Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres Part 29

Infinitus et Immensus;

or--

Oh, juvamen oppressorum;

or--

Consolatrix miserorum Suscitatrix mortuorum.

The organ rolls through them as solemnly as ever it did in the Abbey Church; but in mediaeval art so much more depends on the ma.s.s than on the measure--on the dignity than on the detail--that equivalents are impossible. Even Walter Scott was content to translate only three verses of the "Dies Irae." At best, Viollet-le-Duc could reproduce only a sort of modern Gothic; a more or less effaced or affected echo of a lost emotion which the world never felt but once and never could feel again. Adam composed a number of hymns to the Virgin, and, in them all, the feeling counts for more, by far, than the sense. Supposing we choose the simplest and try to give it a modern version, aiming to show, by comparison, the difference of sound; one can perhaps manage to recover a little of the simplicity, but give it the grand style one cannot; or, at least, if any one has ever done both, it is Walter Scott, and merely by placing side by side the "Dies Irae" and his translation of it, one can see at a glance where he was obliged to sacrifice simplicity only to obtain sound:--

Dies irae, dies illa, Solvet seclum in favilla, Teste David c.u.m Sibylla.

Quantus tremor est futurus, Quando judex est venturus, Cuncta stride discussurus!

Tuba mirum spargens sonum Per sepulchra regionum, Coget omnes ante thronum.

That day of wrath, that dreadful day, When heaven and earth shall pa.s.s away, What power shall be the sinner's stay?

How shall he meet that dreadful day?

When shrivelling like a parched scroll The flaming heavens together roll; When louder yet and yet more dread Swells the high trump that wakes the dead.

As translation the last line is artificial.

The "Dies Irae" does not belong, in spirit, to the twelfth century; it is sombre and gloomy like the Last Judgments on the thirteenth- century portals; it does not love. Adam loved. His verses express the Virgin; they are graceful, tender, fervent, and they hold the same dignity which cannot be translated:--

In hac valle lacrimarum Nihil dulce, nihil carum, Suspecta sunt omnia; Quid hic n.o.bis erit tutum, c.u.m nec ipsa vel virtutum Tuta sit victoria!

Caro n.o.bis adversatur, Mundus cami suffragatur In nostram perniciem; Hostis instat, nos infestans, Nunc se palam manifestans, Nunc occultans rabiem.

Et peccamus et punimur, Et diversis irretimur Laqueis venantium.

O Maria, mater Dei, Tu, post Deum, summa spei, Tu dulce refugium;

Tot et tantis irret.i.ti, Non valemus his reniti Ne vi nec industria; Consolatrix miserorum, Suscitatrix mortuorum, Mortis rompe retia!

In this valley full of tears, Nothing softens, nothing cheers, All is suspected lure; What safety can we hope for, here, When even virtue faints for fear Her victory be not sure!

Within, the flesh a traitor is, Without, the world encompa.s.ses, A deadly wound to bring.

The foe is greedy for our spoils, Now clasping us within his coils, Or hiding now his sting.

We sin, and penalty must pay, And we are caught, like beasts of prey, Within the hunter's snares.

Nearest to G.o.d! oh Mary Mother!

Hope can reach us from none other, Sweet refuge from our cares;

We have no strength to struggle longer, For our bonds are more and stronger Than our hearts can bear!

You who rest the heavy-laden, You who lead lost souls to Heaven, Burst the hunter's snare!

The art of this poetry of love and hope, which marked the mystics, lay of course in the background of shadows which marked the cloister. "Inter vania nihil vanius est homine." Man is an imperceptible atom always trying to become one with G.o.d. If ever modern science achieves a definition of energy, possibly it may borrow the figure: Energy is the inherent effort of every multiplicity to become unity. Adam's poetry was an expression of the effort to reach absorption through love, not through fear; but to do this thoroughly he had to make real to himself his own nothingness; most of all, to annihilate pride; for the loftiest soul can comprehend that an atom,--say, of hydrogen,--which is proud of its personality, will never merge in a molecule of water. The familiar verse: "Oh, why should the spirit of mortal be proud?" echoes Adam's epitaph to this day:--

Haeres peccati, natura filius irae, Exiliique reus nascitur omnis h.o.m.o.

Unde superbit h.o.m.o, cujus conceptio culpa, Nasci poena, labor vita, necesse mori?

Heir of sin, by nature son of wrath, Condemned to exile, every man is born.

Whence is man's pride, whose conception fault, Birth pain, life labour, and whose death is sure?

Four concluding lines, not by him, express him even better:--

Hic ego qui jaceo, miser et miserabilis Adam, Unam pro summo munere posco precem.

Peccavi, fateor; veniam peto; parce fatenti; Parce, pater: fratres, parcite; parce, Deus!

One does not conceive that Adam insisted so pa.s.sionately on his sins because he thought them--or himself--important before the Infinite.

Chemistry does not consider an atom of oxygen as in itself important, yet if it wishes to get a volume of pure gas, it must separate the elements. The human soul was an atom that could unite with G.o.d only as a simple element. The French mystics showed in their mysticism the same French reasonableness; the sense of measure, of logic, of science; the allegiance to form; the transparency of thought, which the French mind has always shown on its surface like a sh.e.l.l of nacre. The mystics were in substance rather more logical than the schoolmen and much more artistic in their correctness of line and scale. At bottom, French saints were not extravagant. One can imagine a Byzantine a.s.serting that no French saint was ever quite saintly. Their aims and ideals were very high, but not beyond reaching and not unreasonable. Drag the French mind as far from line and logic as s.p.a.ce permits, the instant it is freed it springs back to the cla.s.sic and tries to look consequent.

This paradox, that the French mystics were never mystical, runs through all our travels, so obstinately recurring in architecture, sculpture, legend, philosophy, religion, and poetry, that it becomes tiresome; and yet it is an idea that, in spite of Matthew Arnold and many other great critics, never has got lodgment in the English or German mind, and probably never will. Every one who loves travel will hope that it never may. If you are driven to notice it as the most distinctive mark of French art, it is not at all for the purpose of arguing a doubtful law, but only in order to widen the amus.e.m.e.nt of travel. We set out to travel from Mont-Saint-Michel to Chartres, and no farther; there we stop; but we may still look across the boundary to a.s.sisi for a specimen of Italian Gothic architecture, a scheme of colour decoration, or still better for a mystic to compare with the Bernadines and Victorians. Every one who knows anything of religion knows that the ideal mystic saint of western Europe was Francis of a.s.sisi, and that Francis, though he loved France, was as far as possible from being French; though not in the least French, he was still the finest flower from the French mediaeval garden; and though the French mystics could never have understood him, he was what the French mystics would have liked to be or would have thought they liked to be as long as they knew him to be not one of themselves. As an Italian or as a Spaniard, Francis was in harmony with his world; as a Frenchman, he would have been out of place even at Clairvaux, and still more among his own Cordeliers at the doors of the Sorbonne.

Francis was born in 1186, at the instant when French art was culminating, or about to culminate, in the new cathedrals of Laon and Chartres, on the ruins of scholastic religion and in the full summer of the Courts of Love. He died in 1226, just as Queen Blanche became Regent of France and when the Cathedral of Beauvais was planned. His life precisely covered the most perfect moment of art and feeling in the thousand years of pure and confident Christianity. To an emotional nature like his, life was still a phantasm or "concept" of crusade against real or imaginary enemies of G.o.d, with the "Chanson de Roland" for a sort of evangel, and a feminine ideal for a pa.s.sion. He chose for his mistress "domina nostra paupertas," and the rules of his order of knighthood were as visionary as those of Saint Bernard were practical. "Isti sunt fratres mei milites tabulae rotundae, qui lat.i.tant in desertis"; his Knights of the Round Table hid themselves for their training in deserts of poverty, simplicity, humility, innocence of self, absorption in nature, in the silence of G.o.d, and, above all, in love and joy incarnate, whose only influence was example. Poverty of body in itself mattered nothing; what Francis wanted was poverty of pride, and the external robe or the bare feet were outward and necessary forms of protection against its outward display. Against riches or against all external and visible vanity, rules and laws could be easily enforced if it were worth while, although the purest humility would be reached only by those who were indifferent and unconscious of their external dress; but against spiritual pride the soul is defenceless, and of all its forms the subtlest and the meanest is pride of intellect. If "nostra domina paupertas" had a mortal enemy, it was not the pride beneath a scarlet robe, but that in a schoolmaster's ferule, and of all schoolmasters the vainest and most pretentious was the scholastic philosopher. Satan was logic.

Lord Bacon held much the same opinion. "I reject the syllogism," was the starting-point of his teaching as it was the essence of Saint Francis's, and the reasons of both men were the same though their action was opposite. "Let men please themselves as they will in admiring and almost adoring the human mind, this is certain:--that, as an uneven mirror distorts the rays of objects according to its own figure and section, so the mind ... cannot be trusted ..."

Bacon's first object was the same as that of Francis, to humiliate and if possible destroy the pride of human reason; both of them knew that this was their most difficult task, and Francis, who was charity incarnate, lost his self-control whenever he spoke of the schools, and became almost bitter, as though in constant terror of a poison or a cancer. "Praeodorabat etiam tempora non longe ventura in quibus jam praesciebat scientiam inflativam debere esse occasionem ruinae." He foresaw the time not far off when puffed-up science would be the ruin of his "domina paupertas." His struggle with this form of human pride was desperate and tragical in its instant failure. He could not make even his novices understand what he meant. The most impossible task of the mind is to reject in practice the reflex action of itself, as Bacon pointed out, and only the highest training has sometimes partially succeeded in doing it. The schools--ancient, mediaeval, or modern--have almost equally failed, but even the simple rustics who tried to follow Francis could not see why the rule of poverty should extend to the use of a psalter.

Over and over again he explained vehemently and dramatically as only an Italian or a Spaniard could, and still they failed to catch a notion of what he meant.

Quum ergo venisset beatus Franciscus ad loc.u.m ubi erat ille novitius, dixit ille novitius: "Pater, mihi esset magna consolatio habere psalterium, sed licet generalis illud mihi concesserit, tamen vellem ipsum habere, pater, de conscientia tua." Cui beatus Franciscus respondit: "Carolus imperator, Rolandus et Oliverus et omnes palatini et robusti viri qui potentes fuerunt in proelio, prosequendo infideles c.u.m multa sudore et labore usque ad mortem, habuerunt de illis victoriara memorialiter, et ad ultimum ipsi sancti martyres sunt mortui pro fide Christi in certamine. Nunc autem multi sunt qui sola narratione eorum quae illi fecerunt volunt recipere honorem et humanam laudem. Ita et inter nos sunt multi qui solum recitando et praedicando opera quae sancti fecerunt volunt recipere honorem et laudem; ... postquam habueris psalterium, concupisces et volueris habere breviarium; et postquam habueris breviarium, sedebis in cathedra tanquam magnus prelatus et dices fratri tuo:--Apporta mihi breviarium!"

Haec autem dicens beatus Franciscus c.u.m magno fervore spiritus accepit de cinere et posuit super caput suum, et ducendo manum super caput suum in circuitu sicut ille qui lavat caput, dicebat: "Ego breviarium! ego breviarium!" et sic reiteravit multoties ducendo manum per caput. Et stupefactus et verecundatus est frater ille ...

Elapsis autem pluribus mensibus quum esset beatus Franciscus apud loc.u.m sanctae Mariae de Portiuncula, juxta cellam post domum in via, praedictus frater iterum locutus est ei de psalterio. Cui beatus Franciscus dixit: "Vade et facias de hoc sicut dicet tibi minister tuus!" Quo audito, frater ille coepit redire per viam unde venerat.

Beatus autem Franciscus remanens in via coepit considerare illud quod dixerat illi fratri, et statim clamavit post c.u.m, dicens: "Expecta me, frater! expecta!" Et ivit usque ad eum et ait illi: "Revertere mec.u.m, frater, et ostende mihi loc.u.m ubi dixi tibi quod faceres de psalterio sicut diceret minister tuus." Quum ergo pervenissent ad loc.u.m, beatus Franciscus genuflexit coram fratre illo, et dixit: "Mea culpa, frater! mea culpa! quia quicunque vult esse frater Minor non debet habere nisi tunicam, sicut regula sibi concedit, et cordam et femoralia et qui manifesta necessitate coguntur calciamenta."

So when Saint Francis happened to come to the place where the novice was, the novice said: "Father, it would be a great comfort to me to have a psalter, but though my general should grant it, still I would rather have it, father, with your knowledge too." Saint Francis answered: "The Emperor Charlemagne, Roland and Oliver, and all the palatines and strong men who were potent in battle, pursuing the infidels with much toil and sweat even to death, triumphed over them memorably [without writing it?], and at last these holy martyrs died in the contest for the faith of Christ. But now there are many who, merely by telling of what those men did, want to receive honour and human praise. So, too, among us are many who, merely by reciting and preaching the works which the saints have done, want to receive honour and praise; ... After you have got the psalter, you will covet and want a breviary; and after getting the breviary, you will sit on your throne like a bishop, and will say to your brother: 'Bring me the breviary!'"

While saying this, Saint Francis with great vehemence took up a handful of ashes and spread it over his bead; and moving his hand about his head in a circle as though washing it, said: "I, breviary!

I, breviary!" and so kept on, repeatedly moving his hand about his head; and stupefied and ashamed was that novice. ... But several months afterwards when Saint Francis happened to be near Sta Maria de Portiuncula, by the cell behind the house on the road, the same brother again spoke to him about the psalter. Saint Francis replied: "Go and do about it as your director says." On this the brother turned back, but Saint Francis, standing in the road, began to reflect on what he had said, and suddenly called after him: "Wait for me, brother! wait!" and going after him, said: "Return with me, brother, and show me the place where I told you to do as your director should say, about the psalter." When they had come back to it, Saint Francis bent before the brother, and said: "Mea culpa, brother, mea culpa! because whoever wishes to be a Minorite must have nothing but a tunic, as the rule permits, and the cord, and the loincloth, and what covering is manifestly necessary for the limbs."