George Edmund Street: Unpublished Notes and Reprinted Papers

by George Edmund Street

Of the other buildings of the abbey very slight traces now remain. Close to the west end there is, however, a very simple gate-house, and the modern conventual buildings appear to be now used for a school, superintended by nuns.

S. Germer is certainly one of those churches which no ecclesiologist who goes to Beauvais should on any account miss seeing. Its rare scale, dignity, and architectural interest, and its secluded situation afford attractions of the highest kind, and I am confident that no one who takes my advice in this matter will come back disappointed.

III

From Beauvais I made my way to Compiègne, where I found but little of much interest. The principal church is in size, plan, and general design, decidedly conspicuous; yet it is remarkable how little there is in it to detain an architect beyond the general effect. The bulk of the structure is of good uniform first-pointed character. It consists of a nave and aisle (fifty-three feet in width) of six bays, transepts, and an apsidal choir, the lower part of which has been modernized and has a very badly planned flamboyant aisle round it; and there were intended to be two western towers. The groining of the nave is flamboyant. The best feature is the apse, which has a glazed triforium of two lancet windows in each bay, and a clerestory of large single lancets. It is, I think, characteristic of many French churches of this fine scale, that they afford much less matter for study and description than our own churches of one-fourth the size and pretension. Their details are so uniform, and their planning so regular that a description of one bay is, in fact, a description of the whole church, and there is nothing in the shape of monumental effigies, screens, brasses, or other similar relics, to give a special interest to each part of the building. When we lament the general scarcity of examples of groining in our English churches, we ought not to forget that it was, in part at least, to this that we may attribute the extraordinary variety of their character; for it is undoubtedly very much more difficult to obtain those picturesquely irregular effects which charm us so justly in English examples, when groined roofs are used, than when their place is taken by roofs of wood. The points of support must be much more equally spaced, the piers more regularly planned, and each portion more exactly a reproduction of every other portion; and it has sometimes struck me as possible that we owe the much greater variety of designs in the treatment even of our groining, as compared with the French, to the great love of change and variety which our architects had imbibed in dealing so largely with wooden-roofed buildings. In this respect indeed, they sometimes ran into excesses for which they had no example, and happily, no imitators on the Continent; but on the whole, we have undoubtedly reason to be grateful for a feature in our national art which helped to place it in so high a position when compared with that of other countries.

Another church, dedicated to S. Antoine, is of large size and late flamboyant style. It has a fine font (now disused) of the same character and material as the well known fonts at Winchester, East Meon, and Southampton; the bowl of which is no less than three feet nine inches square. The floor of the nave of this church is boarded, and fitted up with very smart chairs, whilst the aisles have tiled floors and common chairs, and there is a rail fixed between the columns to shut in the select occupants of the smart chairs. It is a mistake, therefore, to suppose that the introduction of chairs will necessarily secure the annihilation of the pew system. Here, too, I saw a “mandement” of the Bishop of Beauvais, Senlis and Noyon, dated Dec. 8th, 1856, ordering the adoption of the Roman liturgy, in place of the local uses, of which he says there were no less than nine in his diocese, so that it often happened that the same priest “chargé de deux paroisses, trouve dans l’Église ou il va célébrer une première Messe une liturgie différente de celle qui s’observe dans la paroisse où il réside:”—“le chant, les cérémonies, la couleur des ornemens, les usages, tout est changé.” The Bishop interdicted, among others, the Missals of Beauvais, Noyon, Senlis, Amiens, Meaux, and Rouen, and his order took effect from Whitsunday, 1857.

Of less distinctly ecclesiastical edifices Compiègne retains some remains. A cloister in the Caserne S. Corneille is a good example. The arches have no tracery, and the piers have buttresses to resist the thrust of the groining. This is very simple but good work, though late in the fourteenth century. The old Hôtel-Dieu, too, has a characteristic gable end towards the street, divided by a central buttress, and with a pointed archway below and a large window above in each division.

The very picturesque front of the Hôtel de Ville has been recently very carefully restored, but so completely, that it looks almost like a new building. The effect of the front is very good, though the belfry tower rises awkwardly from behind the parapet of the building. There is an illustration of this building in M. Verdier’s Architecture Civile et Domestique, which will enable your readers to understand the character of this picturesque though late building better than any description that I can give. The roof of the main building, as well as that of the turrets at the angles and the belfry, is covered with slate: and it is worth notice how much the effect of these roofs depends upon the thinness of the slate, its small size and the sharpness and neatness with which it is cut. Foreign slating is in truth just as good in its effect as ours is generally bad and coarse.

The château of Pierrefonds ought to be visited from Compiègne. The ruins must be interesting, and I believe the site is very picturesque. It is a fashionable place of resort, and at a distance of some three hours through the forest from Compiègne. M. Viollet-le-Duc’s description of the buildings is known probably to most of your readers.

From Compiègne I made my way to Soissons. It was here that on this journey I came first on the grand style which distinguishes the buildings of this part of France. Laon, chief in grandeur, both natural and architectural, Noyon, S. Quentin, Meaux, and Soissons, are magnificent illustrations of the main features of the style: whilst smaller churches, remains of abbeys, such as those of Ourscamp (near Noyon) and Longpont (near Soissons), and of castles, such as Coucy-le-Château, enable us to appreciate all its varieties. It is to be hoped that the stream of English travellers will for the future set more in this direction than it has hitherto done, since it is now possible in going to Strasbourg to take the railway through this country to Rheims, and in so doing to make acquaintance with a group of churches, which impress me more and more each time that I see them. They are remarkable evidence also of the wonderful vigour of the age in which they were built: for they are all of very nearly the same date—the end of the twelfth and early part of the thirteenth century, and conceived on the grandest possible scale. Indeed, France, under Philip Augustus, affords a spectacle such as perhaps no other country in the world can show. For if we think of the wars which characterized his reign, it is almost incredible that it should nevertheless at the same time have been possible to found such cathedrals as those of Paris, Bourges, Chartres, Amiens, Laon, Meaux, Soissons, Noyon, Rouen, Séez, Coutances, Bayeux: yet such was the case, and some of them were completed in but a few years with extraordinary energy.