How France Built Her Cathedrals

How France Built
Her Cathedrals
A Study in the Twelfth
and Thirteenth Centuries

By
ELIZABETH BOYLE O’REILLY
Honorary Member of the Société Française d’Archéologie
Author of “Heroic Spain” Etc.
Illustrated With Drawings By
A. PAUL DE LESLIE

HARPER & BROTHERS PUBLISHERS
NEW YORK AND LONDON

How France Built Her Cathedrals
——
Copyright, 1921, by Harper & Brothers
Printed in the United States of America
A-W

Contents

Illustrations

How France Built Her Cathedrals

How France Built Her Cathedrals

INTRODUCTION

E may live without architecture, and worship without her, but we cannot remember without her. How cold is all history, how lifeless all imagery, compared to that which the living nation writes and the uncorrupted marble bears. There are but two strong conquerors of the forgetfulness of men, Poetry and Architecture, and the latter in some sort includes the former, and is mightier in its reality; it is well to have, not only what men have thought and felt, but what their hands have handled and their strength wrought and their eyes beheld, all the days of their life.”[1]

So wrote John Ruskin in one of his flashes of genius, and never was word truer. Architecture is the living voice of the past. Architecture is history. By architecture the forefathers from whom we come relate to us their progress in knowledge, their prowess in handicrafts, their economic conditions, their sorrows, their rejoicings, their aspirations. They wrote it down, those men and women whose blood is our blood, on great stone pages of perennial beauty for us to read—if only we would. By architecture we are linked in a grand solidarity with all that has gone before, with the proud periods of history that thrill us as we read, and with the tragic outbreaks of the oppressed that sadden our spirit.

Whenever men have set themselves to forget this solidarity, their first act has been to fling themselves in frenzy on cathedral and city hall. In 1914 they forgot it, and mighty Rheims fell. They forgot that Bamburg had learned its imagery from Rheims, that German Norbert, revered of St. Bernard, had helped France in the days when Gothic art was in formation, that he died bishop of Magdeburg, and Magdeburg is a Primary Gothic cathedral in the land which frankly called the new architecture opus francigenum. Would the civic halls of Noyon, Arras, St. Quentin, and Ypres lie in ruins if Frankfort and Lübeck had remembered?

In 1793, man again thought to set up a barrier between himself and his past, and he shattered the art treasures of a thousand years and tore down the cathedrals of Cambrai, Arras, and Avranches; he tore down Cluny, the greatest Romanesque church in the world, Cluny the civilizer, that had removed from agriculture its stigma as serfs’ work. Man fancied that to shatter and demolish was to build.

Again in 1562, a date most tragic in the annals of Gothic architecture, men tried again to rear a wall of hate between themselves and the generations gone before, and the cathedral of Orléans met the fate of Cluny and Cambrai, and from end to end of France images were decapitated, and ancestors’ tombs wrecked impiously—even the tombs of spiritual ancestors who with painful journeyings afoot had brought the gospel light. Whether you go to chapel or to temple to-day, to meetinghouse or to cathedral, whether you worship under the open sky, be you a reader of Marx or of Aquinas, you were robbed most piteously of your patrimony in 1562, in 1793, in 1914.

How is it to be prevented again? By trying to make the monuments of the past loved, by relating the tale of their building, by telling the life story of the builders. If we know them we must surely revere them, and when we have learned to know and to love, we have learned to be liberal. Archæology is to teach us to remember. Those who have gone before have passed on to us cathedral and town hall; it is our obligation to transmit them intact to those who come after. They are not ours to destroy. Art is the high-water mark reached by civilization; art does not speak in English, or in German, or in the Latin tongue, but in a language understood of all peoples and all times. To destroy a great monument of the past is to betray civilization. It was proved in 1914 that erudition is not safeguard enough, nor is enthusiasm, sighs 1793, nor purpose to reform, admits 1562. We must comprehend intelligently our own personal solidarity with the past. We must never look at a noble building without proudly realizing that we had a hand in its making. Battles then can rage around cathedrals without danger of their destruction. As in golden amber, the past will preserve them, the past which is yours and mine and everyone’s heritage.

It is a right instinct which makes a man treasure the home he has had transmitted to him through several generations. How much more—when loyalty is roused by an XVIII-century or a XVII-century habitation—should emotion be felt for what was reared from 1140 to 1270 by the very generations who began for us of to-day most of the big things we value: our universities, our literature, our political freedom, our prosperous trade.

Now in the making of these infinitely precious things, France played the leading role. Put partisan feeling aside and acknowledge it honestly. “I believe,” said Ruskin, in a lecture at Edinburgh, in 1853, even before the new science of mediæval archæology was formulated, “that the French nation in the XII and XIII centuries was the greatest nation in the world, and that the French not only invented Gothic architecture, but carried it to its noblest developments.”

French Gothic churches are a fountainhead, and should rank first. Because of them we have Westminster, Ely, and Lincoln, we had Tintern, Melrose, Mellifont, Holycross. They built the Burgos, Toledo, León, Seville, and Belem, which have given wings to the soul of the Peninsula. Because of the French cathedrals we have Cologne, Magdeburg, and Halberstadt, Vienna, Prague, Upsala, Siena, Florence, and Milan.

By her lyrics, her epics, and her architecture, France was the inspiration of Europe in the XII and XIII centuries. With his sword, the crusader carried compass and rule. Those indefatigable wanderers, Cluny, Cîteaux, and the men of Prémontré and Chartreuse carried with them the chisel and the Book. Then as now the commercial traveler was a valiant propagandist; in 1181 a cloth merchant of Assisi, returned from trading in France, where he had seen the cathedral of Lyons rising, or perhaps that of Paris, or that of Poitiers, and he had passed under wonderful new-imaged portals in the Midi and in Burgundy; so, in memory of beautiful things, he chose to call the son born to him, Francis, and the boy grew up to love and to chant the lyrics of France and named himself “God’s little troubadour.”

Backward and forward has moved the ebb and flow of races and their arts. When Celts from conquered Britain passed over to Armorica they carried with them the Arthurian cycle; Teutonic tribes, strong in bone and tissue, poured into Gaul a very avalanche; masterful Norsemen populated the seacoasts; and before the recording of time the Oriental and the Latin had made their home in the land between the northern seas and the big inland water of commerce. Does such history seem too remote to be of emotional value? Are personalities lacking? Not so in the missionary days of Columbanus and Benedict, first hewers of the cathedrals’ foundation blocks, for never came a great movement of building activity that did not tread in the steps of spiritual regeneration. Your forefathers and my forefathers came into France to help her, to bring her art and letters in her dark hour. They came to teach and they came to learn, to succor and to find refuge. They came in the persons of Celtic Columbanus, Brieuc, Malo, Fiacre, Malachy, and holy Laurence buried at Eu, as English Alcuin, Stephen Harding, John of Salisbury, and Saint Edmund Rich buried at Pontigny. They came as German Radegund and the saintly Bruno and Norbert, as Italian Benedict, Fortunatus, Hildebrand, William of Volpiano, Lanfranc, Anselm, Aquinas, and Bonaventure, as Spanish Dominic, and Portuguese Anthony. They came from Egypt with Maurice and his Thebans, from the Levant with Irenæus and Giles, from Hungary with Martin the soldier. And the story of each one of them is recorded in the churches that stand in France to-day. Without architecture we would have forgotten them.

With the ebbing and flowing of the tide in the affairs of men, a day arrived when the big people and the little people of Normandy, Poitou, Anjou, and Flanders passed in large numbers into Great Britain and Ireland in the wake of the Conqueror and of Henry Plantagenet, so that the very names we bear are those of the cathedral builders.

Who has not watched the widening ripples of water spread from a center? Even so is each one of us a center whence in ever-widening circles stretch out our progenitors, embracing more and more men, more and more women, rippling over the pitiful barricades of 1793, sweeping over the factions of 1562, till by the time the widening ripple has reached the age of St. Louis, the age of Suger, it is scientifically impossible that we, in our very own forefathers, were not building some of the eighty cathedrals and three hundred great minsters with which France was then clothing herself as with a white mantle of churches. We were chatelaine, and burgher’s wife, we were villein’s daughter and knight’s son, and side by side we harnessed ourselves to carts and dragged in the blocks for the tower at Chartres and the belfry at Rouen, and the canticles we sang during our voluntary servitude passed into the stones and are still chanting there—if only we would listen. No visionary notion this, but science and history. By architecture we remember.

Of our kin was the bishop who sacrificed his revenue to rear God’s house. Of our kin were the architects, masters of the living stone, who with inspiration conceived their shrines of Notre Dame and were trained soundly enough in mason craft to achieve their dreams; of our kin were the artisans who put up the serene images at cathedral doors for the edification of the people, and chiseled with warm, loving touches the running bramble of the roadside. Even botany is to be learned in mediæval cathedrals. Not a leaf that grows in Champagne to-day but was carved on the walls of Rheims seven hundred years ago. Against the big capitals of Paris Cathedral they laid the broad plantain leaf of the marshy Oise, then, seeing around them that indigenous acanthus, the uncurling fern, they carved it, too, and as they grew adept with chisel they wrought ivy and vine leaf, parsley and holly, and in time, intoxicated with their skill, they undercut the rich foliage and serrated the lobes and curled the leaf edges, till summer ran riot in stone and the architectural line was well-nigh lost sight of in sheer joy of nature’s glad livery.

The cathedrals of France are an enduring appeal to man’s high faculty of imagination. In them we go crusading again. We scale the walls of Constantinople with doughty Bishop Nivelon, builder of Soissons Cathedral, we are ransomed from Saracen captivity with Bishop Albéric, builder of Rheims. We repent of our black feudal deeds with Fulk Nerra, and when we have finished our footsore penances in Holy Land, we punish ourselves in our purses, raising costly abbeys in Anjou and Touraine. On our Eastern pilgrimage we have seen visions of Oriental color, and, remembering them, we lighten our sober churches of the north with translucent mosaic tapestries. We dot our Western land with circular Holy Sepulcher temples. It is said that Suger, builder of the first great Gothic church in the world, maker of jeweled windows over which science sighs in despair of emulation, used eagerly to inquire of travelers returned from the East had they seen aught, even in St. Sophia itself, to surpass his St. Denis’. We are rightly sure that our new art surpasses all others. We may borrow, but our borrowings are creations.

By architecture in happy promiscuity we crowd to the international fairs of Champagne. We elbow and we jostle to see what our diligent brothers, the art-loving Flemish burghers, have brought for exchange, or what things beautiful the merchants from south of the Alps have to barter. To-day, at Troyes, we are astounded by the gathering of art treasures in that lesser-known city, and we wonder at the mighty rampart walls at Provins. Then we remember. It is architecture that will not let us forget what efficient traders we were in the XIII century.

By architecture we are Benedictines at Cluny, white monks at Fontenay, of Prémontré at Braine. Again we pace in meditative cloisters, we tuck up our robes to delve in mother earth to make the desert bloom, we illumine parchment pages, we teach the plain-chant to children, we cast bells, each with its own entity, each a living voice for the people, named with its own name.

By architecture we are one of the thousands athirst for knowledge, who gather at the feet of abstruse debaters in the schools of Bec, Auxerre, Rheims, Orléans, Laon, Chartres and Paris, king’s son seated on the rush-strewn pavements next to peasant’s son, both equally convinced that the most thrilling of all sciences are philosophy and theology. Books are scarce; as yet no printing press; we must wander far to gather crumbs of learning; our strong young brains are intact, prepared for service by long ages of active bone and muscle; with avidity we seize on problems so knotty that the learned ones of 1920 fear to touch them. “The time of big theories is the time of big results.” It is we, in the person of the Scholastics who built Paris Cathedral, and Laon, the intellectual,—churches disciplined, sober and strong. It is we the multitudinous scholars of the Middle Ages who built Chartres, the wise mystic, and opalescent Auxerre, and Châlons on the Marne of Victory. And lest the hungry generations tread us down, we inscribed our loved subtleties on their walls, and at their portals placed images of the Liberal Arts.

By architecture we join one side or the other in the eternal struggle of Might and Right. Sometimes in atonement we spend the revenues secured by heedless Might on minster or cathedral. By pain and struggle we have won our city charter, and we are proud to record in God’s sight and man’s what thrifty burgesses we are, what trained journeymen. To work is to pray, say the cathedral windows set up by furriers, butchers, vintagers, and farm laborers. To work is as fine a thing as to fight at Roncevaux and Mansurah, as did our next-door donor neighbor here. The little people of the Lord are as grateful in his sight as the noble prud’hommes. Le bon Dieu likes to be shown how a tailor cuts his cloth and a baker bakes his bread just as well as to be entertained with pilgrimage adventures or the story of a canonized saint. Are we not saints in the making if only we can get the better of that prowling felon, the devil, whom we have set up over our church door with pitchfork and caldron as a warning to the unwary?

“O men and women of to-day”—appeal the windows at Chartres and Bourges and Tours—“you whose blood is our blood, who without our struggle would have no ordered government, no self-ruling cities, no trade to bind land with land in the sanity of peace, no arts and crafts, why not learn to read our story? There are those unable to decipher a line of our illumined pages who will assure you that we were sunk in gross superstition, that our sole religion was the worship of bits of cloth and bone. Yes, even from the halls founded by good Robert de Sorbon (in order that youth with its lean purse might get a free education) the erudites marshal against us every human frailty of our hardy, enterprising times. And yet, in unparalleled marvels of stone and glass we have recorded the deepest sentiments of mankind. But having eyes, they see not. Come then, you, and interpret us. Come, and through us, remember.”

Each great cathedral is pleading to us by the alluring half-smile of its angels, by the dignified images of reverent personages at its entrances, by each gargoyle, each faithful guardian that has craned his neck for ages to keep rain water from the precious walls. Cease to be so superior to the legends and dreams we set forth, they seem to be saying. We know just as well as you that the apostle St. Thomas did not have all the adventures raising fairy palaces in India which we put to his credit in our windows and tympanums, even though good Bishop James of Voragine, in his cycle of church feasts, our iconographic chart—Legenda Aurea—relates it. The holy Jerome, close to the desert and the origin of things, real and apocryphal, warned us not to be too credulous. But symbols and legends are the breath of art, as art alone realizes through expression, the supersensual visions of mankind. Are there not millions of good Christian folk in India to-day? Her first evangelist builded better than ever we can relate by our imagery.

We are not at all dull, plead the waiting cathedrals. Encyclopædias they call us. Yes, we had our little weakness for symmetry, for the mystic beauty of numbers, for gathering into “Mirrors” all the knowledge of the world. But how admirable is our Mirror of Morals, with virtues and vices contrasted; how interesting our Mirrors of Nature and of History that tell the story from Genesis to Revelations, and that set the marvels of the skies and man’s dumb fellow creatures, the beasts, side by side on the walls of the house of worship, with David and Isaias, St. Peter and St. Paul, Charlemagne and Louis. And our Mirror of Knowledge—how profound it is: not as enemies but as allies would it show forth science and religion. We are no more dull than the Bible is dull, than the Divina Commedia is dull. We satisfy the subtlest intellects; alike the lettered and the unlettered enjoy us.

Each French cathedral and each minster makes its own special plea. Lyons reminds us, in windows of apocalyptic radiance, that her first bishops came from John the Apostle, that Christian blood flowed in her forum as generously as in Rome’s Coliseum. Of the very stones of the Amphitheater, hallowed by her martyrs, is her cathedral built, and the architectural methods of the north and the south are welded here in the ancient central city of Gaul whence rayed out the linking highroads of Rome.

At Tours, the charity of Martin to a beggar is recorded many a time, for it civilized middle Europe. Slow, steady, and deep were the accumulations of culture by the Loire of measured horizons and classic restraint. A tower named of Charlemagne recalls that Saxon Alcuin filled the schoolrooms of St. Martin’s Abbey. A chiseled tomb reminds us that here worked the last sculptor of the Middle Ages (loyal to its humble and profound Christian traditions), as well as the first artists of the imported pagan Renaissance.

At Le Mans and Angers, at Fontevrault, with its tomb of Henry Plantagenet, who gave us our jury system, speak those fighting progressives, the Angevin rulers; and all their love of the arts and of adventure endures in the exotically beautiful development which we call Plantagenet Gothic. An unlettered king is an uncrowned ass, said a X-century count of Anjou.

At Poitiers, city of St. Hilaire who fought the Arians, is the most glorious window in the world—Christ triumphant on the Cross, and again we walk in procession to the strain of Bishop Fortunatus’ hymn, and we read the Church Fathers in Greek and Hebrew in Queen Radegund’s cloister. Aquitaine’s line of troubadour dukes, passionate sinners, and prodigious repenters lives in every church in the old hill city, from the cathedral wherein Aliénor blended the indigenous art of her own Poitou with the Plantagenet suppleness of her Angevin husband, to the cupola-covered abbatial of St. Hilaire, where her son, Richard the Lion-hearted, was installed as duke.

At Caen we live with the Conqueror and Matilda in their penitential abbey-churches, full of thought and purpose, the architecture of hieratic pre-eminence which Normandy passed on to England. At Coutances, the cathedral walls record the Tancreds, so the people say; close by was the eyrie of that eagle brood who set up kingdoms in Italy and the Orient. At Rouen we mutter with the crowd in the market place that a grievous shame it is to burn a saint as a witch, and in reaction, soon we are to rear monuments whose every line is jubilant freedom. At Rheims we are crowned kings in a cathedral so sumptuous that on coronation days it needed no tapestries to adorn its walls. At Clermont and at Vézelay we don the crusaders’ insignia with cries of enthusiasm. The lavish art of Bourges tells of Jacques Cœur’s largess, the princely merchant who financed the army that rid France of her invaders, just as clearly as the ducal tombs and imagery at Dijon relate the pageantry of the XV-century Burgundian life. The stones of Pontigny tell of Becket the martyr, whose cause impassioned all Christendom, as many a sculptured group and storied window in France relate, and of another great Englishman, Stephen Langton, who passed from this cloistral peace—dividing the Bible into chapters for us—to the Magna Charta struggle in England. By architecture we remember.

Until we have seen Albi’s aggressive fortress-church what do we really know of the Albigensian heresy, of the disease un-European, antichristian, antisocial, that bred in the precocious civilization of Languedoc? What do we know of that terrible struggle called a crusade, when the greedy barons of the north descended on the Midi (ever brutal and refined), thinking to cure its soul by the sword and with the same blows to carve out for themselves rich principalities? Forever is the story told in the Jacobins’ church at Toulouse, in the red cathedral fortress above the Tarn.

All the isolating pride of feudalism is resumed in the ramparts of Carcassonne and Aigues-Mortes, all the frustrated destiny of Narbonne in its vast fragment of a cathedral, all the unbroken links with the Latin are in the sculpture at Arles and St. Gilles, all the immemorial story of la grande bleu in Maguelonne’s solitary church. By architecture we remember.

The Celtic remnant, that in the volcanic-torn uplands of middle France inflicted on Cæsar his sole defeat, lives always in the churches of Auvergne, so stubbornly indigenous, planted so sturdily, contriving decorative beauty from the regional varicolored lava stones. In the granite churches of Brittany endures all the aloof individuality, the sensitive independence, the tenacious traditionalism of the dwellers by the sea in the far-north outpost of France. We have our souls to keep, say the lowly Breton shrines, we have always been too busy doing that to find time to erect great churches. But once our neighbors, the Normans, taught us tower-building, our Celtic imagination leaped au delà by their spires, so we raised our royal Kreisker which far out to sea welcomes home our Breton sailors.

Architecture is history. Architecture is what the old Greeks said of history, “philosophy teaching by examples.” The cathedrals of France prove that there is no supreme architecture where there is not liberty or the will to attain it. In 1109 the bishop-baron of Noyon granted his city a charter, the first communal written laws on record. In 1145 Noyon began to build the first Gothic cathedral of France. In the Ile-de-France, where from the nation’s birth were lived its intensest hours, sprang up the churches which are the most national, the most racially French in character, Noyon, Senlis, Soissons, Laon, Paris.

The history of architecture proves that without a right-minded national pride, ready to make sacrifices in order that it may transmit its high deeds to the future, no mighty monuments rise. In 1214 Bouvines’ victory was won and French unity demonstrated. In 1220, not far away, was laid the foundation stone of Amiens Cathedral, the crowning achievement of the national art. A hazard, such juxtaposition? Ah, no. Nothing happens by chance in this science of the builder whose basic forces are long at work in silence. Architecture is the truthteller of history.

The history of France, which in the XII and XIII centuries meant universal history, is written on the walls of the cathedrals built under Philippe-Auguste and his grandson St. Louis, during the full flowering of the new national art. And in the days when France was neither happy nor good nor great, when faith flagged, when a minority’s blind greed of gold ended the international fairs, drove out the Jews, overtaxed the clerical church builders, when the crusading enthusiasm ended in a Templars’ process, then the structural logic of Gothic architecture turned to pitiless geometry. So proclaim the cold, uninspired XIV-century churches, and few of them ever were built. It seemed almost as if the Gothic cycle had run its course. The XII century had seen its rise; the XIII century its apotheosis; the XIV century its decline. Was the last word said? Churches are not built by generations that live in ceaseless war, in misrule, or under a foreign yoke.

There was to be another chapter for the Gothic tale. Aspiration was born again, national pride lifted its head and art flowered. Not from beyond the mountains or the sea came the needed missionary this time, nor from a Carolingian palace, nor out of Norman and Burgundian cloister. No saint-king was to lead now, but only a young girl from a peasant hamlet.

When Jeanne d’Arc broke the spell of foreign invasion, when she gave France a new soul, then all over the land rose that pæan of rejoicing which we call Flamboyant Gothic art, for verily it flamed up with joy. Never will you see an arch of double curvature, accoladed, soaring to its triumphal finial, never will you gaze at radiant belfries rising richer and richer with each story, never will you pray beneath a late-Gothic pageantry picture window with its mullions swaying in exaltation, but the thought of the Maid of Orleans and her mission will come to you. This Flamboyant art may run riot in details like any modern, but it remains true in its essentials to the Middle Ages. Forever will it tell of the freeing of France from foreign rule, even as the academic Rayonnant phase sets forth the lowered ideals of Philippe le Bel, or the ampleness of XIII-century Gothic, the creative age of Louis IX and his augmenting grandfather. No regional schools were there in the last manifestations of the national art; they built the same at Albi as at Rouen, at Bordeaux as at Lyons, for an entire people shared the same feeling of recovered self-respect.

You can learn to read it by yourself, learn to remember, if only you are not repelled by that stiff word “archæology.” Just what generation made Dijon’s crypt and Morienval’s ambulatory, put the masonry roofs on the Caen abbatials, chiseled the column statues at the doors of Angers, Le Mans, and Chartres, made of Bourges’ procession path a heavenly way of ruby, sapphire, emerald, and topaz, raised the tower at Senlis, paid tribute to St. Cecilia’s gentleness in the white imagery of Albi’s grim fortress—that is archæology. Archæology tells how Cluny lifted up a prostrate Christendom, how the Normans conquered England, how Abbot Suger reformed himself, how Bernard of Clairvaux exhorted Europe, how the Lion-hearted went crusading as had his fascinating mother before him, how Simon de Montfort won the Midi, how the wily Philippe-Auguste enlarged his domain, province by province—and all the while most of the Gothic cathedrals of France laid their foundations—and how the bon-saint-homme-roy, truest lover of the builders’ art, sat under an oak tree, dispensing justice at first hand, with his loyal Joinville seated close beside him. That is archæology. It is written down clearly on great stone pages of perennial beauty for us to read—if only we will. A little knowledge of construction’s laws is needed to show us how to see. A little more of history to guide us when to feel. If to love we must know, to know we must set ourselves to learn. Even in these days of easy motor travel one cannot go about book-laden. But there are open libraries in French cities where an inquirer is courteously lent the monographs on the town’s monuments, or the big folios that picture the storied windows. It has, therefore, appeared advisable to give, with each cathedral, a list of its biographies, for they may be of use some rainy afternoon in France.

It seems almost unnecessary to remind ourselves that in the XII and XIII centuries the Church of Europe—barring the Greek schism—was one and united, save for the quarrels inseparable from all manifestations of mankind’s history, and that the Protestant of to-day descends from the same mediæval forefathers as does the Catholic, from the same builders of cathedrals, crusaders, feudal proprietors, and commune winners. To refuse sympathy to the two best centuries of the Middle Ages because, three hundred years later, occurred a break in western Christendom is as illogical as the attitude of those historians who would liken the religious movement of the XVI century to the antisocial outcrop of Oriental dualism called the Albigensian heresy.

Let us then, with open minds, turn to this art of the builder, “the strongest, proudest, most orderly, most enduring of the arts of men that if once well done will stand more strongly than the unbalanced rocks, more prevalently than the crumbling hills; the art which is associated with all civic pride and sacred principle; with which men record their power, satisfy their enthusiasm, make sure their defense, define and make dear their habitation.”[2]

CHAPTER I
What Is Gothic Architecture?[3]

Le temps
Où tous nos monuments, et toutes nos croyances
Portaient le manteau blanc de leur virginité
Où sous la main de Christ, tout venait de renaître.
—Alfred de Musset.

BOUT the year 1000 a new spirit animated the art of the builder in France. That rebirth, to which has been given the name Romanesque, held sway for a hundred and fifty years, and had reached its apogee when, in mid-XII century, it was superseded by the architecture we call Gothic. Gothic architecture did not spring up like a mushroom. Like all manifestations of art, it was the logical fulfillment of its predecessor. Romanesque and Gothic were phases of the same art. The dethronement of Romanesque was a voluntary abdication in favor of younger, more efficient leadership: “What is called the birth of Gothic is but the coming of age of Romanesque.”

The XI-century monks who built monastic churches cleared the path for the laymen builders of the Gothic cathedrals. With persistency, with courage, the monk architects went forward, seeking a way. And the way sought, the problem on which they concentrated their energies, was how to protect their churches by masonry vaulting without sacrificing amplitude or lighting.[4]

Out of their trials to solve that problem there emerged a new principle of construction, and Gothic architecture was then born. Thrust and counterthrust was the law of its being. Instead of the Romanesque idea of equilibrium by dead load, by sheer mass, which may be called a continuous counterbutting of the vault’s thrust, there now was substituted equilibrium by intermittent abutment. By means of diagonal-crossing ribs the vertical and lateral thrusts of the stone roof were collected at fixed points, which points alone had to be counterbutted. Thick walls were a necessity in a Romanesque edifice, if it were to be stable, but in a Gothic building the walls could be made a mere shell, since all the work was done by an active skeleton, a bone structure of stone, consisting of piers, arches, and buttresses.

To define shortly, Gothic architecture is the art of erecting buildings with vaults whose ribs intersect (concentration of load) and whose thrusts are stopped by buttresses (the grounding of the thrusts). The never-ceasing downward and outward thrust of the vaulting is met by an equivalent resistance in pier and buttress and solid earth. Equilibrium results from that well-adjusted opposition of forces.

Since the starting point in the development of Gothic was the vaulting, and how to substitute a stone vault for a wooden roof was the germinal idea of the Romanesque builder, it is no digression to turn to the earlier school, the chrysalis of Gothic. The name “Romanesque” is an affair of yesterday, employed by a French archæologist about 1825. Various local designations had hitherto been used, such as Lombard, or Norman, or Romano-Byzantine, but the term Romanesque for this architecture is as suitable as the name Romance is for the popular languages which, in that same period, were forming out of the corruption of Latin. A definition given by M. Camille Enlart is excellent: “Romanesque art was a product of Rome, animated by a new spirit, and combined with a certain number of elements of barbarian or Oriental origin.”

Rome gave the basilica plan to western Europe, which for centuries continued to build its churches as oblong halls with a small apse at one end. The hall, or nave, consisted of a central vessel with side aisles that were divided from it by piers. In the treatment of vaulting and the method of stone laying Romanesque architecture also derived from Rome. Byzantine influences certainly were important, but they affected the decoration more than the plan or the structure; the use of the Byzantine cupola was merely occasional. The Romanesque masters copied the ivories and miniatures of the Eastern Greeks till, in time, they turned to nature for their models, and then their work took on new life and evolved into the glory which is Gothic sculpture.

While some have laid stress on the Oriental influences, rather than those of Rome, in the formation of Romanesque art, others have overemphasized the personality and fantasy introduced into French architecture by the Barbarian invasions. No doubt the influx of new blood added new elements, but since knowledge of the invaders’ art is fragmentary, there can be no scientific base for the theory. Composite, certainly, were the causes for the new spirit which animated architecture after the Carolingian day, but it is safe to say that the influence of Rome predominated.

In the course of the centuries the Roman basilica was modified by the Catholic liturgy. For catechumens, or penitents, was made the porch, or narthex, before the western end. Tribunes were built over the side aisles.[5] Increased church ceremonial brought about a development of the choir. The custom of burying the dead in crypts under the main altar originated the raised chancel. Between the choir and the nave the builders began to insert a transverse nave called a transept.[6] Such an enlargement enabled the congregation to approach closer to the altar ceremonies; only the bigger churches built transepts in the XI century. Then the liturgical writers saw in a transept the extended arms of the Cross, and it was in that spirit the XIII-century transepts were made—their symbolism was posterior. The first ambulatories were no doubt built in churches which possessed some revered relic, to facilitate the passage of the pilgrim crowd. (The term ambulatory will be used to designate the continuation of the choir aisle round the apse.) Before long that curving processional path, with radiating apsidal chapels opening from it, was taken to represent the crown of thorns about the Sacred Head. “All things as pertain to offices and matters ecclesiastical be full of divine signification and mysteries, and overflow with a celestial sweetness: if so be that a man be diligent in his study of them, and know how to draw honey from the rock and oil from the hardest stone.” So wrote William Durandus, the XIII-century French bishop whose Rationale, or treatise on church symbolism, was an inspiration for centuries and, next to the Bible, the most frequently printed book of the older times.[7]

Despite a host of additions to the basilica of Rome—transept, ambulatory, a long choir, apse chapels, towers—despite the discarding of the classic orders and of antiquity’s use of a veneer of finer stone (the Romanesque builder used the unadorned stone of his own region) the church of western Europe remained, in general plan, a Roman basilica. Like Rome, they covered their main vessel by a flat wooden roof, although they knew how to build barrel and groin vaulting.[8]

Now a wooden roof is an easy prey for fire. Such roofs, a succession of long-continued invasions, and the faulty construction of Merovingian and Carolingian churches are accountable for the fact that in France to-day is no church that predates the year 1000. Some portions of ancient wall are embedded in later work, and some few early crypts are intact. But to speak with certainty of Merovingian and Carolingian architecture is impossible, though they formed the incubating phase of Romanesque art.

In France the IX and X centuries were periods of overwhelming disaster. In the Midi were Saracen incursions. In northern and central France Norman pirates wiped out Charlemagne’s revival of art. As far as Poitiers and Clermont the Northmen’s path of destruction extended. “Look where you will,” wrote Flodoard, the chronicler, “the sky is red with fires.” To the litany was added a new invocation—A furore Normannorum, libera nos, Domine.

The falling to pieces of Charlemagne’s civilization and the general return of social disorders have led to an overdramatic contrasting of the year 1000, when mankind, in terror, anticipated the ending of the world, with the rebirth of hope and of building energy, when the dread day had passed. Whenever the gaunt horses—famine, pest, war, and death—are afoot, humanity is prone to look for the fulfillment of the apocalyptic prophecy. Previous to the X century the final day had been awaited, and the same superstition was to seize on the world’s imagination in following centuries.

The X century was certainly a desperate age. Fifty years of it were famine, and on the highroads people were killed for food. But the evils did not cease precisely with the year 1000; also it should be noted that a certain number of churches were begun before the XI century opened. However, to mark the start of a new art life the year 1000 is a convenient date if we bear in mind that it was not a sharp division between Carolingian and Romanesque architecture, since a gradual evolution took place. All through the XI century the vital renewal of architecture went on, and churches were built which, to this day, are unrivaled for their profound religious spirit. They exist to tell us that in the harsh life whence they emerged there were enlightened cases. They vindicate, by their grand simplicity and detachment of soul, the men who built them. Never was an art less one of routine than this of the so-called hidebound monks, an art of a people reborn, full of youth’s daring, an art that was never to have an old age, eager, untiring, experimental, an art that fitly generated the most scientifically sound of architectures—Gothic.

The heterogeneous races, Celtic and Gallo-Roman, Germanic, and Norse, whose conflicts long had held France in anarchy, were at last welding into one people. The advent of a vigorous third dynasty, under whose leadership social conditions improved, was another cause of art’s rebirth. Not long after 1000 the bishops formulated the Trève de Dieu, by which peace was enforced on the turbulent lords from Wednesday night to Monday morning. With interval of peace came commerce and wealth and the security necessary for works of the imagination. The rebuilding of churches was inevitable.

Invasions and wholesale conflagrations had impressed on the mediæval mind the necessity of a church roof more durable than wood, but a masonry vault over a wide space was a constructive feat too difficult to be achieved immediately. In fact, up to the very end of the XI century, though the builders had succeeded in vaulting with stone the crypt, the apse, and the side aisles, they continued generally to cover the wide central vessel in wood. However, the fecund idea was at work. From the time that it took possession of their imagination, to the day when Gothic, its fulfillment, was clearly enunciated, there was over a century of continuous effort—roughly speaking, from the year 1000 to the memorable day in 1144 when was dedicated the first truly Gothic monument of considerable size—the abbey church of St. Denis. Within that energetic span of years is embraced the Romanesque architecture of France.[9]

The monk, Raoul Glaber, wrote an account of the rebirth of architecture after the year 1000. It has been quoted to weariness, but is none the less a valuable contemporary record. The whole earth, he says, as of one accord seemed to throw off its tatters of old age and to reclothe itself in a white mantle of churches. The monastery in which lived monk Raoul, St. Bénigne, at Dijon, was one of the first to inaugurate the new century, and its present crypt dates from the year 1001. Soon after 1017 the monks of Mont-Saint-Michel, in the far corner of Normandy, began a new church, to which belonged part of the present nave. At Chartres, Bishop Fulbert undertook to rebuild his cathedral after the fire of 1020, and the vast crypt which to-day astonishes every beholder was his work.

The chronicler, Raoul Glaber, lived under the rule of the most powerful monastic brotherhood ever organized, Benedictine Cluny, embracing several thousand houses scattered over Europe. Founded in 910, during the darkest years of the Middle Ages, Cluny kept alive the light of learning and art, “the solitary torchbearer that passed on the flame from the spent glow of Charlemagne to the Gothic rekindling.” Her monks were the pioneers of civilization. Cluny beat back barbarism with a pertinacity that should make hers an honored name in history. So established was her reputation as a civilizer that William the Conqueror wrote to the great Abbot Hugues, to beg from him Cluny monks for England, saying that he would pay their weight in bullion.

Cluny formed the savants who made the XII century memorable. Her fertile seed provided Europe with doctors, ambassadors, bishops, and popes. Gregory VII had passed through her discipline, and in his giant task of reform, it was from Abbot Hugues that he solicited monks of Cluny. Urban II, who set in motion the First Crusade, had been a monk in the great Burgundian house. It is interesting to note that a generation of reforming pontiffs accompanied the expansion of the Romanesque movement. This would seem to contradict the notion, which many hold, that the clergy profits by keeping the people in superstitious ignorance. It is when religion is purified of its dross that man’s respiritualized faith out-flows in generous donations to the Church.

St. Benedict had taught his sons that work as well as prayer was a part of salvation. The monks of Cluny fostered agriculture, thus taking away its stigma as serf’s work. Thierry speaks of the mediæval monastery as a model farm. In Cluny craftsmen of every kind were trained; its school of music was noted, and along the roads, as they traveled, the monks from Burgundy sang canticles. But the art of arts for Cluny was that of the builder, the supreme art that takes into its service all the others, to lead them to the glorification of God’s house. When, in bands of twelve, the monks of Cluny set out to colonize in Spain, in Germany, in Italy, in Poland, everywhere they carried with them the tool as well as the Book. As a rule they conformed in each province to the local building traditions. There was never a distinct Cluny school of Romanesque architecture.

By the end of the XI century the main provincial centers of France had each evolved its own special building characteristics. French Romanesque architecture has been divided into some six or seven regional schools—those of Normandy, Burgundy, Auvergne, Poitou, Languedoc, Provence, and a minor school, the Franco-Picard.[10]

In their efforts to protect their churches by masonry roofs, these various regional schools made use of the barrel vault or the groin vault. The latter was found too insecure to span a wide space. Now, the thrust of a barrel vault was exerted along the whole length of the wall, which necessitated a continuous abutment—in other words, an enormously thick wall. Only small windows could be opened. Since the Romanesque architect had the ambition to light his church well, and not to encumber his floor surface by clumsy piers, a barrel vaulting could be but a temporary solution of the main problem.

The struggle for a satisfactory stone roof was pursued tenaciously. Many a clearstory wall was thrust apart by the vaulting’s pressure. Thus the abbey church of Bec, finished in the ’forties of the XI century, was reconstructed in the ’fifties, and three times, again, had to be rebuilt. No failure could daunt the courage of those old monastic builders. Already inherent in the newly amalgamated race was the creative genius of France. Perseverance and courage were to have their reward.

The theory long taught in the École des Chartes was that in the first part of the XI century, among a number of rural churches in the royal domain, there gradually came into use the member which was to revolutionize the science of building. The idea did not spring from one brain; it was a collective, not an individual, triumph. When, under some groin vault, no doubt at first to reinforce it, some obscure mason constructed the earliest intersecting stone ribs, the first step in Gothic architecture had been taken.[11]

From that essential organ, the other characteristics of Gothic art were deduced: flying buttress, slender piers, expanse of windows. In a Gothic vault the infilling, or web, rested elastically on the diagonal ribs. As the load of the stone roof was thus concentrated at fixed junctures, it was necessary to reinforce only those given points. Buttresses became intermittent. All the disintegrating force of the heavy vaulting was gathered on the diagonally crossing arches. An arch never sleeps, said the old Arab proverb. Let us then, said the mediæval architect, set a guard on it that also never sleeps; and from that idea he proceeded to develop the greatest architecture of all times. The force of expansion was counteracted by a proportionate force of compression. By means of a framework made up of vault ribs, of piers, of buttresses, and flying buttresses, the edifice became a living skeleton. The walls between the active members, when relieved of their load, served merely as screen inclosures and could be carved into fragile beauty and hung with transparent tapestries of colored glass. Because the flying buttress transmitted a large part of the vault’s pressure to the exterior buttress piles, the piers within the church could be lessened in diameter, and greater capacity be given to the interior.

Each new trial was a lesson learned. It was only with time that they adjusted precisely the sufficient counterpoise to the thrust of the vaults; it was only by degrees that the pier’s diameter was lessened, only with practice that was learned the placing of flying buttresses neither too high nor too low. At first many a flying buttress was made needlessly heavy. The solid wall in between the buttresses was not discarded all at once. In the first Gothic churches windows continued to be single lights, then two or three lancets were placed side by side, subsequently each light was subdivided by mullions, and gradually an elaborate fenestration developed. For a time, too, the round arch continued in use, and the earliest vault ribs were semicircular. With the fusion of the equilateral arch and the counterbutted intersecting ribs, the essence of Gothic architecture was achieved.

Lesser consequences of the new form of vaulting followed in logical succession. Obeying the law that it is the thing borne which commands the form of the thing that bears, the ribs may be said to have drawn out of the sturdy pier of Romanesque art the clustered columns of Gothic gracefulness.

Not a single beauty in a Gothic church but has a structural explanation. The soaring pinnacles that crown the buttresses are apparently mere ornaments, but in reality those gallant little bits of decoration are of sound engineering usefulness. By weighting the buttresses, they hasten to channel the transmitted lateral thrust of the vaulting into a vertical pressure, and they increase, too, the counterthrust of the flying buttress against the side walls.

A clear comprehension of Gothic is impossible unless the fact be grasped that architecture is nothing if not structural, and that no decoration can veil a faulty skeleton. Ornamentation is the spontaneous blossoming of the structure, else it is meaningless—a principle many a modern architect might well digest. Too long has the most scientifically exact of architectures been judged by its embellishments, which often enough, in the hands of the copyist, do become a florid veneer without reason.

The Gothic master-of-works was right when he said that nothing which was inherently needed could be ugly. No longer were flying buttresses hidden under the cover of wooden roofs. Proudly ranged about the church, those essential practical members became one of the distinctive beauties of the new science of building. Renan, with his treacherous half praise, has called the flying buttress a crutch needed by an architecture which, from its start, nourished the seeds of decay, since it was based on no sound constructive formula. Its success was a prestidigitator’s trick, he said. Such criticism misunderstands the A B C of Gothic lore. Can a living limb be called a crutch? it has been aptly asked. The Gothic cathedral is not only the most complicated, but is also the most complete, organism ever conceived by man.

Where the first diagonal-crossing ribs are to be found will probably never be known. Various have been the claimants. The Rhenish claim is no longer taken seriously. Gothic made its first appearance in Germany as a fully developed French art, and its XIII-century name, there, was opus francigenum. In his Gothic work the Teuton showed a fondness for the tour-de-force and his manual dexterity surprises more than it satisfies. The best German works in architecture are the sober Romanesque churches. Germany’s school was developed a century before the Romanesque of France; across the Rhine occurred no Norman invasion to sever art traditions from Charlemagne’s renaissance. The pre-Gothic art suited her ethnical temperament, and was long adhered to. While France was building Gothic, Germany was still erecting Romanesque cathedrals. Not till the end of the XII century were churches along that “rue des moines,” the Rhine, vaulted in the new manner.

The claim of Italy to be the first to use the diagonal ribs is denied by most French archæologists, but is put forward by the Italian scholar Rivoira and by Mr. Arthur Kingsley Porter.[12] The latter cites the church of Sannazzaro Sesia as showing proofs that its high nave was Gothic vaulted by 1040. For a century, he says, the Lombard churches used diagonals, especially in Milan, where wood was scarce and it was easier to build permanent brick ribs under the groin vault than to mold the groin on a temporary substructure. Diagonal ribs were invented, he thinks, as a device to economize wood. That may be true of the Lombard churches, of which he has made an elaborate study. And it may be true that the use of such diagonals filtered into Provence and Languedoc, where appeared some early Gothic vaults sporadically before 1150, at Fréjus, Marseilles, Maguelonne, and Moissac, all with the rectangular profile of the Lombard type. The theory he advocates does not prove why the Ile-de-France masons could not themselves, without hint from Lombardy, have stumbled on the new feature which was to revolutionize the builder’s art. Why should we prefer his explanation for the first use of diagonals—the desire to economize wood—to that advanced by the French scholars—the effort to brace a falling groin vault?

Mr. Porter acknowledges that not a single Lombard church was rib-vaulted throughout, that the Lombard architects never counterbutted their diagonals properly, that their vaults proved unsatisfactory, so that after 1120 they returned to their groin and barrel vaulting, or used timber roofs, in those regions where wood abounded. The destruction of Milan through the German invasion, in 1162, was a fatal blow to Lombard architecture. We can only conjecture how northern Italy might have worked out the problem of stone roofs. The best definition of Gothic, thinks Mr. Porter, is Professor Moore’s, which concludes thus: “Wherever is wanting a framework maintained on the principle of thrust and counterthrust, there we have not Gothic.” The Lombard churches never met the vault thrust with counterthrust of buttress. Surely not in Lombardy was conceived the new system of construction?

S. Ambrogio at Milan was cited as l’œuvre initiale, till it was proved that it was built not in the IX century, but after 1067; and as later disasters necessitated reconstructions, none of the present diagonals was extant before 1198. S. Abondio at Como, consecrated by Urban II, in 1095, has some very early intersecting ribs, but they are more a step toward the new system than a true Gothic vault, since the ribs merely reinforce and do not carry the cells.

M. Camille Enlart contends that the systematic use of Gothic in Italy was not earlier than the second quarter of the XIII century, and was brought across the Alps by French Cistercian monks. Though for centuries Italy used it, she apprehended its constructive principle imperfectly. Because she possessed a Niccola Pisano, a Giotto, a family of Cosmati to veil the poverty of her Gothic skeleton with details of consummate beauty, criticism is silenced. Her best Gothic monument, the cathedral of Siena, was insecure because of technical errors. Always was Italy adverse to showing the mechanism by which an edifice stood; few flying buttresses were ever built south of the Alps. She preferred the classic wide spacing of piers, an unencumbered interior, and small windows against her hot sun. Who remembers that he is in a Gothic church when in the somber cathedral of Florence? Its long nave is divided into four bays where a northern church would have used eight. For Italy the Renaissance was a whole-hearted return to a national art which she could fully understand.

No people outside of France better understood and developed Gothic art than the English. Their claim to priority is based on the date of the cathedral of Durham, whose choir-aisle diagonals Mr. John Bilson says are as early as 1093. Since those diagonals show no hesitation, they must have been preceded by others. Where in England are there to be found the earlier trials? The English claim is practically a Norman one, and Normandy’s experimental work in Gothic vaultings remains to be traced. Rivoira claims that Lombard influences predominated in the formation of Normandy’s Romanesque school. Can the Norman be said to have discerned in diagonals their immense possibilities any clearer than had the Lombard?

Those among the French archæologists who have disputed the Norman claim to priority say that the principal span of Norman and English churches was covered with timber roofs far into the XII century. We know that the Gothic vaulting of the two abbey churches of Caen were XII-century additions, and M. de Lasteyrie thought the same was true of Durham, though Mr. Bilson has convinced MM. Enlart and Lefèvre-Pontalis that Durham’s choir-aisle vaults are an original part of the cathedral begun in 1093. Not till 1174, when Guillaume de Sens began Canterbury Cathedral, did French Gothic architecture, in its plenitude, appear in England.

The question of priority remains an open one. It might almost be said that vaulting with intersecting ribs began to appear here and there simultaneously, that if it had not cropped out in the Ile-de-France, it would have appeared in Normandy, or vice versa. And not long after them, the builders in Burgundy and Anjou began to use it. Before 1150, isolated samples of the Gothic rib vault appeared at Vézelay, Poitiers, Bordeaux, Quimperlé, Moissac, St. Gilles, Marseilles. The hour was ripe for the solution. Gothic architecture was the spontaneous invention of French builders at the dawn of the XII century, at a time when the poetry of France was imposing itself on the whole of Europe.

L’œuvre initiale will never be known. However, there was a region where the early use of the ogival vault was not accidental, but systematic, one spot in the heart of France where it immediately made a school, since there it found no strong earlier traditions to overcome, where it became a living organism and went through a succession of logical developments until it had taken on the main characteristics of the new art. There is one center from which Gothic architecture spread out with slow, sure march into the neighboring regions. In the Ile-de-France, all the trials were summed up and developed by Abbot Suger at St. Denis. From 1140 to 1144 he wedded definitely the pointed arch with the diagonal rib.

The French masters, who have contended that the Ile-de-France is the cradle of Gothic architecture, have had lesser controversies among themselves as to which special portion of the royal domain led in the evolution. M. Woillez, a pioneer, considered the environs of Beauvais the favored spot; M. Saint-Paul looked to the districts between Normandy and Paris; M. Enlart sought the nucleus in Amiens diocese in Picardy; and M. Lefèvre-Pontalis chose the classic diocese of Soissons. The two latter masters have modified their views since studying Durham’s vaults, and they may modify them further in regard to Lombardy’s early use of diagonals. The controversy is not closed.

The France of that day was more a feudal confederation than a united kingdom, and some of the king’s vassals ruled territories larger than his own. If the feeling of nationality is created as much by great achievements in common, as by political boundaries and the ties of blood, if, as all now agree, the enthusiasm of the Crusades, those holy wars against a common foe, helped to weld the rival sections of France into one nation, surely that other enthusiasm of the day, those other Gesta Dei per Francos, the building of the Gothic cathedrals, played an important part in forming the national soul. From end to end of France they were building when at the battle of Bouvines a French king united with the jealous barons, with clergy and with burgess and with villein in a common defense of their native land. King, clergy, lords, and people fought at Bouvines, and king, clergy, lords, and people built the big national churches. All the energies of the times went to their making, all the primitive strong purposes, all the newly stirred intellect of the schools. Science was as needed for them as inspiration, for without the long manual training of the guilds, the mystic glow had not sufficed.

There has crept into various architectural manuals, since first M. Viollet-le-Duc voiced it, a theory which scarcely needs refuting, so disproved is it by modern research.[13] Gothic art is considered as the layman’s expression of revolt against the Romanesque art of the monks, an idea that denies the structural sequence of the two phases of the same art, and would present Gothic as a reaction against its predecessor, instead of its supreme development.

We read that a cathedral was built as a sort of assembly hall for the rising communes, and not pour loger le bon Dieu. Now in every known case it was the bishop who started the rebuilding of each cathedral, and the works usually began with the choir, the part of a church suitable only for the cult. Even when a bishop, in his character of proprietor of a city (as in the case of Rheims and Laon), opposed the communal claims, he and the people went on building their cathedral together. We have precious documents to assure us in what spirit of piety the work was done. All classes and all ages, women as well as men, gave their voluntary labor to the new works, after having confessed and communicated in pious confraternities; sometimes it was for an abbot that they dragged in the stones from the quarry, as at St. Denis and St. Pierre-sur-Dives; sometimes it was to aid a bishop, as at Chartres and Rouen. To offset such irrefutable evidence there is not one contemporary reference to a laic, or communal purpose.

Also, when it is asserted that the bishop helped the cathedrals because they were jealous of the monastic orders, there is not one historical record to confront a host of documents which disprove the idea. Large numbers of the bishop-builders issued from monasteries, founded monasteries, and returned to monasteries to die. While Maurice de Sully was erecting Notre Dame, at Paris, he built four monasteries, in one of which he requested to be buried. The bishop who began Auxerre Cathedral chose Cistercian Pontigny for his tomb. The bishop-builders of Noyon, Laon, Senlis, Soissons, Rheims, Bourges, and Rouen were buried among the monks. That there should occasionally be friction between a bishop and an abbot over legal privileges is only characteristic of human nature in all times. As a class the bishops were not opposed to the monks, nor the Orders to the secular clergy. The monks of St. Remi honored the archbishop of Rheims in their choir windows.

The cloister welcomed the new architecture. Transition Gothic churches were built by the monks of St. Germain-des-Prés and St. Martin-des-Champs at Paris, and one could prolong the list into pages. Where in Burgundy is found the earliest Gothic? In the Cistercian church of Pontigny, and in Benedictine Vézelay. Where in Champagne?—the abbatials of Notre Dame at Châlons-sur-Marne and St. Remi at Rheims. In Normandy? In the Midi?—again the answer is, in abbey churches. Indeed, monastic building energy seemed inexhaustible, for where the prime of Gothic arrived, it was still the monks who produced that masterpiece of the new art, the Merveille of Mont-Saint-Michel.

In the XII century the spread of monastic life took on a phenomenal aspect. Benedictine houses and those of the newly founded Orders of Cîteaux and Prémontré increased, not by hundreds, but by thousands. The monks were in absolute accord with the spirit of their time. Sons of the cloister had inspired the entire XI century: Gregory VII, Abbot William of Dijon, St. Anselm, Lanfranc, St. Hugues of Cluny. A bevy of remarkable men of the cloister led the XII century, the chief being Suger of St. Denis, protector of the serfs, the man of genius who stimulated the bishops of France to remake their cathedrals in emulation of his Gothic abbey church, and St. Bernard of Clairvaux, on whose words all Europe hung.

Architecture passed to laic control when the protection of monastic life was no longer needed for artists, and when the science of building required the specialist, the man occupied with it alone. The schools of Cluny had trained the first guildsmen, and many of the names of Gothic architects—Orbais, Honnecourt, Corbic—indicate that they were born in places where monastic building industries flourished. It was in the natural course of events that the art should pass out of the possession of the few into the general national life.

Another natural happening has been distorted by partisans. The burning of monastery archives during the XVI-century religious wars and by the Revolution is accountable for the few names of architects that have come down to us. The scarcity of such names has been cited as an instance of the jealous suppression of the laymen by the clergy forced to employ them. Now precisely the contrary is the truth. What modern architect was ever accorded such prominence as was allowed by the bishops of Amiens and Rheims to their masters-of-works when they inscribe those laymen names in the labyrinth designs of the cathedral pavements? The monks of Marmoutier and of St. Germain-des-Prés were proud to bury in their abbey-churches their architects Étienne de Mortagne and Pierre de Montereau. In Rheims, the architects Hugues Libergier and Robert de Coucy were likewise honored.

By digging in old archives, the modern student is ever adding new names to the nation’s honor roll. Many a gap still remains, but the very anonymousness of such masters of the living stone is stuff for the imagination. One likes to picture the old-time craftsman-artist rejoicing in his insignificance as he chiseled his leaf and vine just as he saw them by the roadside. He served a Master who gave like wages to all who worked in spirit and in truth, to him who, in the hidden corners where no human eye could penetrate, carved his leaf and flower with the same love as did the greater artist working on the stately imaged portals.

The “heretical Gothic-sculpture bogey” has led certain imaginations astray. There are those who find latent heresy in the old carvers’ work; they point, with suggestive smile, to the bishop and monk placed among the damned in the Last Judgments at the cathedral doors. Let them turn to the sermons of the day and they will find precisely the same Christian doctrine of the equality of all men before sin and punishment, preached from the pulpit within the church. Not in all the myriad scenes from Old and New Testaments is a single doctrinal error to be found, says M. Émile Mâle, who is master of the iconography of French churches. The sculptor layman merely carried out the scheme of the trained theologian.

Many a sharp word does M. Viollet-le-Duc give as critic to those who enjoy in a cathedral the superficial beauties of decoration, but are blind to the efficient structure, to the scientific upholding skeleton. Surely it is a still more radical ignorance which perceives in a Gothic church its mechanical perfection, but denies the aspiration to immortality which was its inceptive spirit. To ascribe the origin of cathedrals to the need by the nascent commune of a town hall is to make of those soaring monuments veritable follies of human pride. Restore to them their religious soul, have eyes to see what may be called their spiritual framework, and as up-leaps toward the infinite they are sublimities. Can churches be the creation of rebellion and hate when into their very stones passed the clamorous vibrant faith of those crusading generations? Like hovering prayers their vaults seem to shut one in. The heart, weary of modern sophistry, draws strength from their eternal affirmation. He must have little music in his soul who is deaf to such a Credo. When men built Gothic cathedrals they knelt on both knees to pray, and never have they soared more supremely above themselves. “Deeds of God through the French” are these temples.

A word in regard to the term “Gothic.” It is as unreasonable a misnomer as could have been chosen, but since usage has sanctioned it, it must pass. Primarily put into currency by the Italians of the Renaissance, in the injurious sense of barbarous, the term was adopted by the French neo-classics of the XVII century. Molière’s scathing line on Gothic sculpture is well known—“Ces monstres odieux des siècles ignorants.” He complained that Gothic art “fit à la politesse une mortelle guerre.” When Racine spoke of Chartres Cathedral he made use of the term barbare; even to the churchman Fénelon the cathedrals of the Middle Ages appeared unreasoned and faulty.

The opprobrious term was fixed by the Encyclopædists of the next century, when prejudice against the Middle Ages became militant and organized. With exclusive pedantism they dismissed the most national and civilized of arts as worthy of those rough invaders, the Goths. Voltaire, who, says Guizot, garnered only what was mean and criminal in the Middle Ages, saw in the study of Gothic architecture “a coarse curiosity, lacking good taste.” As late as 1800, a project was abroad to disencumber the soil of France of “these overcharged façades with their multitude of indecent and ridiculous figures.” And still later, the students in the national school of architecture were taught to despise the most reasoned, the most robust, the most logical of arts as a style of confusion and caprice.

The rehabilitation of Gothic architecture in France, if tardy, has been ample. No branch of modern science presents a more able corps of workers. While true to the Latin genius, which unites clarity of style with an exact erudition, they have obeyed a yet deeper race instinct which knows that matter must be vivified by spirit, else learning sinks to a dry-as-dust recording, incapable of its highest flight. The telling of the monumental story of France has been touched by the sacred flame of patriotism. Like paladins, these modern knights are abroad on all the by-paths eager to rescue some hidden treasure of the national art. Future scholarship will look back at the brilliant achievements of the French archæologists of to-day with the same pride that is felt for the Benedictine savants of the XVII century.

The aim of archæology is to date a monument correctly. How to do this by scientific method has been taught the last two generations at the École des Chartes, the national school par excellence, so M. de Vögué called it. Archives are pored over to trace each link with history, and those monuments which have no authenticated pedigree are compared with those of certain date. Each manuscript date is verified by the analysis of the edifice itself, whose successive campaigns of building are deciphered, since few and far between are the homogeneous churches. Each restoration also is verified. One of the solid bases for archæological exactness is the knowledge of profiles, which are called by the English textbook rib molds, arch molds, pier molds, or base molds. By a comparative analysis of profiles, a monument can now be accurately dated. As keystones were of different types in the various earlier decades of Gothic, they too help to substantiate an edifice.[14]

Churches of one region are contrasted with those of another. The material employed is considered, since the stone of a province causes richness or poverty of sculpture: thus, Brittany’s granite and Auvergne’s lava mean an undeveloped sculpture compared with the fine white limestone districts of the Oise, or in Normandy and Poitou. When practicable, excavations under an edifice can give data concerning previous churches on the site.

M. Jules Quicherat was the first to teach that the history of the Middle Ages architecture was the history of the architect’s fight against the weight and push of the vaulting.[15] Once the right path was blazed, many an able pioneer helped clear the new road—such students as Viollet-le-Duc, de Caumont, Woillez, Prosper Merimée, de Dion, Coutan, de Beaurepaire, Grandmaison, Révoil, Rupricht-Robert, Félix de Verneilh, Anthyme Saint-Paul, Louis Courajod, Buhot de Kersers. At the École des Chartes, Robert de Lasteyrie occupied with distinction the chair held by Quicherat for thirty years, and his pupils, Camille Enlart and Eugène Lefèvre-Pontalis, in their turn, are passing on the high tradition to a younger school. M. Enlart, the director of the museum of comparative sculpture at the Trocadéro, is an authority on Romanesque architecture, and has initiated the study of the spread of Gothic architecture in mediæval Italy, Spain, the North, and the Levant.[16] M. Lefèvre-Pontalis has written a host of erudite monographs; one learns to accept his decisions as final, in so far as the ever-expanding realm of knowledge can be final. He directs the invaluable publications called the Congrès Archéologique de France and the Bulletin Monumental, and he edits those excellent short studies known as the Petites Monographies des grands édifices de la France, which are convenient pocket guides for the serious tourist.[17]

Each year is producing final monographs on the chief churches of France. M. Georges Durand has rendered fitting tribute to Amiens. M. de Farcy has identified himself with Angers, René Merlet with Chartres, Lucien Broche with Laon, and Lucien Bégule with Lyons. MM. Brutails has specialized on Gascony, the Thollier and H. du Ranquet on Auvergne, Labande on Provence, Berthelé on Plantagenet Gothic, André Rhein on Poitou and Anjou, Émile Bonnet on Hérault, Charles Porée on Burgundy, and Louis Demaison on Champagne. Other able students are MM. Bouet, Louis Serbat, Marcel Aubert, Ernest Rupin, Jules de Lahondès, René Fage, Amédée Boinet, Jean Virey, Robert Triger, and Louis Régnier.

Precious texts have been unearthed from the archives by Victor Mortet, Henri Stein, and Eugène Müntz. The sculpture of France has been studied by MM. Robert de Lasteyrie, Émile Lambin, Léon Palustre, Eugène Müntz, Gabriel Fleury, Raymond Koechlin, J. M. de Vasselot, Paul Vitry, Gaston Brière, André Michel, Louis Gonse, and Émile Mâle. The latter three have brought out monumental general works. L’art gothique of Gonse gives the most exact and extended account of the beginning of Gothic, says Anthyme Saint-Paul, who is himself one of the most inspiring masters of mediæval archæology. M. Michel, who is conservator of the national museums, has edited the superb Histoire de l’art, to which leading French scholars have contributed.[18] And the iconography of French cathedrals has received no more magistral treatment than from M. Mâle, to whom is due the credit of establishing the scholastic character of Gothic imagery.[19] His path was cleared by pioneers such as Didron, Crosnier, Martin, and Duchesne.

Happily for the local schools, a bevy of intelligent churchmen have devoted themselves to their regional monuments. I hope I may be pardoned if I do not name each with his ecclesiastical designation, but cite them here simply as savants: the Abbés Eugène Müller (Senlis); Bourassé and Bosseboeuf (Touraine); Ledru (Le Mans); Auber, De la Croix, and Mgr. Barbier de Montault (Poitiers); Chomton (Dijon); Bulteau (Chartres); Abgrall (Brittany); Maurin (Aix-en-Provence); Bouvier (Sens); Cerf (Rheims); Bouxin (Laon); and for the Norman churches, the Abbés Fossey, Porée, Loisel, and Pigéon.

The list might be greatly extended. One can cite only a few. From the pages of such students have been written these chapters, by one who has felt that there must be many travelers who love the old cathedrals of Europe and have wandered among them puzzled by half-understood things, longing to know with exactitude how and when they were built. So it has not seemed a useless task to gather into these ten chapters what the French scholars are relating of their churches. So swiftly do archæological discoveries follow one another to-day, that statements accepted now may be obsolete to-morrow. The makers of history and art books can hope to serve only their hour.

The new school of Christian archæology is redeeming the misrepresented centuries after the year 1000. It is undoing the systematic falsification of history, and is teaching us to read the past other than by the printed page. Not hate, but love, opens new windows in the soul. The study of the churches of France adds flesh and blood to many a mere name in history. One gains a very special liking for little Abbot Suger, most dependable of men, whose life was a succession of big undertakings. One feels reverent affection for that sentinel of the Church and its guide, Bernard of Clairvaux, who said some harsh things of fine churches, all the while that he was feeding the mystic life that made them inevitable. And very real become the bishop builders when one knows their cathedrals. One pores over the old volumes of the Histoire Littéraire de la France, begun by XVII-century Benedictines, and still being continued by the Institute of France, to gather details of good Bishop Fulbert and doughty St. Ives, who built at Chartres; of that distinguished literary man, Bishop Hildebert de Lavardin, who worked at Le Mans; of the well-poised Bishop Maurice de Sully, who raised Notre Dame at Paris; of crusading prelates such as Albéric de Humbert, who began Rheims; and of Nivelon de Chérisy, who built Soissons, and who, on the Fourth Crusade, played a foremost role. One grows to love, above all, the saint-king, Louis, truest hero of la douce France, who illuminated his kingdom with fair churches. And no one can admire St. Louis and not keep a warm corner in his heart for Joinville, his comrade-in-arms, the irresistible seneschal of Champagne.

Crusades and chivalry and all the multicolored aspects of the XII and XIII centuries become clearer to the imagination as one traces the story of the cathedrals of France; scholasticism and the early days of the schools, when Abélard sparred with Guillaume de Champeaux. Very real they all become: Peter the Venerable, good Stephen Harding, St. Thomas Becket, John of Salisbury, St. Edmund Rich, Stephen Langton, St. Dominic, St. Malachy O’Morgair, Innocent III, St. Bonaventure, and St. Thomas Aquinas. France welcomed them all during the two vital centuries when she imposed her literature as well as her architecture on western Europe, when the Paris schools were the intellectual center of the world.

To paint a rose-colored picture of the two best centuries of the Middle Ages would be absurd. They were full of very evil things. There were horrifying episodes in them. “Barbarism tempered by religion; religion disfigured by barbarism,” is the definition of Balmes, the theologian. The inconsistencies were gigantic. The same men who sacked Constantinople in 1204, dealing art a staggering blow, were the very men who in western Europe were building cathedrals. Then, as now, there were many for whom religion served as a convenient cloak for the lower instincts; then, as now, there were many who never lost sight of the higher ideals. Side by side with the evil and the self-seeking should be set the sublime impulses which checked those untutored generations. Do not hide the merciless laying waste of Languedoc by the north, but do not forget that, in the same hour, men had reached an abnegation of self that led them to the African coast as voluntary substitutes for their brother Christians in bondage there.

In the midst of its human infirmities it was an age that aspired: its poets sang of the Holy Grail, its kings and its serfs were saints, there were saint scholars and barons and merchants, there was even a saint lawyer.

It is precisely the restored balance between good and evil which the study of Gothic art is bringing about. The partisan may go on compiling a police gazette and call it history.[20] While the towers of Gothic churches point upward, he is refuted. The modern mind has once for all grasped that it is psychologically impossible for an age to have been sunk in blind superstition when it could build, not merely one or two, but hundreds of churches whose every line is an aspiration toward sanctity. The cathedrals are the true apologetics of the Middle Ages. Archæology is again proving its claim to be the soul of history.

CHAPTER II
Abbot Suger and St. Denis-en-France

Under the impulse of this monk, truly great in all things, Gothic architecture was born.—Félix de Verneilh (of Abbot Suger).

HE churches built during the evolution from Romanesque to Gothic have been called transitional, a classification which would be most convenient for the amateur, had not archæologists decided it was an equivocal term. They say that, during the short period when “Romanesque and Gothic inhabited under the same roof,” the Romanesque parts of the edifice were placed side by side with the simultaneously built Gothic parts, that there was juxtaposition, but no fusion. Vaults were either barrel, groin, or of the diagonal-rib type; there was no such thing as a transition form of vault. Arches were either round or pointed; there was no such thing as a transition or intermediary form of arch. And since the radical distinction between Romanesque and Gothic is caused by the vaulting, it is correct to call that part of a church where was groin or barrel vault Romanesque, and that part where were used the intersecting ribs Gothic.

The sequence of the passing from Romanesque to Gothic is obscure, because there is a lack of definite dates. From 1110 to 1140, while the intersecting ribs were coming into use in northern France, such a vault was practically the only sign in an edifice of the new movement. The walls still were massive, the windows still were small and round-arched, the sculpture still was coarse and heavy. Then, as the transition advanced, the supports grew lighter, the profiles (those cross-section outlines of ribs, arches, capitals, and bases) grew purer, and the sculpture discarded Byzantine traditions and took nature as its model.

French archæologists have thought that the use of diagonals came about first through the desire to hold up some groin vault, on the point of collapsing, which would seem a very sensible explanation, since the creative genius of the Ile-de-France seems dimly to have apprehended even in the first hour the stupendous possibility to be drawn from a member whose purpose was to concentrate force in order that other parts of the edifice might be relieved. From the initial hour began the evolution of the cardinal organ in the Ile-de-France. Whereas the Lombard architects looked on the diagonals as a mere contrivance, stubbornly keeping their eyes shut to the structural possibilities latent therein. The masons of the Ile-de-France at once began to profile their diagonals graciously, and even before the genius of Suger had coordinated, at St. Denis, all the foregoing progress of the nascent art, craftsmen had occasionally symbolized, as it were, the importance of the intersecting ribs by carving little caryatids for them to rest upon above the capitals; such figurines are to be seen in the Oise region at Bury and at Cambronne.[21]

Mr. Arthur Kingsley Porter’s idea is that the transitional period resolves itself into a series of experiments on the part of the builders to erect a vault with a minimum of centering, and he cites the hollow spires at Loches as an experiment to put up a stone roof without the use of any temporary substructure of wood, which apparently was costly.[22] He thinks that the earlier Gothic vaults were bombé because that form facilitated construction without centering, and that the Lombards dropped their precocious diagonals after 1120, as soon as they had learned how to build domed groin vaults which required no temporary wooden substructures. What is of value in Mr. Porter’s thesis is sure, in time, to pass into French currency; until a majority of French archæologists find his explanation better than their own it is permissible for us to agree with those who are telling the tale of their own national art.

Probably the earliest extant Gothic vaults in the Ile-de-France are those at Acy-en-Multien (Oise) and at Crouy-sur-Ourcq (Seine-et-Marne). Their outline is rectangular. Some intersecting ribs at Rhuis (Oise) are cited by M. Lefèvre-Pontalis as the oldest in the Soissonnais. Diagonals were put up, about 1115, at St. Vaast-de-Longmont (Oise), Orgeval (Seine-et-Oise), Viffort (Aisne), Airaines (Somme), and in other rural churches. The famous ambulatory vaults at Morienval were probably built about 1122. A year or two earlier, perhaps, are the side-aisle vaults of St. Étienne at Beauvais.

Bury (Oise) shows the first extant half dome with ribs. Of the same time, about 1125, are the diagonals at Marolles, St. Vaast-les-Mello, Béthisy-St.-Pierre, Bonneuil-en-Valois, and Bellefontaine, all in the Oise department. Bellefontaine, whose date of 1125 is certain, has helped to place other churches of the transition by comparing their diagonals with its pointed intersecting ribs. Bruyères (Aisne) is about 1130, Poissy (Seine-et-Oise) and Villetertre (Oise) are about 1135, and so are the ribs of St. Martin-des-Champs at Paris. In the Aisne region are Berzy-le-Sec and Laffaux (c. 1140) and in the Oise region is Chelles, building at the hour when Suger undertook St. Denis (Seine), 1140 to 1144. Cambronne (Oise) and Foy-St.-Quentin (Somme) are about 1145. Such churches as Glennes (Aisne), St. Leu d’Esserent (Oise), and, close to the latter, Creuil’s church of St. Évremont were building in 1150; so were Chars (Seine-et-Oise) and, near it, Pontoise,[23] whose ambulatory vaults some claim are prior to those of the procession path of St. Denis, and therefore a link between Morienval and Suger’s abbatial. The big church at St. Germer (Oise) was begun about 1150, though certain of its features are more archaic than St. Denis, built before it. Some of these churches, called transitional, used wall ribs for their diagonals, others omitted them; in some the intersecting ribs were pointed, in others, semicircular.

Mr. John Bilson, who contends that diagonals were used in Normandy some twenty-five years earlier than in the Ile-de-France, considers the early dates for these rural churches improbable, that scarcely any were anterior to St. Denis, that it was a case of little churches following the great churches, not vice versa. The earliest, he thinks, was St. Étienne at Beauvais (c. 1120), significantly close to Normandy. But Normandy did not suspect the value and fecundity of diagonals. That feat of creative genius none can deny to the Ile-de-France.

The traveler can do nothing more enlightening and delightful as a prelude to his journey among French cathedrals than to spend some early spring days exploring the rural churches of the privileged land of the national art which the old geographers chose to picture as an island inclosed by the Seine, the Marne, the Aisne, and the Oise. Numerous churches of the transition lie between Soissons, Senlis, and Beauvais, and once, around Amiens was another such center, but few of the monuments there have survived.[24] Go to Creuil and see, in the ruins of St. Évremont, a rudimentary flying buttress—a quarter arch once hidden under the lean-to roof. No doubt the architect built it with the intention of bracing the upper walls, but since he omitted to brace the flying buttress itself it failed of its purpose. Four miles away, at St. Leu d’Esserent, is an awkward early trial of a Gothic vault in the tribune above the porch, but as the ribs are embedded in the cells, no proper elasticity is achieved. Go to Morienval and study its remarkable essay in spanning a curving section with diagonals. Trace these early steps of the national art, and the meaning of the Gothic bone structure grows plainer.

MORIENVAL[25]

I approve the life of those for whom the city is a prison, who find paradise in solitude, who live by the works of their hands, or who seek to remake their spirit by the sweetness of their contemplative life, who drink of the fountain of life by the lips of their heart, and forget what is behind them to regard only what lies ahead. But neither the most hidden forest nor the highest mountains will give happiness to man, if he has not in himself solitude of the spirit, peace of conscience, upliftings of the heart to God.—Letter of St. Ives, Bishop of Chartres, 1091-1115.

Of the experimental steps which led to Gothic art, the most appealing is the nunnery church of Morienval, a humble forerunner of Amiens Cathedral that has made as much stir in archæological controversy as Périgueux’s cathedral of St. Front itself. Morienval may not be the passionately sought œuvre-initiale, since its vaults, while they betray inexperience, certainly were preceded by still cruder attempts, but it can boast that it is the first Gothic ambulatory extant, and as the curving aisle around the chancel is the most exquisite feature of the great cathedrals, Morienval’s humble first essay of it merits a pilgrimage.

As one approaches the abbey church it does not appear till one is directly over it, so snugly hidden away is the village in a fold of the rolling country that skirts the forest of Compiègne. Perhaps the IX-century nuns who chose the site may have hoped that the marauders of that troublous time might ride by, unconscious of booty so close at hand. With gratitude one learns that the invasion of 1914 has left Morienval unscathed, as well as those other memorials of tentative Gothic, Acy-en-Multien and Crouy-sur-Ourcq.

Because of excellent proportions, the church appears larger than in reality. The exterior is Romanesque. Two time-stained towers of the XI century mark the angles between transept and choir, an arrangement derived from Rhenish churches. At the west façade is a beautiful XII-century tower. It was building while the nuns were proceeding to tear down a decrepit apse in order to erect the present east end of the church. In that new apse appeared the much-discussed early ribs.

A record tells that relics were installed in the church in 1122, and it was probably then that the new works were finished. Ambulatories had come into favor during the first third of the XII century, when need was felt for a suitable corridor for pilgrims to encircle the altar whereon relics were exposed. Now to vault a curving aisle was no easy task, owing to the trapeze shape of each section. Morienval’s ambulatory must have been designed to hold extra altars, since entrance to the aisle is blocked at both ends by the towers, and the passage is so narrow that only one at a time can walk in it. There are no apse chapels. The sculpture is archaic. Some of the capitals show interlacings, and some are of the pleated type popular in Normandy. The diminutive corridor has four small bays whose clumsy intersecting vault ribs are of the size of the average stovepipe. They curve strangely, and two of the keystones are not in the axis of the passageway, nor has elasticity yet been wholly achieved, since the ends of the ribs plunge into the web of the vault.

Over the choir, consisting of one large bay, are intersecting ribs that appear to be posterior to those of the ambulatory. They, too, are rude and large, but are wholly detached from the cells. M. Lefèvre-Pontalis thinks that the ambulatory diagonals are contemporary, and owe their more archaic character to the difficulty of vaulting a curved passage. So swiftly did the early architects acquire skill in the new system of building, that when a chapel was erected on the northern arm of Morienval’s transept, at the end of the XII century, each diagonal had become a single slender torus, virile and graceful.

Of less architectural importance is the Romanesque nave of Morienval, whose meager vault ribs are of the XVII century. The western tower was the prototype of the Romanesque belfries of the region and should be preserved. It is in a deplorable state, propped by beams, which are gayly scaled by the lads who ring the Angelus. Little Morienval has the human touch which the traveler craves. Set in the wall above the XIII-century lord of Viri’s tomb are tablets that commemorate two pastors of this isolated Valois village who were heroes as valiant as any crusader. Their combined ministry covered a hundred and one years. The first died in 1840, after fifty-seven years of service here, “faithful to his duty in times most difficult,” and difficult indeed was a priest’s life during the Revolution. “Pray for his soul,” begs his grateful commune, to which he had bequeathed the presbytery and all his savings.

His successor came to Morienval in his ’twenties, fresh from Paris, his birthplace, and on this dwindling village he expended his energies for forty-five years. Abbé Riaux loved his parishioners like a father, and was, says the memorial tablet, “physician for body as well as soul.” During the cholera of 1849 his self-denial elicited a gold medal from Morienval and the village of Bonneuil, where is another primitive essay of a Gothic vault. “The state of decay of his beautiful church made him suffer,” runs the inscription, so he willed his modest fortune toward its restoration. Happily, he lived long enough to see the church he loved become a savant’s shrine. It was in 1880 that M. Robert de Lasteyrie first drew attention to Morienval as an early step in the tardily understood national art, and MM. Anthyme Saint-Paul, Eugène Lefèvre-Pontalis, and Camille Enlart joined in the debate. The archæologists’ war horse they have called our little Morienval. Such widespread discussion and the good priest’s bequest fortunately brought about a thorough restoration of the choir.

ST. ÉTIENNE AT BEAUVAIS, AND ST. GERMER[26]

Sous le porche de l’église, chacun laisse le fardeau que la vie lui impose. Ici le plus pauvre homme s’élève au rang des grands intellectuels, des poètes, que dis-je? au rang des esprits: il s’installe dans le domaine de la pensée pure et du rêve. Le gémissement d’une vieille femme agenouillée dans l’église de son village est du même accent, traduit la même ignorance, le même pressentiment que la méditation du savant.... De ces parties profondes de l’être, de ce domaine obscur surgissent toutes les puissances créatrices de l’homme.

—Maurice Barrès.[27]

Close in date to Morienval are the aisle vaults of St. Étienne’s nave at Beauvais, the old city that lies on a tributary of the Oise. The intersecting ribs are not quite so stout as those of Morienval, but their ends still plunge into the massive, and they, too, are round-arched; their date is approximately 1120. That they planned at the same time to throw similar diagonals over the principal span is proved by the existent lower structures, but the actual vaults there were not erected till after a fire in 1180. The transverse arches of the aisles are noticeably stilted. This device was to lead to a solution of the problem how to raise the arches framing each vault section to the level of the diagonals’ crown, and thus avoid the excessive doming which is found in the earlier Gothic vaults.

In the XII-century north façade of the transept is an oculus big enough to be called the first rose window; a wheel of fortune it is called, because the images around its circle are an allegory of the fleet passing of man’s greatness. This is one of the very early approaches to pure sculpture. The nave’s two westernmost bays and its façade are of the XI century. Had the original choir of St. Étienne survived, it is thought that its ambulatory would be one of the missing steps connecting the cramped corridor of Morienval with the double procession path of St. Denis. The present choir, a Flamboyant Gothic structure, is famous for its gloriously colored windows, some of which were made by that notable family of local artists who designed the big rose windows of Beauvais Cathedral, Engrand Le Prince and his sons Jean and Nicolas, and his son-in-law Nicolas Le Pot. The latter carved the cathedral’s wooden doors, for versatility was characteristic of the artisan-artists of those days.

Ten miles from Beauvais, a crawling train sets one down in a field whence a two-mile walk leads to the sleepy bourg of St. Germer-en-Flay. The abbey was founded in 655 by Germer, a noble of Dagobert’s court, nephew of St. Ouen the great bishop of Normandy’s capital. To St. Germer’s abbey came William the Conqueror to beg the French king to join him in his proposed descent on England. But Philip I gathered his counselors, and it was decided not to support the Norman duke, since, if he gained England, he would be richer than his own suzerain, the king of France, and if he failed, France would have antagonized the English.

The large abbatial church of St. Germer, if not beautiful, is of archæological interest. Formerly it was thought to be a monument of 1130, but closer study has shown that it was erected during one bout of work from 1150 to 1180. Hard though it was to believe it the contemporary of the cathedrals at Senlis and Noyon, its sculpture is too excellent to have been done earlier. The crocketed capitals of its westernmost bays were never made earlier than 1175. That the church was continued without pause from apse to façade is proved by the unity of profiles and details. Its anachronisms are to be explained because it derived from a side current of Gothic art, out of touch with the swift-moving main stream, which was channeled by Abbot Suger.

The architect of St. Germer showed in the main parts of his church a thorough understanding of the new Gothic vaulting, and at the same time he covered his tribune gallery with Romanesque groins. He made heavy Romanesque piers, and simultaneously he essayed to disencumber the pavement by employing the corbel, or side bracket. The Norman zigzag or chevron design decorates the heavy molding of the pier arches. Over the sanctuary he attempted the inartistic experiment of having his ribs converge, not on a keystone, but directly on a transverse rib. The ribs of the upper vaulting are heavy and ornamented. The pointed arches of the pier arcade are surmounted by round arches, in the tribunes. And between tribune and clearstory are square apertures neither Romanesque nor Gothic.

To meet the thrust of the upper vaulting, some rudimentary flying buttresses were built under the lean-to roof of the tribune galleries, but as they themselves were not braced, they remained ineffectual. The collapse of some of the high vaults caused the addition, later, of the present flying buttresses. The exterior of the church is gaunt, with windows that are small and round-arched. The west façade was wrecked during the Hundred Years’ War, and never restored. Walled-up arches mar the spacious interior. Thick coats of whitewash cover it, and when dust gathers on that make-shift of cleanliness the effect is tawdry. Directly behind the apse of the big abbatial stands a masterpiece of Rayonnant Gothic, a diminutive church whose west façade faces, with awkward closeness, the back of the larger church. As it is connected with the latter’s ambulatory by a glazed passage, it may be regarded as a sort of Lady chapel. Many such imitations of the Sainte-Chapelle of Paris arose, after St. Louis had made his shrine for the crown of thorns. The abbot who put up St. Germer’s glass reliquary was Pierre Wesencourt, who ruled from 1254 to 1272, and it is thought that the king’s own architect designed it. That Louis IX contributed toward it is shown by the fleur-de-lis and the donjons of Castile in the storied windows. Over the altar once stood the alabaster retablo, depicting St. Germain’s life, now in the Musée Cluny, at Paris.

POISSY[28]

Christianity is still for 400,000,000 of human beings the great pair of wings that are indispensable if man is to rise above himself, above humdrum living and shut-in horizons, it is still the spiritual guide to lead him by patience, resignation, and hope to serenity, to lift him by purity, temperance, and goodness to the heights of devotion and self-sacrifice. Always and everywhere for nineteen hundred years as soon as these wings flag or break, public and private manners degenerate. Neither philosophy, reason, nor artistic and literary culture, nor even feudal honor, military and chivalrous, no code, no administration, no government can serve as substitute for it.—H. Taine (1892).

The church of St. Louis, at Poissy, is a link in the normal development of Gothic, and not like St. Germain, a disconcerting anachronism. About 1135 both systems of vaults were here built at one and the same time.

Poissy lies on the Seine slightly above its junction with the classic Oise. A pleasant way to approach it is to walk from St. Germain-en-Laye through the forest, when it is carpeted with anemones. St. Germain’s palace chapel is thought to be the work of Pierre de Montereau. One goes to Poissy in a spirit of pilgrimage, for at its font, in 1215, St. Louis of France was baptized.[29] He held the gift of Christian citizenship he here received above all that the world could bestow. To his intimates he often signed himself Louis of Poissy. His grandfather, Philippe-Auguste, had given the manor of Poissy to his son, on his marriage to Blanche of Castile. Living then in retirement at Poissy was the gentle Agnes of Méran, that aunt of St. Elizabeth of Hungary whom Philippe-Auguste had been forced by Rome’s decree to set aside. When St. Louis was born, on St. Mark’s Day of 1215, in order to spare the young mother, the church bells were silent. The Spanish princess asked the cause, and ordered—gallant woman that she was—that every bell in the town should ring out a joyous carillon because God had given her un beau fils. Shakespeare would inevitably admire Blanche; she was a Shakespearian character:

That daughter there of Spain, the hardy Blanche,
Is near to England; look upon the years
Of Louis the Dauphin and that lovely maid.
If lusty love should go in search of beauty,
Where shall he find it fairer than in Blanche?
If jealous love should go in search of virtue,
Where shall he find it purer than in Blanche?
If love ambitious sought a match of birth,
Whose veins bound richer blood than Lady Blanche?[30]

The wide ambulatory of Poissy is groin-vaulted, but diagonals cover the two oriented apsidioles that open on a false transept, which arrangement of pseudo-transept with chapels was copied soon after at Sens. The three easternmost bays of the nave have retained their primitive intersecting ribs, which are round-arched, decorated, and very broad, as are the transverse arches that separate the vault into sections. Poissy’s sculpture is of an advanced type. Owing to later changes, there is much patchwork in the church.

ST. DENIS-EN-FRANCE[31]

Give all thou canst: high Heaven rejects the lore
Of nicely calculated less or more:
So deemed the man who fashioned for the sense
These lofty pillars, spread this branching roof
Self-poised.
—Wordsworth.

Finally came the hour of the new architecture’s clear achievement. After all the trial efforts, there now was built, midway in the XII century, a monument which was to wield momentous influence. With the erection of St. Denis, the center of Gothic art may be said to have shifted slightly south, to Paris. From the capital the new movement spread out in systematic progression—each church comprehending better than had its predecessor the principle of thrust and counterthrust, each drawing from it further consequences.

St. Denis did not put a stop abruptly to the coexistence in the same edifice of both systems of vaulting any more than it began immediately the usage of all the consequences of diagonals. Yet none the less the Royal Abbey is rightly called the first Gothic monument, since here first was demonstrated stout-heartedly the advantages of the new system. Abbot Suger was the first to employ the generating member with the full intelligence of its results. “From the moment of St. Denis’ conception, Amiens had become inevitable.”

It was Suger who wedded definitely the pointed arch and the intersecting ribs. He dared to make piers so slender that the beholders were astonished they could carry the weight of a stone roof; he dared to open his walls by windows so large that his choir was called by the people the lantern of St. Denis. The mastery by Suger’s craftsmen of the art of stained glass was to have profound consequences in Gothic structure, since it hastened the suppression of the wall screen between the active members: “Behold I will lay thy stones with fair colors, and thy foundations with sapphires; and I will make thy windows of agates, and thy gates of carbuncles, and all thy borders of pleasant stones.”

Suger has himself told us how the house of God, many-colored as the radiance of precious stones, lifted his soul from the cares of this world to divine meditation, for this Gothic art, whose spiritual appeal he had apprehended as profoundly as he had its structural laws, was most aptly fashioned to be a foretaste of the Beyond, neither touching the baseness of earth nor wholly the serenity of heaven.

Doubtless Suger understood the importance of the dedication day in 1144. He made of it a national ceremony. He started the Gothic movement intrepidly. Before a historic gathering of bishops and barons he demonstrated that a Gothic vault was lighter, more easily built, more economical, and more enduring than any other, and the important men of France went back to their own cities to spread far and wide the lesson they had learned.

In the course of the story of French architecture, fate has most graciously allied certain monuments of prime archæological interest with people or events of historic importance.

Gothic art made its debut in a unique setting. St. Denis was the patron of France, the missionary who first preached Christianity by the Seine, and who there had been martyred in the III century. On Montmartre is the crypt said to have been the burial place of the first Christian martyrs of Paris. In time there rose on the road outside the city a monastery dedicated to St. Denis, and thither were his relics transferred. Each of the three royal lines that have ruled France, Merovingian, Carolingian, and Capetian, chose the abbey of St. Denis as their final resting place and loaded it with favors. The first milestone on the highroad of Gothic art was the famous center of the nation’s life, and the initiator of the new system of building was the maker of the nation’s unity, Abbot Suger.

To Suger may be applied the mediæval term for an architect, Master of Works, maître de l’œuvre. He wrote an account of how he reconstructed his abbey, building it, he says, with the aid of his companions in the community and his brothers in the cloister. The people gave voluntarily of their labor. When a quarry with suitable stone was discovered at Pontoise, the whole countryside—men, women, and children being harnessed to the carts—dragged the blocks in pious enthusiasm to St. Denis.

The tomb of the martyred patron of Paris was a pilgrim shrine from earliest days. The same trait in human nature that, in 1915, sent Americans to gaze reverently at a relic of their national history, the Liberty Bell, when on a two weeks’ journey from the San Francisco Fair to Philadelphia, it was exhibited in different cities, made the early Christians of Gaul flock to revere the relics of the holy man who had brought them the light and liberty of the gospel. Religion then and all through the Middle Ages was fraught with patriotism.

For St. Denis’ abbey a Merovingian church had been built by Dagobert. Pépin and Charlemagne replaced it by a Carolingian church. By the XII century the abbatial had become inadequate for the pilgrim crowds; people were crushed to death on festival days, and Abbot Suger decided to rebuild. He began by demolishing a heavy vestibule which Charlemagne had put up as a kind of tomb over his father’s grave, for Pépin had begged to be buried face downward in penance, before the abbey church. Suger replaced that encumbering porch by what is to-day a narthex, or forechurch, formed by the two westernmost bays of the edifice. In the thirties of the XI century he started the new works. Romanesque feeling lingered in the sculpture, and the stout vault ribs crossed each other in round arches. By 1140 the west façade was finished and ceremoniously consecrated.

A month later, a still greater gathering met at St. Denis for the laying of the corner stone of the choir. To the sound of trumpets, Louis VII descended into the trench prepared for the foundation, and placed the first stone, and as the choir chanted of the jeweled walls of the heavenly city, Lapides pretiosi omnes muri tui, the king, profoundly moved, took from his finger a costly ring and threw it into the mortar, which had been mixed with holy water. Each baron and bishop, as he laid down a stone, did the same. Their vehement faith would turn to literal meaning the Psalmist’s dream of the celestial city.

In his choir, Suger united definitely the pointed arch with the intersecting ribs, and the ribs, now, were not the heavy ones used in his forechurch. All the arches at their crown were brought to the same height by a combination of stilting, pointing, or depressing them. In the outer aisle of his ambulatory, Suger introduced a fifth rib in each vault section, which welded the apse chapels with the procession path. For his inner aisle he employed what is called the broken-rib vault. First, the keystone was planted in the center and from it branched the four ribs, each regardless of making a straight diagonal. This became the generally accepted method for vaulting an ambulatory. Every part of his edifice Suger supervised with untiring energy. Owing to the waste of forest trees for machines of war, none of sufficient girth could be found for the outer roof covering. Suger lay brooding over this one night, then started up impetuously before dawn, took the measurements of the beams needed, and himself went into the dense forest. Before nine that morning he had found a giant tree; by noon ten others, and the timber was hauled in triumph to the abbey.

All France was talking of the new works at St. Denis. Never before had been such a gathering of skilled masons and sculptors, of goldsmiths and glassmakers. St. Denis’ school was to direct the glassmakers’ art through the second half of the XII century. Little is known of the origin of that art; the early basilicas of Christian Gaul had made use of pieces of colored glass framed together, and in the X century figures were represented. No work, however, previous to the XII century has survived. For the earlier fenestration the term “painted glass” is a misnomer, since each piece was colored in the mass, and only a few black lines were applied to denote the features, or the folds of the draperies. The artists of St. Denis obtained their relief effects by a skilled juxtaposition of tones; intensity of hue was increased by the employment of thick rough leaves of glass. Scarcely any white was used; in the ancient windows no spots spring out unpleasantly.

To St. Denis’ school succeeded that of Chartres, which predominated during the first part of the XIII century, while its second half was ruled by the school of Paris, when windows of the Sainte-Chapelle type were the rule. Gradually the craftsmen gave up their sound tradition that a window should be a transparent mosaic, subordinate to its architectural setting. They began to treat a window as an isolated picture and the art declined.

Abbot Suger’s school of glassmakers carried their art to its zenith. Not all the wonders of XIII-century fenestration equaled the unfathomable vibrant blue in the background of XII-century windows—a fugitive mystery whose secret has been entirely lost. The popular fancy was that Suger ground down sapphires to obtain his magic color.

All over the land the church builders desired windows like those of St. Denis. Suger’s own craftsmen went to Chartres to make the three big lancets in that cathedral’s western front. The St. Denis school influenced the superb Crucifixion window in Poitiers Cathedral, and others in the cathedrals of Angers and Le Mans and in the Trinité at Vendôme, also the Tree of Jesse window in York Cathedral. And, had the choir glass of Notre Dame at Paris survived, it would have been of the school of St. Denis.

Suger wrote inscriptions for his abbey windows to make their symbolism clearer. Owing to the vicissitudes of seven hundred years, few of the St. Denis lights have survived. Four are now reset in the central apse chapel and in that to its north. In a medallion at the base of one of these windows Suger himself is represented holding a scroll bearing his name. The medallion figures are of the hieratic Byzantine type. Every window has a closely woven pattern; each losenge has its own border, and a rich jeweled border surrounds the whole lancet. Bracing bars of iron run straight across the pictured story. Slowly, with infinite patience, worked those old XII-century artists, and never has their handicraft been surpassed as sheer splendor of ornamentation.

After three years and three months of passionate work, the choir of St. Denis was finished, and on June 11, 1144, the dedication day, the relics were installed. That date, forever memorable in the annals of architecture, may be called the consecration of the national art. At the ceremony assisted Louis VII with his queen, Aliénor of Aquitaine, whose strange destiny was to make her patroness of that entirely different phase of Gothic called the Plantagenet school. The chief barons were present at the dedication, as well as five archbishops and some fourteen bishops. They looked and wondered, and not a few of them returned home to imitate. The bishops of Noyon and Senlis hastened to rebuild their cathedrals in the new way, and some of Suger’s masons passed into the service of the former prelate. Bishop Geoffrey de Lèves went back to Chartres to build the most beautiful tower in the world, and the sculptors who had made Suger’s western portals (now no longer extant) worked on the three west doors of Chartres.

On the day of St. Denis’ dedication, Abbot Suger, small and frail in person, but towering in personality, was honored on every side. When the abbot of great Cluny, Peter the Venerable, passed from the marvels of the new church to Suger’s narrow cell, he cried out in honest distress: “This man condemns us all. He builds, not for himself, but for God alone!”

Though the last half of Suger’s life was an example of monastic simplicity, not always had he been content with a monk’s cell. Perhaps because of his conversion midway in life, he appeals to us in a more human way. Not that he was converted from evil doings; his purpose always was high. But in his position as St. Denis’ abbot, as a powerful feudal lord, he lived sumptuously, according to the accepted standards of the time. He mixed freely in the world; he directed state affairs for the king to whom he was devoted; he went on embassies; he even led armies. In 1124, when an irate German emperor was marching on Rheims, which he had vowed to destroy, Suger in person led against him some ten thousand of his abbey’s retainers. That was the first time the oriflamme of St. Denis was carried as the national emblem.[32] Suger had grown up in the secular atmosphere of the Royal Abbey, and took its worldliness as a matter of course.

Of peasant parentage himself, he had been brought, a child of ten, to live with the monks, because he already showed exceptional qualities. Among his fellow students in the abbey school was the king’s son, the future Louis VI, and an intimacy began between the two lads destined to continue till death. When Suger became a monk he was sent on notable missions, for he was gifted with tact and good manners, vivacity and charm. Sweetness of disposition, mental energy, courage, and absolute integrity won for him general esteem. Early and often this born lover of things beautiful made the journey into Italy. It was while returning from one of his missions there, in 1122, that he learned of his election as abbot by his fellow monks in St. Denis. Louis VI had come to the throne; henceforth Suger was to lead in all state affairs.

The genius of this son of field workers had pierced to the vital need of the age—unity of government. Only a strong, central administration could cope with the disintegration which was feudalism. For its very existence the feudal system depended on the absence of well-enforced general laws. It was Suger’s strong hand that guided the early steps toward national unity, and king and people worked for it together. Under the king whom Suger served France began her great role of redresser of wrongs. Louis VI was the first to use the title, king of France, not king of the Franks. The ideal of this XII-century statesman was a strong central monarchy, coexistent with a national assembly. His high conception of solidarity was to fructify, within a hundred years, under Philippe-Auguste, the grandson of Suger’s master.

Suger was one of the first in Europe to understand political economy. He laid the base of a sound financial administration. His confirmation of a charter for the townsmen of St. Denis gave security to trade; he relieved the abbey serfs of mainmorte, built a Villeneuve for homeless nomads, and found time to study agriculture scientifically. In his writings we feel the first breath of a national patriotism. A new note in that age of unfettered personal impulse when might meant right, was Suger’s constant reference to “the poor weighed down with taxations,” to “that which has been too long neglected, the care of the surety of laborers, of artisans, and of the poor.” Many a modern politician could well ponder Suger’s censure of the spoils system. “The officers dismissed carry off what they can lay their hands on,” he said, “and those who replace them, fearing to be likewise treated, hasten to steal, to secure their fortune.”

Suger’s pre-eminence in public affairs continued during two reigns. Louis VII, after stumbling some years without guidance, turned to his father’s counselor and, during his absence on the Second Crusade, appointed him regent of France. So masterly was the abbot’s rule that king and people publicly proclaimed him Père de la Patrie. Suger studied the causes of the crusade’s lamentable failure; he felt that forethought and prudence might win success, and, though he was seventy years of age, he began preparations to carry out a crusade at his own expense. Time was not given him again to prove his genius for leadership. When news of his death (1151) reached the court, the king and the Grand Master of the Templars, who was with him, burst into tears. On his grave in the abbey church which he had built they cut the simple inscription, “Here lies Abbot Suger.” No need of panegyric. “The single names are the noblest epitaphs.”

The commanding place held by this monk in the estimation of Europe is vouched for by letters from pope, kings, and many a dignitary. The king of Sicily wrote to beg a line from him; the king of Scotland sent gifts; the bishop of Salisbury made the journey to France expressly to know Suger. By one clear stroke after another—and above all by his own writings—every line of which is of historical value—the picture is filled in of this admirable churchman who was as soundly honest and forceful as the architecture he fostered, and whose delicate, ardent soul accomplished remarkable things with the reasoned orderliness of the art he loved.

Suger’s sudden but thorough conversion is attributed to St. Bernard. Up to middle life he had been a type of those who soar as high as human abilities can reach without super natural aid. Entangled in the mesh of various employments, his soul could not rise to heavenly things. Then the trumpet of Bernard’s reform sounded in Europe. Men’s hearts were set on fire with repentance and aspiration toward the highest. Bernard’s clear eyes read beneath the outer circumstance of Abbot Suger’s life. He saw that here was a good man, capable of becoming a holy one. He wrote fearless words of disapproval. “One would think it was a governor of a province, not of souls,” he wrote, when he saw the abbot of St. Denis ride by with sixty horsemen.

Suger began to scrutinize his manner of life. Grace touched his soul, pomp was laid aside, and he set about his conversion with the same thoroughness that he displayed in all his acts. Before reforming his monastery, he completely reformed himself. With St. Bernard, who was ten years his junior, he was linked in ennobling friendship to the end. “I know profoundly this man,” Bernard wrote of Suger to the pope, “and I know that he is faithful and prudent in temporal things, that he is fervent and humble in things spiritual. If there is any precious vase adorning the palace of the King of Kings, it is the soul of the venerable Suger.” When Suger lay dying, he wrote to St. Bernard: “Could I but see your angelic face before I die, I should go with more confidence.” And Bernard, who was to follow in a year, begged that when Suger reached Paradise he would “think of him before God.”

Yet, if the overwhelming saint could change the whole tenor of Suger’s life, the cultivated little abbot of St. Denis offered a gentle, stubborn opposition to the puritanic ideas of Bernard in the domain of art. “Vanity of vanities,” cried the ascetic, in the well-known open letter in which he denounced the new luxury in church building. Churches were made too long, he complained, too high, and needlessly wide; the capitals were carved with monsters more apt to distract than to lead to pious recollection.

The art lover in St. Denis’ abbey smiled at such iconoclastic vehemence. Suger thought that nothing was too precious for the house of God. He proceeded to erect an abbey church as imposing as a cathedral, and to enrich its treasury with goldsmith work. Over the three gilt-bronze entrance doors of his church he inscribed, “The soul on its earthly pilgrimage rises by material things to contemplate the Divine.” To this day both men have vigorous partisans, and those who set out on a cathedral tour in France are more likely to be on Suger’s side in the controversy.

Suger’s subtle mind reached beyond the ascetic’s maxim. Well he knew that both saint and art patron were needed, well he knew that Bernard of Clairvaux was as instrumental as himself in the formation of the cathedral builders. A living example of Christian perfection, Bernard fortified the faith of all Europe. He might advocate church simplicity, but it was not without cause that his apostolate preceded the most fecund creative period of mankind’s art. His impassioned love of God warmed the imaginations of the men who began the big Gothic churches.

What remains to-day of the XII-century abbatial built by Suger of St. Denis? Comparatively little. The lower parts of the west façade and the two first bays of the nave which form a narthex, or vestibule, are his work. In the choir, his beautiful ambulatory begins at the third bay of the double aisles. There are nine bays of Suger’s processional path, and from them radiate seven apse chapels. The pillars that divide the lovely curving double passage are the very ones which the generous enthusiasm of the people dragged from Pontoise, and, in memory of the little abbot, some will touch those slender columns with reverential gesture. It was Suger who created the disposition of the rond point found in its perfection at St. Denis and copied in the great cathedrals. The crypt also is his work, though its nucleus belonged to an underground shrine built by Abbot Hilduin in the XI century. When Abbot Suger had finished his choir, he proceeded to make a new Gothic transept and nave; but of them scarcely a vestige remains. Some sculpture at the north door of the transept is of the XII century. Whether the construction was faulty, or whether the monks desired a more ample church, there was a total reconstruction of St. Denis’ abbatial, a hundred years after Suger’s day.

THE ST. DENIS OF ST. LOUIS

Tax not the royal Saint with vain expense,
With ill-matched aims, the architect who planned
(Albeit laboring for a scanty band
Of white-robbed scholars only) this immense
And glorious work of fine intelligence.
—Wordsworth.

From 1231 to 1280, at St. Louis’ own expense, the present nave and transept of St. Denis were built, and the first bay of the choir as well as the upper parts of the chevet were reconstructed. Inasmuch as the new nave was wider than the choir, a canted bay of the latter joined it to the transept.

St. Denis, as it now appears, presents the noble elegance of Gothic art in its golden hour. The new transept was made of exceptional width; its aisles and stately piers compose picturesque vistas. The triforium of the reconstructed church was glazed, one of the first essays of a feature which was to be in general use in the XIV century. To unite triforium and clearstory in a brilliant sparkle of color added to the magnificence of a church, but it marked a decline in the sound structural laws of Gothic. The purpose of a triforium arcade was to beautify the plain wall surface necessitated by the lean-to roof over the side aisles. When that blind arcade was opened, the lean-to roof of the aisles had to be changed to a conical one, which signified an inner channel for rain water and the ultimate deterioration of the masonry. Suger’s St. Denis had started the delight in stained glass, and the St. Denis of St. Louis merely carried out its consequences—the suppression of wall inclosures. The present upper windows of the abbatial are poor examples of Louis-Philippe’s day.

The architect of Louis IX, Pierre de Montereau, designed St. Denis as we have it to-day, so says a record recently unearthed by M. Henri Stein.[33] He was an innovator who here first accentuated the upward sweep of Gothic lines. To that XIII-century master they attributed for a time the Sainte-Chapelle of the king’s palace in the Cité, but now that it is certain that he planned St. Denis, it is doubted if he made the Sainte-Chapelle, as there is little kinship between the two. There is a decided likeness between St. Denis and the chapel of the palace at St. Germain-en-Laye, and also with the Lady chapel of St. Germer-en-Flay. Pierre de Montereau was buried in 1267 in a now-destroyed Sainte-Chapelle which he had erected within the monastery inclosure of St. Germain-des-Prés, at Paris.

Both Montereau and Montreuil claim this distinguished master. Probably he was born in the former town on the border of Champagne, as his church at St. Denis shows a trait of that region, the gallery of circulation under the windows of the side aisles. Moreover, two of his abbot patrons came from Montereau. The architect Eudes de Montreuil, whom St. Louis took with him on his first crusade, and who worked on the fortresses of Aigues-Mortes and Jaffa, was a son of Pierre de Montereau, it is supposed, and his name should be spelled in the same way.

No tomb in St. Denis’ abbey church predates the XIII century. To honor King Dagobert, founder of the abbey, St. Louis put up an elaborate monument and ordered the effigies that distinguish his royal predecessors’ graves. With the tombstone of St. Louis’ son, Philip the Bold, began portrait work. An exact likeness of Charles V, the good Valois king, was made by his Flemish sculptor, André Beauneveu, and of almost too great realism is that of his general Bertran Duguesclin, whom King Charles ordered buried with royal honors in the national necropolis.

It was the XVI century that added to St. Denis’ the three tombs of most architectural pretensions, those of Louis XII, Francis I, and Henry II. The monument of Louis XII and Anne of Brittany was undertaken (1516-32) by Jean Juste, who with his brothers had come north from Florence, being among the first to bring into France the ideals of the Renaissance.[34] It has been suggested that the king’s and queen’s kneeling images are from the studio at Tours of Guillaume Regnault, who for forty years was co-worker with Michel Colombe, last of the great Gothic artists. The priants are still quite French in treatment. Jean Juste made the gisants and his brother and nephew aided with the lesser sculpture. It was Louis XII who ordered artists at Genoa to make, in 1502, the Carrara marble tomb of his father, the poet-duke, Charles d’Orléans, and of his grandfather, the murdered duke of Orléans, builder of Pierrefonds Castle, and son of the art-loving Valois king, Charles V.

The tomb of Francis I (1549-59) was designed by Philibert de Lorme. Pierre Bontemps fashioned the bas-reliefs that celebrate the wars in Italy; he and other masters made the priants and gisants. The tomb of Henry II and Catherine de Medici (1570) of less artistic value, has a complicated history. The Italian, Primatici, directed the works; Domenico Florentino made the king’s kneeling figure, and Germain Pilon his gisant; Jerome della Robbia chiseled the queen’s death image.

To sum up: there are in St. Denis’ abbatial three totally different parts, built in different periods. There is Suger’s forechurch, in which linger Romanesque echoes; there is the ambulatory of purest Primary Gothic built a little later by the same great abbot; and finally there are nave, transept, and the main parts of the choir erected during the reign of St. Louis in the zenith of Gothic art.

As one stands in the center of the church, gazing along its vaulting, it is easy to perceive that the axis is broken three times, and each divergence from the straight line conforms to one of the different stages of work. The deviation of the axis line once was called poetically inclinato capite (et inclinato capite, emisit spiritum—St. John xix:30). It was thought to symbolize the inclining of Christ’s head on the Cross. When M. Robert de Lasteyrie proved that a constructive miscalculation was the cause of the irregular line, the beautiful idea had to be renounced.[35] In each successive addition to a church it was difficult for the architect to start the new part exactly on the same axis as the old, since usually a temporary wall shut off the portion of the church already finished and in use. The slightest miscalculation at the start led to a very apparent deflection of alignment. Those churches which show irregular alignment are known to have been built in successive stages. A number of church choirs slant to the south, whereas were the figure on the crucifix taken as model they would deviate to the north. In churches without a transept, or, in other words, churches that lack the extended arms of the cross, is sometimes found a decided slant to the north. Moreover, the crucifix of that epoch represented a triumphant Christ with erect head, for the art of the XIII century was serene; the pathetic in religious iconography was a later development. No writer of the period mentions a symbolic interpretation of the deviated axis, not even Bishop Guillaume Durandus, in his noted Rationale, or Signification of the Divine Offices. There is, instead, a text of the XIV century which says that a certain architect was so chagrined at having built a tortuous axial line that he never returned to be paid by the cathedral chapter. Mr. Arthur Kingsley Porter thinks that the deviation of the axis was intentionally done, in order to overcome that tendency of perspective which lessens the apparent length of a church by foreshortening its far bays. By slanting the east end, the distant bays could be brought into view, and thus the edifice would seem longer.

The Royal Abbey of St. Denis suffered during the Hundred Years’ War, from which period dates the crenelated wall at the birth of the towers. In those checkered times the silver tombs of St. Louis, of his father Louis VIII, and of his grandfather Philippe-Auguste, disappeared. In the XVI-century religious wars the abbey was pillaged, and its library, a national treasure, was burned. The Calvinists carried off Suger’s altar vessels of silver and gold, on which the learned little abbot had inscribed Latin verses. The Revolution completed the havoc; of the monks’ quarters nothing remains to-day. The Committee of Public Safety voted to destroy the tombs of “our ancient tyrants” on the first anniversary of the August 10th that had unseated the monarchy. So the mob sallied forth to St. Denis and scattered the dust of the patriot Suger, whose life work had been the public weal, and the dust of St. Louis, the most conscientious man who ever ruled a nation and the first to give France her written laws. The gruesome account of the wrecking of the royal tombs was written by an eyewitness.[36]

In the opening years of the XVIII century, the abbey church was described by Chateaubriand as in a ruinous state, with the rain falling through its roof and grass growing on the broken altars: “The birds use its nave as a passageway; little children play with the bones of mighty monarchs. St. Denis is a desert.” Napoleon began its restoration, and many of the scattered tombs were brought back. During the first half of the XIX century some deplorably bad work was carried on, and the robust primitive profiles were chiseled away. No sooner was the spire on the north tower finished than cracks showed, and the tower was dismantled to the level of the roof. Later changes have repaired some of the stupidity of those tasteless renovators.

The very history which had been enacted within the walls of the great abbatial would suffice to make it a national relic. To the Primary-Gothic church which Suger was building came Louis VII for the oriflamme, the banner carried before the army in momentous wars. He shared bed and board with the monks the night before he set forth on the Second Crusade. To the same early-Gothic church, in 1190, came his son Philippe-Auguste, to receive the oriflamme for the Third Crusade. The flame-colored abbey gonfalon on its gold lance flouted the German emperor when Bouvines’ great victory was won in 1214. At the funeral of Philippe-Auguste, in 1223, a little lad of eight marched to St. Denis’ behind his grandfather’s bier. It was the first time that the populace had beheld their future saint-king, and an old record tells how his noble bearing gladdened their hearts. At his side walked Jean de Brienne, king of Jerusalem, leader of the recent Fifth Crusade. When St. Louis came to St. Denis for the oriflamme in 1247, it was to find a totally reconstructed church, for Pierre de Montereau had been many years at work. Joinville in his memoirs described the landing in Egypt of the Royal Abbey’s banner, how for miles the sea was dotted with the gleaming ships of the crusaders, how the king, standing head and shoulders above the rest, on perceiving that the leading vessel which bore the oriflamme had touched shore, leaped into the sea, sword in hand, with the cry, “Montjoye St. Denis!” And uttering the same battle cry of France, princes and knights followed. Five years later, tested by defeat and imprisonment, as fine gold is by fire, Louis IX brought back the oriflamme to St. Denis. Again he returned for it in 1270 for his last crusade. Within a year, the whole nation, in mourning, came out to the abbey. In a reliquary, the king’s bones, embalmed with fragrant spices, had been brought from Tunis, and the new king bore the châsse solemnly, and wherever he paused, on the way from Notre Dame to St. Denis, a memorial cross was erected. But, to give the annals of the abbey church would be to tell the history of the French monarchy.

The first time that the gonfalon of St. Denis was carried against Frenchmen was in 1413, two years before the defeat at Agincourt, in the black days of the Hundred Years’ War, days as fatal to the builders’ art as to the civic life of France. What those dire times were that rent France to shreds, and how la fille de Lorraine à nulle autre pareille came to the rescue, have been sung by a poet whose high destiny it was to fall in recent battle. Charles Péguy, in his poem, linked the momentous epochs of the capital: St. Denis, who brought the Light; Ste. Geneviève, the sentinel patroness of Paris, who guarded it, and Jeanne d’Arc, who lifted up the torch from the mire—the torch which the fallen heroes of the World War have passed on refulgent.

In the V century it was at Geneviève’s instigation that a basilica was raised to honor St. Denis. In the XV century Jeanne d’Arc paid tribute to the first martyr of Paris. Her troops lodged in the town of St. Denis, then moved in closer to Paris, and in a shrine dedicated to St. Denis, in the village of La Chapelle, Jeanne heard Mass, the morning that she led the assault on the walls of Paris, September 8, 1429. When wounded she was carried back to La Chapelle (to-day a dense industrial faubourg of the city), and on St. Denis’ altar she offered tribute. During her trial at Rouen they asked her what arms she had offered to St. Denis.[37]

“A complete knight’s outfit in white, with a sword that I had won before Paris,” was Jeanne’s reply. “And why did you make that offering?” asked the judge, bent on twisting her every act to sorcery. Jeanne answered hardily: “For devotion, and because it is the custom for all men-of-arms when they are merely wounded thus to give thanks. Having been wounded before Paris, I offered my arms to St. Denis because his is the cry of France.”

But let Charles Péguy speak, he who fell between Belgium and Paris in August, 1914:[38]

Comme Dieu ne fait rien que par miséricordes,
Il fallut qu’elle [Ste. Geneviève] vît le royaume en lambeaux,
Et sa filleule ville embrasée aux flambeaux,
Et ravagée aux mains des plus sinistres hordes;

Et les cœurs dévorés des plus basses discordes,
Et les morts poursuivis jusque dans les tombeaux,
Et cent mille innocents exposés aux corbeaux,
Et les pendus tiront la langue au bout des cordes;

Pour qu’elle vît fleurir la plus grande merveille
Que jamais Dieu le père en sa simplicité
Aux jardins de sa grâce et de sa volonté
Ait fait jaillir par force et par necessité;

Après neuf cent vingt ans de prière et de veille,
Quand elle vit venir vers l’antique cité ...
La fille de Lorraine à nulle autre pareille ...
Gardant son cœur intact en pleine adversité,
Masquant sous sa visière une efficacité,
Tenant tout un royaume en sa ténacité,
Vivant en pleine mystère avec sagacité,
Mourant en plein martyre avec vivacité ...
Jetânt toute une armée aux pieds de la prière.[39]

CHAPTER III
Some of the Primary Gothic Cathedrals: Noyon, Senlis, Sens, Laon, Soissons

C’est vers le Moyen Âge énorme et délicat,
Qu’il faudrait que mon cœur en panne naviguât.
... Roi, politicien, moine, artisan, chimiste,
Architecte, soldat, médecin, avocat,
Quel temps! Oui, que mon cœur naufragé rembarquât.
Pour toute cette force ardente, souple, artiste!...
Guidé par la folie unique de la Croix
Sur tes ailes de pierre, ô folle Cathédrale!
—Paul Verlaine, Sagesse, IV.[40]

T. DENIS’ abbatial was an object lesson in the new art, and the bishops returned to their dioceses to emulate it. Two of Suger’s personal friends, the bishops of Noyon and Senlis, were the first to rebuild their cathedrals. Already during the Romanesque stage the cathedral of Sens had been initiated; it now was to be carried on according to the new system of building. At Laon was begun a splendid Gothic edifice. At Soissons, a new cathedral was started by that masterpiece of Primary Gothic, the transept’s southern arm. And many a lesser church now rose: the collegiate at Braine, the abbey church of St. Leu d’Esserent, and two abbatials in Champagne as imposing as cathedrals, St. Remi at Rheims, and Notre Dame at Châlons-sur-Marne. Also in Champagne is the Primary Gothic church of St. Quiriace at Provins.

The cathedral of Paris was also begun in the primary stage of the national art. But Notre Dame of Paris must have a chapter to itself. Before its main parts were completed, Gothic architecture had reached its culminating point. With it ended the primary group and opened what we shall call the Era of the Great Cathedrals, though let it be remembered that all such divisions are arbitrary and made use of merely for clearness. From its first assured steps to its apogee, from the middle of the XII century to the middle of the XIII, the sequence of Gothic architecture is welded too logically to be defined by cut-and-dried nomenclature.

During the XII century, the Gothic cathedrals retained Romanesque features, such as deep tribunes over the side aisles, which gave them a wall elevation in four stories—pier arcade, tribune, triforium (to veil the lean-to roof over the tribune), and clearstory. At first it was common usage to encircle the clustered shafts at intervals with stone rings, but by the XIII century the desire for an unbroken ascending line had grown stronger, and the employment of such horizontal bands died out. The simultaneous use of both round and pointed arch is found in all five of these Primary cathedrals; but after the opening of the XIII century, semicircular and equilateral arches rarely were used at the same time in a church. Slowly, as if with reluctance, the new architecture dropped favorite traits of the old school. Sculpture continued longest faithful to Romanesque traditions.

Noyon, Senlis, Sens, Laon, and Soissons—it seems rash to treat of such a bevy of churches in one chapter, when students have made a single cathedral their life work. The passing traveler is encouraged by one fact: each big French church, once seen, remains a clear-cut memory, for each possesses a distinct personality. To confuse one cathedral with another is impossible.

It is an instinct deeper than mere fancy to choose a season æsthetically right for a first visit to such sanctuaries. For these Primary cathedrals the fitting occasion is that fugitive hour when the leaves are multiple yet half transparent still, only partly veiling the virile framework of the tree. In them is the evanescence of spring, the slenderness of adolescence and its virginal restraint, that something of youth’s severity, that something of youth’s radiance which is joy, but not abandonment to joy.

There is something sacred in the modest sobriety of the earlier Gothic churches.... But what words can express their unimaginable charm! If all true art is but a symbol, a prefiguring of the mystery, these churches veil and reveal the coming harmonies of the Beyond as it never before was revealed and veiled. We speak of Chartres as a recollected holiness; the stones of Rheims were made majestic for royal pageants; Amiens is a sursum corda. And yet there is something in the first fugitive hour when Romanesque and Gothic met that makes a deeper appeal to the soul. No Greek, in portico or sepulchral tablet, conceived beauty of lovelier proportion, of more heart-piercing simplicity, than some of the earlier churches of the national genius.

When in the French towns the word passed from mouth to mouth, on a tragic day of September, 1914, that Rheims Cathedral was in flames, there were many who asked breathlessly: “And St. Remi? What of St. Remi?” And when the invaders burst upon Senlis, many who knew the lovely springtime Gothic church of St. Leu d’Esserent trembled for its fate. Over the birthplace of the nation’s unity of language and architecture has poured a pitiless rain of iron and fire, a destruction akin to desecration.[41] Cradle and necropolis!

The iron grip has held cloistral Noyon that was only too content to be forgotten in its distinguished retirement. The proudest mediæval thing in France, Laon set with feudal arrogance on its high hill, has been long years in chained captivity. For seven centuries the faithful bulls on Laon’s towers have looked out, like sentinels, over the city. With dread forebodings they stood in their captivity, aware that the angel guard set about Rheims Cathedral had pleaded in vain, that the tower of Senlis, pride of all the Valois country, had been selected as a target by the invaders’ guns. And Bamburg and Limburg, Halberstadt and Magdeburg, had copied Laon Cathedral in the old days when the opus francigenum aroused emulation, not hate, across the Rhine.

Month after month, year after year, the shells rained on Soissons; town and cathedral lie in ruins. The fair cities of this inmost heart of France have been desolated, the loyal places that hastened to open their gates to Jeanne d’Arc when she rode by with her king from the coronation in Rheims—Senlis and Laon, Soissons and Compiègne,[42] and Crespy-en-Valois, the countryside that greeted her with such love that she said she hoped to be buried among such good folk, among these chiers et bons amis les loyaulx Franxois habitons les bonnes villes.[43] Always in the vanguard of battle were these ancient cities of France, always the boulevard of the capital, yet the wars of centuries had respected their churches. Future ages will read of the glorification of brute force by the invaders who refused to take pity on Soissons, Noyon, and Rheims, when they stand before the giant amorphous 1913 memorial at Leipzig. Therein speaks the Prussian purpose as distinctly as, in Gothic cathedrals, speaks the idealism that sent the old and young crusading, and spurred man on to “the bravest effort he ever made to save his soul.”

Tragic irreparable early churches of France! Like martyrs in the arena, you have been laid low, one after the other.... But martyrs leave undying memories. If loved before with an almost unfair preference, you are sacred now. Rheims, Soissons, Noyon, and Senlis—your names have become sacramental.

NOYON CATHEDRAL[44]

Vous entendrez rugir une de ces batailles
Où les peuples entiers se mordent aux entrailles,
Un combat formidable aux cris désespérés,
Dont parleront longtemps les hommes effarés;
Car nous saurons de moins, si notre France expire,
Lui creuser un tombeau plus large qu’un empire.
—Louis Bouilhet.

Most of the cathedrals of France have an early history following the same general lines. Each may be said to have passed through a Merovingian stage, and to have rebuilt itself larger and finer in Carolingian times.[45] The inroads of the Northmen pirates and the conflagration of timber roofs wrecked most of the cathedrals, so that a third and often a fourth reconstruction went on during the Romanesque era—the century and a half that followed the year 1000. When the evolution of Gothic art was accomplished, there were few churches that were not renewed. It has been said that never before had such a noble frenzy of building seized on mankind.

In the short biography traced here of each cathedral, seldom will an account be given of former edifices, but rather the story of each church as it now stands. While some portion may be Romanesque, it is uncommon to find any Carolingian vestige remaining.

The bishop of Noyon took the initiative set by Abbot Suger at St. Denis. He was the first to start a cathedral in the new way just as Noyon can boast that hers was the first communal charter of which there is record. In 1109 the liberal Bishop Baudry granted the town its franchise, without the turbulent scenes by which other cities were to wrench theirs from their feudal proprietors. “Know then, all Christians, present and future, that by advice of priests, knights, and townsman I have established a commune in Noyon,” begins the bishop’s parchment. Many a neighboring city modeled its charter on that of Noyon.

The quiet towns on the Oise played a precocious part in what Gratry calls “the big historic effort at justice which occurred in the XII century, the strong will to get out of barbaric chaos which began our era, and which, eight hundred years ago, started the impulses of modern progress.” From city to city the communal movement quickened. France began to be covered by associations for mutual aid, and the winning of city charters and the creation of guilds went hand in hand with the intellectual ferment in the schools and the creation of a national architecture.

A second Carolingian cathedral of Noyon was replaced in the XI century by a Romanesque one which was burned in 1131, when the city was laid in ashes. At that time, Pope Innocent II was visiting a lord of the region, a cousin of Louis VII, and the brother of the bishop of Noyon, Simon de Vermandois. The pope wrote to various French prelates enjoining on them to help Noyon in its disaster. Bishop Simon must have built part of the walls of the present choir, but as he accompanied Louis VII on the Second Crusade, and died in the East, it was his successor, Bishop Baudouin II (1148-67), friend of Suger, friend, too, of St. Bernard, who really inaugurated the present cathedral about 1150. He sacrificed in large part what was already done of Bishop Simon’s choir in order to put it into character with the newly expounded principles of architecture. The choir of St. Denis was his direct model, and he obtained from Abbot Suger some of his masons; the profiles and ornamentation at Noyon are identical with those of St. Denis.

In 1157, the relics of St. Eloi, Noyon’s noted VII-century bishop, a skilled goldsmith and prime minister for King Dagobert, were transferred to the new sanctuary, probably because it was then completed. In the time of Bishop Baudouin III, who died in 1174, the transept was finished, as well as the bays of the nave near it. Noyon’s western limb rose during three campaigns of work, as is indicated by differences in its details, but in main part the nave is a work of the final quarter of the XII century.

The cathedral was finished by the westernmost bay of its nave, its capacious porch, and the southwest tower, under Bishop Étienne de Nemours (1188-1222), who had three brothers, also bishops and builders, at Paris, at Meaux, and at Châlons, the sons, all four of them, of a lord chancellor of France. In Noyon, Bishop Étienne was a sound administrator; he was favorable to the municipality, regulated the town’s moneys, and built a hospital. Philippe-Auguste sent him to Denmark to escort to France the unfortunate Princess Ingeborg, who was to be his second wife. The bishop was buried as a benefactor in the abbey of Ourscamp, four miles from Noyon, farther down the Oise, which house was a foundation of Bishop Simon de Vermandois, though only vestiges of its XII-century parts remain.[46]

During the last decade of the XIII century a terrible fire raged for two days in Noyon Cathedral. The vaulting throughout the church, save in the choir aisle, had to be reconstructed. For the sexpartite system, which embraces two bays, and has six branches from the keystone of each vault section, was now substituted the barlong plan, where diagonals cover one bay. The early-Gothic architects took up with enthusiasm the Normans’ sexpartite plan, but after using it for half a century they most sensibly returned to the quadripartite system as better suited to their needs. The sexpartite vault calls for piers of alternating strength, since on the heavier pier fall diagonals and transverse arch, and only a transverse arch on the intermediate pier.

Noyon Cathedral had from its start planned for a sexpartite vault by building its ground supports of alternating strength. Its piers, therefore, became illogical when a barlong vaulting was erected after the fire of 1193. And one regrets that it has not its original stone roof, since the correlations in this hardy first cathedral are elsewhere very perfect. Throughout the church are details of subtle charm. There is a slight bending out, like a horseshoe, of the archivolts of the pier arcade, which archivolts are severely plain. Usually from the abacus of a main pier rise five clustered shafts to the level of the vault-springing, two to catch the diagonals, two for the longitudinal or wall arches, and one for the transverse arch. Noyon showed constructive agility in concentrating its wall ribs and diagonals on a single shaft, which meant only three clustered colonnettes from main piers to vault-springing.

Each cathedral in France possesses a few traits peculiar to itself. Noyon is unique in having both ends of its transept terminate in hemicycles, like a Rhenish church.[47] The Romanesque school of the Rhine had derived the feature from the early chapels of Rome. Probably Noyon’s transept apses came from retaining the foundations of the previous cathedral. A church which was long in the jurisdiction of Noyon—the cathedral at Tournai—still possesses its Romanesque transept with semicircular ends. Cambrai Cathedral, destroyed by the Revolution, once had a similar pre-Gothic transept; its choir, built from 1220 to 1237 in the golden day of the national art, was an irreparable loss. Noyon Cathedral showed another Germanic trait in what may be called a western transept, made by the lower stories of the façade towers and the middle section of the first bay.

The nave of Noyon is a noble vessel, with an interior four-story elevation of happier proportions than was achieved in the transept. No longer do annulets bind the clustered shafts, thus breaking the ascending line as in the choir. Throughout the church is to be found the simultaneous use of round and pointed arches, and, curiously enough, it is the lower stories, pier arcade, and tribune, that used the pointed arch; in the triforium and clearstory the arches are semicircular. Everywhere the sculptured capitals are of rare beauty. The Romanesque acanthus leaf is found in juxtaposition with the Gothic crocket.

Noyon is exceptional in having retained its annexes: the treasure hall built by Bishop Baudouin II, the chapel of the episcopal palace, a half-timber library, and a beautiful chapter house (c. 1240). This latter, opening on a fragment of the cathedral cloister, is a hall divided into two aisles by a row of slender pillars, the type preferred by the French, whereas in England the circular hall whose vault ribs were gathered on a central pier was more popular. Noyon’s chapter house was built by Bishop Pierre Chalot, who died at sea, off Cyprus, on St. Louis’ crusade of 1248.

When in late-Gothic times Noyon was adding chapels and side aisles, her master-of-works was Jean Turpin, who at Péronne—pitiful Péronne la Pucelle entirely a ruin to-day—erected a Flamboyant Gothic church which was a veritable gem.

The battle of giants, foreseen in the poet’s dream, twice engulfed Noyon during the World War. From the first occupation by the enemy the city escaped without serious injury. Then in March, 1918, began the Germans’ desperate advance on Paris. At the end of the month the mayor of Noyon quitted the city, the last to leave. And in September he was the first to re-enter Noyon after the second battle of the Marne had driven back the invaders. He found his town a ruin. Not a single building had escaped injury, and only ten days earlier a photograph taken from a French airship had shown that the Renaissance Town Hall and Noyon’s chief square were intact; few monuments had suffered from the occasional bombardments by the Allies. The Hôtel de Ville had been built in the dawn of the classic Renaissance, and its fine façades retained much of the Gothic spirit. Before their departure the invaders blew up the town; not even Calvin’s birthplace was spared. Hardly 10 per cent of the houses of this amiable little city that asked only to be left unmolested by the fever and fret of new things are to-day worth reconstruction.

As if by a miracle, the cathedral and a side street named for the old goldsmith bishop, St. Eloi, were preserved. The cathedral roof is pierced by shells in a dozen places and the northern tower and the porch between the towers are smashed, but the interior is but slightly damaged. In one of the side chapels a vandal fired his pistol many times at a picture of the Saviour. Perhaps it was the memory that Noyon’s rounded transept ends and forechurch were Germanic which saved the cathedral. Better is it to remember by a Radegund, by a Charlemagne, than by Odin and Thor.

THE CATHEDRAL OF SENLIS[48]

To-day analysis has seized on all things, and it is leading us to death. Man, we must not forget, lives intellectually by synthesis.... If archæology is to make known the monuments of the past, it ought, before all else, to try to make them loved, for, given the uncertitude of the future, it is in that love that they will find their only chance of safety.

—Émile Lambin.[49]

Senlis was the second begun of the Gothic cathedrals. The most fecund region for early essays in the nascent national art lay between Senlis and Noyon. Thibaut, bishop of Senlis, was present at Abbot Suger’s deathbed in 1151. Filled with the ambition to replace his half-ruined church by a Gothic one, he began, about 1152, the new works, and once more the abbey church of St. Denis was the model. Some of Senlis’ original vaults remain over side aisles, tribune, and apse chapels. Their intersecting ribs show a certain inexperience, and in places semicircular diagonals still are used. The framing arches of each section are lower than the keystone of the diagonals, which imparts a bombé shape to the vault. As the masons acquired skill in the making of Gothic stone roofs, this domical form died out; by stilting, by depressing, and by pointing the arches was the difficulty solved. Like Noyon, Senlis played a part in the early history of France. The Merovingian and Carolingian kings and those of the House of Capet frequented the little city in order to hunt in the forests of the Oise. Louis VII made Senlis his favorite residence, and when the new cathedral was undertaken he allowed donations to be collected over the entire kingdom.

When Bishop Thibaut died, the succeeding prelates, Henri and Geoffrey, continued to give largely of their revenues to the new works, but the progress was slow. Senlis was a small diocese for so big a monument. About the time that the choir was finished, 1180, the sculpture of the central-western portal was set up, a gem of Primary Gothic, though sadly damaged by time. It marks a date in French mediæval sculpture. On the lintel is related the Death of the Virgin and her Assumption, in the tympanum her Coronation. Senlis was the first to use this ordinance which the XIII century frequently repeated; we find it at Chartres’ north portal, and at the entrance under the northwest tower of Notre Dame at Paris.

M. Émile Mâle with his usual happy phrasing speaks of the lyric beauty of the lintel stone at Senlis.[50] It was partly inspired by the Golden Legend of the good Bishop James of Genoa, which in its turn had used the apocryphal gospels freely.[51] The legend relates that at the deathbed of Our Lady, the Apostles gathered, and St. John cautioned them: “Be careful when she is dead that no one weeps, lest the people, seeing our tears, be troubled, and say, ‘They fear death, who preach the Resurrection.’” For three days Our Lady rested in her tomb in the valley of Jehoshaphat, then came her Divine Son, with angels, singing the Canticle of Canticles, to escort her to Paradise. The old sculptor of Senlis has depicted the touching reverence with which the angels bend, to lift from the tomb their future Queen of Heaven. Their gesture of eager love is one of the exquisitely delicate conceptions of mediæval sculpture.

While they were carving the west portal there came to Senlis a touching figure, the young mother of the future Louis VIII, Isabelle, daughter of Baudouin V of Flanders, who claimed direct descent from Charlemagne; through her the blood of the Carolingian line passed into the third dynasty of France. She was to die, at nineteen, almost repudiated by Philippe-Auguste, because her people declined to support one of his projects. In Senlis Cathedral this gentle grandmother of St. Louis walked barefooted, candle in hand, beseeching assistance from the Mother of God with such humility that the beholders wept. She founded a chapel in the cathedral.

A few years later, in 1191, the cathedral of Senlis was consecrated by that archbishop of Sens who was Philippe-Auguste’s uncle, Guillaume of Champagne, William of the White Hands, the prelate who had completed the cathedral at Sens. And there came to the dedication Bishop Nivelon de Chérisy, just starting Soissons’ Cathedral; Bishop Étienne de Nemours, at work on Noyon’s; the prelate of Meaux, who was raising that cathedral; and many another expert in the new art. Sometime later, Bishop Geoffrey resigned his see, and in his place was elected Pierre Guérin, chancellor of France under three kings, a figure worthy to stand beside those Gallo-Roman bishops who remained as bulwarks of society when the Roman Empire fell in pieces around them.

Bishop Guérin was a man possessed by a passion for the public weal. His prudence and firmness caused Philippe-Auguste and Louis VIII to name him executor of their testaments. One of his enterprises was the organizing of the royal archives. It was he who came to Blanche of Castile to break the news of her husband’s death as she rode out from Paris to meet Louis VIII returning from the southern war. For Louis IX during his minority he showed a father’s affection. “He governed marvelously well the kingdom’s needs,” says the old chronicler, and when he died, on his grave they inscribed, “Here lies Guérin, whose life was an untiring work.”

In early life Guérin had, in Palestine, become a Knight Hospitalier of St. John of Jerusalem, and, as bishop, continued to wear the white habit of that military order. At the battle of Bouvines, though not an actual combatant, he exhorted the troops and directed maneuvers, for he was skilled in the strategy of war. A survey of the enemy’s position made him urge Philippe-Auguste to attack at once, and the king, who knew Guérin to be sages homs et de parfont conseil, obeyed, thus winning the greatest victory of the century. “On that day French unity received its baptism.”

The king had vowed, were his arms successful, to endow an abbey. Bishop Guérin laid for him the first stone of the Abbaye de la Victoire, near his episcopal city.[52] Before this greatest of the bishops of Senlis died, his cathedral had begun to crown its southwest tower by the octagon and spire which are the boast of all the Valois country. St. Louis must have contributed to Senlis’ famous tower, which places in foremost rank, this, the smallest cathedral in France. The unknown architect gathered features from many a beacon to unite them here in a masterpiece. He may be said to have created a new type, since his belfry at Senlis made a school in the region.[53]

The graduation of the upright shaft into the inclined plane, which in every tower is the crucial point, has here been accomplished with such address, such rhythm, that precisely at what instant the fusion takes place is not to be determined. It has been said that the shaft of the tower is too high in proportion to its spire; at a distance perhaps the criticism may seem justified, but not on closer view. Some have thought that Senlis’ belfry was a trifle too conscious of its charms, that it had not the calm poise of Chartres’ tower. So it may be; there is more of the woman than the archangel in it. Its personal graciousness has become so wedded with the lives of Senlis’ townspeople that they wish it good morning as they pass. The voyager will not find himself many hours in Senlis without pausing at every coign of vantage to gain some new silhouette effect of the slender beacon. It is charming when viewed in the same group as the Gallo-Roman ramparts. And from the open door of the church of St. Frambourg,[54] it can be studied at leisure.

In the original plan of Senlis’ Cathedral there was only an indication of a transept—two small lateral chapels that open, to-day, from the choir aisle. When, about 1240, the radiant tower was finished they undertook to make a real transept. To insert one they had to do away with four bays of the nave; some ancient columns in the west piers of the transept witness to this change. In its present form the transept of Senlis belongs to the XIII century only in its lower walls.

In 1504 a conflagration lasting several days destroyed the cathedral’s upper vaulting and necessitated the total reconstruction of the clearstory. In consequence, the exterior appearance of this very early Gothic church is most decidedly Flamboyant. Only the apse and the west façade have retained their Primary Gothic aspect. Chapels with complicated pendant vaults were built, aisles were added, and balustrades put before the tribune opening. Thick coats of whitewash coarsened the lines; in fact, restorations have been so radical, and many of them so over-ornate, that this cathedral has been called the Gothic of bad taste. An extreme criticism, for if some of the changes are distressing, Senlis’ transept façades, which also are later additions, are to be reckoned among the best work of the final phase of the national art.

After the fire of 1504 the cathedral chapter sought assistance from the king: “Plaise au Roy d’avoir pitié et compassion de la paoure église de Senlis ... laquelle, par fortune et inconvénient de feu a été bruslée, les cloches fondues, et le clocher qui est grant, magnifique et l’un des singuliers du royaume, au moyen du dit feu tellement endommagé qu’il est en danger de tomber.” Royalty responded generously as the sculpture shows; at the transept’s portals are to be seen the porcupine of Louis XII, the ermine of Anne of Brittany, and the salamander of Francis I.

Under the learned Bishop Guillaume Parvi, confessor to Francis I, was laid the first stone of the transept’s elaborate south façade in 1521. On it worked Pierre de Chambiges, son of the noted maker of late-Gothic frontispieces, and Jean Dixieult. And when it was nearing completion in 1560 the north façade was begun, and finished by the latter master.

Effective, vivid, alertly handsome are Senlis’ transept fronts. The wise traveler, even if he infinitely prefers the purer lines of early Gothic, will learn to value this florid final expansion of the national art. The renewal of builders’ energy in the XV and XVI centuries was a sumptuous phase worthy of admiration. Those who are partial to English Gothic do not need to be warned against depreciating French Flamboyant work. The advice to be eclectic in travel, so as not to lose any source of artistic pleasure, is for those whose ideal of the builders’ art is that of the Ile-de-France, comprised between 1150 and 1250. For such the chief interest of Senlis will be the cathedral’s apse, its main façade, and the splendid tower. Let them widen their sympathies and take in the effective transept-fronts of the Flamboyant rebirth.

Senlis of the towers, of the silent squares, of the quaint names—rue des Fromages, rue du Puits-Tiphane, rue des Pigeons Blancs—a charming aristocratic little city, set in an undulating Corot-like landscape, dotted with country houses, was the very epitome of well-conditioned provincial life. Before the summer of 1914 no spot on earth seemed farther removed from violence and crime. Then came the invading hordes over the Valois land. On September 2, 1914, the Germans surrounded Senlis, which, ville ouverte though it was, they proceeded to bombard. One third of the obus that fell hit the cathedral. That the guns, three miles away, were pointed on the famous tower would seem to be proved by the fact that only those houses were damaged which lay in the direct line between the German battery and Notre Dame.

When the enemy entered the city the mayor (shot later in reprisal) met them at the Hôtel de Ville. He had scarcely assured them that no troops remained in Senlis when shots rang out: by ill luck some colonial colored troops, on retiring, fired a salute. Thereupon followed the usual accusation that civilians were the combatants, and the usual tragic scenes of reprisal. Down the main street of the little city passed the trained wreckers of peaceful homes, prying open the doors to throw in incendiary bombs. Before night a whole section of Senlis lay an unsightly blackened ruin.... Then came the victory of the Marne and the invaders retreated. The havoc done to the cathedral can be repaired, though, in the process, must be lost the exquisite golden lichen stain which long ages had achieved. The preservation of Senlis’ tower was due to a curé of the cathedral who fearlessly pleaded for his church before the German commandant.

THE CATHEDRAL OF SENS[55]

What were Rheims and Soissons before their martyrdom but the transfiguring of stone and metal and wood; dead matter delved from the ground or hewn out of the forest, through the labor of man exalted into forms of absolute beauty, and, because of this loving labor, transformed ... into a mysterious creation that, in the words of Suger of St. Denis, was neither wholly of earth nor wholly of Heaven, but a mysterious blending of both.

—Ralph Adams Cram.[56]

Sens was a chief Celtic city at the intersecting of the Roman roads from Lyons to Paris, from Orléans to Troyes. Long did it dispute the title of primate of Gaul with Lyons and Rheims; even down to the XVI century Paris was within its jurisdiction. To-day as the express trains rush by from Paris to Marseilles, many a traveler looks out on a cathedral that seems to over-tower and overpower a flat, sleepy little town whose name he scarcely knows. When the cathedral was building in the XII century Sens was a center of the nation’s life, and under a succession of noteworthy archbishops reached its zenith.

Here at the Council of Sens, in 1140, was scheduled to take place a final contest between St. Bernard and Abélard, and in that hour of enthusiasm over abstract controversy, the king with his court and people of every degree flocked to Sens for the schoolmen’s debate on the Trinity. At the last moment Abélard, the inexhaustible arguer who had himself called for the test, quitted the combat. Some twenty years later Pope Alexander III spent a year and a half in Sens, and hither came Thomas Becket to seek papal indorsement for his opposition to Henry II’s interference in church affairs. Between these two events, 1140 to 1164, lies the building of Sens Cathedral. At the time of Abélard’s and St. Bernard’s visit the present edifice had been started. During the residence here of Alexander III and the archbishop of Canterbury it was nearing completion. The pope is recorded as dedicating an altar.

For a time Sens usurped the claim to be the oldest of the Gothic cathedrals. Its choir was started as Romanesque, but the walls rose slowly, and before a stone roof crowned the ambulatory the new system of building had conquered public opinion. The choir-aisle walls, intended to carry a groin vault, were rearranged to bear one with diagonals. On the outer wall the diagonals were caught on corbels placed above the capitals, and though such an arrangement shows maladroitness, the ribs themselves were made by no novice hand. Sens was a pioneer in the use of the broken rib to avoid the curving of diagonals: from each keystone, set precisely in the center of each section, branched the four ribs.

The walls of the procession path and an apsidal chapel opening on the transept’s north arm, are the oldest parts of Sens Cathedral. It is true that they antedate the dedication of St. Denis, but not by a few Romanesque vestiges can Sens substantiate its claim to be the first built of Gothic cathedrals. In its main parts it belongs to the third quarter of the XII century. It was a distinct advance on Noyon and Senlis, because it eliminated the deep tribunes over the side aisles. One of the striking characteristics of Sens is the way that light floods it from the aisle windows, which are on a noble scale. Because the church was built during a tentative hour its deficiency lies in the height of the central nave. For right proportion, when flanked by such lofty aisles, the nave should have been made considerably higher.

Sens Cathedral was begun by Archbishop Henri-le-Sanglier (1122-43) to replace a church dedicated at the end of the X century. Such strides has mediæval archaeology taken in France during the last generations, it is hard to believe that serious students, during the Congrès Archéologique held at Sens in 1840, could have considered the present edifice to be the one dedicated before 1000.

Henri-le-Sanglier had been appointed by Louis VI to the see of Sens before he had received holy orders, and in the lax spiritual standards of the day, he saw no harm in living like the feudal lord he was by birth. He had not Thomas of Canterbury’s unbending consistency. When his worldliness was censured by St. Bernard he changed his way of life, and ultimately proved himself a loyal and humane pastor.

Of the six archbishops who were to follow him as builders of Sens’ metropolitan church, all of them were national figures. Under the long rule of Hugues de Toucy (1143-68) the church was mainly erected. He was the friend of Abbot Suger the pioneer, the friend, too, of Bernard the regenerator, who came as his guest to Sens, after preaching the Second Crusade at Vézelay. The same hospitable bishop welcomed on two occasions the exiled archbishop of Canterbury. The second visit of St. Thomas Becket was when he had been forced to quit the abbey of Pontigny, situated close by over the Burgundian border, because Henry Plantagenet swore to close every Cistercian house in his English and French domains if further refuge were offered the prelate. Moved by the welcome given him in his distress by the archbishop of Sens, the famous Englishman cried out—so his secretary, Herbert of Bosham, records: “Ah, we have proved the truth of the old saying—‘douce France! ô douce encore, ô très douce France! Oui, elle est douce, vraiment douce, la France!’”

By a series of logical inferences the name of the architect of this Primary Gothic cathedral has been added to the roll call of honor. It is known that Guillaume de Sens, a French master, was chosen in 1174 by the chapter of Canterbury to rebuild their cathedral, destroyed by fire. He drew the plan of Canterbury and had put up its apse, its Lady chapel, and two bays of the choir, when one day he fell fifty feet from a scaffold, and returned, in 1180, to his native land to die. An English architect, also named William, continued the works at Canterbury, always on the plan of French William.

Now the chevet of Canterbury has strong analogies with that of Sens. There is the same single chapel in its axis; at Sens other apse chapels were added in the XVI and XVIII centuries. The profiles were alike in both cathedrals, and so were the sexpartite vaulting and the embryo transept. In both Canterbury and Sens is an exceptional feature, of Champagne origin, which could hardly have been used accidentally by two men in the same generation. Each alternate pier, at Sens, consists of twin columns, placed side by side according to the width, not the length, of the church. At Canterbury, despite subsequent rebuildings, the same arrangement is still to be found in the bay before the sanctuary.

Guillaume de Sens was too prominent to have copied another man’s work, and since it is certain that the plan of Canterbury is his, it is now accepted that he built the cathedral of his native town before he proceeded to England. The homogeneous choir and nave of Sens show that they are the work of the years preceding 1175. And Guillaume’s claim to be Sens’ architect is further strengthened by a historic link. Not only did Thomas Becket spend three weeks with Archbishop Hugues de Toucy on his first arrival in the city during the pope’s stay there, but, after quitting Pontigny, he passed some years in St. Colombe monastery by the town. Without a doubt he knew the master-of-works who was erecting the cathedral, and it may have been he who, on his return to his own see, made the French architect’s skill known to his cathedral chapter. Guillaume was not called to Canterbury, however, till after the martyrdom of its great archbishop.

Sens Cathedral was completed by a prince of the reigning house of Champagne, a son of Thibaut the Great, Archbishop Guillaume-of-the-White-Hands (1168-76). He, too, was Becket’s stanch supporter, and denounced his murder to the pope, though by blood he was Henry II’s cousin. In 1178 he crossed to England to pray by the tomb of the newly canonized saint—one of the first of the Canterbury Pilgrims who for over three hundred years were to wend their way to the shrine in Kent. Through his influence, Becket’s friend and adviser, John of Salisbury, the ablest scholar of his generation, was raised to the see of Chartres. Both William of Champagne and John of Salisbury received episcopal consecration from the hands of good Maurice de Sully, the builder of Paris Cathedral. In his later life Archbishop Guillaume was transferred to the see of Rheims, and in that cathedral he anointed as king his own nephew, Philippe-Auguste, whose prime minister he was; when Philippe II went on the Third Crusade he left as regents his uncle and his mother, Alix of Champagne. The archbishop’s affection for his nephew led him to sanction the king’s divorce from Ingeborg of Denmark and his marriage to Agnes of Méran, which drew on France the papal interdict, and on William of Champagne the censures of Innocent III.

The house occupied by Thomas Becket, in the cloister of Sens Cathedral, was decorated by a statue of him, which disappeared during the Revolution. During excavations in the cloister, in 1899, they came upon an image representing a bishop, and marked with the seal of Archbishop Guillaume-of-the-White-Hands. The statue is now set up in the choir aisle on the site where once stood an altar dedicated to St. Thomas of Canterbury.

The tutelary of Sens Cathedral is St. Stephen, the first martyr. A XII-century statue at the trumeau, or central shaft, of the west door presents him as the beautiful youthful servant of the Lord. Gazing at it one thinks of St. Augustine’s words: “The Church would never have had St. Paul but for St. Stephen’s prayer.” Paul, holding the robes of those who stoned Stephen, heard the martyr pray for his executioners. The trumeau statue of St. Etienne with its parallel feet marks the transition from the column image, such as those at Chartres’ western portal, to the XIII-century type of saintly personages at the doors of Rheims and Amiens. It escaped mutilation during the Revolution because some one had the wit to write on the stone tablet in the saint’s hand, The Book of the Law. The foliage relief on the shaft is exquisite.

As the XII century closed the archbishop of Sens was Michel de Corbeil (1194-99), a well-known scholastic writer. Under him and Pierre de Corbeil (d. 1222), his successor and also a learned teacher from the Paris schools, the axis chapel at Sens was rebuilt, and the upper vaulting of choir and nave reconstructed in order to enlarge the windows. As the longitudinal or wall arches were now raised to the level of the keystone, the bombé shape of the vault disappeared; in the chevet the wall ribs show as many as three sets of capitals. The vault sections of the side aisles, however, remained domical, as originally built.

Two other distinguished brothers, men of great lineage and intellectual attainment, ruled the see of Sens during many years, Gautier de Cornut from 1222 to 1241 and Gilles de Cornut, who died in 1254; and they had a brother who busied himself with the new cathedral at Beauvais. Gautier de Cornut, who while doctor of law in Paris University served as chaplain to Philippe-Auguste and Louis VIII, was the envoy sent in 1234 to fetch Marguerite of Provence to be married to Louis IX in Sens Cathedral, the king then being in his twentieth year. The young princess of the art-loving Midi came north accompanied by a troop of minstrels. Again in 1239 St. Louis returned to Sens for the Crown of Thorns, on its transit from Venice to Paris, and he walked out some miles from the city to meet it. Barefooted, he and his brother, Robert of Artois, bore back the previous relics to the cathedral, through streets hung with tapestries and lighted by candles. The relic rested in St. Étienne’s church all night and then in a solemn, eight-day procession was carried to Paris. The king had the archbishop write the formal account of it all. Gautier de Cornut erected the synodal hall which touches the cathedral’s façade, and his own statue and that of the young king decorated its buttresses. The best civic monument of St. Louis’ reign many think it to be, and as perfect in its own way as the hospital hall at Ourscamp, its contemporary.

In 1267 the cathedral’s southwest tower fell; it may have been one built in Carolingian times from the proceeds of a gold retable, or it may have been a XII-century tower of Archbishop Hugues de Toucy’s time, as are the two lower stories of the present northwest tower. Its fall necessitated the remaking of the last two bays of the nave and of the damaged western doors during the early XIV century. The side chapels were built then, too, but they have been rehandled in the present day, and are now dissimulated behind an arcaded wall. A record of 1319 speaks of the able Nicholas de Chaumes as architect here before he proceeded to Meaux Cathedral. He demolished the ancient chapel on the transept’s southern arm, but its corresponding chapel, on the transept’s northern arm, still exists and is, with the ambulatory walls, the oldest part of the church. Not till after the Hundred Years’ War, however, was the plan to erect a new transept carried through.

Sens then possessed as its archbishop, during forty years, the energetic Tristan de Salazar (d. 1519) who had fought, sword in hand, with Louis XII in the Italian wars. Like Bishop Jacques d’Amboise, who was then finishing at Paris the present Musée Cluny as town house for his abbey of Cluny, Archbishop de Salazar built the Hôtel Sens in Paris for his diocesan house. To his own cathedral he added the southwest tower’s upper story (to which later a Renaissance lantern was attached) and he connected the synodal hall with the episcopal palace by a rich gallery. Some sculptured panels now attached to a pier in the nave of Sens Cathedral originally formed part of a tomb he had made for his parents. It was this munificent art patron who began the late-Gothic transept. In 1490 the most notable architect of the day, Martin Chambiges, was invited to direct the work, and for four years he gave it his personal supervision until called to Troyes to make the Flamboyant Gothic façade of that cathedral.

Sens Cathedral contains some ancient windows, four of which are among the best in France and allied with Suger’s school, though probably executed as the XIII century opened, since the saddle bars follow the outline of the medallion pictures. Those four exceptional windows of the choir aisle sparkle with the jeweled intensity of the golden age of the vitrine art. In one of them is told the story of St. Eustace, often to be met with in French iconography, since he figured in the Golden Legend. Another describes the return to England of Thomas Becket and his immediate martyrdom. Originally next to it hung a companion lancet, giving Becket’s early life, but this was done away with to make room for a chapel. The other two lancets are of the Biblia Pauperum type. In one, the parable of the Prodigal Son is given. In the other is the story of the Good Samaritan, and the half medallions on either side of each central scene interpret it symbolically. Such correlation of the Old and the New Testament was most popular in the Middle Ages. Beside a medallion which shows the traveler fallen among thieves stands the expulsion of Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden; and the scene of the charitable Samaritan is accompanied by pictures of the Saviour’s death and resurrection. They might not be able to write and read, the ordinary men and women of that day, they had no daily journal to crowd their minds with half-digested facts, but their souls were fed by sound ethical truths set forth clearly in their one great book, the cathedral. The artisan donors of such windows we may be sure knew the symbolic meaning of every panel.

In the clearstory windows at the curve of Sens’ choir is more XIII-century glass, but it is later work, lacking the marvelous glow of the choir-aisle lancets. The two big roses of the transept are splendid. A celestial concert was then a favorite theme. The south rose (1500) was made by the same Champagne artists, Lyénin, Varin, Verrat, and Godon who filled the nave of Troyes Cathedral with its high-colored translucent woodcuts. The north rose of the transept finished in 1504, was the work of native masters, influenced by the noted school of Troyes. The side windows in Sens’ Flamboyant transept are equally good.[57]

Jean Cousin, born in Sens, 1501, made two of the cathedral’s windows, the rich one of St. Eutropius, in the nave, and the Tiburtine sibyl of amplest design, in the shrine to the south of the axis chapel. Nothing could be more resplendent as picture windows, but Gothic-Renaissance work, whose tendency was to treat each light as an isolated picture, is not equal to the close-woven patterns of XII-and XIII-century mosaic glass, which kept itself in subordination to its architectural setting. The immense superiority of the earlier windows is demonstrated in Sens Cathedral, which offers us both types at their best.

THE CATHEDRAL OF LAON[58]

And I saw the holy city, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband.—Apoc. xxi:2, used in the office for the dedication of a church.

While Sens, Noyon, and Senlis were building, the splendid cathedral of Laon was begun, about 1160. The usual transition features of Primary Gothic showed in its retention of tribunes over the side aisles, in the simultaneous use of round and pointed arches, the beringed colonnettes, and the salient transept arms. The chapel, in two stories, that opened on each arm of the transept, was another Romanesque tradition.

The interior of Laon, “the cathedral of Purity, Silence, and Power,” is indeed most impressive. One bay follows another with a regularity that is accentuated by the interior elevation being in four stories—pier arcade, tribune arches, triforium wall arcade, and clearstory. It is not a lofty church, but, like English cathedrals, what it lacks in height is compensated for in length. There are eleven bays in the nave, and ten in the choir. Moreover, because it was comparatively low it could build a square transept-crossing tower, and the average French cathedral was too high for such a tower to be artistic. Laon and Braine were exceptions among Ile-de-France churches in having central lanterns; they were derived from Normandy, since the Rhenish lantern usually was octagonal. Strange as it may seem to say of the most prominent, most open, and best-lighted part of a church, there is a blessed seclusion beneath the wide white tower of Laon that “shuts the heart up in tranquillity.”

Down the long church, the stout monolithic piers make two virile lines. Only during a short period were such sturdy cylinders used, here and in Notre Dame at Paris are the chief examples, and both cathedrals were artistically right in preferring their uniform columns, even though both of them used the sexpartite vaulting that called for alternating ground supports. The coming cathedrals were to adopt once for all the barlong system of vaulting, where the concentration of loads fell equally on every bay, and to evolve a classic type of pier, consisting of a central cylinder flanked by four semi-attached columns. At Laon a few piers in the nave experimented with free-standing colonnettes, three of which were placed in front of the pillar to enlarge, there, the abacus of the capital on which stood the shafts that mounted to the vault-springing. The elliptical piers of Beauvais, longer from north to south, were to be the most perfect solution of the problem of ground supports.

There is no denying that Laon’s interior is to-day too white, but we must remember that originally color was used on the stones, so that any effect of a hall would have been impossible in the olden times. Viollet-le-Duc called Laon the laic cathedral par excellence. He considered it a great civic hall wherein the populace “could unite and enjoy spectacles more or less profane.” And even in the flat eastern wall he found something occultly heretical. The towers, he said, were more those of a château than a church. He shut his mind to the fact that Laon was erected largely by its bishops, that it was begun by the choir end, which is suitable only for divine service, and that if its seven towers had been crowned with the sky-pointing spires of the architect’s plan, and if its sky-dreaming windows were still intact, there would be little of the aspect of a town hall about this stately church. Critics like Huysmans have exaggerated its present iciness: no one can pray in Laon, he exclaimed; its soul is fled forever. But what would be Chartres, his spot of election for prayer, were it unsoftened by its “storied windows richly dight”?