It was but a few years after this “parfit gentil” knight passed away before he was as dear a hero of romance as King Arthur had become after many centuries, so little was there in his life for men to forget, so much that was sweet to dream upon. I suppose his story must have been related many times in beautiful glass, though as the panes grew larger and finer they told their stories less personally; but gallant knights on windows far and near are still reflecting an ideal that came to the First Baron of Jerusalem through the old church’s windows. Might it not be said of these old church builders, who builds from the heart feeds three: himself, his hungry neighbor, and Me?
To make [windows] like those of Saint Denis, an orderly, organized factory was necessary, and organization was the crying need of that age. Another astonished old chronicler repeats, that in those days of serfdom Suger paid his glass-workers. But the men learned their rights more readily than the chroniclers. Thereafter we constantly run upon the records of powerful workmen’s unions or guilds. In fact, we read of them later on the glass itself. These splendid church windows were, of course, very costly, and then, as now, they were usually presented to the churches. We find the guilds are the proud donors of many of them; two fine old church windows come down to us proudly representing some imagiers and glass-makers at their work, those guilds having thus elected to “with the angels stand.”
Complaints of the luxury of the church also come down. Saint Bernard declares “their stones were gilded with the money of the needy and wretched to charm the eyes of the rich” (but had the poor no eyes?). Being against the government by temperament, Saint Bernard especially abominated the royal Abbey of Saint Denis. He complained of the “unclean apes and befowled tigers” upon which Suger’s imagiers developed their skill, and it is written (how the writer arrived at the scene he does not explain) that as Suger’s confessor, Bernard commanded him to divest his mind of mundane cares and to dream only of the heavenly Jerusalem.
But the world weighed on Suger as long as he remained in it: his dream was of two splendid powers, England and France, separated, but living in peace! Suger was not in favor of crusades. He was the one ecclesiastic who would subject the clergy as well as the laity to royal authority, rendering unto Cæsar that which was Cæsar’s. Though a priest, in his political methods Suger was a broad, true and practical patriot, and if, unlike Saint Bernard, he was not adapted for canonization, he was a hero to his private secretary and to his king; and he still is a hero to the modern student of architecture, or of economics.
Into the very walls of his big and simple old church the “little old Abbé” built his big and simple sermon. It read: “Let us have good, honest, beautiful work, doing honor alike to God and man. Let us train our craftsmen, pay them and respect them.”
Though Saint Denis may lack the mystical beauty of the best Gothic, so noble and satisfactory is its design that the nineteenth century could do no better than to restore it.
Though Suger’s economics were very simple, the twentieth century has found no better platform: “Pay your workmen voluntarily, and summon all, from the king down, into their respective fields of labor; only when they all respond, we shall have a lovelier church than the old Abbey of Saint Denis.”