In the midst of the wealth of antique ruins, near the Theatre, the Coliseum, and the Forum of this “little Rome of the Gauls,” stands a noble monument of the ruder ages of Christianity, the Cathedral, Saint-Trophime. Here Saint Augustine, apostle to England, was consecrated; here three General Councils of the Church were held, here the Donatists were doomed to everlasting fire, and here the Emperor Constantine, from his summer palace on the Rhone, must have come to “assist” at Mass. The building in which these solemn scenes of the early Church were enacted soon disappeared and was replaced by the present one whose older walls Révoil attributes to the IX century. The present Cathedral's first documentary date is 1152, in the era of the Republic of Arles. The name of Saint-Etienne was changed, and the body of Saint-Trophime, carried in state from the ruined Church of the Aliscamps, was buried under a new altar and he was solemnly proclaimed the Patron of the richest and most majestic church in all Provence.
“IN THE MIDST OF THE WEALTH OF ANTIQUE RUINS.”—ARLES. [To List]
Nearly eight hundred years later a traveller stood before the portal of this church. In the midst of his delighted study he suddenly felt the attraction of a pair of watchful eyes, and turned to find a peasant woman gazing fixedly at him. In her strange fascination she had placed beside her, on the ground, two huge melons and a mammoth cabbage, and her wizened hands were folded before her, Sunday-fashion. She was a little witch of a woman, old and bent and brown.
“THE FAÇADE OF SAINT-TROPHIME”.—ARLES. [To List]
“Yes, my good gentleman,” she said, “I have been looking at you,—five whole minutes of the clock, and much good it has done me. In these days of books and such fine learning there is not enough time spent before our door; and I who pass by it every day, year in, year out, I have watched well, and only two except yourself have ever studied it. The foreigners come with red books and look at them more than at the door itself,—they stay perhaps three minutes, and go off, shaking their wise heads. Our people, passing every day, see but a door, a place for going in and coming out.” She paused for breath.
“And what do you see?” asked the traveller.
“You ask me?” She smiled wisely. “But you know, since you are standing here and looking too. Listen!” And her old eyes began to gleam. “I'll tell you of a time before you were born. I was a child then; and we marched here every Sunday, other little girls and myself, and we stood before this door. And the nuns—it was often Sister Mary Dolorosa—told us the stories of these stones. See! Here is Our Lord Who loves all mankind, but has to judge us too;—and there is Saint-Trophime. But I cannot read, Monsieur. An old peasant woman has no time for such fine things, and you will laugh at me for telling you what you have in your books,—but I have them all here, here in my heart, and many a time I too come to refresh my old memory, and to pray. Those pictures tell great lessons to those that have eyes to see them. Well, well-a-day, I must pick up my melons and begone, for I have taken up your time and said too much. But you will excuse it in an old woman who is good for little else than talking now.”
They parted in true French fashion, with “expressions of mutual esteem,” and the traveller turned to the portal which was still fulfilling its ancient mission of teaching and of making beautiful the House of God. Applied to a severe façade typical of the plainness of Provençal outer walls, this is one of the noblest works of Mediævalism, the richest and most beautiful portal of the South of France; and no others in the Midi, except those of Saint-Gilles-du-Gard and Moissac, are worthy of comparison with it. In boldness and intellectuality of conception it excels many of the northern works and equals the finest of them. For the builder of the northern portal seems to have held closely to one architectural form, the beautiful convention of the Gothic style; and within that door he placed, in a more or less usual way, the subjects which the Church had sanctioned. In nearly every case the treatment of the subject is subordinated to the general architectural plan and symmetry. At Saint-Trophime there was the limit of space, the axiom that a door must be a door, and doubtless many allowable subjects. But within these necessary bounds the unknown sculptor recognised few conventionalities. The usual place for the portrayal of the Last Judgment, the tympanum, was too small for his conception of the scene; the pier that divides his door-way was not built to support the statue of the church's patron saint; he had a multitude of fancies, and instead of curbing them in some beautiful conventionality of form, as one feels great northern builders often did, this artist made a frame within which his ideas found free play, and, forcing conventionality to its will, his genius justified itself. For not only is the portal as a whole, full of dignity and true symmetry, but its details are thoughtfully worked out. They show, with the old scholastic form of his Faith, the grasp of the unknown master's mind, the intellectuality of his symbolism, and few portals grow in fascination as this one, few have so interesting an originality.