Many causes have combined to destroy such churches as then existed. If they escaped the rasings and fires of a siege, they were often destroyed by lightning, or decayed by years; and some of the fragments which endured to the XIII century were torn down to make room for more beautiful buildings.
It was the XI and XII centuries which saw the important beginnings of the great Cathedrals of both North and South. These were the years when religion was the dominant idea of the western world,—when everything, even warfare, was pressed into its service. Instead of devastating their own and their neighbour's country, Christian armies were devastating the Holy Land; doing to the Infidel in the name of their religion what he, in the name of his, had formerly done to them. The capture of Jerusalem had triumphantly ended the First Crusade; the Church was everywhere victorious, and the Pope in actual fact the mightiest monarch of the earth. These were the days when Peter the Hermit's cry, “God wills it,” aroused the world, and aroused it to the most diverse accomplishments.
One form of this activity was church building; but there were other causes than religion for the general magnificence of the effort. Among these was communal pride, the interesting, half-forgotten motive of much that is great in mediæval building.
The Mediævalism of the old writers seems an endless pageant, in which indefinitely gorgeous armies “march up the hill and then march down again;” in newer histories this has disappeared in the long struggle of one class with another; and in neither do we reach the individual, nor see the daily life of the people who are the backbone of a nation. Yet these are the people we must know if we are to have a right conception of the Cathedral's place in the living interest of the Middle Ages. For the Bishop's church was in every sense a popular church. The Abbey was built primarily for its monks, and the Abbey-church for their meditation and worship. The French Cathedral was the people's, it was built by their money, not money from an Abbey-coffer. It did not stand, as the Cathedral of England, majestic and apart, in a scholarly close; it was in the open square of the city; markets and fairs were held about it; the doors to its calm and rest opened directly on the busiest, every-day bustle. It is not a mere architectural relic, as its building was never a mere architectural feat. It is the symbol of a past stage of life, a majestic part of the picture we conjure before our mind's eye, when we consider Mediævalism.
“A NAVE OF THE LATER STYLE.”—RODEZ. [To List]
Such a picture of a city of another country and of the late Middle Ages exists in the drama of Richard Wagner's Meistersinger; and his Nuremberg of the XVI century, with changes of local colour, is the type of all mediæval towns. General travel was unknown. The activity of the great roads was the march of armies, the roving of marauders, the journeys of venturesome merchants or well-armed knights. Not only roads, but even streets were unsafe at night; and after the sun had set he who had gone about freely and carelessly during the day, remained at home or ventured out with much caution. When armies camped about her walls, the city was doubtless much occupied with outside happenings. But when the camp broke up and war was far away, her shoemaker made his shoes, her goldsmith, fine chains and trinkets, her merchants traded in the market-place. Their interests were in street brawls, romancings, new “privileges,” the work or the feast of the day—in a word town-topics. Yet being as other men, the burghers also were awakened by the energy of the age, and instead of wasting it in adventures and wars, their interest took the form of an intense local pride, narrow, but with elements of grandeur, seldom selfish, but civic.
This absence of the personal element is nowhere better illustrated than in Cathedral building. Of all the really great men who planned the Cathedrals of France, almost nothing is known; and by searching, little can be found out. Who can give a dead date, much less a living fact, concerning the life of that Gervais who conceived the great Gothic height of Narbonne? Who can tell even the name of him who planned the sombre, battlemented walls of Agde, or of that great man who first saw in poetic vision the delicate choir of Saint-Nazaire in Carcassonne? Artists have a well-preserved personality,—cathedral-builders, none. Robert of Luzarches who conceived the “Parthenon of all Gothic architecture,” and the man who planned stately Sens and the richness of Canterbury, are as unknown to us as the quarries from which the stones of their Cathedrals were cut. It is not the Cathedral built by Robert of Luzarches belonging to Amiens, as it is the Assumption by Rubens belonging to Antwerp. It is scarcely the Cathedral of its patron, Saint Firmin. It is the Cathedral of Amiens.
“THE DELICATE CHOIR OF SAINT-NAZAIRE.”—CARCASSONNE. [To List]