INTERPRETATIONS.
1. It is the admitted privilege of a custode who loves his cathedral to depreciate, in its comparison, all the other cathedrals of his country that resemble, and all the edifices on the globe that differ from it. But I love too many cathedrals—though I have never had the happiness of becoming the custode of even one—to permit myself the easy and faithful exercise of the privilege in question; and I must vindicate my candour, and my judgment, in the outset, by confessing that the cathedral of Amiens has nothing to boast of in the way of towers,—that its central flèche is merely the pretty caprice of a village carpenter,—that the total structure is in dignity inferior to Chartres, in sublimity to Beauvais, in decorative splendour to Rheims, and in loveliness of figure-sculpture to Bourges. It has nothing like the artful pointing and moulding of the arcades of Salisbury—nothing of the might of Durham;—no Dædalian inlaying like Florence, no glow of mythic fantasy like Verona. And yet, in all, and more than these, ways, outshone or overpowered, the cathedral of Amiens deserves the name given it by M. Viollet le Duc—
"The Parthenon of Gothic Architecture." [4-1]
2. Of Gothic, mind you; Gothic clear of Roman tradition, and of Arabian taint; Gothic pure, authoritative, unsurpassable, and unaccusable;—its proper principles of structure being once understood and admitted. [Pg 89] No well-educated traveller is now without some consciousness of the meaning of what is commonly and rightly called "purity of style," in the modes of art which have been practised by civilized nations; and few are unaware of the distinctive aims and character of Gothic. The purpose of a good Gothic builder was to raise, with the native stone of the place he had to build in, an edifice as high and as spacious as he could, with calculable and visible security, in no protracted and wearisome time, and with no monstrous or oppressive compulsion of human labour.
He did not wish to exhaust in the pride of a single city the energies of a generation, or the resources of a kingdom; he built for Amiens with the strength and the exchequer of Amiens; with chalk from the cliffs of the Somme, [4-2] and under the orders of two successive bishops, one of whom directed the foundations of the edifice, and the other gave thanks in it for its completion. His object, as a designer, in common with all the sacred builders of his time in the North, was to admit as much light into the building as was consistent with the comfort of it; to make its structure intelligibly admirable, but not curious or confusing; and to enrich and enforce the understood structure with ornament sufficient for its beauty, yet yielding to no wanton enthusiasm in expenditure, nor insolent in giddy or selfish ostentation of skill; and finally, to make the external sculpture of its walls and gates at once an alphabet and epitome of the religion, by the knowledge and inspiration of which an acceptable worship might be rendered, within those gates, to the Lord whose Fear was in His [Pg 90] Holy Temple, and whose seat was in Heaven.
3. It is not easy for the citizen of the modern aggregate of bad building, and ill-living held in check by constables, which we call a town,—of which the widest streets are devoted by consent to the encouragement of vice, and the narrow ones to the concealment of misery,—not easy, I say, for the citizen of any such mean city to understand the feeling of a burgher of the Christian ages to his cathedral. For him, the quite simply and frankly-believed text, "Where two or three are gathered in My name, there am I in the midst of them," was expanded into the wider promise to many honest and industrious persons gathered in His name—"They shall be my people and I will be their God";—deepened in his reading of it, by some lovely local and simply affectionate faith that Christ, as he was a Jew among Jews, and a Galilean among Galileans, was also, in His nearness to any—even the poorest—group of disciples, as one of their nation; and that their own "Beau Christ d'Amiens" was as true a compatriot to them as if He had been born of a Picard maiden.
4. It is to be remembered, however—and this is a theological point on which depended much of the structural development of the northern basilicas—that the part of the building in which the Divine presence was believed to be constant, as in the Jewish Holy of Holies, was only the enclosed choir; in front of which the aisles and transepts might become the King's Hall of Justice, as in the presence-chamber of Christ; and whose high altar was guarded always from the surrounding eastern aisles by a screen of the most finished workmanship; while from those surrounding aisles branched off a series of radiating chapels or cells, each dedicated to some separate saint. This conception of the company of Christ with His saints, (the eastern chapel of all being the Virgin's,) was at the root of the entire disposition of the apse with its supporting and dividing buttresses and piers; and the architectural form can never be well delighted in, unless in some sympathy with the spiritual imagination out of which it rose. We talk foolishly and feebly of symbols and types: in old [Pg 91] Christian architecture, every part is literal: the cathedral is for its builders the House of God;—it is surrounded, like an earthly king's, with minor lodgings for the servants; and the glorious carvings of the exterior walls and interior wood of the choir, which an English rector would almost instinctively think of as done for the glorification of the canons, was indeed the Amienois carpenter's way of making his Master-carpenter comfortable, [4-3]—nor less of showing his own native and insuperable virtue of carpenter, before God and man.
5. Whatever you wish to see, or are forced to leave unseen, at Amiens, if the overwhelming responsibilities of your existence, and the inevitable necessities of precipitate locomotion in their fulfilment, have left you so much as one quarter of an hour, not out of breath—for the contemplation of the capital of Picardy, give it wholly to the cathedral choir. Aisles and porches, lancet windows and roses, you can see elsewhere as well as here—but such carpenter's work, you cannot. It is late,—fully developed flamboyant just past the fifteenth century—and has some Flemish stolidity mixed with the playing French fire of it; but wood-carving was the Picard's joy from his youth up, and, so far as I know, there is nothing else so beautiful cut out of the goodly trees of the world.
Sweet and young-grained wood it is: oak, trained and chosen for such work, sound now as four hundred years since. Under the carver's hand it seems to cut like clay, to fold like silk, to grow like living branches, to leap like living flame. Canopy crowning canopy, pinnacle piercing pinnacle—it shoots and wreathes itself into an enchanted glade, inextricable, imperishable, fuller of leafage than any forest, [Pg 92] and fuller of story than any book. [4-4]
6. I have never been able to make up my mind which was really the best way of approaching the cathedral for the first time. If you have plenty of leisure, and the day is fine, and you are not afraid of an [Pg 93] hour's walk, the really right thing to do is to walk down the main street of the old town, and across the river, and quite out to the chalk hill [4-5] out of which the citadel is half quarried—half walled;—and walk to the top of that, and look down into the citadel's dry 'ditch,'—or, more truly, dry valley of death, which is about as deep as a glen in Derbyshire, (or, more precisely, the upper part of the 'Happy Valley' at Oxford, above Lower Hincksey,) and thence across [Pg 94] to the cathedral and ascending slopes of the city; so, you will understand the real height and relation of tower and town:—then, returning, find your way to the Mount Zion of it by any narrow cross streets and chance bridges you can—the more winding and dirty the streets, the better; and whether you come first on west front or apse, you will think them worth all the trouble you have had to reach them.