—Rodin, Les cathédrales de France.
With many a gap, with many a lapse, we have followed the earlier stages of Gothic art in the land where it was born. We have seen how, from the efforts of the monks to cover their Romanesque naves with a permanent stone roof, was evolved the intersecting rib vault which was the basis of Gothic architecture, how for a short time churches used the Romanesque and Gothic systems simultaneously as in Morienval and Poissy, and for another short period the churches were Gothic in essentials while retaining a few traits of the earlier phase. By many the imperishable hour that produced Soissons’ transept, the choir of St. Remi, Notre Dame at Laon, and Notre Dame at Paris, is beyond all others. When the national art expanded into its full flowering in the XIII century—an era as great in men and the making of history as in art—Gothic science, though ever seeking, ever reaching out, remained disciplined, even as the scholastic builders themselves were disciplined.
While eighty cathedrals in France were rising, and in the same hour some hundreds of lesser churches, the rulers of the nation were capable warriors, compilers of laws, and administrators, the builders were monarchs, crusading bishops, troubadour counts, cloistral ascetics, and arduous sinners. Serf, artisan, burgher, baron, and king built the cathedrals; field laborer, minstrel, maiden, and chatelaine were harnessed to the same cart to drag in the great stones. Little children cleared the church pavement of sand and cement in preparation for the “Day of Benediction” for their city, as the solemn blessing of their church was held to be by those God-fearing generations.
The new school of mediæval archæology, that during three generations has been interpreting the Gothic churches of France, is teaching us to read the stones with sympathy. “Symbol of Faith, the cathedral was also a symbol of Love,” says M. Émile Mâle. “All men labored there. The peasants offered their all, the work of their strong arms. They pulled carts and carried stones on their shoulders with the brave good will of the giant-saint, Christopher. The burgess gave his money, the baron his land, the artist his genius. During more than two centuries every vital force in France collaborated on the cathedrals. From that comes the puissant life emanating from these eternal monuments. The dead, too, were associated with the living, for the cathedral was paved with tombstones, and the earlier generations, with hands joined in prayer, continued to worship in their ancient church. Past and present were united in the same feeling of love. The cathedral was the very conscience, the very soul of the city.”[385]
After five generations had reared so many and such magnificent churches, their energy, because it was human, passed from plenitude into decline. The death of St. Louis, in 1270, may be taken as the beginning of the change, though even before had been used various cut-and-dried Rayonnant features. Genius flagged when structural perfection was achieved. The divinely restless reaching out of art was stultified by geometric rule. Graceful and stately as is many a XIV-century church, never in them do we find the unexpected entrancing touches of Apogee Gothic. Gothic was fast becoming an art made tongue-tied by authority.
As time went on profiles deteriorated, sharp prismatic molds succeeding to the virile torus, or molds fluid and vague. By the XV century capitals were omitted altogether. The sane marking of the horizontal line had become an offense to the eye. Without capitals the molds died away weakly in the piers. Flamboyant Gothic architecture exhibited all these traits, and, moreover, gave capricious rein to many a redundant detail, yet it was none the less a phase of art far more vigorous and satisfactory than the Rayonnant geometric period, its predecessor. The verve and abundance of Flamboyant Gothic was a rebirth. The inspiration of St. Jeanne d’Arc, the restored political unity, the increase of trade, the love of pageantry, all aided the art renaissance which was in progress before the advent of Italian ideas. No one can say that Gothic architecture ended in decrepitude who knows such masterpieces as the façades of Rouen and Beauvais, the towers at Bordeaux, Rodez, and Chartres, the baldaquin and choir screen of Albi, or statuary as ample in its simplicity as Riom’s Virgin of the Bird and “the Saints” at Solesmes. And from end to end of France, as the XVI century opened, such work was in progress.
What, then, killed Gothic art? For it was slain with all this warm blood in its veins. Some say the return to pagan ideals dealt the death blow, the deserting of the celestial man-humble ideal for the terrestrial self-intoxicated pride of the Italian Renaissance: “The Renaissance is man seeking knowledge, happiness, and love, outside of Christianity.” A Christian had knelt in prayer on a Gothic tomb, or reposed with serene confidence, awaiting the trumpet call of the archangel, a Book of Hours in his hand. On a Renaissance tomb the deceased reclined like a pagan at a feast. The Italian wars diverted from its natural channels the genius of the northern Latins (who were so strongly Celt and Frank), and in many cases the imported neo-classicism was not that of Italy’s supreme masters, but of the lesser artists, their successors.
Others have contended that the printing press and the Protestant Reformation—with its spirit of hostile criticism—proved fatal to the national art, since the very life of Gothic was legend, poetry, and dreams, and symbolism its inspiration. Doubt quickly drained the sources of life. “Its charm had been to retain the candor of childhood, the limpid book of young saints. It was an art whose faith discussed not—it sang.”[386] It was an art happy and bold and free of restraint, save the restraint which its own right instinct for discipline imposed—co-ordinating the multitudinous into a symmetrical unity—an art unfettered in its truth telling, daring to sculpture king or bishop marching to Hell, yet giving no offense to authority by so doing.
Alas, one must acknowledge that the Church, so long the guardian of Gothic art, dealt a deadly blow at the sweet naïve gayety of the Middle Ages. To reform Catholic Christendom there gathered at Trent a much-needed Council, impregnated with the critical spirit which Luther had unloosed. Pious churchmen had come to look askance on legends. They were ashamed of the simplicities which the XIII-century man was so certain pleased Our Lady, who accepted them with a friendly smile of comprehension of her fellow creatures. The good fathers at Trent regarded prudishly the spiritual passion of the Canticle of Canticles flaming in cathedral windows; they thought it forwardness to carve mechanics’ tools on altar stones. Such manifestations were excessive. What would our critics of Wittemberg and Geneva say? The mystery plays, source of inspiration for the late-Gothic sculptors, now became suspect. Deprived of popular life, the religious themes grew cold. When censured, the creative instinct withered. In 1563 (a year after the iconoclastic outrages in France) the Council of Trent, at its last session, complained that Gothic artists scandalized the faithful by their childish superstitions. The Middle Ages were ended.
Cathedrals are not raised by critics or doubters. When France built her great churches, her faith was humble, her love a mounting flame. Her cathedrals were symbols of the Kingdom of God in her midst, the pons sæculorum whereby man passed beyond the bourne of his narrow life. They were solaces in his hours of misery, in his delinquencies; they stood for justice alike to serf and baron; they were the Sermon on the Mount made visible, the Biblia pauperum wherein lettered and unlettered read the same lessons; they were the Credo chanted by men who believed in Christ, Son of the Living God and Son of the Immaculate Virgin.