The Story of Chartres

by Cecil Headlam

Then occurred scenes such as may be beheld to-day before the grotto in the mountain village of Lourdes. For Chartres was the Lourdes of the Middle Ages. The maimed and the halt recovered their powers, leapt from the waggons and flung away their crutches; the blind received their sight, the sick were healed, and all joined, after returning thanks before the altar, in the task of building the house of their Redeemer.

You see their work, you behold the material in which they wrought, as you stand before the western façade[58] and gaze in wonder; for the stones, it seems, have become intelligent, and matter is here spiritualised. But you will almost cease to wonder when you remember the spirit in which they wrought it. Such was the spirit, and such only could be the spirit, which produced the master-art of Gothic, and led the daring architects from step to step in the attainment of their triumphs, as they left behind them the heavy piers and the thick dark arches of the Pagan Romanesque and arrived at last at the perfect expression of the Christian spirit in their soaring arches, their airy buttresses, and their pointing pinnacles flaming upwards to the skies.

Seven miles distant from Chartres lie the quarries of Berchères-l’Évêque, whence, in the spirit and manner that has been described, they brought this ‘miraculous’ stone—miraculous, for it was in a vision that the existence of the quarry was said to have been revealed. Miraculous one may almost call it still, by reason of its quality of hardness, its gift of wear, and the exquisite tones which it has taken on with years. Of the two towers the old one is the better built; many of the stones of the other were laid in too little mortar and have consequently split. These blocks of stone are marked with various masonic signs, a fact which confirms the supposition that the two towers were built by the Frères Maçons or Logeurs du bon Dieu, as they were called, those famous associations of the Middle Ages, corporations of artist workmen, who were indeed ‘masters of the living stone.’

The first time that the traveller beholds the porches of Chartres he is filled with admiration for the exquisite effect of the whole, and afterwards for the exquisite details of which that whole is composed. He may, if he is of an imaginative temperament, fall into some reverie and picture to himself a host of historic fantasies.

But later he will begin to realise that the sculpture which had pleased his eye and inspired his dreams is not a mere ornament of the building. Each part of the Cathedral, like the Cathedral as a whole, is the superb product of the intimate alliance of nameless architects, nameless sculptors, nameless painters of glass, working with the one object of setting forth the glory of God and His Son and the Virgin to the multitude, of illustrating for all unreading eyes the Word of the Lord. The Cathedral is a Bible in stone, and the porches a gospel in relief, a sculptured catechism, a preface and a résumé of the book. Each stone, thus understood, is seen to be a page of a great drama. This drama is the history of humanity from the creation of the world to the day of the Last Judgment. Within, the same story is repeated. The jewelled windows are there not only for the sake of the holiness of their beauty, not merely to provide the pilgrim with the dim religious light suitable to his mood, or that the placid sunshine of La Beauce may be transformed into imperious angry fire. The five thousand figures in those legendary lights are the commentary and the repetition of the sculptured text without.

Who conceived, the question arises again and again, this admirable plan, this marvellous whole? Who were the artists of Notre-Dame? We are in great ignorance of the matter, and the question cannot be definitely answered.

The cloister we know was the only refuge of art; the monasteries the sole asylums for those who would study science. And to those peaceable retreats painters, sculptors, artists perforce retired to practise, to invent, to teach the secrets of their trade; secrets, alas! of colour among them, which have been irretrievably lost to this scientific generation. We know, for instance, that in the Monastery of Tiron, which S. Bernard founded on lands given to him for that purpose by S. Ives, more than five hundred artists of one sort or another were to be found. S. Bernard insisted on the observance of that point in the Benedictine rule which recommends that ‘if there be artists in the monastery they shall with all humility practise their arts.’ These monks, we also know, established a branch at Chartres, ‘near the market-place.’ Perhaps, therefore, S. Bernard paid his debt to S. Ives and the Chapter of Notre-Dame by furnishing the hands which carved the statues and the storied capitals of the three bays of the western façade.

In the S. Sylvester window, to the right of the entrance to the Chapel of S. Piat, and in the S. Chéron window of the Chapel of the Sacred Heart of Mary, the old glass painters have well represented the masons of Notre-Dame. Here is a beardless dresser of stone, there a sculptor with his rough, pointed cap. The iron hardness of the miraculous stone yields to the untiring application of chisel and mallet, and beneath their ceaseless blows its formless mass by degrees becomes shapely. Above the workers appears the chapel in which the window now is. A mason in a round hat is quietly laying a cornice stone, whilst his help-mate, carrying a piece of sculpture, climbs up a little ladder. In the background four other masons, shaven and clad like the common people, are busy shaping the statues of kings—the very statues which now, representing the ancestors of Christ, stand in the porch without. The statue is as yet only blocked out: the artist is beginning to model it with his chisel. His companion the while, warm with his past exertions, is drinking. The royal statue begins to be distinguishable. The eyes and the mouth are leaping into life: the crown is being adorned with pearls, the sceptre decorated, the robe and mantle draped, the hands modelled. The man who has blocked it out has finished his task and takes his rest; his companion carves, polishes and puts the finishing touches to the work he has begun.

What were their names? No one knows. The names of some of the donors are preserved in the necrologies of the grateful canons, but of all the clever artists of Notre-Dame hardly one has left his name behind him, like the Robbir who carved his signature beneath the combat of David and Goliath on the north porch.

This is in no way surprising, when we remember the spirit in which these works were done. The Cathedrals were built and decorated for the glory of God, not for the glorification of the artists. Men dedicated to the Church their money and their labour for the remission of their sins, and not with the object of acquiring fame. We have seen, and shall see again, how whole populations rose up and came on a pilgrimage from afar to build and to rebuild the house of God, when to the enthusiasm of the Crusades succeeded the holy ardour of religious construction and men took the Cross, not to depart to war in the East, but to labour humbly at the work of God, Our Lady and the saints. Then from the distant cloister came forth the architect, and artists and, at the voice of a bishop calling for aid, the sacred work began. The peasants quarried stone and brought material, the young men dressed it, and the masons raised the lofty piers and fashioned the groined roof beneath the eye of the ‘master of the work.’ The pilgrims would sojourn, perhaps, for a year in the town, labouring with such ardour that when the light failed they would often continue by the light of torches. Not far from the site of the church, in some adjacent monastery, the glass-painters designed and stained and fitted into the leads their coloured windows, and the sculptors chiselled bas-reliefs and statues. A man’s labour was his offering, his art very often his best and only alms. His name was one name only among a thousand, his work might surpass in excellence but it would be the same in spirit with that of a thousand other pilgrims like unto himself. Why should his name therefore be recorded?