Thus the sap of Christianity mounts in all the branches of this immense tree called humanity, and produces abundant fruit. The Gothic art is displayed while developing the Roman; the ogive comes out from the arch by a natural elevation toward the summit or the roof. Elliptical forms, wiser and more perfect than circular ones, (the circle is an ellipsis in which the focuses are blended,) transform the architecture, and give to the monuments an apparent flight to heaven, just as the study of the ellipsis in analytical geometry conducts to the infinite. The austere energy of St. Bernard had no time for art. He needed the science of Roger Bacon and the poetry of St. Francis. The Roman basilica gives place to the Gothic cathedral, and throws its gracious shadows on the mansions of the neighboring town. The whole of Europe is covered with a vegetation of admirable monuments, epic poems of stone—as the church of Assisi, the cathedral of Florence, the cathedral of Cologne—poetry of the highest order, not for rich idlers, or delicate minds, but for the people en masse. Art agrees with the epoch of which it is the emanation—it is for the people themselves. "The more I see of these Gothic monuments," wrote M. David, (d' Angers,) "the more I experience the happiness of reading these beautiful religious pages so piously sculptured on the secular walls of the churches. They were the archives of an ignorant people; it was therefore necessary the handwriting should be legible. The saints sculptured in Gothic art have an expression of serenity and calmness, full of confidence and faith. This evening, as I write, the setting sun gilds the façade of the cathedral of Amiens: the calm faces of the saints in stone diffuse a radiant light."
Mysterious power of truth! M. David was attracted to it by art; M. Pugin was converted, it is said, by studying the cathedral of York. In truth, there are few languages more perfect than that of the symbolism, so deep and complete, of the thirteenth century. "The men of the middle age," said one whose works and remembrances are very dear to me—"the men of the middle age were not satisfied to simply raise stone upon stone; these stones were to speak, and speak a language of painting, equally understood by rich and poor; heaven itself must be visible, and the angels and saints remain present by their images, to console and preach to the people. The vaults of the two basilicas of Assisi were covered with a field of blue, strewn with stars of gold. On the walls were displayed the mysteries of the two Testaments, and the life of St. Francis formed the sequel to the book of divine revelations. But, as if it were impossible to approach with impunity the miraculous tomb, the painters who ornamented in fresco seemed inspired with a new spirit; they conceived an ideal more pure, more animated, than the old Byzantine types which had had their day, but which for eight hundred years had continued to degenerate. The basilica of Assisi became the cradle of a renaissance in art, and evidenced its progress. There Guido of Sienna and Giunta of Pisa detached themselves more and more from the Greek masters whose aridity they softened and whose immobility they shattered. Then came Cimabue. He represented all the sacred writings in a series of paintings which decorated the principal part of the church, and which time has mutilated. But six hundred years have not tarnished the splendor of the heads of Christ, of the Virgin, and of St. John, painted at the top of the vaults; nor the images of the four great doctors, where a Byzantine majesty still carries with it an air of life and immortal youth. At last Giotto appeared, and one of his works was the triumph of St. Francis, painted in four compartments under the vault which crowns the altar of the chapel. Nothing is more celebrated than these beautiful frescoes; but I know nothing more touching than one in which is figured the betrothal of the servant of God to holy poverty. Poverty, under the appearance of a lady perfectly beautiful, but the face attenuated, the clothing torn; a dog barks at her, two children throw stones at her, and put thorns in her way. She, however, calm and joyous, holds out her hand to St. Francis; Christ himself unites the two spouses; and in the midst of clouds appears the Eternal Father accompanied by angels, as if too much of heaven and earth could not be given to assist at the wedding of these two mendicants. Here, nothing suggests the painting of the Grecian school; all is new, free, and inspired. Progress did not cease with the disciples of Giotto appointed to continue his work: Cavalini, Taddeo Gaddi, Puccio Capana. In the midst of the variety of their compositions, we recognize the unity of the faith shed so lustrously through their works. When one pauses before these chaste representations of the Virgin, the Annunciation, the Nativity, before the crucified Christ, with the saddened angels weeping around the cross, or collecting in cups the divine blood, it would require a very hardened heart not to feel the tears flow, and not to bend the humbled knee and strike the breast with the shepherds and poor women who pray at the feet of such images."
And this is the art of the thirteenth century; it caused to weep under the same vault, and caused to pray on the same slab with poor peasants, one of the purest-minded intelligences, one of the noblest hearts of our time, one that the thirteenth century would have styled "the seraphic Ozanam."
And let us again remark this attraction, at once logical and living with facts produced by the germination of Christian thought in civil society. St. Francis and St. Dominic no longer preach as the disciples of St. Benedict to the few members of a military oligarchy, or to a flock of serfs; they address themselves to a civilized society, living in the midst of the benefits of Christianity, without having to give an account of the origin of these benefits; in the midst of a society aggrandized by the progress of Christian equality, and still desirous of enlargement. There is no longer a fierce Licambre, but haughty jurists. No more cruel Anglo-Saxons, but emperors, elegant, educated, poetical, seductive, who hide their despotic projects under titles the most pompous and the most fallacious. No more pagan kings martyrizing the Christian; but Catholic kings more or less sincere, who, in the name of social and state interests, seek to torture consciences. There are no more lords whose brutality scandalizes the coarsest minds; but there are rich citizens, softened and blinded by selfishness, who weary under the Christian yoke, and who hide their sensualism under the interest they profess for Caesar or the prince. It is, then, from the time of St. Francis the chanter of poverty, from the time of St. Dominic the descendant of the Guzman, of the race of Cid, that is born in Italy, by the side of the citizens, a new class which completes the political emancipation of the Christian people. After having grown up, the people disappeared under the Renaissance when Protestantism triumphed, not to appear again until modern times, in our own age, when the sap of Christianity forces the church to remount into the branches of the tree of which I spoke. Art has resented this moral revolution of the thirteenth century, and literature also. The grand writer whom I have already quoted, I was going to say the poet who has founded the society of St. Vincent de Paul, makes somewhere a reflection which has struck me forcibly. Have you remarked, with him, that the church has put poetry into the choir, while she has banished reasoning into the pulpit—into the grand nave? I do not say reason, for true poetry is the chant of reason. Poetry that I call real and practical, that which elevates the soul toward its end, which balances the sighs of humanity, and clothes itself in spoken or written form, rhythmical or not, the sentiment which attracts us toward the infinite, and which St. Francis designates love, such poetry is simply prayer. A poet is naturally sacerdotal. He is really the vates of antiquity. David and Solomon prayed with lyre in hand, and their prayers became the hymns of Christianity. Isaiah chanted the coming of the Messiah.
So in the thirteenth century, poetry was everywhere, a consequence of the Christian sentiment, spread in every direction through the moral life. To Innocent III., who under the name of the Count de Signa was considered one of the most learned men of his time, is attributed the Dies Ire. He has composed other spiritual songs. St. Thomas has left us the Pange Lingua. St. Francis is the chief of the poetic Franciscan school, in which shone St. Bonaventura, St. Antony, and the blessed Jacopone de Todi, of whom every one knows the beautiful stanzas Stabat Mater Dolorosa, etc. Then comes Dante, who governs Christian ages as Homer did the olden time. And lastly in the same age in Italy, at Vercelli, it is said, lived and died the great unknown who has left us the most beautiful book from the hand of man, The Imitation, the true poem of humanity redeemed by the blood of Jesus Christ. The fall, the redemption, the grand drama of the moral history of the world, the battle of life, the art of vanquishing passion and matter, the effort of man to reach his ideal on the wings of simplicity and purity —where are those things better chanted than in The Imitation?
The thirteenth century, then, merits to be cited among the grandest epochs of history. However, it would be a false idea to imagine society elevated to a high degree of perfection. Many Christians of our day, charmed by the recital of the life and works of these great saints, and by the sight of the magnificent monuments of the first era of ogival style, become almost melancholy, and have a disposition to blame everything new in the world, and defy their contemporaries or future generations even to imitate the virtues of the age of Innocent III. I think this tendency all wrong, and Christians who permit themselves to be so carried away, lack firmness and faith; for Christianity cannot decay, and the more the saints of the past, the greater the protectors of the church for the future. Besides, it is so easy to regard only the virtues of the thirteenth century, and ignore the vices. We must remember St. Anthony was the neighbor and the contemporary of Ezelin the Ferocious, the type of the tyrant of the modern world. Frederick II. lived in the same age as St. Louis. The Sicilian Code was revised fifty years after the peace of Constance, at the same time as the Magna Charta of England. St. Thomas d'Aquin and Roger Bacon are contemporaries of the Albigenses. You cannot point out in our age an error or a calamity that has not its equal, or rather its precursor, in the thirteenth century.
Caesarism, vanquished in politics, was protected by the literary men and the jurists. Dante in his old days wrote the Caesarian treatise, De Monarchico. It was in the beginning of the fourteenth century, a hundred years after Innocent III., that the popes, chased from Rome and Italy, set out for the exile of Avignon, which lasted seventy-five years.
III.
A reasonable study of such grandeur and such fall, the review of which must demonstrate human liberty, should make us better know our own age, and love it the more.
We possess more elements of material prosperity and material progress, and we jealously preserve the depository of all the moral truths. We enjoy greater political security, and the sentiment of right is more general in our day than in any other.