The deduction of the historian from the legends of our Trouvère is one which we shall find illustrated by the Cathedral windows. It is, that this Cathedral is a popular and national monument, built by the free labour of the people gathered together freely from all parts of France, joining and rejoicing in the new democratic movement of the Communes, and recording, therefore, in stone and glass their new aspirations, their new dignity.
CHAPTER VI
Mediæval Glass and Mediæval Guilds
‘I gaze round on the windows, pride of France!
Each the bright gift of some mechanic guild,
Who loved their city and thought gold well spent
To make her beautiful with piety.’
James Russel Lowell.
‘Fine coloured windows of several works.’
Francis Bacon.
THERE are in the Cathedral one hundred and seventy-five stained-glass lights, ‘storied windows richly dight,’ and of these almost all date from the thirteenth century. Remembering the glass of the following century in S. Père and the later windows of S. Aignan, we shall not care to dispute the claim of Chartres to be the locus classicus of mediæval glass.
The three western windows of limpid blue belong, as we have said, to the twelfth century. And we know that by the year 1220 all the great legendary lights of the nave and all the windows of the choir, with the exception of those given by S. Piedmont of Castile and Jeanne de Dammartin, had been placed in the bays. Almost all the original glazing remains. There is, of course, fine thirteenth-century glass in England, at Canterbury for instance, and at Lincoln, whilst Salisbury and York are scarcely to be surpassed for the pale beauty of their silvery grisailles. But we have nothing in this country to compare in quantity, and therefore in effect, with the gorgeous glass which illustrates the great French churches. It is at Reims, Le Mans and Bourges, and most of all at Chartres, that are to be found the largest and most complete and therefore the most gorgeous galleries of the deep, rich mosaic glass of that date. At Chartres, throughout the whole vast expanse of jewelled lights, there is scarcely one that is not early, and there are very few that are not of the thirteenth century.
Consider the list of them now as they have come down to us across the ages, in spite of fires and sieges, artists and vandals, cleansing and restoring, in spite of the winds that sweep across La Beauce and the desire of the people to read: in spite even of the eighteenth-century architects and their eagerness to throw daylight upon their abominable deeds. This is the reckoning:—One hundred and twenty-four great windows, three great roses, thirty-five lesser roses, and twelve small ones! And in these are painted 3889 figures, including thirty-two contemporary historical personages, a crowd of saints and prophets in thirty-eight separate legends, and groups of tradesmen in the costumes of their guilds. This is the national portrait gallery of mediæval France! It is one of the most precious documents of mediæval archæology. It is one of the most rich and poetical applications of symbolic art.
Amazing, unspeakable are the glories of this unrivalled treasure of stained glass. ‘I gaze round on the windows, pride of France!’ Language is futile in the presence of their rich, deep, gem-like colouring, and the memory of them, faint though it must be, compared with the intense impression conveyed by the immense reality, makes the tongue to falter, the pen to fail.
‘I gaze round on the windows, pride of France!’
The building is Aladdin’s cave, and the glass a myriad jewels set in lead lines and in tracery of stone! But metaphors are unavailing, epithets are quite powerless to convey the beauty of the light which pours through them. It is as marvellous, and it changes as unceasingly as the ever-changing hues of a sunset on the western shores of Scotland, or on the iridescent waters of the Venetian lagoons. And it is even more brilliant than these. When the noonday sun is darting his angry rays across the aisles, or soft rain-laden beams streak the spaces with stripes of bloom; when the shades of evening have begun to fall, or when the dawn is gathering strength, and is now lighting the dim distances of the vast nave, you may sit and gaze round on those windows. You watch the wine-red, the blood-red, the yellow and the brown of the Rose of France and the lancet lights beneath, till the memory of all other beauty upon earth fades in the intoxication of that stupendous colouring. You turn at last, and, since no memory, however vivid, can retain to the full the impression of the beauty of that glass, you are startled into another ecstasy. For you have forgotten that there can be other windows as beautiful. You cannot believe that there are other colours as exquisite, until you see once more those blues and greens, ultramarines and peacock blues and azures, and those fiery reds which shine in upon the astonished sight from the windows of the south transept and the aisles. And still there remain the lights of the choir and the apse, and still the old glories, ever new, of the azure of the western lancets, the sapphires and rubies of the western rose.