For this architecture, which has lasted four centuries, is not confined to one country or to one description of edifice; it is spread over all Europe, from Scotland to Sicily, and is employed in all civil and religious and public and private monuments. Not only do cathedrals and chapels bear its imprint, but fortresses, palaces, costumes, dwellings, furniture, and equipments. Its universality, accordingly, expresses and attests the great moral crisis, at once morbid and sublime, which, during the whole of the middle ages, exalted, and at the same time disordered, the human intellect.
[1] Rome, thirty years B. C, by Victor Durny.
[2] Andre le Chapelain.
[VII]
Human institutions, like living bodies, are made and unmade by their own forces; and their health passes away or their cure is effected by the sole effect of their nature and their situation. Among these feudal chiefs who ruled and plundered men in the middle-ages one was found in each country, stronger, more politic, and better placed than others, who constituted himself conservator of public order; sustained by public sentiment, he by degrees weakened and subdued, subordinated and rallied the others, and, organizing a systematic obedient administration, became under the name of king the head of the nation. Towards the fifteenth century, the barons, formerly his equals, were only his officers, and towards the seventeenth century they were simply his courtiers.
Note the significance of this term. A courtier is a member of the king's court; that is to say, a person charged with some function or domestic duty in the palace—either chamberlain, equerry, or gentleman of the antechamber—receiving a salary, and addressing his master with all the deference and ceremonial obsequiousness proper to such an employment. But this person is not a valet, as in oriental monarchies, for his ancestor, the grandfather of his grandfather, was the equal, the companion, the peer of the king; and on this account he himself belongs to a privileged class, that of noblemen. He does not serve his prince solely through personal interest; his devotion to him is a point of honor. The prince in his turn never neglects to treat him with consideration. Louis XIV. threw his cane out of the window in order not to be tempted to strike Lauzun, who had offended him. The courtier is honored by his master, and regarded as one of his society. He lives in familiarity with him, dances at his balls, dines at his table, rides in the same carriage, sits in the same chairs, and frequents the same salon. From such a basis court life arose; first in Italy and Spain, subsequently in France, and afterwards in England, in Germany, and in the north of Europe. France was its centre, and Louis XIV. gave to it its principal éclat.
Let us study the effect of this new state of things on minds and characters. The kings salon is the first in the country, and is frequented by the most select society; the most admired personage, therefore, the accomplished man whom everybody accepts for a model, is the nobleman enjoying familiarity with his sovereign. This nobleman entertains generous sentiments; he believes himself of a superior race, and he says to himself, noblesse oblige. He is more sensitive than other men on the point of honor, and freely risks his life at the slightest insult. Under Louis XIII. four thousand noblemen were killed in duels. Contempt of danger, in the eyes of this nobleman, is the first obligation of a soul nobly born. The dandy, the worldling, so choice of his ribbons, so careful of his perruque, is ready to encamp in Flanders mud, and expose himself to bullets for hours together at Neerwinden. When Luxembourg announces that he is about to give battle, Versailles is deserted; all these young perfumed gallants hasten off to the army as if they were going to a ball. Finally, and through a remnant of the spirit of ancient feudalism, our nobleman regards the monarch as his natural legitimate chief: he knows he is bound to him, as the vassal formerly was to his suzerain, and at need will give him his blood, his property, and his life. Under Louis XYI. noblemen voluntarily placed themselves at the king's disposal, and on the 10th of August many were slain in his behalf.
But they are nevertheless courtiers, that is to say, men of the world, and in this respect perfectly polite. The King himself sets them an example. Louis XIV. even doffed his hat to a chambermaid, and the Memoirs of St. Simon mention a duke who saluted so frequently that he was obliged to cross the courts of Versailles bareheaded. The courtier, for the same reason, is accomplished in all that appertains to good breed-ins; language never fails him in difficult circumstances; he is a diplomat, master of himself, an adept in the art of disguising, concealing, flattering and managing others, never giving offence, and often pleasing. All these qualifications and these sentiments proceed from an aristocratic spirit refined by the usages of society; they attain to perfection in this court and in this century. Anybody of the present time disposed to admire the choice flowers of this lost and delicate species need not look for them in our equalized, rude and mixed society, but must turn to the elegant, formal, monumental parterres in which they formerly flourished.
You can imagine that people so constituted must have chosen pleasures appropriate to their character. Their taste, indeed, like their persons, was noble; for they were not only noble by birth, but also through their sentiments; and correct because they were educated to practise and respect what was becoming to them. It was this taste which, in the seventeenth century, fashioned all their works of art—the serious, elevated, severe productions of Poussin and Lesueur, the grave, pompous, elaborate architecture of Mansart and Perrault, and the stately symmetrical gardens of LeNotre. You will find its traces in the furniture, costumes, house decoration, and carriages of the engravings and paintings of Perelle, Sebastian Leclerc, Eigaud, Nanteuil, and many others. Versailles, with its groups of well-bred gods, its symmetrical alleys, its my theological water-works, its large artificial basins, its trimmed and pruned trees modelled into architectural designs, is a masterpiece in this direction; all its edifices and parterres, everything belonging to it, was constructed for men solicitous about their dignity, and strict observers of the recognized standard of social propriety. But the imprint is still more visible in the literature of the epoch. Never in France or in Europe has the art of fine writing been carried to such perfection. The greatest of French authors, as you are aware, belong to this epoch—Bossuet, Pascal, La Fontaine, Molière, Corneille, Racine, La Rochefoucauld, Madame de Sévigné, Boileau, La Bruyère, Bourdalone, and others. Great men not only wrote well, but almost everybody; Courier asserted that a chambermaid of those days knew more about style than a modern academy. In fact, a good style at that time pervaded the air, people unconsciously inhaling it; it prevailed in correspondence and in conversation; the court taught it; it entered into the ways of people of the world. The man who aimed to be polished and correct in deportment, got to be so likewise in the attributes of language and of style. Among so many branches of literature there is one, tragedy, which reached a singular degree of perfection, and which more than all the rest furnishes at that time the most striking example of the concordance which links together man and his works, manners and the arts.