How France Built Her Cathedrals Part 10

Down the long church, the stout monolithic piers make two virile lines.

Only during a short period were such st.u.r.dy 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 s.e.xpart.i.te 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 cla.s.sic 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 chateau 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"?

Only a slight amount of ancient gla.s.s has survived in Laon. The north rose of the transept shows pictures of the sciences. Beneath the rose window in the flat eastern wall are three handsome lancets made by the school of Chartres early in the XIII century. They show the pa.s.sing away of the hieratic Byzantine gesture: in the Annunciation and Visitation medallions the robes float naturally; in the Nativity scene the natural gesture of a woman who tests the warmth of the water before bathing the Holy Child has been well rendered.

If a lack of accessories makes the interior of Laon Cathedral seem to-day more philosophic than religious, there are certain lovable individual touches in it that warm both heart and imagination. In the first place it is a church fairly garlanded with springtime foliage. The wonder of eternal youth is in its half-curled leaves which the sculptors conventionalized just enough to make them architectural. Not one sprig, not one leaf is like another. Never was nature more profoundly loved or more convincingly interpreted.

Then there are the stone bulls of Laon. They stand high on the western towers, those sixteen ma.s.sive oxen, stretching their necks, as if watching the people climb the steep hill below. Each stands under a columned canopy. The popular fancy is that they commemorate the patient beasts who dragged the stones for the cathedral up Laon's precipitous crags, and there is nothing improbable in the idea. It was a day when St. Francis was telling man to love his dumb fellow creatures. The towers of Laon Cathedral are worthy of the magistral setting of the church on the edge of the abrupt hill where had grown the ancient city.

For miles Laon's towers command the plain, "an a.s.sembly without rival among Gothic monuments." Incomplete though they are, Laon's five towers come nearer to the ideal plan of seven spires than does any other cathedral. The corner tourelles pa.s.s from one form to another, as they rise, converting themselves into octagons. "Ponder it well," wrote the XIII-century architect, Villard de Honnecourt, in his famous sketchbook.

"I have been in many lands, as you can see by this book, but never in any place is to be found a tower equal to Laon."

Four of the towers are alike, each with the same long lancet openings, the same free-standing pillars at the corners. Rows of crockets mark the main lines, for the old-time masters were adepts in every device whereby to fix the eye on the essential. There are aspects when the fretwork designs made by Laon's towers against the sky are superb.

The date of the cathedral long gave rise to discussion in the days when mediaeval archaeology was still hazy. No one now contends that the present Notre Dame is the church which was patched up hastily by Bishop Bartholomew de Vir after the fire of 1112. That conflagration was a semi-lawless act. Laon's bishop was also its feudal proprietor, hence a greedy baronage contended to hold the see. One Gaudry, a knight adventurer who had served under William the Conqueror in England and there grown rich, obtained the bishopric of Laon by simony. All his talk was of hawks, hounds, and hunting. During one of his absences in England the townspeople set up a commune, and Gaudry bent his energies to frustrate it. In an uprising in 1112 the infuriated populace murdered him. The fire, started during the riots, spread to the cathedral, which was practically consumed. The burghers, being unskilled in arms, were forced to call to their aid a fierce robber-baron of the house of Coucy, Thomas of Marle, who, according as he found it profitable, fought, now against, now for, the communes.[59] It took the king of France half a lifetime to destroy that "raging wolf," as Abbot Suger called him.

Guizot has brought out that the XII-century uprisings against feudal exactions on the part of the burgesses were often favored by king and clergy. Such was the unformed state of society that no liberal general views could be adhered to; the king is to be found granting charters to some towns and marching against the rebellious citizens in others. The bishops of Noyon, Beauvais, and Soissons favored the people's claims.

The prelates of Rheims and Laon opposed them. Such feudalism as that of Thomas of Marle meant permanent anarchy; for the royal power to centralize authority then meant law and order.

It is sad to relate that no sooner did the burgess gain his civic rights than he began to oppress the peasantry. Before the XIII century closed there were outbreaks of the peasants against the prosperous townspeople.

In our own day has the cry of the underman, voiced by the old Norman poet, been silenced? "We are men as they. The same in stature, the same in limb, and the same in strength--_for suffering_. Are we not men even as they?"

At Laon the antagonism between bishop and citizens continued for a century; several times the charter was won, only to be abrogated later.

There is food for thought that all through the embittered struggle the building of the cathedral was carried forward, and it was an enterprise that required the collaboration of bishop and people. The people might fight their baron bishop to wrench from him certain civic rights, but they were aware of the difference between his temporal claims and his spiritual authority. Their robust faith was not disconcerted by a discrepancy between "Peter's key" and "Peter's sword." To the end of time Peter will show his weak human side. Had he not denied thrice? Had not another of the selected twelve betrayed for paltry lucre? Had not everyone of them run away in the hour of need?

While Bishop Gaudri's ill-gotten gains were buying him a bishopric there was in Laon's cathedral chapter a famous scholar who had stoutly opposed his election. Anselm of Laon, son of a laborer, "the grave, the sweet, the prudent," was a pupil of St. Anselm of Bec and Canterbury.

For over forty years he taught in Paris and in Laon, and from the nucleus of his pupils, among whom were Guillaume de Champeaux and Abelard, was to emerge Paris University, which was not, however, to appear by name in history till 1215. Anselm of Laon (d. 1117), like his greater namesake, was a pioneer in scholasticism, which brought to the study of Christian doctrine not only the aid of tradition, the Old and New Testaments and the Church Fathers, but also the use of metaphysics and dialectics. The school of this master at Laon became a veritable university to which flocked students from Italy, Spain, Germany, and England.

Laon Cathedral is justly ent.i.tled to carve the Liberal Arts on its facade. A score of the coming notable men of the XII century were Anselm's pupils; one of them was that bishop who began the Primary Gothic tower of the cathedral at Rouen. Anselm and his brother trained the youths who, having heard St. Norbert of Cologne preach in Laon Cathedral, in 1120, followed him to Premontre, in the forest of Coucy, which estate gave its name to the new order Norbert there founded. Like the Cistercians, so swift an increase had the white canons of Premontre that they soon counted a thousand houses over Europe and were an evangelizing force for their century even as Cluny had been earlier and as the Franciscans and Dominicans were to be in the XIII century. The citizens of Laon clamored for Anselm as their bishop when the miserable Gaudri was killed in 1112, but he declined the honor and directed the choice to the worthy Bartholomew de Vir, who restored temporarily the cathedral.

It is not known exactly when was laid the foundation stone of Laon's Gothic cathedral. By its sculpture, the profiles, and the noticeable keystones, the archaeologists say that it belongs to the last third of the XII century and that it kept to its original plans, though its building continued into the first third of the XIII century. The bishop-founder was a pupil of Anselm's and himself had taught rhetoric in Paris. Gautier de Mortagne (1155-71) gave generously of his own revenues to the new works. The choir he built ended in a semicircle and consisted of the present three bays next the transept. There, and in the west wall of the transept, the profiles are different from those elsewhere in the church.

In a second spell of work they finished the transept, the nave, the towers, and the west facade just before 1200. Laon's facade ranks among the great western frontispieces of Gothic architecture, a model for that of Rheims. What chiefly characterizes it are the profound shadows made by cavernous porches, projecting gables, and other varied surfaces. It has been called a supreme composition in light and shade. In accentuating the upward surge of lines it was a pioneer. When the facade was finished the choir was lengthened by seven bays, and now was terminated by a flat wall whose prototype is to be found in Laon town in the church of St. Martin, an early-Gothic edifice, building about 1165.

Various regional churches used the square chevet. As the custom died out in France, it struck root in England, where the Cistercians made it popular. Those accustomed to the rectagonal chevet of the English cathedral may prefer that type, but to a lover of the apse of the French cathedral, of the curving procession path with its radiating chapels that mystically suggests the thorn crown around the Sacred Head, it will ever seem a dull way to end a sanctuary precisely like a transept arm.

The cathedral of Laon was consecrated in 1237. That same century built the treasure hall and the large chapel beside the west facade. The XIV century added side chapels between the b.u.t.tresses, and in those chapels at Laon appears the academic precision of that skilled but dry period.

About the same time was made a new southern portal for the transept, and the wheel window over it was replaced by a big Rayonnant Gothic light.

The hill citadel called by Charlemagne in the _Chanson de Roland_ "my good town of Laon" was held by the invader from August, 1914, to October, 1918. Though the city was sh.e.l.led by the French, not a piece of gla.s.s in the cathedral was broken. St. Martin's abbatial, too, is intact, and the XII-century Templar's church, the only well-preserved monument in France built by the great military Order. The Prussians'

horses were stabled at first in the cathedral till a general public protest stopped such a desecration. When the Allies, under General Foch, drove back the German lines in the final weeks of the war, the retreat was too swift for much havoc to be wrought. On October 13, 1918, General Mangin made his triumphal entry into Laon, whose much-enduring citizens flocked around him in the cathedral to chant a solemn _Te Deum_.

THE CATHEDRAL OF SOISSONS[60]

The other evening before the ruins of a Cistercian abbey, that once harbored St. Louis and his mother, Blanche of Castile, a group of Alpine cha.s.seurs and Zouaves fell to recounting their daily feats of heroism just as in the times of chivalry the strong, swift strophes of the _chanson de geste_ celebrated knightly prowess. To the north, the cannon thundered.... And the next morning, a Sunday, I a.s.sisted at Ma.s.s in a Gothic-vaulted hall that had served as _promenoir_ for the monks of Citeaux. Soldiers filled all the wooden seats, others thronged the threshold, bareheaded in the shadow of the ruins.... Then when the sacrifice of the body and blood of our Lord was celebrated, a song rose in the dawn: "_Kyrie Eleison! G.o.d be praised!_" And the soldiers within the chapel and without sang before returning to battle as in the ancient _Chanson de Saucourt: "Kyrie Eleison!"_ Even those harnessing the great cart horses, those saddling their own restive mounts, those extinguishing the fires of the night's bivouac, and those charging the six-wheeled camions, all took up the canticle: "_G.o.d be praised! Kyrie Eleison!_".... And the implacable cannonading to the north echoed in the deep quarries, whence had come the stones builded here for G.o.d's glory.

--A war picture of Longpont abbey,[61] by GABRIELE D'ANNUNZIO, who visited the battle-front in 1914.

[Ill.u.s.tration: _The Oxen on Laon's Towers_]

To-day the fair white city of Soissons lies a scene of desolation, only to be likened to a wrecked town of old-time barbarism. They say that Soissons Cathedral is more damaged than if a geological convulsion had wrecked it. Deliberately was it taken as a target, though, as French troops held the highlands round the flat town, there can be no excuse that the towers were used as posts of observation. The westernmost bays are ruined; the north side of the big church has been riddled with projectiles; flying b.u.t.tresses have been cut off; great rents show in roof and sides; the vaulting hangs in air; a pier lies p.r.o.ne, its stones scattered like a pack of cards; the aisles are dismantled, and the windows, some of which Blanche of Castile gave in 1225, have been reduced to powdered dust. In one week of January, 1916, over three hundred projectiles fell on the church, said the old priest, who lived in the midst of the wreckage, to a visitor to whom he spoke gently of G.o.d's mercy. In the once "sweet and tranquil provincial city, whose soul was the daughter of honorable simplicity, gra.s.s grows in the street.

Soissons is a dead city. Its cas.e.m.e.ntless windows fix you like the eye of the blind." Always has it lain in the path of war, this ancient capital of Clovis that has ever been part of the very heart of France, but never war such as this!

Here, in 486, Clovis won the battle of Soissons that annihilated the last remnant of Rome's empire in Gaul, and conquered the land to the Loire. In the evil days of the Hundred Years' War, Soissons suffered.

So depopulated was it by the XVI-century religious wars that it took over a century to recover. Nor did the Revolution spare the seat of the ancient monarchies of France. In 1814 occurred an explosion of gunpowder that wrecked precious windows in the cathedral, some of them the gifts of Philippe-Auguste. In 1870 the Prussian bombardment of Soissons devastated what remained of the abbey church of St. Jean-des-Vignes, whose Flamboyant Gothic spires have been mutilated again in the World War.[62]

Under the southern flank of the shattered cathedral nestles the diamond of Primary Gothic art in France, the transept arm built by the crusading bishop, Nivelon de Cherisy. As by a miracle it has escaped. The most exquisite thing in France, many of us hold it to be. It has drawn its devotees back to Soissons time and time again, this perfect thing so little heralded. They would test a second and a third time the overpowering first impression it had made. Perhaps it had been some happy mood, some subtle lingering shadows of the late afternoon, that had touched it momentarily to an ethereal grace. And then standing face to face again with its small and stately beauty, those who love this early-Gothic monument of France know that its power is not a chance or borrowed comeliness.

Sit before it for hours; study the mystery and play of its lights and shadows; try to seize in what lies its young poesy of grace, its maturity of dignity, "its invincible impression of virginity." In vain to a.n.a.lyze it. Can that intangible quality which is sheer inevitable beauty be dissected? Those who fall under the spell of its supernal loveliness lose all false shame that would prune adjectives, lest their praise be excessive. No glow of words can convey the something celestial here. The nave and the choir of Soissons Cathedral are XIII-century Gothic at its prime, and yet they seem merely to be the setting for a jewel, for the small apse preceded by one bay, which is the transept's southern arm. That apse and bay are the culmination of the Romanesque ideals, and at the same time, indissolubly part of the new and richer art, they crown the Primary Gothic hour.

Soissons' chief church is better doc.u.mented than Laon's. Bishop Nivelon I de Cherisy (a Cherisy fell on the field of honor in 1914) occupied the see from 1176 to 1207. The Romanesque cathedral which he inherited had become inadequate, so the bishop gave land from his episcopal garden, and about 1180 the foundation of the south arm of the transept was laid.

Like Noyon's transept, it terminated in a hemicycle, and its interior elevation was also in four stories, but here was attained a consummate symmetry not achieved at Noyon. Soissons' curving transept arm is exceptional in having an ambulatory. The apsidal chapel which opens in its eastern wall has over it a similar chapel that gives on the tribune gallery. Slender columns with stilted arches are planted at the entrance of each of these chapels in the gracious fashion originated by the Champagne school of Gothic. It was born of a necessity, in order that a more regular vaulting might be built over the curving aisle. St. Remi at Rheims had used the same arrangement. So many are the points of resemblance between Soissons' transept arm and the choir of St. Remi's abbey church that it is thought the architect of the Champagne abbatial proceeded to Soissons later; there are the same profiles, the same plan, the same encircling frieze of sculpture. At Soissons, the architect had grown bolder and dared to diminish his supports. To have made Soissons'

curving wall of arches and colonnettes proves him to have been, not only well practiced in mason-craft, but a man of genius who had visions. He here created a thing apart. The exterior of the transept's arm is unimpressive and plain; the lower windows are round-arched. Inside, the pointed arch reigns, however. "The king's daughter is all glorious within."

The prelate who built Soissons Cathedral was a remarkable personage and played a foremost part on the Fourth Crusade. Villehardouin tells us that it was Bishop Nivelon de Cherisy who was sent as an envoy to Innocent III, when against papal commands the Crusaders had turned aside to capture the Christian city of Zara on the Dalmatian coast. The bishop-amba.s.sador found the pope at Viterbo and obtained from him the raising of the excommunication on condition that the knights should proceed direct to Palestine. We all know how, a second time, they went filibustering. Among the first to scale the walls of Constantinople was Nivelon de Cherisy; with him was the bishop of Troyes. When the chief barons met to elect the first Latin emperor of Constantinople, it was Bishop Nivelon who pa.s.sed out to the waiting crowd to announce that Baldwin of Flanders had been chosen--Baldwin who began the Cloth Hall at Ypres--and it was he who crowned Baldwin in St. Sophia. When that new emperor was captured by the Bulgars the bishop of Soissons returned to Europe for aid.

All the time that he was absent in the Holy Land Nivelon had devoted the revenues of his see toward the renewal of the cathedral. Strangely enough, it was this same prelate who also built Soissons' choir, which in scale and plan differs so radically from the transept arm. The fleeting hour of Primary Gothic was over. The new art was moving forward swiftly; irresistible the development of its principles and impossible at such a time that the work of one decade could be similar to the decade preceding it unless, as at Laon, the primitive plan was insistently adhered to. Whoever the master that designed Soissons' choir and nave, he incorporated the perfect transept into his bigger church with reverence. Not to dwarf it was his main care, for he bowed before the touch of perfection in his predecessor's work, and sought to give to his own monument, different though it was, a like clarity and n.o.ble simplicity. Examine the skill with which choir and nave are joined to the small transept arm. It is lower than they, it has four vertical stories to their three, and yet no discrepancy is felt. It was as if the new builder said: "Here is a miracle of force and grace, done in a fugitive hour never to be recaptured. Let us enshrine it fittingly."

In 1212 services were held in the finished choir. The nave proceeded without interruption and was in use in the first years of St. Louis'

reign. Probably the final touches were given to it by that bishop of Soissons of whom Joinville tells, Mgr. Jacques de Castel, _fort et vaillant homme_, who started with the king on the crusade of 1248. After Mansourah's battle and the disastrous retreat toward Damietta good Bishop Jacques felt such a desire "to go to G.o.d" that he rushed alone to attack the infidels, whose swords soon "dispatched him to G.o.d's company with the martyrs."

Singular good taste has at all times guided the builders of Soissons.

The XIV century decided to make a northern arm to the transept; and as if to avoid all hint of rivalry with its peerless neighbor, the new structure was finished by a flat end wall without a portal.

The cylinder piers of Soissons choir and nave are a distinguishing trait of the church interior, neither too high nor too short. Before each is engaged a slender shaft which rises to the level of the springing and causes the edifice to appear more lofty than its reality. Everywhere, in the church, the fitting of the stones was done with peculiar nicety, though the picking out of the mortar lines in black, a recent innovation, was a sad mistake. In the choir and nave the clearstory windows were an advance on those of Chartres, their model, for the lights were made longer, and the oculus, above the twin lancets, smaller, which gave greater compactness to the whole composition. St.

Gereon at Cologne copied these windows. Marburg's church also was aided by Soissons.

The talc of this desolate city during the World War is heartrending. The Germans first entered Soissons on September 1, 1914. The mayor had fled.

But an admirable woman, Madame Macherez, the widow of a senator, went to the _etat-major_ of the Prussians and a.s.sumed the responsibility to keep order among the civilians: "_Le maire c'est moi_." Already the poets of France have enshrined the memory of this heroine of sixty winters who saved her city from pillage:

Le regard bleu comme strie de lave De Jeanne Macherez qui nous sauva Soissons.

Ah! la vieille brave!

For ten days the Germans occupied the town. The first battle of the Marne caused their departure on September 12th. Then a French reverse in January, 1915, let them draw near enough to the city to bring it within the range of fire, and such was its tragic fate till the Germans'

strategic retreat in the spring of 1917. The enemy had intrenched himself solidly in the vast quarries on the left bank of the Aisne, and month after month poured his fire on desolated Soissons. Then came the final grand act of the war. Rolling forward in overwhelming numbers in March, 1918, the invaders drove the French troops from Soissons after a desperate resistance in the streets. There they encamped until the first days of the following August, when the French army re-entered the smoking ruins of a dead city over which stood a phantom cathedral.

Noyon, Senlis, Sens, Laon, and Soisson, are with Notre Dame of Paris the first cathedrals of the national art. They are far from being the complete list of Primary Gothic monuments, which includes such churches as the Trinite at Vendome, two churches at etampes,[63] the collegiate of Notre Dame at Mantes, the Trinite at Fecamp, and Lisieux Cathedral.

There are the two towers built in an hour of religious enthusiasm: the _clocher vieux_ at Chartres and the belfry of St. Romain at Rouen. The nave of Angers Cathedral is the Primary Gothic of the Plantagenet school.

The Attica of Gothic art is the Ile-de-France, and where Picardy touches it on the north, and Champagne on the south. In that land filled with never-to-be-forgotten churches speaks the clarity of French genius in its cla.s.sic simplicity. The beauty of such churches comes from their rightness of proportion, that quality which gives the most enduring joy in architecture, beyond all richness of detail or startling effect. From such churches one learns the difference between the architect born and the architect made. The supreme quality of proportion must be innate; it is never acquired. The artist blessed with it may only produce a small masterpiece, such a church as that of St. Yved of Braine or a St.

Leu-d'Esserent, but one is sure that he would not exchange the glow which his work gave him for the fame of building even a Strasbourg.

It is in the early-Gothic churches of the Ile-de-France that the taste is best purified and trained. There the sense of beauty is spiritualized. In them art gives an ent.i.ty to what is ethereal, art seems to make tangible what is impalpable. In them the heart feels the loveliness of the s.p.a.ce inclosed as the eye rejoices in the inclosing walls. There is something of poignancy in such churches. Standing in all the promise of their youth, of the youth of the greatest architecture the world ever produced, they gravely admonish us that beauty even as theirs is but a momentary lifting of the veil. To such churches the memory returns with nostalgic regret amid the magnificence of the Gothic expansion, when the leaves opened wide to show the golden pollen. But the sadness which the early-Gothic churches of France rouse in the soul, is it not the stumbling name we give to an eternal Hope? "There are no hours in this cathedral," wrote Rodin of Soissons; "there is Eternity."[64]

THE ABBATIALS OF ST. REMI AT RHEIMS, AND NOTRE DAME AT CHaLONS-SUR-MARNE[65]