Of the two great churches, Amiens could more easily have been spared. The word is ill chosen; Amiens in ruins, its exquisite façade with its perfect sculptures seared and shattered by bursting shells and consuming fire, would have been a catastrophe that could only put to the test the most stoical fortitude, but—it is neither Chartres nor Bourges nor Reims, and simply because the perfect balance between all possible elements in great architecture is here trembling toward its overthrow. Gothic art had three controlling forces working toward an unattainable perfection; structural integrity irradiated by consummate invention and an almost divine creative genius; passion for that exalted beauty that is unchangeable and eternal, expressed through new forms at once northern and Catholic; the just balance and intimate interplay of these two impulses. Its virtues, like all virtues, were most easily transmuted into vices, once the controlling balance was overthrown, and each was, in its stimulating possibilities, a constant and irresistible temptation toward excess. In Reims, the beginnings of which antedate Amiens by only a decade, the balance remains true and firm; in Amiens we see the first fatal steps in the development of a purely human (and notably French) logic, toward that intellectual pride, that almost arrogance of self-confidence, that found its nemesis in the unstable marvel of Beauvais.
In an admirable but anonymous little book called “Some French Cathedrals,” the author says: “French Gothic was most rational and most beautiful while it still remembered its Romanesque origin. At Amiens it was just beginning to forget that and to lose itself in dreams of an impossible romance which changed it from architecture into a very wonderful kind of ornamental engineering.” This subtle and significant change you feel everywhere except in the inimitable façade. The interior is too high, the masonry too wire-drawn and tenuous, the chevet too giddy and insecure. It is true that all but the west front has been impossibly restored, so that outwardly little remains of the original work, while the glass is gone from all but the ambulatory windows, leaving the nave a cold blaze of intolerable light. Nevertheless, the fundamental fault is there; the architect intrudes himself in place of the dévot, the craft of man supplants the guiding of God; so we have one of the most technically perfect of cathedrals, and one of the least inspired; you must go to the Rhine to find, in Cologne, a more self-conscious and serenely satisfied work, and it is well to make this comparison, for by so doing you realise the real greatness of Amiens, and how it fails only in comparison with the three perfect examples of an art that wholly expresses the great concept of mediæval Catholic philosophy, that in life, as we know it, material and spiritual are inseparable, that their just balance is the true end of man in this phase of existence, and that therefore sacramentalism is of the esse of religion, and as well the law of life.
As a whole, both from within and without, Amiens in a measure fails, but this does not hold
AMIENS
of its several parts. The west front is still a masterpiece of consummate and wholly original design, though the towers have been incongruously (but engagingly) terminated in later centuries. The three great doors, the first and second arcades, and the rose-window story contain more brilliant, spirited, ingenious, and withal beautiful design than any similar work in the world, while the ornament (there is a wild-rose border around the archivolts of the great porches that finds no rival in Greece) and the sculptures reach a level of decorative and emotional significance that marks the time of their production as the crowning moment in human culture and in Christian civilisation.
We turn to Reims—we turn now in reverence to the memory of Reims—in a different spirit. Master Robert of Luzarches was a master, and knew it. Master Robert of Coucy was the servant of a Lord who was greater than he, and knew this also, and was proud of his service. He was just as great an architect as his brother of Amiens, but he worked in a godly fear, and so he built the noblest church in Christendom. This is not to say that its nave order is equal to Chartres, its rhythm and composition equal to Bourges. In every great church from 1175 to 1225 there is some one element or more that is final and unexcelled, but at Reims there was a great consistency, a noble and all-embracing competence, that placed it in a class by itself.
Reims was without a fault; perhaps this made its appeal less poignant and searching than that of the eager and sometimes less-perfect efforts of men more human in their inadequacies. Man is the creature that tries, and it is perhaps only human to feel a reverence that lessens affection for those who seem to transcend the limits that are set to human accomplishment.