How France Built Her Cathedrals Part 36

There is a book of interior consolation, precious to humanity, which has preserved for us intact the spiritual teachings of this Cistercian abbot who led the XII century. Scholars say that the _Imitation of Christ_ bears the direct impress of St. Bernard's spirit, that it reproduced and a.n.a.lyzed his writings. Whoever its author, his prayer _Da mihi nesciri_ has been answered.

Those who have been comforted by the book which, next to the Bible, has been chief solace for the stricken heart, have leaned unaware on the purpose, the faith, and the purity of the greatest saint of the Middle Ages, the man who made Burgundy as ill.u.s.trious by its Cistercian reformers and missionary builders as it had been by its Benedictines when Cluny was a world power.

CHAPTER X

Gothic Art in Normandy[314]

The cathedral was perfected slowly and pa.s.sionately. The Romans brought to it their force, their logic, their serenity. The Barbarians brought to it their nave grace, their love of life, their dreamful imaginations. From this unpremeditated collaboration sprang a work modelled by times and places. It is the French genius and its image. It did not progress by fits and starts; it was not the servant of pride. It mounted in the course of centuries to complete expression. And that expression, one throughout the country, varies with each province, with each fraction of a province, just enough to make interesting the chain that joins all the pearls of this monumental necklace of France.

--RODIN, _Les cathedrales de France_.[315]

Virtually the land conquered by the vikings received its civilization from monasteries. Like Burgundy, Normandy was a very Egypt, a Thebaid, for the number of its religious houses. Each baron sought to have one on his domain. In the capital of the duchy was St. Ouen, whose abbot owned half the city; on the same Seine lay Jumieges, a center of letters and arts, and farther down the river was St. Wandrille, "nursery for saints"--three noted houses that inherited directly the apostolate of Celtic Columba.n.u.s. From St. Wandrille went monks to establish Fecamp, favorite of the Norman dukes, with an early-Gothic church equal to a cathedral. Other monks from Fontenelle reorganized the most romantic pile of monastic buildings in the world, Mont-Saint-Michel, guarded by the patron of the kingdom of France, _Sanctus Michael in periculo maris_.

When that man of genius, William of Volpiano, abbot of St. Benigne, at Dijon, came to Normandy to reform its houses, he himself rebuilt the abbatial church at Bernay which architecturally is an ancestress for such Romanesque work as Cerisy-la-Foret, Lessay, the Caen abbatials, and St. Georges de Boscherville. At Mortain, at St. Sauveur-le-Vicomte, at St. evroult, were monastery churches, and the picturesque ruins of Hambye cause one to mourn that Primary Gothic abbatial wrecked by the Revolution. St. Pierre-sur-Dives and the collegiate at Eu are later monastic works of the province. For its influence as a world power--what we may call the Cluny of Normandy--was Bec abbey that became, under Lanfranc the Lombard, and St. Anselm the Piedmontese, the intellectual leader of the West. Its mammoth church has gone the way of Cluny's--scarcely stone left on stone.

BEC ABBEY[316]

O beata solitudo!

O sola beat.i.tudo!

--(Inscription on a Benedictine monastery in France.)

In Bec, theology for the first time spoke the language of philosophy.

Herlouin, an unlettered knight, who learned to write only at forty, founded, in 1034, an abbey on his lands on the banks of a beck in the valley of Brionne. With the monks who gathered round him, he was engaged in building with his own hands his convent when, one day in 1042, Lanfranc of Pavia arrived in their midst, the learned one needed by those simple, good men. Lanfranc had been teaching at Avranches, and was journeying to Rouen when brigands seized him in a forest near Bec, stripped and tied him to a tree to perish. Before aid came to him, as he faced death during long hours--learning that despite his scholarship he was incapable of reciting one single psalm to support his soul--a new comprehension of life dawned on him, and he vowed himself to the triumph of religion.

The school which he opened in Bec abbey soon drew students from all parts of Europe. From northern Italy came young Anselm, destined twice to succeed his master, in Bec as prior, in Canterbury as archbishop.

Lanfranc, practiced in the affairs of the world, a born statesman, was better fitted to be primate of England than was Anselm with his childlike, tender nature, and his subtle, speculative brain. Bec gave still a third archbishop to the see of Canterbury, Theobald, the patron of St. Thomas Becket; Martin, whilom abbot of Bec, built Peterborough Cathedral.

For thirty-three years St. Anselm wrote and taught in Bec abbey, student first, then monk, then prior, and in 1078 abbot. There at night, while all the house slept, he wrote the books which have won for him the t.i.tle of founder of the Christian philosophy of the Middle Ages. A forerunner of scholasticism, he was among the first to set forth the conformity of Christian doctrine with human reason. Dante places him in Paradise among the great contemplatives. The union of the mystic and the rational in theology, in the Norman abbey ruled by Anselm, started impulses which were to pa.s.s down through the centuries. An immediate result was the quickening of the mental life of the XII century. Among St. Anselm's pupils at Bec was Anselm de Laon, whose cla.s.ses, with those of Guillaume de Champeaux, are regarded as the nucleus of the University of Paris.

What is of interest to us here is that, from the hour of the opening of men's minds to scholastic learning, rose the architecture of France, that the giant energy which built cathedrals had its source in a faith that _believed in order that it might understand_, which is St. Anselm's own proposition, _Credo ut intelligam_, as well as it is the apogee flight reached by Plato, what the Greek philosopher called _the wings of the soul_. And Plato's peer, XIII-century Aquinas, voiced the Greek's vision, and repeated Anselm's thought, in a hymn whose subtle stanzas are sung daily over Christendom: "_Praestat fides supplementum sensuum defectui_" ("Faith for all defects supplying where the feeble senses fail"). Anselm, with his "face of an angel," navely enthusiastic over his metaphysical proof of G.o.d, writing alone in Bec, in the silence of the night, was digging unaware the foundations for Chartres, Rheims, Amiens, and those other visions of the Beyond to which man gave tangible shape in the scholastic-trained centuries because, _believing_, he _understood_.

Sorely against his will St. Anselm left the peace of Bec to take up the duties of England's primacy in an hour when the eternal lay-ecclesiastical controversy was embittered. The wanton and despotic William Rufus was the opponent who overwhelmed him. His sole friends were the little people for whom, at that time, any churchman who maintained independence against layman tyranny was a champion of civic liberties. The scholar of Bec was the only prelate of the many crossing from Normandy to England who displayed loving kindness for the downtrodden Saxons. Homesick in England, St. Anselm used pathetically to sign his letters to his intimates, "Brother Anselm by the heart, Archbishop of Canterbury by coercion."

At Le Bec-h.e.l.louin to-day little remains of the abbatial whose choir once soared on twenty immense piers. Again and again the church was reconstructed. In 1077 Archbishop Lanfranc crossed the Channel for a dedication. Early in the XIII century the master-of-works at Rouen, Enguerrand, proceeded to Bec to superintend a new Gothic edifice. A fire in 1263 caused another renewal of the choir. In the Rayonnant day the nave was rebuilt on the same lines as St. Ouen's abbatial. The religious wars of the XVI century damaged the church, whose demolition was continued as late as 1814. What now remains are a portion of the transept, a chapter house of the XII century, and the isolated tower of St. Nicholas (1467-80), another memorial of Normandy's rejoicing to be free of foreign rule. Eight large statues adorn its upper walls.

Bec had been pillaged by Henry V's troops before Jeanne d'Arc's advent, and the abbot then appointed by the invaders was one of the sixty university professors and ecclesiastics who condemned the Maid to death in Rouen, 1431. Ten abbots of Normandy thus tarnished their great names, but it is well to bear in mind that in each case the delinquent monastery had recently been sacked because of its patriotic stand against the foreigners, and that it was governed by a tool of the victors. Fifty Norman abbeys honored themselves by their absence from the torture of a young girl who had all England against her, half of France, as well as the perverted learning of Paris University.

NORMANDY'S ROMANESQUE SCHOOL[317]

The Christian world made no mistake when, in calm confidence, it sought, under the wing of the Benedictine abbeys, that strong education of the Western races which made possible all the marvels of faith, courage, fervor, and humility with which Europe was illuminated from the XI to the XV century, from Gregory VII to Jeanne d'Arc.

--CHARLES DE MONTALEMBERT, _The Monks of the West_.

Normandy's hardy personality showed at its best in her Romanesque monastic churches. Their design is decisive and vast, their construction solid--the Norman excelled in masoncraft--and as art they have never been surpa.s.sed for grave impressiveness. In the Norman minsters is a primeval energy admirably restrained, a ma.s.sive grace, a something of reasoned simplicity lost in the Gothic cathedrals of the region. One who fell under the spell of Normandy's Romanesque architecture has told how its repose "appeals to men and women who have lived long and are tired, who want rest, who have done with aspiration and ambitions, whose life has been a broken arch.... The quiet strength of these lines, the solid support of the moderate lights, the absence of display, of effort, of self-consciousness, satisfy them as no other art does. They come back to it to rest after a long cycle of pilgrimage--the cradle of rest from which their ancestors started."[318]

No church earlier than the year 1000 has survived in Normandy. The Norseman, while still an unbaptized buccaneer, laid low every Merovingian and Carolingian edifice. All was in ruin. "From Blois to Senlis," says the old record, "not an acre is plowed, for none dare work in the fields." Then, Rollo, chief of the marauders, baptized in Rouen, settled down in the duchy granted him in fief by the hara.s.sed king of France. In an incredibly short time the erstwhile pagans became the most indefatigable of church builders. For Normandy, the date 911 is as important a landmark as is 910 for Burgundy, the year of Cluny's foundation.[319]

The Norman Romanesque school made general use of the roll molding at window and portal, of griffes at the base of piers, blind arcading, intercrossing wall arches (that became monotonous in the Anglo-Norman school), and very frequently it contrived an interior pa.s.sage at the clearstory level, whose effect was heightened by the use of arches of different designs in its outer and inner walls.

Certain archaeologists contend that the predominant influences in the development of Norman Romanesque were Lombard, and that in this it differed from other French schools which in main part derived from local Carolingian work. As the Norman's creative genius was not on a par with his constructive abilities, it seems reasonable to look for foreign influence when finding its school precociously formed by the middle of the XI century. The Lombards used, before the Normans, the alternate system of ground supports, cubic capitals, transverse arches, compound piers, crypts, and raised choirs, and their most striking feature of exterior decoration was the arched corbel table that made a continuous cornice. Mr. Arthur Kingsley Porter says that diagonals were used in Lombardy early in the XI century as an expedient to economize wood, groin vaults being molded on a temporary wooden substructure, but as the Lombard never counterb.u.t.ted his intersecting ribs, such vaults proved unsatisfactory and were given up after 1120. If the Norman had an early knowledge of diagonals through the Lombard, like the Lombard he failed to derive from them their constructive consequences. That fact of creative genius no one can deny to the Ile-de-France. Even if the controversy as to who first used Gothic ribs should be decided in favor of the Anglo-Norman school, and behind their use of it, traced to Lombardy's Romanesque builders, none of them saw in it what Abbot Suger did--the radical member of a new system of building.

William of Volpiano, a Lombard, and an architect as well as a reformer, spent many active years in Normandy, where he died in 1031. At Fecamp he is said to have trained a group of masons. A decade after his death, Lanfranc, born in northern Italy, became a leader in the duchy, and under him was built the present nave of the Abbaye-aux-Hommes at Caen.

It seems very natural to suppose that such men, alert as they were to architectural progress, should have exerted influence on the Norman school. However, M. Lefevre-Pontalis thinks it wiser not to exaggerate the immediate influence from beyond the Alps. He holds that the Romanesque school of Normandy proceeded in main part from the same element as the other pre-Gothic schools of France, elements derived somewhat from Barbarian sources, but chiefly from Rome's occupation of Gaul. In the case of Normandy the Barbarian influences would be largely Scandinavian, and there has been considerable speculation over the Norseman's wooden structure and the Norman's partiality for the pleated capital.

Mr. John Bilson is unsympathetic to Mr. Kingsley Porter's ideas of Lombard influence in Normandy, and he considers the early dates ascribed to Lombard diagonals most improbable. Why, he asks, if the solution was reached in Lombardy about 1025, did it take three quarters of a century for the Normans, directly in contact with the builders of Italy, to arrive after long experimenting at the same intersecting ribs? He claims that the Ile-de-France was indebted to Normandy for diagonals, which were not in use in the royal domain before 1130, but that, once that school came into possession of intersecting pointed arches and flying b.u.t.tresses, it developed from them a new system of construction, clothing it with a new expression, which we call Gothic. The controversy is by no means closed.

Normandy's Romanesque school spread far afield.[320] It pa.s.sed into Picardy and penetrated as far south as Chartres. It crossed the Channel with the adventurers who descended on England, and with other free lances who carved out distant kingdoms for themselves, its characteristics appeared in southern Italy and Sicily.

The ornamentation of the Norman school came in part from Oriental or Byzantine sources already in use in the Carolingian era, and in part from Scandinavian. Unlike Burgundy, this province, despite its good stone, never won distinction in sculpture either in the Romanesque or the Gothic day. Never was Norman decoration equal to Norman construction, otherwise this school would be without a peer. Its ornamentation lacks variety and imagination. Geometric designs were endlessly repeated. Both in England and in Normandy the traveler grows weary of the zigzag or chevron motive, taken from Merovingian interlacings, or Carolingian triangular outlines, and very weary, too, of its variants, the dog-tooth or star ornament, and the fret or meander which reproduced a cla.s.sical motive. The Carolingian billet molding was also overused. Such monotony of decoration was probably the defect of a good quality--caution and thoroughness. The Norman seldom attempted what he could not put through, hence his churches were usually completed, even to having their towers crowned by stone spires. The builders of the Ile-de-France were less cautious, but more sublime.

THE ROMANESQUE ABBEY CHURCH OF JUMIeGES[321]

Aucun pays n'avait fourni au moyen age plus de missionnaires chretiens qu'Irlande, ni d'hommes empresses de repandre chez les nations etrangeres les etudes de leur patrie.--A. THIERRY.

The first Romanesque church of Normandy with architectural pretensions, the first to present the regional school fully formed, was the abbatial of Jumieges, begun about 1040. That virile, rugged "chateau de Dieu"

stands on a semi-island of the Seine where the river makes a gracious twenty-mile meander, or rather, there stand the "incredible ma.s.ses of masonry" which are the ruins of Jumieges, a wall of the big central lantern, a roofless nave, and two gaunt facade towers, the only Norman towers entirely of the XI century. In all France is no more austere, stark, and grandiose a ruin.

How from such a predecessor as Bernay's abbatial the Norman could immediately evolve an architectural feat as tremendous as Jumieges seems explicable only by some strong exterior impetus. Here is the Lombard alternance of ground supports over whose origin in Normandy much printer's ink has been spilled. As the Lombard groin vault embraced two bays, a strong pier was needed only for the transverse arch separating the large square vault sections; or if a timber roof was used, a reinforced pier was required only for the bigger tiebeams. Now, at Jumieges, the lower structure proves (say certain archaeologists) that never was a masonry roof planned for, so it is probable that the open timber roof required heavy tiebeams only at every other bay, hence an alternance of substantial and slight piers to correspond to the alternance of big beams and little beams. Jumieges also used the Lombard engaged shaft. Its uniform _hautes colonnes_, without capitals, rise from soil to roof, serving as interior b.u.t.tresses, and some say as supports for the tiebeams, since they rose too high to be intended for a masonry roof. They bind together the three stories, and aesthetically their rhythm breaks the monotony of the plain walls. Mr. John Bilson thinks that the wall shafts of Jumieges can have had no other motive than to support a vault over the princ.i.p.al span, and cannot have been the supports of mere tiebeams. They may have been planned, suggests Prof. Baldwin Brown, to carry an undergirding arch such as occurs beneath some wooden roofs.

Normandy's invention of the s.e.xpart.i.te vault came about, thinks M.

Anthyme Saint-Paul, through her predilection for multiple lines. With such Gothic vaults--each section of which embraced two bays--she proceeded to reroof various of her Romanesque abbatials, whose already existent alternated piers were thus made logical. Almost it would seem as if the presence of ground supports, substantial and slight, had called into being the new type of masonry roof. St. Denis used a s.e.xpart.i.te vault in 1140, and M. Lefevre-Pontalis suggested, at one time, that Normandy derived the idea from the Ile-de-France. In the royal domain, however, no steps are to be found leading up to it, whereas in Normandy can be seen s.e.xpart.i.te vaults of primitive design, such as those covering the Abbaye-aux-Dames, which consist merely of two diagonals with a transverse rib crossing their apex. In the Abbaye-aux-Hommes, where the timber roof of the nave was replaced by a Gothic vault as early, perhaps, as 1135, the vault web is warped to the intermediate transverse rib. It has been suggested that the s.e.xpart.i.te vault originated from the employment of the diaphragm arch.

Jumieges abbey church was dedicated "with great spiritual joy," so an old chronicle relates, by saintly Archbishop Maurille of Rouen, in the presence of William the Conqueror and Matilda. Maurille had been trained at Fecamp under the great William of Volpiano. A Gothic choir, added to the abbatial later, was blown up after the Revolution by a contractor who acquired the monastery in order to sell its stones as building material. Under the flank of the now roofless nave nestles a ruined little church of the XIV century, St. Peter its tutelary. Two of its bays incorporate parts from a Carolingian church built by Rollo's son, William Longsword (928-943). They are of archaeological interest in being the oldest examples extant of twin arches beneath a common arch for the tribune-opening on the middle vessel. The arrangement became popular in the Romanesque churches of Normandy and England, and can be seen at Mont-Saint-Michel, Rochester, Ely, Gloucester, Peterborough, and Winchester.

Jumieges was an ancient foundation of Clovis II and Queen Bathilde.

They granted forests on the Seine to St. Philibert (d. 684), who had been an intimate at the Merovingian court, of St. Ouen and St.

Wandrille. To obtain the Celtic rule of Columba.n.u.s at its source, Philibert visited Luxeuil and Bobbio, and he dedicated a chapel of his abbatial at Jumieges to the Irish missionary. His own cult was to crop out at Tournus and Dijon when the Norse piratical inroads drove the inmates of wrecked monastic houses into Burgundy.

Jumieges was a scene of pillage and ma.s.sacre during the last acts of the Capet-Plantagenet duel, when Henry V, the victor of Agincourt, overran Normandy. The abbot, then appointed, sat in judgment on St. Jeanne in 1431, and fell down dead three months later. After Charles VII had entered Rouen as conqueror, in 1449, he retired to Jumieges. During the feasts of rejoicing _la dame de beaulte_, Agnes Sorel, died in a manor close by, and her memorial stone in Jumieges abbatial recorded her "pitiful loving kindness to all men and especially the poor and children." Days of decline came for Jumieges under her commendatory abbots. A XVII-century revival of learning was led by the reformers of the Congregation of St. Maur, but the famous establishment went under completely during the Revolution. The sequence is the same for most French abbeys.

Farther down the Seine, at what once was Fontenelle, stand the less imposing ruins of St. Wandrille's abbatial, consisting of a transept of the XIII century and a Flamboyant Gothic cloister, whose _lave-mains_ is a gem of Renaissance delicacy. The house was founded in 649 by St.

Wandrille, of Merovingian blood. Like his friend, Philibert of Jumieges, he sought the rule of St. Columba.n.u.s at its fountainhead, though the more equable rule of St. Benedict was to prevail in French religious establishments before the VII century closed. St. Wandrille trained many of the saints who planted monasteries over northern France, and in later centuries the Duke of Normandy chose monks from St. Wandrille's abbey to inst.i.tute a Benedictine house of prayer on the rock of St.

Michael-in-peril-of-the-sea.

THE ROMANESQUE ABBATIALS AT CAEN[322]

Clochers legers, clochers aigus, Clochers de France, Par quel attrait d'elan pieux Emportez-vous si vite et si haut dans les cieux Nos regards et notre esperance?...

Longs et pareils a ces lances pointus Que les geants piquaient au sol, Vous montiez d'un seul jet pour defier le vol Des hirondelles eperdues.

--GEORGES LAFENESTRE, "Clochers de France."[323]

Caen played a prominent part in the builder's story of Normandy. It has been called the Romanesque Mecca. Its church of St. Nicolas (c.