How France Built Her Cathedrals Part 16

Even after the opening of the XIII century the St. Denis school exerted influence, as is shown by the Charlemagne-Roland windows in Chartres'

ambulatory, whose outline was taken from a crusader window of Suger's abbey. The majority of Chartres' windows belong to the early XIII century, when the city was mistress of the vitrine art and supplied the cathedrals of Bourges, Rouen, Sens, Laon, Auxerre, Tours, Le Mans, Poitiers, and even Canterbury. In the nave's north aisle, the St.

Eustace window (the third) is held to be of faultless artistry. The large lancets which light the aisles scintillate as with precious jewels. Only some five or six have floral scrolls filling the s.p.a.ces between the medallions and the deep border that surrounds each window; in France a geometric pattern for such interstices was more frequent.

At the base of each window is what is called its signature--a medallion which usually represents the avocation of the donors, whether kings, knights, priests, butchers, shoemakers, furriers, or water carriers.

Thus below the Charlemagne-Roland windows tradesmen display rich fur mantles, and we know that the _pelletiers_ were the donors. Splendid were the gifts of the old artisan guilds. The tanners presented an apse-chapel window in honor of St. Thomas Becket, the vintners one that related the story of Noe, planter of vines. An overpowering sensation it must have been for those mediaeval workmen to worship beneath the vaults they themselves had helped to build, under the windows they had contributed. Kings and knights were their fellow donors, but in the cathedrals of France the gifts of the lowly were the most plentiful, a Christian quality which endured till the XVI-century disunion.

To Chartres St. Louis gave a window in honor of St. Denis, patron of his kingdom. The splendid red northern rose, "The Rose of France," is a glorification of Our Lady. The donjons of Castile adorn it in honor of the queen regent. Directly opposite is the big south rose presented by Blanche's enemy, Pierre Mauclerc, who tried to kidnap Louis IX from his mother, but who was to die fighting the infidels under his cousin the king, as did Pierre de Courtenay, another donor of a window at Chartres.

Pierre de Dreux, it is said, began the porch before the southern entrance to commemorate his marriage with the heiress of Brittany, a granddaughter of Henry II, Plantagenet. Like every door of this church of the resplendent entranceways, it is a ma.s.s of sculpture. Mauclerc was grandson of the builder of St. Yved at Braine, and brother of Archbishop Henri de Dreux, who donated windows to his cathedral at Rheims. Below the Dreux rose at Chartres, four of the Prophets are borne on the shoulders of the four Evangelists, for never could those generations, enamored of symmetry, resist the opportunity to weave together the Old and New Testaments.

A first cousin of St. Louis, Ferdinand III, the saint-conqueror of Seville and Cordova, donated to Chartres a window commemorating the patron of Spain. Three times was St. James honored here, so popular was the Santiago Compostela pilgrimage. St. Martin and St. Nicolas of Bari are also commemorated, the former some seven times, for it pleased the voyagers to noted shrines to record their travels. By pilgrimages French art and song spread in Italy and Spain.

Single monumental figures of prophet or saint were used in the clearstory windows instead of small medallions, which would be indistinct when viewed at such a height. Although most of the windows in the cathedral belong to the XIII century, the XV century is represented in the Vendome chapel, begun in 1417 by Louis de Bourbon, an ancestor of Henry IV. Much white was then employed for the better lighting of the church, and the straight saddle-bars of Suger's time were again made use of.

No attempt was made for perspective in the earlier gla.s.s, which was treated like a translucent mosaic: relief was obtained by the skilled juxtaposition of tones. The old workers had taught themselves many of the secrets of optics. They knew that designs on a background of blue--an expansive color--should be larger than those on red--an absorbent. They knew that blue was a sedative, that red excited the vision, and that yellow stopped contours, hence it was to be employed in borders.

It is not of technique that one thinks when standing face to face with the windows of Chartres. "Create in me a new heart, O G.o.d!" one murmurs when gazing at them. When at noon the sun renders the colors dazzling and bewildering, the cathedral seems to be chanting "_Sanctus! Sanctus!

Sanctus!_" with the seraphim proclaiming that the whole earth is full of the glory of the Lord. Live coals from heaven's high altar are the windows of Chartres, then, cleansing us of our iniquities; and seeing with our eyes we see, and hearing with our ears we hear, and understanding with our heart we comprehend the vision and are converted and healed.

When evening blots out the rest of the church, and in luminous obscurity the windows hang ethereally in s.p.a.ce, they are psalms of intercession and penitence. To gaze at such windows is to pray, think the Levites who serve in this temple. At sunset it is no unusual sight to see a young student of theology seated with his back to the choir, his forgotten breviary open on his knee, gazing spellbound at the western lancets, in his face a rapt reverence, indicating that his soul is in prayer. Each evening the windows of Abbot Suger's craftsmen hymn the suave and lovely _Te Lucis ante_ which ushers in night's purity. A mediaeval cathedral was designed for the Real Presence, and without that soul of all ritual it stands bereft. Windows such as Chartres' proclaim the miracle of the Tabernacle as symbolically as do those pillars of humanity sculptured by the northern doors, Melchisedek and Peter, types of the Christ, each holding a chalice, or as do the transept's outspread arms that recall the sacrifice on Calvary, renewed daily in the sacrifice of the Ma.s.s.

That Chartres Cathedral has preserved its wealth of colored gla.s.s is proof that it came gently through the ages; moreover, it was constructed solidly, being a pioneer in the use of flying b.u.t.tresses with double arches united by an arcature. Its lower walls never were weakened by the insertion of side chapels, those customary XIV-century additions. That academic period built at Chartres merely the semi-detached chapel of St.

Piat, to which a stair ascends from the ambulatory. In the XVIII century some well-intentioned but misguided canons of the cathedral lined their sanctuary with neo-cla.s.sic marbles and stucco, and cluttered the plain wall s.p.a.ces over the pier arches with needless ornament.

In the time of the Revolution, the entire demolition of the big church was proposed, but happily the embarra.s.sment of how to dispose of such a mountain of stone prevented the vandalism. Lead was stripped from the roof to make bullets and pennies. In the XIX century the vast timber covering of the masonry vaults, called _la foret_, was burned, but the new steep-pitched roof covered with lead has taken on a greenish hue that blends well with the ancient gray stones.

The easy hill of the town serves as pedestal for Chartres Cathedral.

Walk through the little city, whose air of cold propriety is very typical of French provincial life, pa.s.s through the Porte Guillaume, and from the boulevard beside the stream study the chief edifice of this Beauce which is "the granary of France." Observe how salient are the transept arms. Another Romanesque trait is the placing of two towers--unfinished here--between choir and transept. What Huysmans called the _maigreur distinguee_ of youth is a characteristic of this church. In Rheims, the next begun of the big Gothic cathedrals, is no trace of youth's structural plainness.

As you sit by the stream watching Notre Dame of Chartres, its Flamboyant Gothic tower, perfect of its kind, seems to ride imperiously over the nave; none the less it will be the weather-beaten southwest tower on which the eye will linger longest. Though it was designed to accompany a church of lesser proportions, though it labors under the disadvantage of being overtopped by its sister beacon, nothing can diminish its unparalleled unity. Virile, virginal, aerial, majestic, venerable in youth and youthful in its venerable age, the _clocher vieux_ of Chartres is one of the supreme things of the national art, "full of sweet dreams and health and quiet breathing."

THE CATHEDRAL OF RHEIMS[113]

The nation that made a compact with G.o.d at the baptismal font of Rheims will be converted and will return to her first vocation. Her errors may not go unpunished, but the child of such virtues, of so many sighs, of so many tears, will not perish. A day will come, and we hope it may not long tarry, when France, like Saul on the road to Damascus, will be enveloped in a supernal light whence will proceed a voice, asking: "Why persecutest thou me? Rise up and wash the stains that disfigure thee. Go, first-born of the Church, predestined nation, race of election, go carry as in the past my name before all the peoples and before all the kings of the earth."--Address of POPE PIUS X, in 1912, to the visiting French cardinals.

The other two of the four great cathedrals have no setting equal to the hill pedestal of Chartres or to the river island of Notre Dame of Paris.

Seldom is a French cathedral surrounded by the pleasant precincts and cloisters preserved by the English minsters, and Rheims Cathedral is no exception in its abrupt rise from flat city streets. Its druidical ma.s.siveness can easily dispense with a pedestal. Rheims imposes itself.

Even in the night its prodigy of magnificence endures. "The huge bas-relief is always there in the darkness," wrote Rodin. "I cannot distinguish it, but I feel it. Its beauty persists. It triumphs over shadows and forces me to admire its powerful black harmony. It fills my window, it almost hides the sky. How explain why, even when enveloped in night, this cathedral loses nothing of its beauty? Does the power of that beauty transcend the senses, that the eye sees what it sees not?...

_O Nuit! tu es plus grande ici que partout ailleurs!_"[114]

The "masters of the living stone" who built Rheims Cathedral are known to us to-day. Their names were commemorated in a labyrinth that once formed part of the nave's pavement, a drawing of which has been unearthed by M. Louis Demaison. The obliterated figure in the middle of the labyrinth no doubt represented the bishop who laid the foundation stone. He was Alberic de Humbert, formerly archdeacon of Notre Dame at Paris while the bishops Maurice and Eudes de Sully were raising that cathedral. Builder and crusader, Alberic was a true product of his age.

He marched into Languedoc, in 1208, to chastise the Albigensian heretics; he attended Innocent III's great Council of the Lateran in 1214, and when he ventured again to the East to take part in the crusade of Jean de Brienne, he was captured by Saracens and ransomed by the Spanish knights of Calatrava. He died on the return journey, 1218.

For a man of such energy, it could have been with slight regret that he witnessed, in May, 1210, the destruction by fire of the decrepit church he had inherited, one of whose builders had been Archbishop Hincmar in the IX century. That early cathedral of Rheims had been redressed with a facade by Archbishop Sampson, a friend of Abbot Suger's, and among the prelates who attended the memorable dedication of St. Denis. His Primary Gothic work, wiped out in the conflagration of 1210, was a loss indeed for art.

Bishop Alberic de Humbert set vigorously to work, and within a year of the fire had laid the corner stone of the present cathedral (1211). By 1241 services were held in the finished choir. An archbishop of the Dreux line (1227-40) gave windows to the upper apse, and although he and the townsfolk were at bitter odds, the building of the great church by both prelate and people went on unabated. The imperious Henri de Dreux, like Pierre Mauclerc, the donor of Chartres' south rose, was a grandson of that brother of King Louis VII who built the beautiful church of St.

Yved at Braine on the highway between Rheims and Soissons. While the cathedral of Rheims was building, another of its archbishops was a Joinville, and in 1270 its sixtieth ruler died on St. Louis' last crusade.

The plan of the cathedral was made by Jean d'Orbais, who had watched the erection of the abbatial (1180) in his native town of Orbais,[115] a church modeled on the choir of St. Remi which the celebrated schoolman Pierre de Celle had built from 1170 to 1180. Thus...o...b..is is the intermediary between the big abbey church of Rheims and Rheims Cathedral.

For twenty years Jean d'Orbais directed the works at Rheims, so stated the inscription in the labyrinth; and on his death Jean de Loup became directing architect for sixteen years (1231-47), during which the transept and its portals were constructed. The third architect, Gaucher de Rheims (1250-59), began the west portals and worked on the nave. In his precious notebook, Villard de Honnecourt sketched a bay of the nave before 1250. The fourth master-of-works at Rheims, whose name was inscribed in the labyrinth, was Bernard de Soissons. He worked here for thirty-five years; the inscription states that he made five bays of the nave--no doubt the westernmost ones--and that he opened the big O, the rose window of twelve mammoth petals that flowers in the west facade, and is one of the most beautiful designs of the age. By the end of the XIII century, therefore, Rheims Cathedral was completed in its main parts. Carried on with scarcely a pause, and always after the original plan of Jean d'Orbais, the great church kept its unity throughout. The first four architects who during a century had directed the works were succeeded by Robert de Coucy, to whom for a time was erroneously attributed the original plan, but who really continued to build the elaborate west facade.

That frontispiece of Rheims Cathedral, with its cloud of witnesses, is a culmination of Gothic art. Some have called it a work of the XIV century, but the labyrinth, set in the pavement before Robert de Coucy's day, distinctly attributed the placing of the big rose window to Bernard de Soissons, who was in the city till 1298. Also a text of 1299 refers to one of the west towers, and the armor worn in the David-Goliath group of the gable is of the 1280 type. All critics acknowledge that the big statues of the portals belong in main part to the golden period of Gothic sculpture, and were done between 1250 and 1260.[116] The images under the southwest tower had been prepared about thirty years earlier, in the time of Jean d'Orbais. The facade of Rheims inspired many a later Gothic frontispiece--Meaux, Tours, Rouen, Troyes, and Abbeville.

The cathedral went on perfecting itself in detail, and was nearing a complete finish when, four months after the raising of the siege of Orleans, Jeanne d'Arc brought her king to be crowned in the city where two hundred years earlier St. Louis had been anointed. Three gentlemen of Anjou wrote a letter to the queen of Charles VII, Marie of Anjou, and to her mother, Jolande of Aragon, to describe the ceremonies at Rheims on that fifth day of August, 1429. As the crown was set on the king's head trumpets rang out, till it seemed that the vaults would crack, and every man cried "_Noel!_" and drew his sword. A fair sight it was to see the gallant bearing of Jeanne the Maid as she stood by the king, holding the banner she cherished more than the sword.

At her trial in Rouen even her standard was used against her. "Why,"

asked her judges, "was your banner carried into the church of Rheims to the consecration rather than those of the other captains?" And Jeanne made one of her ringing answers: "It had been in the fray, surely there was good reason it should be at the victory"--_a la peine ... a l'honneur_--her phrase was to become a proverb of France.[117] Jeanne liked fair play. In her army she would tolerate no pillage, nor eat of food which she thought had been so obtained. But then Jeanne had no _Kultur_. She was merely an unlettered peasant girl of the Middle Ages, who called it plain thieving to carry off household goods in an invaded country. For her good friends of Rheims _la bonne Lorraine_ kept a warm place in her memory, as her letter to them showed: "_Mes chiers et bons amis les bons et loyaulx Franxois de la cite de Rains, Jehanne la Pucelle vous faict a savoir de ses nouvelles ... je vous promect et certiffy que je ne vous abandonneray poinct_."

Not many years after that national hour of rejoicing the cathedral of Rheims suffered a disaster which put a stop to further construction; henceforth only restorations went on. In 1481 some careless plumbers set on fire the timber overroof and the molten lead ran like a river into the streets. Many a citizen perished in the effort to check the flames.

The stone roof of the cathedral stood firm, justifying those generations whose life struggle had been the problem how to cover their churches enduringly. Though all France contributed, the huge edifice was never to be crowned by the six spires of Jean d'Orbais' plan; yet even as it is, Rheims presents the ideal exterior of a Gothic cathedral.

The main facade was made most appropriately a thing of pomp and circ.u.mstance, regal and gorgeous for the royal coronations. No need to hang such walls with tapestries for the feast. The three deep portals were united as one by means of an unbroken line of thirty or more large images, deriving from similar arrays at Chartres and Amiens, but possessing a p.r.o.nounced indigenous genius. In the groups of the Annunciation and the Presentation the Blessed Virgin is a figure of spotless purity, meek and infinitely touching in her little mantle that falls in straight simplicity from her slender shoulders. "By humility the holy Virgin merited to become the mother of G.o.d," was the answer given by St. Isabelle of France, the only sister of St. Louis, when asked why she named her convent at Longchamp, L'Humilite-Notre-Dame. A very different Virgin is that in the Visitation group. She and St.

Elizabeth are draped voluminously like stately Roman matrons. Those two statues (imitated by Bamburg Cathedral in 1280) must have been inspired by some work of antiquity, of which Rheims possessed a number. Cla.s.sic influences in the imagery of northern France during the Middle Ages was transitory, however. First and last mediaeval sculpture was a building-stone sculpture.

In the eyes and on the lips of a few of the entranceway statues hovered a half-smile, a fleeting, rare expression which, long centuries before, the Greek sculptors preceding Phidias had achieved. Again, at the Renaissance, Da Vinci was obsessed by the same expression, "born of a miracle, meant to gladden men's souls forever." To-day, the angel image La Sourire stands headless at the portal under the north tower.

Not only was the west frontispiece of Rheims unique, but its transept facades would have distinguished any cathedral. One of the three doors of the north facade is composed of fragments from a monument which had been in the Romanesque metropolitan burned in 1210. The middle door commemorates local saints, for cathedrals were historians and linked the generations with that continuance of tradition which makes the strength of a race. To honor their spiritual forefathers was held to be patriotism by those believing generations. At both west and north facades was an image of St. Nicaise, the eleventh bishop of Rheims, who had been martyred as he knelt by his cathedral door. Tradition relates that he was reciting the Psalmist's words, "My soul is bowed to earth,"

when the Vandals struck off his head, and that the severed head finished the verse: "Verify me, O Lord, according to thy word."[118]

The fifteenth bishop (459-533), St. Remigius, apostle of the Franks, is honored by a statue. In the cathedral of his day he baptized Clovis, and thus made France the first orthodox Christian kingdom of the West, since Gaul's other conquerors had fallen into the Arian heresy. Many an archbishop of Rheims played a foremost part in the life of the nation.

The military prowess of Turpin, the twenty-seventh prelate here, is related in the _Chanson de Roland_.[119] The forty-first archbishop was the learned Gerbert, who died Pope Sylvester II (1003). He made the cathedral school famous, among his pupils being the king's son and Bishop Fulbert of Chartres.

One of the students in Rheims in that age was St. Bruno of Cologne, founder of the Carthusian Order. For long years he directed the cathedral school, guiding the people during the misrule of a scandalous archbishop. A pupil of his at Rheims became Urban II, who instigated the First Crusade. And a century later one of his ablest and holiest sons, St. Hugh of Avalon, built the cathedral choir of Lincoln, as well as its small transept, and part of the big transept--the oldest examples of Early-English Gothic. In 1180, the archbishop of Rheims, Guillaume de Champagne, crowned as king his nephew, Philippe-Auguste. Only those shepherds of the flock who attained to canonized sainthood were honored by statues at the church entrances.

The Beau Dieu of Rheims of most benign majesty is the central image of the transept's northern facade. Surmounting it is a Last Judgment that speaks well for the honesty of the clerics whose pupils were the sculptors. Here at the king's own basilica, whither he came for the most brilliant hour of his life, was sculptured a crowned monarch, as the front figure, marching to h.e.l.l, and behind him walked a bishop. No pharisees were the men of the XIII century. Sin was sin, and all men were equal before sin's punishment.

There are statues on the towers of that same north frontispiece to which names have been given. One has been called Philippe-Auguste, and it certainly was a portrait study, whether or not it represented the most able monarch of the feudal ages, the victor of Bouvines, who tripled the area of France and under whom was begun almost every Gothic cathedral in the land. The name of his grandson, St. Louis, has been given to another image. In a niche of the facade stands a charming Eve holding a very mediaeval serpent.

One can merely indicate, in pa.s.sing, the astounding wealth of Rheims--five thousand images whose verve and fecundity are marvelous.

"If your heart is right, all creatures will be for you a book of holy doctrine," so they dared to carve clown, dog, cat, or sheep on pinnacle, or in hidden nook, and their flora was as generous as their fauna. A local botanist has found that every leaf growing to-day by the roadsides was reproduced in the cathedral. It was only natural that in Champagne the vine leaf should be popular; on one of the capitals of the nave a pleasant vintage scene is represented.

If the gorgeous west approaches of the Cathedral-Royal were suited for earthly pageantry, its eastern end paid homage, in holier simplicity, to the Spiritual King. Around the exterior wall of the apse was set a guard of angels, each carrying an emblem of the Pa.s.sion, or of its symbol, the Ma.s.s--chalice, censer, missal, spear--and the procession met at the Christ image placed in the center of the curving wall. The ordinance was derived from Byzantine art. Many an artist has said of the apse sculpture of Rheims that the Greeks can show no lovelier work. A few years later, more angelic thrones, dominations, and powers were set around this, the Cathedral of the Angels. A seraphic sentry adorned each b.u.t.tress and at the same time increased its counterb.u.t.ting force, and were agents toward the swifter grounding of the load.

And now, having touched superficially on the exterior of this inexhaustible church, let us step inside its imaged doors. On the inner wall of the three western portals is an elaborate decoration found nowhere else. Tier upon tier of statues shrined in foliage-covered niches rise to the level of the triforium. Never has a wall been more glorified both within and without. Lavish leaf ornamentation forms the capitals of the piers. Each pier consists of a circular shaft cantoned by four lesser columns; the capitals of the latter are divided into two stories because their diameter is less--a skillful contrivance that solves the difficulty of grouping pillars of different sizes.

[Ill.u.s.tration: _The Angel Apse of Rheims (c. 1220)_]

The nave of Rheims was never weakened by the addition of side chapels, which always diminishes the integrity of an edifice. In fact, the lower walls[120] as well as the piers were made oversolid for what they bear, since it had not yet been learned how to apply exactly the right counterforce to the pressure of the vaulting. Amiens was to be the first to achieve that perfect equilibrium.

The interior proportions of Rheims are harmonious; the side aisles are relatively right with the central vessel, and the nave leads up well to the sanctuary, which, inside and out, is beyond criticism. As a whole, however, the interior of this cathedral has not the slender upwardness of Amiens nor the ascetic holiness of Chartres. It stands more than it soars. It praises the deity in another fashion than does the mystic cathedral. The keynote here is a right-minded human splendor. Robust and majestic, this is the church for state pageants, the regal temple for national festivals.

Alas! poor battle-worn Rheims! Alas for the _bons et loyaulx Franxois de la cite de Rains!_ Has Jehanne la Purcelle forgotten her promise never to abandon you?

Mourant en plein martyre avec vivacite ...

Masquant sous sa visiere une efficacite ...

Jetant toute une armee aux pieds de la priere....

So wrote the poet who fell on the field of honor, in September, 1914, of St. Jeanne, whose martyrdom was a victory; so he might have written of Rheims Cathedral. Again a sublime holocaust was needed for the saving of the soul of France.