The Old Cathedral, Marseilles
It is a reminder of a faith and a power that still live in spite of the attempts of the world of progress to live it down, and has found its echo in the present-day cathedral of Ste. Marie Majeure, one of the few remarkably successful attempts at the designing of a great church in modern times. The others are the new Westminster Roman Catholic Cathedral London, the projected cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York, and Trinity Church in Boston.
As an exemplification of church-building after an old-time manner adapted to modern needs, called variously French-Romanesque, Byzantine, and, by nearly every expert who has passed comment upon it, by some special nomenclature of his own, the cathedral at Marseilles is one of those great churches which will live in the future as has St. Marc's at Venice in the past.
Its material is a soft stone of two contrasting varieties,—the green being from the neighbourhood of Florence, and the white known as pierre de Calissant,—laid in alternate courses. Its deep sunken portal, with its twin flanking Byzantine towers, dominates the old part of the city, lying around about the water-front, as do few other churches, and no cathedrals, in all the world.
It stands a far more impressive and inspiring sentinel at the water-gate of the city than does the ludicrously fashioned modern "sailors' church" of Notre Dame de la Gard, which is perched in unstable fashion on a pinnacle of rock on the opposite side of the harbour.
This "curiosity"—for it is hardly more—is reached by a cable-lift or funicular railway, which seems principally to be conducted for the delectation of those winter birds of passage yclept "Riviera tourists."
The true pilgrim, the sailor who leaves a votive offering, or his wife or sweetheart, who goes there to pray for his safety, journeys on foot by an abrupt, stony road,—as one truly devout should.
This sumptuous cathedral will not please every one, but it cannot be denied that it is an admirably planned and wonderfully executed neo-Byzantine work. In size it is really vast, though its chief remarkable dimension is its breadth. Its length is four hundred and sixty feet.
At the crossing is a dome which rises to one hundred and ninety-seven feet, while two smaller ones are at each end of the transept, and yet others, smaller still, above the various chapels.
The general effect of the interior is—as might be expected—grandoise. There is an immensely wide central nave, flanked by two others of only appreciably reduced proportions.