How France Built Her Cathedrals Part 3

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 Lubeck 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 Orleans 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.

Archaeology is _to teach us to remember_. Those who have gone before have pa.s.sed 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 n.o.ble 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 mediaeval archaeology 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 n.o.blest 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, Leon, 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 compa.s.s and rule. Those indefatigable wanderers, Cluny, Citeaux, and the men of Premontre 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 a.s.sisi, 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 pa.s.sed 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 "G.o.d's little troubadour."

Backward and forward has moved the ebb and flow of races and their arts.

When Celts from conquered Britain pa.s.sed over to Armorica they carried with them the Arthurian cycle; Teutonic tribes, strong in bone and tissue, poured into Gaul a very avalanche; masterful Nors.e.m.e.n 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 Columba.n.u.s 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 Columba.n.u.s, 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 Irenaeus 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 pa.s.sed 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 pa.s.sed 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 G.o.d'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 mediaeval 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 Alberic, 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 surpa.s.s his St. Denis'. We are rightly sure that our new art surpa.s.ses 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 Premontre 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 ent.i.ty, 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, Orleans, 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 mult.i.tudinous scholars of the Middle Ages who built Chartres, the wise mystic, and opalescent Auxerre, and Chalons 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 G.o.d'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 n.o.ble _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 a.s.sure you that we were sunk in gross superst.i.tion, 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 gla.s.s 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. Encyclopaedias 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 acc.u.mulations of culture by the Loire of measured horizons and cla.s.sic 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 a.s.s, 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, pa.s.sionate sinners, and prodigious repenters lives in every church in the old hill city, from the cathedral wherein Alienor 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 pa.s.sed 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 Vezelay we don the crusaders' insignia with cries of enthusiasm. The lavish art of Bourges tells of Jacques Coeur'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 impa.s.sioned all Christendom, as many a sculptured group and storied window in France relate, and of another great Englishman, Stephen Langton, who pa.s.sed 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 princ.i.p.alities? 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 Carca.s.sonne 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 Caesar his sole defeat, lives always in the churches of Auvergne, so stubbornly indigenous, planted so st.u.r.dily, 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 dela_ 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 paean 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 "archaeology." 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 archaeology. Archaeology 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 archaeology. 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 mediaeval 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 att.i.tude 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 a.s.sociated 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 Ou tous nos monuments, et toutes nos croyances Portaient le manteau blanc de leur virginite Ou sous la main de Christ, tout venait de renaitre._ --ALFRED DE MUSSET.

About 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."