flat-bedded stone with tolerable mortar; but as your material is the worse and as your masons are the more unskilled, you have to build the thicker. Indeed the history of Romanesque architecture is that of a long-continued fight between the problem and the would-be solvers thereof. It was desirable to roof with masonry, partly as a safeguard when, as often happened, the wooden structure of the high roof above the walls caught fire and was destroyed, and also because of the comparative stateliness of effect, and because each bishop thought of building not for his own brief time only, but for his successors. And this very requirement, that each part of the building should be closed at the top with masonry, kept the builders of Western Europe busy from the time of Clovis on. The history of any one great church is a record of continual failure of walls, foundations or abutments; some part of the vaulting is forever crumbling and threatening to fall so that it has to be rebuilt; and now and then there’s a crash and a catastrophe. The buttresses[40] have to be enlarged; iron ties have to be inserted; even the plan of the vaulting has to be changed every now and then and a new experiment tried with a view to its greater permanence in another style of work. Hence it is that the modern student of such buildings has at once that delight in them which comes from their very archaism mingled with a kind of deprecatory pity: we sympathize with their builders’ aims and regret their feeble resources and their small knowledge: we love their buildings as we love the stammering speech of childhood. There is something else, no doubt: such a splendid tower-group as that at Tournai, such a noble interior as that of Mayence (Mainz) cathedral (see [Plate XX]), are individually, and as works of art, powerful enough to command our sincere admiration: but these are the exceptions.
Exceptions in another way are found in northern and central France. The buildings there are not so remarkable for their superiority in general design as they are for their unparalleled richness in sculptural adornment. They have at the same time many larger features which are of peculiar interest. Thus the tower of St. Radegonde at Poitiers (see [Plate XXI]), square below and coming to an octagon for the belfry, is a wonderfully spirited composition: and close to it is that famous church of Notre Dame la Grande, of which the west front is shown in the next plate. The builders of this latter church were lovers of sculpture and knew how to handle it in order to produce a great result, so they composed boldly in groups of statuary, floral sculpture, or sculpture as rich made up of wholly conventional forms. [Plate XXII] gives the wall above the three great portals of the west front of this extraordinary church; and while inferior in tasteful harmony to the cathedral at Angoulême near by, or indeed to many a noble church of the centre of France, the richness of conception, and the easy way in which the constructional parts of the building are loaded with carved adornment without injury to its massiveness and its dignity are surprising enough. The sculpture is barbaric in its lack of knowledge, but to be barbaric is not to be weak or insignificant. The nineteenth century workmen of Europe had no such power of effective design. In this, as in building, the eleventh century men were surpassed by those of the years to follow: and but for that still greater Gothic art (see Chapter IV) we should have to go to Romanesque architecture for constant stimulus.
The architecture of the Eastern half of the Empire was much less nearly Roman in its plan. Basilicas there were; but at a very early epoch the type of what the Germans call the Centralbau prevailed. The centred building; so we might designate the plan and structure which presuppose a supremely important central feature, a hall, however opened up on three sides or four
