"In point of fact," said Durtal to himself as he stood dreaming on the market-place, "no one exactly knows what was the origin of the Gothic forms of a cathedral. Archæologists and architects have exhausted hypotheses and systems in vain; they seem to agree in attributing the Romanesque to Oriental parentage, and that in fact maybe proven. That the Romanesque should be an offshoot of the Latin and Byzantine styles, and be, as Quicherat defines it, 'the style which has ceased to be Roman and is not yet Gothic, though it already has something of the Gothic,' I am ready to admit; and indeed, on examining the capitals, and studying their outline and drawing, we perceive that they are Assyrian or Persian rather than Roman or Byzantine and Gothic; but as to discovering the paternity even of the pointed and flamboyant styles, that is quite another thing. Some writers assert that the pointed arch based on an equilateral triangle existed in Egypt, Syria, and Persia; others regard it as descended from Saracen and Arab art; nothing certainly is provable.
"Again, it must be clearly stated that the pointed equilateral arch, which some persons still suppose to be the distinctive characteristic of an era in architecture, is not so in fact, as Quicherat has very clearly demonstrated, and, since him, Lecoy de la Marche. The study of archives has, on this point, completely overset the hobbies of architects, and demolished the twaddle of the Bonzes. Besides, there is abundant evidence of the employment of the pointed arch side by side with the round arch in a perfectly systematic design, in the construction of many Romanesque churches; in the Cathedrals of Avignon and Fréjus, in Notre Dame at
Aries, in Saint Front at Périgueux, at Saint Martin d'Ainay, at Lyon, in Saint Martin des Champs in Paris, in Saint Etienne at Beauvais, in the Cathedral of Le Mans; and in Burgundy, at Vézelay, at Beaune, in Saint Philibert at Dijon, at La Charité-sur-Loire, in Saint Ladre at Autun, and in most of the basilicas erected by the monastic school of Cluny.
"Still, all this throws no light on the lineage of the Gothic, which remains obscure—possibly because it is perfectly clear; setting aside the theory which restricts itself to discerning in this question a merely material and technical problem of stability and resistance, solved by monks who discovered one fine day that the strength of their roofs would be increased by the adoption of the mitre-shaped vaulting of the pointed arch instead of the semicircular arch, would it not seem that the romantic hypothesis—Chateaubriand's explanation—which was so much laughed at, and which is nevertheless the simplest and the most natural, may really be the most obvious and the true one?
"To me," thought Durtal, "it is almost certain that it was in the forest that man found the prototype of the nave and the pointed arch. The most amazing cathedral constructed by Nature herself, with lavish outlay of the pointed aisle of branches, is at Jumièges. There, close to the splendid ruins of the Abbey, where the two towers are still intact, while the roofless nave, carpeted with flowers, ends in a chancel of foliage shut in by an apse of trees, three vast aisles of centenary boles extend in parallel lines; one in the middle, very wide, the two others, one on each side, somewhat narrower; they exactly represent a church nave with its two side aisles, upheld by black columns and roofed with verdure. The ribs of the arches are accurately represented by the branches which meet above, as the columns which support them are simulated by the great shafts. It must be seen in winter, with the groining outlined and powdered with snow, and the pillars as white as the trunks of birch-trees, to understand the primitive idea, the seed of art which could give rise in the mind of an architect to the conception of similar arcades, and lead to the gradual refining of the Romanesque till the pointed arch had entirely superseded the round.
"
And there is not a park, whether older or more recent than the groves of Jumièges, which does not exhibit the same forms with equal exactitude; but what Nature could not give was the prodigious art, the deep symbolical knowledge, the over-strung but tranquil mysticism of the believers who erected cathedrals. But for them the church in its rough-hewn state, as Nature had formed it, was but a soulless thing, a sketch, rudimentary; the embryo only of a basilica, varying with the seasons and the days, at once living and inert, awaking only to the roaring organ of the wind, the swaying roof of boughs wrung with the slightest breath; it was lax and often sullen; the yielding victim of the breeze, the resigned slave of the rain; it was lighted only by the sunshine that filtered between the diamond and heart-shaped leaves, as if through the meshes of a green network. Man's genius collected the scattered gleams, condensed them in roses and broad blades, to pour it into his avenues of white shafts; and even in the darkest weather the glass was splendid, catching the very last rays of sunset, dressing Christ and the Virgin in the most fabulous magnificence, and almost realizing on earth the only attire that beseems the glorified Body, a robe of mingled flame.
"Really, when you come to think of it, a cathedral is a superhuman thing!
"Starting in our lands from the old Roman crypt, from the vault, crushed like the soul by humility and fear, and bowed before the infinite Majesty whose praise they hardly dared to sing, the churches gradually waxed bolder; they gave an upward spring to the semicircular arch, lengthening it to an almond shape, leaping from the earth, uplifting roofs, heightening naves, breaking out into a thousand sculptured forms all round the choir, and flinging heavenward, like prayers, their rapturous piles of stones! They symbolized the loving tenderness of orisons; they became more trusting, more playful, more daring in the sight of God.
"Each and all seemed to smile, as soon as they gave up their dismal skeleton and strove upwards.