Our Fathers Have Told Us Part 9

The entire work was ended on St. John's Day, 1522, without (so far as we hear) any manner of interruption by dissension, death, dishonesty, or incapacity, among its fellow-workmen, master or servant. And the accounts being audited by four members of the Chapter, it was found that the total expense was 9488 livres, 11 sous, and 3 obols (decimes), or 474 napoleons, 11 sous, 3 decimes of modern French money, or roughly four hundred sterling English pounds.

For which sum, you perceive, a company of probably six or eight good workmen, old and young, had been kept merry and busy for fourteen years; and this that you see--left for substantial result and gift to you.

I have not examined the carvings so as to a.s.sign, with any decision, the several masters' work; but in general the flower and leaf design in the traceries will be by the two head menuisiers, and their apprentices; the elaborate Scripture histories by Avernier, with variously completing incidental grotesque by Trupin; and the joining and fitting by the common workmen. No nails are used,--all is morticed, and so beautifully that the joints have not moved to this day, and are still almost imperceptible. The four terminal pyramids 'you might take for giant pines forgotten for six centuries on the soil where the church was built; they might be looked on at first as a wild luxury of sculpture and hollow traceries--but examined in a.n.a.lysis they are marvels of order and system in construction, uniting all the lightness, strength, and grace of the most renowned spires in the last epoch of the Middle ages.'

The above particulars are all extracted--or simply translated, out of the excellent description of the "Stalles et les Clotures du Choeur"

of the Cathedral of Amiens, by MM. les Chanoines Jourdain et Duval (Amiens, Vv. Alfred Caron, 1867). The accompanying lithographic outlines are exceedingly good, and the reader will find the entire series of subjects indicated with precision and brevity, both for the woodwork and the external veil of the choir, of which I have no room to speak in this traveller's summary.]

6. I have never been able to make up my mind which was really the best way of approaching the cathedral for the first time. If you have plenty of leisure, and the day is fine, and you are not afraid of an hour's walk, the really right thing to do is to walk down the main street of the old town, and across the river, and quite out to the chalk hill[44]

out of which the citadel is half quarried--half walled;--and walk to the top of that, and look down into the citadel's dry 'ditch,'--or, more truly, dry valley of death, which is about as deep as a glen in Derbyshire, (or, more precisely, the upper part of the 'Happy Valley'

at Oxford, above Lower Hincksey,) and thence across to the cathedral and ascending slopes of the city; so, you will understand the real height and relation of tower and town:--then, returning, find your way to the Mount Zion of it by any narrow cross streets and chance bridges you can--the more winding and dirty the streets, the better; and whether you come first on west front or apse, you will think them worth all the trouble you have had to reach them.

[Footnote 44: The strongest and finally to be defended part of the earliest city was on this height.]

7. But if the day be dismal, as it may sometimes be, even in France, of late years,--or if you cannot or will not walk, which may also chance, for all our athletics and lawn-tennis,--or if you must really go to Paris this afternoon, and only mean to see all you can in an hour or two,--then, supposing that, notwithstanding these weaknesses, you are still a nice sort of person, for whom it is of some consequence which way you come at a pretty thing, or begin to look at it--I _think_ the best way is to walk from the Hotel de France or the Place de Perigord, up the Street of Three Pebbles, towards the railway station--stopping a little as you go, so as to get into a cheerful temper, and buying some bonbons or tarts for the children in one of the charming patissiers' shops on the left. Just past them, ask for the theatre; and just past that, you will find, also on the left, three open arches, through which you can turn, pa.s.sing the Palais de Justice, and go straight up to the south transept, which has really something about it to please everybody. It is simple and severe at the bottom, and daintily traceried and pinnacled at the top, and yet seems all of a piece--though it isn't--and everybody _must_ like the taper and transparent fretwork of the fleche above, which seems to bend to the west wind,--though it doesn't--at least, the bending is a long habit, gradually yielded into, with gaining grace and submissiveness, during the last three hundred years. And, coming quite up to the porch, everybody must like the pretty French Madonna in the middle of it, with her head a little aside, and her nimbus switched a little aside too, like a becoming bonnet. A Madonna in decadence she is, though, for all, or rather by reason of all, her prettiness, and her gay soubrette's smile; and she has no business there, neither, for this is St. Honore's porch, not hers; and grim and grey St. Honore used to stand there to receive you,--he is banished now to the north porch, where n.o.body ever goes in. This was done long ago, in the fourteenth-century days, when the people first began to find Christianity too serious, and devised a merrier faith for France, and would have bright-glancing, soubrette Madonnas everywhere--letting their own dark-eyed Joan of Arc be burned for a witch. And thenceforward, things went their merry way, straight on, 'ca allait, ca ira,' to the merriest days of the guillotine.

But they could still carve, in the fourteenth century, and the Madonna and her hawthorn-blossom lintel are worth your looking at,--much more the field above, of sculpture as delicate and more calm, which tells St. Honore's own story, little talked of now in his Parisian faubourg.

8. I will not keep you just now to tell St. Honore's story--(only too glad to leave you a little curious about it, if it were possible)[45]--for certainly you will be impatient to go into the church; and cannot enter it to better advantage than by this door. For all cathedrals of any mark have nearly the same effect when you enter at the west door; but I know no other which shows so much of its n.o.bleness from the south interior transept; the opposite rose being of exquisite fineness in tracery, and lovely in l.u.s.tre; and the shafts of the transept aisles forming wonderful groups with those of the choir and nave; also, the apse shows its height better, as it opens to you when you advance from the transept into the mid-nave, than when it is seen at once from the west end of the nave; where it is just possible for an irreverent person rather to think the nave narrow, than the apse high.

Therefore, if you let me guide you, go in at this south transept door, (and put a sou into every beggar's box who asks it there,--it is none of your business whether they should be there or not, nor whether they deserve to have the sou,--be sure only that you yourself deserve to have it to give; and give it prettily, and not as if it burnt your fingers).

Then, being once inside, take what first sensation and general glimpse of it pleases you--promising the custode to come back to _see_ it properly; (only then mind you keep the promise;) and in this first quarter of an hour, seeing only what fancy bid you--but at least, as I said, the apse from mid-nave, and all the traverses of the building, from its centre. Then you will know, when you go outside again, what the architect was working for, and what his b.u.t.tresses and traceries mean.

For the outside of a French cathedral, except for its sculpture, is always to be thought of as the wrong side of the stuff, in which you find how the threads go that produce the inside or right-side pattern.

And if you have no wonder in you for that choir and its encompa.s.sing circlet of light, when you look up into it from the cross-centre, you need not travel farther in search of cathedrals, for the waiting-room of any station is a better place for you;--but, if it amaze you and delight you at first, then, the more you know of it, the more it will amaze. For it is not possible for imagination and mathematics together, to do anything n.o.bler or stronger than that procession of window, with material of gla.s.s and stone--nor anything which shall look loftier, with so temperate and prudent measure of actual loftiness.

[Footnote 45: See, however, pages 32 and 130 (---- 36, 112-114) of the octavo edition of 'The Two Paths.']

9. From the pavement to the keystone of its vault is but 132 French feet--about 150 English. Think only--you who have been in Switzerland,--the Staubbach falls _nine_ hundred! Nay, Dover cliff under the castle, just at the end of the Marine Parade, is twice as high; and the little c.o.c.kneys parading to military polka on the asphalt below, think themselves about as tall as it, I suppose,--nay, what with their little lodgings and stodgings and podgings about it, they have managed to make it look no bigger than a moderate-sized limekiln. Yet it is twice the height of Amiens' apse!--and it takes good building, with only such bits of chalk as one can quarry beside Somme, to make your work stand half that height, for six hundred years.

10. It takes good building, I say, and you may even aver the best--that ever was, or is again likely for many a day to be, on the unquaking and fruitful earth, where one could calculate on a pillar's standing fast, once well set up; and where aisles of aspen, and orchards of apple, and cl.u.s.ters of vine, gave type of what might be most beautifully made sacred in the constancy of sculptured stone.

From the unhewn block set on end in the Druid's Bethel, to _this_ Lord's House and blue-vitrailed gate of Heaven, you have the entire course and consummation of the Northern Religious Builder's pa.s.sion and art.

11. But, note further--and earnestly,--this apse of Amiens is not only the best, but the very _first_ thing done _perfectly_ in its manner, by Northern Christendom. In pages 323 and 327 of the sixth volume of M. Viollet le Duc, you will find the exact history of the development of these traceries through which the eastern light shines on you as you stand, from the less perfect and tentative forms of Rheims: and so momentary was the culmination of the exact rightness, that here, from nave to transept--built only ten years later,--there is a little change, not towards decline, but to a not quite necessary precision.

Where decline begins, one cannot, among the lovely fantasies that succeeded, exactly say--but exactly, and indisputably, we know that this apse of Amiens is the first virgin perfect work,--Parthenon also in that sense,--of Gothic Architecture.

12. Who built it, shall we ask? G.o.d, and Man,--is the first and most true answer. The stars in their courses built it, and the Nations.

Greek Athena labours here--and Roman Father Jove, and Guardian Mars.

The Gaul labours here, and the Frank: knightly Norman,--mighty Ostrogoth,--and wasted anchorite of Idumea.

The actual Man who built it scarcely cared to tell you he did so; nor do the historians brag of him. Any quant.i.ty of heraldries of knaves and faineants you may find in what they call their 'history': but this is probably the first time you ever read the name of Robert of Luzarches. I say he 'scarcely cared'--we are not sure that he cared at all. He signed his name nowhere, that I can hear of. You may perhaps find some recent initials cut by English remarkable visitors desirous of immortality, here and there about the edifice, but Robert the builder--or at least the Master of building, cut _his_ on no stone of it. Only when, after his death, the headstone had been brought forth with shouting, Grace unto it, this following legend was written, recording all who had part or lot in the labour, within the middle of the labyrinth then inlaid in the pavement of the nave. You must read it trippingly on the tongue: it was rhymed gaily for you by pure French gaiety, not the least like that of the Theatre de Folies.

"En l'an de Grace mil deux cent Et vingt, fu l'oeuvre de cheens Premierement encomenchie.

A donc y ert de cheste evesquie Evrart, eveque benis; Et, Roy de France, Loys Qui fut fils Phelippe le Sage.

Qui maistre y ert de l'oeuvre Maistre Robert estoit nomes Et de Luzarches surnomes.

Maistre Thomas fu apres lui De Cormont. Et apres, son filz Maistre Regnault, qui mestre Fist a chest point chi cheste lectre Que l'incarnation valoit Treize cent, moins douze, en faloit."

13. I have written the numerals in letters, else the metre would not have come clear: they were really in figures thus, "II C. et XX,"

"XIII C. moins XII". I quote the inscription from M. l'Abbe Roze's admirable little book, "Visite a la Cathedrale d'Amiens,"--Sup. Lib.

de Mgr l'Eveque d'Amiens, 1877,--which every grateful traveller should buy, for I am only going to steal a little bit of it here and there. I only wish there had been a translation of the legend to steal, too; for there are one or two points, both of idea and chronology, in it, that I should have liked the Abbe's opinion of.

The main purport of the rhyme, however, we perceive to be, line for line, as follows:--

"In the year of Grace, Twelve Hundred And twenty, the work, then falling to ruin, Was first begun again.

Then was, of this Bishopric Everard the blessed Bishop.

And, King of France, Louis, Who was son to Philip the Wise.

He who was Master of the Work Was called Master Robert, And called, beyond that, of Luzarches.

Master Thomas was after him, Of Cormont. And after him, his son, Master Reginald, who to be put Made--at this point--this reading.

When the Incarnation was of account Thirteen hundred, less twelve, which it failed of."

In which legend, while you stand where once it was written (it was removed--to make the old pavement more polite--in the year, I sorrowfully observe, of my own earliest tour on the Continent, 1825, when I had not yet turned my attention to Ecclesiastical Architecture), these points are noticeable--if you have still a little patience.

14. 'The work'--_i.e._, the Work of Amiens in especial, her cathedral, was 'decheant,' falling to ruin, for the--I cannot at once say--fourth, fifth, or what time,--in the year 1220. For it was a wonderfully difficult matter for little Amiens to get this piece of business fairly done, so hard did the Devil pull against her. She built her first Bishop's church (scarcely more than St. Firmin's tomb-chapel) about the year 350, just outside the railway station on the road to Paris;[46]

then, after being nearly herself destroyed, chapel and all, by the Frank invasion, having recovered, and converted her Franks, she built another and a properly called cathedral, where this one stands now, under Bishop St. Save (St. Sauve, or Salve). But even this proper cathedral was only of wood, and the Normans burnt it in 881. Rebuilt, it stood for 200 years; but was in great part destroyed by lightning in 1019. Rebuilt again, it and the town were more or less burnt together by lightning, in 1107,--my authority says calmly, "un incendie provoque par la meme cause detruisit _la ville_, et une partie de la cathedrale." The 'partie'

being rebuilt once more, the whole was again reduced to ashes, "reduite en cendre par le feu de ciel en 1218, ainsi que tous les t.i.tres, les martyrologies, les calendriers, et les Archives de l'Eveche et du Chapitre."

[Footnote 46: At St. Acheul. See the first chapter of this book, and the "Description Historique de la Cathedrale d'Amiens," by A. P. M.

Gilbert. 8vo, Amiens, 1833, pp. 5-7.]

15. It was the fifth cathedral, I count, then, that lay in 'ashes,'

according to Mons. Gilbert--in ruin certainly--decheant;--and ruin of a very discouraging completeness it would have been, to less lively townspeople--in 1218. But it was rather of a stimulating completeness to Bishop Everard and his people--the ground well cleared for them, as it were: and lightning (feu de l'enfer, not du ciel, recognized for a diabolic plague, as in Egypt), was to be defied to the pit. They only took two years, you see, to pull themselves together; and to work they went, in 1220, they, and their bishop, and their king, and their Robert of Luzarches. And this, that roofs you, was what their hands found to do with their might.

16. Their king was 'a-donc,' 'at that time,' Louis VIII., who is especially further called the son of Philip of August, or Philip the Wise, because his father was not dead in 1220; but must have resigned the practical kingdom to his son, as his own father had done to him; the old and wise king retiring to his chamber, and thence silently guiding his son's hands, very gloriously, yet for three years.

But, farther--and this is the point on which chiefly I would have desired the Abbe's judgment--Louis VIII. died of fever at Montpensier in 1226. And the entire conduct of the main labour of the cathedral, and the chief glory of its service, as we shall hear presently, was _Saint_ Louis's; for a time of forty-four years. And the inscription was put "a ce point ci" by the last architect, six years after St. Louis's death.

How is it that the great and holy king is not named?

17. I must not, in this traveller's brief, lose time in conjectural answers to the questions which every step here will raise from the ravaged shrine. But this is a very solemn one; and must be kept in our hearts, till we may perhaps get clue to it. One thing only we are sure of,--that at least the _due_ honour--alike by the sons of Kings and sons of Craftsmen--is given always to their fathers; and that apparently the chief honour of all is given here to Philip the Wise.

From whose house, not of parliament but of peace, came, in the years when this temple was first in building, an edict indeed of peace-making: "That it should be criminal for any man to take vengeance for an insult or injury till forty days after the commission of the offence--and then only with the approbation of the Bishop of the Diocese." Which was perhaps a wiser effort to end the Feudal system in its Saxon sense,[47] than any of our recent projects for ending it in the Norman one.

[Footnote 47: Feud, Saxon faedh, low Latin Faida (Scottish 'fae,'

English 'foe,' derivative), Johnson. Remember also that the root of Feud, in its Norman sense of land-allotment, is _foi_, not _fee_, which Johnson, old Tory as he was, did not observe--neither in general does the modern Antifeudalist.]

18. "A ce point ci." The point, namely, of the labyrinth inlaid in the cathedral floor; a recognized emblem of many things to the people, who knew that the ground they stood on was holy, as the roof over their head. Chiefly, to them, it was an emblem of n.o.ble human life--strait-gated, narrow-walled, with infinite darknesses and the "inextricabilis error" on either hand--and in the depth of it, the brutal nature to be conquered.

19. This meaning, from the proudest heroic, and purest legislative, days of Greece, the symbol had borne for all men skilled in her traditions: to the schools of craftsmen the sign meant further their craft's n.o.blesse, and pure descent from the divinely-terrestrial skill of Daedalus, the labyrinth-builder, and the first sculptor of imagery _pathetic_[48] with human life and death.

[Footnote 48:

"Tu quoque, magnam Partem opere in tanto, sineret dolor, Icare, haberes, Bis conatus erat casus effingere in auro,-- Bis patriae cecidere ma.n.u.s."

There is, advisedly, no pathos allowed in primary sculpture. Its heroes conquer without exultation, and die without sorrow.]

20. Quite the most beautiful sign of the power of true Christian-Catholic faith is this continual acknowledgment by it of the brotherhood--nay, more, the fatherhood, of the elder nations who had not seen Christ; but had been filled with the Spirit of G.o.d; and obeyed, according to their knowledge, His unwritten law. The pure charity and humility of this temper are seen in all Christian art, according to its strength and purity of race; but best, to the full, seen and interpreted by the three great Christian-Heathen poets, Dante, Douglas of Dunkeld,[49] and George Chapman. The prayer with which the last ends his life's work is, so far as I know, the perfectest and deepest expression of Natural Religion given us in literature; and if you can, pray it here--standing on the spot where the builder once wrote the history of the Parthenon of Christianity.

[Footnote 49: See 'Fors Clavigera,' Letter LXI., p. 22.]

21. "I pray thee, Lord, the Father, and the Guide of our reason, that we may remember the n.o.bleness with which Thou hast adorned us; and that Thou wouldst be always on our right hand and on our left,[50] in the motion of our own Wills: that so we may be purged from the contagion of the Body and the Affections of the Brute, and overcome them and rule; and use, as it becomes men to use them, for instruments. And then, that Thou wouldst be in Fellowship with us for the careful correction of our reason, and for its conjunction by the light of truth with the things that truly are.

[Footnote 50: Thus, the command to the children of Israel "that they go forward" is to their own wills. They obeying, the sea retreats, _but not before_ they dare to advance into it. _Then_, the waters are a wall unto them, on their right hand and their left.]