St. Bernard had been commissioned by the pope to set the new venture in motion, and he threw his whole passionate heart into the enterprise. Standing above the vast gathering, he read the papal letter that told of Odessa’s fall, two years earlier, and the horrifying massacre of eastern Christians. It was sound statesmanship that discerned the menace of the Eastern Question; the advance of the Seljukian Turk was indeed a knotty problem for the XII century, when XX-century Europe, after oceans of blood, has not settled the trouble. We may be sure that Bernard of Clairvaux used no flatteries in addressing the throng at Vézelay, if his public word was as uncompromising as his private letters: “Up! soldier of Christ! Go, expiate your sins! The breath of corruption is on every side. The license of manners is unchecked. Brigandage goes unpunished. Debout, soldats du Christ!” We know that his words of flame swept the crowd, and that, as at Clermont, fifty years earlier, again rose the cry: “God wills it! The Cross! The Cross!” The seductive queen, whose equivocal conduct on this very crusade was to start centuries of calamity for France, threw herself at Bernard’s feet, to receive from his hand the Cross. The lowly people jostled with the lords to take the vow, “les menues gens et les gens de grand air,” for crusades were democratic things that did more than aught else to break up feudal autocracy.
The eager men and women of 1146 knelt in the actual nave and narthex of Vézelay’s abbatial. The choir which we have to-day was not yet built. In 1165 a fire damaged the choir of the Madeleine. A year later the exiled archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Becket, excommunicated his enemies in England from Vézelay’s pulpit. The new choir was built mainly under Abbot Girard d’Arcy (1171-96), and is Burgundy’s Primary Gothic, though a generation behind the work of that phase in the Ile-de-France. Unpracticed hands made its vaulting, whose web is not built elastically as in the true Gothic fashion; the stones were welded in a compact mass by a bath of mortar. Viollet-le-Duc suggested that Abbot Hugues, deposed by the pope in 1206 for indebtedness, may have expended more than he should on the church.
The choir was well advanced when, in July of 1191, the second great gathering at Vézelay occurred. Here Philippe-Auguste and Richard Cœur-de-Lion met, swore eternal friendship, and then marched south together for the Third Crusade. Before ever they reached Palestine their pact of good will was broken, as was only to be expected with the virus of the Capet-Angevin duel in their veins. Richard’s mother, Aliénor, had flouted Philippe’s father, her first husband, on the former great enterprise for the East which had been initiated at Vézelay. The Madeleine church reconstructed its west frontispiece in the XIII century in order to light better its narthex; the pignon is overheavy and rather odd.
Three times St. Louis came to pray in the famous Burgundian pilgrim church, his last visit being a few months before his death while crusading in Africa. Then, in Provence in 1279, was discovered what was claimed to be the real body of the Magdalene. Before the XIII century was ended the prestige of Vézelay’s pilgrimages was a thing of the past. The monastery’s ruin was consummated during the religious wars.[295] Such was the decrepitude into which the splendid church fell, that only a complete restoration by Viollet-le-Duc, from 1840 to 1858, saved the edifice from collapse.
Because Vézelay’s nave belongs to Burgundy’s school of Romanesque it is spacious and amply lighted; no gloom, no cramping here. Such a nave could lead up to a Gothic choir, without sharp contrast. The choir, taken by itself, may be a cold work, but the sublimity of its setting places it beyond criticism. There is no more romantically ideal a vista in architecture than the white choir of Vézelay, as it appears from the narthex through the imaged portico. Seen thus down the prospect of the sober nave four hundred feet away, it rises like the crusaders’ dream of the Heavenly Jerusalem.
The dominant note of Vézelay’s interior is serenity. Pace up and down its deserted aisles as a warm June day fades. The rose glow of sunset transmutes the coarse, porous stones to glory and the church seems voicing, securo e gaudioso, the grand old plain-chant psalmody which through long centuries echoed here. With you, like a tangible presence, is Faith’s certitude, the certitude of John the Baptist who witnessed, the vision of John the Evangelist who loved, the impassioned tranquillity of Mary of Magdala. Here reigns the benignant gladness, benigna letizia, that Dante attributes to St. Bernard in Paradise. The luminous stillness of Vézelay testifies that he that cometh to God must believe that He is. Here Faith is an overwhelming acquiescence of the conscience as entire as was the belief of the men and women of the XII century who, when they heard the preacher’s word, responded with the cry: “The Cross! The Cross!” In the solitary abbatial of to-day, half forgotten on a bypath of the world, breathes the living quietude, the active repose, the voluntary discipline of its old Benedictine builders. “Faith is the substance of things to be hoped for, the evidence of things that appear not. Without faith, it is impossible to please God.”
Like the Tag, in India, there is here a supersensual art beauty that renews the jaded spirit. Both have been embalmed for eternity in a vivifying peace. “Without holiness no man shall see God,” thought the faulty, vehement, crusading generations who prayed in Vezelay’s church, and holiness, then, meant primarily the humble repentance of sins. Whoever it was built the tomb of the Indian princess at Agra, whoever it was built the church in Burgundy called after Mary of Magdala, he worked in something more than stones and mortar. At Agra you end by thinking that the secret of the enthralling magic lies in the marvel of atmosphere, the deep soft shadows which break the dazzling sun expanses. At Vézelay, in the groping effort to put its spell into words, you end by saying that the beauty lies in the space which the inclosing walls have so holily shut in. But what analysis or what detailed description can convey how the spirit is impressed by this shrine, named for the Sinner who poured out the precious ointment with a Faith and Love so complete that it washed her clean!
In such a church come flashes of insight, momentary liftings of the veil, periods of mental fecundity that make clear why the true mystic passes without loss from his isolated reverie of Divine Love to an intensely practical activity, and when you begin to understand that you are on the way to a comprehensive sympathy with that pillar of French Christianity, that apostle sent of God as surely as was Paul to the Gentiles—Bernard the Burgundian, who prayed and preached in this abbey church.
THE GOTHIC COLLEGIATE AT SEMUR-EN-AUXOIS[296]
Les Français, fils ainés de l’antiquité, Romain par le génie, sont Grec par le caractère. Inquiets et volages dans le bonheur; constant et invincibles dans l’aversité; formés pour les arts; civilisés jusqu’à l’excès durant le calme de l’État; grossiers et sauvages dans les troubles politiques; flottants comme des vaisseaux sans lest au gré des passions; enthusiastes du bien et du mal; aimants pusillanimes de la vie pendant la paix; prodigues de leur jours dans les batailles; charmants dans leur pays; insupportable chez l’étranger; tels furent les Athéniens d’autrefois, tels sont les Français d’aujourd’hui.—Chateaubriand.