive
remains the same, since it is always the Virgin; but although the
Virgin of Chartres is always the Virgin of Majesty, there are
degrees in the assertion of her majesty even here, which affect the
art, and qualify its feeling. Before stepping down to the thirteenth
century, one should look at these changes of the Virgin's royal
presence.
First and most important as record is the stone Virgin on the south
door of the western portal, which we studied, with her Byzantine
Court; and the second, also in stone, is of the same period, on one
of the carved capitals of the portal, representing the Adoration of
the Magi. The third is the glass Virgin at the top of the central
lancet. All three are undoubted twelfth-century work; and you can
see another at Paris, on the same door of Notre Dame, and still more
on Abbe Suger's window at Saint-Denis, and, later, within a
beautiful grisaille at Auxerre; but all represent the same figure; a
Queen, enthroned, crowned, with the symbols of royal power, holding
in her lap the infant King whose guardian she is. Without pretending
to know what special crown she bears, we can assume, till corrected,
that it is the Carlovingian imperial, not the Byzantine. The Trinity
nowhere appears except as implied in the Christ. At the utmost, a
mystic hand may symbolize the Father. The Virgin as represented by
the artists of the twelfth century in the Ile de France and at
Chartres seems to be wholly French in spite of the Greek atmosphere
of her workmanship. One might almost insist that she is blonde, full
in face, large in figure, dazzlingly beautiful, and not more than
thirty years of age. The Child never seems to be more than five.
You are equally free to see a Southern or Eastern type in her face,
and perhaps the glass suggests a dark type, but the face of the
Virgin on the central lancet is a fourteenth-century restoration
which may or may not reproduce the original, while all the other
Virgins represented in glass, except one, belong to the thirteenth
century. The possible exception is a well-known figure called Notre-
Dame-de-la-Belle-Verriere in the choir next the south transept. A
strange, almost uncanny feeling seems to haunt this window,
heightened by the veneration in which it was long held as a shrine,
though it is now deserted for Notre-Dame-du-Pilier on the opposite
side of the choir. The charm is partly due to the beauty of the
scheme of the angels, supporting, saluting, and incensing the Virgin
and Child with singular grace and exquisite feeling, but rather that
of the thirteenth than of the twelfth century. Here, too, the face
of the Virgin is not ancient. Apparently the original glass was
injured by time or accident, and the colours were covered or renewed
by a simple drawing in oil. Elsewhere the colour is thought to be
particularly good, and the window is a favourite mine of motives for
artists to exploit, but to us its chief interest is its singular
depth of feeling. The Empress Mother sits full-face, on a rich
throne and dais, with the Child on her lap, repeating her attitude
except that her hands support His shoulders. She wears her crown;
her feet rest on a stool, and both stool, rug, robe, and throne are
as rich as colour and decoration can make them. At last a dove
appears, with the rays of the Holy Ghost. Imperial as the Virgin is,
it is no longer quite the unlimited empire of the western lancet.
The aureole encircles her head only; she holds no sceptre; the Holy
Ghost seems to give her support which she did not need before, while
Saint Gabriel and Saint Michael, her archangels, with their symbols
of power, have disappeared. Exquisite as the angels are who surround
and bear up her throne, they assert no authority. The window itself
is not a single composition; the panels below seem inserted later
merely to fill up the space; six represent the Marriage of Cana, and
the three at the bottom show a grotesque little demon tempting
Christ in the Desert. The effect of the whole, in this angle which
is almost always dark or filled with shadow, is deep and sad, as
though the Empress felt her authority fail, and had come down from
the western portal to reproach us for neglect. The face is haunting.
Perhaps its force may be due to nearness, for this is the only
instance in glass of her descending so low that we can almost touch
her, and see what the twelfth century instinctively felt in the
features which, even in their beatitude, were serious and almost sad
under the austere responsibilities of infinite pity and power.
No doubt the window is very old, or perhaps an imitation or
reproduction of one which was much older, but to the pilgrim its
interest lies mostly in its personality, and there it stands alone.
Although the Virgin reappears again and again in the lower windows,-
-as in those on either side of the Belle-Verriere; in the remnant of
window representing her miracles at Chartres, in the south aisle
next the transept; in the fifteenth-century window of the chapel of
Vendome which follows; and in the third window which follows that of
Vendome and represents her coronation,--she does not show herself
again in all her majesty till we look up to the high windows above.
There we shall find her in her splendour on her throne, above the
high altar, and still more conspicuously in the Rose of France in
the north transept. Still again she is enthroned in the first window
of the choir next the north transept. Elsewhere we can see her
standing, but never does she come down to us in the full splendour
of her presence. Yet wherever we find her at Chartres, and of
whatever period, she is always Queen. Her expression and attitude
are always calm and commanding. She never calls for sympathy by
hysterical appeals to our feelings; she does not even altogether
command, but rather accepts the voluntary, unquestioning,
unhesitating, instinctive faith, love, and devotion of mankind. She
will accept ours, and we have not the heart to refuse it; we have
not even the right, for we are her guests.
CHAPTER IX
THE LEGENDARY WINDOWS
One's first visit to a great cathedral is like one's first visit to
the British Museum; the only intelligent idea is to follow the order
of time, but the museum is a chaos in time, and the cathedral is
generally all of one and the same time. At Chartres, after finishing
with the twelfth century, everything is of the thirteenth. To catch
even an order in time, one must first know what part of the
thirteenth-century church was oldest. The books say it was the
choir. After the fire of 1194, the pilgrims used the great crypt as
a church where services were maintained; but the builders must have
begun with the central piers and the choir, because the choir was
the only essential part of the church. Nave and transepts might be
suppressed, but without a choir the church was useless, and in a
shrine, such as Chartres, the choir was the whole church. Toward the
choir, then, the priest or artist looks first; and, since dates are
useful, the choir must be dated. The same popular enthusiasm, which
had broken out in 1145, revived in 1195 to help the rebuilding; and
the work was pressed forward with the same feverish haste, so that
ten years should have been ample to provide for the choir, if for
nothing more; and services may have been resumed there as early as
the year 1206; certainly in 1210. Probably the windows were designed
and put in hand as soon as the architect gave the measurements, and
any one who intended to give a window would have been apt to choose
one of the spaces in the apse, in Mary's own presence, next the
sanctuary.
The first of the choir windows to demand a date is the Belle-
Verriere, which is commonly classed as early thirteenth-century, and
may go with the two windows next it, one of which--the so-called
Zodiac window--bears a singularly interesting inscription: "COMES
TEOBALDUS DAT...AD PRECES COMIXIS PTICENSIS." If Shakespeare could
write the tragedy of "King John," we cannot admit ourselves not to
have read it, and this inscription might be a part of the play. The
"pagus perticensis" lies a short drive to the west, some fifteen or
twenty miles on the road to Le Mans, and in history is known as the
Comte du Perche, although its memory is now preserved chiefly by its
famous breed of Percheron horses. Probably the horse also dates from
the crusades, and may have carried Richard Coeur-de-Lion, but in any
case the count of that day was a vassal of Richard, and one of his
intimate friends, whose memory is preserved forever by a single line
in Richard's prison-song:--
Mes compaignons cui j'amoie et cui j'aim,
Ces dou Caheu et ces dou Percherain.
In 1194, when Richard Coeur-de-Lion wrote these verses, the Comte du
Perche was Geoffrey III, who had been a companion of Richard on his
crusade in 1192, where, according to the Chronicle, "he shewed
himself but a timid man"; which seems scarcely likely in a companion
of Richard; but it is not of him that the Chartres window speaks,
except as the son of Mahaut or Matilda of Champagne who was a sister
of Alix of Champagne, Queen of France. The Table shows, therefore,
that Geoffroi's son and successor as the Comte du Perche--Thomas--
was second cousin of Louis the Lion, known as King Louis VIII of
France. They were probably of much the same age.
If this were all, one might carry it in one's head for a while, but
the relationship which dominates the history of this period was that
of all these great ruling families with Richard Coeur-de-Lion and
his brother John, nicknamed Lackland, both of whom in succession
were the most powerful Frenchmen in France. The Table shows that
their mother Eleanor of Guienne, the first Queen of Louis VII, bore
him two daughters, one of whom, Alix, married, about 1164, the Count
Thibaut of Chartres and Blois, while the other, Mary, married the
great Count of Champagne. Both of them being half-sisters of Coeur-
de-Lion and John, their children were nephews or half-nephews,
indiscriminately, of all the reigning monarchs, and Coeur-de-Lion
immortalized one of them by a line in his prison-song, as he
immortalized Le Perche:--
Je nel di pas de celi de Chartain,
La mere Loeis.
"Loeis," therefore, or Count Louis of Chatres, was not only nephew
of Coeur-de-Lion and John Lackland, but was also, like Count Thomas
of Le Perche, a second cousin of Louis VIII. Feudally and personally
he was directly attached to Coeur-de-Lion rather than to Philip
Augustus.
If society in the twelfth century could follow the effects of these
relationships, personal and feudal, it was cleverer than society in
the twentieth; but so much is simple: Louis of France, Thibaut of
Chartres, and Thomas of Le Perche, were cousins and close friends in
the year 1215, and all were devoted to the Virgin of Chartres.
Judging from the character of Louis's future queen, Blanche of
Castile, their wives were, if possible, more devoted still; and in
that year Blanche gave birth to Saint Louis, who seems to have been
the most devoted of all.
Meanwhile their favourite uncle, Coeur-de-Lion, had died in the year
1199. Thibaut's great-grandmother, Eleanor of Guienne, died in 1202.
King John, left to himself, rapidly accumulated enemies innumerable,
abroad and at home. In 1203, Philip Augustus confiscated all the
fiefs he held from the French Crown, and in 1204 seized Normandy.
John sank rapidly from worse to worst, until at last the English
barons rose and forced him to grant their Magna Carta at Runnimede
in 1215.
The year 1215 was, therefore, a year to be remembered at Chartres,
as at Mont-Saint-Michel; one of the most convenient dates in
history. Every one is supposed, even now, to know what happened
then, to give another violent wrench to society, like the Norman
Conquest in 1066. John turned on the barons and broke them down;
they sent to
[Genealogical chart showing the relationships among England,
Champagne and Chartres and France and La Perche.]
France for help, and offered the crown of England to young Louis,
whose father, Philip Augustus, called a council which pledged
support to Louis. Naturally the Comte du Perche and the Comte de
Chartres must have pledged their support, among the foremost, to go
with Louis to England. He was then twenty-nine years old; they were
probably somewhat younger.
The Zodiac window, with its inscription, was the immediate result.
The usual authority that figures in the histories is Roger of
Wendover, but much the more amusing for our purpose is a garrulous
Frenchman known as the Menestrel de Rheims who wrote some fifty
years later. After telling in his delightful thirteenth-century
French, how the English barons sent hostages to Louis, "et mes sires
Loueys les fit bien gardeir et honourablement," the Menestrel
continued:--
Et assembla granz genz par amours, et par deniers, et par lignage.
Et fu avec lui li cuens dou Perche, et li cuens de Montfort, et li
cuens de Chartres, et li cuens de Monbleart, et mes sires Enjorrans
de Couci, et mout d'autre grant seigneur dont je ne parole mie.
The Comte de Chartres, therefore, may be supposed to have gone with
the Comte du Perche, and to have witnessed the disaster at Lincoln
which took place May 20, 1217, after King John's death:--
Et li cuens dou Perche faisait l'avantgarde, et courut tout leiz des
portes; et la garnisons de laienz issi hors et leur coururent sus;
et i ot asseiz trait et lancie; et chevaus morz et chevaliers
abatuz, et gent a pie morz et navreiz. Et li cuens dou Perche i fu
morz par un ribaut qui li leva le pan dou hauberc, et l'ocist d'un
coutel; et fu desconfite l'avantgarde par la mort le conte. Et quant
mes sires Loueys le sot, si ot graigneur duel qu'il eust onques, car
il estoit ses prochains ami de char.
Such language would be spoiled by translation. For us it is enough
to know that the "ribaut" who lifted the "pan," or skirt, of the
Count's "hauberc" or coat-of-mail, as he sat on his horse refusing
to surrender to English traitors, and stabbed him from below with a
knife, may have been an invention of the Menestrel; or the knight
who pierced with his lance through the visor to the brain, may have
been an invention of Roger of Wendover; but in either case, Count
Thomas du Perche lost his life at Lincoln, May 20, 1217, to the
deepest regret of his cousin Louis the Lion as well as of the Count
Thibaut of Chartres, whom he charged to put up a window for him in
honour of the Virgin.
The window must have been ordered at once, because Count Thibaut,
"le Jeune ou le Lepreux," died himself within a year, April 22,
1218, thus giving an exact date for one of the choir windows.
Probably it was one of the latest, because the earliest to be
provided would have been certainly those of the central apsidal
chapel. According to the rule laid down by Viollet-le-Duc, the
windows in which blue strongly predominates, like the Saint
Sylvester, are likely to be earlier than those with a prevailing
tone of red. We must take for granted that some of these great
legendary windows were in place as early as 1210, because, in
October of that year, Philip Augustus attended mass here. There are
some two dozen of these windows in the choir alone, each of which
may well have represented a year's work in the slow processes of
that day, and we can hardly suppose that the workshops of 1200 were
on a scale such as to allow of more than two to have been in hand at
once. Thirty or forty years later, when the Sainte Chapelle was
built, the workshops must have been vastly enlarged, but with the
enlargement, the glass deteriorated. Therefore, if the architecture
were so far advanced in the year 1200 as to allow of beginning work
on the glass, in the apse, the year 1225 is none too late to allow
for its completion in the choir.
Dates are stupidly annoying;--what we want is not dates but taste;--
yet we are uncomfortable without them. Except the Perche window,
none of the lower ones in the choir helps at all; but the clere-
story is more useful. There they run in pairs, each pair surmounted
by a rose. The first pair (numbers 27 and 28) next the north
transept, shows the Virgin of France, supported, according to the
Abbes Bulteau and Clerval, by the arms of Bishop Reynault de Moucon,
who was Bishop of Chartres at the time of the great fire in 1194 and
died in 1217. The window number 28 shows two groups of peasants on
pilgrimage; below, on his knees, Robert of Berou, as donor:
"ROBERTUS DE BEROU: CARN. CANCELLARIUS." The Cartulary of the
Cathedral contains an entry (Bulteau, i, 123): "The 26th February,
1216, died Robert de Berou, Chancellor, who has given us a window."
The Cartulary mentions several previous gifts of windows by canons
or other dignitaries of the Church in the year 1215.
Next follow, or once followed, a pair of windows (numbers 29 and 30)
which were removed by the sculptor Bridan, in 1788, in order to
obtain light for his statuary below. The donor was "DOMINA JOHANNES
BAPTISTA," who, we are told, was Jeanne de Dammartin; and the window
was given in memory, or in honour, of her marriage to Ferdinand of
Castile in 1237. Jeanne was a very great lady, daughter of the Comte
d'Aumale and Marie de Ponthieu. Her father affianced her in 1235 to
the King of England, Henry III, and even caused the marriage to be
celebrated by proxy, but Queen Blanche broke it off, as she had
forbidden, in 1231, that of Yolande of Britanny. She relented so far
as to allow Jeanne in 1237 to marry Ferdinand of Castile, who still
sits on horseback in the next rose: "REX CASTILLAE." He won the
crown of Castile in 1217 and died in 1252, when Queen Jeanne
returned to Abbeville and then, at latest, put up this window at
Chartres in memory of her husband.
The windows numbers 31 and 32 are the subject of much dispute, but
whether the donors were Jean de Chatillon or the three children of
Thibaut le Grand of Champagne, they must equally belong to the later
series of 1260-70, rather than to the earlier of 1210-20. The same
thing is or was true of the next pair, numbers 33 and 34, which were
removed in 1773, but the record says that at the bottom of number 34
was the figure of Saint Louis's son, Louis of France, who died in
1260, before his father, who still rides in the rose above.
Thus the north side of the choir shows a series of windows that
precisely cover the lifetime of Saint Louis (1215-70). The south
side begins, next the apse, with windows numbers 35 and 36, which
belong, according to the Comte d'Armancourt, to the family of
Montfort, whose ruined castle crowns the hill of Montfort l'Amaury,
on the road to Paris, some forty kilometres northeast of Chartres.
Every one is supposed to know the story of Simon de Montfort who was
killed before Toulouse in 1218. Simon left two sons, Amaury and
Simon. The sculptor Bridan put an end also to the window of Amaury,
but in the rose, Amaury, according to the Abbes, still rides on a
white horse. Amaury's history is well known. He was made Constable
of France by Queen Blanche in 1231; went on crusade in 1239; was
captured by the infidels, taken to Babylon, ransomed, and in
returning to France, died at Otranto in 1241. For that age Amaury
was but a commonplace person, totally overshadowed by his brother
Simon, who went to England, married King John's daughter Eleanor,
and became almost king himself as Earl of Leicester. At your leisure
you can read Matthew Paris's dramatic account of him and of his
death at the battle of Evesham, August 5, 1265. He was perhaps the
last of the very great men of the thirteenth century, excepting
Saint Louis himself, who lived a few years longer. M. d'Armancourt
insists that it is the great Earl of Leicester who rides with his
visor up, in full armour, on a brown horse, in the rose above the
windows numbers 37 and 38. In any case, the windows would be later
than 1240.
The next pair of windows, numbers 39 and 40, also removed in 1788,
still offer, in their rose, the figure of a member of the Courtenay
family. Gibbon was so much attracted by the romance of the
Courtenays as to make an amusing digression on the subject which
does not concern us or the cathedral except so far as it tells us
that the Courtenays, like so many other benefactors of Chartres
Cathedral, belonged to the royal blood. Louis-le-Gros, who died in
1137, besides his son Louis-le-Jeune, who married Eleanor of Guienne
in that year, had a younger son, Pierre, whom he married to Isabel
de Courtenay, and who, like Philip Hurepel, took the title of his
wife. Pierre had a son, Pierre II, who was a cousin of Philip
Augustus, and became the hero of the most lurid tragedy of the time.
Chosen Emperor of Constantinople in 1216, to succeed his brothers-
in-law Henry and Baldwin, he tried to march across Illyria and
Macedonia, from Durazzo opposite Brindisi, with a little army of
five thousand men, and instantly disappeared forever. The Epirotes
captured him in the summer of 1217, and from that moment nothing is
known of his fate.
On the whole, this catastrophe was perhaps the grimmest of all the
Shakespearean tragedies of the thirteenth century; and one would
like to think that the Chartres window was a memorial of this
Pierre, who was a cousin of France and an emperor without empire;
but M. d'Armancourt insists that the window was given in memory not
of this Pierre, but of his nephew, another Pierre de Courtenay,
Seigneur de Conches, who went on crusade with Saint Louis in 1249 to
Egypt, and died shortly before the defeat and captivity of the King,
on February 8, 1250. His brother Raoul, Seigneur d'Illiers, who died
in 1271, is said to be donor of the next window, number 40. The date
of the Courtenay windows should therefore be no earlier than the
death of Saint Louis in 1270; yet one would like to know what has
become of another Courtenay window left by the first Pierre's son-
in-law, Gaucher or Gaultier of Bar-sur-Seine, who seems to have been
Vicomte de Chartres, and who, dying before Damietta in 1218, made a
will leaving to Notre Dame de Chartres thirty silver marks, "de
quibus fieri debet miles montatus super equum suum." Not only would
this mounted knight on horseback supply an early date for these
interesting figures, but would fix also the cost, for a mark
contained eight ounces of silver, and was worth ten sous, or half a
livre. We shall presently see that Aucassins gave twenty sous, or a
livre, for a strong ox, so that the "miles montatus super equum
suum" in glass was equivalent to fifteen oxen if it were money of
Paris, which is far from certain.
This is an economical problem which belongs to experts, but the
historical value of these early evidences is still something,--
perhaps still as much as ten sous. All the windows tend to the same
conclusion. Even the last pair, numbers 41 and 42, offer three
personal clues which lead to the same result:--the arms of Bouchard
de Marly who died in 1226, almost at the same time as Louis VIII; a
certain Colinus or Colin, "de camera Regis," who was alive in 1225;
and Robert of Beaumont in the rose, who seems to be a Beaumont of Le
Perche, of whom little or nothing is as yet certainly known. As a
general rule, there are two series of windows, one figuring the
companions or followers of Louis VIII (1215-26); the other, friends
or companions of Saint Louis (1226-70), Queen Blanche uniting both.
What helps to hold the sequences in a certain order, is that the
choir was complete, and services regularly resumed there, in 1210,
while in 1220 the transept and nave were finished and vaulted. For
the apside windows, therefore, we will assume, subject to
correction, a date from 1200 to 1225 for their design and
workmanship; for the transept, 1220 to 1236; and for the nave a
general tendency to the actual reign of Saint Louis from 1236 to
1270. Since there is a deal of later glass scattered everywhere
among the earlier, the margin of error is great; but by keeping the
reign of Louis VIII and its personages distinct from that of Louis
IX and his generation, we can be fairly sure of our main facts.
Meanwhile the Sainte Chapelle in Paris, wholly built and completed
between 1240 and 1248, offers a standard of comparison for the
legendary windows.
The choir of Chartres is as long as the nave, and much broader,
besides that the apse was planned with seven circular projections
which greatly increased the window space, so that the guidebook
reckons thirty-seven windows. A number of these are grisailles, and
the true amateur of glass considers the grisailles to be as well
worth study as the legendary windows. They are a decoration which
has no particular concern with churches, and no distinct religious
meaning, but, it seems, a religious value which Viollet-le-Duc is at
some trouble to explain; and, since his explanation is not very
technical, we can look at it, before looking at the legends:--
The colouration of the windows had the advantage of throwing on the
opaque walls a veil, or coloured glazing, of extreme delicacy,
always assuming that the coloured windows themselves were
harmoniously toned. Whether their resources did not permit the
artists to adopt a complete system of coloured glass, or whether
they wanted to get daylight in purer quality into their interiors,--
whatever may have been their reasons,--they resorted to this
beautiful grisaille decoration which is also a colouring harmony
obtained by the aid of a long experience in the effects of light on
translucent surfaces. Many of our churches retain grisaille windows
filling either all, or only a part, of their bays. In the latter
case, the grisailles are reserved for the side windows which are
meant to be seen obliquely, and in that case the coloured glass
fills the bays of the fond, the apsidal openings which are meant to
be seen in face from a distance. These lateral grisailles are still
opaque enough to prevent the solar rays which pass through them from
lighting the coloured windows on the reverse side; yet, at certain
hours of the day, these solar rays throw a pearly light on the
coloured windows which gives them indescribable transparence and
refinement of tones. The lateral windows in the choir of the Auxerre
Cathedral, half-grisaille, half-coloured, throw on the wholly
coloured apsidal window, by this means, a glazing the softness of
which one can hardly conceive. The opaline light which comes through
these lateral bays, and makes a sort of veil, transparent in the
extreme, under the lofty vaulting, is crossed by the brilliant tones
of the windows behind, which give the play of precious stones. The
solid outlines then seem to waver like objects seen through a sheet
of clear water. Distances change their values, and take depths in
which the eye gets lost. With every hour of the day these effects
are altered, and always with new harmonies which one never tires of
trying to understand; but the deeper one's study goes, the more
astounded one becomes before the experience acquired by these
artists, whose theories on the effects of colour, assuming that they
had any, are unknown to us and whom the most kindly-disposed among
us treat as simple children.
You can read the rest for yourselves. Grisaille is a separate branch
of colour-decoration which belongs with the whole system of lighting
and fenetrage, and will have to remain a closed book because the
feeling and experience which explained it once are lost, and we
cannot recover either. Such things must have been always felt rather
than reasoned, like the irregularities in plan of the builders; the
best work of the best times shows the same subtlety of sense as the
dog shows in retrieving, or the bee in flying, but which tourists
have lost. All we can do is to note that the grisailles were
intended to have values. They were among the refinements of light
and colour with which the apse of Chartres is so crowded that one
must be content to feel what one can, and let the rest go.
Understand, we cannot! nothing proves that the greatest artists who
ever lived have, in a logical sense, understood! or that omnipotence
has ever understood! or that the utmost power of expression has ever
been capable of expressing more than the reaction of one energy on
another, but not of two on two; and when one sits here, in the
central axis of this complicated apse, one sees, in mere light
alone, the reaction of hundreds of energies, although time has left
only a wreck of what the artist put here. One of the best window
spaces is wholly filled up by the fourteenth-century doorway to the
chapel of Saint Piat, and only by looking at the two windows which
correspond on the north does a curious inquirer get a notion of the
probable loss. The same chapel more or less blocks the light of
three other principal windows. The sun, the dust, the acids of
dripping water, and the other works of time, have in seven hundred
years corroded or worn away or altered the glass, especially on the
south side. Windows have been darkened by time and mutilated by
wilful injury. Scores of the panels are wholly restored, modern
reproductions or imitations. Even after all this loss, the glass is
probably the best-preserved, or perhaps the only preserved part of
the decoration in colour, for we never shall know the colour-
decoration of the vaults, the walls, the columns, or the floors.
Only one point is fairly sure;--that on festivals, if not at other
times, every foot of space was covered in some way or another,
throughout the apse, with colour; either paint or tapestry or
embroidery or Byzantine brocades and Oriental stuffs or rugs, lining
the walls, covering the altars, and hiding the floor. Occasionally
you happen upon illuminated manuscripts showing the interiors of
chapels with their colour-decoration; but everything has perished
here except the glass.
If one may judge from the glass of later centuries, the first
impression from the thirteenth-century windows ought to be
disappointment. You should find them too effeminate, too soft, too
small, and above all not particularly religious. Indeed, except for
the nominal subjects of the legends, one sees nothing religious
about them; the medallions, when studied with the binocle, turn out
to be less religious than decorative. Saint Michael would not have
felt at home here, and Saint Bernard would have turned from them
with disapproval; but when they were put up, Saint Bernard was long
dead, and Saint Michael had yielded his place to the Virgin. This
apse is all for her. At its entrance she sat, on either side, in the
Belle-Verriere or as Our Lady of the Pillar, to receive the secrets
and the prayers of suppliants who wished to address her directly in
person; there she bent down to our level, resumed her humanity, and
felt our griefs and passions. Within, where the cross-lights fell
through the wide columned space behind the high altar, was her
withdrawing room, where the decorator and builder thought only of
pleasing her. The very faults of the architecture and effeminacy of
taste witness the artists' object. If the glassworkers had thought
of themselves or of the public or even of the priests, they would
have strained for effects, strong masses of colour, and striking
subjects to impress the imagination. Nothing of the sort is even
suggested. The great, awe-inspiring mosaic figure of the Byzantine
half-dome was a splendid religious effect, but this artist had in
his mind an altogether different thought. He was in the Virgin's
employ; he was decorating her own chamber in her own palace; he
wanted to please her; and he knew her tastes, even when she did not
give him her personal orders. To him, a dream would have been an
order. The salary of the twelfth-century artist was out of all
relation with the percentage of a twentieth-century decorator. The
artist of 1200 was probably the last who cared little for the baron,
not very much for the priest, and nothing for the public, unless he
happened to be paid by the guild, and then he cared just to the
extent of his hire, or, if he was himself a priest, not even for
that. His pay was mostly of a different kind, and was the same as
that of the peasants who were hauling the stone from the quarry at
Bercheres while he was firing his ovens. His reward was to come when
he should be promoted to decorate the Queen of Heaven's palace in
the New Jerusalem, and he served a mistress who knew better than he
did what work was good and what was bad, and how to give him his
right place. Mary's taste was infallible; her knowledge like her
power had no limits; she knew men's thoughts as well as acts, and
could not be deceived. Probably, even in our own time, an artist
might find his imagination considerably stimulated and his work
powerfully improved if he knew that anything short of his best would
bring him to the gallows, with or without trial by jury; but in the
twelfth century the gallows was a trifle; the Queen hardly
considered it a punishment for an offence to her dignity. The artist
was vividly aware that Mary disposed of hell.
All this is written in full, on every stone and window of this apse,
as legible as the legends to any one who cares to read. The artists
were doing their best, not to please a swarm of flat-eared peasants
or slow-witted barons, but to satisfy Mary, the Queen of Heaven, to
whom the Kings and Queens of France were coming constantly for help,
and whose absolute power was almost the only restraint recognized by
Emperor, Pope, and clown. The colour-decoration is hers, and hers
alone. For her the lights are subdued, the tones softened, the
subjects selected, the feminine taste preserved. That other great
ladies interested themselves in the matter, even down to its
technical refinements, is more than likely; indeed, in the central
apside chapel, suggesting the Auxerre grisaille that Viollet-le-Duc
mentioned, is a grisaille which bears the arms of Castile and Queen
Blanche; further on, three other grisailles bear also the famous
castles, but this is by no means the strongest proof of feminine
taste. The difficulty would be rather to find a touch of certainly
masculine taste in the whole apse.
Since the central apside chapel is the most important, we can begin
with the windows there, bearing in mind that the subject of the
central window was the Life of Christ, dictated by rule or custom.
On Christ's left hand is the window of Saint Peter; next him is
Saint Paul. All are much restored; thirty-three of the medallions
are wholly new. Opposite Saint Peter, at Christ's right hand, is the
window of Saint Simon and Saint Jude; and next is the grisaille with
the arms of Castile. If these windows were ordered between 1205 and
1210, Blanche, who was born in 1187, and married in 1200, would have
been a young princess of twenty or twenty-five when she gave this
window in grisaille to regulate and harmonize and soften the
lighting of the Virgin's boudoir. The central chapel must be taken
to be the most serious, the most studied, and the oldest of the
chapels in the church, above the crypt. The windows here should rank
in importance next to the lancets of the west front which are only
about sixty years earlier. They show fully that difference.
Here one must see for one's self. Few artists know much about it,
and still fewer care for an art which has been quite dead these four
hundred years. The ruins of Nippur would hardly be more intelligible
to the ordinary architect of English tradition than these twelfth-
century efforts of the builders of Chartres. Even the learning of
Viollet-le-Duc was at fault in dealing with a building so personal
as this, the history of which is almost wholly lost. This central
chapel must have been meant to give tone to the apse, and it shows
with the colour-decoration of a queen's salon, a subject-decoration
too serious for the amusement of heretics. One sees at a glance that
the subject-decoration was inspired by church-custom, while colour
was an experiment and the decorators of this enormous window space
were at liberty as colourists to please the Countess of Chartres and
the Princess Blanche and the Duchess of Brittany, without much
regarding the opinions of the late Bernard of Clairvaux or even
Augustine of Hippo, since the great ladies of the Court knew better
than the Saints what would suit the Virgin.
The subject of the central window was prescribed by tradition.
Christ is the Church, and in this church he and his Mother are one;
therefore the life of Christ is the subject of the central window,
but the treatment is the Virgin's, as the colours show, and as the
absence of every influence but hers, including the Crucifixion,
proves officially. Saint Peter and Saint Paul are in their proper
place as the two great ministers of the throne who represent the two
great parties in western religion, the Jewish and the Gentile.
Opposite them, balancing by their family influence the weight of
delegated power, are two of Mary's nephews, Simon and Jude; but this
subject branches off again into matters so personal to Mary that
Simon and Jude require closer acquaintance. One must study a new
guidebook--the "Golden Legend," by the blessed James, Bishop of
Genoa and member of the order of Dominic, who was born at Varazze or
Voragio in almost the same year that Thomas was born at Aquino, and
whose "Legenda Aurea," written about the middle of the thirteenth
century, was more popular history than the Bible itself, and more
generally consulted as authority. The decorators of the thirteenth
century got their motives quite outside the Bible, in sources that
James of Genoa compiled into a volume almost as fascinating as the
"Fioretti of Saint Francis."
According to the "Golden Legend" and the tradition accepted in
Jerusalem by pilgrims and crusaders, Mary's family connection was
large. It appears that her mother Anne was three times married, and
by each husband had a daughter Mary, so that there were three Marys,
half-sisters.
Joachim-Anne- Cleophas- -Salome
Joseph-Mary Alpheus-Mary Mary-Zebedee
Christ James Joseph Simon Jude James John
the Minor the the Major the Evangelist
Apostle Just St. Iago of Compostella
Simon and Jude were, therefore, nephews of Mary and cousins of
Christ, whose lives were evidence of the truth not merely of
Scripture, but specially of the private and family distinction of
their aunt, the Virgin Mother of Christ. They were selected, rather
than their brothers, or cousins James and John, for the conspicuous
honour of standing opposite Peter and Paul, doubtless by reason of
some merit of their own, but perhaps also because in art the two
counted as one, and therefore the one window offered two witnesses,
which allowed the artist to insert a grisaille in place of another
legendary window to complete the chapel on their right. According to
Viollet-le-Duc, the grisaille in this position regulates the light
and so completes the effect.
If custom prescribed a general rule for the central chapel, it seems
to have left great freedom in the windows near by. At Chartres the
curved projection that contains the next two windows was not a
chapel, but only a window-bay, for the sake of the windows, and, if
the artists aimed at pleasing the Virgin, they would put their best
work there. At Bourges in the same relative place are three of the
best windows in the building:--the Prodigal Son, the New Alliance
and the Good Samaritan; all of them full of life, story, and colour,
with little reference to a worship or a saint. At Chartres the
choice is still more striking, and the windows are also the best in
the building, after the twelfth-century glass of the west front. The
first, which comes next to Blanche's grisaille in the central
chapel, is given to another nephew of Mary and apostle of Christ,
Saint James the Major, whose life is recorded in the proper Bible
Dictionaries, with a terminal remark as follows:--
For legends respecting his death and his connections with Spain, see
the Roman Breviary, in which the healing of a paralytic and the
conversion of Hermogenes are attributed to him, and where it is
asserted that he preached the Gospel in Spain, and that his remains
were translated to Compostella ... As there is no shadow of
foundation for any of the legends here referred to, we pass them by
without further notice. Even Baronius shows himself ashamed of
them....
If the learned Baronius thought himself required to show shame for
all the legends that pass as history, he must have suffered cruelly
during his laborious life, and his sufferings would not have been
confined to the annals of the Church; but the historical accuracy of
the glass windows is not our affair, nor are historians especially
concerned in the events of the Virgin's life, whether recorded or
legendary. Religion is, or ought to be, a feeling, and the
thirteenth-century windows are original documents, much more
historical than any recorded in the Bible, since their inspiration
is a different thing from their authority. The true life of Saint
James or Saint Jude or any other of the apostles, did not, in the
opinion of the ladies in the Court of France, furnish subjects
agreeable enough to decorate the palace of the Queen of Heaven; and
that they were right, any one must feel, who compares these two
windows with subjects of dogma. Saint James, better known as
Santiago of Compostella, was a compliment to the young Dauphine--
before Dauphines existed--the Princess Blanche of Castile, whose
arms, or castles, are on the grisaille window next to it. Perhaps
she chose him to stand there. Certainly her hand is seen plainly
enough throughout the church to warrant suspecting it here. As a
nephew, Saint James was dear to the Virgin, but, as a friend to
Spain, still more dear to Blanche, and it is not likely that pure
accident caused three adjacent windows to take a Spanish tone.
The Saint James in whom the thirteenth century delighted, and whose
windows one sees at Bourges, Tours, and wherever the scallop-shell
tells of the pilgrim, belongs not to the Bible but to the "Golden
Legend." This window was given by the Merchant Tailors whose
signature appears at the bottom, in the corners, in two pictures
that paint the tailor's shop of Chartres in the first quarter of the
thirteenth century. The shop-boy takes cloth from chests for his
master to show to customers, and to measure off by his ell. The
story of Saint James begins in the lower panel, where he receives
his mission from Christ, Above, on the right, he seems to be
preaching. On the left appears a figure which tells the reason for
the popularity of the story. It is Almogenes, or in the Latin,
Hermogenes, a famous magician in great credit among the Pharisees,
who has the command of demons, as you see, for behind his shoulder,
standing, a little demon is perched, while he orders his pupil
Filetus to convert James. Next, James is shown in discussion with a
group of listeners. Filetus gives him a volume of false doctrine.
Almogenes then further instructs Filetus. James is led away by a
rope, curing a paralytic as he goes. He sends his cloak to Filetus
to drive away the demon. Filetus receives the cloak, and the droll
little demon departs in tears. Almogenes, losing his temper, sends
two demons, with horns on their heads and clubs in their hands, to
reason with James; who sends them back to remonstrate with
Almogenes. The demons then bind Almogenes and bring him before
James, who discusses differences with him until Almogenes burns his
books of magic and prostrates himself before the Saint. Both are
then brought before Herod, and Almogenes breaks a pretty heathen
idol, while James goes to prison. A panel comes in here, out of
place, showing Almogenes enchanting Filetus, and the demon entering
into possession of him. Then Almogenes is seen being very roughly
handled by a young Jew, while the bystanders seem to approve. James
next makes Almogenes throw his books of magic into the sea; both are
led away to execution, curing the infirm on their way; their heads
are cut off; and, at the top, God blesses the orb of the world.
That this window was intended to amuse the Virgin seems quite as
reasonable an idea as that it should have been made to instruct the
people, or us. Its humour was as humorous then as now, for the
French of the thirteenth century loved humour even in churches, as
their grotesques proclaim. The Saint James window is a tale of
magic, told with the vivacity of a fabliau; but if its motive of
amusement seems still a forced idea, we can pass on, at once, to the
companion window which holds the best position in the church, where,
in the usual cathedral, one expects to find Saint John or some other
apostle; or Saint Joseph; or a doctrinal lesson such as that called
the New Alliance where the Old and New Testaments are united. The
window which the artists have set up here is regarded as the best of
the thirteenth-century windows, and is the least religious.
The subject is nothing less than the "Chanson de Roland" in pictures
of coloured glass, set in a border worth comparing at leisure with
the twelfth-century borders of the western lancets. Even at
Chartres, the artists could not risk displeasing the Virgin and the
Church by following a wholly profane work like the "Chanson" itself,
and Roland had no place in religion. He could be introduced only
through Charlemagne, who had almost as little right there as he. The
twelfth century had made persistent efforts to get Charlemagne into
the Church, and the Church had made very little effort to keep him
out; yet by the year 1200, Charlemagne had not been sainted except
by the anti-Pope Pascal III in 1165, although there was a popular
belief, supported in Spain by the necessary documents, that Pope
Calixtus II in 1122 had declared the so-called Chronicle of
Archbishop Turpin to be authentic. The Bishop of Chartres in 1200
was very much too enlightened a prelate to accept the Chronicle or
Turpin or Charlemagne himself, still less Roland and Thierry, as
authentic in sanctity; but if the young and beautiful Dauphine of
France, and her cousins of Chartres, and their artists, warmly
believed that the Virgin would be pleased by the story of
Charlemagne and Roland, the Bishop might have let them have their
way in spite of the irregularity. That the window was an
irregularity, is plain; that it has always been immensely admired,
is certain; and that Bishop Renaud must have given his assent to it,
is not to be denied.
The most elaborate account of this window can be found in Male's
"Art Religieux" (pp. 444-50). Its feeling or motive is quite another
matter, as it is with the statuary on the north porch. The Furriers
or Fur Merchants paid for the Charlemagne window, and their
signature stands at the bottom, where a merchant shows a fur-lined
cloak to his customer. That Mary was personally interested in furs,
no authority seems to affirm, but that Blanche and Isabel and every
lady of the Court, as well as every king and every count, in that
day, took keen interest in the subject, is proved by the prices they
paid, and the quantities they wore. Not even the Merchant Tailors
had a better standing at Court than the Furriers, which may account
for their standing so near the Virgin. Whatever the cause, the
Furriers were allowed to put their signature here, side by side with
the Tailors, and next to the Princess Blanche. Their gift warranted
it. Above the signature, in the first panel, the Emperor Constantine
is seen, asleep, in Constantinople, on an elaborate bed, while an
angel is giving him the order to seek aid from Charlemagne against
the Saracens. Charlemagne appears, in full armour of the year 1200,
on horseback. Then Charlemagne, sainted, wearing his halo, converses
with two bishops on the subject of a crusade for the rescue of
Constantine. In the next scene, he arrives at the gates of
Constantinople where Constantine receives him. The fifth picture is
most interesting; Charlemagne has advanced with his knights and
attacks the Saracens; the Franks wear coats-of-mail, and carry long,
pointed shields; the infidels carry round shields; Charlemagne,
wearing a crown, strikes off with one blow of his sword the head of
a Saracen emir; but the battle is desperate; the chargers are at
full gallop, and a Saracen is striking at Charlemagne with his
battle-axe. After the victory has been won, the Emperor Constantine
rewards Charlemagne by the priceless gift of three chasses or
reliquaries, containing a piece of the true Cross; the Suaire or
grave-cloth of the Saviour; and a tunic of the Virgin. Charlemagne
then returns to France, and in the next medallion presents the three
chasses and the crown of the Saracen king to the church at Aix,
which to a French audience meant the Abbey of Saint-Denis. This
scene closes the first volume of the story.
The second part opens on Charlemagne, seated between two persons,
looking up to heaven at the Milky Way, called then the Way of Saint
James, which directs him to the grave of Saint James in Spain. Saint
James himself appears to Charlemagne in a dream, and orders him to
redeem the tomb from the infidels. Then Charlemagne sets out, with
Archbishop Turpin of Rheims and knights. In presence of his army he
dismounts and implores the aid of God. Then he arrives before
Pampeluna and transfixes with his lance the Saracen chief as he
flies into the city. Mounted, he directs workmen to construct a
church in honour of Saint James; a little cloud figures the hand of
God. Next is shown the miracle of the lances; stuck in the ground at
night, they are found in the morning to have burst into foliage,
prefiguring martyrdom. Two thousand people perish in battle. Then
begins the story of Roland which the artists and donors are so eager
to tell, knowing, as they do, that what has so deeply interested men
and women on earth, must interest Mary who loves them. You see
Archbishop Turpin celebrating mass when an angel appears, to warn
him of Roland's fate. Then Roland himself, also wearing a halo, is
introduced, in the act of killing the giant Ferragus. The combat of
Roland and Ferragus is at the top, out of sequence, as often happens
in the legendary windows. Charlemagne and his army are seen marching
homeward through the Pyrenees, while Roland winds his horn and
splits the rock without being able to break Durendal. Thierry,
likewise sainted, brings water to Roland in a helmet. At last
Thierry announces Roland's death. At the top, on either side of
Roland and Ferragus, is an angel with incense.
The execution of this window is said to be superb. Of the colour,
and its relations with that of the Saint James, one needs time and
long acquaintance to learn the value. In the feeling, compared with
that of the twelfth century, one needs no time in order to see a
change. These two windows are as French and as modern as a picture
of Lancret; they are pure art, as simply decorative as the
decorations of the Grand Opera. The thirteenth century knew more
about religion and decoration than the twentieth century will ever
learn. The windows were neither symbolic nor mystical, nor more
religious than they pretended to be. That they are more intelligent
or more costly or more effective is nothing to the purpose, so long
as one grants that the combat of Roland and Ferragus, or Roland
winding his olifant, or Charlemagne cutting off heads and
transfixing Moors, were subjects never intended to teach religion or
instruct the ignorant, but to please the Queen of Heaven as they
pleased the queens of earth with a roman, not in verse but in
colour, as near as possible to decorative perfection. Instinctively
one looks to the corresponding bay, opposite, to see what the
artists could have done to balance these two great efforts of their
art; but the bay opposite is now occupied by the entrance to Saint
Piat's chapel and one does not know what changes may have been made
in the fourteenth century to rearrange the glass; yet, even as it
now stands, the Sylvester window which corresponds to the
Charlemagne is, as glass, the strongest in the whole cathedral. In
the next chapel, on our left, come the martyrs, with Saint Stephen,
the first martyr, in the middle window. Naturally the subject is
more serious, but the colour is not differently treated. A step
further, and you see the artists returning to their lighter
subjects. The stories of Saint Julian and Saint Thomas are more
amusing than the plots of half the thirteenth-century romances, and
not very much more religious. The subject of Saint Thomas is a
pendant to that of Saint James, for Saint Thomas was a great
traveller and an architect, who carried Mary's worship to India as
Saint James carried it to Spain. Here is the amusement of many days
in studying the stories, the colour and the execution of these
windows, with the help of the "Monographs" of Chartres and Bourges
or the "Golden Legend" and occasional visits to Le Mans, Tours,
Clermont Ferrand, and other cathedrals; but, in passing, one has to
note that the window of Saint Thomas was given by France, and bears
the royal arms, perhaps for Philip Augustus the King; while the
window of Saint Julian was given by the Carpenters and Coopers. One
feels no need to explain how it happens that the taste of the royal
family, and of their tailors, furriers, carpenters, and coopers,
should fit so marvellously, one with another, and with that of the
Virgin; but one can compare with theirs the taste of the Stone-
workers opposite, in the window of Saint Sylvester and Saint
Melchiades, whose blues almost kill the Charlemagne itself, and of
the Tanners in that of Saint Thomas of Canterbury; or, in the last
chapel on the south side, with that of the Shoemakers in the window
to Saint Martin, attributed for some reason to a certain Clemens
vitrearius Carnutensis, whose name is on a window in the cathedral
of Rouen. The name tells nothing, even if the identity could be
proved. Clement the glassmaker may have worked on his own account,
or for others; the glass differs only in refinements of taste or
perhaps of cost. Nicolas Lescine, the canon, or Geoffroi Chardonnel,
may have been less rich than the Bakers, and even the Furriers may
have not had the revenues of the King; but some controlling hand has
given more or less identical taste to all.
What one can least explain is the reason why some windows, that
should be here, are elsewhere. In most churches, one finds in the
choir a window of doctrine, such as the so-called New Alliance, but
here the New Alliance is banished to the nave. Besides the costly
Charlemagne and Saint James windows in the apse, the Furriers and
Drapers gave several others, and one of these seems particularly
suited to serve as companion to Saint Thomas, Saint James, and Saint
Julian, so that it is best taken with these while comparing them. It
is in the nave, the third window from the new tower, in the north
aisle,--the window of Saint Eustace. The story and treatment and
beauty of the work would have warranted making it a pendant to
Almogenes, in the bay now serving as the door to Saint Piat's
chapel, which should have been the most effective of all the
positions in the church for a legendary story. Saint Eustace, whose
name was Placidas, commanded the guards of the Emperor Trajan. One
day he went out hunting with huntsmen and hounds, as the legend in
the lower panel of the window begins; a pretty picture of a stag
hunt about the year 1200; followed by one still prettier, where the
stag, after leaping upon a rock, has turned, and shows a crucifix
between his horns, the stag on one side balancing the horse on the
other, while Placidas on his knees yields to the miracle of Christ.
Then Placidas is baptized as Eustace; and in the centre, you see him
with his wife and two children--another charming composition--
leaving the city. Four small panels in the corners are said to
contain the signatures of the Drapers and Furriers. Above, the story
of adventure goes on, showing Eustace bargaining with a shipmaster
for his passage; his embarcation with wife and children, and their
arrival at some shore, where the two children have landed, and the
master drives Eustace after them while he detains the wife. Four
small panels here have not been identified, but the legend was no
doubt familiar to the Middle Ages, and they knew how Eustace and the
children came to a river, where you can see a pink lion carrying off
one child, while a wolf, which has seized the other, is attacked by
shepherds and dogs. The children are rescued, and the wife
reappears, on her knees before her lord, telling of her escape from
the shipmaster, while the children stand behind; and then the
reunited family, restored to the Emperor's favour, is seen feasting
and happy. At last Eustace refuses to offer a sacrifice to a
graceful antique idol, and is then shut up, with all his family, in
a brazen bull; a fire is kindled beneath it; and, from above, a hand
confers the crown of martyrdom.
Another subject, which should have been placed in the apse, stands
in a singular isolation which has struck many of the students in
this branch of church learning. At Sens, Saint Eustace is in the
choir, and by his side is the Prodigal Son. At Bourges also the
Prodigal Son is in the choir. At Chartres, he is banished to the
north transept, where you will find him in the window next the nave,
almost as though he were in disgrace; yet the glass is said to be
very fine, among the best in the church, while the story is told
with rather more vivacity than usual; and as far as colour and
execution go, the window has an air of age and quality higher than
the average. At the bottom you see the signature of the corporation
of Butchers. The window at Bourges was given by the Tanners. The
story begins with the picture showing the younger son asking the
father for his share of the inheritance, which he receives in the
next panel, and proceeds, on horseback, to spend, as one cannot help
suspecting, at Paris, in the Latin Quarter, where he is seen
arriving, welcomed by two ladies. No one has offered to explain why
Chartres should consider two ladies theologically more correct than
one; or why Sens should fix on three, or why Bourges should require
six. Perhaps this was left to the artist's fancy; but, before
quitting the twelfth century, we shall see that the usual young man
who took his share of patrimony and went up to study in the Latin
Quarter, found two schools of scholastic teaching, one called
Realism, the other Nominalism, each of which in turn the Church had
been obliged to condemn. Meanwhile the Prodigal Son is seen feasting
with them, and is crowned with flowers, like a new Abelard, singing
his songs to Heloise, until his religious capital is exhausted, and
he is dragged out of bed, to be driven naked from the house with
sticks, in this also I resembling Abelard. At Bourges he is gently
turned out; at Sens he is dragged away by three devils. Then he
seeks service, and is seen knocking acorns from boughs, to feed his
employer's swine; but, among the thousands of young men who must
have come here directly from the schools, nine in every ten said
that he was teaching letters to his employer's children or lecturing
to the students of the Latin Quarter. At last he decides to return
to his father,--possibly the Archbishop of Paris or the Abbot of
Saint-Denis,--who receives him with open arms, and gives him a new
robe, which to the ribald student would mean a church living--an
abbey, perhaps Saint Gildas-de-Rhuys in Brittany, or elsewhere. The
fatted calf is killed, the feast is begun, and the elder son, whom
the malicious student would name Bernard, appears in order to make
protest. Above, God, on His throne, blesses the globe of the world.
The original symbol of the Prodigal Son was a rather different form
of prodigality. According to the Church interpretation, the Father
had two sons; the older was the people of the Jews; the younger, the
Gentiles. The Father divided his substance between them, giving to
the older the divine law, to the younger, the law of nature. The
younger went off and dissipated his substance, as one must believe,
on Aristotle; but repented and returned when the Father sacrificed
the victim--Christ--as the symbol of reunion. That the Synagogue
also accepts the sacrifice is not so clear; but the Church clung to
the idea of converting the Synagogue as a necessary proof of
Christ's divine character. Not until about the time when this window
may have been made, did the new Church, under the influence of Saint
Dominic, abandon the Jews and turn in despair to the Gentiles alone.
The old symbolism belonged to the fourth and fifth centuries, and,
as told by the Jesuit fathers Martin and Cahier in their "Monograph"
of Bourges, it should have pleased the Virgin who was particularly
loved by the young, and habitually showed her attachment to them. At
Bourges the window stands next the central chapel of the apse, where
at Chartres is the entrance to Saint Piat's chapel; but Bourges did
not belong to Notre Dame, nor did Sens. The story of the prodigal
sons of these years from 1200 to 1230 lends the window a little
personal interest that the Prodigal Son of Saint Luke's Gospel could
hardly have had even to thirteenth-century penitents. Neither the
Church nor the Crown loved prodigal sons. So far from killing fatted
calves for them, the bishops in 1209 burned no less than ten in
Paris for too great intimacy with Arab and Jew disciples of
Aristotle. The position of the Bishop of Chartres between the
schools had been always awkward. As for Blanche of Castile, her
first son, afterwards Saint Louis, was born in 1215; and after that
time no Prodigal Son was likely to be welcomed in any society which
she frequented. For her, above all other women on earth or in
heaven, prodigal sons felt most antipathy, until, in 1229, the
quarrel became so violent that she turned her police on them and
beat a number to death in the streets. They retaliated without
regard for loyalty or decency, being far from model youth and prone
to relapses from virtue, even when forgiven and beneficed.
The Virgin Mary, Queen of Heaven, showed no prejudice against
prodigal sons, or even prodigal daughters. She would hardly, of her
own accord, have ordered such persons out of her apse, when Saint
Stephen at Bourges and Sens showed no such puritanism; yet the
Chartres window is put away in the north transept. Even there it
still stands opposite the Virgin of the Pillar, on the women's and
Queen Blanche's side of the church, and in an excellent position,
better seen from the choir than some of the windows in the choir
itself, because the late summer sun shines full upon it, and carries
its colours far into the apse. This may have been one of the many
instances of tastes in the Virgin which were almost too imperial for
her official court. Omniscient as Mary was, she knew no difference
between the Blanches of Castile and the students of the Latin
Quarter. She was rather fond of prodigals, and gentle toward the
ladies who consumed the prodigal's substance. She admitted Mary
Magdalen and Mary the Gipsy to her society. She fretted little about
Aristotle so long as the prodigal adored her, and naturally the
prodigal adored her almost to the exclusion of the Trinity. She
always cared less for her dignity than was to be wished. Especially
in the nave and on the porch, among the peasants, she liked to
appear as one of themselves; she insisted on lying in bed, in a
stable, with the cows and asses about her, and her baby in a cradle
by the bedside, as though she had suffered like other women, though
the Church insisted she had not. Her husband, Saint Joseph, was
notoriously uncomfortable in her Court, and always preferred to get
as near to the door as he could. The choir at Chartres, on the
contrary, was aristocratic; every window there had a court quality,
even down to the contemporary Thomas a'Becket, the fashionable
martyr of good society. Theology was put into the transepts or still
further away in the nave where the window of the New Alliance elbows
the Prodigal Son. Even to Blanche of Castile, Mary was neither a
philanthropist nor theologist nor merely a mother,--she was an
absolute Empress, and whatever she said was obeyed, but sometimes
she seems to have willed an order that worried some of her most
powerful servants.
Mary chose to put her Prodigal into the transept, and one would like
to know the reason. Was it a concession to the Bishop or the Queen?
Or was it to please the common people that these familiar picture-
books, with their popular interest, like the Good Samaritan and the
Prodigal Son, were put on the walls of the great public hall? This
can hardly be, since the people would surely have preferred the
Charlemagne and Saint James to any other. We shall never know; but
sitting here in the subdued afternoon light of the apse, one goes on
for hours reading the open volumes of colour, and listening to the
steady discussion by the architects, artists, priests, princes, and
princesses of the thirteenth century about the arrangements of this
apse. However strong-willed they might be, each in turn whether
priest, or noble, or glassworker, would have certainly appealed to
the Virgin and one can imagine the architect still beside us, in the
growing dusk of evening, mentally praying, as he looked at the work
of a finished day: "Lady Virgin, show me what you like best! The
central chapel is correct, I know. The Lady Blanche's grisaille
veils the rather strong blue tone nicely, and I am confident it will
suit you. The Charlemagne window seems to me very successful, but
the Bishop feels not at all easy about it, and I should never have
dared put it here if the Lady Blanche had not insisted on a Spanish
bay. To balance at once both the subjects and the colour, we have
tried the Stephen window in the next chapel, with more red; but if
Saint Stephen is not good enough to satisfy you, we have tried again
with Saint Julian, whose story is really worth telling you as we
tell it; and with him we have put Saint Thomas because you loved him
and gave him your girdle. I do not myself care so very much for
Saint Thomas of Canterbury opposite, though the Count is wild about
it, and the Bishop wants it; but the Sylvester is stupendous in the
morning sun. What troubles me most is the first right-hand bay. The
princesses would not have let me put the Prodigal Son there, even if
it were made for the place. I've nothing else good enough to balance
the Charlemagne unless it be the Eustace. Gracious Lady, what ought
I to do? Forgive me my blunders, my stupidity, my wretched want of
taste and feeling! I love and adore you! All that I am, I am for
you! If I cannot please you, I care not for Heaven! but without your
help, I am lost!"
Upon my word, you may sit here forever imagining such appeals, and
the endless discussions and criticisms that were heard every day,
under these vaults, seven hundred years ago. That the Virgin
answered the questions is my firm belief, just as it is my
conviction that she did not answer them elsewhere. One sees her
personal presence on every side. Any one can feel it who will only
consent to feel like a child. Sitting here any Sunday afternoon,
while the voices of the children of the maitrise are chanting in the
choir,--your mind held in the grasp of the strong lines and shadows
of the architecture; your eyes flooded with the autumn tones of the
glass; your ears drowned with the purity of the voices; one sense
reacting upon another until sensation reaches the limit of its
range,--you, or any other lost soul, could, if you cared to look and
listen, feel a sense beyond the human ready to reveal a sense divine
that would make that world once more intelligible, and would bring
the Virgin to life again, in all the depths of feeling which she
shows here,--in lines, vaults, chapels, colours, legends, chants,--
more eloquent than the prayer-book, and more beautiful than the
autumn sunlight; and any one willing to try could feel it like the
child, reading new thought without end into the art he has studied a
hundred times; but what is still more convincing, he could, at will,
in an instant, shatter the whole art by calling into it a single
motive of his own.
CHAPTER X
THE COURT OF THE QUEEN OF HEAVEN
All artists love the sanctuary of the Christian Church, and all
tourists love the rest. The reason becomes clear as one leaves the
choir, and goes back to the broad, open hall of the nave. The choir
was made not for the pilgrim but for the deity, and is as old as
Adam, or perhaps older; at all events old enough to have existed in
complete artistic and theological form, with the whole mystery of
the Trinity, the Mother and Child, and even the Cross, thousands of
years before Christ was born; but the Christian Church not only took
the sanctuary in hand, and gave it a new form, more beautiful and
much more refined than the Romans or Greeks or Egyptians had ever
imagined, but it also added the idea of the nave and transepts, and
developed it into imperial splendour. The pilgrim-tourist feels at
home in the nave because it was built for him; the artist loves the
sanctuary because he built it for God.
Chartres was intended to hold ten thousand people easily, or fifteen
thousand when crowded, and the decoration of this great space,
though not a wholly new problem, had to be treated in a new way.
Sancta Sofia was built by the Emperor Justinian, with all the
resources of the Empire, in a single violent effort, in six years,
and was decorated throughout with mosaics on a general scheme, with
the unity that Empire and Church could give, when they acted
together. The Norman Kings of Sicily, the richest princes of the
twelfth century, were able to carry out a complete work of the most
costly kind, in a single sustained effort from beginning to end,
according to a given plan. Chartres was a local shrine, in an
agricultural province, not even a part of the royal domain, and its
cathedral was the work of society, without much more tie than the
Virgin gave it. Socially Chartres, as far as its stone-work goes,
seems to have been mostly rural; its decoration, in the porches and
transepts, is royal and feudal; in the nave and choir it is chiefly
bourgeois. The want of unity is much less surprising than the unity,
but it is still evident, especially in the glass. The mosaics of
Monreale begin and end; they are a series; their connection is
artistic and theological at once; they have unity. The windows of
Chartres have no sequence, and their charm is in variety, in
individuality, and sometimes even in downright hostility to each
other, reflecting the picturesque society that gave them. They have,
too, the charm that the world has made no attempt to popularize them
for its modern uses, so that, except for the useful little guide-
book of the Abbe Clerval, one can see no clue to the legendary
chaos; one has it to one's self, without much fear of being trampled
upon by critics or Jew dealers in works of art; any Chartres beggar-
woman can still pass a summer's day here, and never once be
mortified by ignorance of things that every dealer in bric-a-brac is
supposed to know.
Yet the artists seem to have begun even here with some idea of
sequence, for the first window in the north aisle, next the new
tower, tells the story of Noah; but the next plunges into the local
history of Chartres, and is devoted to Saint Lubin, a bishop of this
diocese who died in or about the year 556, and was, for some reason,
selected by the Wine-Merchants to represent them, as their
interesting medallions show. Then follow three amusing subjects,
charmingly treated: Saint Eustace, whose story has been told; Joseph
and his brethren; and Saint Nicholas, the most popular saint of the
thirteenth century, both in the Greek and in the Roman Churches. The
sixth and last window on the north aisle of the nave is the New
Alliance.
Opposite these, in the south aisle, the series begins next the tower
with John the Evangelist, followed by Saint Mary Magdalen, given by
the Water-Carriers. The third, the Good Samaritan, given by the
Shoemakers, has a rival at Sens which critics think even better. The
fourth is the Death, Assumption, and Coronation of the Virgin. Then
comes the fifteenth-century Chapel of Vendome, to compare the early
and later glass. The sixth is, or was, devoted to the Virgin's
Miracles at Chartres; but only one complete subject remains.
These windows light the two aisles of the nave and decorate the
lower walls of the church with a mass of colour and variety of line
still practically intact in spite of much injury; but the windows of
the transepts on the same level have almost disappeared, except the
Prodigal Son and a border to what was once a Saint Lawrence, on the
north; and, on the south, part of a window to Saint Apollinaris of
Ravenna, with an interesting hierarchy of angels above:--seraphim
and cherubim with six wings, red and blue; Dominations; Powers;
Principalities; all, except Thrones.
All this seems to be simple enough, at least to the people for whom
the nave was built, and to whom the windows were meant to speak.
There is nothing esoteric here; nothing but what might have suited
the great hall of a great palace. There is no difference in taste
between the Virgin in the choir, and the Water-Carriers by the
doorway. Blanche, the young Queen, liked the same colours, legends,
and lines that her Grocers and Bakers liked. All equally loved the
Virgin. There was not even a social difference. In the choir,
Thibaut, the Count of Chartres, immediate lord of the province, let
himself be put in a dark corner next the Belle Verriere, and left
the Bakers to display their wealth in the most serious spot in the
church, the central window of the central chapel, while in the nave
and transepts all the lower windows that bear signatures were given
by trades, as though that part of the church were abandoned to the
commons. One might suppose that the feudal aristocracy would have
fortified itself in the clerestory and upper windows, but even there
the bourgeoisie invaded them, and you can see, with a glass, the
Pastrycooks and Turners looking across at the Weavers and Curriers
and Money-Changers, and the "Men of Tours." Beneath the throne of
the Mother of God, there was no distinction of gifts; and above it
the distinction favoured the commonalty.
Of the seven immense windows above and around the high altar, which
are designed as one composition, none was given by a prince or a
noble. The Drapers, the Butchers, the Bakers, the Bankers are
charged with the highest duties attached to the Virgin's service.
Apparently neither Saint Louis, nor his father Louis VIII, nor his
mother Blanche, nor his uncle Philippe Hurepel, nor his cousin Saint
Ferdinand of Castile, nor his other cousin Pierre de Dreux, nor the
Duchess Alix of Brittany, cared whether their portraits or armorial
shields were thrust out of sight into corners by Pastrycooks and
Teamsters, or took a whole wall of the church to themselves. The
only relation that connects them is their common relation to the
Virgin, but that is emphatic, and dominates the whole.
It dominates us, too, if we reflect on it, even after seven hundred
years that its meaning has faded. When one looks up to this display
of splendour in the clerestory, and asks what was in the minds of
the people who joined to produce, with such immense effort and at
such self-sacrifice, this astonishing effect, the question seems to
answer itself like an echo. With only half of an atrophied
imagination, in a happy mood we could still see the nave and
transepts filled with ten thousand people on their knees, and the
Virgin, crowned and robed, seating herself on the embroidered
cushion that covered her imperial throne; sparkling with gems;
bearing in her right hand the sceptre, and in her lap the infant
King; but, in the act of seating herself, we should see her pause a
moment to look down with love and sympathy on us,--her people,--who
pack the enormous hall, and throng far out beyond the open portals;
while, an instant later, she glances up to see that her great lords,
spiritual and temporal, the advisers of her judgment, the supports
of her authority, the agents of her will, shall be in place; robed,
mitred, armed; bearing the symbols of her authority and their
office; on horseback, lance in hand; all of them ready at a sign to
carry out a sentence of judgment or an errand of mercy; to touch
with the sceptre or to strike with the sword; and never err.
There they still stand! unchanged, unfaded, as alive and complete as
when they represented the real world, and the people below were the
unreal and ephemeral pageant! Then the reality was the Queen of
Heaven on her throne in the sanctuary, and her court in the glass;
not the queens or princes who were prostrating themselves, with the
crowd, at her feet. These people knew the Virgin as well as they
knew their own mothers; every jewel in her crown, every stitch of
gold-embroidery in her many robes; every colour; every fold; every
expression on the perfectly familiar features of her grave, imperial
face; every care that lurked in the silent sadness of her power;
repeated over and over again, in stone, glass, ivory, enamel, wood;
in every room, at the head of every bed, hanging on every neck,
standing at every street-corner, the Virgin was as familiar to every
one of them as the sun or the seasons; far more familiar than their
own earthly queen or countess, although these were no strangers in
their daily life; familiar from the earliest childhood to the last
agony; in every joy and every sorrow and every danger; in every act
and almost in every thought of life, the Virgin was present with a
reality that never belonged to her Son or to the Trinity, and hardly
to any earthly being, prelate, king, or kaiser; her daily life was
as real to them as their own loyalty which brought to her the best
they had to offer as the return for her boundless sympathy; but
while they knew the Virgin as though she were one of themselves, and
because she had been one of themselves, they were not so familiar
with all the officers of her court at Chartres; and pilgrims from
abroad, like us, must always have looked with curious interest at
the pageant.
Far down the nave, next the western towers, the rank began with
saints, prophets, and martyrs, of all ages and countries; local,
like Saint Lubin; national, like Saint Martin of Tours and Saint
Hilary of Poitiers; popular like Saint Nicholas; militant like Saint
George; without order; symbols like Abraham and Isaac; the Virgin
herself, holding on her lap the Seven Gifts of the Holy Ghost;
Christ with the Alpha and Omega; Moses and Saint Augustine; Saint
Peter; Saint Mary the Egyptian; Saint Jerome; a whole throne-room of
heavenly powers, repeating, within, the pageant carved on the
porches and on the portals without. From the croisee in the centre,
where the crowd is most dense, one sees the whole almost better than
Mary sees it from her high altar, for there all the great rose
windows flash in turn, and the three twelfth-century lancets glow on
the western sun. When the eyes of the throng are directed to the
north, the Rose of France strikes them almost with a physical shock
of colour, and, from the south, the Rose of Dreux challenges the
Rose of France.
Every one knows that there is war between the two! The thirteenth
century has few secrets. There are no outsiders. We are one family
as we are one Church. Every man and woman here, from Mary on her
throne to the beggar on the porch, knows that Pierre de Dreux
detests Blanche of Castile, and that their two windows carry on war
across the very heart of the cathedral. Both unite only in asking
help from Mary; but Blanche is a woman, alone in the world with
young children to protect, and most women incline strongly to
suspect that Mary will never desert her. Pierre, with all his
masculine strength, is no courtier. He wants to rule by force. He
carries the assertion of his sex into the very presence of the Queen
of Heaven.
The year happens to be 1230, when the roses may be supposed just
finished and showing their whole splendour for the first time. Queen
Blanche is forty-three years old, and her son Louis is fifteen.
Blanche is a widow these four years, and Pierre a widower since
1221. Both are regents and guardians for their heirs. They have
necessarily carried their disputes before Mary. Queen Blanche claims
for her son, who is to be Saint Louis, the place of honour at Mary's
right hand; she has taken possession of the north porch outside, and
of the north transept within, and has filled the windows with glass,
as she is filling the porch with statuary. Above is the huge rose;
below are five long windows; and all proclaim the homage that France
renders to the Queen of Heaven.
The Rose of France shows in its centre the Virgin in her majesty,
seated, crowned, holding the sceptre with her right hand, while her
left supports the infant Christ-King on her knees; which shows that
she, too, is acting as regent for her Son. Round her, in a circle,
are twelve medallions; four containing doves; four six-winged angels
or Thrones; four angels of a lower order, but all symbolizing the
gifts and endowments of the Queen of Heaven. Outside these are
twelve more medallions with the Kings of Judah, and a third circle
contains the twelve lesser prophets. So Mary sits, hedged in by all
the divinity that graces earthly or heavenly kings; while between
the two outer circles are twelve quatrefoils bearing on a blue
ground the golden lilies of France; and in each angle below the rose
are four openings, showing alternately the lilies of Louis and the
castles of Blanche. We who are below, the common people, understand
that France claims to protect and defend the Virgin of Chartres, as
her chief vassal, and that this ostentatious profusion of lilies and
castles is intended not in honour of France, but as a demonstration
of loyalty to Notre Dame, and an assertion of her rights as Queen
Regent of Heaven against all comers, but particularly against
Pierre, the rebel, who has the audacity to assert rival rights in
the opposite transept.
Beneath the rose are five long windows, very unlike the twelfth-
century pendants to the western rose. These five windows blaze with
red, and their splendour throws the Virgin above quite into the
background. The artists, who felt that the twelfth-century glass was
too fine and too delicate for the new scale of the church, have not
only enlarged their scale and coarsened their design, but have
coarsened their colour-scheme also, discarding blue in order to
crush us under the earthly majesty of red. These windows, too, bear
the stamp and seal of Blanche's Spanish temper as energetically as
though they bore her portrait. The great central figure, the tallest
and most commanding in the whole church, is not the Virgin, but her
mother Saint Anne, standing erect as on the trumeau of the door
beneath, and holding the infant Mary on her left arm. She wears no
royal crown, but bears a flowered sceptre. The only other difference
between Mary and her mother, that seems intended to strike
attention, is that Mary sits, while her mother stands; but as though
to proclaim still more distinctly that France supports the royal and
divine pretensions of Saint Anne, Queen Blanche has put beneath the
figure a great shield blazoned with the golden lilies on an azure
ground.
With singular insistence on this motive, Saint Anne has at either
hand a royal court of her own, marked as her own by containing only
figures from the Old Testament. Standing next on her right is
Solomon, her Prime Minister, bringing wisdom in worldly counsel, and
trampling on human folly. Beyond Wisdom stands Law, figured by Aaron
with the Book, trampling on the lawless Pharaoh. Opposite them, on
Saint Anne's left, is David, the energy of State, trampling on a
Saul suggesting suspicions of a Saul de Dreux; while last,
Melchisedec who is Faith, tramples on a disobedient Nebuchadnezzar
Mauclerc.
How can we, the common people, help seeing all this, and much more,
when we know that Pierre de Dreux has been for years in constant
strife with the Crown and the Church? He is very valiant and lion-
hearted;--so say the chroniclers, priests though they are;--very
skilful and experienced in war whether by land or sea; very adroit,
with more sense than any other great lord in France; but restless,
factious, and regardless of his word. Brave and bold as the day;
full of courtesy and "largesse"; but very hard on the clergy; a good
Christian but a bad churchman! Certainly the first man of his time,
says Michelet! "I have never found any that sought to do me more ill
than he," says Blanche, and Joinville gives her very words; indeed,
this year, 1230, she has summoned our own Bishop of Chartres among
others to Paris in a court of peers, where Pierre has been found
guilty of treason and deposed. War still continues, but Pierre must
make submission. Blanche has beaten him in politics and in the
field! Let us look round and see how he fares in theology and art!
There is his rose--so beautiful that Blanche may well think it seeks
to do hers ill! As colour, judge for yourselves whether it holds its
own against the flaming self-assertion of the opposite wall! As
subject, it asserts flat defiance of the monarchy of Queen Blanche.
In the central circle, Christ as King is seated on a royal throne,
both arms raised, one holding the golden cup of eternal priesthood,
the other, blessing the world. Two great flambeaux burn beside Him.
The four Apocalyptic figures surround and worship Him; and in the
concentric circles round the central medallion are the angels and
the kings in a blaze of colour, symbolizing the New Jerusalem.
All the force of the Apocalypse is there, and so is some of the
weakness of theology, for, in the five great windows below, Pierre
shows his training in the schools. Four of these windows represent
what is called, for want of a better name, the New Alliance; the
dependence of the New Testament on the Old; but Pierre's choice in
symbols was as masculine as that of Blanche was feminine. In each of
the four windows, a gigantic Evangelist strides the shoulders of a
colossal Prophet. Saint John rides on Ezekiel; Saint Mark bestrides
Daniel; Saint Matthew is on the shoulders of Isaiah; Saint Luke is
carried by Jeremiah. The effect verges on the grotesque. The balance
of Christ's Church seems uncertain. The Evangelists clutch the
Prophets by the hair, and while the synagogue stands firm, the
Church looks small, feeble, and vacillating. The new dispensation
has not the air of mastery either physical or intellectual; the old
gives it all the support it has, and, in the absence of Saint Paul,
both old and new seem little concerned with the sympathies of
Frenchmen. The synagogue is stronger than the Church, but even the
Church is Jew.
That Pierre could ever have meant this is not to be dreamed; but
when the true scholar gets thoroughly to work, his logic is
remorseless, his art is implacable, and his sense of humour is
blighted. In the rose above, Pierre had asserted the exclusive
authority of Christ in the New Jerusalem, and his scheme required
him to show how the Church rested on the Evangelists below, who in
their turn had no visible support except what the Prophets gave
them. Yet the artist may have had a reason for weakening the
Evangelists, because there remained the Virgin! One dares no more
than hint at a motive so disrespectful to the Evangelists; but it is
certainly true that, in the central window, immediately beneath the
Christ, and His chief support, with the four staggering Evangelists
and Prophets on either hand, the Virgin stands, and betrays no sign
of weakness.
The compliment is singularly masculine; a kind of twelfth-century
flattery that might have softened the anger of Blanche herself, if
the Virgin had been her own; but the Virgin of Dreux is not the
Virgin of France. No doubt she still wears her royal crown, and her
head is circled with the halo; her right hand still holds the
flowered sceptre, and her left the infant Christ, but she stands,
and Christ is King. Note, too, that she stands directly opposite to
her mother Saint Anne in the Rose of France, so as to place her one
stage lower than the Virgin of France in the hierarchy. She is the
Saint Anne of France, and shows it. "She is no longer," says the
official Monograph, "that majestic queen who was seated on a throne,
with her feet on the stool of honour; the personages have become
less imposing and the heads show the decadence." She is the Virgin
of Theology; she has her rights, and no more; but she is not the
Virgin of Chartres.
She, too, stands on an altar or pedestal, on which hangs a shield
bearing the ermines, an exact counterpart of the royal shield
beneath Saint Anne. In this excessive display of armorial bearings--
for the two roses above are crowded with them--one likes to think
that these great princes had in their minds not so much the thought
of their own importance--which is a modern sort of religion--as the
thought of their devotion to Mary. The assertion of power and
attachment by one is met by the assertion of equal devotion by the
other, and while both loudly proclaim their homage to the Virgin,
each glares defiance across the church. Pierre meant the Queen of
Heaven to know that, in case of need, her left hand was as good as
her right, and truer; that the ermines were as well able to defend
her as the lilies, and that Brittany would fight her battles as
bravely as France. Whether his meaning carried with it more devotion
to the Virgin or more defiance to France depends a little on the
date of the windows, but, as a mere point of history, every one must
allow that Pierre's promise of allegiance was kept more faithfully
by Brittany than that of Blanche and Saint Louis has been kept by
France.
The date seems to be fixed by the windows themselves. Beneath the
Prophets kneel Pierre and his wife Alix, while their two children,
Yolande and Jean, stand. Alix died in 1221. Jean was born in 1217.
Yolande was affianced in marriage in 1227, while a child, and given
to Queen Blanche to be brought up as the future wife of her younger
son John, then in his eighth year. When John died, Yolande was
contracted to Thibaut of Champagne in 1231, and Blanche is said to
have written to Thibaut in consequence: "Sire Thibauld of Champagne,
I have heard that you have covenanted and promised to take to wife
the daughter of Count Perron of Brittany. Wherefore I charge you, if
you do not wish to lose whatever you possess in the kingdom of
France, not to do it. If you hold dear or love aught in the said
kingdom, do it not." Whether Blanche wrote in these words or not,
she certainly prevented the marriage, and Yolande remained single
until 1238 when she married the Comte de la Marche, who was, by the
way, almost as bitter an enemy of Blanche as Pierre had been; but by
that time both Blanche and Pierre had ceased to be regents.
Yolande's figure in the window is that of a girl, perhaps twelve or
fourteen years old; Jean is younger, certainly not more than eight
or ten years of age; and the appearance of the two children shows
that the window itself should date between 1225 and 1230, the year
when Pierre de Dreux was condemned because he had renounced his
homage to King Louis, declared war on him, and invited the King of
England into France. As already told, Philippe Hurepel de Boulogne,
the Comte de la Marche, Enguerrand de Couci,--nearly all the great
nobles,--had been leagued with Pierre de Dreux since Blanche's
regency began in 1226.
That these transept windows harmonize at all, is due to the Virgin,
not to the donors. At the time they were designed, supposing it to
be during Blanche's regency (1226-36), the passions of these donors
brought France to momentary ruin, and the Virgin in Blanche's Rose
de France, as she looked across the church, could not see a single
friend of Blanche. What is more curious, she saw enemies in plenty,
and in full readiness for battle. We have seen in the centre of the
small rose in the north transept, Philippe Hurepel still waiting her
orders; across the nave, in another small rose of the south
transept, sits Pierre de Dreux on his horse. The upper windows on
the side walls of the choir are very interesting but impossible to
see, even with the best glasses, from the floor of the church. Their
sequence and dates have already been discussed; but their feeling is
shown by the character of the Virgin, who in French territory, next
the north transept, is still the Virgin of France, but in Pierre's
territory, next the Rose de Dreux, becomes again the Virgin of
Dreux, who is absorbed in the Child,--not the Child absorbed in
her,--and accordingly the window shows the chequers and ermines.
The figures, like the stone figures outside, are the earliest of
French art, before any school of painting fairly existed. Among
them, one can see no friend of Blanche. Indeed, outside of her own
immediate family and the Church, Blanche had no friend of much
importance except the famous Thibaut of Champagne, the single member
of the royal family who took her side and suffered for her sake, and
who, as far as books tell, has no window or memorial here. One might
suppose that Thibaut, who loved both Blanche and the Virgin, would
have claimed a place, and perhaps he did; but one seeks him in vain.
If Blanche had friends here, they are gone. Pierre de Dreux, lance
in hand, openly defies her, and it was not on her brother-in-law
Philippe Hurepel that she could depend for defence.
This is the court pageant of the Virgin that shows itself to the
people who are kneeling at high mass. We, the public, whoever we
are,--Chartrain, Breton, Norman, Angevin, Frenchman, Percherain, or
what not,--know our local politics as intimately as our lords do, or
even better, for our imaginations are active, and we do not love
Blanche of Castile. We know how to read the passions that fill the
church. From the north transept Blanche flames out on us in splendid
reds and flings her Spanish castles in our face. From the south
transept Pierre retorts with a brutal energy which shows itself in
the Prophets who serve as battle-chargers and in the Evangelists who
serve as knights,--mounted warriors of faith,--whose great eyes
follow us across the church and defy Saint Anne and her French
shield opposite. Pierre was not effeminate; Blanche was fairly
masculine. Between them, as a matter of sex, we can see little to
choose; and, in any case, it is a family quarrel; they are all
cousins; they are all equals on earth, and none means to submit to
any superior except the Virgin and her Son in heaven. The Virgin is
not afraid. She has seen many troubles worse than this; she knows
how to manage perverse children, and if necessary she will shut them
up in a darker room than ever their mothers kept open for them in
this world. One has only to look at the Virgin to see!
There she is, of course, looking down on us from the great window
above the high altar, where we never forget her presence! Is there a
thought of disturbance there? Around the curve of the choir are
seven great windows, without roses, filling the whole semicircle and
the whole vault, forty-seven feet high, and meant to dominate the
nave as far as the western portal, so that we may never forget how
Mary fills her church without being disturbed by quarrels, and may
understand why Saint Ferdinand and Saint Louis creep out of our
sight, close by the Virgin's side, far up above brawls; and why
France and Brittany hide their ugly or their splendid passions at
the ends of the transepts, out of sight of the high altar where Mary
is to sit in state as Queen with the young King on her lap. In an
instant she will come, but we have a moment still to look about at
the last great decoration of her palace, and see how the artists
have arranged it.
Since the building of Sancta Sofia, no artist has had such a chance.
No doubt, Rheims and Amiens and Bourges and Beauvais, which are now
building, may be even finer, but none of them is yet finished, and
all must take their ideas from here. One would like, before looking
at it, to think over the problem, as though it were new, and so
choose the scheme that would suit us best if the decoration were to
be done for the first time. The architecture is fixed; we have to do
only with the colour of this mass of seven huge windows, forty-seven
feet high, in the clerestory, round the curve of the choir, which
close the vista of the church as viewed from the entrance. This
vista is about three hundred and thirty feet long. The windows rise
above a hundred feet. How ought this vast space to be filled? Should
the perpendicular upward leap of the architecture be followed and
accented by a perpendicular leap of colour? The decorators of the
fifteenth and sixteenth centuries seem to have thought so, and made
perpendicular architectural drawings in yellow that simulated gold,
and lines that ran with the general lines of the building. Many
fifteenth-century windows seem to be made up of florid Gothic
details rising in stages to the vault. No doubt critics complained,
and still complain, that the monotony of this scheme, and its
cheapness of intelligence, were objections; but at least the effect
was light, decorative, and safe. The artist could not go far wrong
and was still at liberty to do beautiful work, as can be seen in any
number of churches scattered broadcast over Europe and swarming in
Paris and France. On the other hand, might not the artist disregard
the architecture and fill the space with a climax of colour? Could
he not unite the Roses of France and Dreux above the high altar in
an overpowering outburst of purples and reds? The seventeenth
century might have preferred to mass clouds and colours, and Michael
Angelo, in the sixteenth, might have known how to do it. What we
want is not the feeling of the artist so much as the feeling of
Chartres. What shall it be--the jewelled brilliancy of the western
windows, or the fierce self-assertion of Pierre Mauclerc, or the
royal splendour of Queen Blanche, or the feminine grace and
decorative refinement of the Charlemagne and Santiago windows in the
apse?
Never again in art was so splendid a problem offered, either before
or since, for the artist of Chartres solved it, as he did the whole
matter of fenestration, and later artists could only offer
variations on his work. You will see them at Bourges and Tours and
in scores of thirteenth and fourteenth and fifteenth and sixteenth
century churches and windows, and perhaps in some of the twentieth
century,--all of them interesting and some of them beautiful,--and
far be it from us, mean and ignorant pilgrims of art, to condemn any
intelligent effort to vary or improve the effect; but we have set
out to seek the feeling, and while we think of art in relation to
ourselves, the sermon of Chartres, from beginning to end, teaches
and preaches and insists and reiterates and hammers into our torpid
minds the moral that the art of the Virgin was not that of her
artists but her own. We inevitably think of our tastes; they thought
instinctively of hers.
In the transepts, Queen Blanche and Duke Perron, in legal possession
of their territory, showed that they were thinking of each other as
well as of the Virgin, and claimed loudly that they ought each to be
first in the Virgin's favour; and they stand there in place, as the
thirteenth century felt them. Subject to their fealty to Mary, the
transepts belonged to them, and if Blanche did not, like Pierre,
assert Herself and her son on the Virgin's window, perhaps she
thought the Virgin would resent Pierre's boldness the more by
contrast with her own good taste. So far as is known, nowhere does
Blanche appear in person at Chartres; she felt herself too near the
Virgin to obtrude a useless image, or she was too deeply religious
to ask anything for herself. A queen who was to have two children
sainted, to intercede for her at Mary's throne, stood in a solitude
almost as unique as that of Mary, and might ignore the raw
brutalities of a man-at-arms; but neither she nor Pierre has carried
the quarrel into Mary's presence, nor has the Virgin condescended
even to seem conscious of their temper. This is the theme of the
artist--the purity, the beauty, the grace, and the infinite
loftiness of Mary's nature, among the things of earth, and above the
clamour of kings.
Therefore, when we, and the crushed crowd of kneeling worshippers
around us, lift our eyes at last after the miracle of the mass, we
see, far above the high altar, high over all the agitation of
prayer, the passion of politics, the anguish of suffering, the
terrors of sin, only the figure of the Virgin in majesty, looking
down on her people, crowned, throned, glorified, with the infant
Christ on her knees. She does not assert herself; probably she
intends to be felt rather than feared. Compared with the Greek
Virgin, as you see her, for example, at Torcello, the Chartres
Virgin is retiring and hardly important enough for the place. She is
not exaggerated either in scale, drawing, or colour. She shows not a
sign of self-consciousness, not an effort for brilliancy, not a
trace of stage effect--hardly even a thought of herself, except that
she is at home, among her own people, where she is loved and known
as well as she knows them. The seven great windows are one
composition; and it is plain that the artist, had he been ordered to
make an exhibition of power, could have overwhelmed us with a storm
of purple, red, yellows, or given us a Virgin of Passion who would
have torn the vault asunder; his ability is never in doubt, and if
he has kept true to the spirit of the western portal and the
twelfth-century, it is because the Virgin of Chartres was the Virgin
of Grace, and ordered him to paint her so. One shudders to think how
a single false note--a suggestion of meanness, in this climax of
line and colour--would bring the whole fabric down in ruins on the
eighteenth-century meanness of the choir below; and one notes,
almost bashfully, the expedients of the artists to quiet their
effects. So the lines of the seven windows are built up, to avoid
the horizontal, and yet not exaggerate the vertical.
The architect counts here for more than the colourist; but the
colour, when you study it, suggests the same restraint. Three great
windows on the Virgin's right, balanced by three more on her left,
show the prophets and precursors of her Son; all architecturally
support and exalt the Virgin, in her celestial atmosphere of blue,
shot with red, calm in the certainty of heaven. Any one who is
prematurely curious to see the difference in treatment between
different centuries should go down to the church of Saint Pierre in
the lower town, and study there the methods of the Renaissance. Then
we can come back to study again the ways of the thirteenth century.
The Virgin will wait; she will not be angry; she knows her power; we
all come back to her in the end.
Or the Renaissance, if one prefers, can wait equally well, while one
kneels with the thirteenth century, and feels the little one still
can feel of what it felt. Technically these apsidal windows have not
received much notice; the books rarely speak of them; travellers
seldom look at them; and their height is such that even with the
best glass, the quality of the work is beyond our power to judge. We
see, and the artists meant that we should see, only the great lines,
the colour, and the Virgin. The mass of suppliants before the choir
look up to the light, clear blues and reds of this great space, and
feel there the celestial peace and beauty of Mary's nature and
abode. There is heaven! and Mary looks down from it, into her
church, where she sees us on our knees, and knows each one of us by
name. There she actually is--not in symbol or in fancy, but in
person, descending on her errands of mercy and listening to each one
of us, as her miracles prove, or satisfying our prayers merely by
her presence which calms our excitement as that of a mother calms
her child. She is there as Queen, not merely as intercessor, and her
power is such that to her the difference between us earthly beings
is nothing. Her quiet, masculine strength enchants us most. Pierre
Mauclerc and Philippe Hurepel and their men-at-arms are afraid of
her, and the Bishop himself is never quite at his ease in her
presence; but to peasants, and beggars, and people in trouble, this
sense of her power and calm is better than active sympathy. People
who suffer beyond the formulas of expression--who are crushed into
silence, and beyond pain--want no display of emotion--no bleeding
heart--no weeping at the foot of the Cross--no hysterics--no
phrases! They want to see God, and to know that He is watching over
His own. How many women are there, in this mass of thirteenth
century suppliants, who have lost children? Probably nearly all, for
the death rate is very high in the conditions of medieval life.
There are thousands of such women here, for it is precisely this
class who come most; and probably every one of them has looked up to
Mary in her great window, and has felt actual certainty, as though
she saw with her own eyes--there, in heaven, while she looked--her
own lost baby playing with the Christ-Child at the Virgin's knee, as
much at home as the saints, and much more at home than the kings.
Before rising from her knees, every one of these women will have
bent down and kissed the stone pavement in gratitude for Mary's
mercy. The earth, she says, is a sorry place, and the best of it is
bad enough, no doubt, even for Queen Blanche and the Duchess Alix
who has had to leave her children here alone; but there above is
Mary in heaven who sees and hears me as I see her, and who keeps my
little boy till I come; so I can wait with patience, more or less!
Saints and prophets and martyrs are all very well, and Christ is
very sublime and just, but Mary knows!
It was very childlike, very foolish, very beautiful, and very true,-
-as art, at least:--so true that everything else shades off into
vulgarity, as you see the Persephone of a Syracusan coin shade off
into the vulgarity of a Roman emperor; as though the heaven that
lies about us in our infancy too quickly takes colours that are not
so much sober as sordid, and would be welcome if no worse than that.
Vulgarity, too, has feeling, and its expression in art has truth and
even pathos, but we shall have time enough in our lives for that,
and all the more because, when we rise from our knees now, we have
finished our pilgrimage. We have done with Chartres. For seven
hundred years Chartres has seen pilgrims, coming and going more or
less like us, and will perhaps see them for another seven hundred
years; but we shall see it no more, and can safely leave the Virgin
in her majesty, with her three great prophets on either hand, as
calm and confident in their own strength and in God's providence as
they were when Saint Louis was born, but looking down from a
deserted heaven, into an empty church, on a dead faith.
CHAPTER XI
THE THREE QUEENS
After worshipping at the shrines of Saint Michael on his Mount and
of the Virgin at Chartres, one may wander far and wide over France,
and seldom feel lost; all later Gothic art comes naturally, and no
new thought disturbs the perfected form. Yet tourists of English
blood and American training are seldom or never quite at home there.
Commonly they feel it only as a stage-decoration. The twelfth and
thirteenth centuries, studied in the pure light of political
economy, are insane. The scientific mind is atrophied, and suffers
under inherited cerebral weakness, when it comes in contact with the
eternal woman--Astarte, Isis, Demeter, Aphrodite, and the last and
greatest deity of all, the Virgin. Very rarely one lingers, with a
mild sympathy, such as suits the patient student of human error,
willing to be interested in what he cannot understand. Still more
rarely, owing to some revival of archaic instincts, he rediscovers
the woman. This is perhaps the mark of the artist alone, and his
solitary privilege. The rest of us cannot feel; we can only study.
The proper study of mankind is woman and, by common agreement since
the time of Adam, it is the most complex and arduous. The study of
Our Lady, as shown by the art of Chartres, leads directly back to
Eve, and lays bare the whole subject of sex.
If it were worth while to argue a paradox, one might maintain that
Nature regards the female as the essential, the male as the
superfluity of her world. Perhaps the best starting-point for study
of the Virgin would be a practical acquaintance with bees, and
especially with queen bees. Precisely where the French man may come
in, on the genealogical tree of parthenogenesis, one hesitates to
say; but certain it is that the French woman, from very early times,
has shown qualities peculiar to herself, and that the French woman
of the Middle Ages was a masculine character. Almost any book which
deals with the social side of the twelfth century has something to
say on this subject, like the following page from M. Garreau's
volume published in 1899, on the "Social State of France during the
Crusades":--
A trait peculiar to this epoch is the close resemblance between the
manners of men and women. The rule that such and such feelings or
acts are permitted to one sex and forbidden to the other was not
fairly settled. Men had the right to dissolve in tears, and women
that of talking without prudery .... If we look at their
intellectual level, the women appear distinctly superior. They are
more serious; more subtle. With them we do not seem dealing with the
rude state of civilization that their husbands belong to .... As a
rule, the women seem to have the habit of weighing their acts; of
not yielding to momentary impressions. While the sense of
Christianity is more developed in them than in their husbands, on
the other hand they show more perfidy and art in crime .... One
might doubtless prove by a series of examples that the maternal
influence when it predominated in the education of a son gave him a
marked superiority over his contemporaries. Richard Coeur-de-Lion
the crowned poet, artist, the king whose noble manners and refined
mind in spite of his cruelty exercised so strong an impression on
his age, was formed by that brilliant Eleanor of Guienne who, in her
struggle with her husband, retained her sons as much as possible
within her sphere of influence in order to make party chiefs of
them. Our great Saint Louis, as all know, was brought up exclusively
by Blanche of Castile; and Joinville, the charming writer so worthy
of Saint Louis's friendship, and apparently so superior to his
surroundings, was also the pupil of a widowed and regent mother.
The superiority of the woman was not a fancy, but a fact. Man's
business was to fight or hunt or feast or make love. The man was
also the travelling partner in commerce, commonly absent from home
for months together, while the woman carried on the business. The
woman ruled the household and the workshop; cared for the economy;
supplied the intelligence, and dictated the taste. Her ascendancy
was secured by her alliance with the Church, into which she sent her
most intelligent children; and a priest or clerk, for the most part,
counted socially as a woman. Both physically and mentally the woman
was robust, as the men often complained, and she did not greatly
resent being treated as a man. Sometimes the husband beat her,
dragged her about by the hair, locked her up in the house; but he
was quite conscious that she always got even with him in the end. As
a matter of fact, probably she got more than even. On this point,
history, legend, poetry, romance, and especially the popular
fabliaux--invented to amuse the gross tastes of the coarser class--
are all agreed, and one could give scores of volumes illustrating
it. The greatest men illustrate it best, as one might show almost at
hazard. The greatest men of the eleventh, twelfth, and thirteenth
centuries were William the Norman; his great grandson Henry II
Plantagenet; Saint Louis of France; and, if a fourth be needed,
Richard Coeur-de-Lion. Notoriously all these men had as much
difficulty as Louis XIV himself with the women of their family.
Tradition exaggerates everything it touches, but shows, at the same
time, what is passing in the minds of the society which tradites. In
Normandy, the people of Caen have kept a tradition, told elsewhere
in other forms, that one day, Duke William,--the Conqueror,--
exasperated by having his bastardy constantly thrown in his face by
the Duchess Matilda, dragged her by the hair, tied to his horse's
tail, as far as the suburb of Vaucelles; and this legend accounts
for the splendour of the Abbaye-aux-Dames, because William, the
common people believed, afterwards regretted the impropriety, and
atoned for it by giving her money to build the abbey. The story
betrays the man's weakness. The Abbaye-aux-Dames stands in the same
relation to the Abbaye-aux-Hommes that Matilda took towards William.
Inferiority there was none; on the contrary, the woman was socially
the superior, and William was probably more afraid of her than she
of him, if Mr. Freeman is right in insisting that he married her in
spite of her having a husband living, and certainly two children. If
William was the strongest man in the eleventh century, his great-
grandson, Henry II of England, was the strongest man of the twelfth;
but the history of the time resounds with the noise of his battles
with Queen Eleanor whom he, at last, held in prison for fourteen
years. Prisoner as she was, she broke him down in the end. One is
tempted to suspect that, had her husband and children been guided by
her, and by her policy as peacemaker for the good of Guienne, most
of the disasters of England and France might have been postponed for
the time; but we can never know the truth, for monks and historians
abhor emancipated women,--with good reason, since such women are apt
to abhor them,--and the quarrel can never be pacified. Historians
have commonly shown fear of women without admitting it, but the man
of the Middle Ages knew at least why he feared the woman, and told
it openly, not to say brutally. Long after Eleanor and Blanche were
dead, Chaucer brought the Wife of Bath on his Shakespearean stage,
to explain the woman, and as usual he touched masculine frailty with
caustic, while seeming to laugh at woman and man alike:--
"My liege lady! generally," quoth he,
"Women desiren to have soverainetee."
The point was that the Wife of Bath, like Queen Blanche and Queen
Eleanor, not only wanted sovereignty, but won and held it.
That Saint Louis, even when a grown man and king, stood in awe of
his mother, Blanche of Castile, was not only notorious but seemed to
be thought natural. Joinville recorded it not so much to mark the
King's weakness, as the woman's strength; for his Queen, Margaret of
Provence, showed the courage which the King had not. Blanche and
Margaret were exceedingly jealous of each other. "One day," said
Joinville, "Queen Blanche went to the Queen's [Margaret] chamber
where her son [Louis IX] had gone before to comfort her, for she was
in great danger of death from a bad delivery; and he hid himself
behind the Queen [Margaret] to avoid being seen; but his mother
perceived him, and taking him by the hand said: 'Come along! you
will do no good here!' and put him out of the chamber. Queen
Margaret, observing this, and that she was to be separated from her
husband, cried aloud: 'Alas! will you not allow me to see my lord
either living or dying?'" According to Joinville, King Louis always
hid himself when, in his wife's chamber, he heard his mother coming.
The great period of Gothic architecture begins with the coming of
Eleanor (1137) and ends with the passing of Blanche (1252).
Eleanor's long life was full of energy and passion of which next to
nothing is known; the woman was always too slippery for monks or
soldiers to grasp.
Eleanor came to Paris, a Queen of fifteen years old, in 1137,
bringing Poitiers and Guienne as the greatest dowry ever offered to
the French Crown. She brought also the tastes and manners of the
South, little in harmony with the tastes and manners of Saint
Bernard whose authority at court rivalled her own. The Abbe Suger
supported her, but the King leaned toward the Abbe Bernard. What
this puritan reaction meant is a matter to be studied by itself, if
one can find a cloister to study in; but it bore the mark of most
puritan reactions in its hostility to women. As long as the woman
remained docile, she ruled, through the Church; but the man feared
her and was jealous of her, and she of him. Bernard specially adored
the Virgin because she was an example of docile obedience to the
Trinity who atoned for the indocility of Eve, but Eve herself
remained the instrument of Satan, and French society as a whole
showed a taste for Eves.
[Genealogical chart showing the relationships among the three
queens.]
Eleanor could hardly be called docile. Whatever else she loved, she
certainly loved rule. She shared this passion to the full with her
only great successor and rival on the English throne, Queen
Elizabeth, and she happened to become Queen of France at the moment
when society was turning from worship of its military ideal, Saint
Michael, to worship of its social ideal, the Virgin. According to
the monk Orderic, men had begun to throw aside their old military
dress and manners even before the first crusade, in the days of
William Rufus (1087-1100), and to affect feminine fashions. In all
ages, priests and monks have denounced the growing vices of society,
with more or less reason; but there seems to have been a real
outbreak of display at about the time of the first crusade, which
set a deep mark on every sort of social expression, even down to the
shoes of the statues on the western portal of Chartres:--
A debauched fellow named Robert [said Orderic] was the first, about
the time of William Rufus, who introduced the practice of filling
the long points of the shoes with tow, and of turning them up like a
ram's horn. Hence he got the surname of Cornard; and this absurd
fashion was speedily adopted by great numbers of the nobility as a
proud distinction and sign of merit. At this time effeminacy was the
prevailing vice throughout the world ... They parted their hair from
the crown of the head on each side of the forehead, and their locks
grew long like women, and wore long shirts and tunics, closely tied
with points ... In our days, ancient customs are almost all changed
for new fashions. Our wanton youths are sunk in effeminacy ... They
insert their toes in things like serpents' tails which present to
view the shape of scorpions. Sweeping the dusty ground with the
prodigious trains of their robes and mantles, they cover their hands
with gloves ...
If you are curious to follow these monkish criticisms on your
ancestors' habits, you can read Orderic at your leisure; but you
want only to carry in mind the fact that the generation of warriors
who fought at Hastings and captured Jerusalem were regarded by
themselves as effeminate, and plunged in luxury. "Their locks are
curled with hot irons, and instead of wearing caps, they bind their
heads with fillets. A knight seldom appears in public with his head
uncovered and properly shaved according to the apostolic precept."
The effeminacy of the first crusade took artistic shape in the west
portal of Chartres and the glass of Saint-Denis, and led instantly
to the puritan reaction of Saint Bernard, followed by the gentle
asceticism of Queen Blanche and Saint Louis. Whether the pilgrimages
to Jerusalem and contact with the East were the cause or only a
consequence of this revolution, or whether it was all one,--a result
of converting the Northern pagans to peaceful habits and the
consequent enrichment of northern Europe,--is indifferent; the fact
and the date are enough. The art is French, but the ideas may have
come from anywhere, like the game of chess which the pilgrims or
crusaders brought home from Syria. In the Oriental game, the King
was followed step by step by a Minister whose functions were
personal. The crusaders freed the piece from control; gave it
liberty to move up or down or diagonally, forwards and backwards;
made it the most arbitrary and formidable champion on the board,
while the King and the Knight were the most restricted in movement;
and this piece they named Queen, and called the Virgin:--
Li Baudrains traist sa fierge por son paon sauver,
E cele son aufin qui cuida conquester
La firge ou le paon, ou faire reculer.
The aufin or dauphin became the Fou of the French game, and the
bishop of the English. Baldwin played his Virgin to save his pawn;
his opponent played the bishop to threaten either the Virgin or the
pawn.
For a hundred and fifty years, the Virgin and Queens ruled French
taste and thought so successfully that the French man has never yet
quite decided whether to be more proud or ashamed of it. Life has
ever since seemed a little flat to him, and art a little cheap. He
saw that the woman, in elevating herself, had made him appear
ridiculous, and he tried to retaliate with a wit not always
sparkling, and too often at his own expense. Sometimes in museums or
collections of bric-a-brac, you will see, in an illuminated
manuscript, or carved on stone, or cast in bronze, the figure of a
man on his hands and knees, bestridden by another figure holding a
bridle and a whip; it is Aristotle, symbol of masculine wisdom,
bridled and driven by woman. Six hundred years afterwards, Tennyson
revived the same motive in Merlin, enslaved not for a time but
forever. In both cases the satire justly punished the man. Another
version of the same story--perhaps the original--was the Mystery of
Adam, one of the earliest Church plays. Gaston Paris says "it was
written in England in the twelfth century, and its author had real
poetic talent; the scene of the seduction of Eve by the serpent is
one of the best pieces of Christian dramaturgy ... This remarkable
work seems to have been played no longer inside the church, but
under the porch":--
Diabolus. Jo vi Adam mais trop est fols.
Eva. Un poi est durs.
Diabolus. Il serra mols.
Il est plus durs qui n'est enfers.
Eva. Il est mult francs.
Diabolus. Ainz est mult sers.
Cure ne volt prendre de sei
Car la prenge sevals de tei.
Tu es fieblette et tendre chose
E es plus fresche que n'est rose.
Tu es plus blanche que crystal
Que neif que chiet sor glace en val.
Mal cuple en fist li Criatur.
Tu es trop tendre e il trop dur.
Mais neporquant tu es plus sage
En grant sens as mis tun corrage
For co fait bon traire a tei.
Parler te voil.
Eva. Ore ja fai.
Devil. Adam I've seen, but he's too rough.
Eve. A little hard!
Devil. He'll soon be soft enough!
Harder than hell he is till now.
Eve. He's very frank!
Devil. Say very low!
To help himself he does not care;
The helping you shall be my share;
For you are tender, gentle, true,
The rose is not so fresh as you;
Whiter than crystal, or than snow
That falls from heaven on ice below.
A sorry mixture God has brewed,
You too tender, he too rude.
But you have much the greater sense,
Your will is all intelligence.
Therefore it is I turn to you.
I want to tell you--
Eve. Do it now!
The woman's greater intelligence was to blame for Adam's fall. Eve
was justly punished because she should have known better, while
Adam, as the Devil truly said, was a dull animal, hardly worth the
trouble of deceiving. Adam was disloyal, too, untrue to his wife
after being untrue to his Creator:--
La femme que tu me donas
Ele fist prime icest trespass
Donat le mei e jo mangai.
Or mest vis tornez est a gwai
Mal acontai icest manger.
Jo ai mesfait par ma moiller.
The woman that you made me take
First led me into this mistake.
She gave the apple that I ate
And brought me to this evil state.
Badly for me it turned, I own,
But all the fault is hers alone.
The audience accepted this as natural and proper. They recognized
the man as, of course, stupid, cowardly, and traitorous. The men of
the baser sort revenged themselves by boorishness that passed with
them for wit in the taverns of Arras, but the poets of the higher
class commonly took sides with the women. Even Chaucer, who lived
after the glamour had faded, and who satirized women to satiety,
told their tale in his "Legend of Good Women," with evident
sympathy. To him, also, the ordinary man was inferior,--stupid,
brutal, and untrue. "Full brittle is the truest," he said:--
For well I wote that Christ himself telleth
That in Israel, as wide as is the lond,
That so great faith in all the loud he ne fond
As in a woman, and this is no lie;
And as for men, look ye, such tyrannie
They doen all day, assay hem who so list,
The truest is full brotell for to trist.
Neither brutality nor wit helped the man much. Even Bluebeard in the
end fell a victim to the superior qualities of his last wife, and
Scheherazade's wit alone has preserved the memory of her royal
husband. The tradition of thirteenth-century society still rules the
French stage. The struggle between two strong-willed women to control
one weak-willed man is the usual motive of the French drama in the
nineteenth century, as it was the whole motive of Partenopeus of
Blois, one of the best twelfth-century romans; and Joinville
described it, in the middle of the thirteenth, as the leading motive
in the court of Saint Louis, with Queen Blanche and Queen Margaret
for players, and Saint Louis himself for pawn.
One has only to look at the common, so-called Elzevirian, volume of
thirteenth-century nouvelles to see the Frenchman as he saw himself.
The story of "La Comtesse de Ponthieu" is the more Shakespearean,
but "La Belle Jehanne" is the more natural and lifelike. The plot is
the common masculine intrigue against the woman, which was used over
and over again before Shakespeare appropriated it in "Much Ado"; but
its French development is rather in the line of "All's Well." The
fair Jeanne, married to a penniless knight, not at all by her
choice, but only because he was a favourite of her father's, was a
woman of the true twelfth-century type. She broke the head of the
traitor, and when he, with his masculine falseness, caused her
husband to desert her, she disguised herself as a squire and
followed Sir Robert to Marseilles in search of service in war, for
the poor knight could get no other means of livelihood. Robert was
the husband, and the wife, in entering his service as squire without
pay, called herself John:--
Molt fu mesire Robiers dolans cant il vint a Marselle de cou k'il
n'oi parler de nulle chose ki fust ou pais; si dist a Jehan:
--Ke ferons nous? Vous m'aves preste de vos deniers la vostre
mierchi, si les vos renderai car je venderai mon palefroi et
m'acuiterai a vous.
--Sire, dist Jehans, crees moi se il vous plaist je vous dirai ke
nous ferons; jou ai bien enchore c sous de tournois, s'll vous
plaist je venderai nos ii chevaus et en ferai deniers; et je suis li
miousdres boulengiers ke vous sacies, si ferai pain francois et je
ne douc mie ke je ne gaagne bien et largement mon depens.
--Jehans, dist mesire Robiers, je m'otroi del tout a faire votre
volente
Et lendemam vendi Jehans ses .ii. chevaux X livres de tornois, et
achata son ble et le fist muire, et achata des corbelles et
coumencha a faire pain francois si bon et si bien fait k'il en
vendoit plus ke li doi melleur boulengier de la ville, et fist tant
dedens les ii ans k'il ot bien c livres de katel. Lors dist Jehans a
son segnour:
--Je lo bien que nous louons une tres grant mason et jou akaterai
del vin et hierbegerai la bonne gent
--Jehan, dist mesire Robiers, faites a vo volente kar je l'otroi et
si me loc molt de vous.
Jehans loua une mason grant et bielle, et si hierbrega la bonne gent
et gaegnoit ases a plente, et viestoit son segnour biellement et
richement, et avoit mesire Robiers son palefroi et aloit boire et
mengier aveukes les plus vallans de la ville, et Jehans li envoioit
vins et viandes ke tout cil ki o lui conpagnoient s'en
esmervelloient. Si gaegna tant ke dedens .iiii ans il gaegna plus de
ccc livres de meuble sains son harnois qui valoit bien .L. livres.
Much was Sir Robert grieved when he came to Marseilles and found
that there was no talk of anything doing in the country, and he said
to John: "What shall we do? You have lent me your money, I thank
you, and will repay you, for I will sell my palfrey and discharge
the debt to you."
"Sir," said John, "trust to me, if you please, I will tell you what
we will do, I have still a hundred sous, if you please I will sell
our two horses and turn them into money, and I am the best baker you
ever knew, I will make French bread, and I've no doubt I shall pay
my expenses well and make money"
"John," said Sir Robert, "I agree wholly to do whatever you like"
And the next day John sold their two horse for ten pounds, and
bought his wheat and had it ground, and bought baskets, and began to
make French bread so good and so well made that he sold more of it
than the two best bakers in the city, and made so much within two
years that he had a good hundred pound property Then he said to his
lord "I advise our hiring a very large house, and I will buy wine
and will keep lodgings for good society
"John," said Sir Robert, "do what you please, for I grant it, and am
greatly pleased with you."
John hired a large and fine house and lodged the best people and
gained a great plenty, and dressed his master handsomely and richly,
and Sir Robert kept his palfrey and went out to eat and drink with
the best people of the city, and John sent them such wines and food
that all his companions marvelled at it. He made so much that within
four years he gained more than three hundred pounds in money besides
clothes, etc, well worth fifty.
The docile obedience of the man to the woman seemed as reasonable to
the thirteenth century as the devotion of the woman to the man, not
because she loved him, for there was no question of love, but
because he was HER man, and she owned him as though he were child.
The tale went on to develop her character always in the same sense.
When she was ready, Jeanne broke up the establishment at Marseilles,
brought her husband back to Hainault, and made him, without knowing
her object, kill the traitor and redress her wrongs. Then after
seven years' patient waiting, she revealed herself and resumed her
place.
If you care to see the same type developed to its highest capacity,
go to the theatre the first time some ambitious actress attempts the
part of Lady Macbeth. Shakespeare realized the thirteenth-century
woman more vividly than the thirteenth-century poets ever did; but
that is no new thing to say of Shakespeare. The author of "La
Comtesse de Ponthieu" made no bad sketch of the character. These are
fictions, but the Chronicles contain the names of women by scores
who were the originals of the sketch. The society which Orderic
described in Normandy--the generation of the first crusade--produced
a great variety of Lady Macbeths. In the country of Evreux, about
1100, Orderic says that "a worse than civil war was waged between
two powerful brothers, and the mischief was fomented by the spiteful
jealousy of their haughty wives. The Countess Havise of Evreux took
offence at some taunts uttered by Isabel de Conches,--wife of Ralph,
the Seigneur of Conches, some ten miles from Evreux,--and used all
her influence with her husband, Count William, and his barons, to
make trouble ... Both the ladies who stirred up these fierce
enmities were great talkers and spirited as well as handsome; they
ruled their husbands, oppressed their vassals, and inspired terror
in various ways. But still their characters were very different.
Havise had wit and eloquence, but she was cruel and avaricious.
Isabel was generous, enterprising, and gay, so that she was beloved
and esteemed by those about her. She rode in knight's armour when
her vassals were called to war, and showed as much daring among men-
at-arms and mounted knights as Camilla ..." More than three hundred
years afterwards, far off in the Vosges, from a village never heard
of, appeared a common peasant of seventeen years old, a girl without
birth, education, wealth, or claim of any sort to consideration, who
made her way to Chinon and claimed from Charles VII a commission to
lead his army against the English. Neither the king nor the court
had faith in her, and yet the commission was given, and the rank-
and-file showed again that the true Frenchman had more confidence in
the woman than in the man, no matter what the gossips might say. No
one was surprised when Jeanne did what she promised, or when the men
burned her for doing it. There were Jeannes in every village.
Ridicule was powerless against them. Even Voltaire became what the
French call frankly "bete," in trying it.
Eleanor of Guienne was the greatest of all Frenchwomen. Her decision
was law, whether in Bordeaux or Poitiers, in Paris or in Palestine,
in London or in Normandy; in the court of Louis VII, or in that of
Henry II, or in her own Court of Love. For fifteen years she was
Queen of France; for fifty she was Queen in England; for eighty or
thereabouts she was equivalent to Queen over Guienne. No other
Frenchwoman ever had such rule. Unfortunately, as Queen of France,
she struck against an authority greater than her own, that of Saint
Bernard, and after combating it, with Suger's help, from 1137 until
1152, the monk at last gained such mastery that Eleanor quitted the
country and Suger died. She was not a person to accept defeat. She
royally divorced her husband and went back to her own kingdom of
Guienne. Neither Louis nor Bernard dared to stop her, or to hold her
territories from her, but they put the best face they could on their
defeat by proclaiming her as a person of irregular conduct. The
irregularity would not have stood in their way, if they had dared to
stand in hers, but Louis was much the weaker, and made himself
weaker still by allowing her to leave him for the sake of Henry of
Anjou, a story of a sort that rarely raised the respect in which
French kings were held by French society. Probably politics had more
to do with the matter than personal attachments, for Eleanor was a
great ruler, the equal of any ordinary king, and more powerful than
most kings living in 1152. If she deserted France in order to join
the enemies of France, she had serious reasons besides love for
young Henry of Anjou; but in any case she did, as usual, what
pleased her, and forced Louis to pronounce the divorce at a council
held at Beaugency, March 18, 1152, on the usual pretext of
relationship. The humours of the twelfth century were Shakespearean.
Eleanor, having obtained her divorce at Beaugency, to the deep
regret of all Frenchmen, started at once for Poitiers, knowing how
unsafe she was in any territory but her own. Beaugency is on the
Loire, between Orleans and Blois, and Eleanor's first night was at
Blois, or should have been; but she was told, on arriving, that
Count Thibaut of Blois, undeterred by King Louis's experience, was
making plans to detain her, with perfectly honourable views of
marriage; and, as she seems at least not to have been in love with
Thibaut, she was obliged to depart at once, in the night, to Tours.
A night journey on horseback from Blois to Tours in the middle of
March can have been no pleasure-trip, even in 1152; but, on arriving
at Tours in the morning, Eleanor found that her lovers were still so
dangerously near that she set forward at once on the road to
Poitiers. As she approached her own territory she learned that
Geoffrey of Anjou, the younger brother of her intended husband, was
waiting for her at the border, with views of marriage as strictly
honourable as those of all the others. She was driven to take
another road, and at last got safe to Poitiers.
About no figure in the Middle Ages, man or woman, did so many
legends grow, and with such freedom, as about Eleanor, whose
strength appealed to French sympathies and whose adventures appealed
to their imagination. They never forgave Louis for letting her go.
They delighted to be told that in Palestine she had carried on
relations of the most improper character, now with a Saracen slave
of great beauty; now with Raymond of Poitiers, her uncle, the
handsomest man of his time; now with Saladin himself; and, as all
this occurred at Antioch in 1147 or 1148, they could not explain why
her husband should have waited until 1152 in order to express his
unwilling disapproval; but they quoted with evident sympathy a
remark attributed to her that she thought she had married a king,
and found she had married a monk. To the Frenchman, Eleanor remained
always sympathetic, which is the more significant because, in
English tradition, her character suffered a violent and incredible
change. Although English history has lavished on Eleanor somewhat
more than her due share of conventional moral reproof, considering
that, from the moment she married Henry of Anjou, May 18, 1152, she
was never charged with a breath of scandal, it atoned for her want
of wickedness by French standards, in the usual manner of
historians, by inventing traits which reflected the moral standards
of England. Tradition converted her into the fairy-book type of
feminine jealousy and invented for her the legend of the Fair
Rosamund and the poison of toads.
For us, both legends are true. They reflected, not perhaps the
character of Eleanor, but what the society liked to see acted on its
theatre of life. Eleanor's real nature in no way concerns us. The
single fact worth remembering was that she had two daughters by
Louis VII, as shown in the table; who, in due time, married--Mary,
in 1164, married Henry, the great Count of Champagne; Alix, at the
same time, became Countess of Chartres by marriage with Thibaut, who
had driven her mother from Blois in 1152 by his marital intentions.
Henry and Thibaut were brothers whose sister Alix had married Louis
VII in 1160, eight years after the divorce. The relations thus
created were fantastic, especially for Queen Eleanor, who, besides
her two French daughters, had eight children as Queen of England.
Her second son, Richard Coeur-de-Lion, born in 1157, was affianced
in 1174 to a daughter of Louis VII and Alix, a child only six years
old, who was sent to England to be brought up as future queen. This
was certainly Eleanor's doing, and equally certain was it that the
child came to no good in the English court. The historians, by
exception, have not charged this crime to Queen Eleanor; they
charged it to Eleanor's husband, who passed most of his life in
crossing his wife's political plans; but with politics we want as
little as possible to do. We are concerned with the artistic and
social side of life, and have only to notice the coincidence that
while the Virgin was miraculously using the power of spiritual love
to elevate and purify the people, Eleanor and her daughters were
using the power of earthly love to discipline and refine the courts.
Side by side with the crude realities about them, they insisted on
teaching and enforcing an ideal that contradicted the realities, and
had no value for them or for us except in the contradiction.
The ideals of Eleanor and her daughter Mary of Champagne were a form
of religion, and if you care to see its evangels, you had best go
directly to Dante and Petrarch, or, if you like it better, to Don
Quixote de la Mancha. The religion is dead as Demeter, and its art
alone survives as, on the whole, the highest expression of man's
thought or emotion; but in its day it was almost as practical as it
now is fanciful. Eleanor and her daughter Mary and her granddaughter
Blanche knew as well as Saint Bernard did, or Saint Francis, what a
brute the emancipated man could be; and as though they foresaw the
society of the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, they used every
terror they could invent, as well as every tenderness they could
invoke, to tame the beasts around them. Their charge was of manners,
and, to teach manners, they made a school which they called their
Court of Love, with a code of law to which they gave the name of
"courteous love." The decisions of this court were recorded, like
the decisions of a modern bench, under the names of the great ladies
who made them, and were enforced by the ladies of good society for
whose guidance they were made. They are worth reading, and any one
who likes may read them to this day, with considerable scepticism
about their genuineness. The doubt is only ignorance. We do not, and
never can, know the twelfth-century woman, or, for that matter, any
other woman, but we do know the literature she created; we know the
art she lived in, and the religion she professed. We can collect
from them some idea why the Virgin Mary ruled, and what she was
taken to be, by the world which worshipped her.
Mary of Champagne created the literature of courteous love. She must
have been about twenty years old when she married Count Henry and
went to live at Troyes, not actually a queen in title, but certainly
a queen in social influence. In 1164, Champagne was a powerful
country, and Troyes a centre of taste. In Normandy, at the same
date, William of Saint Pair and Wace were writing the poetry we
know. In Champagne the court poet was Christian of Troyes, whose
poems were new when the churches of Noyon and Senlis and Saint Leu
d'Esserent, and the fleche of Chartres, and the Leaning Tower of
Pisa, were building, at the same time with the Abbey of Vezelay, and
before the church at Mantes. Christian died not long after 1175,
leaving a great mass of verse, much of which has survived, and which
you can read more easily than you can read Dante or Petrarch,
although both are almost modern compared with Christian. The quality
of this verse is something like the quality of the glass windows--
conventional decoration; colours in conventional harmonies;
refinement, restraint, and feminine delicacy of taste. Christian has
not the grand manner of the eleventh century, and never recalls the
masculine strength of the "Chanson de Roland" or "Raoul de Cambrai."
Even his most charming story, "Erec et Enide," carries chiefly a
moral of courtesy. His is poet-laureate's work, says M. Gaston
Paris; the flower of a twelfth-century court and of twelfth-century
French; the best example of an admirable language; but not lyric;
neither strong, nor deep, nor deeply felt. What we call tragedy is
unknown to it. Christian's world is sky-blue and rose, with only
enough red to give it warmth, and so flooded with light that even
its mysteries count only by the clearness with which they are shown.
Among other great works, before Mary of France came to Troyes
Christian had, toward 1160, written a "Tristan," which is lost. Mary
herself, he says, gave him the subject of "Lancelot," with the
request or order to make it a lesson of "courteous love," which he
obeyed. Courtesy has lost its meaning as well as its charm, and you
might find the "Chevalier de la Charette" even more unintelligible
than tiresome; but its influence was great in its day, and the
lesson of courteous love, under the authority of Mary of Champagne,
lasted for centuries as the standard of taste. "Lancelot" was never
finished, but later, not long after 1174, Christian wrote a
"Perceval," or "Conte du Graal," which must also have been intended
to please Mary, and which is interesting because, while the
"Lancelot" gave the twelfth-century idea of courteous love, the
"Perceval" gave the twelfth-century idea of religious mystery. Mary
was certainly concerned with both. "It is for this same Mary," says
Gaston Paris, "that Walter of Arras undertook his poem of 'Eracle';
she was the object of the songs of the troubadours as well as of
their French imitators; for her use also she caused the translations
of books of piety like Genesis, or the paraphrase at great length,
in verse, of the psalm 'Eructavit.'"
With her theories of courteous love, every one is more or less
familiar if only from the ridicule of Cervantes and the follies of
Quixote, who, though four hundred years younger, was Lancelot's
child; but we never can know how far she took herself and her laws
of love seriously, and to speculate on so deep a subject as her
seriousness is worse than useless, since she would herself have been
as uncertain as her lovers were. Visionary as the courtesy was, the
Holy Grail was as practical as any bric-a-brac that has survived of
the time. The mystery of Perceval is like that of the Gothic
cathedral, illuminated by floods of light, and enlivened by rivers
of colour. Unfortunately Christian never told what he meant by the
fragment, itself a mystery, in which he narrated the story of the
knight who saw the Holy Grail, because the knight, who was warned,
as usual, to ask no questions, for once, unlike most knights, obeyed
the warning when he should have disregarded it. As knights-errant
necessarily did the wrong thing in order to make their adventures
possible, Perceval's error cannot be in itself mysterious, nor was
the castle in any way mysterious where the miracle occurred, It
appeared to him to be the usual castle, and he saw nothing unusual
in the manner of his reception by the usual old lord, or in the fact
that both seated themselves quite simply before the hall-fire with
the usual household. Then, as though it were an everyday habit, the
Holy Grail was brought in (Bartsch, "Chrestomathie," 183-85, ed.
1895):--
Et leans avail luminaire
Si grant con l'an le porrait faire
De chandoiles a un ostel.
Que qu'il parloient d'un et d'el,
Uns vallez d'une chambre vint
Qui une blanche lance tint
Ampoigniee par le mi lieu.
Si passa par endroit le feu
Et cil qui al feu se seoient,
Et tuit cil de leans veoient
La lance blanche et le fer blanc.
S'issoit une gote de sang
Del fer de la lance au sommet,
Et jusqu'a la main au vaslet
Coroit cele gote vermoille....
A tant dui autre vaslet vindrent
Qui chandeliers an lors mains tindrent
De fin or ovrez a neel.
Li vaslet estoient moult bel
Qui les chandeliers aportoient.
An chacun chandelier ardoient
Dous chandoiles a tot le mains.
Un graal antre ses dous mains
Une demoiselle tenoit,
Qui avec les vaslets venoit,
Bele et gente et bien acesmee.
Quant cle fu leans antree
Atot le graal qu'ele tint
Une si granz clartez i vint
Qu'ausi perdirent les chandoiles
Lor clarte come les estoiles
Qant li solauz luist et la lune.
Apres celi an revint une
Qui tint un tailleor d'argent.
Le graal qui aloit devant
De fin or esmere estoit,
Pierres precieuses avoit
El graal de maintes menieres
Des plus riches et des plus chieres
Qui en mer ne en terre soient.
Totes autres pierres passoient
Celes del graal sanz dotance.
Tot ainsi con passa la lance
Par devant le lit trespasserent
Et d'une chambre a l'autre alerent.
Et li vaslet les vit passer,
Ni n'osa mire demander
Del graal cui l'an an servoit.
And, within, the hall was bright
As any hall could be with light
Of candles in a house at night.
So, while of this and that they talked,
A squire from a chamber walked,
Bearing a white lance in his hand,
Grasped by the middle, like a wand;
And, as he passed the chimney wide,
Those seated by the fireside,
And all the others, caught a glance
Of the white steel and the white lance.
As they looked, a drop of blood
Down the lance's handle flowed;
Down to where the youth's hand stood.
From the lance-head at the top
They saw run that crimson drop....
Presently came two more squires,
In their hands two chandeliers,
Of fine gold in enamel wrought.
Each squire that the candle brought
Was a handsome chevalier.
There burned in every chandelier
Two lighted candles at the least.
A damsel, graceful and well dressed,
Behind the squires followed fast
Who carried in her hands a graal;
And as she came within the hall
With the graal there came a light So brilliant that the candles all
Lost clearness, as the stars at night
When moon shines, or in day the sun.
After her there followed one
Who a dish of silver bore.
The graal, which had gone before,
Of gold the finest had been made,
With precious stones had been inlaid,
Richest and rarest of each kind
That man in sea or earth could find.
All other jewels far surpassed
Those which the holy graal enchased.
Just as before had passed the lance
They all before the bed advance,
Passing straightway through the hall,
And the knight who saw them pass
Never ventured once to ask
For the meaning of the graal.
The simplicity of this narration gives a certain dramatic effect to
the mystery, like seeing a ghost in full daylight, but Christian
carried simplicity further still. He seemed either to feel, or to
want others to feel, the reality of the adventure and the miracle,
and he followed up the appearance of the graal by a solid meal in
the style of the twelfth century, such as one expects to find in
"Ivanhoe" or the "Talisman." The knight sat down with his host to
the best dinner that the county of Champagne afforded, and they ate
their haunch of venison with the graal in full view. They drank
their Champagne wine of various sorts, out of gold cups:--
Vins clers ne raspez ne lor faut
A copes dorees a boivre;
they sat before the fire and talked till bedtime, when the squires
made up the beds in the hall, and brought in supper--dates, figs,
nutmegs, spices, pomegranates, and at last lectuaries, suspiciously
like what we call jams; and "alexandrine gingerbread"; after which
they drank various drinks, with or without spice or honey or pepper;
and old moret, which is thought to be mulberry wine, but which
generally went with clairet, a colourless grape-juice, or piment. At
least, here are the lines, and one may translate them to suit one's
self:--
Et li vaslet aparellierent
Les lis et le fruit au colchier
Que il en i ot de moult chier,
Dates, figues, et nois mugates,
Girofles et pomes de grenates,
Et leituaires an la fin,
Et gingenbret alixandrin.
Apres ce burent de maint boivre,
Piment ou n'ot ne miel ne poivre
Et viez more et cler sirop.
The twelfth century had the child's love of sweets and spices and
preserved fruits, and drinks sweetened or spiced, whether they were
taken for supper or for poetry; the true knight's palate was fresh
and his appetite excellent either for sweets or verses or love; the
world was young then; Robin Hoods lived in every forest, and Richard
Coeur-de-Lion was not yet twenty years old. The pleasant adventures
of Robin Hood were real, as you can read in the stories of a dozen
outlaws, and men troubled themselves about pain and death much as
healthy bears did, in the mountains. Life had miseries enough, but
few shadows deeper than those of the imaginative lover, or the
terrors of ghosts at night. Men's imaginations ran riot, but did not
keep them awake; at least, neither the preserved fruits nor the
mulberry wine nor the clear syrup nor the gingerbread nor the Holy
Graal kept Perceval awake, but he slept the sound and healthy sleep
of youth, and when he woke the next morning, he felt only a mild
surprise to find that his host and household had disappeared,
leaving him to ride away without farewell, breakfast, or Graal.
Christian wrote about Perceval in 1174 in the same spirit in which
the workmen in glass, thirty years later, told the story of
Charlemagne. One artist worked for Mary of Champagne; the others for
Mary of Chartres, commonly known as the Virgin; but all did their
work in good faith, with the first, fresh, easy instinct of colour,
light, and line. Neither of the two Maries was mystical, in a modern
sense; none of the artists was oppressed by the burden of doubt;
their scepticism was as childlike as faith. If one has to make an
exception, perhaps the passion of love was more serious than that of
religion, and gave to religion the deepest emotion, and the most
complicated one, which society knew. Love was certainly a passion;
and even more certainly it was, as seen in poets like Dante and
Petrarch,--in romans like "Lancelot" and "Aucassin,"--in ideals like
the Virgin,--complicated beyond modern conception. For this reason
the loss of Christian's "Tristan" makes a terrible gap in art, for
Christian's poem would have given the first and best idea of what
led to courteous love. The "Tristan" was written before 1160, and
belonged to the cycle of Queen Eleanor of England rather than to
that of her daughter Mary of Troyes; but the subject was one neither
of courtesy nor of France; it belonged to an age far behind the
eleventh century, or even the tenth, or indeed any century within
the range of French history; and it was as little fitted for
Christian's way of treatment as for any avowed burlesque. The
original Tristan--critics say--was not French, and neither Tristan
nor Isolde had ever a drop of French blood in their veins. In their
form as Christian received it, they were Celts or Scots; they came
from Brittany, Wales, Ireland, the northern ocean, or farther still.
Behind the Welsh Tristan, which passed probably through England to
Normandy and thence to France and Champagne, critics detect a far
more ancient figure living in a form of society that France could
not remember ever to have known. King Marc was a tribal chief of the
Stone Age whose subjects loved the forest and lived on the sea or in
caves; King Marc's royal hall was a common shelter on the banks of a
stream, where every one was at home, and king, queen, knights,
attendants, and dwarf slept on the floor, on beds laid down where
they pleased; Tristan's weapons were the bow and stone knife; he
never saw a horse or a spear; his ideas of loyalty and Isolde's
ideas of marriage were as vague as Marc's royal authority; and all
were alike unconscious of law, chivalry, or church. The note they
sang was more unlike the note of Christian, if possible, than that
of Richard Wagner; it was the simplest expression of rude and
primitive love, as one could perhaps find it among North American
Indians, though hardly so defiant even there, and certainly in the
Icelandic Sagas hardly so lawless; but it was a note of real
passion, and touched the deepest chords of sympathy in the
artificial society of the twelfth century, as it did in that of the
nineteenth. The task of the French poet was to tone it down and give
it the fashionable dress, the pointed shoes and long sleeves, of the
time. "The Frenchman," says Gaston Paris, "is specially interested
in making his story entertaining for the society it is meant for; he
is 'social'; that is, of the world; he smiles at the adventures he
tells, and delicately lets you see that he is not their dupe; he
exerts himself to give to his style a constant elegance, a uniform
polish, in which a few neatly turned, clever phrases sparkle here
and there; above all, he wants to please, and thinks of his audience
more than of his subject."
In the twelfth century he wanted chiefly to please women, as Orderic
complained; Isolde came out of Brittany to meet Eleanor coming up
from Guienne, and the Virgin from the east; and all united in giving
law to society. In each case it was the woman, not the man, who gave
the law;--it was Mary, not the Trinity; Eleanor, not Louis VII;
Isolde, not Tristan. No doubt, the original Tristan had given the
law like Roland or Achilles, but the twelfth-century Tristan was a
comparatively poor creature. He was in his way a secondary figure in
the romance, as Louis VII was to Eleanor and Abelard to Heloise.
Every one knows how, about twenty years before Eleanor came to
Paris, the poet-professor Abelard, the hero of the Latin Quarter,
had sung to Heloise those songs which--he tells us--resounded
through Europe as widely as his scholastic fame, and probably to
more effect for his renown. In popular notions Heloise was Isolde,
and would in a moment have done what Isolde did (Bartsch, 107-08):--
Quaint reis Marcs nus out conjeies
E de sa curt nus out chascez,
As mains ensemble nus preismes
E hors de la sale en eissimes,
A la forest puis en alasmes
E un mult bel liu i trouvames
E une roche, fu cavee,
Devant ert estraite la entree,
Dedans fu voesse ben faite,
Tante bel cum se fust portraite.
When King Marc had banned us both,
And from his court had chased us forth,
Hand in hand each clasping fast
Straight from out the hall we passed;
To the forest turned our face;
Found in it a perfect place,
Where the rock that made a cave
Hardly more than passage gave;
Spacious within and fit for use,
As though it had been planned for us.
At any time of her life, Heloise would have defied society or
church, and would--at least in the public's fancy--have taken
Abelard by the hand and gone off to the forest much more readily
than she went to the cloister; but Abelard would have made a poor
figure as Tristan. Abelard and Christian of Troyes were as remote as
we are from the legendary Tristan; but Isolde and Heloise, Eleanor
and Mary were the immortal and eternal woman. The legend of Isolde,
both in the earlier and the later version, seems to have served as a
sacred book to the women of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries,
and Christian's Isolde surely helped Mary in giving law to the Court
of Troyes and decisions in the Court of Love.
Countess Mary's authority lasted from 1164 to 1198, thirty-four
years, during which, at uncertain intervals, glimpses of her
influence flash out in poetry rather than in prose. Christian began
his "Roman de la Charette" by invoking her:--
Puisque ma dame de Chanpaigne
Vialt que romans a faire anpraigne
Si deist et jel tesmoignasse
Que ce est la dame qui passe
Totes celes qui sont vivanz
Si con li funs passe les vanz
Qui vante en Mai ou en Avril
Dirai je: tant com une jame
Vaut de pailes et de sardines
Vaut la contesse de reines?
Christian chose curious similes. His dame surpassed all living
rivals as smoke passes the winds that blow in May; or as much as a
gem would buy of straws and sardines is the Countess worth in
queens. Louis XIV would have thought that Christian might be
laughing at him, but court styles changed with their masters. Louis
XIV would scarcely have written a prison-song to his sister such as
Richard Coeur-de-Lion wrote to Mary of Champagne:--
Ja nus bons pris ne dirat sa raison
Adroitement s'ansi com dolans non;
Mais par confort puet il faire chanson.
Moult ai d'amins, mais povre sont li don;
Honte en avront se por ma reancon
Suix ces deus yvers pris.
Ceu sevent bien mi home et mi baron,
Englois, Normant, Poitevin et Gascon,
Ke je n'avoie si povre compaingnon
Cui je laissasse por avoir au prixon.
Je nel di pas por nulle retraison,
Mais ancor suix je pris.
Or sai ge bien de voir certainement
Ke mors ne pris n'ait amin ne parent,
Cant on me lait por or ne por argent.
Moult m'est de moi, mais plus m'est de ma gent
C'apres ma mort avront reprochier grant
Se longement suix pris.
N'est pas mervelle se j'ai lo cuer dolent
Cant li miens sires tient ma terre en torment.
S'or li menbroit de nostre sairement
Ke nos feismes andui communament,
Bien sai de voir ke ceans longement
Ne seroie pas pris.
Ce sevent bien Angevin et Torain,
Cil bacheler ki or sont fort et sain,
C'ancombreis suix long d'aus en autrui main.
Forment m'amoient, mais or ne m'aimment grain.
De belles armes sont ores veut cil plain,
Por tant ke je suix pris.
Mes compaingnons cui j'amoie et cui j'aim,
Ces dou Caheu et ces dou Percherain,
Me di, chanson, kil ne sont pas certain,
C'onques vers aus n'en oi cuer faus ne vain.
S'il me guerroient, il font moult que villain
Tant com je serai pris.
Comtesse suer, vostre pris soverain
Vos saut et gart cil a cui je me claim
Et par cui je suix pris.
Je n'ou di pas de celi de Chartain
La meire Loweis.
No prisoner can tell his honest thought
Unless he speaks as one who suffers wrong;
But for his comfort he may make a song.
My friends are many, but their gifts are naught.
Shame will be theirs, if, for my ransom, here
I lie another year.
They know this well, my barons and my men,
Normandy, England, Gascony, Poitou,
That I had never follower so low
Whom I would leave in prison to my gain.
I say it not for a reproach to them,
But prisoner I am!
The ancient proverb now I know for sure:
Death and a prison know nor kin nor tie,
Since for mere lack of gold they let me lie.
Much for myself I grieve; for them still more.
After my death they will have grievous wrong
If I am prisoner long.
What marvel that my heart is sad and sore
When my own lord torments my helpless lands!
Well do I know that, if he held his hands,
Remembering the common oath we swore,
I should not here imprisoned with my song,
Remain a prisoner long.
They know this well who now are rich and strong
Young gentlemen of Anjou and Touraine,
That far from them, on hostile bonds I strain.
They loved me much, but have not loved me long.
Their plains will see no more fair lists arrayed,
While I lie here betrayed.
Companions, whom I loved, and still do love,
Geoffroi du Perche and Ansel de Caleux,
Tell them, my song, that they are friends untrue.
Never to them did I false-hearted prove;
But they do villainy if they war on me,
While I lie here, unfree.
Countess sister! your sovereign fame
May he preserve whose help I claim,
Victim for whom am I!
I say not this of Chartres' dame,
Mother of Louis!
Richard's prison-song, one of the chief monuments of English
literature, sounds to every ear, accustomed to twelfth-century
verse, as charming as when it was household rhyme to
mi ome et mi baron
Englois, Normant, Poitevin et Gascon.
Not only was Richard a far greater king than any Louis ever was, but
he also composed better poetry than any other king who is known to
tourists, and, when he spoke to his sister in this cry of the heart
altogether singular among monarchs, he made law and style, above
discussion. Whether he meant to reproach his other sister, Alix of
Chartres, historians may tell, if they know. If he did, the reproach
answered its purpose, for the song was written in 1193; Richard was
ransomed and released in 1194; and in 1198 the young Count "Loweis"
of Chartres and Blois leagued with the Counts of Flanders, Le
Perche, Guines, and Toulouse, against Philip Augustus, in favor of
Coeur-de-Lion to whom they rendered homage. In any case, neither
Mary nor Alice in 1193 was reigning Countess. Mary was a widow since
1181, and her son Henry was Count in Champagne, apparently a great
favourite with his uncle Richard Coeur-de-Lion. The life of this
Henry of Champagne was another twelfth-century romance, but can
serve no purpose here except to recall the story that his mother,
the great Countess Mary, died in 1198 of sorrow for the death of
this son, who was then King of Jerusalem, and was killed, in 1197,
by a fall from the window of his palace at Acre. Coeur-de-Lion died
in 1199. In 1201, Mary's other son, who succeeded Henry,--Count
Thibaut III,--died, leaving a posthumous heir, famous in the
thirteenth century as Thibaut-le-Grand--the Thibaut of Queen
Blanche.
They were all astonishing--men and women--and filled the world, for
two hundred years, with their extraordinary energy and genius; but
the greatest of all was old Queen Eleanor, who survived her son
Coeur-de-Lion, as well as her two husbands,--Louis-le-Jeune and
Henry II Plantagenet,--and was left in 1200 still struggling to
repair the evils and fend off the dangers they caused. "Queen by the
wrath of God," she called herself, and she knew what just claim she
had to the rank. Of her two husbands and ten children, little
remained except her son John, who, by the unanimous voice of his
family, his friends, his enemies, and even his admirers, achieved a
reputation for excelling in every form of twelfth-century crime. He
was a liar and a traitor, as was not uncommon, but he was thought to
be also a coward, which, in that family, was singular. Some
redeeming quality he must have had, but none is recorded. His mother
saw him running, in his masculine, twelfth-century recklessness, to
destruction, and she made a last and a characteristic effort to save
him and Guienne by a treaty of amity with the French king, to be
secured by the marriage of the heir of France, Louis, to Eleanor's
granddaughter, John's niece, Blanche of Castile, then twelve or
thirteen years old. Eleanor herself was eighty, and yet she made the
journey to Spain, brought back the child to Bordeaux, affianced her
to Louis VIII as she had herself been affianced in 1137 to Louis
VII, and in May, 1200, saw her married. The French had then given up
their conventional trick of attributing Eleanor's acts to her want
of morals; and France gave her--as to most women after sixty years
old--the benefit of the convention which made women respectable
after they had lost the opportunity to be vicious. In French eyes,
Eleanor played out the drama according to the rules. She could not
save John, but she died in 1202, before his ruin, and you can still
see her lying with her husband and her son Richard at Fontevrault in
her twelfth-century tomb.
In 1223, Blanche became Queen of France. She was thirty-six years
old. Her husband, Louis VIII, was ambitious to rival his father,
Philip Augustus, who had seized Normandy in 1203. Louis undertook to
seize Toulouse and Avignon. In 1225, he set out with a large army in
which, among the chief vassals, his cousin Thibaut of Champagne led
a contingent. Thibaut was five-and-twenty years old, and, like
Pierre de Dreux, then Duke of Brittany, was one of the most
brilliant and versatile men of his time, and one of the greatest
rulers. As royal vassal Thibaut owed forty days' service in the
field; but his interests were at variance with the King's, and at
the end of the term he marched home with his men, leaving the King
to fall ill and die in Auvergne, November 8, 1226, and a child of
ten years old to carry on the government as Louis IX.
Chartres Cathedral has already told the story twice, in stone and
glass; but Thibaut does not appear there, although he saved the
Queen. Some member of the royal family must be regent. Queen Blanche
took the place, and of course the princes of the blood, who thought
it was their right, united against her. At first, Blanche turned
violently on Thibaut and forbade him to appear at the coronation at
Rheims in his own territory, on November 29, as though she held him
guilty of treason; but when the league of great vassals united to
deprive her of the regency, she had no choice but to detach at any
cost any member of the league, and Thibaut alone offered help. What
price she paid him was best known to her; but what price she would
be believed to have paid him was as well known to her as what had
been said of her grandmother Eleanor when she changed her allegiance
in 1152. If the scandal had concerned Thibaut alone, she might have
been well content, but Blanche was obliged also to pay desperate
court to the papal legate. Every member of her husband's family
united against her and libelled her character with the freedom which
enlivened and envenomed royal tongues.
Maintes paroles en dit en
Comme d'Iseult et de Tristan.
Had this been all, she would have cared no more than Eleanor or any
other queen had cared, for in French drama, real or imaginary, such
charges were not very serious and hardly uncomplimentary; but Iseult
had never been accused, over and above her arbitrary views on the
marriage-contract, of acting as an accomplice with Tristan in
poisoning King Marc. French convention required that Thibaut should
have poisoned Louis VIII for love of the Queen, and that this secret
reciprocal love should control their lives. Fortunately for Blanche
she was a devout ally of the Church, and the Church believed evil
only of enemies. The legate and the prelates rallied to her support
and after eight years of desperate struggle they crushed Pierre
Mauclerc and saved Thibaut and Blanche.
For us the poetry is history, and the facts are false. French art
starts not from facts, but from certain assumptions as conventional
as a legendary window, and the commonest convention is the Woman.
The fact, then as now, was Power, or its equivalent in exchange, but
Frenchmen, while struggling for the Power, expressed it in terms of
Art. They looked on life as a drama,--and on drama as a phase of
life--in which the bystanders were bound to assume and accept the
regular stage-plot. That the plot might be altogether untrue to real
life affected in no way its interest. To them Thibaut and Blanche
were bound to act Tristan and Isolde. Whatever they were when off
the stage, they were lovers on it. Their loves were as real and as
reasonable as the worship of the Virgin. Courteous love was avowedly
a form of drama, but not the less a force of society. Illusion for
illusion, courteous love, in Thibaut's hands, or in the hands of
Dante and Petrarch, was as substantial as any other convention;--the
balance of trade, the rights of man, or the Athanasian Creed. In
that sense the illusions alone were real; if the Middle Ages had
reflected only what was practical, nothing would have survived for
us.
Thibaut was Tristan, and is said to have painted his verses on the
walls of his chateau. If he did, he painted there, in the opinion of
M. Gaston Paris, better poetry than any that was written on paper or
parchment, for Thibaut was a great prince and great poet who did in
both characters whatever he pleased. In modern equivalents, one
would give much to see the chateau again with the poetry on its
walls. Provins has lost the verses, but Troyes still keeps some
churches and glass of Thibaut's time which hold their own with the
best. Even of Thibaut himself, something survives, and though it
were only the memories of his seneschal, the famous Sire de
Joinville, history and France would be poor without him. With
Joinville in hand, you may still pass an hour in the company of
these astonishing thirteenth-century men and women:--crusaders who
fight, hunt, make love, build churches, put up glass windows to the
Virgin, buy missals, talk scholastic philosophy, compose poetry:
Blanche, Thibaut, Perron, Joinville, Saint Louis, Saint Thomas,
Saint Dominic, Saint Francis--you may know them as intimately as you
can ever know a world that is lost; and in the case of Thibaut you
may know more, for he is still alive in his poems; he even vibrates
with life. One might try a few verses, to see what he meant by
courtesy. Perhaps he wrote them for Queen Blanche, but, to whomever
he sent them, the French were right in thinking that she ought to
have returned his love (edition of 1742):--
Nus hom ne puet ami reconforter
Se cele non ou il a son cuer mis.
Pour ce m'estuet sovent plaindre et plourer
Que mis confors ne me vient, ce m'est vis,
De la ou j'ai tote ma remembrance.
Pour bien amer ai sovent esmaiance
A dire voir.
Dame, merci! donez moi esperance
De joie avoir.
Jene puis pas sovent a li parler
Ne remirer les biaus iex de son vis.
Ce pois moi que je n'i puis aler
Car ades est mes cuers ententis.
Ho! bele riens, douce sans conoissance,
Car me mettez en millor attendance
De bon espoir!
Dame, merci! donez moi esperance
De joie avoir.
Aucuns si sont qui me vuelent blamer
Quant je ne di a qui je suis amis;
Mais ja, dame, ne saura mon penser
Nus qui soit nes fors vous cui je le dis
Couardement a pavours a doutance
Dont puestes vous lors bien a ma semblance
Mon cuer savoir.
Dame, merci! donez moi esperance
De joie avoir.
There is no comfort to be found for pain
Save only where the heart has made its home.
Therefore I can but murmur and complain
Because no comfort to my pain has come
From where I garnered all my happiness.
From true love have I only earned distress
The truth to say.
Grace, lady! give me comfort to possess
A hope, one day.
Seldom the music of her voice I hear
Or wonder at the beauty of her eyes.
It grieves me that I may not follow there
Where at her feet my heart attentive lies.
Oh, gentle Beauty without consciousness,
Let me once feel a moment's hopefulness,
If but one ray!
Grace, lady! give me comfort to possess
A hope, one day.
Certain there are who blame upon me throw
Because I will not tell whose love I seek;
But truly, lady, none my thought shall know,
None that is born, save you to whom I speak
In cowardice and awe and doubtfulness,
That you may happily with fearlessness
My heart essay.
Grace, lady! give me comfort to possess
A hope, one day.
Does Thibaut's verse sound simple? It is the simplicity of the
thirteenth-century glass--so refined and complicated that sensible
people are mostly satisfied to feel, and not to understand. Any
blunderer in verse, who will merely look at the rhymes of these
three stanzas, will see that simplicity is about as much concerned
there as it is with the windows of Chartres; the verses are as
perfect as the colours, and the versification as elaborate. These
stanzas might have been addressed to Queen Blanche; now see how
Thibaut kept the same tone of courteous love in addressing the Queen
of Heaven!
De grant travail et de petit esploit
Voi ce siegle cargie et encombre
Que tant somes plain de maleurte
Ke nus ne pens a faire ce qu'il doit,
Ains avons si le Deauble trouve
Qu'a lui servir chascuns paine et essaie
Et Diex ki ot pour nos ja cruel plaie
Metons arrier et sa grant dignite;
Molt est hardis qui pour mort ne s'esmaie.
Diex que tout set et tout puet et tout voit
Nous auroit tost en entre-deus giete
Se la Dame plaine de grant bonte
Pardelez lui pour nos ne li prioit
Si tres douc mot plaisant et savoure
Le grant courous dou grant Signour apaie;
Molt par est fox ki autre amor essai
K'en cestui n'a barat ne fausete
Ne es autres n'a ne merti ne manaie.
La souris quiert pour son cors garandir
Contre l'yver la noif et le forment
Et nous chaitif nous n'alons rien querant
Quant nous morrons ou nous puissions garir.
Nous ne cherchons fors k'infer le puant;
Or esgardes come beste sauvage
Pourvoit de loin encontre son domage
Et nous n'avons ne sens ne hardement;
Il est avis que plain somes de rage.
Li Deable a getey por nos ravir
Quatre amecons aescbies de torment;
Covoitise lance premierement
Et puis Orguel por sa grant rois emplir
Et Luxure va le batel trainant
Felonie les governe et les nage.
Ensi peschant s'en viegnent au rivage
Dont Diex nous gart par son commandement
En qui sains fons nous feismes homage.
A la Dame qui tous les bien avance
T'en va, chancon s'el te vielt escouter
Onques ne fu nus di millor chaunce.
With travail great, and little cargo fraught,
See how our world is labouring in pain;
So filled we are with love of evil gain
That no one thinks of doing what he ought,
But we all hustle in the Devil's train,
And only in his service toil and pray;
And God, who suffered for us agony,
We set behind, and treat him with disdain;
Hardy is he whom death does not dismay.
God who rules all, from whom we can hide nought,
Had quickly flung us back to nought again
But that our gentle, gracious, Lady Queen
Begged him to spare us, and our pardon wrought;
Striving with words of sweetness to restrain
Our angry Lord, and his great wrath allay.
Felon is he who shall her love betray
Which is pure truth, and falsehood cannot feign,
While all the rest is lie and cheating play.
The feeble mouse, against the winter's cold,
Garners the nuts and grain within his cell,
While man goes groping, without sense to tell
Where to seek refuge against growing old.
We seek it in the smoking mouth of Hell.
With the poor beast our impotence compare!
See him protect his life with utmost care,
While us nor wit nor courage can compel
To save our souls, so foolish mad we are.
The Devil doth in snares our life enfold;
Four hooks has he with torments baited well;
And first with Greed he casts a mighty spell,
And then, to fill his nets, has Pride enrolled,
And Luxury steers the boat, and fills the sail,
And Perfidy controls and sets the snare;
Thus the poor fish are brought to land, and there
May God preserve us and the foe repel!
Homage to him who saves us from despair!
To Mary Queen, who passes all compare,
Go, little song! to her your sorrows tell!
Nor Heaven nor Earth holds happiness so rare.
CHAPTER XII
NICOLETTE AND MARION
C'est d'Aucassins et de Nicolete.
Qui vauroit bons vers oir
Del deport du viel caitiff
De deus biax enfans petis
Nicolete et Aucassins;
Des grans paines qu'il soufri
Et des proueces qu'il fist
For s'amie o le cler vis.
Dox est li cans biax est li dis
Et cortois et bien asis.
Nus hom n'est si esbahis
Tant dolans ni entrepris
De grant mal amaladis
Se il l'oit ne soit garis
Et de joie resbaudis
Tant par est dou-ce.
This is of Aucassins and Nicolette.
Whom would a good ballad please
By the captive from o'er-seas,
A sweet song in children's praise,
Nicolette and Aucassins;
What he bore for her caress,
What he proved of his prowess
For his friend with the bright face?
The song has charm, the tale has grace,
And courtesy and good address.
No man is in such distress,
Such suffering or weariness,
Sick with ever such sickness,
But he shall, if he hear this,
Recover all his happiness,
So sweet it is!
This little thirteenth-century gem is called a "chante-fable," a
story partly in prose, partly in verse, to be sung according to
musical notation accompanying the words in the single manuscript
known, and published in facsimile by Mr. F. W. Bourdillon at Oxford
in 1896. Indeed, few poems, old or new, have in the last few years
been more reprinted, translated, and discussed, than "Aucassins,"
yet the discussion lacks interest to the idle tourist, and tells him
little. Nothing is known of the author or his date. The second line
alone offers a hint, but nothing more. "Caitif" means in the first
place a captive, and secondly any unfortunate or wretched man.
Critics have liked to think that the word means here a captive to
the Saracens, and that the poet, like Cervantes three or four
hundred years later, may have been a prisoner to the infidels. What
the critics can do, we can do. If liberties can be taken with
impunity by scholars, we can take the liberty of supposing that the
poet was a prisoner in the crusade of Coeur-de-Lion and Philippe-
Auguste; that he had recovered his liberty, with his master, in
1194; and that he passed the rest of his life singing to the old
Queen Eleanor or to Richard, at Chinon, and to the lords of all the
chateaux in Guienne, Poitiers, Anjou, and Normandy, not to mention
England. The living was a pleasant one, as the sunny atmosphere of
the Southern poetry proves.
Dox est li cans; biax est li dis,
Et cortois et bien asis.
The poet-troubadour who composed and recited "Aucassins" could not
have been unhappy, but this is the affair of his private life, and
not of ours. What rather interests us is his poetic motive,
"courteous love," which gives the tale a place in the direct line
between Christian of Troyes, Thibaut-le-Grand, and William of
Lorris. Christian of Troyes died in 1175; at least he wrote nothing
of a later date, so far as is certainly known. Richard Coeur-de-Lion
died in 1199, very soon after the death of his half-sister Mary of
Champagne. Thibaut-le-Grand was born in 1201. William of Lorris, who
concluded the line of great "courteous" poets, died in 1260 or
thereabouts. For our purposes, "Aucassins" comes between Christian
of Troyes and William of Lorris; the trouvere or jogleor, who sang,
was a "viel caitif" when the Chartres glass was set up, and the
Charlemagne window designed, about 1210, or perhaps a little later.
When one is not a professor, one has not the right to make inept
guesses, and, when one is not a critic, one should not risk
confusing a difficult question by baseless assumptions; but even a
summer tourist may without offence visit his churches in the order
that suits him best; and, for our tour, "Aucassins" follows
Christian and goes hand in hand with Blondel and the chatelain de
Coucy, as the most exquisite expression of "courteous love." As one
of "Aucassins'" German editors says in his introduction: "Love is
the medium through which alone the hero surveys the world around
him, and for which he contemns everything that the age prized:
knightly honour; deeds of arms; father and mother; hell, and even
heaven; but the mere promise by his father of a kiss from Nicolette
inspires him to superhuman heroism; while the old poet sings and
smiles aside to his audience as though he wished them to understand
that Aucassins, a foolish boy, must not be judged quite seriously,
but that, old as he was himself, he was just as foolish about
Nicolette."
Aucassins was the son of the Count of Beaucaire. Nicolette was a
young girl whom the Viscount of Beaucaire had redeemed as a captive
of the Saracens, and had brought up as a god-daughter in his family.
Aucassins fell in love with Nicolette, and wanted to marry her. The
action turned on marriage, for, to the Counts of Beaucaire, as to
other counts, not to speak of kings, high alliance was not a matter
of choice but of necessity, without which they could not defend
their lives, let alone their counties; and, to make Aucassins'
conduct absolutely treasonable, Beaucaire was at that time
surrounded and besieged, and the Count, Aucassins' father, stood in
dire need of his son's help. Aucassins refused to stir unless he
could have Nicolette. What were honours to him if Nicolette were not
to share them. "S'ele estait empereris de Colstentinoble u
d'Alemaigne u roine de France u d'Engletere, si aroit il asses peu
en li, tant est france et cortoise et de bon aire et entecie de
toutes bones teces." To be empress of "Colstentinoble" would be none
too good for her, so stamped is she with nobility and courtesy and
high-breeding and all good qualities.
So the Count, after a long struggle, sent for his Viscount and
threatened to have Nicolette burned alive, and the Viscount himself
treated no better, if he did not put a stop to the affair; and the
Viscount shut up Nicolette, and remonstrated with Aucassins: "Marry
a king's daughter, or a count's! leave Nicolette alone, or you will
never see Paradise!" This at once gave Aucassins the excuse for a
charming tirade against Paradise, for which, a century or two later,
he would properly have been burned together with Nicolette:--
En paradis qu'ai je a faire? Je n'i quier entrer mais que j'aie
Nicolete, ma tres douce amie, que j'aim tant. C'en paradis ne vont
fors tex gens con je vous dirai. Il i vont ci viel prestre et cil
vieil clop et cil manke, qui tote jour et tote nuit cropent devant
ces autex et en ces vies cruutes, et ci a ces vies capes ereses et a
ces vies tatereles vestues, qui sont nu et decauc et estrumele, qui
moeurent de faim et d'esci et de froid et de mesaises. Icil vont en
paradis; aveuc ciax n'ai jou que faire; mais en infer voil jou aler.
Car en infer vont li bel clerc et li bel cevalier qui sont mort as
tornois et as rices gueres, et li bien sergant et li franc home.
Aveuc ciax voil jou aler. Et si vont les beles dames cortoises que
eles ont ii amis ou iii avec leurs barons. Et si va li ors et li
agens et li vairs et li gris; et si i vont herpeor et jogleor et li
roi del siecle. Avec ciax voil jou aler mais que j'aie Nicolete, ma
tres douce amie, aveuc moi.
In Paradise what have I to do? I do not care to go there unless I
may have Nicolette, my very sweet friend, whom I love so much. For
to Paradise goes no one but such people as I will tell you of. There
go old priests and old cripples and the maimed, who all day and all
night crouch before altars and in old crypts, and are clothed with
old worn-out capes and old tattered rags; who are naked and footbare
and sore; who die of hunger and want and misery. These go to
Paradise; with them I have nothing to do; but to Hell I am willing
to go. For, to Hell go the fine scholars and the fair knights who
die in tournies and in glorious wars; and the good men-at-arms and
the well-born. With them I will gladly go. And there go the fair
courteous ladies whether they have two or three friends besides
their lords. And the gold and silver go there, and the ermines and
sables; and there go the harpers and jongleurs, and the kings of the
world. With these will I go, if only I may have Nicolette, my very
sweet friend, with me.
Three times, in these short extracts, the word "courteous" has
already appeared. The story itself is promised as "courteous";
Nicolette is "courteous"; and the ladies who are not to go to heaven
are "courteous." Aucassins is in the full tide of courtesy, and
evidently a professional, or he never would have claimed a place for
harpers and jongleurs with kings and chevaliers in the next world.
The poets of "courteous love" showed as little interest in religion
as the poets of the eleventh century had shown for it in their poems
of war. Aucassins resembled Christian of Troyes in this, and both of
them resembled Thibaut, while William of Lorris went beyond them
all. The literature of the "siecle" was always unreligious, from the
"Chanson de Roland" to the "Tragedy of Hamlet"; to be "papelard" was
unworthy of a chevalier; the true knight of courtesy made nothing of
defying the torments of hell, as he defied the lance of a rival, the
frowns of society, the threats of parents or the terrors of magic;
the perfect, gentle, courteous lover thought of nothing but his
love. Whether the object of his love were Nicolette of Beaucaire or
Blanche of Castile, Mary of Champagne or Mary of Chartres, was a
detail which did not affect the devotion of his worship.
So Nicolette, shut up in a vaulted chamber, leaned out at the marble
window and sang, while Aucassins, when his father promised that he
should have a kiss from Nicolette, went out to make fabulous
slaughter of the enemy; and when his father broke the promise, shut
himself up in his chamber, and also sang; and the action went on by
scenes and interludes, until, one night, Nicolette let herself down
from the window, by the help of sheets and towels, into the garden,
and, with a natural dislike of wetting her skirts which has
delighted every hearer or reader from that day to this, "prist se
vesture a l'une main devant et a l'autre deriere si s'escorca por le
rousee qu'ele vit grande sor l'erbe si s'en ala aval le gardin"; she
raised her skirts with one hand in front and the other behind, for
the dew which she saw heavy on the grass, and went off down the
garden, to the tower where Aucassins was locked up, and sang to him
through a crack in the masonry, and gave him a lock of her hair, and
they talked till the friendly night-watch came by and warned her by
a sweetly-sung chant, that she had better escape. So she bade
farewell to Aucassins, and went on to a breach in the city wall, and
she looked through it down into the fosse which was very deep and
very steep. So she sang to herself--
Peres rois de maeste
Or ne sai quel part aler.
Se je vois u gaut rame
Ja me mengeront li le
Li lions et li sengler
Dont il i a a plente.
Father, King of Majesty!
Now I know not where to flee.
If I seek the forest free,
Then the lions will eat me,
Wolves and wild boars terribly,
Of which plenty there there be.
The lions were a touch of poetic licence, even for Beaucaire, but
the wolves and wild boars were real enough; yet Nicolette feared
even them less than she feared the Count, so she slid down what her
audience well knew to be a most dangerous and difficult descent, and
reached the bottom with many wounds in her hands and feet, "et san
en sali bien en xii lius"; so that blood was drawn in a dozen
places, and then she climbed up the other side, and went off bravely
into the depths of the forest; an uncanny thing to do by night, as
you can still see.
Then followed a pastoral, which might be taken from the works of
another poet of the same period, whose acquaintance no one can
neglect to make--Adam de la Halle, a Picard, of Arras. Adam lived,
it is true, fifty years later than the date imagined for Aucassins,
but his shepherds and shepherdesses are not so much like, as
identical with, those of the Southern poet, and all have so singular
an air of life that the conventional courteous knight fades out
beside them. The poet, whether bourgeois, professional, noble, or
clerical, never much loved the peasant, and the peasant never much
loved him, or any one else. The peasant was a class by himself, and
his trait, as a class, was suspicion of everybody and all things,
whether material, social, or divine. Naturally he detested his lord,
whether temporal or spiritual, because the seigneur and the priest
took his earnings, but he was never servile, though a serf; he was
far from civil; he was commonly gross. He was cruel, but not more so
than his betters; and his morals were no worse. The object of
oppression on all sides,--the invariable victim, whoever else might
escape,--the French peasant, as a class, held his own--and more. In
fact, he succeeded in plundering Church, Crown, nobility, and
bourgeoisie, and was the only class in French history that rose
steadily in power and well-being, from the time of the crusades to
the present day, whatever his occasional suffering may have been;
and, in the thirteenth century, he was suffering. When Nicolette, on
the morning after her escape, came upon a group of peasants in the
forest, tending the Count's cattle, she had reason to be afraid of
them, but instead they were afraid of her. They thought at first
that she was a fairy. When they guessed the riddle, they kept the
secret, though they risked punishment and lost the chance of reward
by protecting her. Worse than this, they agreed, for a small
present, to give a message to Aucassins if he should ride that way.
Aucassins was not very bright, but when he got out of prison after
Nicolette's escape, he did ride out, at his friends' suggestion, and
tried to learn what had become of her. Passing through the woods he
came upon the same group of shepherds and shepherdesses:--
Esmeres et Martinet, Fruelins et Johannes, Robecons et
Aubries,--
who might have been living in the Forest of Arden, so like were they
to the clowns of Shakespeare. They were singing of Nicolette and her
present, and the cakes and knives and flute they would buy with it.
Aucassins jumped to the bait they offered him; and they instantly
began to play him as though he were a trout:--
"Bel enfant, dix vos i ait!"
"Dix vos benie!" fait cil qui fu plus enparles des autres.
"Bel enfant," fait il, "redites le cancon que vos disiez ore!"
"Nous n'i dirons," fait cil qui plus fu enparles des autres. "Dehait
ore qui por vos i cantera, biax sire!"
"Bel enfant!" fait Aucassins, "enne me connissies vos?"
"Oil! nos savions bien que vos estes Aucassins, nos damoisiax, mais
nos ne somes mie a vos, ains somes au conte."
"Bel enfant, si feres, je vos en pri!"
"Os, por le cuer be!" fait cil. "Por quoi canteroie je por vos, s'il
ne me seoit! Quant il n'a si rice home en cest pais sans le cors le
conte Garin s'il trovait mes bues ne mes vaces ne mes brebis en ses
pres n'en sen forment qu'il fust mie tant hardis por les es a crever
qu'il les en ossast cacier. Et por quoi canteroie je por vos s'il ne
me seoit?"
"Se dix vos ait, bel enfant, si feres! et tenes x sous que j'ai ci
en une borse!"
"God bless you, fair child!" said Aucassins.
"God be with you!" replied the one who talked best.
"Fair child!" said he, "repeat the song you were just singing."
"We won't!" replied he who talked best among them. "Bad luck to him
who shall sing for you, good sir!"
"Fair child," said Aucassins, "do you know me?"
"Yes! we know very well that you are Aucassins, our young lord; but
we are none of yours; we belong to the Count."
"Fair child, indeed you'll do it, I pray you!"
"Listen, for love of God!" said he. "Why should I sing for you if it
does not suit me? when there is no man so powerful in this country,
except Count Garin, if he found my oxen or my cows or my sheep in
his pasture or his close, would not rather risk losing his eyes than
dare to turn them out! and why should I sing for you, if it does not
suit me!"
"So God help you, good child, indeed you will do it! and take these
ten sous that I have here in my purse."
"Sire les deniers prenderons nos, mais je ne vos canterai mie, car
j'en ai jure. Mais je le vos conterai se vos voles."
"De par diu!" faits Aucassins. "Encore aim je mix center que nient."
"Sire, the money we will take, but I'll not sing to you, for I've
sworn it. But I will tell it you, if you like."
"For God's sake!" said Aucassins; "better telling than nothing!"
Ten sous was no small gift! twenty sous was the value of a strong
ox. The poet put a high money-value on the force of love, but he set
a higher value on it in courtesy. These boors were openly insolent
to their young lord, trying to extort money from him, and
threatening him with telling his father; but they were in their
right, and Nicolette was in their power. At heart they meant
Aucassins well, but they were rude and grasping, and the poet used
them in order to show how love made the true lover courteous even to
clowns. Aucassins' gentle courtesy is brought out by the boors'
greed, as the colours in the window were brought out and given their
value by a bit of blue or green. The poet, having got his little
touch of colour rightly placed, let the peasants go. "Cil qui fu
plus enparles des autres," having been given his way and his money,
told Aucassins what he knew of Nicolette and her message; so
Aucassins put spurs to his horse and cantered into the forest,
singing:--
Se diu plaist le pere fort
Je vos reverai encore
Suer, douce a-mie!
So please God, great and strong,
I will find you now ere long,
Sister, sweet friend!
But the peasant had singular attraction for the poet. Whether the
character gave him a chance for some clever mimicry, which was one
of his strong points as a story-teller: or whether he wanted to
treat his subjects, like the legendary windows, in pairs; or whether
he felt that the forest-scene specially amused his audience, he
immediately introduced a peasant of another class, much more
strongly coloured, or deeply shadowed. Every one in the audience
was--and, for that matter, still would be--familiar with the great
forests, the home of half the fairy and nursery tales of Europe,
still wild enough and extensive enough to hide in, although they
have now comparatively few lions, and not many wolves or wild boars
or serpents such as Nicolette feared. Every one saw, without an
effort, the young damoiseau riding out with his hound or hawk,
looking for game; the lanes under the trees, through the wood, or
the thick underbrush before lanes were made; the herdsmen watching
their herds, and keeping a sharp look-out for wolves; the peasant
seeking lost cattle; the black kiln-men burning charcoal; and in the
depths of the rocks or swamps or thickets--the outlaw. Even now,
forests like Rambouillet, or Fontainebleau or Compiegne are enormous
and wild; one can see Aucassins breaking his way through thorns and
branches in search of Nicolette, tearing his clothes and wounding
himself "en xl lius u en xxx," until evening approached, and he
began to weep for disappointment:--
Il esgarda devant lui enmi la voie si vit un vallet tei que je vos
dirai. Grans estoit et mervellex et lais et hidex. Il avoit une
grande hure plus noire qu'une carbouclee, et avoit plus de planne
paume entre ii ex, et avoit unes grandes joes et un grandisme nez
plat, et une grans narines lees et unes grosses levres plus rouges
d'unes carbounees, et uns grans dens gaunes et lais et estoit
caucies d'uns housiax et d'uns sollers de buef fretes de tille
dusque deseure le genol et estoit afules d'une cape a ii envers si
estoit apoiies sor une grande macue. Aucassins s'enbati sor lui
s'eut grand paor quant il le sorvit...
"Baix frere, dix ti ait!"
"Dix vos benie!" fait cil. "Se dix t'ait, que fais tu ilec?"
"A vos que monte?" fait cil.
"Nient!" fait Aucassins; "je nel vos demant se por bien non."
"Mais pour quoi ploures vos?" fait cil, "et faites si fait doel?
Certes se j'estoie ausi rices hom que vos estes, tos li mons ne me
feroit mie plorer."
"Ba! me conissies vos!" fait Aucassins.
"Oie! je sai bien que vos estes Aucassins li fix le conte, et se vos
me dites por quoi vos plores je vos dirai que je fac ici."
As he looked before him along the way he saw a man such as I will
tell you. Tall he was, and menacing, and ugly, and hideous. He had
a great mane blacker than charcoal and had more than a full palm-
width between his two eyes, and had big cheeks, and a huge flat nose
and great broad nostrils, and thick lips redder than raw beef, and
large ugly yellow teeth, and was shod with hose and leggings of raw
hide laced with bark cord to above the knee, and was muffled in a
cloak without lining, and was leaning on a great club. Aucassins
came upon him suddenly and had great fear when he saw him.
"Fair brother, good day!" said he.
"God bless you!" said the other.
"As God help you, what do you here?"
"What is that to you?" said the other.
"Nothing!" said Aucassins; "I ask only from good-will."
"But why are you crying!" said the other, "and mounring so loud?
Sure, if I were as great a man as you are, nothing on earth would
make me cry."
"Bah! you know me?" said Aucassins.
"Yes, I know very well that you are Aucassins, the count's son; and
if you will tell me what you are crying for, I will tell you what I
am doing here."
Aucassins seemed to think this an equal bargain. All damoiseaux were
not as courteous as Aucassins, nor all "varlets" as rude as his
peasants; we shall see how the young gentlemen of Picardy treated
the peasantry for no offence at all; but Aucassins carried a softer,
Southern temper in a happier climate, and, with his invariable
gentle courtesy, took no offence at the familiarity with which the
ploughman treated him. Yet he dared not tell the truth, so he
invented, on the spur of the moment, an excuse;--he has lost, he
said, a beautiful white hound. The peasant hooted--
"Os!" fait cil; "por le cuer que cil sires eut en sen ventre! que
vos plorastes por un cien puant! Mal dehait ait qui ja mais vos
prisera quant il n'a si rice home en ceste tere se vos peres len
mandoit x u xv u xx qu'il ne les envoyast trop volontiers et s'en
esteroit trop lies. Mais je dois plorer et dol faire?"
"Et tu de quoi frere?"
"Sire je lo vos dirai. J'estoie liues a un rice vilain si cacoie se
carue. iiii bues i avoit. Or a iii jors qu il m'avint une grande
malaventure que je perdi le mellor de mes bues Roget le mellor de me
carue. Si le vois querant. Si ne mengai ne ne bue iii jors a passes.
Si n'os aler a le vile c'on me metroit en prison que je ne l'ai de
quoi saure. De tot l'avoir du monde n'ai je plus vaillant que vos
vees sor le cors de mi. Une lasse mere avoie, si n'avoit plus
vaillant que une keutisele, si h a on sacie de desous le dos si gist
a pur l'estrain, si m'en poise asses plus que denu. Car avoirs va et
viaent; se j'ai or perdu je gaaignerai une autre fois si sorrai mon
buef quant je porrai, ne ja por cien n'en plorerai. Et vos plorastes
por un cien de longaigne! Mal dehait ait qui mais vos prisera!"
"Certes tu es de bon confort, biax frere! que benois sois tu! Et que
valoit tes bues!"
"Sire xx sous m'en demande on, je n'en puis mie abatre une seule
maille."
"Or, tien" fait Aucassins, "xx que j'ai ci en me borse, si sol ten
buef!"
"Listen!" said he, "By the heart God had in his body, that you
should cry for a stinking dog! Bad luck to him who ever prizes you!
When there is no man in this land so great, if your father sent to
him for ten or fifteen or twenty but would fetch them very gladly,
and be only too pleased. But I ought to cry and mourn."
"And--why you, brother?"
"Sir, I will tell you. I was hired out to a rich farmer to drive his
plough. There were four oxen. Now three days ago I had a great
misfortune, for I lost the best of my oxen, Roget, the best of my
team. I am looking to find him. I've not eaten or drunk these three
days past. I dare n't go to the town, for they would put me in
prison as I've nothing to pay with. In all the world I've not the
worth of anything but what you see on my body I've a poor old mother
who owned nothing but a feather mattress, and they've dragged it
from under her back so she lies on the bare straw, and she troubles
me more than myself. For riches come and go if I lose to day, I gain
to-morrow; I will pay for my ox when I can, and will not cry for
that. And you cry for a filthy dog! Bad luck to him who ever thinks
well of you!"
"Truly, you counsel well, good brother! God bless you! And what was
your ox worth?"
"Sir, they ask me twenty sous for it. I cannot beat them down a
single centime."
"Here are twenty," said Aucassins, "that I have in my purse! Pay for
your ox!"
"Sire!" fait il, "grans mercies! et dix vos laist trover ce que vox
queres!"
"Sir!" said he; "many thanks! and Go! grant you find what you seek!"
The little episode was thrown in without rhyme or reason to the
rapid emotion of the love-story, as though the jongleur were showing
his own cleverness and humour, at the expense of his hero, as
jongleurs had a way of doing; but he took no such liberties with his
heroine. While Aucassins tore through the thickets on horseback,
crying aloud, Nicolette had built herself a little hut in the depths
of the forest:--
Ele prist des flors de lis
Et de l'erbe du garris
Et de le foille autresi;
Une belle loge en fist,
Ainques tant gente ne vi.
Jure diu qui ne menti
Se par la vient Aucassins
Et il por l'amor de li
Ne si repose un petit
Ja ne sera ses amis
N'ele s'a-mie.
So she twined the lilies' flower,
Roofed with leafy branches o'er,
Made of it a lovely bower,
With the freshest grass for floor
Such as never mortal saw.
By God's Verity, she swore,
Should Aucassins pass her door,
And not stop for love of her,
To repose a moment there,
He should be her love no more,
Nor she his dear!
So night came on, and Nicolette went to sleep, a little distance
away from her hut. Aucassins at last came by, and dismounted,
spraining his shoulder in doing it. Then he crept into the little
hut, and lying on his back, looked up through the leaves to the
moon, and sang:--
Estoilete, je te voi,
Que la lune trait a soi.
Nicolete est aveuc toi,
M'amiete o le blond poil.
Je quid que dix le veut avoir
Por la lumiere de soir
Que par li plus clere soit.
Vien, amie, je te proie!
Ou monter vauroie droit,
Que que fust du recaoir.
Que fuisse lassus o toi
Ja te baiseroi estroit.
Se j'estoie fix a roi
S'afferies vos bien a moi
Suer douce amie!
I can see you, little star,
That the moon draws through the air.
Nicolette is where you are,
My own love with the blonde hair.
I think God must want her near
To shine down upon us here
That the evening be more clear.
Come down, dearest, to my prayer,
Or I climb up where you are!
Though I fell, I would not care.
If I once were with you there
I would kiss you closely, dear!
If a monarch's son I were
You should all my kingdom share,
Sweet friend, sister!
How Nicolette heard him sing, and came to him and rubbed his
shoulder and dressed his wounds as though he were a child; and how
in the morning they rode away together, like Tennyson's "Sleeping
Beauty,"--
O'er the hills and far away
Beyond their utmost purple rim,
Beyond the night, beyond the day,
singing as they rode, the story goes on to tell or to sing in verse--
Aucassins, li biax, li blons,
Li gentix, It amorous,
Est issous del gaut parfont,
Entre ses bras ses amors
Devant lui sor son arcon.
Les ex li baise et le front,
Et le bouce et le menton.
Elle l'a mis a raison.
"Aucassins, biax amis dox,
"En quel tere en irons nous?"
"Douce amie, que sai jou?
"Moi ne caut u nous aillons,
"En forest u en destor
"Mais que je soie aveuc vous."
Passent les vaus et les mons,
Et les viles et les bors
A la mer vinrent au jor,
Si descendent u sablon
Les le rivage.
Aucassins, the brave, the fair,
Courteous knight and gentle lover,
From the forest dense came forth;
In his arms his love he bore
On his saddle-bow before;
Her eyes he kisses and her mouth,
And her forehead and her chin.
She brings him back to earth again:
"Aucassins, my love, my own,
"To what country shall we turn?"
"Dearest angel, what say you?
"I care nothing where we go,
"In the forest or outside,
"While you on my saddle ride."
So they pass by hill and dale,
And the city, and the town,
Till they reach the morning pale,
And on sea-sands set them down,
Hard by the shore.
There we will leave them, for their further adventures have not much
to do with our matter. Like all the romans, or nearly all,
"Aucassins" is singularly pure and refined. Apparently the ladies of
courteous love frowned on coarseness and allowed no licence. Their
power must have been great, for the best romans are as free from
grossness as the "Chanson de Roland" itself, or the church glass, or
the illuminations in the manuscripts; and as long as the power of
the Church ruled good society, this decency continued. As far as
women were concerned, they seem always to have been more clean than
the men, except when men painted them in colours which men liked
best.
Perhaps society was actually cleaner in the thirteenth century than
in the sixteenth, as Saint Louis was more decent than Francis I, and
as the bath was habitual in the twelfth century and exceptional at
the Renaissance. The rule held good for the bourgeoisie as well as
among the dames cortoises. Christian and Thibaut, "Aucassins" and
the "Roman de la Rose," may have expressed only the tastes of high-
born ladies, but other poems were avowedly bourgeois, and among the
bourgeois poets none was better than Adam de la Halle. Adam wrote
also for the court, or at least for Robert of Artois, Saint Louis's
nephew, whom he followed to Naples in 1284, but his poetry was as
little aristocratic as poetry could well be, and most of it was
cynically--almost defiantly--middle-class, as though the weavers of
Arras were his only audience, and recognized him and the objects of
his satire in every verse. The bitter personalities do not concern
us, but, at Naples, to amuse Robert of Artois and his court, Adam
composed the first of French comic operas, which had an immense
success, and, as a pastoral poem, has it still. The Idyll of Arras
was a singular contrast to the Idyll of Beaucaire, but the social
value was the same in both; Robin and Marion were a pendant to
Aucassins and Nicolette; Robin was almost a burlesque on Aucassins,
while Marion was a Northern, energetic, intelligent, pastoral
Nicolette.
"Li Gieus de Robin et de Marion" had little or no plot. Adam strung
together, on a thread of dialogue and by a group of suitable
figures, a number of the favourite songs of his time, followed by
the favourite games, and ending with a favourite dance, the
"tresca." The songs, the games, and the dances do not concern us,
but the dialogue runs along prettily, with an air of Flemish
realism, like a picture of Teniers, as unlike that of "courtoisie"
as Teniers was to Guido Reni. Underneath it all a tone of satire
made itself felt, good-natured enough, but directed wholly against
the men.
The scene opens on Marion tending her sheep, and singing the pretty
air: "Robin m'aime, Robin ma'a," after which enters a chevalier or
esquire, on horseback, and sings: "Je me repairoie du tournoiement."
Then follows a dialogue between the chevalier and Marion, with no
other object than to show off the charm of Marion against the
masculine defects of the knight. Being, like most squires, somewhat
slow of ideas in conversation with young women, the gentleman began
by asking for sport for his falcon. Has she seen any duck down by
the river?
Mais veis tu par chi devant
Vers ceste riviere nul ane?
"Ane," it seems, was the usual word for wild duck, the falcon's
prey, and Marion knew it as well as he, but she chose to
misunderstand him:--
C'est une bete qui recane;
J'en vis ier iii sur che quemin,
Tous quarchies aler au moulin.
Est che chou que vous demandes?
"It is a beast that brays; I saw three yesterday on the road, all
with loads going to the mill. Is that what you ask?" That is not
what the squire has asked, and he is conscious that Marion knows it,
but he tries again. If she has not seen a duck, perhaps she has seen
a heron:--
Hairons, sire? par me foi, non!
Je n'en vi nesun puis quareme
Que j'en vi mengier chies dame Eme
Me taiien qui sorit ches brebis.
"Heron, sir! by my faith, no! I've not seen one since Lent when I
saw some eaten at my grandmother's--Dame Emma who owns these sheep."
"Hairons," it seems, meant also herring, and this wilful
misunderstanding struck the chevalier as carrying jest too far:--
Par foi! or suis j'ou esbaubis!
N'ainc mais je ne fui si gabes!
"On my word, I am silenced! never in my life was I so chaffed!"
Marion herself seems to think her joke a little too evident, for she
takes up the conversation in her turn, only to conclude that she
likes Robin better than she does the knight; he is gayer, and when
he plays his musette he starts the whole village dancing. At this,
the squire makes a declaration of love with such energy as to spur
his horse almost over her:--
Aimi, sirel ostez vo cheval!
A poi que il ne m'a blechie.
Li Robin ne regiete mie
Quand je voie apres se karue.
"Aimi!" is an exclamation of alarm, real or affected: "Dear me, sir!
take your horse away! he almost hurt me! Robin's horse never rears
when I go behind his plough!" Still the knight persists, and though
Marion still tells him to go away, she asks his name, which he says
is Aubert, and so gives her the catchword for another song:--"Vos
perdes vo paine, sire Aubert!"--which ends the scene with a duo. The
second scene begins with a duo of Marion and Robin, followed by her
giving a softened account of the chevalier's behaviour, and then
they lunch on bread and cheese and apples, and more songs follow,
till she sends him to get Baldwin and Walter and Peronette and the
pipers, for a dance. In his absence the chevalier returns and
becomes very pressing in his attentions, which gives her occasion to
sing:-
J'oi Robin flagoler
Au flagol d'argent.
When Robin enters, the knight picks a quarrel with him for not
handling properly the falcon which he has caught in the hedge; and
Robin gets a severe beating. The scene ends by the horseman carrying
off Marion by force; but he soon gets tired of carrying her against
her will, and drops her, and disappears once for all.
Certes voirement sui je beste
Quant a ceste beste m'areste.
Adieu, bergiere!
Bete the knight certainly was, and was meant to be, in order to give
the necessary colour to Marion's charms. Chevaliers were seldom
intellectually brilliant in the mediaeval romans, and even the
"Chansons de Geste" liked better to talk of their prowess than of
their wit; but Adam de la Halle, who felt no great love for
chevaliers, was not satisfied with ridiculing them in order to exalt
Marion; his second act was devoted to exalting Marion at the expense
of her own boors.
The first act was given up to song; the second, to games and dances.
The games prove not to be wholly a success; Marion is bored by them,
and wants to dance. The dialogue shows Marion trying constantly to
control her clowns and make them decent, as Blanche of Castile had
been all her life trying to control her princes, and Mary of
Chartres her kings. Robin is a rustic counterpart to Thibaut. He is
tamed by his love of Marion, but he has just enough intelligence to
think well of himself, and to get himself into trouble without
knowing how to get out of it. Marion loves him much as she would her
child; she makes only a little fun of him; defends him from the
others; laughs at his jealousy; scolds him on occasion; flatters his
dancing; sends him on errands, to bring the pipers or drive away the
wolf; and what is most to our purpose, uses him to make the other
peasants decent. Walter and Baldwin and Hugh are coarse, and their
idea of wit is to shock the women or make Robin jealous. Love makes
gentlemen even of boors, whether noble or villain, is the constant
moral of mediaeval story, and love turns Robin into a champion of
decency. When, at last, Walter, playing the jongleur, begins to
repeat a particularly coarse fabliau, or story in verse, Robin stops
him short--
Ho, Gautier, je n'en voeil plus! fi!
Dites, seres vous tous jours teus!
Vous estes un ors menestreus!
"Ho, Walter! I want no more of that: Shame! Say! are you going to be
always like that? You're a dirty beggar!" A fight seems inevitable,
but Marion turns it into a dance, and the whole party, led by the
pipers, with Robin and Marion at the head of the band, leave the
stage in the dance which is said to be still known in Italy as the
"tresca." Marion is in her way as charming as Nicolette, but we are
less interested in her charm than in her power. Always the woman
appears as the practical guide; the one who keeps her head, even in
love:--
Elle l'a mis a raison:
"Aucassins, biax amis dox,
En quele tere en irons nous?"
"Douce amie, que sai jou?
Moi ne caut ou nous aillons."
The man never cared; he was always getting himself into crusades, or
feuds, or love, or debt, and depended on the woman to get him out.
The story was always of Charles VII and Jeanne d'Arc, or Agnes
Sorel. The woman might be the good or the evil spirit, but she was
always the stronger force. The twelfth and thirteenth centuries were
a period when men were at their strongest; never before or since
have they shown equal energy in such varied directions, or such
intelligence in the direction of their energy; yet these marvels of
history,--these Plantagenets; these scholastic philosophers; these
architects of Rheims and Amiens; these Innocents, and Robin Hoods
and Marco Polos; these crusaders, who planted their enormous
fortresses all over the Levant; these monks who made the wastes and
barrens yield harvests;--all, without apparent exception, bowed down
before the woman.
Explain it who will! We are not particularly interested in the
explanation; it is the art we have chased through this French
forest, like Aucassins hunting for Nicolette; and the art leads
always to the woman. Poetry, like the architecture and the
decoration, harks back to the same standard of taste. The specimens
of Christian of Troyes, Thibaut, Tristan, Aucassins, and Adam de la
Halle were mild admissions of feminine superiority compared with
some that were more in vogue, If Thibaut painted his love-verses on
the walls of his castle, he put there only what a more famous poet,
who may have been his friend, set on the walls of his Chateau of
Courteous Love, which, not being made with hands or with stone, but
merely with verse, has not wholly perished. The "Roman de la Rose"
is the end of true mediaeval poetry and goes with the Sainte-
Chapelle in architecture, and three hundred years of more or less
graceful imitation or variation on the same themes which followed.
Our age calls it false taste, and no doubt our age is right;--every
age is right by its own standards as long as its standards amuse
it;--but after all, the "Roman de la Rose" charmed Chaucer,--it may
well charm you. The charm may not be that of Mont-Saint-Michel or of
Roland; it has not the grand manner of the eleventh century, or the
jewelled brilliancy of the Chartres lancets, or the splendid self-
assertion of the roses: but even to this day it gives out a faint
odour of Champagne and Touraine, of Provence and Cyprus. One hears
Thibaut and sees Queen Blanche.
Of course, this odour of true sanctity belongs only to the "Roman"
of William of Lorris, which dates from the death of Queen Blanche
and of all good things, about 1250; a short allegory of courteous
love in forty-six hundred and seventy lines. To modern taste, an
allegory of forty-six hundred and seventy lines seems to be not so
short as it might be; but the fourteenth century found five thousand
verses totally inadequate to the subject, and, about 1300, Jean de
Meung added eighteen thousand lines, the favourite reading of
society for one or two hundred years, but beyond our horizon. The
"Roman" of William of Lorris was complete in itself; it had shape;
beginning, middle, and end; even a certain realism, action,--almost
life!
The Rose is any feminine ideal of beauty, intelligence, purity, or
grace,--always culminating in the Virgin,--but the scene is the
Court of Love, and the action is avowedly in a dream, without time
or place. The poet's tone is very pure; a little subdued; at times
sad; and the poem ends sadly; but all the figures that were
positively hideous were shut out of the court, and painted on the
outside walls:--Hatred; Felony; Covetousness; Envy; Poverty;
Melancholy, and Old Age. Death did not appear. The passion for
representing death in its horrors did not belong to the sunny
atmosphere of the thirteenth century, and indeed jarred on French
taste always, though the Church came to insist on it; but Old Age
gave the poet a motive more artistic, foreshadowing Death, and quite
sad enough to supply the necessary contrast. The poet who approached
the walls of the chateau and saw, outside, all the unpleasant facts
of life conspicuously posted up, as though to shut them out of
doors, hastened to ask for entrance, and, when once admitted, found
a court of ideals. Their names matter little. In the mind of William
of Lorris, every one would people his ideal world with whatever
ideal figures pleased him, and the only personal value of William's
figures is that they represent what he thought the thirteenth-
century ideals of a perfect society. Here is Courtesy, with a
translation long thought to be by Chaucer:-
Apres se tenoit Cortoisie
Qui moult estoit de tous prisie.
Si n'ere orgueilleuse ne fole.
C'est cele qui a la karole,
La soe merci, m'apela,
Ains que nule, quand je vins la.
Et ne fut ne nice n'umbrage,
Mais sages auques, sans outrage,
De biaus respons et de biaus dis,
Onc nus ne fu par li laidis,
Ne ne porta nului rancune,
Et fu clere comme la lune
Est avers les autres estoiles
Qui ne resemblent que chandoiles.
Faitisse estoit et avenant;
Je ne sai fame plus plaisant.
Ele ert en toutes cors bien digne
D'estre empereris ou roine.
And next that daunced Courtesye,
That preised was of lowe and hye,
For neither proude ne foole was she;
She for to daunce called me,
I pray God yeve hir right good grace,
When I come first into the place.
She was not nyce ne outrageous,
But wys and ware and vertuous;
Of faire speche and of faire answere;
Was never wight mysseid of her,
Ne she bar rancour to no wight.
Clere browne she was, and thereto bright
Of face, of body avenaunt.
I wot no lady so pleasaunt.
She were worthy forto bene
An empresse or crowned quene.
You can read for yourselves the characters, and can follow the
simple action which owes its slight interest only to the constant
effort of the dreamer to attain his ideal,--the Rose,--and owes its
charm chiefly to the constant disappointment and final defeat. An
undertone of sadness runs through it, felt already in the picture of
Time which foreshadows the end of Love--the Rose--and her court, and
with it the end of hope:--
Li tens qui s'en va nuit et jor,
Sans repos prendre et sans sejor,
Et qui de nous se part et emble
Si celeement qu'il nous semble
Qu'il s'arreste ades en un point,
Et il ne s'i arreste point,
Ains ne fine de trespasser,
Que nus ne puet neis penser
Quex tens ce est qui est presens;
S'el demandes as clers lisans,
Aincois que l'en l'eust pense
Seroit il ja trois tens passe;
Li tens qui ne puet sejourner,
Ains vait tous jors sans retorner,
Com l'iaue qui s'avale toute,
N'il n'en retourne arriere goute;
Li tens vers qui noient ne dure,
Ne fer ne chose tant soit dure,
Car il gaste tout et menjue;
Li tens qui tote chose mue,
Qui tout fait croistre et tout norist,
Et qui tout use et tout porrist.
The tyme that passeth nyght and daye.
And restelesse travayleth aye,
And steleth from us so prively,
That to us semeth so sykerly
That it in one poynt dwelleth never,
But gothe so fast, and passeth aye
That there nys man that thynke may
What tyme that now present is;
Asketh at these clerkes this,
For or men thynke it readily
Thre tymes ben ypassed by.
The tyme that may not sojourne
But goth, and may never returne,
As water that down renneth ay,
But never drope retourne may.
There may no thing as time endure,
Metall nor earthly creature:
For alle thing it frette and shall.
The tyme eke that chaungith all,
And all doth waxe and fostered be,
And alle thing distroieth he.
The note of sadness has begun, which the poets were to find so much
more to their taste than the note of gladness. From the "Roman de la
Rose" to the "Ballade des Dames du Temps jadis" was a short step for
the Middle-Age giant Time,--a poor two hundred years. Then Villon
woke up to ask what had become of the Roses:--Ou est la tres sage
Helois
Pour qui fut chastie puis moyne,
Pierre Esbaillart a Saint Denis?
Pour son amour ot cest essoyne.
Et Jehanne la bonne Lorraine
Qu' Englois brulerent a Rouan;
Ou sont elles, Vierge Souvraine?
Mais ou sont les neiges dantan?
Where is the virtuous Heloise,
For whom suffered, then turned monk,
Pierre Abelard at Saint-Denis?
For his love he bore that pain.
And Jeanne d'Arc, the good Lorraine,
Whom the English burned at Rouen!
Where are they, Virgin Queen?
But where are the snows of spring?
Between the death of William of Lorris and the advent of John of
Meung, a short half-century (1250-1300), the Woman and the Rose
became bankrupt. Satire took the place of worship. Man, with his
usual monkey-like malice, took pleasure in pulling down what he had
built up. The Frenchman had made what he called "fausse route."
William of Lorris was first to see it, and say it, with more sadness
and less bitterness than Villon showed; he won immortality by
telling how he, and the thirteenth century in him, had lost himself
in pursuing his Rose, and how he had lost the Rose, too, waking up
at last to the dull memory of pain and sorrow and death, that "tout
porrist." The world had still a long march to make from the Rose of
Queen Blanche to the guillotine of Madame du Barry; but the "Roman
de la Rose" made epoch. For the first time since Constantine
proclaimed the reign of Christ, a thousand years, or so, before
Philip the Fair dethroned Him, the deepest expression of social
feeling ended with the word: Despair.
CHAPTER XIII
LES MIRACLES DE NOTRE DAME
Vergine Madre, figlia del tuo figlio,
Umile ed alta piu che creatura,
Termine fisso d'eterno consiglio,
Tu sei colei che l'umana natura
Nobilitasti si, che il suo fattore
Non disdegno di farsi sua fattura....
La tua benignita non pur soccorre
A chi dimanda, ma molte fiate
Liberamente al dimandar precorre.
In te misericordia, in te pietate,
In te magnificenza, in te s'aduna
Quantunque in creatura e di bontate.
Vergine bella, che di sol vestita,
Coronata di stelle, al sommo sole
Piacesti si che'n te sua luce ascose;
Amor mi spinge a dir di te parole;
Ma non so 'ncominciar senza tu aita,
E di colui ch'amando in te si pose.
Invoco lei che ben sempre rispose
Chi la chiamo con fede.
Vergine, s'a mercede
Miseria estrema dell' umane cose
Giammai ti volse, al mio prego t'inchina!
Soccorri alia mia guerra,
Bench'i sia terra, e tu del del regina!
Dante composed one of these prayers; Petrarch the other. Chaucer
translated Dante's prayer in the "Second Nonnes Tale." He who will
may undertake to translate either;--not I! The Virgin, in whom is
united whatever goodness is in created being, might possibly, in her
infinite grace, forgive the sacrilege; but her power has limits, if
not her grace; and the whole Trinity, with the Virgin to aid, had
not the power to pardon him who should translate Dante and Petrarch.
The prayers come in here, not merely for their beauty,--although the
Virgin knows how beautiful they are, whether man knows it or not;
but chiefly to show the good faith, the depth of feeling, the
intensity of conviction, with which society adored its ideal of
human perfection.
The Virgin filled so enormous a space in the life and thought of the
time that one stands now helpless before the mass of testimony to
her direct action and constant presence in every moment and form of
the illusion which men thought they thought their existence. The
twelfth and thirteenth centuries believed in the supernatural, and
might almost be said to have contracted a miracle-habit, as morbid
as any other form of artificial stimulant; they stood, like
children, in an attitude of gaping wonder before the miracle of
miracles which they felt in their own consciousness; but one can see
in this emotion, which is, after all, not exclusively infantile, no
special reason why they should have so passionately flung themselves
at the feet of the Woman rather than of the Man. Dante wrote in
1300, after the height of this emotion had passed; and Petrarch
wrote half a century later still; but so slowly did the vision fade,
and so often did it revive, that, to this day, it remains the
strongest symbol with which the Church can conjure.
Men were, after all, not wholly inconsequent; their attachment to
Mary rested on an instinct of self-preservation. They knew their own
peril. If there was to be a future life, Mary was their only hope.
She alone represented Love. The Trinity were, or was, One, and
could, by the nature of its essence, administer justice alone. Only
childlike illusion could expect a personal favour from Christ. Turn
the dogma as one would, to this it must logically come. Call the
three Godheads by what names one liked, still they must remain One;
must administer one justice; must admit only one law. In that law,
no human weakness or error could exist; by its essence it was
infinite, eternal, immutable. There was no crack and no cranny in
the system, through which human frailty could hope for escape. One
was forced from corner to corner by a remorseless logic until one
fell helpless at Mary's feet.
Without Mary, man had no hope except in atheism, and for atheism the
world was not ready. Hemmed back on that side, men rushed like sheep
to escape the butcher, and were driven to Mary; only too happy in
finding protection and hope in a being who could understand the
language they talked, and the excuses they had to offer. How
passionately they worshipped Mary, the Cathedral of Chartres shows;
and how this worship elevated the whole sex, all the literature and
history of the time proclaim. If you need more proof, you can read
more Petrarch; but still one cannot realize how actual Mary was, to
the men and women of the Middle Ages, and how she was present, as a
matter of course, whether by way of miracle or as a habit of life,
throughout their daily existence. The surest measure of her reality
is the enormous money value they put on her assistance, and the art
that was lavished on her gratification, but an almost equally
certain sign is the casual allusion, the chance reference to her,
which assumes her presence.
The earliest prose writer in the French language, who gave a picture
of actual French life, was Joinville; and although he wrote after
the death of Saint Louis and of William of Lorris and Adam de la
Halle, in the full decadence of Philip the Fair, toward 1300, he had
been a vassal of Thibaut and an intimate friend of Louis, and his
memories went back to the France of Blanche's regency. Born in 1224,
he must have seen in his youth the struggles of Thibaut against the
enemies of Blanche, and in fact his memoirs contain Blanche's
emphatic letter forbidding Thibaut to marry Yolande of Brittany. He
knew Pierre de Dreux well, and when they were captured by the
Saracens at Damietta, and thrown into the hold of a galley, "I had
my feet right on the face of the Count Pierre de Bretagne, whose
feet, in turn, were by my face." Joinville is almost twelfth-century
in feeling. He was neither feminine nor sceptical, but simple. He
showed no concern for poetry, but he put up a glass window to the
Virgin. His religion belonged to the "Chanson de Roland." When Saint
Louis, who had a pleasant sense of humour put to him his favourite
religious conundrums, Joinville affected not the least hypocrisy.
"Would you rather be a leper or commit a mortal sin?" asked the
King. "I would rather commit thirty mortal sins than be a leper,"
answered Joinville. "Do you wash the feet of the poor on Holy
Thursday?" asked the King. "God forbid!" replied Joinville; "never
will I wash the feet of such creatures!" Saint Louis mildly
corrected his, or rather Thibaut's, seneschal, for these impieties,
but he was no doubt used to them, for the soldier was never a
churchman. If one asks Joinville what he thinks of the Virgin, he
answers with the same frankness:--
Ung jour moi estant devant le roi lui demanday congie d'aller en
pelerinage a nostre Dame de Tourtouze [Tortosa in Syria] qui estoit
ung veage tres fort requis. Et y avoit grant quantite de pelerins
par chacun jour pour ce que c'est le premier autel qui onques fust
fait en l'onneur de la Mere de Dieu ainsi qu'on disoit lors. Et y
faisoit nostre Dame de grans miracles a merveilles. Entre lesquelz
elle en fist ung d'un pouvre homme qui estoit hors de son sens et
demoniacle. Car il avoit le maling esperit dedans le corps. Et
advint par ung jour qu'il fut amene a icelui autel de nostre Dame de
Tourtouze. Et ainsi que ses amys qui l'avoient la amene prioient a
nostre Dame qu'elle lui voulsist recouvrer sante et guerison le
diable que la pouvre creature avoit ou corps respondit: "Nostre Dame
n'est pas ici; elle est en Egipte pour aider au Roi de France et aux
Chrestiens qui aujourdhui arrivent en la Terre sainte centre toute
paiennie qui sont a cheval." Et fut mis en escript le jour que le
deable profera ces motz et fut apporte au legat qui estoit avecques
le roi de France; lequel me dist depuis que a celui jour nous estion
arrivez en la terre d'Egipte. Et suis bien certain que la bonne Dame
Marie nous y eut bien besoin.
This happened in Syria, after the total failure of the crusade in
Egypt. The ordinary man, even if he were a priest or a soldier,
needed a miraculous faith to persuade him that Our Lady or any other
divine power, had helped the crusades of Saint Louis. Few of the
usual fictions on which society rested had ever required such
defiance of facts; but, at least for a time, society held firm. The
thirteenth century could not afford to admit a doubt. Society had
staked its existence, in this world and the next, on the reality and
power of the Virgin; it had invested in her care nearly its whole
capital, spiritual, artistic, intellectual, and economical, even to
the bulk of its real and personal estate; and her overthrow would
have been the most appalling disaster the Western world had ever
known. Without her, the Trinity itself could not stand; the Church
must fall; the future world must dissolve. Not even the collapse of
the Roman Empire compared with a calamity so serious; for that had
created, not destroyed, a faith.
If sceptics there were, they kept silence. Men disputed and doubted
about the Trinity, but about the Virgin the satirists Rutebeuf and
Adam de la Halle wrote in the same spirit as Saint Bernard and
Abelard, Adam de Saint-Victor and the pious monk Gaultier de Coincy.
In the midst of violent disputes on other points of doctrine, the
disputants united in devotion to Mary; and it was the single
redeeming quality about them. The monarchs believed almost more
implicitly than their subjects, and maintained the belief to the
last. Doubtless the death of Queen Blanche marked the flood-tide at
its height; but an authority so established as that of the Virgin,
founded on instincts so deep, logic so rigorous, and, above all, on
wealth so vast, declined slowly. Saint Louis died in 1270. Two
hundred long and dismal years followed, in the midst of wars,
decline of faith, dissolution of the old ties and interests, until,
toward 1470, Louis XI succeeded in restoring some semblance of
solidity to the State; and Louis XI divided his time and his money
impartially between the Virgin of Chartres and the Virgin of Paris.
In that respect, one can see no difference between him and Saint
Louis, nor much between Philippe de Commines and Joinville. After
Louis XI, another fantastic century passed, filled with the foulest
horrors of history--religious wars; assassinations; Saint
Bartholomews; sieges of Chartres; Huguenot leagues and sweeping
destruction of religious monuments; Catholic leagues and fanatical
reprisals on friends and foes,--the actual dissolution of society in
a mass of horrors compared with which even the Albigensian crusade
was a local accident, all ending in the reign of the last Valois,
Henry III, the weirdest, most fascinating, most repulsive, most
pathetic and most pitiable of the whole picturesque series of French
kings. If you look into the Journal of Pierre de l'Estoile, under
date of January 26,1582, you can read the entry:--
The King and the Queen [Louise de Lorraine], separately, and each
accompanied by a good troop [of companions] went on foot from Paris
to Chartres on a pilgrimage [voyage] to Notre-Dame-de-dessous-Terre
[Our Lady of the Crypt], where a neuvaine was celebrated at the last
mass at which the King and Queen assisted, and offered a silver-gilt
statue of Notre Dame which weighed a hundred marks [eight hundred
ounces], with the object of having lineage which might succeed to
the throne.
In the dead of winter, in robes of penitents, over the roughest
roads, on foot, the King and Queen, then seven years married, walked
fifty miles to Chartres to supplicate the Virgin for children, and
back again; and this they did year after year until Jacques Clement
put an end to it with his dagger, in 1589, although the Virgin never
chose to perform that miracle; but, instead, allowed the House of
Valois to die out and sat on her throne in patience while the House
of Bourbon was anointed in their place. The only French King ever
crowned in the presence of Our Lady of Chartres was Henry IV--a
heretic.
The year 1589, which was so decisive for Henry IV in France, marked
in England the rise of Shakespeare as a sort of stage-monarch. While
in France the Virgin still held such power that kings and queens
asked her for favours, almost as instinctively as they had done five
hundred years before, in England Shakespeare set all human nature
and all human history on the stage, with hardly an allusion to the
Virgin's name, unless as an oath. The exceptions are worth noting as
a matter of curious Shakespearean criticism, for they are but two,
and both are lines in the "First Part of Henry VI," spoken by the
Maid of Orleans:--
Christ's mother helps me, else I were too weak!
Whether the "First Part of Henry VI" was written by Shakespeare at
all has been a doubt much discussed, and too deep for tourists; but
that this line was written by a Roman Catholic is the more likely
because no such religious thought recurs in all the rest of
Shakespeare's works, dramatic or lyric, unless it is implied in
Gaunt's allusion to "the world's ransom, blessed Mary's Son." Thus,
while three hundred years caused in England the disappearance of the
great divinity on whom the twelfth and thirteenth centuries had
lavished all their hopes, and during these three centuries every
earthly throne had been repeatedly shaken or shattered, the Church
had been broken in halves, faith had been lost, and philosophies
overthrown, the Virgin still remained and remains the most intensely
and the most widely and the most personally felt, of all characters,
divine or human or imaginary, that ever existed among men. Nothing
has even remotely taken her place. The only possible exception is
the Buddha, Sakya Muni; but to the Western mind, a figure like the
Buddha stood much farther away than the Virgin. That of the Christ
even to Saint Bernard stood not so near as that of his mother.
Abelard expressed the fact in its logical necessity even more
strongly than Saint Bernard did:--
Te requirunt vota fidelium,
Ad te corda suspirant omnium,
Tu spes nostra post Deum unica,
Advocata nobis es posita.
Ad judicis matrem confugiunt,
Qui judicis iram effugiunt,
Quae praecari pro eis cogitur,
Quae pro reis mater efficitur.
"After the Trinity, you are our ONLY hope"; spes nostra unica; "you
are placed there as our advocate; all of us who fear the wrath of
the Judge, fly to the Judge's mother, who is logically compelled to
sue for us, and stands in the place of a mother to the guilty."
Abelard's logic was always ruthless, and the "cogitur" is a stronger
word than one would like to use now, with a priest in hearing. We
need not insist on it; but what one must insist on, is the good
faith of the whole people,--kings, queens, princes of all sorts,
philosophers, poets, soldiers, artists, as well as of the commoners
like ourselves, and the poor,--for the good faith of the priests is
not important to the understanding, since any class which is
sufficiently interested in believing will always believe. In order
to feel Gothic architecture in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries,
one must feel first and last, around and above and beneath it, the
good faith of the public, excepting only Jews and atheists,
permeating every portion of it with the conviction of an immediate
alternative between heaven and hell, with Mary as the ONLY court in
equity capable of overruling strict law.
The Virgin was a real person, whose tastes, wishes, instincts,
passions, were intimately known. Enough of the Virgin's literature
survives to show her character, and the course of her daily life. We
know more about her habits and thoughts than about those of earthly
queens. The "Miracles de la Vierge" make a large part, and not the
poorest part, of the enormous literature of these two centuries,
although the works of Albertus Magnus fill twenty-one folio volumes
and those of Thomas Aquinas fill more, while the "Chansons de Geste"
and the "Romans," published or unpublished, are a special branch of
literature with libraries to themselves. The collection of the
Virgin's miracles put in verse by Gaultier de Coincy, monk, prior,
and poet, between 1214 and 1233--the precise moment of the Chartres
sculpture and glass--contains thirty thousand lines. Another great
collection, narrating especially the miracles of the Virgin of
Chartres, was made by a priest of Chartres Cathedral about 1240.
Separate series, or single tales, have appeared and are appearing
constantly, but no general collection has ever been made, although
the whole poetic literature of the Virgin could be printed in the
space of two or three volumes of scholastic philosophy, and if the
Church had cared half as truly for the Virgin as it has for Thomas
Aquinas, every miracle might have been collected and published a
score of times. The miracles themselves, indeed, are not very
numerous. In Gaultier de Coincy's collection they number only about
fifty. The Chartres collection relates chiefly to the horrible
outbreak of what was called leprosy--the "mal ardent,"--which
ravaged the north of France during the crusades, and added intensity
to the feelings which brought all society to the Virgin's feet.
Recent scholars are cataloguing and classifying the miracles, as far
as they survive, and have reduced the number within very moderate
limits. As poetry, Gaultier de Coincy's are the best.
Of Gaultier de Coincy and his poetry, Gaston Paris has something to
say which is worth quoting:--
It is the most curious, and often the most singular monument of the
infantile piety of the Middle Ages. Devotion to Mary is presented in
it as a kind of infallible guarantee not only against every sort of
evil, but also against the most legitimate consequences of sin and
even of crime. In these stories which have revolted the most
rational piety, as well as the philosophy of modern times, one must
still admit a gentle and penetrating charm; a naivete; a tenderness
and a simplicity of heart, which touch, while they raise a smile.
There, for instance, one sees a sick monk cured by the milk that Our
Lady herself comes to invite him to draw from her "douce mamelle"; a
robber who is in the habit of recommending himself to the Virgin
whenever he is going to "embler," is held up by her white hands for
three days on the gibbet where he is hung, until the miracle becomes
evident, and procures his pardon; an ignorant monk who knows only
his Ave Maria, and is despised on that account, when dead reveals
his sanctity by five roses which come out of his mouth in honour of
the five letters of the name Maria; a nun, who has quitted her
convent to lead a life of sin, returns after long years, and finds
that the Holy Virgin, to whom, in spite of all, she has never ceased
to offer every day her prayer, has, during all this time, filled her
place as sacristine, so that no one has perceived her absence.
Gaston Paris inclined to apologize to his "bons bourgeois de Paris"
for reintroducing to them a character so doubtful as the Virgin
Mary, but, for our studies, the professor's elementary morality is
eloquent. Clearly, M. Paris, the highest academic authority in the
world, thought that the Virgin could hardly, in his time, say the
year 1900, be received into good society in the Latin Quarter. Our
own English ancestors, known as Puritans, held the same opinion, and
excluded her from their society some four hundred years earlier, for
the same reasons which affected M. Gaston Paris. These reasons were
just, and showed the respectability of the citizens who held them.
In no well-regulated community, under a proper system of police,
could the Virgin feel at home, and the same thing may be said of
most other saints as well as sinners. Her conduct was at times
undignified, as M. Paris complained, She condescended to do domestic
service, in order to help her friends, and she would use her needle,
if she were in the mood, for the same object. The "Golden Legend"
relates that:--
A certain priest, who celebrated every day a mass in honour of the
Holy Virgin, was brought up before Saint Thomas of Canterbury who
suspended him from his charge, judging him to be short-witted and
irresponsible. Now Saint Thomas had occasion to mend his hair-cloth
shirt, and while waiting for an opportunity to do so, had hidden it
under his bed; so the Virgin appeared to the priest and said to him:
"Go find the archbishop and tell him that she, for love of whom you
celebrated masses, has herself mended his shirt for him which is
under his bed; and tell him that she sends you to him that he may
take off the interdict he has imposed on you." And Saint Thomas
found that his shirt had in fact been mended. He relieved the
priest, begging him to keep the secret of his wearing a hair-shirt.
Mary did some exceedingly unconventional things, and among them the
darning Thomas A'Becket's hair-shirt, and the supporting a robber on
the gibbet, were not the most singular, yet they seem not to have
shocked Queen Blanche or Saint Francis or Saint Thomas Aquinas so
much as they shocked M. Gaston Paris and M. Prudhomme. You have
still to visit the cathedral at Le Mans for the sake of its twelfth-
century glass, and there, in the lower panel of the beautiful, and
very early, window of Saint Protais, you will see the full-length
figure of a man, lying in bed, under a handsome blanket, watching,
with staring eyes, the Virgin, in a green tunic, wearing her royal
crown, who is striking him on the head with a heavy hammer and with
both hands. The miracle belongs to local history, and is amusing
only to show how little the Virgin cared for criticism of her
manners or acts. She was above criticism. She made manners. Her acts
were laws. No one thought of criticizing, in the style of a normal
school, the will of such a queen; but one might treat her with a
degree of familiarity, under great provocation, which would startle
easier critics than the French, Here is an instance:--
A widow had an only child whom she tenderly loved. On hearing that
this son had been taken by the enemy, chained, and put in prison,
she burst into tears, and addressing herself to the Virgin, to whom
she was especially devoted, she asked her with obstinacy for the
release of her son; but when she saw at last that her prayers
remained unanswered, she went to the church where there was a
sculptured image of Mary, and there, before the image, she said:
"Holy Virgin, I have begged you to deliver my son, and you have not
been willing to help an unhappy mother! I've implored your patronage
for my son, and you have refused it! Very good! just as my son has
been taken away from me, so I am going to take away yours, and keep
him as a hostage!" Saying this, she approached, took the statue
child on the Virgin's breast, carried it home, wrapped it in
spotless linen, and locked it up in a box, happy to have such a
hostage for her son's return. Now, the following night, the Virgin
appeared to the young man, opened his prison doors, and said: "Tell
your mother, my child, to return me my Son now that I have returned
hers!" The young man came home to his mother and told her of his
miraculous deliverance; and she, overjoyed, hastened to go with the
little Jesus to the Virgin, saying to her: "I thank you, heavenly
lady, for restoring me my child, and in return I restore yours!"
For the exactness of this story in all its details, Bishop James of
Voragio could not have vouched, nor did it greatly matter. What he
could vouch for was the relation of intimacy and confidence between
his people and the Queen of Heaven. The fact, conspicuous above all
other historical certainties about religion, that the Virgin was by
essence illogical, unreasonable and feminine, is the only fact of
any ultimate value worth studying, and starts a number of questions
that history has shown itself clearly afraid to touch. Protestant
and Catholic differ little in that respect. No one has ventured to
explain why the Virgin wielded exclusive power over poor and rich,
sinners and saints, alike. Why were all the Protestant churches cold
failures without her help? Why could not the Holy Ghost--the spirit
of Love and Grace--equally answer their prayers? Why was the Son
powerless? Why was Chartres Cathedral in the thirteenth century--
like Lourdes to-day--the expression of what is in substance a
separate religion? Why did the gentle and gracious Virgin Mother so
exasperate the Pilgrim Father? Why was the Woman struck out of the
Church and ignored in the State? These questions are not antiquarian
or trifling in historical value; they tug at the very heart-strings
of all that makes whatever order is in the cosmos. If a Unity
exists, in which and toward which all energies centre, it must
explain and include Duality, Diversity, Infinity--Sex!
Although certain to be contradicted by every pious churchman, a
heretic must insist on thinking that the Mater Dolorosa was the
logical Virgin of the Church, and that the Trinity would never have
raised her from the foot of the Cross, had not the Virgin of Majesty
been imposed, by necessity and public unanimity, on a creed which
was meant to be complete without her. The true feeling of the Church
was best expressed by the Virgin herself in one of her attested
miracles: "A clerk, trusting more in the Mother than in the Son,
never stopped repeating the angelic salutation for his only prayer.
Once as he said again the 'Ave Maria,' the Lord appeared to him, and
said to him: 'My Mother thanks you much for all the Salutations that
you make her; but still you should not forget to salute me also:
tamen et me salutare memento.'" The Trinity feared absorption in
her, but was compelled to accept, and even to invite her aid,
because the Trinity was a court of strict law, and, as in the old
customary law, no process of equity could be introduced except by
direct appeal to a higher power. She was imposed unanimously by all
classes, because what man wanted most in the Middle Ages was not
merely law or equity, but also and particularly favour. Strict
justice, either on earth or in heaven, was the last thing that
society cared to face. All men were sinners, and had, at least, the
merit of feeling that, if they got their deserts, not one would
escape worse than whipping. The instinct of individuality went down
through all classes, from the count at the top, to the jugleors and
menestreus at the bottom. The individual rebelled against restraint;
society wanted to do what it pleased; all disliked the laws which
Church and State were trying to fasten on them. They longed for a
power above law,--or above the contorted mass of ignorance and
absurdity bearing the name of law; but the power which they longed
for was not human, for humanity they knew to be corrupt and
incompetent from the day of Adam's creation to the day of the Last
Judgment. They were all criminals; if not, they would have had no
use for the Church and very little for the State; but they had at
least the merit of their faults; they knew what they were, and, like
children, they yearned for protection, pardon, and love. This was
what the Trinity, though omnipotent, could not give. Whatever the
heretic or mystic might try to persuade himself, God could not be
Love. God was Justice, Order, Unity, Perfection; He could not be
human and imperfect, nor could the Son or the Holy Ghost be other
than the Father. The Mother alone was human, imperfect, and could
love; she alone was Favour, Duality, Diversity. Under any
conceivable form of religion, this duality must find embodiment
somewhere, and the Middle Ages logically insisted that, as it could
not be in the Trinity, either separately or together, it must be in
the Mother. If the Trinity was in its essence Unity, the Mother
alone could represent whatever was not Unity; whatever was
irregular, exceptional, outlawed; and this was the whole human race.
The saints alone were safe, after they were sainted. Every one else
was criminal, and men differed so little in degree of sin that, in
Mary's eyes, all were subjects for her pity and help.
This general rule of favour, apart from law, or the reverse of law,
was the mark of Mary's activity in human affairs. Take, for an
example, an entire class of her miracles, applying to the discipline
of the Church! A bishop ejected an ignorant and corrupt priest from
his living, as all bishops constantly had to do. The priest had
taken the precaution to make himself Mary's MAN; he had devoted
himself to her service and her worship. Mary instantly interfered,--
just as Queen Eleanor or Queen Blanche would have done,--most
unreasonably, and never was a poor bishop more roughly scolded by an
orthodox queen! "Moult airieement," very airily or angrily, she said
to him (Bartsch, 1887, p. 363):--
Ce saches tu certainement
Se tu li matinet bien main
Ne rapeles mon chapelain
A son servise et a s'enor,
L'ame de toi a desenor
Ains trente jors departira
Et es dolors d'infer ira.
Now know you this for sure and true,
Unless to-morrow this you do,
--And do it very early too,--
Restore my chaplain to his due,
A much worse fate remains for you!
Within a month your soul shall go
To suffer in the flames below.
The story-teller--himself a priest and prior--caught the lofty trick
of manner which belonged to the great ladies of the court, and was
inherited by them, even in England, down to the time of Queen
Elizabeth, who treated her bishops also like domestic servants;--
"matinet bien main!" To the public, as to us, the justice of the
rebuke was nothing to the point; but that a friend should exist on
earth or in heaven, who dared to browbeat a bishop, caused the
keenest personal delight. The legends are clearer on this point than
on any other. The people loved Mary because she trampled on
conventions; not merely because she could do it, but because she
liked to do what shocked every well-regulated authority. Her pity
had no limit.
One of the Chartres miracles expresses the same motive in language
almost plainer still. A good-for-nothing clerk, vicious, proud,
vain, rude, and altogether worthless, but devoted to the Virgin,
died, and with general approval his body was thrown into a ditch
(Bartsch, 1887, p. 369):--
Mais cele ou sort tote pities
Tote douceurs tote amisties
Et qui les siens onques n'oublie
SON PECHEOR n'oblia mie.
"HER sinner!" Mary would not have been a true queen unless she had
protected her own. The whole morality of the Middle Ages stood in
the obligation of every master to protect his dependent. The
herdsmen of Count Garin of Beaucaire were the superiors of their
damoiseau Aucassins, while they felt sure of the Count. Mary was the
highest of all the feudal ladies, and was the example for all in
loyalty to her own, when she had to humiliate her own Bishop of
Chartres for the sake of a worthless brute. "Do you suppose it
doesn't annoy me," she said, "to see my friend buried in a common
ditch? Take him out at once! I command! tell the clergy it is my
order, and that I will never forgive them unless to-morrow morning
without delay, they bury my friend in the best place in the
cemetery!":--
Cuidies vos donc qu'il ne m'enuit
Quant vos l'aves si adosse
Que mis l'aves en un fosse?
Metes Ten fors je le comant!
Di le clergie que je li mant!
Ne me puet mi repaier
Se le matin sans delayer
A grant heneur n'est mis amis
Ou plus beau leu de l'aitre mis.
Naturally, her order was instantly obeyed. In the feudal regime,
disobedience to an order was treason--or even hesitation to obey--
when the order was serious; very much as in a modern army,
disobedience is not regarded as conceivable. Mary's wish was
absolute law, on earth as in heaven. For her, other laws were not
made. Intensely human, but always Queen, she upset, at her pleasure,
the decisions of every court and the orders of every authority,
human or divine; interfered directly in the ordeal; altered the
processes of nature; abolished space; annihilated time. Like other
queens, she had many of the failings and prejudices of her humanity.
In spite of her own origin, she disliked Jews, and rarely neglected
a chance to maltreat them. She was not in the least a prude. To her,
sin was simply humanity, and she seemed often on the point of
defending her arbitrary acts of mercy, by frankly telling the
Trinity that if the Creator meant to punish man, He should not have
made him. The people, who always in their hearts protested against
bearing the responsibility for the Creator's arbitrary creations,
delighted to see her upset the law, and reverse the rulings of the
Trinity. They idolized her for being strong, physically and in will,
so that she feared nothing, and was as helpful to the knight in the
melee of battle as to the young mother in child-bed. The only
character in which they seemed slow to recognize Mary was that of
bourgeoise. The bourgeoisie courted her favour at great expense, but
she seemed to be at home on the farm, rather than in the shop. She
had very rudimentary knowledge, indeed, of the principles of
political economy as we understand them, and her views on the
subject of money-lending or banking were so feminine as to rouse in
that powerful class a vindictive enmity which helped to overthrow
her throne. On the other hand, she showed a marked weakness for
chivalry, and one of her prettiest and most twelfth-century miracles
is that of the knight who heard mass while Mary took his place in
the lists. It is much too charming to lose (Bartsch, 1895, p. 311):--
Un chevalier courtois et sages,
Hardis et de grant vasselages,
Nus mieudres en chevalerie,
Moult amoit la vierge Marie.
Pour son barnage demener
Et son franc cors d'armes pener,
Aloit a son tournoiement
Garnis de son contentement.
Au dieu plaisir ainsi avint
Que quant le jour du tournoi vint
Il se hastoit de chevauchier,
Bien vousist estre en champ premier.
D'une eglise qui pres estoit
Oi les sains que l'on sonnoit
Pour la sainte messe chanter.
Le chevalier sans arrester
S'en est ale droit a l'eglise
Pour escouter le dieu servise.
L'en chantoit tantost hautement
Une messe devotement
De la sainte Vierge Marie;
Puis a on autre comencie.
Le chevalier vien l'escouta,
De bon cuer la dame pria,
Et quant la messe fut finee
La tierce fu recomenciee
Tantost en ce meisme lieu.
"Sire, pour la sainte char dieu!"
Ce li a dit son escuier,
"L'heure passe de tournoier,
Et vous que demourez ici?
Venez vous en, je vous en pri!
Volez vous devenir hermite
Ou papelart ou ypocrite?
Alons en a nostre mestier!"
A knight both courteous and wise
And brave and bold in enterprise.
No better knight was ever seen,
Greatly loved the Virgin Queen.
Once, to contest the tourney's prize
And keep his strength in exercise,
He rode out to the listed field
Armed at all points with lance and shield;
But it pleased God that when the day
Of tourney came, and on his way
He pressed his charger's speed apace
To reach, before his friends, the place,
He saw a church hard by the road
And heard the church-bells sounding loud
To celebrate the holy mass.
Without a thought the church to pass
The knight drew rein, and entered there
To seek the aid of God in prayer.
High and dear they chanted then
A solemn mass to Mary Queen;
Then afresh began again.
Lost in his prayers the good knight stayed;
With all his heart to Mary prayed;
And, when the second one was done,
Straightway the third mass was begun,
Right there upon the self-same place.
"Sire, for mercy of God's grace!"
Whispered his squire in his ear;
"The hour of tournament is near;
Why do you want to linger here?
Is it a hermit to become,
Or hypocrite, or priest of Rome?
Come on, at once! despatch your prayer!
Let us be off to our affair!"
The accent of truth still lingers in this remonstrance of the
squire, who must, from all time, have lost his temper on finding his
chevalier addicted to "papelardie" when he should have been
fighting; but the priest had the advantage of telling the story and
pointing the moral. This advantage the priest neglected rarely, but
in this case he used it with such refinement and so much literary
skill that even the squire might have been patient. With the
invariable gentle courtesy of the true knight, the chevalier replied
only by soft words:--
"Amis!" ce dist li chevalier,
"Cil tournoie moult noblement
Qui le servise dieu entent."
In one of Milton's sonnets is a famous line which is commonly
classed among the noblest verses of the English language:--
"They also serve, who only stand and wait."
Fine as it is, with the simplicity of the grand style, like the
"Chanson de Roland" the verse of Milton does not quite destroy the
charm of thirteenth-century diction:--
"Friend!" said to him the chevalier,
"He tourneys very nobly too,
Who only hears God's service through!"
No doubt the verses lack the singular power of the eleventh century;
it is not worth while to pretend that any verse written in the
thirteenth century wholly holds its own against "Roland":--
"Sire cumpain! faites le vus de gred?
Ja est co Rollanz ki tant vos soelt amer!"
The courtesy of Roland has the serious solidity of the Romanesque
arch, and that of Lancelot and Aucassins has the grace of a
legendary window; but one may love it, all the same; and one may
even love the knight,--papelard though he were,--as he turned back
to the altar and remained in prayer until the last mass was ended.
Then they mounted and rode on toward the field, and of course you
foresee what had happened. In itself the story is bald enough, but
it is told with such skill that one never tires of it. As the
chevalier and the squire approached the lists, they met the other
knights returning, for the jousts were over; but, to the
astonishment of the chevalier, he was greeted by all who passed him
with shouts of applause for his marvellous triumph in the lists,
where he had taken all the prizes and all the prisoners:--
Les chevaliers ont encontrez,
Qui du tournois sont retournes,
Qui du tout en tout est feru.
S'en avoit tout le pris eu
Le chevalier qui reperoit
Des messes qu' oies avoit.
Les autres qui s'en reperoient
Le saluent et le conjoient
Et distrent bien que onques mes
Nul chevalier ne prist tel fes
D'armes com il ot fet ce jour;
A tousjours en avroit l'onnour.
Moult en i ot qui se rendoient
A lui prisonier, et disoient
"Nous somes vostre prisonier,
Ne nous ne pourrions nier,
Ne nous aiez par armes pris."
Lors ne fu plus cil esbahis,
Car il a entendu tantost
Que cele fu pour lui en l'ost
Pour qui il fu en la chapelle.
His friends, returning from the fight,
On the way there met the knight,
For the jousts were wholly run,
And all the prizes had been won
By the knight who had not stirred
From the masses he had heard.
All the knights, as they came by,
Saluted him and gave him joy,
And frankly said that never yet
Had any knight performed such feat,
Nor ever honour won so great
As he had done in arms that day;
While many of them stopped to say
That they all his prisoners were:
"In truth, your prisoners we are:
We cannot but admit it true:
Taken we were in arms by you!"
Then the truth dawned on him there,
And all at once he saw the light,
That She, by whom he stood in prayer,
--The Virgin,--stood by him in fight!
The moral of the tale belongs to the best feudal times. The knight
at once recognized that he had become the liege-man of the Queen,
and henceforth must render his service entirely to her. So he called
his "barons," or tenants, together, and after telling them what had
happened, took leave of them and the "siecle":--
"Moult est ciest tournoiement beaux
Ou ele a pour moi tournoie;
Mes trop l'avroit mal emploie
Se pour lui je ne tournoioie!
Fox seroie se retournoie
A la mondaine vanite.
A dieu promet en verite
Que james ne tournoierai
Fors devant le juge verai
Qui conoit le bon chevalier
Et selonc le fet set jutgier."
Lors prent congie piteusement,
Et maint en plorent tenrement.
D'euls se part, en une abaie
Servi puis la vierge Marie.
"Glorious has the tourney been
Where for me has fought the Queen;
But a disgrace for me it were
If I tourneyed not for her.
Traitor to her should I be,
Returned to worldly vanity.
I promise truly, by God's grace,
Never again the lists to see,
Except before that Judge's face,
Who knows the true knight from the base,
And gives to each his final place."
Then piteously he takes his leave
While in tears his barons grieve.
So he parts, and in an abbey
Serves henceforth the Virgin Mary.
Observe that in this case Mary exacted no service! Usually the
legends are told, as in this instance, by priests, though they were
told in the same spirit by laymen, as you can see in the poems of
Rutebeuf, and they would not have been told very differently by
soldiers, if one may judge from Joinville; but commonly the Virgin
herself prescribed the kind of service she wished. Especially to the
young knight who had, of his own accord, chosen her for his liege,
she showed herself as exacting as other great ladies showed
themselves toward their Lancelots and Tristans. When she chose, she
could even indulge in more or less coquetry, else she could never
have appealed to the sympathies of the thirteenth-century knight-
errant. One of her miracles told how she disciplined the young men
who were too much in the habit of assuming her service in order to
obtain selfish objects. A youthful chevalier, much given to
tournaments and the other worldly diversions of the siecle, fell in
love, after the rigorous obligation of his class, as you know from
your Dulcinea del Toboso, with a lady who, as was also prescribed by
the rules of courteous love, declined to listen to him. An abbot of
his acquaintance, sympathizing with his distress, suggested to him
the happy idea of appealing for help to the Queen of Heaven. He
followed the advice, and for an entire year shut himself up, and
prayed to Mary, in her chapel, that she would soften the heart of
his beloved, and bring her to listen to his prayer. At the end of
the twelvemonth, fixed as a natural and sufficient proof of his
earnestness in devotion, he felt himself entitled to indulge again
in innocent worldly pleasures, and on the first morning after his
release, he started out on horseback for a day's hunting. Probably
thousands of young knights and squires were always doing more or
less the same thing, and it was quite usual that, as they rode
through the fields or forests, they should happen on a solitary
chapel or shrine, as this knight did. He stopped long enough to
kneel in it and renew his prayer to the Queen:--
La mere dieu qui maint chetif
A retrait de chetivete
Par sa grant debonnairte
Par sa courtoise courtoisie
Au las qui tant l'apele et prie
Ignelement s'est demonstree,
D'une coronne corronnee
Plaine de pierres precieuses
Si flamboianz si precieuses
Pour pou li euil ne li esluisent.
Si netement ainsi reluisent
Et resplendissent com la raie
Qui en este au matin raie.
Tant par a bel et cler le vis
Que buer fu mez, ce li est vis,
Qui s'i puest assez mirer.
"Cele qui te fait soupirer
Et en si grant erreur t'a mis,"
Fait nostre dame, "biau douz amis,
Est ele plus bele que moi?"
Li chevaliers a tel effroi
De la clarte, ne sai que face;
Ses mains giete devant sa face;
Tel hide a et tel freeur
Chaoir se laisse de freeur;
Mais cele en qui pitie est toute
Li dist: "Amis, or n'aies doute!
Je suis cele, n'en doute mie,
Qui te doi faire avoir t'amie.
Or prens garde que tu feras.
Cele que tu miex ameras
De nous ii auras a amie."
God's Mother who to many a wretch
Has brought relief from wretchedness.
By her infinite goodness,
By her courteous courteousness,
To her suppliant in distress
Came from heaven quickly down;
On her head she bore the crown,
Full of precious stones and gems
Darting splendour, flashing flames,
Till the eye near lost its sight
In the keenness of the light,
As the summer morning's sun
Blinds the eyes it shines upon.
So beautiful and bright her face,
Only to look on her is grace.
"She who has caused you thus to sigh,
And has brought you to this end,"--
Said Our Lady,--"Tell me, friend,
Is she handsomer than I?"
Scared by her brilliancy, the knight
Knows not what to do for fright;
He clasps his hands before his face,
And in his shame and his disgrace
Falls prostrate on the ground with fear;
But she with pity ever near
Tells him:--"Friend, be not afraid!
Doubt not that I am she whose aid
Shall surely bring your love to you;
But take good care what you shall do!
She you shall love most faithfully
Of us two, shall your mistress be."
One is at a loss to imagine what a young gentleman could do, in such
a situation, except to obey, with the fewest words possible, the
suggestion so gracefully intended. Queen's favours might be fatal
gifts, but they were much more fatal to reject than to accept.
Whatever might be the preferences of the knight, he had invited his
own fate, and in consequence was fortunate to be allowed the option
of dying and going to heaven, or dying without going to heaven. Mary
was not always so gentle with young men who deserted or neglected
her for an earthly rival;--the offence which irritated her most, and
occasionally caused her to use language which hardly bears
translation into modern English. Without meaning to assert that the
Queen of Heaven was jealous as Queen Blanche herself, one must still
admit that she was very severe on lovers who showed willingness to
leave her service, and take service with any other lady. One of her
admirers, educated for the priesthood but not yet in full orders,
was obliged by reasons of family interest to quit his career in
order to marry. An insult like this was more than Mary could endure,
and she gave the young man a lesson he never forgot:--
Ireement li prent a dire
La mere au roi de paradis:
"Di moi, di moi, tu que jadis
M'amoies tant de tout ton coeur.
Pourquoi m'as tu jete puer?
Di moi, di moi, ou est donc cele
Qui plus de moi bone est et bele?...
Pourquoi, pourquoi, las durfeus,
Las engignez, las deceuz,
Me lais pour une lasse fame,
Qui suis du del Royne et Dame?
Enne fais tu trop mauvais change
Qui tu por une fame estrange
Me laisses qui par amors t'amoie
Et ja ou ciel t'apareilloie
En mes chambres un riche lit
Por couchier t'ame a grand delit?
Trop par as faites grant merveilles
S'autrement tost ne te conseilles
Ou ciel serra tes lits deffais
Et en la flamme d'enfer faiz!"
With anger flashing in her eyes
Answers the Queen of Paradise:
"Tell me, tell me! you of old
Loved me once with love untold;
Why now throw me aside?
Tell me, tell me! where a bride
Kinder or fairer have you won?...
Wherefore, wherefore, wretched one,
Deceived, betrayed, misled, undone,
Leave me for a creature mean,
Me, who am of Heaven the Queen?
Can you make a worse exchange,
You that for a woman strange,
Leave me who, with perfect love,
Waiting you in heaven above,
Had in my chamber richly dressed
A bed of bliss your soul to rest?
Terrible is your mistake!
Unless you better council take,
In heaven your bed shall be unmade,
And in the flames of hell be spread."
A mistress who loved in this manner was not to be gainsaid. No
earthly love had a chance of holding its own against this unfair
combination of heaven and hell, and Mary was as unscrupulous as any
other great lady in abusing all her advantages in order to save HER
souls. Frenchmen never found fault with abuses of power for what
they thought a serious object. The more tyrannical Mary was, the
more her adorers adored, and they wholly approved, both in love and
in law, the rule that any man who changed his allegiance without
permission, did so at his own peril. His life and property were
forfeit. Mary showed him too much grace in giving him an option.
Even in anger Mary always remained a great lady, and in the ordinary
relations of society her manners were exquisite, as they were,
according to Joinville, in the court of Saint Louis, when tempers
were not overwrought. The very brutality of the brutal compelled the
courteous to exaggerate courtesy, and some of the royal family were
as coarse as the king was delicate in manners. In heaven the manners
were perfect, and almost as stately as those of Roland and Oliver.
On one occasion Saint Peter found himself embarrassed by an affair
which the public opinion of the Court of Heaven, although not by any
means puritanic, thought more objectionable--in fact, more frankly
discreditable--than an honest corrupt job ought to be; and even his
influence, though certainly considerable, wholly failed to carry it
through the law-court. The case, as reported by Gaultier de Coincy,
was this: A very worthless creature of Saint Peter's--a monk of
Cologne--who had led a scandalous life, and "ne cremoit dieu, ordre
ne roule," died, and in due course of law was tried, convicted, and
dragged off by the devils to undergo his term of punishment. Saint
Peter could not desert his sinner, though much ashamed of him, and
accordingly made formal application to the Trinity for a pardon. The
Trinity, somewhat severely, refused. Finding his own interest
insufficient, Saint Peter tried to strengthen it by asking the
archangels to help him; but the case was too much for them also, and
they declined. The brother apostles were appealed to, with the same
result; and finally even the saints, though they had so obvious
interest in keeping friendly relations with Peter, found public
opinion too strong to defy. The case was desperate. The Trinity
were--or was--emphatic, and--what was rare in the Middle Ages--every
member of the feudal hierarchy sustained its decision. Nothing more
could be done in the regular way. Saint Peter was obliged to divest
himself of authority, and place himself and his dignity in the hands
of the Virgin. Accordingly he asked for an audience, and stated the
case to Our Lady. With the utmost grace, she instantly responded:--
"Pierre, Pierre," dit Nostre Dame,
"En moult grand poine et por ceste ame
De mon douz filz me fierai
Tant que pour toi l'en prierai."
La Mere Dieu lors s'est levee,
Devant son filz s'en est alee
Et ses virges toutes apres.
De lui si tint Pierre pres,
Quar sanz doutance bien savoit
Que sa besoigne faite avoit
Puisque cele l'avoit en prise
Ou forme humaine avoit prise.
Quant sa Mere vit li douz Sire
Qui de son doit daigna escrire
Qu'en honourant et pere et mere
En contre lui a chere clere
Se leva moult festivement
Et si li dist moult doucement;
"Bien veigniez vous, ma douce mere,"
Comme douz filz, comme douz pere.
Doucement l'a par la main prise
Et doucement lez lui assise;
Lors li a dit:--"A douce chiere,
Que veus ma douce mere chiere,
Mes amies et mes sereurs?"
"Pierre, Pierre," our Lady said,
"With all my heart I'll give you aid,
And to my gentle Son I'll sue
Until I beg that soul for you."
God's Mother then arose straightway,
And sought her Son without delay;
All her virgins followed her,
And Saint Peter kept him near,
For he knew his task was done
And his prize already won,
Since it was hers, in whom began
The life of God in form of Man.
When our dear Lord, who deigned to write
With his own hand that in his sight
Those in his kingdom held most dear
Father and mother honoured here,--
When He saw His Mother's face
He rose and said with gentle grace:
"Well are you come, my heart's desire!"
Like loving son, like gracious sire;
Took her hand gently in His own;
Gently placed her on His throne,
Wishing her graciously good cheer:--
"What brings my gentle Mother here,
My sister, and my dearest friend?"
One can see Queen Blanche going to beg--or command--a favour of her
son, King Louis, and the stately dignity of their address, while
Saint Peter and the virgins remain in the antechamber; but, as for
Saint Peter's lost soul, the request was a mere form, and the doors
of paradise were instantly opened to it, after such brief
formalities as should tend to preserve the technical record of the
law-court. We tread here on very delicate ground. Gaultier de
Coincy, being a priest and a prior, could take liberties which we
cannot or ought not to take. The doctrines of the Church are too
serious and too ancient to be wilfully misstated, and the doctrines
of what is called Mariolatry were never even doctrines of the
Church. Yet it is true that, in the hearts of Mary's servants, the
Church and its doctrines were at the mercy of Mary's will. Gaultier
de Coincy claimed that Mary exasperated the devils by exercising a
wholly arbitrary and illegitimate power. Gaultier not merely
admitted, but frankly asserted, that this was the fact:--
Font li deables:--"de cest plait,
Mal por mal, assez miex nous plest
Que nous aillons au jugement
Li haut jugeur qui ne ment.
C'au plait n'au jugement sa mere
De droit jugier est trop avere;
Mais dieu nous juge si adroit,
Plainement nous lest notre droit.
Sa mere juge en tel maniere
Qu'elle nous met touz jors arriere
Quant nous cuidons estre devant.
. . . . . . .
En ciel et en terre est plus Dame
Par un petit que Diex ne soit.
Il l'aimme tant et tant la croit,
N'est riens qu'elle face ne die
Qu'il desveile ne contredie.
Quant qu'elle veut li fait acroire,
S'elle disoit la pie est noire
Et l'eue trouble est toute clere:
Si diroit il voir dit ma mere!"
"In this law-suit," say the devils,
"Since it is a choice of evils,
We had best appeal on high
To the Judge Who does not lie.
What is law to any other,
'T is no use pleading with His Mother;
But God judges us so true
That He leaves us all our due.
His Mother judges us so short
That she throws us out of court
When we ought to win our cause.
. . . . . . . .
In heaven and earth she makes more laws
By far, than God Himself can do,
He loves her so, and trusts her so,
There's nothing she can do or say
That He'll refuse, or say her nay.
Whatever she may want is right,
Though she say that black is white,
And dirty water clear as snow:--
My Mother says it, and it's so!"
If the Virgin took the feelings of the Trinity into consideration,
or recognized its existence except as her Son, the case has not been
reported, or, at all events, has been somewhat carefully kept out of
sight by the Virgin's poets. The devils were emphatic in denouncing
Mary for absorbing the whole Trinity. In one sharply disputed case
in regard to a villain, or labourer, whose soul the Virgin claimed
because he had learned the "Ave Maria," the devils became very
angry, indeed, and protested vehemently:--
Li lait maufe, li rechinie
Adonc ont ris et eschinie.
C'en font il:--"Merveillans merveille!
Por ce vilain plate oreille
Aprent vo Dame a saluer,
Se nous vorro trestous tuer
Se regarder osons vers s'ame.
De tout le monde vieut estre Dame!
Ains nule dame ne fu tiez.
II est avis qu'ele soit Diex
Ou qu'ele ait Diex en main bornie.
Nul besoigne n'est fournie,
Ne terrienne ne celestre,
Que toute Dame ne veille estre.
Il est avis que tout soit suen;
Dieu ne deable n'i ont rien."
The ugly demons laugh outright
And grind their teeth with envious spite;
Crying:--"Marvel marvellous!
Because that flat-eared ploughman there
Learned to make your Dame a prayer,
She would like to kill us all
Just for looking toward his soul.
All the world she wants to rule!
No such Dame was ever seen!
She thinks that she is God, I ween,
Or holds Him in her hollow hand.
Not a judgment or command
Or an order can be given
Here on earth or there in heaven,
That she does not want control.
She thinks that she ordains the whole,
And keeps it all for her own profit.
God nor Devil share not of it."
As regards Mary of Chartres, these charges seem to have been
literally true, except so far as concerned the "laid maufe" Pierre
de Dreux. Gaultier de Coincy saw no impropriety in accepting, as
sufficiently exact, the allegations of the devils against the
Virgin's abuse of power. Down to the death of Queen Blanche, which
is all that concerns us, the public saw no more impropriety in it
than Gaultier did. The ugly, envious devils, notorious as students
of the Latin Quarter, were perpetually making the same charges
against Queen Blanche and her son, without disturbing her authority.
No one could conceive that the Virgin held less influence in heaven
than the queen mother on earth. Nevertheless there were points in
the royal policy and conduct of Mary which thoughtful men even then
hesitated to approve. The Church itself never liked to be dragged
too far under feminine influence, although the moment it discarded
feminine influence it lost nearly everything of any value to it or
to the world, except its philosophy. Mary's tastes were too popular;
some of the uglier devils said they were too low; many ladies and
gentlemen of the "siecle" thought them disreputable, though they
dared not say so, or dared say so only by proxy, as in "Aucassins."
As usual, one must go to the devils for the exact truth, and in
spite of their outcry, the devils admitted that they had no reason
to complain of Mary's administration:--
"Les beles dames de grant pris
Qui traynant vont ver et gris,
Roys, roynes, dus et contesses, En enfer vienent a granz presses;
Mais ou ciel vont pres tout a fait
Tort et bocu et contrefait.
Ou ciel va toute la ringaille;
Le grain avons et diex la paille."
"All the great dames and ladies fair
Who costly robes and ermine wear,
Kings, queens, and countesses and lords
Come down to hell in endless hordes;
While up to heaven go the lamed,
The dwarfs, the humpbacks, and the maimed;
To heaven goes the whole riff-raff;
We get the grain and God the chaff."
True it was, although one should not say it jestingly, that the
Virgin embarrassed the Trinity; and perhaps this was the reason,
behind all the other excellent reasons, why men loved and adored her
with a passion such as no other deity has ever inspired: and why we,
although utter strangers to her, are not far from getting down on
our knees and praying to her still. Mary concentrated in herself the
whole rebellion of man against fate; the whole protest against
divine law; the whole contempt for human law as its outcome; the
whole unutterable fury of human nature beating itself against the
walls of its prison-house, and suddenly seized by a hope that in the
Virgin man had found a door of escape. She was above law; she took
feminine pleasure in turning hell into an ornament; she delighted in
trampling on every social distinction in this world and the next.
She knew that the universe was as unintelligible to her, on any
theory of morals, as it was to her worshippers, and she felt, like
them, no sure conviction that it was any more intelligible to the
Creator of it. To her, every suppliant was a universe in itself, to
be judged apart, on his own merits, by his love for her,--by no
means on his orthodoxy, or his conventional standing in the Church,
or according to his correctness in defining the nature of the
Trinity. The convulsive hold which Mary to this day maintains over
human imagination--as you can see at Lourdes--was due much less to
her power of saving soul or body than to her sympathy with people
who suffered under law,--divine or human,--justly or unjustly, by
accident or design, by decree of God or by guile of Devil. She cared
not a straw for conventional morality, and she had no notion of
letting her friends be punished, to the tenth or any other
generation, for the sins of their ancestors or the peccadilloes of
Eve.
So Mary filled heaven with a sort of persons little to the taste of
any respectable middle-class society, which has trouble enough in
making this world decent and pay its bills, without having to
continue the effort in another. Mary stood in a Church of her own,
so independent that the Trinity might have perished without much
affecting her position; but, on the other hand, the Trinity could
look on and see her dethroned with almost a breath of relief.
Aucassins and the devils of Gaultier de Coincy foresaw her danger.
Mary's treatment of respectable and law-abiding people who had no
favours to ask, and were reasonably confident of getting to heaven
by the regular judgment, without expense, rankled so deeply that
three hundred years later the Puritan reformers were not satisfied
with abolishing her, but sought to abolish the woman altogether as
the cause of all evil in heaven and on earth. The Puritans abandoned
the New Testament and the Virgin in order to go back to the
beginning, and renew the quarrel with Eve. This is the Church's
affair, not ours, and the women are competent to settle it with
Church or State, without help from outside; but honest tourists are
seriously interested in putting the feeling back into the dead
architecture where it belongs.
Mary was rarely harsh to any suppliant or servant, and she took no
special interest in humiliating the rich or the learned or the wise.
For them, law was made; by them, law was administered; and with
their doings Mary never arbitrarily interfered; but occasionally she
could not resist the temptation to intimate her opinion of the
manner in which the Trinity allowed their--the regular--Church to be
administered. She was a queen, and never for an instant forgot it,
but she took little thought about her divine rights, if she had
any,--and in fact Saint Bernard preferred her without them,--while
she was scandalized at the greed of officials in her Son's Court.
One day a rich usurer and a very poor old woman happened to be dying
in the same town. Gaultier de Coincy did not say, as an accurate
historian should, that he was present, nor did he mention names or
dates, although it was one of his longest and best stories. Mary
never loved bankers, and had no reason for taking interest in this
one, or for doing him injury; but it happened that the parish priest
was summoned to both death-beds at the same time, and neglected the
old pauper in the hope of securing a bequest for his church from the
banker. This was the sort of fault that most annoyed Mary in the
Church of the Trinity, which, in her opinion, was not cared for as
it should be, and she felt it her duty to intimate as much.
Although the priest refused to come at the old woman's summons, his
young clerk, who seems to have acted as vicar though not in orders,
took pity on her, and went alone with the sacrament to her hut,
which was the poorest of poor hovels even for that age:--
Close de piex et de serciaus
Comme une viez souz a porciaus.
Roof of hoops, and wall of logs,
Like a wretched stye for hogs.
There the beggar lay, already insensible or at the last gasp, on
coarse thatch, on the ground, covered by an old hempen sack. The
picture represented the extremest poverty of the thirteenth century;
a hovel without even a feather bed or bedstead, as Aucassins'
ploughman described his mother's want; and the old woman alone,
dying, as the clerk appeared at the opening:--
Li clers qui fu moult bien apris
Le cors Nostre Seigneur a pris
A l'ostel a la povre fame
S'en vient touz seus mes n'i treuve ame.
Si grant clarte y a veue
Que grant peeur en a eue.
Ou povre lit a la vieillete
Qui couvers iert d'une nateite
Assises voit XII puceles
Si avenans et si tres beles
N'est nus tant penser i seust
Qui raconter le vout peust.
A coutee voist Nostre Dame
Sus le chevez la povre fame
Qui por la mort sue et travaille.
La Mere Dieu d'une tovaille
Qui blanche est plus que fleur de lis
La grant sueur d'entor le vis
A ses blanches mains li essuie.
The clerk, well in these duties taught,
The body of our Saviour brought
Where she lay upon her bed
Without a soul to give her aid.
But such brightness there he saw
As filled his mind with fear and awe.
Covered with a mat of straw
The woman lay; but round and near
A dozen maidens sat, so fair
No mortal man could dream such light,
No mortal tongue describe the sight.
Then he saw that next the bed,
By the poor old woman's head,
As she gasped and strained for breath
In the agony of death,
Sat Our Lady,--bending low,--
While, with napkin white as snow,
She dried the death-sweat on the brow.
The clerk, in terror, hesitated whether to turn and run away, but
Our Lady beckoned him to the bed, while all rose and kneeled
devoutly to the sacrament. Then she said to the trembling clerk:--
"Friend, be not afraid!
But seat yourself, to give us aid,
Beside these maidens, on the bed."
And when the clerk had obeyed, she continued--
"Or tost, amis!" fait Nostre Dame,
"Confessies ceste bone fame
Et puis apres tout sans freeur
Recevra tost son sauveeur
Qui char et sanc vout en moi prendre."
"Come quickly, friend!" Our Lady says,
"This good old woman now confess
And afterwards without distress
She will at once receive her God
Who deigned in me take flesh and blood."
After the sacrament came a touch of realism that recalls the simple
death-scenes that Walter Scott described in his grand twelfth-
century manner. The old woman lingered pitiably in her agony:--
Lors dit une des demoiselles
A madame sainte Marie:
"Encore, dame, n'istra mie
Si com moi semble du cors l'ame."
"Bele fille," fait Nostre Dame,
"Traveiller lais un peu le cors,
Aincois que l'ame en isse hors,
Si que puree soil et nete
Aincois qu'en Paradis la mete.
N'est or mestier qui soions plus,
Ralon nous en ou ciel lassus,
Quant tens en iert bien reviendrons
En paradis l'ame emmerrons."
A maiden said to Saint Marie,
"My lady, still it seems to me
The soul will not the body fly."
"Fair child!" Our Lady made reply,
"Still let awhile the body fight
Before the soul shall leave it quite.
So that it pure may be, and cleansed
When it to Paradise ascends.
No longer need we here remain;
We can go back to heaven again;
We will return before she dies,
And take the soul to paradise."
The rest of the story concerned the usurer, whose death-bed was of a
different character, but Mary's interest in death-beds of that kind
was small. The fate of the usurer mattered the less because she knew
too well how easily the banker, in good credit, could arrange with
the officials of the Trinity to open the doors of paradise for him.
The administration of heaven was very like the administration of
France; the Queen Mother saw many things of which she could not
wholly approve; but her nature was pity, not justice, and she shut
her eyes to much that she could not change. Her miracles, therefore,
were for the most part mere evidence of her pity for those who
needed it most, and these were rarely the well-to-do people of the
siecle, but more commonly the helpless. Every saint performed
miracles, and these are standard, not peculiar to any one
intermediator; and every saint protected his own friends; but beyond
these exhibitions of power, which are more or less common to the
whole hierarchy below the Trinity, Mary was the mother of pity and
the only hope of despair. One might go on for a volume, studying the
character of Mary and the changes that time made in it, from the
earliest Byzantine legends down to the daily recorded miracles at
Lourdes; no character in history has had so long or varied a
development, and none so sympathetic; but the greatest poets long
ago plundered that mine of rich motives, and have stolen what was
most dramatic for popular use. The Virgin's most famous early
miracle seems to have been that of the monk Theophilus, which was
what one might call her salvation of Faust. Another Byzantine
miracle was an original version of Shylock. Shakespeare and his
fellow dramatists plundered the Church legends as freely as their
masters plundered the Church treasuries, yet left a mass of dramatic
material untouched. Let us pray the Virgin that it may remain
untouched, for, although a good miracle was in its day worth much
money--so much that the rival shrines stole each other's miracles
without decency--one does not care to see one's Virgin put to money-
making for Jew theatre-managers. One's two-hundred and fifty million
arithmetical ancestors shrink.
For mere amusement, too, the miracle is worth reading of the little
Jew child who ignorantly joined in the Christian communion, and was
thrown into a furnace by his father in consequence; but when the
furnace was opened, the Virgin appeared seated in the midst of the
flames, with the little child unharmed in her lap. Better is that
called the "Tombeor de Notre Dame," only recently printed; told by
some unknown poet of the thirteenth century, and told as well as any
of Gaultier de Coincy's. Indeed the "Tombeor de Notre Dame" has had
more success in our time than it ever had in its own, as far as one
knows, for it appeals to a quiet sense of humour that pleases modern
French taste as much as it pleased the Virgin. One fears only to
spoil it by translation, but if a translation be merely used as a
glossary or footnote, it need not do fatal harm.
The story is that of a tumbler--tombeor, street-acrobat--who was
disgusted with the world, as his class has had a reputation for
becoming, and who was fortunate enough to obtain admission into the
famous monastery of Clairvaux, where Saint Bernard may have formerly
been blessed by the Virgin's presence. Ignorant at best, and
especially ignorant of letters, music, and the offices of a
religious society, he found himself unable to join in the services:--
Car n'ot vescu fors de tumer
Et d'espringier et de baler.
Treper, saillir, ice savoit;
Ne d'autre rien il ne savoit;
Car ne savoit autre lecon
Ne "pater noster" ne chancon
Ne le "credo" ne le salu
Ne rien qui fust a son salu.
For he had learned no other thing
Than to tumble, dance and spring:
Leaping and vaulting, that he knew,
But nothing better could he do.
He could not say his prayers by rote;
Not "Pater noster", not a note,
Not "Ave Mary," nor the creed;
Nothing to help his soul in need.
Tormented by the sense of his uselessness to the society whose bread
he ate without giving a return in service, and afraid of being
expelled as a useless member, one day while the bells were calling
to mass he hid in the crypt, and in despair began to soliloquize
before the Virgin's altar, at the same spot, one hopes, where the
Virgin had shown herself, or might have shown herself, in her
infinite bounty, to Saint Bernard, a hundred years before:--
"Hai," fait il, "con suis trais!
Or dira ja cascuns sa laisse
Et jo suis ci i hues en laisse
Qui ne fas ci fors que broster
Et viandes por nient gaster.
Si ne dirai ne ne ferai?
Par la mere deu, si ferai!
Ja n'en serai ore repris;
Jo ferai ce que j'ai apris;
Si servirai de men mestier
La mere deu en son mostier;
Li autre servent de canter
Et jo servirai de tumer."
Sa cape oste, si se despoille,
Deles l'autel met sa despoille,
Mais por sa char que ne soit nue
Une cotele a retenue
Qui moult estait tenre et alise,
Petit vaut miex d'une chemise,
Si est en pur le cors remes.
Il s'est bien chains et acesmes,
Sa cote caint et bien s'atorne,
Devers l'ymage se retorne
Mout humblement et si l'esgarde:
"Dame," fait il, "en vostre garde
Comant jo et mon cors et m'ame.
Douce reine, douce dame,
Ne despisies ce que jo sai
Car jo me voil metre a l'asai
De vos servir en bone foi
Se dex m'ait sans nul desroi.
Jo ne sai canter ne lire
Mais certes jo vos voil eslire
Tos mes biax gieus a eslicon.
Or soie al fuer de taurecon
Qui trepe et saut devant sa mere.
Dame, qui n'estes mie amere
A cels qui vos servent a droit,
Quelsque jo soie, por vos soit!"
Lors li commence a faire saus
Bas et petits et grans et haus
Primes deseur et puis desos,
Puis se remet sor ses genols,
Devers l'ymage, et si l'encline:
"He!" fait il, "tres douce reine
Par vo pitie, par vo francise,
Ne despisies pas mon servise!"
"Ha!" said he, "how I am ashamed!
To sing his part goes now each priest,
And I stand here, a tethered beast,
Who nothing do but browse and feed
And waste the food that others need.
Shall I say nothing, and stand still?
No! by God's mother, but I will!
She shall not think me here for naught;
At least I'll do what I've been taught!
At least I'll serve in my own way
God's mother in her church to-day.
The others serve to pray and sing;
I will serve to leap and spring."
Then he strips him of his gown,
Lays it on the altar down;
But for himself he takes good care
Not to show his body bare,
But keeps a jacket, soft and thin,
Almost a shirt, to tumble in.
Clothed in this supple woof of maille
His strength and health and form showed well.
And when his belt is buckled fast,
Toward the Virgin turns at last:
Very humbly makes his prayer;
"Lady!" says he, "to your care
I commit my soul and frame.
Gentle Virgin, gentle dame,
Do not despise what I shall do,
For I ask only to please you,
To serve you like an honest man,
So help me God, the best I can.
I cannot chant, nor can I read,
But I can show you here instead,
All my best tricks to make you laugh,
And so shall be as though a calf
Should leap and jump before its dam.
Lady, who never yet could blame
Those who serve you well and true,
All that I am, I am for you."
Then he begins to jump about,
High and low, and in and out,
Straining hard with might and main;
Then, falling on his knees again,
Before the image bows his face:
"By your pity! by your grace!"
Says he, "Ha! my gentle queen,
Do not despise my offering!"
In his earnestness he exerted himself until, at the end of his
strength, he lay exhausted and unconscious on the altar steps.
Pleased with his own exhibition, and satisfied that the Virgin was
equally pleased, he continued these devotions every day, until at
last his constant and singular absence from the regular services
attracted the curiosity of a monk, who kept watch on him and
reported his eccentric exercise to the Abbot.
The mediaeval monasteries seem to have been gently administered.
Indeed, this has been made the chief reproach on them, and the
excuse for robbing them for the benefit of a more energetic crown
and nobility who tolerated no beggars or idleness but their own; at
least, it is safe to say that few well-regulated and economically
administered modern charities would have the patience of the Abbot
of Clairvaux, who, instead of calling up the weak-minded tombeor and
sending him back to the world to earn a living by his profession,
went with his informant to the crypt, to see for himself what the
strange report meant. We have seen at Chartres what a crypt may be,
and how easily one might hide in its shadows while mass is said at
the altars. The Abbot and his informant hid themselves behind a
column in the shadow, and watched the whole performance to its end
when the exhausted tumbler dropped unconscious and drenched with
perspiration on the steps of the altar, with the words:--
"Dame!" fait il, "ne puis plus ore;
Mais voire je reviendrai encore."
"Lady!" says he, "no more I can,
But truly I'll come back again!"
You can imagine the dim crypt; the tumbler lying unconscious beneath
the image of the Virgin; the Abbot peering out from the shadow of
the column, and wondering what sort of discipline he could inflict
for this unforeseen infraction of rule; when suddenly, before he
could decide what next to do, the vault above the altar, of its own
accord, opened:--
L'abes esgarde sans atendre
Et vit de la volte descendre
Une dame si gloriouse
Ains nus ne vit si preciouse
Ni si ricement conreee,
N'onques tant bele ne fu nee.
Ses vesteures sont bien chieres
D'or et de precieuses pieres.
Avec li estoient li angle
Del ciel amont, et li arcangle,
Qui entor le menestrel vienent,
Si le solacent et sostienent.
Quant entor lui sont arengie
S'ot tot son cuer asoagie.
Dont s'aprestent de lui servir
Por ce qu'ils volrent deservir
La servise que fait la dame
Qui tant est precieuse geme.
Et la douce reine france
Tenoit une touaille blance,
S'en avente son menestrel
Mout doucement devant l'autel.
La franc dame debonnaire
Le col, le cors, et le viaire
Li avente por refroidier;
Bien s'entremet de lui aidier;
La dame bien s'i abandone;
Li bons hom garde ne s'en done,
Car il ne voit, si ne set mie
Qu'il ait si bele compaignie.
The Abbot strains his eyes to see,
And, from the vaulting, suddenly,
A lady steps,--so glorious,--
Beyond all thought so precious,--
Her robes so rich, so nobly worn,--
So rare the gems the robes adorn,--
As never yet so fair was born.
Along with her the angels were,
Archangels stood beside her there;
Round about the tumbler group
To give him solace, bring him hope;
And when round him in ranks they stood,
His whole heart felt its strength renewed.
So they haste to give him aid
Because their wills are only made
To serve the service of their Queen,
Most precious gem the earth has seen.
And the lady, gentle, true,
Holds in her hand a towel new;
Fans him with her hand divine
Where he lies before the shrine.
The kind lady, full of grace,
Fans his neck, his breast, his face!
Fans him herself to give him air!
Labours, herself, to help him there!
The lady gives herself to it;
The poor man takes no heed of it;
For he knows not and cannot see
That he has such fair company.
Beyond this we need not care to go. If you cannot feel the colour
and quality--the union of naivete and art, the refinement, the
infinite delicacy and tenderness--of this little poem, then nothing
will matter much to you; and if you can feel it, you can feel,
without more assistance, the majesty of Chartres.
CHAPTER XIV
ABELARD
Super cuncta, subter cuncta,
Extra cuncta, intra cuncta,
Intra cuncta nec inclusus,
Extra cuncta nec exclusus,
Super cuncta nec elatus,
Subter cuncta nec substratus,
Super totus, praesidendo,
Subter totus, sustinendo,
Extra totus, complectendo,
Intra totus est, implendo.
According to Hildebert, Bishop of Le Mans and Archbishop of Tours,
these verses describe God. Hildebert was the first poet of his time;
no small merit, since he was contemporary with the "Chanson de
Roland" and the first crusade; he was also a strong man, since he
was able, as Bishop of Le Mans, to gain great credit by maintaining
himself against William the Norman and Fulk of Anjou; and finally he
was a prelate of high authority. He lived between 1055 and 1133.
Supposing his verses to have been written in middle life, toward the
year 1100, they may be taken to represent the accepted doctrine of
the Church at the time of the first crusade. They were little more
than a versified form of the Latin of Saint Gregory the Great who
wrote five-hundred years before: "Ipse manet intra omnia, ipse extra
omnia, ipse supra omnia, ipse infra omnia; et superior est per
potentiam et inferior per sustentationem; exterior per magnitudinem
et interior per subtilitatem; sursum regens, deorsum continens,
extra circumdans, interius penetrans; nec alia parte superior, alia
inferior, aut alia ex parte exterior atque ex alia manet interior,
sed unus idemque totus ubique." According to Saint Gregory, in the
sixth century, God was "one and the same and wholly everywhere";
"immanent within everything, without everything, above everything,
below everything, sursum regens, dear sum continens"; while
according to Archbishop Hildebert in the eleventh century: "God is
overall things, under all things; outside all, inside all; within
but not enclosed; without but not excluded; above but not raised up;
below but not depressed; wholly above, presiding; wholly beneath,
sustaining; wholly without, embracing; wholly within, filling."
Finally, according to Benedict Spinoza, another five hundred years
later still: "God is a being, absolutely infinite; that is to say, a
substance made up of an infinity of attributes, each one of which
expresses an eternal and infinite essence."
Spinoza was the great pantheist, whose name is still a terror to the
orthodox, and whose philosophy is--very properly--a horror to the
Church--and yet Spinoza never wrote a line that, to the unguided
student, sounds more Spinozist than the words of Saint Gregory and
Archbishop Hildebert. If God is everywhere; wholly; presiding,
sustaining, embracing and filling, "sursum regens, deorsum
continens," He is the only possible energy, and leaves no place for
human will to act. A force which is "one and the same and wholly
everywhere" is more Spinozist than Spinoza, and is likely to be
mistaken for frank pantheism by the large majority of religious
minds who must try to understand it without a theological course in
a Jesuit college. In the year 1100 Jesuit colleges did not exist,
and even the great Dominican and Franciscan schools were far from
sight in the future; but the School of Notre Dame at Paris existed,
and taught the existence of God much as Archbishop Hildebert
described it. The most successful lecturer was William of Champeaux,
and to any one who ever heard of William at all, the name instantly
calls up the figure of Abelard, in flesh and blood, as he sang to
Heloise the songs which he says resounded through Europe. The
twelfth century, with all its sparkle, would be dull without Abelard
and Heloise. With infinite regret, Heloise must be left out of the
story, because she was not a philosopher or a poet or an artist, but
only a Frenchwoman to the last millimetre of her shadow. Even though
one may suspect that her famous letters to Abelard are, for the most
part, by no means above scepticism, she was, by French standards,
worth at least a dozen Abelards, if only because she called Saint
Bernard a false apostle.
Unfortunately, French standards, by which she must be judged in our
ignorance, take for granted that she philosophized only for the sake
of Abelard, while Abelard taught philosophy to her not so much
because he believed in philosophy or in her as because he believed
in himself. To this day, Abelard remains a problem as perplexing as
he must have been to Heloise, and almost as fascinating. As the west
portal of Chartres is the door through which one must of necessity
enter the Gothic architecture of the thirteenth century, so Abelard
is the portal of approach to the Gothic thought and philosophy
within. Neither art nor thought has a modern equivalent; only
Heloise, like Isolde, unites the ages.
The first crusade seems, in perspective, to have rilled the whole
field of vision in France at the time; but, in fact, France seethed
with other emotions, and while the crusaders set out to scale heaven
by force at Jerusalem, the monks, who remained at home, undertook to
scale heaven by prayer and by absorption of body and soul in God;
the Cistercian Order was founded in 1098, and was joined in 1112 by
young Bernard, born in 1090 at Fontaines-les-Dijon, drawing with him
or after him so many thousands of young men into the self-immolation
of the monastery as carried dismay into the hearts of half the women
of France. At the same time--that is, about 1098 or 1100--Abelard
came up to Paris from Brittany, with as much faith in logic as
Bernard had in prayer or Godfrey of Bouillon in arms, and led an
equal or even a greater number of combatants to the conquest of
heaven by force of pure reason. None showed doubt. Hundreds of
thousands of young men wandered from their provinces, mostly to
Palestine, largely to cloisters, but also in great numbers to Paris
and the schools, while few ever returned.
Abelard had the advantage of being well-born; not so highly
descended as Albertus Magnus and Thomas Aquinas who were to complete
his work in the thirteenth century, but, like Bernard, a gentleman
born and bred. He was the eldest son of Berenger, Sieur du Pallet, a
chateau in Brittany, south of the Loire, on the edge of Poitou. His
name was Pierre du Pallet, although, for some unknown reason, he
called himself Pierre Abailard, or Abeillard, or Esbaillart, or
Beylard; for the spelling was never fixed. He was born in 1079, and
when, in 1096, the young men of his rank were rushing off to the
first crusade, Pierre, a boy of seventeen, threw himself with equal
zeal into the study of science, and, giving up his inheritance or
birthright, at last came to Paris to seize a position in the
schools. The year is supposed to have been 1100.
The Paris of Abelard's time was astonishingly old; so old that
hardly a stone of it can be now pointed out. Even the oldest of the
buildings still standing in that quarter--Saint-Julien-le-Pauvre,
Saint-Severin, and the tower of the Lycee Henri IV--are more modern;
only the old Roman Thermae, now part of the Musee de Cluny, within
the walls, and the Abbey Tower of Saint-Germain-des-Pres, outside,
in the fields, were standing in the year 1100. Politically, Paris
was a small provincial town before the reign of Louis-le-Gros (1108-
37), who cleared its gates of its nearest enemies; but as a school,
Paris was even then easily first. Students crowded into it by
thousands, till the town is said to have contained more students
than citizens, Modern Paris seems to have begun as a university town
before it had a university. Students flocked to it from great
distances, encouraged and supported by charity, and stimulated by
privileges, until they took entire possession of what is still
called the Latin Quarter from the barbarous Latin they chattered;
and a town more riotous, drunken, and vicious than it became, in the
course of time, hardly existed even in the Middle Ages. In 1100,
when enthusiasm was fresh and faith in science was strong, the great
mass of students came there to study, and, having no regular
university organization or buildings, they thronged the cloister of
Notre Dame--not our Notre Dame, which dates only from 1163, but the
old Romanesque cathedral which stood on the same spot--and there
they listened, and retained what they could remember, for they were
not encouraged to take notes even if they were rich enough to buy
notebooks, while manuscripts were far beyond their means. One
valuable right the students seem to have had--that of asking
questions and even of disputing with the lecturer provided they
followed the correct form of dialectics. The lecturer himself was
licensed by the Bishop.
Five thousand students are supposed to have swarmed about the
cloister of Notre Dame, across the Petit Pont, and up the hill of
Sainte-Genevieve; three thousand are said to have paid fees to
Abelard in the days of his great vogue and they seem to have
attached themselves to their favourite master as a champion to be
upheld against the world. Jealousies ran high, and neither scholars
nor masters shunned dispute. Indeed, the only science they taught or
knew was the art of dispute--dialectics. Rhetoric, grammar, and
dialectics were the regular branches of science, and bold students,
who were not afraid of dabbling in forbidden fields, extended their
studies to mathematics--"exercitium nefarium," according to Abelard,
which he professed to know nothing about but which he studied
nevertheless. Abelard, whether pupil or master, never held his
tongue if he could help it, for his fortune depended on using it
well; but he never used it so well in dialectics or theology as he
did, toward the end of his life, in writing a bit of autobiography,
so admirably told, so vivid, so vibrating with the curious intensity
of his generation, that it needed only to have been written in
"Romieu" to be the chief monument of early French prose, as the
western portal of Chartres is the chief monument of early French
sculpture, and of about the same date. Unfortunately Abelard was a
noble scholar, who necessarily wrote and talked Latin, even with
Heloise, and, although the Latin was mediaeval, it is not much the
better on that account, because, in spite of its quaintness, the
naivetes of a young language--the egotism, jealousies, suspicions,
boastings, and lamentations of a childlike time--take a false air of
outworn Rome and Byzantium, although, underneath, the spirit lives:--
I arrived at last in Paris where for a long time dialectics had
specially flourished under William of Champeaux, rightly reckoned
the first of my masters in that branch of study. I stayed some time
in his school, but, though well received at first, I soon got to be
an annoyance to him because I persisted in refuting certain ideas of
his, and because, not being afraid to enter into argument against
him, I sometimes got the better. This boldness, too, roused the
wrath of those fellow students who were classed higher, because I was
the youngest and the last comer. This was the beginning of my series
of misfortunes which still last; my renown every day increasing,
envy was kindled against me in every direction.
This picture of the boy of twenty, harassing the professor, day
after day, in his own lecture-room before hundreds of older
students, paints Abelard to the life; but one may safely add a few
touches that heighten the effect; as that William of Champeaux
himself was barely thirty, and that Abelard throughout his career,
made use of every social and personal advantage to gain a point,
with little scruple either in manner or in sophistry. One may easily
imagine the scene. Teachers are always much the same. Pupils and
students differ only in degrees of docility. In 1100, both classes
began by accepting the foundations of society, as they have to do
still; only they then accepted laws of the Church and Aristotle,
while now they accept laws of the legislature and of energy. In
1100, the students took for granted that, with the help of Aristotle
and syllogisms, they could build out the Church intellectually, as
the architects, with the help of the pointed arch, were soon to
enlarge it architecturally. They never doubted the certainty of
their method. To them words had fixed values, like numbers, and
syllogisms were hewn stones that needed only to be set in place, in
order to reach any height or support any weight. Every sentence was
made to take the form of a syllogism. One must have been educated in
a Jesuit or Dominican school in order to frame these syllogisms
correctly, but merely by way of illustration one may timidly suggest
how the phrases sounded in their simplest form. For example, Plato
or other equally good authority deemed substance as that which
stands underneath phenomena; the most universal of universals, the
ultimate, the highest in order of generalization. The ultimate
essence or substance is indivisible; God is substance; God is
indivisible. The divine substance is incapable of alteration or
accident; all other substance is liable to alteration or accident;
therefore, the divine substance differs from all other substance. A
substance is a universal; as for example, Humanity, or the Human, is
a universal and indivisible; the Man Socrates, for instance, is not
a universal, but an individual; therefore, the substance Humanity,
being indivisible, must exist entire and undivided in Socrates.
The form of logic most fascinating to youthful minds, as well as to
some minds that are only too acute, is the reductio ad absurdum; the
forcing an opponent into an absurd alternative or admission; and the
syllogism lent itself happily to this use. Socrates abused the
weapon and Abelard was the first French master of the art; but
neither State nor Church likes to be reduced to an absurdity, and,
on the whole, both Socrates and Abelard fared ill in the result.
Even now, one had best be civil toward the idols of the forum.
Abelard would find most of his old problems sensitive to his touch
to-day. Time has settled few or none of the essential points of
dispute. Science hesitates, more visibly than the Church ever did,
to decide once for all whether unity or diversity is ultimate law;
whether order or chaos is the governing rule of the universe, if
universe there is; whether anything, except phenomena, exists. Even
in matters more vital to society, one dares not speak too loud. Why,
and for what, and to whom, is man a responsible agent? Every jury
and judge, every lawyer and doctor, every legislator and clergyman
has his own views, and the law constantly varies. Every nation may
have a different system. One court may hang and another may acquit
for the same crime, on the same day; and science only repeats what
the Church said to Abelard, that where we know so little, we had
better hold our tongues.
According to the latest authorities, the doctrine of universals
which convulsed the schools of the twelfth century has never
received an adequate answer. What is a species? what is a genus or a
family or an order? More or less convenient terms of classification,
about which the twelfth century cared very little, while it cared
deeply about the essence of classes! Science has become too complex
to affirm the existence of universal truths, but it strives for
nothing else, and disputes the problem, within its own limits,
almost as earnestly as in the twelfth century, when the whole field
of human and superhuman activity was shut between these barriers of
substance, universals, and particulars. Little has changed except
the vocabulary and the method. The schools knew that their society
hung for life on the demonstration that God, the ultimate universal,
was a reality, out of which all other universal truths or realities
sprang. Truth was a real thing, outside of human experience. The
schools of Paris talked and thought of nothing else. John of
Salisbury, who attended Abelard's lectures about 1136, and became
Bishop of Chartres in 1176, seems to have been more surprised than
we need be at the intensity of the emotion. "One never gets away
from this question," he said. "From whatever point a discussion
starts, it is always led back and attached to that. It is the
madness of Rufus about Naevia; 'He thinks of nothing else; talks of
nothing else, and if Naevia did not exist, Rufus would be dumb.'"
Abelard began it. After his first visit to Paris in 1100, he seems
to have passed several years elsewhere, while Guillaume de Champeaux
in 1108, retired from the school in the cloister of Notre Dame, and,
taking orders, established a class in a chapel near by, afterwards
famous as the Abbaye-de-Saint-Victor. The Jardin des Plantes and the
Gare d'Orleans now cover the ground where the Abbey stood, on the
banks of the Seine outside the Latin Quarter, and not a trace is
left of its site; but there William continued his course in
dialectics, until suddenly Abelard reappeared among his scholars,
and resumed his old attacks. This time Abelard could hardly call
himself a student. He was thirty years old, and long since had been
himself a teacher; he had attended William's course on dialectics
nearly ten years before, and was past master in the art; he had
nothing to learn from William in theology, for neither William nor
he was yet a theologist by profession. If Abelard went back to
school, it was certainly not to learn; but indeed, he himself made
little or no pretence of it, and told with childlike candour not
only why he went, but also how brilliantly he succeeded in his
object:--
I returned to study rhetoric in his school. Among other
controversial battles, I succeeded, by the most irrefutable
argument, in making him change, or rather ruin his doctrine of
universals. His doctrine consisted in affirming the perfect identity
of the essence in every individual of the same species, so that
according to him there was no difference in the essence but only in
the infinite variety of accidents. He then came to amend his
doctrine so as to affirm, not the identity any longer, but the
absence of distinction--the want of difference--in the essence. And
as this question of universals had always been one of the most
important questions of dialectics--so important that Porphyry,
touching on it in his Preliminaries, did not dare to take the
responsibility of cutting the knot, but said, "It is a very grave
point,"--Champeaux, who was obliged to modify his idea and then
renounce it, saw his course fall into such discredit that they
hardly let him make his dialectical lectures, as though dialectics
consisted entirely in the question of universals.
Why was this point so "very grave"? Not because it was mere
dialectics! The only part of the story that seems grave today is the
part that Abelard left out; the part which Saint Bernard, thirty
years later put in, on behalf of William. We should be more
credulous than twelfth-century monks, if we believed, on Abelard's
word in 1135, that in 1110 he had driven out of the schools the most
accomplished dialectician of the age by an objection so familiar
that no other dialectician was ever silenced by it--whatever may
have been the case with theologians--and so obvious that it could
not have troubled a scholar of fifteen. William stated a settled
doctrine as old as Plato; Abelard interposed an objection as old as
Aristotle. Probably Plato and Aristotle had received the question
and answer from philosophers ten-thousand years older than
themselves. Certainly the whole of philosophy has always been
involved in the dispute.
The subject is as amusing as a comedy; so amusing that ten minutes
may be well given to playing the scene between William and Abelard,
not as it happened, but in a form nearer our ignorance, with liberty
to invent arguments for William, and analogies--which are figures
intended to serve as fatal weapons if they succeed, and as innocent
toys if they fail--such as he never imagined; while Abelard can
respond with his true rejoinder, fatal in a different sense. For the
chief analogy, the notes of music would serve, or the colours of the
solar spectrum, or an energy, such as gravity--but the best is
geometrical, because Euclid was as scholastic as William of
Champeaux himself, and his axioms are even more familiar to the
schoolboy of the twentieth, than to the schoolman of the twelfth
century.
In these scholastic tournaments the two champions started from
opposite points--one, from the ultimate substance, God--the
universal, the ideal, the type--the other from the individual,
Socrates, the concrete, the observed fact of experience, the object
of sensual perception. The first champion--William in this instance--
assumed that the universal was a real thing; and for that reason he
was called a realist. His opponent--Abelard--held that the universal
was only nominally real; and on that account he was called a
nominalist. Truth, virtue, humanity, exist as units and realities,
said William. Truth, replied Abelard, is only the sum of all
possible facts that are true, as humanity is the sum of all actual
human beings. The ideal bed is a form, made by God, said Plato. The
ideal bed is a name, imagined by ourselves, said Aristotle. "I start
from the universe," said William. "I start from the atom," said
Abelard; and, once having started, they necessarily came into
collision at some point between the two.
William of Champeaux, lecturing on dialectics or logic, comes to the
question of universals, which he says, are substances. Starting from
the highest substance, God, all being descends through created
substances by stages, until it reaches the substance animality, from
which it descends to the substance humanity: and humanity being,
like other essences or substances, indivisible, passes wholly into
each individual, becoming Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, much as
the divine substance exists wholly and undivided in each member of
the Trinity.
Here Abelard interrupts. The divine substance, he says, operates by
laws of its own, and cannot be used for comparison. In treating of
human substance, one is bound by human limitations. If the whole of
humanity is in Socrates, it is wholly absorbed by Socrates, and
cannot be at the same time in Plato, or elsewhere. Following his
favourite reductio ad absurdum, Abelard turns the idea round, and
infers from it that, since Socrates carries all humanity in him, he
carries Plato, too; and both must be in the same place, though
Socrates is at Athens and Plato in Rome.
The objection is familiar to William, who replies by another
commonplace:--
"Mr. Abelard, might I, without offence, ask you a simple matter? Can
you give me Euclid's definition of a point?"
"If I remember right it is, 'illud cujus nulla pars est'; that which
has no parts."
"Has it existence?"
"Only in our minds."
"Not, then, in God?"
"All necessary truths exist first in God. If the point is a
necessary truth, it exists first there."
"Then might I ask you for Euclid's definition of the line?"
"The line is that which has only extension; 'Linea vocatur illa quae
solam longitudinem habet.'" "Can you conceive an infinite straight
line?"
"Only as a line which has no end, like the point extended."
"Supposing we imagine a straight line, like opposite rays of the
sun, proceeding in opposite directions to infinity--is it real?"
"It has no reality except in the mind that conceives it."
"Supposing we divide that line which has no reality into two parts
at its origin in the sun or star, shall we get two infinities?--or
shall we say, two halves of the infinite?"
"We conceive of each as partaking the quality of infinity."
"Now, let us cut out the diameter of the sun; or rather--since this
is what our successors in the school will do,--let us take a line of
our earth's longitude which is equally unreal, and measure a degree
of this thing which does not exist, and then divide it into equal
parts which we will use as a measure or metre. This metre, which is
still nothing, as I understand you, is infinitely divisible into
points? and the point itself is infinitely small? Therefore we have
the finite partaking the nature of the infinite?"
"Undoubtedly!"
"One step more, Mr. Abelard, if I do not weary you! Let me take
three of these metres which do not exist, and place them so that the
ends of one shall touch the ends of the others. May I ask what is
that figure?"
"I presume you mean it to be a triangle."
"Precisely! and what sort of a triangle?"
"An equilateral triangle, the sides of which measure one metre
each."
"Now let me take three more of these metres which do not exist, and
construct another triangle which does not exist;--are these two
triangles or one triangle?"
"They are most certainly one--a single concept of the only possible
equilateral triangle measuring one metre on each face."
"You told us a moment ago that a universal could not exist wholly
and exclusively in two individuals at once. Does not the universal
by definition--THE equilateral triangle measuring one metre on each
face--does it not exist wholly, in its integrity of essence, in each
of the two triangles we have conceived?"
"It does--as a conception."
"I thank you! Now, although I fear wearying you, perhaps you will
consent to let me add matter to mind. I have here on my desk an
object not uncommon in nature, which I will ask you to describe."
"It appears to be a crystal."
"May I ask its shape?"
"I should call it a regular octahedron."
"That is, two pyramids, set base to base? making eight plane
surfaces, each a perfect equilateral triangle?"
"Concedo triangula (I grant the triangles)."
"Do you know, perchance, what is this material which seems to give
substantial existence to these eight triangles?"
"I do not."
"Nor I! nor does it matter, unless you conceive it to be the work of
man?"
"I do not claim it as man's work."
"Whose, then?"
"We believe all actual creation of matter, united with form, to be
the work of God."
"Surely not the substance of God himself? Perhaps you mean that this
form--this octahedron--is a divine concept."
"I understand such to be the doctrine of the Church."
"Then it seems that God uses this concept habitually to create this
very common crystal. One question more, and only one, if you will
permit me to come to the point. Does the matter--the material--of
which this crystal is made affect in any way the form--the nature,
the soul--of the universal equilateral triangle as you see it
bounding these eight plane surfaces?"
"That I do not know, and do not think essential to decide. As far as
these triangles are individual, they are made so by the will of God,
and not by the substance you call triangle. The universal--the
abstract right angle, or any other abstract form--is only an idea, a
concept, to which reality, individuality, or what we might call
energy is wanting. The only true energy, except man's free will, is
God."
"Very good, Mr. Abelard! we can now reach our issue. You affirm
that, just as the line does not exist in space, although the eye
sees little else in space, so the triangle does not exist in this
crystal, although the crystal shows eight of them, each perfect. You
are aware that on this line which does not exist, and its
combination in this triangle which does not exist, rests the whole
fabric of mathematics with all its necessary truths. In other words,
you know that in this line, though it does not exist, is bound up
the truth of the only branch of human knowledge which claims
absolute certainty for human processes. You admit that this line and
triangle, which are mere figments of our human imagination, not only
exist independent of us in the crystal, but are, as we suppose,
habitually and invariably used by God Himself to give form to the
matter contained within the planes of the crystal. Yet to this line
and triangle you deny reality. To mathematical truth, you deny
compulsive force. You hold that an equilateral triangle may, to you
and all other human individuals, be a right-angled triangle if you
choose to imagine it so. Allow me to say, without assuming any claim
to superior knowledge, that to me your logic results in a different
conclusion. If you are compelled, at one point or another of the
chain of being, to deny existence to a substance, surely it should
be to the last and feeblest. I see nothing to hinder you from
denying your own existence, which is, in fact, impossible to
demonstrate. Certainly you are free, in logic, to argue that
Socrates and Plato are mere names--that men and matter are phantoms
and dreams. No one ever has proved or ever can prove the contrary,
Infallibly, a great philosophical school will some day be founded on
that assumption. I venture even to recommend it to your acute and
sceptical mind; but I cannot conceive how, by any process of
reasoning, sensual or supersensual, you can reach the conclusion
that the single form of truth which instantly and inexorably compels
our submission to its laws--is nothing."
Thus far, all was familiar ground; certainly at least as familiar as
the Pons Asinorum; and neither of the two champions had need to feel
ruffled in temper by the discussion. The real struggle began only at
this point; for until this point was reached, both positions were
about equally tenable. Abelard had hitherto rested quietly on the
defensive, but William's last thrust obliged him to strike in his
turn, and he drew himself up for what, five hundred years later, was
called the "Coup de Jarnac":--
"I do not deny," he begins; "on the contrary, I affirm that the
universal, whether we call it humanity, or equilateral triangle, has
a sort of reality as a concept; that it is something; even a
substance, if you insist upon it. Undoubtedly the sum of all
individual men results in the concept of humanity. What I deny is
that the concept results in the individual. You have correctly
stated the essence of the point and the line as sources of our
concept of the infinite; what I deny is that they are divisions of
the infinite. Universals cannot be divided; what is capable of
division cannot be a universal. I admit the force of your analogy in
the case of the crystal; but I am obliged to point out to you that,
if you insist on this analogy, you will bring yourself and me into
flagrant contradiction with the fixed foundations of the Church. If
the energy of the triangle gives form to the crystal, and the energy
of the line gives reality to the triangle, and the energy of the
infinite gives substance to the line, all energy at last becomes
identical with the ultimate substance, God Himself. Socrates becomes
God in small; Judas is identical with both; humanity is of the
divine essence, and exists, wholly and undivided, in each of us. The
equilateral triangle we call humanity exists, therefore, entire,
identical, in you and me, as a subdivision of the infinite line,
space, energy, or substance, which is God. I need not remind you
that this is pantheism, and that if God is the only energy, human
free will merges in God's free will; the Church ceases to have a
reason for existence; man cannot be held responsible for his own
acts, either to the Church or to the State; and finally, though very
unwillingly, I must, in regard for my own safety, bring the subject
to the attention of the Archbishop, which, as you know better than
I, will lead to your seclusion, or worse."
Whether Abelard used these precise words is nothing to the point.
The words he left on record were equivalent to these. As translated
by M. de Remusat from a manuscript entitled: "Glossulae magistri
Petri Baelardi super Porphyrium," the phrase runs: "A grave heresy
is at the end of this doctrine; for, according to it, the divine
substance which is recognized as admitting of no form, is
necessarily identical with every substance in particular and with
all substance in general." Even had he not stated the heresy so
bluntly, his objection necessarily pushed William in face of it.
Realism, when pressed, always led to pantheism. William of Champeaux
and Bishop or Archbishop Hildebert were personal friends, and
Hildebert's divine substance left no more room for human free will
than Abelard saw in the geometric analogy imagined for William.
Throughout the history of the Church for fifteen hundred years,
whenever this theological point has been pressed against churchmen
it has reduced them to evasion or to apology. Admittedly, the weak
point of realism was its fatally pantheistic term.
Of course, William consulted his friends in the Church, probably
Archbishop Hildebert among the rest, before deciding whether to
maintain or to abandon his ground, and the result showed that he was
guided by their advice. Realism was the Roman arch--the only
possible foundation for any Church; because it assumed unity, and
any other scheme was compelled to prove it, for a starting-point.
Let us see, for a moment, what became of the dialogue, when pushed
into theology, in order to reach some of the reasons which reduced
William to tacit abandonment of a doctrine he could never have
surrendered unless under compulsion. That he was angry is sure, for
Abelard, by thus thrusting theology into dialectics, had struck him
a full blow; and William knew Abelard well:--
"Ah!" he would have rejoined; "you are quick, M. du Pallet, to turn
what I offered as an analogy, into an argument of heresy against my
person. You are at liberty to take that course if you choose, though
I give you fair warning that it will lead you far. But now I must
ask you still another question. This concept that you talk about--
this image in the mind of man, of God, of matter; for I know not
where to seek it--whether is it a reality or not?"
"I hold it as, in a manner, real."
"I want a categorical answer--Yes or No!"
"Distinguo! (I must qualify.)"
"I will have no qualifications. A substance either is, or not.
Choose!"
To this challenge Abelard had the choice of answering Yes, or of
answering no, or of refusing to answer at all. He seems to have done
the last; but we suppose him to have accepted the wager of battle,
and to answer:--
"Yes, then!"
"Good!" William rejoins; "now let us see how your pantheism differs
from mine. My triangle exists as a reality, or what science will
call an energy, outside my mind, in God, and is impressed on my mind
as it is on a mirror, like the triangle on the crystal, its energy
giving form. Your triangle you say is also an energy, but an essence
of my mind itself; you thrust it into the mind as an integral part
of the mirror; identically the same concept, energy, or necessary
truth which is inherent in God. Whatever subterfuge you may resort
to, sooner or later you have got to agree that your mind is
identical with God's nature as far as that concept is concerned.
Your pantheism goes further than mine. As a doctrine of the Real
Presence peculiar to yourself, I can commend it to the Archbishop
together with your delation of me."
Supposing that Abelard took the opposite course, and answered:--
"No! my concept is a mere sign."
"A sign of what, in God's name!"
"A sound! a word! a symbol! an echo only of my ignorance."
"Nothing, then! So truth and virtue and charity do not exist at all.
You suppose yourself to exist, but you have no means of knowing God;
therefore, to you God does not exist except as an echo of your
ignorance; and, what concerns you most, the Church does not exist
except as your concept of certain individuals, whom you cannot
regard as a unity, and who suppose themselves to believe in a
Trinity which exists only as a sound, or a symbol. I will not repeat
your words, M. du Pallet, outside this cloister, because the
consequences to you would certainly be fatal; but it is only too
clear that you are a materialist, and as such your fate must be
decided by a Church Council, unless you prefer the stake by judgment
of a secular court."
In truth, pure nominalism--if, indeed, any one ever maintained it--
afforded no cover whatever. Nor did Abelard's concept help the
matter, although for want of a better refuge, the Church was often
driven into it. Conceptualism was a device, like the false wooden
roof, to cover and conceal an inherent weakness of construction.
Unity either is, or is not. If soldiers, no matter in what number,
can never make an army, and worshippers, though in millions, do not
make a Church, and all humanity united would not necessarily
constitute a State, equally little can their concepts, individual or
united, constitute the one or the other. Army, Church, and State,
each is an organic whole, complex beyond all possible addition of
units, and not a concept at all, but rather an animal that thinks,
creates, devours, and destroys. The attempt to bridge the chasm
between multiplicity and unity is the oldest problem of philosophy,
religion, and science, but the flimsiest bridge of all is the human
concept, unless somewhere, within or beyond it, an energy not
individual is hidden; and in that case the old question instantly
reappears: What is that energy?
Abelard would have done well to leave William alone, but Abelard was
an adventurer, and William was a churchman. To win a victory over a
churchman is not very difficult for an adventurer, and is always a
tempting amusement, because the ambition of churchmen to shine in
worldly contests is disciplined and checked by the broader interests
of the Church: but the victory is usually sterile, and rarely harms
the churchman. The Church cares for its own. Probably the bishops
advised William not to insist on his doctrine, although every bishop
may have held the same view. William allowed himself to be silenced
without a judgment, and in that respect stands almost if not quite
alone among schoolmen. The students divined that he had sold himself
to the Church, and consequently deserted him. Very soon he received
his reward in the shape of the highest dignity open to private
ambition--a bishopric. As Bishop of Chalons-sur-Marne he made for
himself a great reputation, which does not concern us, although it
deeply concerned the unfortunate Abelard, for it happened, either by
chance or design, that within a year or two after William
established himself at Chalons, young Bernard of Citeaux chose a
neighbouring diocese in which to establish a branch of the
Cistercian Order, and Bishop William took so keen an interest in the
success of Bernard as almost to claim equal credit for it. Clairvaux
was, in a manner, William's creation, although not in his diocese,
and yet, if there was a priest in all France who fervently despised
the schools, it was young Bernard. William of Champeaux, the chief
of schoolmen, could never have gained Bernard's affections. Bishop
William of Chalons must have drifted far from dialectics into
mysticism in order to win the support of Clairvaux, and train up a
new army of allies who were to mark Abelard for an easy prey.
Meanwhile Abelard pursued his course of triumph in the schools, and
in due time turned from dialectics to theology, as every ambitious
teacher could hardly fail to do. His affair with Heloise and their
marriage seem to have occupied his time in 1117 or 1118, for they
both retired into religious orders in 1119, and he resumed his
lectures in 1120. With his passion for rule, he was fatally certain
to attempt ruling the Church as he ruled the schools; and, as it was
always enough for him that any point should be tender in order that
he should press upon it, he instantly and instinctively seized on
the most sensitive nerve of the Church system to wrench it into his
service. He became a sort of apostle of the Holy Ghost.
That the Trinity is a mystery was a law of theology so absolute as
in a degree to hide the law of philosophy that the Trinity was meant
as a solution of a greater mystery still. In truth, as a matter of
philosophy, the Trinity was intended to explain the eternal and
primary problem of the process by which unity could produce
diversity. Starting from unity alone, philosophers found themselves
unable to stir hand or foot until they could account for duality. To
the common, ignorant peasant, no such trouble occurred, for he knew
the Trinity in its simpler form as the first condition of life, like
time and space and force. No human being was so stupid as not to
understand that the father, mother, and child made a trinity,
returning into each other, and although every father, every mother,
and every child, from the dawn of man's intelligence, had asked why,
and had never received an answer more intelligible to them than to
philosophers, they never showed difficulty in accepting that trinity
as a fact. They might even, in their beneficent blindness, ask the
Church why that trinity, which had satisfied the Egyptians for five
or ten-thousand years, was not good enough for churchmen. They
themselves were doing their utmost, though unconsciously, to
identify the Holy Ghost with the Mother, while philosophy insisted
on excluding the human symbol precisely because it was human and led
back to an infinite series. Philosophy required three units to start
from; it posed the equilateral triangle, not the straight line, as
the foundation of its deometry. The first straight line, infinite in
extension, must be assumed, and its reflection engendered the
second, but whence came the third? Under protest, philosophy was
compelled to accept the symbol of Father and Son as a matter of
faith, but, if the relation of Father and Son were accepted for the
two units which reflected each other, what relation expressed the
Holy Ghost? In philosophy, the product of two units was not a third
unit, but diversity, multiplicity, infinity. The subject was, for
that reason, better handled by the Arabs, whose reasoning worked
back on the Christian theologists and made the point more delicate
still. Common people, like women and children and ourselves, could
never understand the Trinity; naturally, intelligent people
understood it still less, but for them it did not matter; they did
not need to understand it provided their neighbours would leave it
alone.
The mass of mankind wanted something nearer to them than either the
Father or the Son; they wanted the Mother, and the Church tried, in
what seems to women and children and ourselves rather a feeble way,
to give the Holy Ghost, as far as possible, the Mother's attributes
--Love, Charity, Grace; but in spite of conscientious effort and
unswerving faith, the Holy Ghost remained to the mass of Frenchmen
somewhat apart, feared rather than loved. The sin against the Holy
Ghost was a haunting spectre, for no one knew what else it was.
Naturally the Church, and especially its official theologists, took
an instinctive attitude of defence whenever a question on this
subject was asked, and were thrown into a flutter of irritation
whenever an answer was suggested. No man likes to have his
intelligence or good faith questioned, especially if he has doubts
about it himself. The distinguishing essence of the Holy Ghost, as a
theological substance, was its mystery. That this mystery should be
touched at all was annoying to every one who knew the dangers that
lurked behind the veil, but that it should be freely handled before
audiences of laymen by persons of doubtful character was impossible.
Such license must end in discrediting the whole Trinity under
pretence of making it intelligible.
Precisely this license was what Abelard took, and on it he chose to
insist. He said nothing heretical; he treated the Holy Ghost with
almost exaggerated respect, as though other churchmen did not quite
appreciate its merits; but he would not let it alone, and the Church
dreaded every moment lest, with his enormous influence in the
schools, he should raise a new storm by his notorious indiscretion.
Yet so long as he merely lectured, he was not molested; only when he
began to publish his theology did the Church interfere. Then a
council held at Soissons in 1121 abruptly condemned his book in
block, without reading it, without specifying its errors, and
without hearing his defence; obliged him to throw the manuscript
into the fire with his own hands, and finally shut him up in a
monastery.
He had invited the jurisdiction by taking orders, but even the
Church was shocked by the summary nature of the judgment, which
seems to have been quite irregular. In fact, the Church has never
known what it was that the council condemned. The latest great work
on the Trinity, by the Jesuit Father de Regnon, suggests that
Abelard's fault was in applying to the Trinity his theory of
concepts.
"Yes!" he says; "the mystery is explained; the key of conceptualism
has opened the tabernacle, and Saint Bernard was right in saying
that, thanks to Abelard, every one can penetrate it and contemplate
it at his ease; 'even the graceless, even the uncircumcised.' Yes!
the Trinity is explained, but after the manner of the Sabellians.
For to identify the Persons in the terms of human concepts is, in
the same stroke, to destroy their 'subsistances propres.'"
Although the Saviour seems to have felt no compunctions about
identifying the persons of the Trinity in the terms of human
concepts, it is clear that tourists and heretics had best leave the
Church to deal with its "subsistances propres," and with its own
members, in its own way. In sum, the Church preferred to stand firm
on the Roman arch, and the architects seem now inclined to think it
was right; that scholastic science and the pointed arch proved to be
failures. In the twelfth century the world may have been rough, but
it was not stupid. The Council of Soissons was held while the
architects and sculptors were building the west porch of Chartres
and the Aquilon at Mont-Saint-Michel. Averroes was born at Cordova
in 1126; Omar Khayyam died at Naishapur in 1123. Poetry and
metaphysics owned the world, and their quarrel with theology was a
private, family dispute. Very soon the tide turned decisively in
Abelard's favour. Suger, a political prelate, became minister of the
King, and in March, 1122, Abbot of Saint-Denis. In both capacities
he took the part of Abelard, released him from restraint, and even
restored to him liberty of instruction, at least beyond the
jurisdiction of the Bishop of Paris. Abelard then took a line of
conduct singularly parallel with that of Bernard. Quitting civilized
life he turned wholly to religion. "When the agreement," he said,
"had been executed by both parties to it, in presence of the King
and his ministers, I next retired within the territory of Troyes,
upon a desert spot which I knew, and on a piece of ground given me
by certain persons, I built, with the consent of the bishop of the
diocese, a sort of oratory of reeds and thatch, which I placed under
the invocation of the Holy Trinity ... Founded at first in the name
of the Holy Trinity, then placed under its invocation, it was called
'Paraclete' in memory of my having come there as a fugitive and in
my despair having found some repose in the consolations of divine
grace. This denomination was received by many with great
astonishment, and some attacked it with violence under pretext that
it was not permitted to consecrate a church specially to the Holy
Ghost any more than to God the Father, but that, according to
ancient usage, it must be dedicated either to the Son alone or to
the Trinity."
The spot is still called Paraclete, near Nogent-sur-Seine, in the
parish of Quincey about halfway between Fontainebleau and Troyes.
The name Paraclete as applied to the Holy Ghost meant the Consoler,
the Comforter, the Spirit of Love and Grace; as applied to the
oratory by Abelard it meant a renewal of his challenge to
theologists, a separation of the Persons in the Trinity, a
vulgarization of the mystery; and, as his story frankly says, it was
so received by many. The spot was not so remote but that his
scholars could follow him, and he invited them to do so. They came
in great numbers, and he lectured to them. "In body I was hidden in
this spot; but my renown overran the whole world and filled it with
my word." Undoubtedly Abelard taught theology, and, in defiance of
the council that had condemned him, attempted to define the persons
of the Trinity. For this purpose he had fallen on a spot only fifty
or sixty miles from Clairvaux where Bernard was inspiring a contrary
spirit of religion; he placed himself on the direct line between
Clairvaux and its source at Citeaux near Dijon; indeed, if he had
sought for a spot as central as possible to the active movement of
the Church and the time, he could have hit on none more convenient
and conspicuous unless it were the city of Troyes itself, the
capital of Champagne, some thirty miles away. The proof that he
meant to be aggressive is furnished by his own account of the
consequences. Two rivals, he says, one of whom seems to have been
Bernard of Clairvaux, took the field against him, "and succeeded in
exciting the hostility of certain ecclesiastical and secular
authorities, by charging monstrous things, not only against my
faith, but also against my manner of life, to such a point as to
detach from me some of my principal friends; even those who
preserved some affection for me dared no longer display it, for
fear. God is my witness that I never heard of the union of an
ecclesiastical assembly without thinking that its object was my
condemnation." The Church had good reason, for Abelard's conduct
defied discipline; but far from showing harshness, the Church this
time showed a true spirit of conciliation most creditable to
Bernard. Deeply as the Cistercians disliked and distrusted Abelard,
they did not violently suppress him, but tacitly consented to let
the authorities buy his silence with Church patronage.
The transaction passed through Suger's hands, and offered an
ordinary example of political customs as old as history. An abbey in
Brittany became vacant; at a hint from the Duke Conan, which may
well be supposed to have been suggested from Paris, the monks chose
Abelard as their new abbot, and sent some of their number to Suger
to request permission for Abelard, who was a monk of Saint-Denis, to
become Abbot of Saint-Gildas-de-Rhuys, near Vannes, in Brittany.
Suger probably intimated to Abelard, with a certain degree of
authority, that he had better accept. Abelard, "struck with terror,
and as it were under the menace of a thunderbolt," accepted. Of
course the dignity was in effect banishment and worse, and was so
understood on all sides. The Abbaye-de-Saint-Gildas-de-Rhuys, though
less isolated than Mont-Saint-Michel, was not an agreeable winter
residence. Though situated in Abelard's native province of Brittany,
only sixty or eighty miles from his birthplace, it was for him a
prison with the ocean around it and a singularly wild people to deal
with; but he could have endured his lot with contentment, had not
discipline or fear or pledge compelled him to hold his tongue. From
1125, when he was sent to Brittany until 1135 when he reappeared in
Paris, he never opened his mouth to lecture. "Never, as God is my
witness,--never would I have acquiesced in such an offer, had it not
been to escape, no matter how, from the vexations with which I was
incessantly overwhelmed."
A great career in the Church was thus opened for him against his
will, and if he did not die an archbishop it was not wholly the
fault of the Church. Already he was a great prelate, the equal in
rank of the Abbe Suger, himself, of Saint-Denis; of Peter the
Venerable of Cluny; of Bernard of Clairvaux. He was in a manner a
peer of the realm. Almost immediately he felt the advantages of the
change. Barely two years passed when, in 1127, the Abbe Suger, in
reforming his subordinate Abbey of Argenteuil, was obliged to
disturb Heloise, then a sister in that congregation. Abelard was
warned of the necessity that his wife should be protected, and with
the assistance of everyone concerned, he was allowed to establish
his wife at the Paraclete as head of a religious sisterhood. "I
returned there; I invited Heloise to come there with the nuns of her
community; and when they arrived, I made them the entire donation of
the oratory and its dependencies ... The bishops cherished her as
their daughter; the abbots as their sister; the laymen as their
mother." This was merely the beginning of her favour and of his. For
ten years they were both of them petted children of the Church.
The formal establishment of Heloise at the Paraclete took place in
1129. In February, 1130, on the death of the Pope at Rome, a schism
broke out, and the cardinals elected two popes, one of whom took the
name of Innocent II, and appealed for support to France. Suger saw a
great political opportunity and used it. The heads of the French
Church agreed in supporting Innocent, and the King summoned a Church
council at Etampes to declare its adhesion. The council met in the
late summer; Bernard of Clairvaux took the lead; Peter the
Venerable, Suger of Saint-Denis, and the Abbot of Saint-Gildas-de-
Rhuys supported him; Innocent himself took refuge at Cluny in
October, and on January 20, 1131, he stopped at the Benedictine
Abbey of Morigny. The Chronicle of the monastery, recording the
abbots present on this occasion,--the Abbot of Morigny itself, of
Feversham; of Saint-Lucien of Beauvais, and so forth,--added
especially: "Bernard of Clairvaux, who was then the most famous
pulpit orator in France; and Peter Abelard, Abbot of Saint-Gildas,
also a monk and the most eminent master of the schools to which the
scholars of almost all the Latin races flowed."
Innocent needed popular support; Bernard and Abelard were the two
leaders of popular opinion in France. To attach them, Innocent could
refuse nothing. Probably Abelard remained with Innocent, but in any
case Innocent gave him, at Auxerre, in the following November, a
diploma, granting to Heloise, prioress of the Oratory of the Holy
Trinity, all rights of property over whatever she might possess,
against all assailants; which proves Abelard's favour. At this time
he seems to have taken great interest in the new sisterhood. "I made
them more frequent visits," he said, "in order to work for their
benefit." He worked so earnestly for their benefit that he
scandalized the neighbourhood and had to argue at unnecessary length
his innocence of evil. He went so far as to express a wish to take
refuge among them and to abandon his abbey in Brittany. He professed
to stand in terror of his monks; he excommunicated them; they paid
no attention to him; he appealed to the Pope, his friend, and
Innocent sent a special legate to enforce their submission "in
presence of the Count and the Bishops."
Even since that, they would not keep quiet. And quite recently,
since the expulsion of those of whom I have spoken, when I returned
to the abbey, abandoning myself to the rest of the brothers who
inspired me with less distrust, I found them even worse than the
others. It was no longer a question of poison; it was the dagger
that they now sharpened against my breast. I had great difficulty in
escaping from them under the guidance of one of the neighbouring
lords. Similar perils menace me still and every day I see the sword
raised over my head. Even at table I can hardly breathe ... This is
the torture that I endure every moment of the day; I, a poor monk,
raised to the prelacy, becoming more miserable in becoming more
great, that by my example the ambitious may learn to curb their
greed.
With this, the "Story of Calamity" ends. The allusions to Innocent
II seem to prove that it was written not earlier than 1132; the
confession of constant and abject personal fear suggests that it was
written under the shock caused by the atrocious murder of the Prior
of Saint-Victor by the nephews of the Archdeacon of Paris, who had
also been subjected to reforms. This murder was committed a few
miles outside of the walls of Paris, on August 20, 1133. The "Story
of Calamity" is evidently a long plea for release from the
restraints imposed on its author by his position in the prelacy and
the tacit, or possibly the express, contract he had made, or to
which he had submitted, in 1125. This plea was obviously written in
order to serve one of two purposes:--either to be placed before the
authorities whose consent alone could relieve Abelard from his
restraints; or to justify him in throwing off the load of the
Church, and resuming the profession of schoolman. Supposing the
second explanation, the date of the paper would be more or less
closely fixed by John of Salisbury, who coming to Paris as a
student, in 1136, found Abelard lecturing on the Mont-Sainte-
Genevieve; that is to say, not under the license of the Bishop of
Paris or his Chancellor, but independently, in a private school of
his own, outside the walls. "I attached myself to the Palatine
Peripatician who then presided on the hill of Sainte-Genevieve, the
doctor illustrious, admired by all. There, at his feet, I received
the first elements of the dialectic art, and according to the
measure of my poor understanding I received with all the avidity of
my soul everything that came from his mouth."
This explanation is hardly reasonable, for no prelate who was not
also a temporal lord would have dared throw off his official duties
without permission from his superiors. In Abelard's case the only
superior to whom he could apply, as Abbot of Saint-Gildas in
Brittany, was probably the Pope himself. In the year 1135 the moment
was exceedingly favourable for asking privileges. Innocent, driven
from Rome a second time, had summoned a council at Pisa for May 30
to help him. Louis-le-Gros and his minister Suger gave at first no
support to this council, and were overruled by Bernard of Clairvaux
who in a manner drove them into giving the French clergy permission
to attend. The principal archbishops, a number of bishops, and
sixteen abbots went to Pisa in May, 1135, and some one of them
certainly asked Innocent for favours on behalf of Abelard, which the
Pope granted.
The proof is a papal bull, dated in 1136, in favour of Heloise,
giving her the rank and title of Abbess, accompanied by another
giving to the Oratory of the Holy Trinity the rank and name of
Monastery of the Paraclete, a novelty in Church tradition so
extraordinary or so shocking that it still astounds churchmen. With
this excessive mark of favour Innocent could have felt little
difficulty in giving Abelard the permission to absent himself from
his abbey, and with this permission in his hands Abelard might have
lectured on dialectics to John of Salisbury in the summer or autumn
of 1136. He did not, as far as known, resume lectures on theology.
Such success might have turned heads much better balanced than that
of Abelard. With the support of the Pope and at least one of the
most prominent cardinals, and with relations at court with the
ministers of Louis-le-Gros, Abelard seemed to himself as strong as
Bernard of Clairvaux, and a more popular champion of reform. The
year 1137, which has marked a date for so many great points in our
travels, marked also the moment of Abelard's greatest vogue. The
victory of Aristotle and the pointed arch seemed assured when Suger
effected the marriage of the young Prince Louis to the heiress
Eleanor of Guienne. The exact moment was stamped on the facade of
his exquisite creation, the Abbey Church of Saint-Denis, finished in
1140 and still in part erect. From Saint-Denis to Saint-Sulpice was
but a step. Louis-le-Grand seems to stand close in succession to
Louis-le-Gros.
Fortunately for tourists, the world, restless though it might be,
could not hurry, and Abelard was to know of the pointed arch very
little except its restlessness. Just at the apex of his triumph,
August 1, 1137, Louis-le-Gros died. Six months afterwards the anti-
pope also died, the schism ended, and Innocent II needed Abelard's
help no more. Bernard of Clairvaux became Pope and King at once.
Both Innocent and Louis-le-Jeune were in a manner his personal
creations. The King's brother Henry, next in succession, actually
became a monk at Clairvaux not long afterwards. Even the
architecture told the same story, for at Saint-Denis, though the
arch might simulate a point, the old Romanesque lines still assert
as firmly as ever their spiritual control. The fleche that gave the
facade a new spirit was not added until 1215, which marks Abelard's
error in terms of time.
Once arrived at power, Bernard made short work of all that tried to
resist him. During 1139 he seems to have been too busy or too ill to
take up the affair of Abelard, but in March, 1140, the attack was
opened in a formal letter from William of Saint-Thierry, who was
Bernard's closest friend, bringing charges against Abelard before
Bernard and the Bishop of Chartres. The charges were simple enough:--
Pierre Abelard seized the moment, when all the masters of
ecclesiastical doctrine have disappeared from the scene of the
world, to conquer a place apart, for himself, in the schools, and to
create there an exclusive domination. He treats Holy Scripture as
though it were dialectics. It is a matter with him of personal
invention and annual novelties. He is the censor and not the
disciple of the faith; the corrector and not the imitator of the
authorized masters.
In substance, this is all. The need of action was even simpler.
Abelard's novelties were becoming a danger; they affected not only
the schools, but also even the Curia at Rome. Bernard must act
because there was no one else to act: "This man fears you; he dreads
you! if you shut your eyes, whom will he fear? ... The evil has
become too public to allow a correction limited to amicable
discipline and secret warning." In fact, Abelard's works were flying
about Europe in every direction, and every year produced a novelty.
One can still read them in M. Cousin's collected edition; among
others, a volume on ethics: "Ethica, seu Scito teipsum"; on theology
in general, an epitome; a "Dialogus inter Philosophum, Judaeum et
Christianum"; and, what was perhaps the most alarming of all, an
abstract of quotations from standard authorities, on the principle
of the parallel column, showing the fatal contradictions of the
authorized masters, and entitled "Sic et Non"! Not one of these
works but dealt with sacred matters in a spirit implying that the
Essence of God was better understood by Pierre du Pallet than by the
whole array of bishops and prelates in Europe! Had Bernard been
fortunate enough to light upon the "Story of Calamity," which must
also have been in existence, he would have found there Abelard's own
childlike avowal that he taught theology because his scholars "said
that they did not want mere words; that one can believe only what
one understands; and that it is ridiculous to preach to others what
one understands no better than they do." Bernard himself never
charged Abelard with any presumption equal to this. Bernard said
only that "he sees nothing as an enigma, nothing as in a mirror, but
looks on everything face to face." If this had been all, even
Bernard could scarcely have complained. For several thousand years
mankind has stared Infinity in the face without pretending to be the
wiser; the pretension of Abelard was that, by his dialectic method,
he could explain the Infinite, while all other theologists talked
mere words; and by way of proving that he had got to the bottom of
the matter, he laid down the ultimate law of the universe as his
starting-point: "All that God does," he said, "He wills necessarily
and does it necessarily; for His goodness is such that it pushes Him
necessarily to do all the good He can, and the best He can, and the
quickest He can ... Therefore it is of necessity that God willed and
made the world." Pure logic admitted no contingency; it was bound to
be necessitarian or ceased to be logical; but the result, as Bernard
understood it, was that Abelard's world, being the best and only
possible, need trouble itself no more about God, or Church, or man.
Strange as the paradox seems, Saint Bernard and Lord Bacon, though
looking at the world from opposite standpoints, agreed in this: that
the scholastic method was false and mischievous, and that the longer
it was followed, the greater was its mischief. Bernard thought that
because dialectics led wrong, therefore faith led right. He saw no
alternative, and perhaps in fact there was none. If he had lived a
century later, he would have said to Thomas Aquinas what he said to
a schoolman of his own day: "If you had once tasted true food,"--if
you knew what true religion is,--"how quick you would leave those
Jew makers of books (literatoribus judaeis) to gnaw their crusts by
themselves!" Locke or Hume might perhaps still have resented a
little the "literator judaeus," but Faraday or Clerk-Maxwell would
have expressed the same opinion with only the change of a word: "If
the twelfth century had once tasted true science, how quick they
would have dropped Avicenna and Averroes!" Science admits that
Bernard's disbelief in scholasticism was well founded, whatever it
may think of his reasons. The only point that remains is personal:
Which is the more sympathetic, Bernard or Abelard?
The Church feels no doubt, but is a bad witness. Bernard is not a
character to be taken or rejected in a lump. He was many-sided, and
even toward Abelard he showed more than one surface. He wanted no
unnecessary scandals in the Church; he had too many that were not of
his seeking. He seems to have gone through the forms of friendly
negotiation with Abelard although he could have required nothing
less than Abelard's submission and return to Brittany, and silence;
terms which Abelard thought worse than death. On Abelard's refusal,
Bernard began his attack. We know, from the "Story of Calamity,"
what Bernard's party could not have certainly known then,--the
abject terror into which the very thought of a council had for
twenty years thrown Abelard whenever he was threatened with it; and
in 1140 he saw it to be inevitable. He preferred to face it with
dignity, and requested to be heard at a council to meet at Sens in
June. One cannot admit that he felt the shadow of a hope to escape.
At the utmost he could have dreamed of nothing more than a hearing.
Bernard's friends, who had a lively fear of his dialectics, took
care to shut the door on even this hope. The council was carefully
packed and overawed. The King was present; archbishops, bishops,
abbots, and other prelates by the score; Bernard acted in person as
the prosecuting attorney; the public outside were stimulated to
threaten violence. Abelard had less chance of a judicial hearing
than he had had at Soissons twenty years before. He acted with a
proper sense of their dignity and his own by simply appearing and
entering an appeal to Rome. The council paid no attention to the
appeal, but passed to an immediate condemnation. His friends said
that it was done after dinner; that when the volume of Abelard's
"Theology" was produced and the clerk began to read it aloud, after
the first few sentences the bishops ceased attention, talked, joked,
laughed, stamped their feet, got angry, and at last went to sleep.
They were waked only to growl "Damnamus--namus," and so made an end.
The story may be true, for all prelates, even in the twelfth
century, were not Bernards of Clairvaux or Peters of Cluny; all
drank wine, and all were probably sleepy after dinner; while
Abelard's writings are, for the most part, exceedingly hard reading.
The clergy knew quite well what they were doing; the judgment was
certain long in advance, and the council was called only to register
it. Political trials were usually mere forms.
The appeal to Rome seems to have been taken seriously by Bernard,
which is surprising unless the character of Innocent II inspired his
friends with doubts unknown to us. Innocent owed everything to
Bernard, while Abelard owed everything to Innocent. The Pope was not
in a position to alienate the French Church or the French King. To
any one who knows only what is now to be known, Bernard seems to
have been sure of the Curia, yet he wrote in a tone of excitement as
though he feared Abelard's influence there even more than at home.
He became abusive; Abelard was a crawling viper (coluber tortuosus)
who had come out of his hole (egressus est de caverna sua), and
after the manner of a hydra (in similitudinem hydrae), after having
one head cut off at Soissons, had thrown out seven more. He was a
monk without rule; a prelate without responsibility; an abbot
without discipline; "disputing with boys; conversing with women."
The charges in themselves seem to be literally true, and would not
in some later centuries have been thought very serious; neither
faith nor morals were impugned. On the other hand, Abelard never
affected or aspired to be a saint, while Bernard always affected to
judge the acts and motives of his fellow-creatures from a standpoint
of more than worldly charity. Bernard had no right to Abelard's
vices; he claimed to be judged by a higher standard; but his temper
was none of the best, and his pride was something of the worst;
which gave to Peter the Venerable occasion for turning on him
sharply with a rebuke that cut to the bone. "You perform all the
difficult religious duties," wrote Peter to the saint who wrought
miracles; "you fast; you watch; you suffer; but you will not endure
the easy ones--you do not love (non vis levia ferre, ut diligas)."
This was the end of Abelard. Of course the Pope confirmed the
judgment, and even hurried to do so in order that he might not be
obliged to give Abelard a hearing. The judgment was not severe, as
judgments went; indeed, it amounted to little more than an order to
keep silence, and, as it happened, was never carried into effect.
Abelard, at best a nervous invalid, started for Rome, but stopped at
Cluny, perhaps the most agreeable stopping-place in Europe.
Personally he seems to have been a favourite of Abbot Peter the
Venerable, whose love for Bernard was not much stronger than
Abelard's or Suger's. Bernard was an excessively sharp critic, and
spared worldliness, or what he thought lack of spirituality, in no
prelate whatever; Clairvaux existed for nothing else, politically,
than as a rebuke to them all, and Bernard's enmity was their bond of
union. Under the protection of Peter the Venerable, the most amiable
figure of the twelfth century, and in the most agreeable residence
in Europe, Abelard remained unmolested at Cluny, occupied, as is
believed, in writing or revising his treatises, in defiance of the
council. He died there two years later, April 21, 1142, in full
communion, still nominal Abbot of Saint-Gildas, and so distinguished
a prelate that Peter the Venerable thought himself obliged to write
a charming letter to Heloise at the Paraclete not far away,
condoling with her on the loss of a husband who was the Socrates,
the Aristotle, the Plato, of France and the West; who, if among
logicians he had rivals, had no master; who was the prince of study,
learned, eloquent, subtle, penetrating; who overcame everything by
the force of reason, and was never so great as when he passed to
true philosophy, that of Christ.
All this was in Latin verses, and seems sufficiently strong,
considering that Abelard's philosophy had been so recently and so
emphatically condemned by the entire Church, including Peter the
Venerable himself. The twelfth century had this singular charm of
liberty in practice, just as its architecture knew no mathematical
formula of precision; but Peter's letter to Heloise went further
still, and rang with absolute passion:--
Thus, dear and venerable sister in God, he to whom you are united,
after your tie in the flesh, by the better and stronger bond of the
divine love; he, with whom, and under whom, you have served the
Lord, the Lord now takes, in your place, like another you, and warms
in His bosom; and, for the day of His coming, when shall sound the
voice of the archangel and the trumpet of God descending from
heaven, He keeps him to restore him to you by His grace.
CHAPTER XV
THE MYSTICS
The schoolmen of the twelfth century thought they could reach God by
reason; the Council of Sens, guided by Saint Bernard, replied that
the effort was futile and likely to be mischievous. The council made
little pretence of knowing or caring what method Abelard followed;
they condemned any effort at all on that line; and no sooner had
Bernard silenced the Abbot of Saint-Gildas for innovation than he
turned about and silenced the Bishop of Poitiers for conservatism.
Neither in the twelfth nor in any other century could three men have
understood alike the meaning of Gilbert de la Poree, who seems to
one high authority unworthy of notice and to another, worthy of an
elaborate but quite unintelligible commentary. When M. Rousselet and
M. Haureau judge so differently of a voluminous writer, the Council
at Rheims which censured Bishop Gilbert in 1148 can hardly have been
clear in mind. One dare hazard no more than a guess at Gilbert's
offence, but the guess is tolerably safe that he, like Abelard,
insisted on discussing and analyzing the Trinity. Gilbert seems to
have been a rigid realist, and he reduced to a correct syllogism the
idea of the ultimate substance--God. To make theology a system
capable of scholastic definition he had to suppose, behind the
active deity, a passive abstraction, or absolute substance without
attributes; and then the attributes--justice, mercy, and the rest--
fell into rank as secondary substances. "Formam dei divinitatem
appellant." Bernard answered him by insisting with his usual fiery
conviction that the Church should lay down the law, once for all,
and inscribe it with iron and diamond, that Divinity--Divine Wisdom
--is God. In philosophy and science the question seems to be still
open. Whether anything ultimate exists--whether substance is more
than a complex of elements--whether the "thing in itself" is a
reality or a name--is a question that Faraday and Clerk-Maxwell seem
to answer as Bernard did, while Haeckel answers it as Gilbert did;
but in theology even a heretic wonders how a doubt was possible. The
absolute substance behind the attributes seems to be pure Spinoza.
This supposes that the heretic understands what Gilbert or Haeckel
meant, which is certainly a mistake; but it is possible that he may
see in part what Bernard meant and this is enough if it is all.
Abelard's necessitarianism and Gilbert's Spinozism, if Bernard
understood them right, were equally impossible theology, and the
Church could by no evasion escape the necessity of condemning both.
Unfortunately, Bernard could not put his foot down so roughly on the
schools without putting it on Aristotle as well; and, for at least
sixty years after the Council of Rheims, Aristotle was either
tacitly or expressly prohibited.
One cannot stop to explain why Aristotle himself would have been
first to forbid the teaching of what was called by his name in the
Middle Ages; but you are bound to remember that this period between
1140 and 1200 was that of Transition architecture and art. One must
go to Noyon, Soissons, and Laon to study the Church that trampled on
the schools; one must recall how the peasants of Normandy and the
Chartrain were crusading for the Virgin in 1145, and building her
fleches at Chartres and Saint-Pierre-sur-Dives while Bernard was
condemning Gilbert at Rheims in 1148; we must go to the poets to see
what they all meant by it; but the sum is an emotion--clear and
strong as love and much clearer than logic--whose charm lies in its
unstable balance. The Transition is the equilibrium between the love
of God--which is faith--and the logic of God--which is reason;
between the round arch and the pointed. One may not be sure which
pleases most, but one need not be harsh toward people who think that
the moment of balance is exquisite. The last and highest moment is
seen at Chartres, where, in 1200, the charm depends on the constant
doubt whether emotion or science is uppermost. At Amiens, doubt
ceases; emotion is trained in school; Thomas Aquinas reigns.
Bernard of Clairvaux and Thomas of Aquino were both artists,--very
great artists, if the Church pleases,--and one need not decide which
was the greater; but between them is a region of pure emotion--of
poetry and art--which is more interesting than either. In every age
man has been apt to dream uneasily, rolling from side to side,
beating against imaginary bars, unless, tired out, he has sunk into
indifference or scepticism. Religious minds prefer scepticism. The
true saint is a profound sceptic; a total disbeliever in human
reason, who has more than once joined hands on this ground with some
who were at best sinners. Bernard was a total disbeliever in
scholasticism; so was Voltaire. Bernard brought the society of his
time to share his scepticism, but could give the society no other
intellectual amusement to relieve its restlessness. His crusade
failed; his ascetic enthusiasm faded; God came no nearer. If there
was in all France, between 1140 and 1200, a more typical Englishman
of the future Church of England type than John of Salisbury, he has
left no trace; and John wrote a description of his time which makes
a picturesque contrast with the picture painted by Abelard, his old
master, of the century at its beginning. John weighed Abelard and
the schools against Bernard and the cloister, and coolly concluded
that the way to truth led rather through Citeaux, which brought him
to Chartres as Bishop in 1176, and to a mild scepticism in faith. "I
prefer to doubt," he said, "rather than rashly define what is
hidden." The battle with the schools had then resulted only in
creating three kinds of sceptics:--the disbelievers in human reason;
the passive agnostics; and the sceptics proper, who would have been
atheists had they dared. The first class was represented by the
School of Saint-Victor; the second by John of Salisbury himself; the
third, by a class of schoolmen whom he called Cornificii, as though
they made a practice of inventing horns of dilemma on which to fix
their opponents; as, for example, they asked whether a pig which was
led to market was led by the man or the cord. One asks instantly:
What cord?--whether Grace, for instance, or Free Will?
Bishop John used the science he had learned in the school only to
reach the conclusion that, if philosophy were a science at all, its
best practical use was to teach charity--love. Even the early,
superficial debates of the schools, in 1100-50, had so exhausted the
subject that the most intelligent men saw how little was to be
gained by pursuing further those lines of thought. The twelfth
century had already reached the point where the seventeenth century
stood when Descartes renewed the attempt to give a solid,
philosophical basis for deism by his celebrated "Cogito, ergo sum."
Although that ultimate fact seemed new to Europe when Descartes
revived it as the starting-point of his demonstration, it was as old
and familiar as Saint Augustine to the twelfth century, and as
little conclusive as any other assumption of the Ego or the Non-Ego.
The schools argued, according to their tastes, from unity to
multiplicity, or from multiplicity to unity; but what they wanted
was to connect the two. They tried realism and found that it led to
pantheism. They tried nominalism and found that it ended in
materialism. They attempted a compromise in conceptualism which
begged the whole question. Then they lay down, exhausted. In the
seventeenth century the same violent struggle broke out again, and
wrung from Pascal the famous outcry of despair in which the French
language rose, perhaps for the last time, to the grand style of the
twelfth century. To the twelfth century it belongs; to the century
of faith and simplicity; not to the mathematical certainties of
Descartes and Leibnitz and Newton, or to the mathematical
abstractions of Spinoza. Descartes had proclaimed his famous
conceptual proof of God: "I am conscious of myself, and must exist;
I am conscious of God and He must exist." Pascal wearily replied
that it was not God he doubted, but logic. He was tortured by the
impossibility of rejecting man's reason by reason; unconsciously
sceptical, he forced himself to disbelieve in himself rather than
admit a doubt of God. Man had tried to prove God, and had failed:
"The metaphysical proofs of God are so remote (eloignees) from the
reasoning of men, and so contradictory (impliquees, far-fetched)
that they make little impression; and even if they served to
convince some people, it would only be during the instant that they
see the demonstration; an hour afterwards they fear to have deceived
themselves." Moreover, this kind of proof could lead only to a
speculative knowledge, and to know God only in that way was not to
know Him at all. The only way to reach God was to deny the value of
reason, and to deny reason was scepticism:--
En voyant l'aveuglement et la misere de l'homme et ces contrarietes
etonnantes qui se decouvrent dans sa nature, et regardant tout
l'univers muet, et l'homme sans lumiere, abandonne a lui-meme et
comme egare dans ce recoin de l'umvers, sans savoir qui l'y a mis,
ce qu'il y est venu faire, ce qu'il deviendra en mourant, j'entre en
effroi comme un homme qu'on aurait porte endormi dans une ile
deserte et effroyable, et qui s'eveillerait sans connaitre ou il est
et sans avoir aucun moyen d'en sortir. Et sur cela j'admire comment
on n'entre pas en desespoir d'un si miserable etat. Je vois d'autres
personnes aupres de moi de semblable nature, et je leur demande
s'ils sont mieux instruits que moi, et ils me disent que non Et sur
cela, ces miserables egares, ayant regarde autour d'eux, et ayant vu
quelques objets plaisants, s'y sont donnes et s'y sont attaches Pour
moi je n'ai pu m'y arreter ni me reposer dans la societe de ces
personnes, en tout semblables a moi, miserables comme moi,
impuissants comme moi. Je vois qu'ils ne m'aideraient pas a mourir,
je mourrai seul, il faut donc faire comme si j'etais seul or, si
j'etais seul, je ne batirais pas des maisons, je ne m'embarrasserais
point dans des occupations tumultuaires, je ne chercherais l'estime
de personne, mais je tacherais settlement a decouvrir la verite.
Ainsi, considerant combien il y a d'apparence qu'il y a autre chose
que ce que je vois, j'ai recherche si ce Dieu dont tout le monde
parle n'aurait pas laisse quelques marques de lui. Je regarde de
toutes parts et ne vois partout qu' obscuritd. La nature ne m'offre
rien que ne soit matiere de doute et d'inquietude. Si je n'y voyais
rien qui marquat une divinite, je me determinerais a n'en rien
croire. Si je voyais partout les marques d'un Createur, je me
reposerais en paix dans la foi. Mais voyant trop pour nier, et trop
peu pour m'assurer, je suis dans un etat a plaindre, et ou j'ai
souhaite cent fois que si un Dieu soutient la nature, elle le
marquat sans Equivoque; et que, si les marques qu'elle en donne sont
trompeuses, elle les supprimat tout a fait; qu'elle dit tout ou
rien, afin que je visse quel parti je dois suivre.
When I see the blindness and misery of man and the astonishing
contradictions revealed in his nature, and observe the whole
universe mute, and man without light, abandoned to himself, as
though lost in this corner of the universe, without knowing who put
him here, or what he has come here to do, or what will become of him
in dying, I feel fear like a man who has been carried when asleep
into a desert and fearful island, and has waked without knowing
where he is and without having means of rescue. And thereupon I
wonder how man escapes despair at so miserable an estate. I see
others about me, like myself, and I ask them if they are better
informed than I, and they tell me no. And then these wretched
wanderers, after looking about them and seeing some pleasant object,
have given themselves up and attached themselves to it. As for me I
cannot stop there, or rest in the company of these persons, wholly
like myself, miserable like me, impotent like me. I see that they
would not help me to die, I shall die alone, I must then act as
though alone, but if I were alone I should not build houses, I
should not fret myself with bustling occupations, I should seek the
esteem of no one, but I should try only to discover the truth.
So, considering how much appearance there is that something exists
other than what I see I have sought whether this God of Whom every
one talks may not have left some marks of Himself. I search
everywhere, and see only obscurity everywhere. Nature offers me
nothing but matter of possible doubt and disquiet. If I saw there
nothing to mark a divinity, I should make up my mind to believe
nothing of it. If I saw everywhere the marks of a Creator, I should
rest in peace in faith. But seeing too much to deny, and too little
to affirm, I am in a pitiable state, where I have an hundred times
wishes that, if a God supports nature, she would show it without
equivocation; and that, if the marks she gives are deceptive, she
would suppress them wholly; that she say all of nothing, that I may
see my path.
This is the true Prometheus lyric, but when put back in its place it
refuses to rest at Port-Royal which has a right to nothing but
precision; it has but one real home--the Abbaye-de-Saint-Victor. The
mind that recoils from itself can only commit a sort of ecstatic
suicide; it must absorb itself in God; and in the bankruptcy of
twelfth-century science the Western Christian seemed actually on the
point of attainment; he, like Pascal, touched God behind the veil of
scepticism.
The schools had already proved one or two points which need never
have been discussed again. In essence, religion was love; in no case
was it logic. Reason can reach nothing except through the senses;
God, by essence, cannot be reached through the senses; if He is to
be known at all, He must be known by contact of spirit with spirit,
essence with essence; directly; by emotion; by ecstasy; by
absorption of our existence in His; by substitution of his spirit
for ours. The world had no need to wait five hundred years longer in
order to hear this same result reaffirmed by Pascal. Saint Francis
of Assisi had affirmed it loudly enough, even if the voice of Saint
Bernard had been less powerful than it was. The Virgin had asserted
it in tones more gentle, but any one may still see how convincing,
who stops a moment to feel the emotion that lifted her wonderful
Chartres spire up to God.
The Virgin, indeed, made all easy, for it was little enough she
cared for reason or logic. She cared for her baby, a simple matter,
which any woman could do and understand. That, and the grace of God,
had made her Queen of Heaven. The Trinity had its source in her,--
totius Trinitatis nobile Triclinium,--and she was maternity. She was
also poetry and art. In the bankruptcy of reason, she alone was
real.
So Guillaume de Champeaux, half a century dead, came to life again
in another of his creations. His own Abbey of Saint-Victor, where
Abelard had carried on imaginary disputes with him, became the
dominant school. As far as concerns its logic, we had best pass it
by. The Victorians needed logic only to drive away logicians, which
was hardly necessary after Bernard had shut up the schools. As for
its mysticism, all training is much alike in idea, whether one
follows the six degrees of contemplation taught by Richard of Saint-
Victor, or the eightfold noble way taught by Gautama Buddha. The
theology of the school was still less important, for the Victorians
contented themselves with orthodoxy only in the sense of caring as
little for dogma as for dialectics; their thoughts were fixed on
higher emotions. Not Richard the teacher, but Adam the poet,
represents the school to us, and when Adam dealt with dogma he
frankly admitted his ignorance and hinted his indifference; he was,
as always, conscientious; but he was not always, or often, as cold.
His statement of the Trinity is a marvel; but two verses of it are
enough:--
Digne loqui de personis
Vim transcendit rationis,
Excedit ingenia.
Quid sit gigni, quid processus,
Me nescire sum professus,
Sed fide non dubia.
Qui sic credit, non festinet,
Et a via non declinet
Insolenter regia.
Servet fidem, formet mores,
Nec attendat ad errors
Quos damnat Ecclesia.
Of the Trinity to reason
Leads to license or to treason
Punishment deserving.
What is birth and what procession
Is not mine to make profession,
Save with faith unswerving.
Thus professing, thus believing,
Never insolently leaving
The highway of our faith,
Duty weighing, law obeying,
Never shall we wander straying
Where heresy is death.
Such a school took natural refuge in the Holy Ghost and the Virgin,
--Grace and Love,--but the Holy Ghost, as usual, profited by it much
less than the Virgin. Comparatively little of Adam's poetry is
expressly given to the Saint Esprit, and too large a part of this
has a certain flavour of dogma:--
Qui procedis ab utroque
Genitore Genitoque
Pariter, Paraclite!
. . . . . . . . . Amor Patris, Filiique
Par amborum et utrique
Compar et consimilis!
The Holy Ghost is of the Father and of the
Son; neither made nor created nor begotten,
but proceeding.
The whole three Persons are coeternal
together; and coequal.
This sounds like a mere versification of the Creed, yet when Adam
ceased to be dogmatic and broke into true prayer, his verse added a
lofty beauty even to the Holy Ghost; a beauty too serious for modern
rhyme:--
Oh, juvamen oppressorum,
Oh, solamen miserorum,
Pauperum refugium,
Da contemptum terrenorum!
Ad amorem supernorum
Trahe desiderium!
Consolator et fundator,
Habitator et amator,
Cordium humilium,
Pelle mala, terge sordes,
Et discordes fac Concordes,
Et affer praesidium!
Oh, helper of the heavy-laden,
Oh, solace of the miserable,
Of the poor, the refuge,
Give contempt of earthly pleasures!
To the love of heavenly treasures
Lift our hearts' desire!
Consolation and foundation,
Dearest friend and habitation
Of the lowly-hearted,
Dispel our evil, cleanse our foulness,
And our discords turn to concord,
And bring us succour!
Adam's scholasticism was the most sympathetic form of mediaeval
philosophy. Even in prose, the greatest writers have not often
succeeded in stating simply and clearly the fact that infinity can
make itself finite, or that space can make itself bounds, or that
eternity can generate time. In verse, Adam did it as easily as
though he were writing any other miracle,--as Gaultier de Coincy
told the Virgin's,--and any one who thinks that the task was as easy
as it seems, has only to try it and see whether he can render into a
modern tongue any single word which shall retain the whole value of
the word which Adam has chosen:--
Ne periret homo reus
Redemptorem misit Deus,
Pater unigenitum;
Visitavit quos amavit
Nosque vitae revocavit
Gratia non meritum.
Infinitus et Immensus,
Quem non capit ullus sensus
Nec locorum spatia,
Ex eterno temporalis,
Ex immenso fit localis,
Ut restauret omnia.
To death condemned by awful sentence,
God recalled us to repentance,
Sending His only Son;
Whom He loved He came to cherish;
Whom His justice doomed to perish,
By grace to life he won.
Infinity, Immensity,
Whom no human eye can see
Or human thought contain,
Made of infinity a space,
Made of Immensity a place,
To win us Life again.
The English verses, compared with the Latin, are poor enough, with
the canting jingle of a cheap religion and a thin philosophy, but by
contrast and comparison they give higher value to the Latin. One
feels the dignity and religious quality of Adam's chants the better
for trying to give them an equivalent. One would not care to hazard
such experiments on poetry of the highest class like that of Dante
and Petrarch, but Adam was conventional both in verse and thought,
and aimed at obtaining his effects from the skilful use of the Latin
sonorities for the purposes of the chant. With dogma and metaphysics
he dealt boldly and even baldly as he was required to do, and
successfully as far as concerned the ear or the voice; but poetry
was hardly made for dogma; even the Trinity was better expressed
mathematically than by rhythm. With the stronger emotions, such as
terror, Adam was still conventional, and showed that he thought of
the chant more than of the feeling and exaggerated the sound beyond
the value of the sense. He could never have written the "Dies Irae."
He described the shipwreck of the soul in magnificent sounds without
rousing an emotion of fear; the raging waves and winds that swept
his bark past the abysses and up to the sky were as conventional as
the sirens, the dragons, the dogs, and the pirates that lay in wait.
The mast nodded as usual; the sails were rent; the sailors ceased
work; all the machinery was classical; only the prayer to the Virgin
saved the poetry from sinking like the ship; and yet, when chanted,
the effect was much too fine to bear translation:--
Ave, Virgo singularis,
Mater nostri Salutaris,
Quae vocaris Stella Maris,
Stella non erratica;
Nos in hujus vitae mari
Non permitte naufragari,
Sed pro nobis Salutari
Tuo semper supplica!
Saevit mare, fremunt venti,
Fluctus surgunt turbulenti;
Navis currit, sed currenti
Tot occurrunt obvia!
Hic sirenes voluptatis,
Draco, canes cum piratis,
Mortem pene desperatis
Haec intentant omnia.
Post abyssos, nunc ad coelum
Furens unda fert phaselum;
Nutat malus, fluit velum,
Nautae cessat opera;
Contabescit in his malis
Homo noster animalis;
Tu nos, Mater spiritalis,
Pereuntes liberal!
Finer still is the famous stanza sung at Easter, in which Christ
rises, the Lion of Judah, in the crash of the burst gates of death,
at the roar of the Father Lion:--
Sic de Juda, leo fortis,
Fractis portis dirae mortis,
Die surgens tertia,
Rugiente voce patris
Ad supernae sinum matris
Tot revexit spolia.
For terror or ferocity or images of pain, the art of the twelfth
century had no use except to give a higher value to their images of
love. The figures on the west portal of Chartres are alive with the
spirit of Adam's poetry, but it is the spirit of the Virgin. Like
Saint Bernard, Adam lavished his affections on Mary, and even more
than Saint Bernard he could claim to be her poet-laureate. Bernard
was not himself author of the hymn "Stella Maris" which brought him
the honour of the Virgin's personal recognition, but Adam was author
of a dozen hymns in which her perfections were told with equal
fervour, and which were sung at her festivals. Among these was the
famous
Salve, Mater Pietatis,
Et totius Trinitatis
Nobile Triclinium!
a compliment so refined and yet so excessive that the Venerable
Thomas Cantimpratensis who died a century later, about 1280, related
in his "Apiarium" that when "venerabilis Adam" wrote down these
lines, Mary herself appeared to him and bent her head in
recognition. Although the manuscripts do not expressly mention this
miracle, they do contain, at that stanza, a curious note expressing
an opinion, apparently authorized by the prior, that, if the Virgin
had seen fit to recognize the salutation of the Venerable Adam in
this manner, she would have done only what he merited: "ab ea
resalutari et regratiari meruit."
Adam's poems are still on the shelves of most Parisian bookshops, as
common as "Aucassins" and better known than much poetry of our own
time; for the mediaeval Latin rhymes have a delightful sonority and
simplicity that keep them popular because they were not made to be
read but to be sung. One does not forget their swing:--
Infinitus et Immensus;
or--
Oh, juvamen oppressorum;
or--
Consolatrix miserorum
Suscitatrix mortuorum.
The organ rolls through them as solemnly as ever it did in the Abbey
Church; but in mediaeval art so much more depends on the mass than
on the measure--on the dignity than on the detail--that equivalents
are impossible. Even Walter Scott was content to translate only
three verses of the "Dies Irae." At best, Viollet-le-Duc could
reproduce only a sort of modern Gothic; a more or less effaced or
affected echo of a lost emotion which the world never felt but once
and never could feel again. Adam composed a number of hymns to the
Virgin, and, in them all, the feeling counts for more, by far, than
the sense. Supposing we choose the simplest and try to give it a
modern version, aiming to show, by comparison, the difference of
sound; one can perhaps manage to recover a little of the simplicity,
but give it the grand style one cannot; or, at least, if any one has
ever done both, it is Walter Scott, and merely by placing side by
side the "Dies Irae" and his translation of it, one can see at a
glance where he was obliged to sacrifice simplicity only to obtain
sound:--
Dies irae, dies illa,
Solvet seclum in favilla,
Teste David cum Sibylla.
Quantus tremor est futurus,
Quando judex est venturus,
Cuncta stride discussurus!
Tuba mirum spargens sonum
Per sepulchra regionum,
Coget omnes ante thronum.
That day of wrath, that dreadful day,
When heaven and earth shall pass away,
What power shall be the sinner's stay?
How shall he meet that dreadful day?
When shrivelling like a parched scroll
The flaming heavens together roll;
When louder yet and yet more dread
Swells the high trump that wakes the dead.
As translation the last line is artificial.
The "Dies Irae" does not belong, in spirit, to the twelfth century;
it is sombre and gloomy like the Last Judgments on the thirteenth-
century portals; it does not love. Adam loved. His verses express
the Virgin; they are graceful, tender, fervent, and they hold the
same dignity which cannot be translated:--
In hac valle lacrimarum
Nihil dulce, nihil carum,
Suspecta sunt omnia;
Quid hic nobis erit tutum,
Cum nec ipsa vel virtutum
Tuta sit victoria!
Caro nobis adversatur,
Mundus cami suffragatur
In nostram perniciem;
Hostis instat, nos infestans,
Nunc se palam manifestans,
Nunc occultans rabiem.
Et peccamus et punimur,
Et diversis irretimur
Laqueis venantium.
O Maria, mater Dei,
Tu, post Deum, summa spei,
Tu dulce refugium;
Tot et tantis irretiti,
Non valemus his reniti
Ne vi nec industria;
Consolatrix miserorum,
Suscitatrix mortuorum,
Mortis rompe retia!
In this valley full of tears,
Nothing softens, nothing cheers,
All is suspected lure;
What safety can we hope for, here,
When even virtue faints for fear
Her victory be not sure!
Within, the flesh a traitor is,
Without, the world encompasses,
A deadly wound to bring.
The foe is greedy for our spoils,
Now clasping us within his coils,
Or hiding now his sting.
We sin, and penalty must pay,
And we are caught, like beasts of prey,
Within the hunter's snares.
Nearest to God! oh Mary Mother!
Hope can reach us from none other,
Sweet refuge from our cares;
We have no strength to struggle longer,
For our bonds are more and stronger
Than our hearts can bear!
You who rest the heavy-laden,
You who lead lost souls to Heaven,
Burst the hunter's snare!
The art of this poetry of love and hope, which marked the mystics,
lay of course in the background of shadows which marked the
cloister. "Inter vania nihil vanius est homine." Man is an
imperceptible atom always trying to become one with God. If ever
modern science achieves a definition of energy, possibly it may
borrow the figure: Energy is the inherent effort of every
multiplicity to become unity. Adam's poetry was an expression of the
effort to reach absorption through love, not through fear; but to do
this thoroughly he had to make real to himself his own nothingness;
most of all, to annihilate pride; for the loftiest soul can
comprehend that an atom,--say, of hydrogen,--which is proud of its
personality, will never merge in a molecule of water. The familiar
verse: "Oh, why should the spirit of mortal be proud?" echoes Adam's
epitaph to this day:--
Haeres peccati, natura filius irae,
Exiliique reus nascitur omnis homo.
Unde superbit homo, cujus conceptio culpa,
Nasci poena, labor vita, necesse mori?
Heir of sin, by nature son of wrath,
Condemned to exile, every man is born.
Whence is man's pride, whose conception fault,
Birth pain, life labour, and whose death is sure?
Four concluding lines, not by him, express him even better:--
Hic ego qui jaceo, miser et miserabilis Adam,
Unam pro summo munere posco precem.
Peccavi, fateor; veniam peto; parce fatenti;
Parce, pater: fratres, parcite; parce, Deus!
One does not conceive that Adam insisted so passionately on his sins
because he thought them--or himself--important before the Infinite.
Chemistry does not consider an atom of oxygen as in itself
important, yet if it wishes to get a volume of pure gas, it must
separate the elements. The human soul was an atom that could unite
with God only as a simple element. The French mystics showed in
their mysticism the same French reasonableness; the sense of
measure, of logic, of science; the allegiance to form; the
transparency of thought, which the French mind has always shown on
its surface like a shell of nacre. The mystics were in substance
rather more logical than the schoolmen and much more artistic in
their correctness of line and scale. At bottom, French saints were
not extravagant. One can imagine a Byzantine asserting that no
French saint was ever quite saintly. Their aims and ideals were very
high, but not beyond reaching and not unreasonable. Drag the French
mind as far from line and logic as space permits, the instant it is
freed it springs back to the classic and tries to look consequent.
This paradox, that the French mystics were never mystical, runs
through all our travels, so obstinately recurring in architecture,
sculpture, legend, philosophy, religion, and poetry, that it becomes
tiresome; and yet it is an idea that, in spite of Matthew Arnold and
many other great critics, never has got lodgment in the English or
German mind, and probably never will. Every one who loves travel
will hope that it never may. If you are driven to notice it as the
most distinctive mark of French art, it is not at all for the
purpose of arguing a doubtful law, but only in order to widen the
amusement of travel. We set out to travel from Mont-Saint-Michel to
Chartres, and no farther; there we stop; but we may still look
across the boundary to Assisi for a specimen of Italian Gothic
architecture, a scheme of colour decoration, or still better for a
mystic to compare with the Bernadines and Victorians. Every one who
knows anything of religion knows that the ideal mystic saint of
western Europe was Francis of Assisi, and that Francis, though he
loved France, was as far as possible from being French; though not
in the least French, he was still the finest flower from the French
mediaeval garden; and though the French mystics could never have
understood him, he was what the French mystics would have liked to
be or would have thought they liked to be as long as they knew him
to be not one of themselves. As an Italian or as a Spaniard, Francis
was in harmony with his world; as a Frenchman, he would have been
out of place even at Clairvaux, and still more among his own
Cordeliers at the doors of the Sorbonne.
Francis was born in 1186, at the instant when French art was
culminating, or about to culminate, in the new cathedrals of Laon
and Chartres, on the ruins of scholastic religion and in the full
summer of the Courts of Love. He died in 1226, just as Queen Blanche
became Regent of France and when the Cathedral of Beauvais was
planned. His life precisely covered the most perfect moment of art
and feeling in the thousand years of pure and confident
Christianity. To an emotional nature like his, life was still a
phantasm or "concept" of crusade against real or imaginary enemies
of God, with the "Chanson de Roland" for a sort of evangel, and a
feminine ideal for a passion. He chose for his mistress "domina
nostra paupertas," and the rules of his order of knighthood were as
visionary as those of Saint Bernard were practical. "Isti sunt
fratres mei milites tabulae rotundae, qui latitant in desertis"; his
Knights of the Round Table hid themselves for their training in
deserts of poverty, simplicity, humility, innocence of self,
absorption in nature, in the silence of God, and, above all, in love
and joy incarnate, whose only influence was example. Poverty of body
in itself mattered nothing; what Francis wanted was poverty of
pride, and the external robe or the bare feet were outward and
necessary forms of protection against its outward display. Against
riches or against all external and visible vanity, rules and laws
could be easily enforced if it were worth while, although the purest
humility would be reached only by those who were indifferent and
unconscious of their external dress; but against spiritual pride the
soul is defenceless, and of all its forms the subtlest and the
meanest is pride of intellect. If "nostra domina paupertas" had a
mortal enemy, it was not the pride beneath a scarlet robe, but that
in a schoolmaster's ferule, and of all schoolmasters the vainest and
most pretentious was the scholastic philosopher. Satan was logic.
Lord Bacon held much the same opinion. "I reject the syllogism," was
the starting-point of his teaching as it was the essence of Saint
Francis's, and the reasons of both men were the same though their
action was opposite. "Let men please themselves as they will in
admiring and almost adoring the human mind, this is certain:--that,
as an uneven mirror distorts the rays of objects according to its
own figure and section, so the mind ... cannot be trusted ..."
Bacon's first object was the same as that of Francis, to humiliate
and if possible destroy the pride of human reason; both of them knew
that this was their most difficult task, and Francis, who was
charity incarnate, lost his self-control whenever he spoke of the
schools, and became almost bitter, as though in constant terror of a
poison or a cancer. "Praeodorabat etiam tempora non longe ventura in
quibus jam praesciebat scientiam inflativam debere esse occasionem
ruinae." He foresaw the time not far off when puffed-up science
would be the ruin of his "domina paupertas." His struggle with this
form of human pride was desperate and tragical in its instant
failure. He could not make even his novices understand what he
meant. The most impossible task of the mind is to reject in practice
the reflex action of itself, as Bacon pointed out, and only the
highest training has sometimes partially succeeded in doing it. The
schools--ancient, mediaeval, or modern--have almost equally failed,
but even the simple rustics who tried to follow Francis could not
see why the rule of poverty should extend to the use of a psalter.
Over and over again he explained vehemently and dramatically as only
an Italian or a Spaniard could, and still they failed to catch a
notion of what he meant.
Quum ergo venisset beatus Franciscus ad locum ubi erat ille
novitius, dixit ille novitius: "Pater, mihi esset magna consolatio
habere psalterium, sed licet generalis illud mihi concesserit, tamen
vellem ipsum habere, pater, de conscientia tua." Cui beatus
Franciscus respondit: "Carolus imperator, Rolandus et Oliverus et
omnes palatini et robusti viri qui potentes fuerunt in proelio,
prosequendo infideles cum multa sudore et labore usque ad mortem,
habuerunt de illis victoriara memorialiter, et ad ultimum ipsi
sancti martyres sunt mortui pro fide Christi in certamine. Nunc
autem multi sunt qui sola narratione eorum quae illi fecerunt volunt
recipere honorem et humanam laudem. Ita et inter nos sunt multi qui
solum recitando et praedicando opera quae sancti fecerunt volunt
recipere honorem et laudem; ... postquam habueris psalterium,
concupisces et volueris habere breviarium; et postquam habueris
breviarium, sedebis in cathedra tanquam magnus prelatus et dices
fratri tuo:--Apporta mihi breviarium!"
Haec autem dicens beatus Franciscus cum magno fervore spiritus
accepit de cinere et posuit super caput suum, et ducendo manum super
caput suum in circuitu sicut ille qui lavat caput, dicebat: "Ego
breviarium! ego breviarium!" et sic reiteravit multoties ducendo
manum per caput. Et stupefactus et verecundatus est frater ille ...
Elapsis autem pluribus mensibus quum esset beatus Franciscus apud
locum sanctae Mariae de Portiuncula, juxta cellam post domum in via,
praedictus frater iterum locutus est ei de psalterio. Cui beatus
Franciscus dixit: "Vade et facias de hoc sicut dicet tibi minister
tuus!" Quo audito, frater ille coepit redire per viam unde venerat.
Beatus autem Franciscus remanens in via coepit considerare illud
quod dixerat illi fratri, et statim clamavit post cum, dicens:
"Expecta me, frater! expecta!" Et ivit usque ad eum et ait illi:
"Revertere mecum, frater, et ostende mihi locum ubi dixi tibi quod
faceres de psalterio sicut diceret minister tuus." Quum ergo
pervenissent ad locum, beatus Franciscus genuflexit coram fratre
illo, et dixit: "Mea culpa, frater! mea culpa! quia quicunque vult
esse frater Minor non debet habere nisi tunicam, sicut regula sibi
concedit, et cordam et femoralia et qui manifesta necessitate
coguntur calciamenta."
So when Saint Francis happened to come to the place where the novice
was, the novice said: "Father, it would be a great comfort to me to
have a psalter, but though my general should grant it, still I would
rather have it, father, with your knowledge too." Saint Francis
answered: "The Emperor Charlemagne, Roland and Oliver, and all the
palatines and strong men who were potent in battle, pursuing the
infidels with much toil and sweat even to death, triumphed over them
memorably [without writing it?], and at last these holy martyrs died
in the contest for the faith of Christ. But now there are many who,
merely by telling of what those men did, want to receive honour and
human praise. So, too, among us are many who, merely by reciting and
preaching the works which the saints have done, want to receive
honour and praise; ... After you have got the psalter, you will
covet and want a breviary; and after getting the breviary, you will
sit on your throne like a bishop, and will say to your brother:
'Bring me the breviary!'"
While saying this, Saint Francis with great vehemence took up a
handful of ashes and spread it over his bead; and moving his hand
about his head in a circle as though washing it, said: "I, breviary!
I, breviary!" and so kept on, repeatedly moving his hand about his
head; and stupefied and ashamed was that novice. ... But several
months afterwards when Saint Francis happened to be near Sta Maria
de Portiuncula, by the cell behind the house on the road, the same
brother again spoke to him about the psalter. Saint Francis replied:
"Go and do about it as your director says." On this the brother
turned back, but Saint Francis, standing in the road, began to
reflect on what he had said, and suddenly called after him: "Wait
for me, brother! wait!" and going after him, said: "Return with me,
brother, and show me the place where I told you to do as your
director should say, about the psalter." When they had come back to
it, Saint Francis bent before the brother, and said: "Mea culpa,
brother, mea culpa! because whoever wishes to be a Minorite must
have nothing but a tunic, as the rule permits, and the cord, and the
loincloth, and what covering is manifestly necessary for the limbs."
So vivid a picture of an actual mediaeval saint stands out upon this
simple background as is hardly to be found elsewhere in all the
records of centuries, but if the brother himself did not understand
it and was so shamed and stupefied by Francis's vehemence, the world
could understand it no better; the Order itself was ashamed of Saint
Francis because they understood him too well. They hastened to
suppress this teaching against science, although it was the life of
Francis's doctrine. He taught that the science of the schools led to
perdition because it was puffed up with emptiness and pride.
Humility, simplicity, poverty were alone true science. They alone
led to heaven. Before the tribunal of Christ, the schoolmen would be
condemned, "and, with their dark logic (opinionibus tenebrosis)
shall be plunged into outer darkness with the spirits of the
darkness." They were devilish, and would perish with the devils.
One sees instantly that neither Francis of Assisi nor Bacon of
Verulam could have hoped for peace with the schools; twelfth-century
ecstasy felt the futility of mere rhetoric quite as keenly as
seventeenth-century scepticism was to feel it; and yet when Francis
died in 1226 at Assisi, Thomas was just being born at Aquino some
two hundred kilometres to the southward. True scholasticism had not
begun. Four hundred years seem long for the human mind to stand
still--or go backward; the more because the human mind was never
better satisfied with itself than when thus absorbed in its mirror;
but with that chapter we have nothing to do. The pleasantest way to
treat it was that of Saint Francis; half-serious, half-jesting; as
though, after all, in the thought of infinity, four hundred years
were at most only a serio-comic interlude. At Assisi, once, when a
theologian attacked Fra Egidio by the usual formal arraignment in
syllogisms, the brother waited until the conclusions were laid down,
and then, taking out a flute from the folds of his robe, he played
his answer in rustic melodies. The soul of Saint Francis was a
rustic melody and the simplest that ever reached so high an
expression. Compared with it, Theocritus and Virgil are as modern as
Tennyson and ourselves.
All this shows only what Saint Francis was not; to understand what
he was and how he goes with Saint Bernard and Saint Victor through
the religious idyll of Transition architecture, one must wander
about Assisi with the "Floretum" or "Fioretti" in one's hand;--the
legends which are the gospel of Francis as the evangels are the
gospel of Christ, who was reincarnated in Assisi. We have given a
deal of time to showing our own sceptical natures how simple the
architects and decorators of Chartres were in their notions of the
Virgin and her wants; but French simple-mindedness was already
complex compared with Italian. The Virgin was human; Francis was
elementary nature itself, like sun and air; he was Greek in his joy
of life:--
... Recessit inde et venit inter Cannarium
et Mevanium. Et respexit quasdam arbores
juxta viam in quibus residebat tanta multitudo
avium diversarum quod nunquam in
partibus illis visa similis multitudo. In campo
insuper juxta praedictas arbores etiam multitudo
maxima residebat. Quam multitudinem
sanctus Franciscus respiciens et admirans,
facto super eum Spiritu Dei, dixit sociis: "Vobis
hic me in via exspectantibus, ibo et praedicabo
sororibus nostris aviculis." Et intravit
in campum ad aves quae residebant in terra.
Et statim quum praedicare incepit omnes aves
in arboribus residentes descenderunt ad eum
et simul cum aliis de campo immobiles perman
serunt, quum tamen ipse inter eas iret plurimas
tunica contingendo. Et nulla earum penitus
movebatur, sicut recitavit frater Jacobus de
Massa, sanctus homo, qui omnia supradicta
habuit ab ore fratris Massei, qui fuit unus de
iis qui tune erant socii sancti patris.
Quibus avibus sanctus Franciscus ait:
"Multum tenemini Deo, sorores meas aves,
et debetis eum semper et ubique laudare propter
liberum quem ubique habetis volatum,
propter vestitum duplicatum et triplicatum,
propter habitum pictum et ornatum, propter
victum sine vestro labore paratum, propter
cantum a Creatore vobis intimatum, propter
numerum ex Dei benedictione multiplicatum,
propter semen vestrum a Deo in area reservatum,
propter elementum aeris vobis deputatum.
Vos non seminatis neque metitis, et Deus
vos pascit; et dedit vobis flumina et fontes ad
potandum, montes et colles, saxa et ibices ad
refugium, et arbores altes ad nidificandum;
et quum nec filare nec texere sciatis, praebet
tam vobis quam vestris filiis necessarium indumentum.
Unde multum diligit vos Creator
qui tot beneficia contulit. Quapropter cavete,
sorores mes aviculae, ni sitis ingratae sed
semper laudare Deum studete."
... He departed thence and came between
Cannara and Bevagna; and near the road he
saw some trees on which perched so great a
number of birds as never in those parts had
been seen the like. Also in the field beyond,
near these same trees, a very great multitude
rested on the ground. This multitude, Saint
Francis seeing with wonder, the spirit of God
descending on him he said to his companions:
"Wait for me on the road, while I go and
preach to our sisters the little birds." And he
went into the field where the birds were on
the ground. And as soon as he began to preach,
all the birds in the trees came down to him and
with those in the field stood quite still, even
when he went among them touching many
with his robe. Not one of them moved,
as Brother James of Massa related, a saintly
man who had the whole story from the mouth
of Brother Masseo who was one of those then
with the sainted father.
To these birds, Saint Francis said: "Much
are you bound to God, birds, my sisters, and
everywhere and always must you praise him for
the free flight you everywhere have; for the
double and triple covering; for the painted and
decorated robe; for the food prepared without
your labour; for the song taught you by the
Creator; for your number multiplied by God's
blessing; for your seed preserved by God in
the ark; for the element of air allotted to you.
You neither sow nor reap, and God feeds
you; and has given you rivers and springs
to drink at, mountains and hills, rocks and
wild goats for refuge, and high trees for nesting;
and though you know neither how to spin nor
to weave, He gives both you and your children
all the garments you need. Whence much must
the Creator love you, Who confers so many
blessings. Therefore take care, my small bird
sisters, never to be ungrateful, but always strive
to praise God."
Fra Ugolino, or whoever wrote from the dictation of Brother James of
Massa, after the tradition of Brother Masseo of Marignano reported
Saint Francis's sermon in absolute good faith as Saint Francis
probably made it and as the birds possibly received it. All were
God's creatures, brothers and sisters, and God alone knew or knows
whether or how far they understand each other; but Saint Francis, in
any case, understood them and believed that they were in sympathy
with him. As far as the birds or wolves were concerned, it was no
great matter, but Francis did not stop with vertebrates or even with
organic forms. "Nor was it surprising," said the "Speculum," "if
fire and other creatures sometimes revered and obeyed him; for, as
we who were with him very frequently saw, he held them in such
affection and so much delighted in them, and his soul was moved by
such pity and compassion for them, that he would not see them
roughly handled, and talked with them with such evident delight as
if they were rational beings":--
Nam quadam vice, quum sederet juxta ignem, ipso nesciente, ignis
invasit pannos ejus de lino, sive brachas, juxta genu, quumque
sentiret calorem ejus nolebat ipsum extinguere. Socius autem ejus
videns comburi pannos ejus cucurrit ad eum volens extinguere ignem;
ipse vero prohibuit ei, dicens: "Noli, frater, carissime, noli male
facere igni!" Et sic nullo modo voluit quod extingueret ipsum. Ille
vero festinanter ivit ad fratrem qui erat guardianus ipsius, et
duxit eum ad beatum Franciscum, et statim contra voluntatem beati
Francisci, extinxit ignem. Unde quacunque necessitate urgente
nunquam voluit extinguere ignem vel lampadem vel candelam, tantum
pietate movebatur ad ipsum. Nolebat etiam quod frater projiceret
ignem vel lignum fumigantem de loco ad locum sicut solet fieri, sed
volebat ut plane poneret ipsum in terra ob reverentiam illius cujus
est creatura.
For once when he was sitting by the fire, a spark, without his
knowing it, caught his linen drawers and set them burning near the
knee, and when he felt the heat he would not extinguish it; but his
companion, seeing his clothes on fire, ran to put it out, and he
forbade it, saying: "Don't, my dearest brother, don't hurt the
fire!" So he utterly refused to let him put it out, and the brother
hurried off to get his guardian, and brought him to Saint Francis,
and together they put out the fire at once against Saint Francis's
will. So, no matter what the necessity, he would never put out fire
Or a lamp or candle, so strong was his feeling for it; he would not
even let a brother throw fire or a smoking log from place to place,
as is usual, but wanted it placed gently (piano) on the ground, out
of respect for Him Whose creature it is.
The modern tourist, having with difficulty satisfied himself that
Saint Francis acted thus in good faith, immediately exclaims that he
was a heretic and should have been burned; but, in truth, the
immense popular charm of Saint Francis, as of the Virgin, was
precisely his heresies. Both were illogical and heretical by
essence;--in strict discipline, in the days of the Holy Office, a
hundred years later, both would have been burned by the Church, as
Jeanne d'Arc was, with infinitely less reason, in 1431. The charm of
the twelfth-century Church was that it knew how to be illogical--no
great moral authority ever knew it better--when God Himself became
illogical. It cared no more than Saint Francis, or Lord Bacon, for
the syllogism. Nothing in twelfth-century art is so fine as the air
and gesture of sympathetic majesty with which the Church drew aside
to let the Virgin and Saint Francis pass and take the lead--for a
time. Both were human ideals too intensely realized to be resisted
merely because they were illogical. The Church bowed and was silent.
This does not concern us. What the Church thought or thinks is its
own affair, and what it chooses to call orthodox is orthodox. We
have been trying only to understand what the Virgin and Saint
Francis thought, which is matter of fact, not of faith. Saint
Francis was even more outspoken than the Virgin. She calmly set
herself above dogma, and, with feminine indifference to authority,
overruled it. He, having asserted in the strongest terms the
principle of obedience, paid no further attention to dogma, but,
without the least reticence, insisted on practices and ideas that no
Church could possibly permit or avow. Toward the end of his life,
his physician cauterized his face for some neuralgic pain:--
Et posito ferro in igne pro coctura fienda, beatus Franciscus volens
confortare spiritum suum ne pavesceret, sic locutus est ad ignem:
"Frater mi, ignis, nobilis et utilis inter alias creaturas, esto
mihi curialis in hac hora quia olim te dilexi et diligam amore
illius qui creavit te. Deprecor etiam creatorem nostrum qui nos
creavit ut ita tuum calorem temperct ut ipsum sustinere valeam." Et
oratione finita signavit ignem signo crucis.
When the iron was put on the fire for making the cotterie, Saint
Francis, wishing to encourage himself against fear, spoke thus to
the fire: "My brother, fire, noblest and usefullest of creatures, be
gentle to me now, because I have loved and will love you with the
love of Him who created you. Our Creator, too, Who created us both,
I implore so to temper your heat that I may have strength to bear
it." And having spoken, he signed the fire with the cross.
With him, this was not merely a symbol. Children and saints can
believe two contrary things at the same time, but Saint Francis had
also a complete faith of his own which satisfied him wholly. All
nature was God's creature. The sun and fire, air and water, were
neither more nor less brothers and sisters than sparrows, wolves,
and bandits. Even "daemones sunt castalli Domini nostri"; the devils
are wardens of our Lord. If Saint Francis made any exception from
his univeral law of brotherhood it was that of the schoolmen, but it
was never expressed. Even in his passionate outbreak, in the
presence of Saint Dominic, at the great Chapter of his Order at
Sancta Maria de Portiuncula in 1218, he did not go quite to the
length of denying the brotherhood of schoolmen, although he placed
them far below the devils, and yet every word of this address seems
to sob with the anguish of his despair at the power of the school
anti-Christ:--
Quum beatus Franciscus esset in capitulo generali apud Sanctam
Mariam de Portiuncula ... et fuerunt ibi quinque millia fratres,
quamplures fratres sapientes et scientiati iverunt ad dominum
Ostiensem qui erat ibidem, et dixerunt ei: "Domine, volumus ut
suadetis fratri Francisco quod sequatur consilium fratrum sapientium
et permittat se interdum duci ab eis." Et allegabant regulam sancti
Benedicti, Augustini et Bernardi qui docent sic et sic vivere
ordinate. Quae omnia quum retulisset cardinalis beato Francisco per
modum admoni admonitionis, beatus Franciscus, nihil sibi respondens,
cepit ipsum per manum et duxit eum ad fratres congregatos in
capitulo, et sic locutus est fratribus in fervore et virtute Spirit
us sancti:--
"Fratres mei, fratres mei, Dominus vocavit me per viam simplicitatis
et humilitatis, et bane viam ostendit mini in veritate pro me et pro
illis qui volunt mini credere et imitari. Et ideo volo quod non
nominetis mihi aliquam regulam neque sancti Benedicti neque sancti
Augustini neque sancti Bernardi, neque aliquam viam et formam
vivendi praeter illam quae mihi a Domino est ostensa misericorditer
et donata. Et dixit mihi Dominus quod volebat me esse unum pauperem
et stultum idiotam [magnum fatuum] in hoc mundo et noluit nos ducere
per viam aliam quam per istam scientiam. Sed per vestram scientiam
et sapientiam Deus vos confundet et ego confido in castallis Domini
[idest dasmonibus] quod per ipsos puniet vos Deus et adhuc redibitis
ad vestrum statum cum vituperio vestro velitis nolitis."
When Saint Francis was at the General Chapter held at Sancta maris
de Portiuncula ... and five thousand brothers were present, A number
of them who were schoolmen went to Cardinal Hugolino who was there,
and said to him: "My lord, we want you to persuade Brother Francis
to follow the council of the learned brothers, and sometimes let
himself be guided by them." And they suggested the rule of Saint
Benedict or Augustine or Bernard who require their congregations to
live so and so, by regulation. When the cardinal had repeated all
this to Saint Francis by way of counsel, Saint Francis, making no
answer, took him by the hand and led him to the brothers assembled
in Chapter, and in the fervour and virtue of the Holy Ghost, spoke
thus to the brothers:
"My brothers, my brothers, God has called me by way of simplicity
and humility, and has shown me in verity this path for me and
those who want to believe and follow me; so I want you to talk of no
Rule to me, neither Saint Benedict nor Saint Augustine nor Saint
Bernard, nor any way or form of Life whatever except that which God
has mercifully pointed out and granted to me. And God said that he
wanted me to be a pauper [poverello] and an idiot--a great fool--in
this world, and would not lead us by any other path of science than
this. But by your science and syllogisms God will confound you, and
I trust in God's warders, the devils, that through them God shall
punish you, and you will yet come back to your proper station with
shame, whether you will or no."
The narration continues: "Tunc cardinalis obstupuit valde et nihil
respondit. Et omnes fratres plurimum timuerunt."
One feels that the reporter has not exaggerated a word; on the
contrary, he softened the scandal, because in his time the Cardinal
had gained his point, and Francis was dead. One can hear Francis
beginning with some restraint, and gradually carried away by passion
till he lost control of himself and his language: "'God told me,
with his own words, that he meant me to be a beggar and a great
fool, and would not have us on any other terms; and as for your
science, I trust in God's devils who will beat you out of it, as you
deserve.' And the Cardinal was utterly dumbfounded and answered
nothing; and all the brothers were scared to death." The Cardinal
Hugolino was a great schoolman, and Dominic was then founding the
famous order in which the greatest of all doctors, Albertus Magnus,
was about to begin his studies. One can imagine that the Cardinal
"obstupuit valde," and that Dominic felt shaken in his scheme of
school instruction. For a single instant, in the flash of Francis's
passion, the whole mass of five thousand monks in a state of semi-
ecstasy recoiled before the impassable gulf that opened between them
and the Church.
No one was to blame--no one ever is to blame--because God wanted
contradictory things, and man tried to carry out, as he saw them,
God's trusts. The schoolmen saw their duty in one direction; Francis
saw his in another; and, apparently, when both lines had been
carried, after such fashion as might be, to their utmost results,
and five hundred years had been devoted to the effort, society
declared both to be failures. Perhaps both may some day be revived,
for the two paths seem to be the only roads that can exist, if man
starts by taking for granted that there is an object to be reached
at the end of his journey. The Church, embracing all mankind, had no
choice but to march with caution, seeking God by every possible
means of intellect and study. Francis, acting only for himself,
could throw caution aside and trust implicitly in God, like the
children who went on crusade. The two poles of social and political
philosophy seem necessarily to be organization or anarchy; man's
intellect or the forces of nature. Francis saw God in nature, if he
did not see nature in God; as the builders of Chartres saw the
Virgin in their apse. Francis held the simplest and most childlike
form of pantheism. He carried to its last point the mystical union
with God, and its necessary consequence of contempt and hatred for
human intellectual processes. Even Saint Bernard would have thought
his ideas wanting in that "mesure" which the French mind so much
prizes. At the same time we had best try, as innocently as may be,
to realize that no final judgment has yet been pronounced, either by
the Church or by society or by science, on either or any of these
points; and until mankind finally settles to a certainty where it
means to go, or whether it means to go anywhere,--what its object
is, or whether it has an object,--Saint Francis may still prove to
have been its ultimate expression. In that case, his famous chant--
the "Cantico del Sole"--will be the last word of religion, as it was
probably its first. Here it is--too sincere for translation:--
CANTICO DEL SOLE
... Laudato sie, misignore, con tucte le tue creature
spetialmente messor lo frate sole
lo quale iorno et allumini noi per loi
et ellu e bellu e radiante cum grande splendore
de te, altissimo, porta significatione.
Laudato si, misignore, per sora luna e le stelle
in celu lai formate clarite et pretiose et belle.
Laudato si, misignore, per frate vento
et per aere et nubilo et sereno et onne tempo
per lo quale a le tue creature dai sustentamento.
Laudato si, misignore, per sor aqua
la quale e multo utile et humile et pretiosa et casta.
Laudato si, misignore, per frate focu
per lo quale enallumini la nocte
ed ello e bello et jocondo et robustoso et forte.
Laudato si, misignore, per sora nostra matre terra
la quale ne sustenta et governa
et produce diversi fructi con coloriti flori et herba.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Laudato si, misignore, per sora nostra morte corporale
de la quale nullu homo vivente po skappare
guai acquelli ke morrano ne le peccata mortali....
The verses, if verses they are, have little or nothing in common
with the art of Saint Bernard or Adam of Saint-Victor. Whatever art
they have, granting that they have any, seems to go back to the
cave-dwellers and the age of stone. Compared with the naivete of the
"Cantico del Sole," the "Chanson de Roland" or the "Iliad" is a
triumph of perfect technique. The value is not in the verse. The
"Chant of the Sun" is another "Pons Seclorum"--or perhaps rather a
"Pons Sanctorum"--over which only children and saints can pass. It
is almost a paraphrase of the sermon to the birds. "Thank you, mi
signore, for messor brother sun, in especial, who is your symbol;
and for sister moon and the stars; and for brother wind and air and
sky; and for sister water; and for brother fire; and for mother
earth! We are all yours, mi signore! We are your children; your
household; your feudal family! but we never heard of a Church. We
are all varying forms of the same ultimate energy; shifting symbols
of the same absolute unity; but our only unity, beneath you, is
nature, not law! We thank you for no human institutions, even for
those established in your name; but, with all our hearts we thank
you for sister our mother Earth and its fruits and coloured
flowers!"
Francis loved them all--the brothers and sisters--as intensely as a
child loves the taste and smell of a peach, and as simply; but
behind them remained one sister whom no one loved, and for whom, in
his first verses, Francis had rendered no thanks. Only on his death-
bed he added the lines of gratitude for "our sister death," the
long-sought, never-found sister of the schoolmen, who solved all
philosophy and merged multiplicity in unity. The solution was at
least simple; one must decide for one's self, according to one's
personal standards, whether or not it is more sympathetic than that
with which we have got lastly to grapple in the works of Saint
Thomas Aquinas.
CHAPTER XVI
SAINT THOMAS AQUINAS
Long before Saint Francis's death, in 1226, the French mystics had
exhausted their energies and the siecle had taken new heart. Society
could not remain forever balancing between thought and act. A few
gifted natures could absorb themselves in the absolute, but the rest
lived for the day, and needed shelter and safety. So the Church bent
again to its task, and bade the Spaniard Dominic arm new levies with
the best weapons of science, and flaunt the name of Aristotle on the
Church banners along with that of Saint Augustine. The year 1215,
which happened to be the date of Magna Charta and other easily fixed
events, like the birth of Saint Louis, may serve to mark the triumph
of the schools. The pointed arch revelled at Rheims and the Gothic
architects reached perfection at Amiens just as Francis died at
Assisi and Thomas was born at Aquino. The Franciscan Order itself
was swept with the stream that Francis tried to dam, and the great
Franciscan schoolman, Alexander Hales, in 1222, four years before
the death of Francis, joined the order and began lecturing as though
Francis himself had lived only to teach scholastic philosophy.
The rival Dominican champion, Albertus Magnus, began his career a
little later, in 1228. Born of the noble Swabian family of
Bollstadt, in 1193, he drifted, like other schoolmen, to Paris, and
the Rue Maitre Albert, opposite Notre Dame, still records his fame
as a teacher there. Thence he passed to a school established by the
order at Cologne, where he was lecturing with great authority in
1243 when the general superior of the order brought up from Italy a
young man of the highest promise to be trained as his assistant.
Thomas, the new pupil, was born under the shadow of Monte Cassino in
1226 or 1227. His father, the Count of Aquino, claimed descent from
the imperial line of Swabia; his mother, from the Norman princes of
Sicily; so that in him the two most energetic strains in Europe met.
His social rank was royal, and the order set the highest value on
it. He took the vows in 1243, and went north at once to help
Albertus at Cologne. In 1245, the order sent Albertus back to Paris,
and Thomas with him. There he remained till 1248 when he was ordered
to Cologne as assistant lecturer, and only four years afterwards, at
twenty-five years old, he was made full professor at Paris. His
industry and activity never rested till his death in 1274, not yet
fifty years old, when he bequeathed to the Church a mass of
manuscript that tourists will never know enough to estimate except
by weight. His complete works, repeatedly printed, fill between
twenty and thirty quarto volumes. For so famous a doctor, this is
almost meagre. Unfortunately his greatest work, the "Summa
Theologiae," is unfinished--like Beauvais Cathedral.
Perhaps Thomas's success was partly due to his memory which is said
to have been phenomenal; for, in an age when cyclopaedias were
unknown, a cyclopaedic memory must have counted for half the battle
in these scholastic disputes where authority could be met only by
authority; but in this case, memory was supported by mind. Outwardly
Thomas was heavy and slow in manner, if it is true that his
companions called him "the big dumb ox of Sicily"; and in
fashionable or court circles he did not enjoy reputation for acute
sense of humour. Saint Louis's household offers a picture not wholly
clerical, least of all among the King's brothers and sons; and
perhaps the dinner-table was not much more used then than now to
abrupt interjections of theology into the talk about hunting and
hounds; but however it happened, Thomas one day surprised the
company by solemnly announcing--"I have a decisive argument against
the Manicheans!" No wit or humour could be more to the point--
between two saints that were to be--than a decisive argument against
enemies of Christ, and one greatly regrets that the rest of the
conversation was not reported, unless, indeed, it is somewhere in
the twenty-eight quarto volumes; but it probably lacked humour for
courtiers.
The twenty-eight quarto volumes must be closed books for us. None
but Dominicans have a right to interpret them. No Franciscan--or
even Jesuit--understands Saint Thomas exactly or explains him with
authority. For summer tourists to handle these intricate problems in
a theological spirit would be altogether absurd; but, for us, these
great theologians were also architects who undertook to build a
Church Intellectual, corresponding bit by bit to the Church
Administrative, both expressing--and expressed by--the Church
Architectural. Alexander Hales, Albert the Great, Thomas Aquinas,
Duns Scotus, and the rest, were artists; and if Saint Thomas happens
to stand at their head as type, it is not because we choose him or
understand him better than his rivals, but because his order chose
him rather than his master Albert, to impose as authority on the
Church; and because Pope John XXII canonized him on the ground that
his decisions were miracles; and because the Council of Trent placed
his "Summa" among the sacred books on their table; and because
Innocent VI said that his doctrine alone was sure; and finally,
because Leo XIII very lately made a point of declaring that, on the
wings of Saint Thomas's genius, human reason has reached the most
sublime height it can probably ever attain.
Although the Franciscans, and, later, the Jesuits, have not always
shown as much admiration as the Dominicans for the genius of Saint
Thomas, and the mystics have never shown any admiration whatever for
the philosophy of the schools, the authority of Leo XIII is final,
at least on one point and the only one that concerns us. Saint
Thomas is still alive and overshadows as many schools as he ever
did; at all events, as many as the Church maintains. He has outlived
Descartes and Leibnitz and a dozen other schools of philosophy more
or less serious in their day. He has mostly outlived Hume, Voltaire,
and the militant sceptics. His method is typical and classic; his
sentences, when interpreted by the Church, seem, even to an
untrained mind, intelligible and consistent; his Church Intellectual
remains practically unchanged, and, like the Cathedral of Beauvais,
erect, although the storms of six or seven centuries have
prostrated, over and over again, every other social or political or
juristic shelter. Compared with it, all modern systems are complex
and chaotic, crowded with self-contradictions, anomalies,
impracticable functions and outworn inheritances; but beyond all
their practical shortcomings is their fragmentary character. An
economic civilization troubles itself about the universe much as a
hive of honey-bees troubles about the ocean, only as a region to be
avoided. The hive of Saint Thomas sheltered God and man, mind and
matter, the universe and the atom, the one and the multiple, within
the walls of an harmonious home.
Theologians, like architects, were supposed to receive their Church
complete in all its lines; they were modern judges who interpreted
the laws but never invented it. Saint Thomas merely selected between
disputed opinions, but he allowed himself to wander very far afield,
indeed, in search of opinions to dispute. The field embraced all
that existed, or might have existed, or could never exist. The
immense structure rested on Aristotle and Saint Augustine at the
last, but as a work of art it stood alone, like Rheims or Amiens
Cathedral, as though it had no antecedents. Then, although, like
Rheims, its style was never meant to suit modern housekeeping and is
ill-seen by the Ecole des Beaux Arts, it reveals itself in its great
mass and intelligence as a work of extraordinary genius; a system as
admirably proportioned as any cathedral and as complete; a success
not universal either in art or science.
Saint Thomas's architecture, like any other work of art, is best
studied by itself as though he created it outright; otherwise a
tourist would never get beyond its threshold. Beginning with the
foundation which is God and God's active presence in His Church,
Thomas next built God into the walls and towers of His Church, in
the Trinity and its creation of mind and matter in time and space;
then finally he filled the Church by uniting mind and matter in man,
or man's soul, giving to humanity a free will that rose, like the
fleche, to heaven. The foundation--the structure--the congregation--
are enough for students of art; his ideas of law, ethics, and
politics; his vocabulary, his syllogisms, his arrangement are, like
the drawings of Villard de Honnecourt's sketch-book, curious but not
vital. After the eleventh-century Romanesque Church of Saint Michael
came the twelfth-century Transition Church of the Virgin, and all
merged and ended at last in the thirteenth-century Gothic Cathedral
of the Trinity. One wants to see the end.
The foundation of the Christian Church should be--as the simple
deist might suppose--always the same, but Saint Thomas knew better.
His foundation was Norman, not French; it spoke the practical
architect who knew the mathematics of his art, and who saw that the
foundation laid by Saint Bernard, Saint Victor, Saint Francis, the
whole mystical, semi-mystical, Cartesian, Spinozan foundation, past
or future, could not bear the weight of the structure to be put on
it. Thomas began by sweeping the ground clear of them. God must be a
concrete thing, not a human thought. God must be proved by the
senses like any other concrete thing; "nihil est in intellectu quin
prius fuerit in sensu"; even if Aristotle had not affirmed the law,
Thomas would have discovered it. He admitted at once that God could
not be taken for granted.
The admission, as every boy-student of the Latin Quarter knew, was
exceedingly bold and dangerous. The greatest logicians commonly
shrank from proving unity by multiplicity. Thomas was one of the
greatest logicians that ever lived; the question had always been at
the bottom of theology; he deliberately challenged what every one
knew to be an extreme peril. If his foundation failed, his Church
fell. Many critics have thought that he saw dangers four hundred
years ahead. The time came, about 1650-1700, when Descartes,
deserting Saint Thomas, started afresh with the idea of God as a
concept, and at once found himself charged with a deity that
contained the universe; nor did the Cartesians--until Spinoza made
it clear--seem able or willing to see that the Church could not
accept this deity because the Church required a God who caused the
universe. The two deities destroyed each other. One was passive; the
other active. Thomas warned Descartes of a logical quicksand which
must necessarily swallow up any Church, and which Spinoza explored
to the bottom. Thomas said truly that every true cause must be
proved as a cause, not merely as a sequence; otherwise they must end
in a universal energy or substance without causality--a source.
Whatever God might be to others, to His Church he could not be a
sequence or a source. That point had been admitted by William of
Champeaux, and made the division between Christians and infidels. On
the other hand, if God must be proved as a true cause in order to
warrant the Church or the State in requiring men to worship Him as
Creator, the student became the more curious--if a churchman, the
more anxious--to be assured that Thomas succeeded in his proof,
especially since he did not satisfy Descartes and still less Pascal.
That the mystics should be dissatisfied was natural enough, since
they were committed to the contrary view, but that Descartes should
desert was a serious blow which threw the French Church into
consternation from which it never quite recovered.
"I see motion," said Thomas: "I infer a motor!" This reasoning,
which may be fifty thousand years old, is as strong as ever it was;
stronger than some more modern inferences of science; but the
average mechanic stated it differently. "I see motion," he admitted:
"I infer energy. I see motion everywhere; I infer energy
everywhere." Saint Thomas barred this door to materialism by adding:
"I see motion; I cannot infer an infinite series of motors: I can
only infer, somewhere at the end of the series, an intelligent,
fixed motor." The average modern mechanic might not dissent but
would certainly hesitate. "No doubt!" he might say; "we can conduct
our works as well on that as on any other theory, or as we could on
no theory at all; but, if you offer it as proof, we can only say
that we have not yet reduced all motion to one source or all
energies to one law, much less to one act of creation, although we
have tried our best." The result of some centuries of experiment
tended to raise rather than silence doubt, although, even in his own
day, Thomas would have been scandalized beyond the resources of his
Latin had Saint Bonaventure met him at Saint Louis's dinner-table
and complimented him, in the King's hearing, on having proved,
beyond all Franciscan cavils, that the Church Intellectual had
necessarily but one first cause and creator--himself.
The Church Intellectual, like the Church Architectural, implied not
one architect, but myriads, and not one fixed, intelligent architect
at the end of the series, but a vanishing vista without a beginning
at any definite moment; and if Thomas pressed his argument, the
twentieth-century mechanic who should attend his conferences at the
Sorbonne would be apt to say so. "What is the use of trying to argue
me into it? Your inference may be sound logic, but is not proof.
Actually we know less about it than you did. All we know is the
thing we handle, and we cannot handle your fixed, intelligent prime
motor. To your old ideas of form we have added what we call force,
and we are rather further than ever from reducing the complex to
unity. In fact, if you are aiming to convince me, I will tell you
flatly that I know only the multiple, and have no use for unity at
all."
In the thirteenth century men did not depend so much as now on
actual experiment, but the nominalist said in effect the same thing.
Unity to him was a pure concept, and any one who thought it real
would believe that a triangle was alive and could walk on its legs.
Without proving unity, philosophers saw no way to prove God. They
could only fall back on an attempt to prove that the concept of
unity proved itself, and this phantasm drove the Cartesians to drop
Thomas's argument and assert that "the mere fact of having within us
the idea of a thing more perfect than ourselves, proves the real
existence of that thing." Four hundred years earlier Saint Thomas
had replied in advance that Descartes wanted to prove altogether too
much, and Spinoza showed mathematically that Saint Thomas had been
in the right. The finest religious mind of the time--Pascal--
admitted it and gave up the struggle, like the mystics of Saint-
Victor.
Thus some of the greatest priests and professors of the Church,
including Duns Scotus himself, seemed not wholly satisfied that
Thomas's proof was complete, but most of them admitted that it was
the safest among possible foundations, and that it showed, as
architecture, the Norman temper of courage and caution. The Norman
was ready to run great risks, but he would rather grasp too little
than too much; he narrowed the spacing of his piers rather than
spread them too wide for safe vaulting. Between Norman blood and
Breton blood was a singular gap, as Renan and every other Breton has
delighted to point out. Both Abelard and Descartes were Breton. The
Breton seized more than he could hold; the Norman took less than he
would have liked.
God, then, is proved. What the schools called form, what science
calls energy, and what the intermediate period called the evidence
of design, made the foundation of Saint Thomas's cathedral. God is
an intelligent, fixed prime motor--not a concept, or proved by
concepts;--a concrete fact, proved by the senses of sight and touch.
On that foundation Thomas built. The walls and vaults of his Church
were more complex than the foundation; especially the towers were
troublesome. Dogma, the vital purpose of the Church, required
support. The most weighty dogma, the central tower of the Norman
cathedral, was the Trinity, and between the Breton solution which
was too heavy, and the French solution which was too light, the
Norman Thomas found a way. Remembering how vehemently the French
Church, under Saint Bernard, had protected the Trinity from all
interference whatever, one turns anxiously to see what Thomas said
about it; and unless one misunderstands him,--as is very likely,
indeed, to be the case, since no one may even profess to understand
the Trinity,--Thomas treated it as simply as he could. "God, being
conscious of Himself, thinks Himself; his thought is Himself, his
own reflection in the Verb--the so-called Son." "Est in Deo
intelligente seipsum Verbum Dei quasi Deus intellectus." The idea
was not new, and as ideas went it was hardly a mystery; but the next
step was naif:--God, as a double consciousness, loves Himself, and
realizes Himself in the Holy Ghost. The third side of the triangle
is love or grace.
Many theologians have found fault with this treatment of the
subject, which seemed open to every objection that had been made to
Abelard, Gilbert de la Poree, or a thousand other logicians. They
commonly asked why Thomas stopped the Deity's self-realizations at
love, or inside the triangle, since these realizations were real,
not symbolic, and the square was at least as real as any other
combination of line. Thomas replied that knowledge and will--the
Verb and the Holy Ghost--were alone essential. The reply did not
suit every one, even among doctors, but since Saint Thomas rested on
this simple assertion, it is no concern of ours to argue the
theology. Only as art, one can afford to say that the form is more
architectural than religious; it would surely have been suspicious
to Saint Bernard. Mystery there was none, and logic little. The
concept of the Holy Ghost was childlike; for a pupil of Aristotle it
was inadmissible, since it led to nothing and helped no step toward
the universe.
Admitting, if necessary, the criticism, Thomas need not admit the
blame, if blame there were. Every theologian was obliged to stop the
pursuit of logic by force, before it dragged him into paganism and
pantheism. Theology begins with the universal,--God,--who must be a
reality, not a symbol; but it is forced to limit the process of
God's realizations somewhere, or the priest soon becomes a
worshipper of God in sticks and stones. Theologists had commonly
chosen, from time immemorial, to stop at the Trinity; within the
triangle they were wholly realist; but they could not admit that God
went on to realize Himself in the square and circle, or that the
third member of the Trinity contained multiplicity, because the
Trinity was a restless weight on the Church piers, which, like the
central tower, constantly tended to fall, and needed to be
lightened. Thomas gave it the lightest form possible, and there
fixed it.
Then came his great tour-de-force, the vaulting of his broad nave;
and, if ignorance is allowed an opinion, even a lost soul may admire
the grand simplicity of Thomas's scheme. He swept away the
horizontal lines altogether, leaving them barely as a part of
decoration. The whole weight of his arches fell, as in the latest
Gothic, where the eye sees nothing to break the sheer spring of the
nervures, from the rosette on the keystone a hundred feet above down
to the church floor. In Thomas's creation nothing intervened between
God and his world; secondary causes become ornaments; only two
forces, God and man, stood in the Church.
The chapter of Creation is so serious, and Thomas's creation, like
every other, is open to so much debate, that no student can allow
another to explain it; and certainly no man whatever, either saint
or sceptic, can ever yet have understood Creation aright unless
divinely inspired; but whatever Thomas's theory was as he meant it,
he seems to be understood as holding that every created individual--
animal, vegetable, or mineral--was a special, divine act. Whatever
has form is created, and whatever is created takes form directly
from the will of God, which is also his act. The intermediate
universals--the secondary causes--vanish as causes; they are, at
most, sequences or relations; all merge in one universal act of
will; instantaneous, infinite, eternal.
Saint Thomas saw God, much as Milton saw him, resplendent in
That glorious form, that light unsufferable,
And that far-beaming blaze of Majesty,
Wherewith he wont, at Heaven's high council-table,
To sit the midst of Trinal Unity;
except that, in Thomas's thought, the council-table was a work-
table, because God did not take counsel; He was an act. The Trinity
was an infinite possibility of will; nothing within but
The baby image of the giant mass
Of things to come at large.
Neither time nor space, neither matter nor mind, not even force
existed, nor could any intelligence conceive how, even though they
should exist, they could be united in the lowest association. A
crystal was as miraculous as Socrates. Only abstract force, or what
the schoolmen called form, existed undeveloped from eternity, like
the abstract line in mathematics.
Fifty or a hundred years before Saint Thomas settled the Church
dogma, a monk of Citeaux or some other abbey, a certain Alain of
Lille, had written a Latin poem, as abstruse an allegory as the
best, which had the merit of painting the scene of man's creation as
far as concerned the mechanical process much as Thomas seems to have
seen it. M. Haureau has printed an extract (vol. I, p. 352). Alain
conceded to the weakness of human thought, that God was working in
time and space, or rather on His throne in heaven, when nature,
proposing to create a new and improved man, sent Reason and Prudence
up to ask Him for a soul to fit the new body. Having passed through
various adventures and much scholastic instruction, the messenger
Prudence arrived, after having dropped her dangerous friend Reason
by the way. The request was respectfully presented to God, and
favourably received. God promised the soul, and at once sent His
servant Noys--Thought--to the storehouse of ideas, to choose it:--
Ipse Deus rem prosequitur, producit in actum
Quod pepigit. Vocat ergo Noym quae praepaert illi
Numinis exemplar, humanae mentis Idaeam,
Ad cujus formam formetur spiritus omni
Munere virtutum dives, qui, nube caducae
Carnis odumbratus veletur corporis umbra.
Tunc Noys ad regis praeceptum singula rerum
Vestigans exempla, novam perquirit Idaeam.
Inter tot species, speciem vix invenit illam
Quam petit; offertur tandem quaesita petenti
. Hanc formam Noys ipsa Deo praesentat ut ejus
Formet ad exemplar animam. Tunc ille sigillum
Sumit, ad ipsius formae vestigia formam
Dans animae, vultum qualem deposcit Idaea
Imprimit exemplo; totas usurpat imago
Exemplaris opes, loquiturque figura sigillum.
God Himself pursues the task, and sets in act
What He promised. So He calls Noys to seek
A copy of His will, Idea of the human mind,
To whose form the spirit should be shaped,
Rich in every virtue, which, veiled in garb
Of frail flesh, is to be hidden in a shade of body,
Then Noys, at the King's order, turning one by one
Each sample, seeks the new Idea.
Among so many images she hardly finds that
Which she seeks; at last the sought one appears.
This form Noys herself brings to God for Him
To form a soul to its pattern. He takes the seal,
And gives form to the soul after the model
Of the form itself, stamping on the sample
The figure such as the Idea requires. The seal
Covers the whole field, and the impression expresses the stamp.
The translation is probably full of mistakes; indeed, one is
permitted to doubt whether Alain himself accurately understood the
process; but in substance he meant that God contained a storehouse
of ideas, and stamped each creation with one of these forms. The
poets used a variety of figures to help out their logic, but that of
the potter and his pot was one of the most common. Omar Khayyam was
using it at the same time with Alain of Lille, but with a
difference: for his pot seems to have been matter alone, and his
soul was the wine it received from God; while Alain's soul seems to
have been the form and not the contents of the pot.
The figure matters little. In any case God's act was the union of
mind with matter by the same act or will which created both. No
intermediate cause or condition intervened; no secondary influence
had anything whatever to do with the result. Time had nothing to do
with it. Every individual that has existed or shall exist was
created by the same instantaneous act, for all time. "When the
question regards the universal agent who produces beings and time,
we cannot consider him as acting now and before, according to the
succession of time." God emanated time, force, matter, mind, as He
might emanate gravitation, not as a part of His substance but as an
energy of His will, and maintains them in their activity by the same
act, not by a new one. Every individual is a part of the direct act;
not a secondary outcome. The soul has no father or mother. Of all
errors one of the most serious is to suppose that the soul descends
by generation. "Having life and action of its own, it subsists
without the body; ... it must therefore be produced directly, and
since it is not a material substance, it cannot be produced by way
of generation; it must necessarily be created by God. Consequently
to suppose that the intelligence [or intelligent soul] is the effect
of generation is to suppose that it is not a pure and simple
substance, but corruptible like the body. It is therefore heresy to
say that this soul is transmitted by generation." What is true of
the soul should be true of all other form, since no form is a
material substance. The utmost possible relation between any two
individuals is that God may have used the same stamp or mould for a
series of creations, and especially for the less spiritual: "God is
the first model for all things. One may also say that, among His
creatures some serve as types or models for others because there are
some which are made in the image of others"; but generation means
sequence, not cause. The only true cause is God. Creation is His
sole act, in which no second cause can share." Creation is more
perfect and loftier than generation, because it aims at producing
the whole substance of the being, though it starts from absolute
nothing."
Thomas Aquinas, when he pleased, was singularly lucid, and on this
point he was particularly positive. The architect insisted on the
controlling idea of his structure. The Church was God, and its lines
excluded interference. God and the Church embraced all the
converging lines of the universe, and the universe showed none but
lines that converged. Between God and man, nothing whatever
intervened. The individual was a compound of form, or soul, and
matter; but both were always created together, by the same act, out
of nothing. "Simpliciter fatendum est animas simul cum corporibus
creari et infundi." It must be distinctly understood that souls were
not created before bodies, but that they were created at the same
time as the bodies they animate. Nothing whatever preceded this
union of two substances which did not exist: "Creatio est productio
alicujus rei secundum suam totam substantiam, nullo praesupposito,
quod sit vel increatum vel ab aliquo creatum." Language can go no
further in exclusion of every possible preceding, secondary, or
subsequent cause, "Productio universalis entis a Deo non est motus
nec mutatio, sed est quaedam simplex emanatio." The whole universe
is, so to speak, a simple emanation from God.
The famous junction, then, is made!--that celebrated fusion of the
universal with the individual, of unity with multiplicity, of God
and nature, which had broken the neck of every philosophy ever
invented; which had ruined William of Champeaux and was to ruin
Descartes; this evolution of the finite from the infinite was
accomplished. The supreme triumph was as easily effected by Thomas
Aquinas as it was to be again effected, four hundred years later, by
Spinoza. He had merely to assert the fact: "It is so! it cannot be
otherwise!" "For the thousandth and hundred-thousandth time;--what
is the use of discussing this prime motor, this Spinozan substance,
any longer? We know it is there!" that--as Professor Haeckel very
justly repeats for the millionth time--is enough.
One point, however, remained undetermined. The Prime Motor and His
action stood fixed, and no one wished to disturb Him; but this was
not the point that had disturbed William of Champeaux. Abelard's
question still remained to be answered. How did Socrates differ from
Plato--Judas from John--Thomas Aquinas from Professor Haeckel? Were
they, in fact, two, or one? What made an individual? What was God's
centimetre measure? The abstract form or soul which existed as a
possibility in God, from all time,--was it one or many? To the
Church, this issue overshadowed all else, for, if humanity was one
and not multiple, the Church, which dealt only with individuals, was
lost. To the schools, also, the issue was vital, for, if the soul or
form was already multiple from the first, unity was lost; the
ultimate substance and prime motor itself became multiple; the whole
issue was reopened.
To the consternation of the Church, and even of his own order,
Thomas, following closely his masters, Albert and Aristotle,
asserted that the soul was measured by matter. "Division occurs in
substances in ratio of quantity, as Aristotle says in his 'Physics.'
And so dimensional quantity is a principle of individuation." The
soul is a fluid absorbed by matter in proportion to the absorptive
power of the matter. The soul is an energy existing in matter
proportionately to the dimensional quantity of the matter. The soul
is a wine, greater or less in quantity according to the size of the
cup. In our report of the great debate of 1110, between Champeaux
and Abelard, we have seen William persistently tempting Abelard to
fall into this admission that matter made the man;--that the
universal equilateral triangle became an individual if it were
shaped in metal, the matter giving it reality which mere form could
not give; and Abelard evading the issue as though his life depended
on it. In fact, had Abelard dared to follow Aristotle into what
looked like an admission that Socrates and Plato were identical as
form and differed only in weight, his life might have been the
forfeit. How Saint Thomas escaped is a question closely connected
with the same inquiry about Saint Francis of Assisi. A Church which
embraced, with equal sympathy, and within a hundred years, the
Virgin, Saint Bernard, William of Champeaux and the School of Saint-
Victor, Peter the Venerable, Saint Francis of Assisi, Saint Dominic,
Saint Thomas Aquinas, and Saint Bonaventure, was more liberal than
any modern State can afford to be. Radical contradictions the State
may perhaps tolerate, though hardly, but never embrace or profess.
Such elasticity long ago vanished from human thought.
Yet only Dominicans believe that the Church adopted this law of
individualization, or even assented to it. If M. Jourdain is right,
Thomas was quickly obliged to give it another form:--that, though
all souls belonged to the same species, they differed in their
aptitudes for uniting with particular bodies. "This soul is
commensurate with this body, and not with that other one." The idea
is double; for either the souls individualized themselves, and
Thomas abandoned his doctrine of their instantaneous creation, with
the bodies, out of nothing; or God individualized them in the act of
creation, and matter had nothing to do with it. The difficulty is no
concern of ours, but the great scholars who took upon themselves to
explain it made it worse, until at last one gathers only that Saint
Thomas held one of three views: either the soul of humanity was
individualized by God, or it individualized itself, or it was
divided by ratio of quantity, that is, by matter. This amounts to
saying that one knows nothing about it, which we knew before and may
admit with calmness; but Thomas Aquinas was not so happily placed,
between the Church and the schools. Humanity had a form common to
itself, which made it what it was. By some means this form was
associated with matter; in fact, matter was only known as associated
with form. If, then, God, by an instantaneous act, created matter
and gave it form according to the dimensions of the matter, innocent
ignorance might infer that there was, in the act of God, one world-
soul and one world-matter, which He united in different proportions
to make men and things. Such a doctrine was fatal to the Church. No
greater heresy could be charged against the worst Arab or Jew, and
Thomas was so well aware of his danger that he recoiled from it with
a vehemence not at all in keeping with his supposed phlegm. With
feverish eagerness to get clear of such companions, he denied and
denounced, in all companies, in season and out of season, the idea
that intellect was one and the same for all men, differing only with
the quantity of matter it accompanied. He challenged the adherent of
such a doctrine to battle; "let him take the pen if he dares!" No
one dared, seeing that even Jews enjoyed a share of common sense and
had seen some of their friends burn at the stake not very long
before for such opinions, not even openly maintained; while
uneducated people, who are perhaps incapable of receiving intellect
at all, but for whose instruction and salvation the great work of
Saint Thomas and his scholars must chiefly exist, cannot do battle
because they cannot understand Thomas's doctrine of matter and form
which to them seems frank pantheism.
So it appeared to Duns Scotus also, if one may assert in the Doctor
Subtilis any opinion without qualification. Duns began his career
only about 1300, after Thomas's death, and stands, therefore, beyond
our horizon; but he is still the pride of the Franciscan Order and
stands second in authority to the great Dominican alone. In denying
Thomas's doctrine that matter individualizes mind, Duns laid himself
open to the worse charge of investing matter with a certain
embryonic, independent, shadowy soul of its own. Scot's system,
compared with that of Thomas, tended toward liberty. Scot held that
the excess of power in Thomas's prime motor neutralized the power of
his secondary causes, so that these appeared altogether superfluous.
This is a point that ought to be left to the Church to decide, but
there can be no harm in quoting, on the other hand, the authority of
some of Scot's critics within the Church, who have thought that his
doctrine tended to deify matter and to keep open the road to
Spinoza. Narrow and dangerous was the border-line always between
pantheism and materialism, and the chief interest of the schools was
in finding fault with each other's paths.
The opinions in themselves need not disturb us, although the
question is as open to dispute as ever it was and perhaps as much
disputed; but the turn of Thomas's mind is worth study. A century or
two later, his passion to be reasonable, scientific, architectural
would have brought him within range of the Inquisition. Francis of
Assisi was not more archaic and cave-dweller than Thomas of Aquino
was modern and scientific. In his effort to be logical he forced his
Deity to be as logical as himself, which hardly suited Omnipotence.
He hewed the Church dogmas into shape as though they were rough
stones. About no dogma could mankind feel interest more acute than
about that of immortality, which seemed to be the single point
vitally necessary for any Church to prove and define as clearly as
light itself. Thomas trimmed down the soul to half its legitimate
claims as an immortal being by insisting that God created it from
nothing in the same act or will by which He created the body and
united the two in time and space. The soul existed as form for the
body, and had no previous existence. Logic seemed to require that
when the body died and dissolved, after the union which had lasted,
at most, only an instant or two of eternity, the soul, which fitted
that body and no other, should dissolve with it. In that case the
Church dissolved, too, since it had no reason for existence except
the soul. Thomas met the difficulty by suggesting that the body's
form might take permanence from the matter to which it gave form.
That matter should individualize mind was itself a violent wrench of
logic, but that it should also give permanence--the one quality it
did not possess--to this individual mind seemed to many learned
doctors a scandal. Perhaps Thomas meant to leave the responsibility
on the Church, where it belonged as a matter not of logic but of
revealed truth. At all events, this treatment of mind and matter
brought him into trouble which few modern logicians would suspect.
The human soul having become a person by contact with matter, and
having gained eternal personality by the momentary union, was
finished, and remains to this day for practical purposes unchanged;
but the angels and devils, a world of realities then more real than
man, were never united with matter, and therefore could not be
persons. Thomas admitted and insisted that the angels, being
immaterial,--neither clothed in matter, nor stamped on it, nor mixed
with it,--were universals; that is, each was a species in himself, a
class, or perhaps what would be now called an energy, with no other
individuality than he gave himself.
The idea seems to modern science reasonable enough. Science has to
deal, for example, with scores of chemical energies which it knows
little about except that they always seem to be constant to the same
conditions; but every one knows that in the particular relation of
mind to matter the battle is as furious as ever. The soul has always
refused to live in peace with the body. The angels, too, were always
in rebellion. They insisted on personality, and the devils even more
obstinately than the angels. The dispute was--and is--far from
trifling. Mind would rather ignore matter altogether. In the
thirteenth century mind did, indeed, admit that matter was
something,--which it quite refuses to admit in the twentieth,--but
treated it as a nuisance to be abated. To the pure in spirit one
argued in vain that spirit must compromise; that nature compromised;
that God compromised; that man himself was nothing but a somewhat
clumsy compromise. No argument served. Mind insisted on absolute
despotism. Schoolmen as well as mystics would not believe that
matter was what it seemed,--if, indeed, it existed;--unsubstantial,
shifty, shadowy; changing with incredible swiftness into dust, gas,
flame; vanishing in mysterious lines of force into space beyond hope
of recovery; whirled about in eternity and infinity by that mind,
form, energy, or thought which guides and rules and tyrannizes and
is the universe. The Church wanted to be pure spirit; she regarded
matter with antipathy as something foul, to be held at arms' length
lest it should stain and corrupt the soul; the most she would
willingly admit was that mind and matter might travel side by side,
like a doubleheaded comet, on parallel lines that never met, with a
preestablished harmony that existed only in the prime motor.
Thomas and his master Albert were almost alone in imposing on the
Church the compromise so necessary for its equilibrium. The balance
of matter against mind was the same necessity in the Church
Intellectual as the balance of thrusts in the arch of the Gothic
cathedral. Nowhere did Thomas show his architectural obstinacy quite
so plainly as in thus taking matter under his protection. Nothing
would induce him to compromise with the angels. He insisted on
keeping man wholly apart, as a complex of energies in which matter
shared equally with mind. The Church must rest firmly on both. The
angels differed from other beings below them' precisely because they
were immaterial and impersonal. Such rigid logic outraged the
spiritual Church.
Perhaps Thomas's sudden death in 1274 alone saved him from the fate
of Abelard, but it did not save his doctrine. Two years afterwards,
in 1276, the French and English churches combined to condemn it.
Etienne Tempier, Bishop of Paris, presided over the French Synod;
Robert Kilwardeby, of the Dominican Order, Archbishop of Canterbury,
presided over the Council at Oxford. The synods were composed of
schoolmen as well as churchmen, and seem to have been the result of
a serious struggle for power between the Dominican and Franciscan
Orders. Apparently the Church compromised between them by condemning
the errors of both. Some of these errors, springing from Alexander
Hales and his Franciscan schools, were in effect the foundation of
another Church. Some were expressly charged against Brother Thomas.
"Contra fratrem Thomam" the councils forbade teaching that--"quia
intelligentiae non habent materiam, Deus non potest plures ejusdem
speciei facere; et quod materia non est in angelis"; further, the
councils struck at the vital centre of Thomas's system--"quod Deus
non potest individua multiplicare sub una specie sine materia"; and
again in its broadest form,--"quod formae non accipiunt divisionem
nisi secundam materiam." These condemnations made a great stir. Old
Albertus Magnus, who was the real victim of attack, fought for
himself and for Thomas. After a long and earnest effort, the
Thomists rooted out opposition in the order, and carried their
campaign to Rome. After fifty years of struggle, by use of every
method known in Church politics, the Dominican Order, in 1323,
caused John XXII to canonize Thomas and in effect affirm his
doctrine.
The story shows how modern, how heterodox, how material, how
altogether new and revolutionary the system of Saint Thomas seemed
at first even in the schools; but that was the affair of the Church
and a matter of pure theology. We study only his art. Step by step,
stone by stone, we see him build his church-building like a
stonemason, "with the care that the twelfth-century architects put
into" their work, as Viollet-le-Duc saw some similar architect at
Rouen, building the tower of Saint-Romain: "He has thrown over his
work the grace and finesse, the study of detail, the sobriety in
projections, the perfect harmony," which belongs to his school, and
yet he was rigidly structural and Norman. The foundation showed it;
the elevation, which is God, developed it; the vaulting, with its
balance of thrusts in mind and matter, proved it; but he had still
the hardest task in art, to model man.
The cathedral, then, is built, and God is built into it, but, thus
far, God is there alone, filling it all, and maintains the
equilibrium by balancing created matter separately against created
mind. The proportions of the building are superb; nothing so lofty,
so large in treatment, so true in scale, so eloquent of multiplicity
in unity, has ever been conceived elsewhere; but it was the virtue
or the fault of superb structures like Bourges and Amiens and the
Church universal that they seemed to need man more than man needed
them; they were made for crowds, for thousands and tens of thousands
of human beings; for the whole human race, on its knees, hungry for
pardon and love. Chartres needed no crowd, for it was meant as a
palace of the Virgin, and the Virgin filled it wholly; but the
Trinity made their church for no other purpose than to accommodate
man, and made man for no other purpose than to fill their church; if
man failed to fill it, the church and the Trinity seemed equally
failures. Empty, Bourges and Beauvais are cold; hardly as religious
as a wayside cross; and yet, even empty, they are perhaps more
religious than when filled with cattle and machines. Saint Thomas
needed to fill his Church with real men, and although he had created
his own God for that special purpose, the task was, as every boy
knew by heart, the most difficult that Omnipotence had dealt with.
God, as Descartes justly said, we know! but what is man? The schools
answered: Man is a rational animal! So was apparently a dog, or a
bee, or a beaver, none of which seemed to need churches. Modern
science, with infinite effort, has discovered and announced that man
is a bewildering complex of energies, which helps little to explain
his relations with the ultimate substance or energy or prime motor
whose existence both science and schoolmen admit; which science
studies in laboratories and religion worships in churches. The man
whom God created to fill his Church, must be an energy independent
of God; otherwise God filled his own Church with his own energy.
Thus far, the God of Saint Thomas was alone in His Church. The
beings He had created out of nothing--Omar's pipkins of clay and
shape--stood against the walls, waiting to receive the wine of life,
a life of their own.
Of that life, energy, will, or wine,--whatever the poets or
professors called it,--God was the only cause, as He was also the
immediate cause, and support. Thomas was emphatic on that point. God
is the cause of energy as the sun is the cause of colour: "prout sol
dicitur causa manifestationis coloris." He not only gives forms to
his pipkins, or energies to his agents, but He also maintains those
forms in being: "dat formas creaturis agentibus et eas tenet in
esse." He acts directly, not through secondary causes, on everything
and every one: "Deus in omnibus intime operatur." If, for an
instant, God's action, which is also His will, were to stop, the
universe would not merely fall to pieces, but would vanish, and must
then be created anew from nothing: "Quia non habet radicem in aere,
statim cessat lumen, cessante actione solis. Sic autem se habet
omnis creatura ad Deum sicut aer ad solem illuminantem." God
radiates energy as the sun radiates light, and "the whole fabric of
nature would return to nothing" if that radiation ceased even for an
instant. Everything is created by one instantaneous, eternal,
universal act of will, and by the same act is maintained in being.
Where, then,--in what mysterious cave outside of creation,--could
man, and his free will, and his private world of responsibilities
and duties, lie hidden? Unless man was a free agent in a world of
his own beyond constraint, the Church was a fraud, and it helped
little to add that the State was another. If God was the sole and
immediate cause and support of everything in His creation, God was
also the cause of its defects, and could not--being Justice and
Goodness in essence--hold man responsible for His own omissions.
Still less could the State or Church do it in His name.
Whatever truth lies in the charge that the schools discussed futile
questions by faulty methods, one cannot decently deny that in this
case the question was practical and the method vital. Theist or
atheist, monist or anarchist must all admit that society and science
are equally interested with theology in deciding whether the
universe is one or many, a harmony or a discord. The Church and
State asserted that it was a harmony, and that they were its
representatives. They say so still. Their claim led to singular but
unavoidable conclusions, with which society has struggled for seven
hundred years, and is still struggling.
Freedom could not exist in nature, or even in God, after the single,
unalterable act or will which created. The only possible free will
was that of God before the act. Abelard with his rigid logic averred
that God had no freedom; being Himself whatever is most perfect, He
produced necessarily the most perfect possible world. Nothing seemed
more logical, but if God acted necessarily, His world must also be
of necessity the only possible product of His act, and the Church
became an impertinence, since man proved only fatuity by attempting
to interfere. Thomas dared not disturb the foundations of the
Church, and therefore began by laying down the law that God--
previous to His act--could choose, and had chosen, whatever scheme
of creation He pleased, and that the harmony of the actual scheme
proved His perfections. Thus he saved God's free will.
This philosophical apse would have closed the lines and finished the
plan of his church-choir had the universe not shown some
divergencies or discords needing to be explained. The student of the
Latin Quarter was then harder to convince than now that God was
Infinite Love and His world a perfect harmony, when perfect love and
harmony showed them, even in the Latin Quarter, and still more in
revealed truth, a picture of suffering, sorrow, and death; plague,
pestilence, and famine; inundations, droughts, and frosts;
catastrophes world-wide and accidents in corners; cruelty,
perversity, stupidity, uncertainty, insanity; virtue begetting vice;
vice working for good; happiness without sense, selfishness without
gain, misery without cause, and horrors undefined. The students in
public dared not ask, as Voltaire did, "avec son hideux sourire,"
whether the Lisbon earthquake was the final proof of God's infinite
goodness, but in private they used the argumentum ad personam
divinam freely enough, and when the Church told them that evil did
not exist, the ribalds laughed.
Saint Augustine certainly tempted Satan when he fastened the Church
to this doctrine that evil is only the privation of good, an amissio
boni; and that good alone exists. The point was infinitely
troublesome. Good was order, law, unity. Evil was disorder, anarchy,
multiplicity. Which was truth? The Church had committed itself to
the dogma that order and unity were the ultimate truth, and that the
anarchist should be burned. She could do nothing else, and society
supported her--still supports her; yet the Church, who was wiser
than the State, had always seen that Saint Augustine dealt with only
half the question. She knew that evil might be an excess of good as
well as absence of it; that good leads to evil, evil to good; and
that, as Pascal says, "three degrees of polar elevation upset all
jurisprudence; a meridian decides truth; fundamental laws change;
rights have epochs. Pleasing Justice! bounded by a river or a
mountain! truths on this side the Pyrenees! errors beyond!" Thomas
conceded that God Himself, with the best intentions, might be the
source of evil, and pleaded only that his action might in the end
work benefits. He could offer no proof of it, but he could assume as
probable a plan of good which became the more perfect for the very
reason that it allowed great liberty in detail.
One hardly feels Saint Thomas here in all his force. He offers
suggestion rather than proof;--apology--the weaker because of
obvious effort to apologize--rather than defence, for Infinite
Goodness, Justice, and Power; scoffers might add that he invented a
new proof ab defectu, or argument for proving the perfection of a
machine by the number of its imperfections; but at all events,
society has never done better by way of proving its right to enforce
morals or unity of opinion. Unless it asserts law, it can only
assert force. Rigid theology went much further. In God's providence,
man was as nothing. With a proper sense of duty, every solar system
should be content to suffer, if thereby the efficiency of the Milky
Way were improved. Such theology shocked Saint Thomas, who never
wholly abandoned man in order to exalt God. He persistently brought
God and man together, and if he erred, the Church rightly pardons
him because he erred on the human side. Whenever the path lay
through the valley of despair he called God to his aid, as though he
felt the moral obligation of the Creator to help His creation.
At best the vision of God, sitting forever at His work-table,
willing the existence of mankind exactly as it is, while conscious
that, among these myriad arbitrary creations of His will, hardly one
in a million could escape temporary misery or eternal damnation, was
not the best possible background for a Church, as the Virgin and the
Saviour frankly admitted by taking the foreground; but the Church
was not responsible for it. Mankind could not admit an anarchical--a
dual or a multiple--universe. The world was there, staring them in
the face, with all its chaotic conditions, and society insisted on
its unity in self-defence. Society still insists on treating it as
unity, though no longer affecting logic. Society insists on its free
will, although free will has never been explained to the
satisfaction of any but those who much wish to be satisfied, and
although the words in any common sense implied not unity but duality
in creation. The Church had nothing to do with inventing this
riddle--the oldest that fretted mankind.
Apart from all theological interferences,--fall of Adam or fault of
Eve, Atonement, Justification, or Redemption,--either the universe
was one, or it was two, or it was many; either energy was one, seen
only in powers of itself, or it was several; either God was harmony,
or He was discord. With practical unanimity, mankind rejected the
dual or multiple scheme; it insisted on unity. Thomas took the
question as it was given him. The unity was full of defects; he did
not deny them; but he claimed that they might be incidents, and that
the admitted unity might even prove their beneficence. Granting this
enormous concession, he still needed a means of bringing into the
system one element which vehemently refused to be brought:--that is,
man himself, who insisted that the universe was a unit, but that he
was a universe; that energy was one, but that he was another energy;
that God was omnipotent, but that man was free. The contradiction
had always existed, exists still, and always must exist, unless man
either admits that he is a machine, or agrees that anarchy and chaos
are the habit of nature, and law and order its accident. The
agreement may become possible, but it was not possible in the
thirteenth century nor is it now. Saint Thomas's settlement could
not be a simple one or final, except for practical use, but it
served, and it holds good still.
No one ever seriously affirmed the literal freedom of will. Absolute
liberty is absence of restraint; responsibility is restraint;
therefore, the ideally free individual is responsible only to
himself. This principle is the philosophical foundation of
anarchism, and, for anything that science has yet proved, may be the
philosophical foundation of the universe; but it is fatal to all
society and is especially hostile to the State. Perhaps the Church
of the thirteenth century might have found a way to use even this
principle for a good purpose; certainly, the influence of Saint
Bernard was sufficiently unsocial and that of Saint Francis was
sufficiently unselfish to conciliate even anarchists of the militant
class; but Saint Thomas was working for the Church and the
State, not for the salvation of souls, and his chief object was to
repress anarchy. The theory of absolute free will never entered his
mind, more than the theory of material free will would enter the
mind of an architect. The Church gave him no warrant for discussing
the subject in such a sense. In fact, the Church never admitted free
will, or used the word when it could be avoided. In Latin, the term
used was "liberum arbitrium,"--free choice,--and in French to this
day it remains in strictness "libre arbitre" still. From Saint
Augustine downwards the Church was never so unscientific as to admit
of liberty beyond the faculty of choosing between paths, some
leading through the Church and some not, but all leading to the next
world; as a criminal might be allowed the liberty of choosing
between the guillotine and the gallows, without infringing on the
supremacy of the judge.
Thomas started from that point, already far from theoretic freedom.
"We are masters of our acts," he began, "in the sense that we can
choose such and such a thing; now, we have not to choose our end,
but the means that relate to it, as Aristotle says." Unfortunately,
even this trenchant amputation of man's free energies would not
accord with fact or with logic. Experience proved that man's power
of choice in action was very far from absolute, and logic seemed to
require that every choice should have some predetermining cause
which decided the will to act. Science affirmed that choice was not
free,--could not be free,--without abandoning the unity of force and
the foundation of law. Society insisted that its choice must be left
free, whatever became of science or unity. Saint Thomas was required
to illustrate the theory of "liberum arbitrium" by choosing a path
through these difficulties, where path there was obviously none.
Thomas's method of treating this problem was sure to be as
scientific as the vaulting of a Gothic arch. Indeed, one follows it
most easily by translating his school-vocabulary into modern
technical terms. With very slight straining of equivalents, Thomas
might now be written thus:--
By the term God, is meant a prime motor which supplies all energy to
the universe, and acts directly on man as well as on all other
creatures, moving him as a mechanical motor might do; but man, being
specially provided with an organism more complex than the organisms
of other creatures, enjoys an exceptional capacity for reflex
action,--a power of reflection,--which enables him within certain
limits to choose between paths; and this singular capacity is called
free choice or free will. Of course, the reflection is not choice,
and though a man's mind reflected as perfectly as the facets of a
lighthouse lantern, it would never reach a choice without an energy
which impels it to act.
Now let us read Saint Thomas:--
Some kind of an agent is required to determine one's choice; that
agent is reflection. Man reflects, then, in order to learn what
choice to make between the two acts which offer themselves. But
reflection is, in its turn, a faculty of doing opposite things, for
we can reflect or not reflect; and we are no further forward than
before. One cannot carry back this process infinitely, for in that
case one would never decide. The fixed point is not in man, since we
meet in him, as a being apart by himself, only the alternative
faculties; we must, therefore, recur to the intervention of an
exterior agent who shall impress on our will a movement capable of
putting an end to its hesitations:--That exterior agent is nothing
else than God!
The scheme seems to differ little, and unwillingly, from a system of
dynamics as modern as the dynamo. Even in the prime motor, from the
moment of action, freedom of will vanished. Creation was not
successive; it was one instantaneous thought and act, identical with
the will, and was complete and unchangeable from end to end,
including time as one of its functions. Thomas was as clear as
possible on that point:--"Supposing God wills anything in effect; He
cannot will not to will it, because His will cannot change." He
wills that some things shall be contingent and others necessary, but
He wills in the same act that the contingency shall be necessary.
"They are contingent because God has willed them to be so, and with
this object has subjected them to causes which are so." In the same
way He wills that His creation shall develop itself in time and
space and sequence, but He creates these conditions as well as the
events. He creates the whole, in one act, complete, unchangeable,
and it is then unfolded like a rolling panorama, with its
predetermined contingencies.
Man's free choice--liberum arbitrium--falls easily into place as a
predetermined contingency. God is the first cause, and acts in all
secondary causes directly; but while He acts mechanically on the
rest of creation,--as far as is known,--He acts freely at one point,
and this free action remains free as far as it extends on that line.
Man's freedom derives from this source, but it is simply apparent,
as far as he is a cause; it is a reflex action determined by a new
agency of the first cause.
However abstruse these ideas may once have sounded, they are far
from seeming difficult in comparison with modern theories of energy.
Indeed, measured by that standard, the only striking feature of
Saint Thomas's motor is its simplicity. Thomas's prime motor was
very powerful, and its lines of energy were infinite. Among these
infinite lines, a certain group ran to the human race, and, as long
as the conduction was perfect, each man acted mechanically. In cases
where the current, for any reason, was for a moment checked,--that
is to say, produced the effect of hesitation or reflection in the
mind,--the current accumulated until it acquired power to leap the
obstacle. As Saint Thomas expressed it, the Prime Motor, Who was
nothing else than God, intervened to decide the channel of the
current. The only difference between man and a vegetable was the
reflex action of the complicated mirror which was called mind, and
the mark of mind was reflective absorption or choice. The apparent
freedom was an illusion arising from the extreme delicacy of the
machine, but the motive power was in fact the same--that of God.
This exclusion of what men commonly called freedom was carried still
further in the process of explaining dogma. Supposing the
conduction to be insufficient for a given purpose; a purpose which
shall require perfect conduction? Under ordinary circumstances, in
ninety-nine cases out of a hundred, the conductor will be burned
out, so to speak; condemned, and thrown away. This is the case with
most human beings. Yet there are cases where the conductor is
capable of receiving an increase of energy from the prime motor,
which enables it to attain the object aimed at. In dogma, this store
of reserved energy is technically called Grace. In the strict,
theological sense of the word, as it is used by Saint Thomas, the
exact, literal meaning of Grace is "a motion which the Prime Motor,
as a supernatural cause, produces in the soul, perfecting free
will." It is a reserved energy, which comes to aid and reinforce the
normal energy of the battery.
To religious minds this scientific inversion of solemn truths seems,
and is, sacrilege; but Thomas's numerous critics in the Church have
always brought precisely this charge against his doctrine, and are
doing so still. They insist that he has reduced God to a mechanism
and man to a passive conductor of force. He has left, they say,
nothing but God in the universe. The terrible word which annihilates
all other philosophical systems against which it is hurled, has been
hurled freely against his for six hundred years and more, without
visibly affecting the Church; and yet its propriety seems, to the
vulgar, beyond reasonable cavil. To Father de Regnon, of the
extremely learned and intelligent Society of Jesus, the difference
between pantheism and Thomism reduces itself to this: "Pantheism,
starting from the notion of an infinite substance which is the
plenitude of being, concludes that there can exist no other beings
than THE being; no other realities than the absolute reality.
Thomism, starting from the efficacy of the first cause, tends to
reduce more and more the efficacy of second causes, and to replace
it by a passivity which receives without producing, which is
determined without determining." To students of architecture, who
know equally little about pantheism and about Thomism,--or, indeed,
for that matter, about architecture, too,--the quality that rouses
most surprise in Thomism is its astonishingly scientific method. The
Franciscans and the Jesuits call it pantheism, but science, too, is
pantheism, or has till very recently been wholly pantheistic.
Avowedly science has aimed at nothing but the reduction of
multiplicity to unity, and has excommunicated, as though it were
itself a Church, any one who doubted or disputed its object, its
method, or its results. The effort is as evident and quite as
laborious in modern science, starting as it does from multiplicity,
as in Thomas Aquinas, who started from unity; and it is necessarily
less successful, for its true aims, as far as it is science and not
disguised religion, were equally attained by reaching infinite
complexity; but the assertion or assumption of ultimate unity has
characterized the Law of Energy as emphatically as it has
characterized the definition of God in theology. If it is a reproach
to Saint Thomas, it is equally a reproach to Clerk-Maxwell. In
truth, it is what men most admire in both--the power of broad and
lofty generalization.
Under any conceivable system the process of getting God and man
under the same roof--of bringing two independent energies under the
same control--required a painful effort, as science has much cause
to know. No doubt, many good Christians and some heretics have been
shocked at the tour de force by which they felt themselves suddenly
seized, bound hand and foot, attached to each other, and dragged
into the Church, without consent or consultation. To religious
mystics, whose scepticism concerned chiefly themselves and their own
existence, Saint Thomas's man seemed hardly worth herding, at so
much expense and trouble, into a Church where he was not eager to
go. True religion felt the nearness of God without caring to see the
mechanism. Mystics like Saint Bernard, Saint Francis, Saint
Bonaventure, or Pascal had a right to make this objection, since
they got into the Church, so to speak, by breaking through the
windows; but society at large accepted and retains Saint Thomas's
man much as Saint Thomas delivered him to the Government; a two-
sided being, free or unfree, responsible or irresponsible, an energy
or a victim of energy, moved by choice or moved by compulsion, as
the interests of society seemed for the moment to need. Certainly
Saint Thomas lavished no excess of liberty on the man he created,
but still he was more generous than the State has ever been. Saint
Thomas asked little from man, and gave much; even as much freedom of
will as the State gave or now gives; he added immortality hereafter
and eternal happiness under reasonable restraints; his God watched
over man's temporal welfare far more anxiously than the State has
ever done, and assigned him space in the Church which he never can
have in the galleries of Parliament or Congress; more than all this,
Saint Thomas and his God placed man in the centre of the universe,
and made the sun and the stars for his uses. No statute law ever did
as much for man, and no social reform ever will try to do it; yet
man bitterly complained that he had not his rights, and even in the
Church is still complaining, because Saint Thomas set a limit, more
or less vague, to what the man was obstinate in calling his freedom
of will.
Thus Saint Thomas completed his work, keeping his converging lines
clear and pure throughout, and bringing them together, unbroken, in
the curves that gave unity to his plan. His sense of scale and
proportion was that of the great architects of his age. One might go
on studying it for a lifetime. He showed no more hesitation in
keeping his Deity in scale than in adjusting man to it. Strange as
it sounds, although man thought himself hardly treated in respect to
freedom, yet, if freedom meant superiority, man was in action much
the superior of God, Whose freedom suffered, from Saint Thomas,
under restraints that man never would have tolerated. Saint Thomas
did not allow God even an undetermined will; He was pure Act, and as
such He could not change. Man alone was allowed, in act, to change
direction. What was more curious still, man might absolutely prove
his freedom by refusing to move at all; if he did not like his life
he could stop it, and habitually did so, or acquiesced in its being
done for him; while God could not commit suicide or even cease for a
single instant His continuous action. If man had the singular fancy
of making himself absurd,--a taste confined to himself but attested
by evidence exceedingly strong,--he could be as absurd as he liked;
but God could not be absurd. Saint Thomas did not allow the Deity
the right to contradict Himself, which is one of man's chief
pleasures. While man enjoyed what was, for his purposes, an
unlimited freedom to be wicked,--a privilege which, as both Church
and State bitterly complained and still complain, he has
outrageously abused,--God was Goodness, and could be nothing else.
While man moved about his relatively spacious prison with a certain
degree of ease, God, being everywhere, could not move. In one
respect, at least, man's freedom seemed to be not relative but
absolute, for his thought was an energy paying no regard to space or
time or order or object or sense; but God's thought was His act and
will at once; speaking correctly, God could not think; He is. Saint
Thomas would not, or could not, admit that God was Necessity, as
Abelard seems to have held, but he refused to tolerate the idea of a
divine maniac, free from moral obligation to himself. The atmosphere
of Saint Louis surrounds the God of Saint Thomas, and its pure ether
shuts out the corruption and pollution to come,--the Valois and
Bourbons, the Occams and Hobbes's, the Tudors and the Medicis, of an
enlightened Europe.
The theology turns always into art at the last, and ends in
aspiration. The spire justifies the church. In Saint Thomas's
Church, man's free will was the aspiration to God, and he treated it
as the architects of Chartres and Laon had treated their famous
fleches. The square foundation-tower, the expression of God's power
in act,--His Creation,--rose to the level of the Church facade as a
part of the normal unity of God's energy; and then, suddenly,
without show of effort, without break, without logical violence,
became a many-sided, voluntary, vanishing human soul, and neither
Villard de Honnecourt nor Duns Scotus could distinguish where God's
power ends and man's free will begins. All they saw was the soul
vanishing into the skies. How it was done, one does not care to ask;
in a result so exquisite, one has not the heart to find fault with
"adresse."
About Saint Thomas's theology we need not greatly disturb ourselves;
it can matter now not much, whether he put more pantheism than the
law allowed or more materialism than Duns Scotus approved--or less
of either--into his universe, since the Church is still on the spot,
responsible for its own doctrines; but his architecture is another
matter. So scientific and structural a method was never an accident
or the property of a single mind even with Aristotle to prompt it.
Neither his Church nor the architect's church was a sketch, but a
completely studied structure. Every relation of parts, every
disturbance of equilibrium, every detail of construction was treated
with infinite labour, as the result of two hundred years of
experiment and discussion among thousands of men whose minds and
whose instincts were acute, and who discussed little else. Science
and art were one. Thomas Aquinas would probably have built a better
cathedral at Beauvais than the actual architect who planned it; but
it is quite likely that the architect might have saved Thomas some
of his errors, as pointed out by the Councils of 1276. Both were
great artists; perhaps in their professions, the greatest that ever
lived; and both must have been great students beyond their practice.
Both were subject to constant criticism from men and bodies of men
whose minds were as acute and whose learning was as great as their
own. If the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Bishop of Paris
condemned Thomas, the Bernardines had, for near two hundred years,
condemned Beauvais in advance. Both the "Summa Theologiae" and
Beauvais Cathedral were excessively modern, scientific, and
technical, marking the extreme points reached by Europe on the lines
of scholastic science. This is all we need to know. If we like, we
can go on to study, inch by inch, the slow decline of the art. The
essence of it--the despotic central idea--was that of organic unity
both in the thought and the building. From that time, the universe
has steadily become more complex and less reducible to a central
control. With as much obstinacy as though it were human, it has
insisted on expanding its parts; with as much elusiveness as though
it were feminine, it has evaded the attempt to impose on it a single
will. Modern science, like modern art, tends, in practice, to drop
the dogma of organic unity. Some of the mediaeval habit of mind
survives, but even that is said to be yielding before the daily
evidence of increasing and extending complexity. The fault, then,
was not in man, if he no longer looked at science or art as an
organic whole or as the expression of unity. Unity turned itself
into complexity, multiplicity, variety, and even contradiction. All
experience, human and divine, assured man in the thirteenth century
that the lines of the universe converged. How was he to know that
these lines ran in every conceivable and inconceivable direction,
and that at least half of them seemed to diverge from any imaginable
centre of unity! Dimly conscious that his Trinity required in logic
a fourth dimension, how was the schoolman to supply it, when even
the mathematician of to-day can only infer its necessity? Naturally
man tended to lose his sense of scale and relation. A straight line,
or a combination of straight lines, may have still a sort of
artistic unity, but what can be done in art with a series of
negative symbols? Even if the negative were continuous, the artist
might express at least a negation; but supposing that Omar's kinetic
analogy of the ball and the players turned out to be a scientific
formula!--supposing that the highest scientific authority, in order
to obtain any unity at all, had to resort to the Middle Ages for an
imaginary demon to sort his atoms!--how could art deal with such
problems, and what wonder that art lost unity with philosophy and
science! Art had to be confused in order to express confusion; but
perhaps it was truest, so.
Some future summer, when you are older, and when I have left, like
Omar, only the empty glass of my scholasticism for you to turn down,
you can amuse yourselves by going on with the story after the death
of Saint Louis, Saint Thomas, and William of Lorris, and after the
failure of Beauvais. The pathetic interest of the drama deepens with
every new expression, but at least you can learn from it that your
parents in the nineteenth century were not to blame for losing the
sense of unity in art. As early as the fourteenth century, signs of
unsteadiness appeared, and, before the eighteenth century, unity
became only a reminiscence. The old habit of centralizing a strain
at one point, and then dividing and subdividing it, and distributing
it on visible lines of support to a visible foundation, disappeared
in architecture soon after 1500, but lingered in theology two
centuries longer, and even, in very old-fashioned communities, far
down to our own time; but its values were forgotten, and it survived
chiefly as a stock jest against the clergy. The passage between the
two epochs is as beautiful as the Slave of Michael Angelo; but, to
feel its beauty, you should see it from above, as it came from its
radiant source. Truth, indeed, may not exist; science avers it to be
only a relation; but what men took for truth stares one everywhere
in the eye and begs for sympathy. The architects of the twelfth and
thirteenth centuries took the Church and the universe for truths,
and tried to express them in a structure which should be final.
Knowing by an enormous experience precisely where the strains were
to come, they enlarged their scale to the utmost point of material
endurance, lightening the load and distributing the burden until the
gutters and gargoyles that seem mere ornament, and the grotesques
that seem rude absurdities, all do work either for the arch or for
the eye; and every inch of material, up and down, from crypt to
vault, from man to God, from the universe to the atom, had its task,
giving support where support was needed, or weight where
concentration was felt, but always with the condition of showing
conspicuously to the eye the great lines which led to unity and the
curves which controlled divergence; so that, from the cross on the
fleche and the keystone of the vault, down through the ribbed
nervures, the columns, the windows, to the foundation of the flying
buttresses far beyond the walls, one idea controlled every line; and
this is true of Saint Thomas's Church as it is of Amiens Cathedral.
The method was the same for both, and the result was an art marked
by singular unity, which endured and served its purpose until man
changed his attitude toward the universe. The trouble was not in the
art or the method or the structure, but in the universe itself which
presented different aspects as man moved. Granted a Church, Saint
Thomas's Church was the most expressive that man has made, and the
great Gothic cathedrals were its most complete expression.
Perhaps the best proof of it is their apparent instability. Of all
the elaborate symbolism which has been suggested for the Gothic
cathedral, the most vital and most perfect may be that the slender
nervure, the springing motion of the broken arch, the leap downwards
of the flying buttress,--the visible effort to throw off a visible
strain,--never let us forget that Faith alone supports it, and that,
if Faith fails, Heaven is lost. The equilibrium is visibly delicate
beyond the line of safety; danger lurks in every stone. The peril of
the heavy tower, of the restless vault, of the vagrant buttress; the
uncertainty of logic, the inequalities of the syllogism, the
irregularities of the mental mirror,--all these haunting nightmares
of the Church are expressed as strongly by the Gothic cathedral as
though it had been the cry of human suffering, and as no emotion had
ever been expressed before or is likely to find expression again.
The delight of its aspirations is flung up to the sky. The pathos of
its self-distrust and anguish of doubt is buried in the earth as its
last secret. You can read out of it whatever else pleases your youth
and confidence; to me, this is all.
THE END
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