Note

The friendly eyes that read these pages, knowing the pathetic fails relating to their publication, will not be content without a word to tell to other readers the story that will cause one and all to look on the little book in the same sympathetic mood.

The trips among the scenes of the storied past, here recorded, were taken not so much in search of health as in search of diversion from the sad employment of watching the inexorable approach of mortal disease. The writing was undertaken to occupy a vigorous mind, conscious that its tenement would not long endure.

Alas! the task was not done before its purpose had been fully completed, and to others was left the duty of reading the final proofs. Such imperfections as may be found should be charged to this account, and all the excellences are to be credited to the brave soul that fought her fight so silently that only a very few closest friends knew of the unequal battle.

C. S. G.

The Abbatical Church of Saint Ouen is Perhaps the Most
Perfect Example of the Gothic in its Full Maturity

FLOWERS
FROM MEDIÆVAL
HISTORY

BY

MINNIE D. KELLOGG

I never can feel
sure of any truth but from
a clear perception
of its beauty.
Keats

ILLUSTRATED

PAUL ELDER AND COMPANY
PUBLISHERS·SAN FRANCISCO

Copyright, 1910
by Paul Elder and Company

Contents

Illustrations

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These accounts all relate to places and objects that the uncommercial traveler may casually run upon at some turn of his way. Subjects mentioned in Baedeker have been considered here reflectively rather than descriptively. Although I do not propose to analyze the soil in which these flowers of history have sprung up, nor to speak of the rank weeds growing by their sides, I have tried not to blight these blossoms with falsehood. Certainly one-half of the truth is as true as the other and it may be infinitely pleasanter. As far as they go, these little historiettes are based upon evidence and authority.

I want to teach you so much history that your sympathy may grow continually wider and you may be able to realize past generations of men just as you do the present, sorrowing for them when they failed, triumphing with them when they prevailed; for I find this one conviction never changing with me but always increasingy that one cannot live a life manfully without a wide world of sympathy and love to exercise it in.

—Burne-Jones to His Son.

Suggested itineraries for cathedral trips in Normandy, giving monuments of the first order only, places readily reached by rail:

First. Land at Bologne sur Mer, Amiens, Laon, Rheims, Paris, Saint Denis, Chartres, Caen, Bayeux, Mt. San Michele, embark from Cherbourg.

Second. Land from England at Dieppe, or from America at Havre, proceed to Rouen, which possesses the most perfect example of later Gothic in the great abbatical Church of Saint Ouen; an excellent example of flamboyant Gothic in Saint Maclou; and a large, irregular but imposing Gothic cathedral on the order of Rheims; thence to Mt. San Michele, most unique of mediæval monuments; thence to Caen and Bayeux near by it, Chartres and Paris. Amiens and Rheims being very similar, and on the order of Chartres and Notre Dame of Paris, are not included in this itinerary. The traveler to whom time is money will be greatly tried by the connections made and lost by the trains in Normandy that stop at small places. Both these itineraries respect the idiosyncrasies of French railroads.

The motorist, rejoicing in the excellent Norman roads, can combine these itineraries very easily—taking in the cathedrals of Le Mans, Bourg, Beauvais and Coutances. I would especially call his attention to the small but interesting Early Norman church at Dols, and to the walled town of San Malo on the sea, with picturesque little Dinan, fashionable Dinard, and a dirty little fishing village near by.

By Way of Introduction

Modern invention has actually reflected upon ancient history: the railroad, the steam derrick and the photograph have changed our conceptions of the past. Written history is now accepted as its author’s opinion, while tangible records stand forth as facts.

This attitude brings the Middle Ages particularly near to us, for though its people wrote comparatively little, they were wonderful builders: their art was more literally expressive than the classic; then, too, of course, it is better preserved.

While the Greeks and Romans were our schoolmasters, the Europeans of the Middle Ages are our ancestors. Their experience foreshadows our own; for however far removed from us in thought and action they may have been, they were akin to us in feeling.

Though the rude pioneers of Christianity were often intensely cruel, as you follow their history, you may meet with some gentle deed springing from the good seed, even when sown in stony places, with some action in its sweetness and humility entirely beyond the pagan world. In their childish story one may trace the early workings of the Christian ideal. It did not control behavior, nor did it always direct it wisely; morality, being judicial and scientific, implies a certain maturity of mind. Religion is simple; it is unlogical, sentimental and impulsive. Whatever this indefinable instinct may be, it has manifested itself as a spiritualizing force in morality and an initiative force in art.

Religion has in it a craving for a loveliness beyond all literal perception of the senses; a philosophic mind projects this ideal in contemplation; an artistic mind, in symbol; for, as Michael Angelo explains, “Rash is the thought and vain that maketh beauty from the senses grow.”

The Greeks did develop an art from the motif of physical beauty, however, but their statues, executed before art became mature enough to produce that beauty, have no message, while one often catches something high and holy from a very early Christian image. It may radiate from a pretty smile on the face of a crude Madonna, or a graceful upturned head, in a figure entirely destitute of anatomy, which looks as though the simple craftsman had called upon a higher power than knowledge.

Spiritual beauty being the ideal in Christian art, the image, however rude, which suggests it, makes its appeal in the charmed language of that loving religion.

Mediæval archives have been ransacked by Protestants for the errors of Catholicism; by political economists, who even penetrate to the Dark Ages in search of the chilly lessons of the dismal science, for wisdom; and between them what a conception we have! But it is not the whole story, for Chaucer assures us the Moyen Age was a fairly livable period, peopled by beings like ourselves; moreover, it was an artistic age which has left us not only a wonderful architecture but two supreme poets.

Perhaps the fairest chroniclers of such a period are its own artists, great and small, for history has grown too democratic to confine herself to kings, however worthy. She does not find the crude carver voiceless who, in default of skill, surrounds his Madonna with gold and loads her with rude jewels; indeed, she often finds her sweetest flowers growing between the lines of an unskilful brush or chisel.

Although as painting, mediæval efforts are often [taken too seriously], as literature they are charming, for they speak of the good and the beautiful as their Age conceived it. While the written stories of the time were shallow and coarse beyond our endurance, its painters were giving us their accounts of this life and the next (particularly the next). First come bright, pretty colors prettily placed, pretty thoughts of happy angels. Then gold backgrounds give way to skies, and shadows creep onto the canvas. Then they begin to tell stories; so eager they are that they cram four or five pictures into one, dotting the little scenes, by way of parenthesis, into the backgrounds.

These pictures give the other half of the truth, the tenderer side of the old life and theology. What sympathetic Bible scholars some of the artists became! And, in general, the greatest were the tenderest. Albrecht Dürer’s Evangelists are interesting character studies for all time. He conceives of Saint Mark as a plain, simple enthusiast; of Saint Paul, as a broad-minded, thoughtful man whom he even imagines to be bald. He does not try to make either of them exactly handsome but the way Mark looks up to Paul is most winning. A little later Andrea del Sarto paints a splendid account of the warring doctors of the Church, which shows clearly he saw beyond them: but this takes us into the Renaissance which has been defined as a marriage of the Grecian and the Gothic.

As Art, Early Painting is
Often Taken too Seriously; but as Literature,
it is Charming.

A strict analysis has come into art and it is creeping into life,—our race childhood is drawing to a close but not without leaving us many things that are sweet to remember.

We tell our children some of the very same stories that the wandering story-tellers used to relate to good knights and their fair ladies in the old baronial halls,—Cinderella, Beauty and the Beast, or Puss in Boots,—only the knights and their ladies believed them. There is a pathos in mediæval story; it is a tragedy of misdirected effort (as perhaps all history is), only the mediæval tragedy strikes home. Its actors were people of our own blood and of our own Church—our own people only under delusions from which we have emancipated ourselves. To understand their story we must take them as children and listen with them for the imaginary voices that lead them on.

A veritable allegory of the Age of Faith was presented on the great stage of history in 1212, when two enormous armies of little boys and girls started from France and Germany singing, to march to the Holy Land; if any of these children turned back, none of them seem to have found their old homes.

As far as is known to history, one child alone returned as an aged pilgrim, to tell the tale,—how the bones of the children strewed the mountainside; how they had been embarked on unseaworthy vessels to be sold into slavery; how few, how very few, ever reached their goal; how few, how very few, ever remained pure and holy.

Connected with this tragedy was a horrible pope and a horrible doge, but now they seem but foils to the purity of the children, it was all so long ago. And that the mystic beauty of that little legion may live lyrically in our life, the Twentieth Century has set their pathetic march to music in stately oratorio; for pure aspiration is the melody of melodies, the veritable flower of history.

A certain childish disinterestedness was the tender grace of the Age of Faith,—“the tender grace of a day that is dead.” It must pass from a broader age; taking all factors duly into account even drives it from serious history its proportion is so inconsiderable.

The life of Saint Francis, who espoused My Lady Poverty, is one of the sweetest examples of mediæval disinterestedness. Viewed literally, the accounts picture a crazy man preaching to birds and fishes, making a bargain with a wolf and injudiciously mortifying his flesh till he became blind and useless. Viewed by the light of their influence his teachings were revolutionary,—they brought new-found energy and sympathy into the Church; yet, at best, they were only the teachings of Christ, without the Savior’s beautiful sanity. Viewed by the results he brought about, Saint Francis must have been one of the profoundest of men, and yet his wisdom, if he had any, was only that of the heart.

Sabatier has written a life of Francis, at once scholarly, judicious and vivid, but as the Franciscan Father remarked, he wrote the life of Mr. Francis. If you would learn of Saint Francis of blessed memory, you must study by yourself with loving diligence a childish old book which tells of the miracles wrought through the tail of Saint Francis—“The Little Flowers of Saint Francis.” The fruits of history others may put before us, but the passing fragrance of the flowers we must perceive for ourselves.

I here submit for your interpretation certain incidents that seem to me the outgrowth of the fine feeling of the impulsive Moyen Age.

FLOWERS
FROM MEDIÆVAL
HISTORY

Flowers of History
From the Romantic Thirteenth
Century

I have borrowed my title from a Thirteenth Century chronicle, of disputed authorship, purporting to be a history of the world, but from 447 a. d. on it is engrossed with the story of England. From this insular partiality of its author I should be inclined to award the work to the English claimant, for what is a flower of history but a phase of the human story which especially charms the writer.

To me the Gothic cathedrals are the flowers of Thirteenth Century history, which era saw every one of the greatest of them building. Their cornerstones may have been laid earlier, and the finishing touches came much later, but they owe their character to that one wonderful century which stands apart through the ages, thus telling its beads.

The written history of the Thirteenth Century is cruel reading, but an age, like a man, has two soul sides, and the better side is always the harder to fathom. The Thirteenth Century opened for France, the native land of the Gothic, with an abominable pope, a selfish king and, nearer at hand, the evil of various tyrannical seigneurs. The great social movement which endowed the French towns with their magnificent cathedrals was apart from those powers and hardly affected by their war or peace.

These great edifices were built by the secular clergy and the townspeople for municipal, as well as religious, purposes. Therein they held councils for deliverance from their feudal lords, lay and ecclesiastic, for in the Thirteenth Century the Third Estate became a political power.

The cathedrals express the patriotism, generosity and civic pride of the freemen of the old towns; they realize the dream of the socialist for the good and the beautiful held in common; the love of the poet for beauty for its own sweet self; and the inspiration of the artist, working at the white heat of a rising art, as surely as the reverence of the age of faith.

The Crucifix, the Eternal Warning,
Built into the Very Walls of the Old Courtroom
in the Town Hall of Rouen.

In the Low Countries they built city halls at an early date, but the French towns did not need them, for there the cathedrals lent pomp and circumstance to all municipal assemblages. The first States General was held in Notre Dame of Paris.

The early Church had endeared itself to the people in many ways. It entertained the traveler, and it was well that it did, for the public houses were of a very low order; it instructed the children; it ministered to the sick, and, if it was a crazy physician, it was a gentle nurse. The modern hospital, the fairest monument of humanity, is directly descended from the old Hotels-Dieu, where monks and nuns tended the sick. In the cathedral sat the Bishops’ Courts which, the people felt, were more just than the seigneurs. From these old Bishops’ Courts the beautiful French custom has descended of hanging a [crucifix] back of the judge’s seat in the courts of common law where the symbol, recalling a politic judge washing his hands of the blood of a just man, seems more than a human warning.

Within the consecrated walls of the church was that ever-blessed privilege of the temple—Christian, Pagan, or Jewish—sanctuary, the right of the hunted. Of course it was abused, mercy expects to be; therein it is more divine than human; but in a lawless day sanctuary was an unconscious protest against lynching. We do read of accidents arising from it; a Christian Church at Seez was burned down in an attempt to dislodge a band of thieves, but this embarrassing circumstance reflects on the management of those who burned it rather than upon the church.

A complaint comes down to us from the Thirteenth Century of the would-be popular clergy who allowed their parishioners to dance in their churches and even assisted at these dances and at shows peu convenable given by jugglers and clowns, they themselves playing at chess, all of which goes to show that we must regard these immense churches as meeting houses in the literal sense of the term and allow for the coarseness of the age in considering its amusements. Among other buffooneries, at Laon particularly, which seems to have been very “low church,” we read of the annual fête des innocents, in which the choir boys dressed up as priests and went through various antics in the church, which was given up to them for the night, the chapter giving them a supper after. At Laon again there is public complaint of a change having been made in the hour of mass and vespers on account of a miracle play that was given in the church. Lovers of the drama may look leniently upon this arrangement, whereas I suppose the stricter churchmen, when the ecclesiastical supremacy came to be questioned, even in the bishop’s own church, both at Rheims and Laon, said, “I told you so.” By such concessions the clergy induced the citizens to go in with them in building[1] such churches that succeeding generations have called them mad.

Though the evolution of the Gothic is one of the most interesting chapters in the history of architecture, the history of the builders themselves, if we could only have it, might be still more fascinating. Indeed,

“Who builds a church to God and not to fame, Will never mark the marble with his name.”

Hence we do not know who designed some of the noblest monuments of Gothic architecture, but we do catch charming psychological glimpses as we watch the mystical and the practical unconsciously working together for the beautiful in these old cathedrals, which make us wonder how such spiritual designs arose and how the artists who conceived them were able to carry them out. How could an age when kings could hardly read and write, when artists drew like children, evolve such works of art? How could an age so ignorant of physics and the abstract principles of mechanics erect such buildings?

Some hazy legends, fairy tales even, with their grain of truth (that truth which one troweth but cannot prove), and a few scant records, scattered among the archives of such old churches as have escaped the accidents of war and of peace, are really all that is left us with which to picture a beautiful phase of thought and feeling which lured a childish people onward toward art, organization and nationality.

From the old archives of Chartres, which was built so slowly, from the old records of Saint Denis, which was built so quickly, between the lines of the naïve old letters of tactful old bishops who coaxed nobles and workmen alike, as much as they coerced them, thereby raising fabulous sums paid in labor or in gold with which to build such temples that succeeding generations have thought them inspired, we may pick up a few fragments of the untold story of these exquisitely poetic Builders who taught architecture to speak a universal language.

The Middle Ages Dealt Much
in Allegory. The Virgin Greets the Angel
of Death.—A Sermon in Marble.

Saint Denis, which immediately antedated the great Gothic churches of Northern France, is a stately mansion with a steeple at its side, but the Gothic cathedrals are Christian temples every inch; their design itself is consecrate. Their lines and harmonies however varied, however bizarre, always resolve at last into some ideal of reverence, while their solemn beauty speaks a various language. From crypt to steeple the Gothic church is a Christian metaphor. Its ground plan is the Cross, while the huge cathedral with all its worshipers is but a standard bearer for loftier crosses borne upon its towers and spires.

From the bulwarks of their massive foundations, laid in the Dark Ages, these old churches deliberately grew more ornate, carrying with them countless generations of architects growing steadily in pride and skill until it only required a burst of popular enthusiasm to bring forth the artistic revolution of the Thirteenth Century. Again (but not in wrath) the old churches were demolished simply because they were no longer the noblest possible treasure houses for their precious relics. Then it was that the gentle, mystical, French monarch, who maintained his court so simply, purchased “The Crown of Thorns” from the mercenary Venetians, into whose hands it had fallen through a chattel mortgage given by those who had acquired it as a spoil of war.

Never were the rites of the church so descriptive, so picturesque, so splendid, as in the Thirteenth Century. Barefooted and in penitential garb, but followed by a band of light, a great procession of worshipers, each carrying a candle, the king and his brother met the supreme relic and bore it tenderly onward to the Royal Chapel in Paris and all the cities, towns and hamlets through which they passed were reverently illuminated.

Then Saint Louis entreated the great architects of his realm, whose genius was already proven, to strive to design a reliquary even worthy of the Crown of Thorns, and in five years the beautiful Sainte Chapelle arose: like other poetry this lovely chapel was born of a passionate yearning.

Sainte Chapelle,
which Sprang from the Crown of
Thorns.

If the cathedrals are epics of architecture, the Sainte Chapelle is a sonnet, a masterpiece of single-minded expression, the purity of whose design established a standard. No cathedral could be finished on its original plan; it was necessarily too long in building; but the model which was to harmonize the labors of successive builders may be sought in the little Sainte Chapelle of Paris which sprang from the Crown of Thorns.

As every great work of art mirrors a human heart, reflecting that of which its author took no note as clearly as that which stirred his conscious being, so the Sainte Chapelle reflects Saint Louis and Saint Louis reflects the Age of Faith. He was its poet who wrote in deeds.

It is not strange that Louis IX was canonized for he was in perfect accord with the ideals of his age, asceticism, chivalry, humility and regality; and too, he was a great builder.

Saint Louis built the [Sainte Chapelle] to hold that which did not physically exist; but as with the pen of a recording angel, on this tablet of stone he wrote a message from the better self of his age to all humanity.

Though history repeats, the history of the Gothic is as unique as that architecture itself; when otherwise men were trammeled body and soul its builders were free to create, to vary or to destroy.

In the nineteenth century, when travel became general (“he who runs may read”), certain gentle readers like Corroyer, Hugo, Rodin, Ruskin, and most accurate of all, Viollet-le-Duc, interpreted this marvelous architecture of the Moyen Age to the multitude.

“They builded better than they knew; they wrought in sad sincerity,” vaguely exclaimed the philosopher.

“They built as well as they knew; they built in glad sincerity,” observed the architect.

Rodin reminds us that it is a mistake to imagine that the religious conceptions of that day were able to bring forth architectural masterpieces any more than that the religious conceptions of today are responsible for the defects in modern structures.

The Gothic cathedrals are epics of labor. They grew up under the hands of many designers and builders, who were learning as they worked. Democracy echoes through these noble buildings into which were wrought the hope, the promise and the enthusiasm of a rising people.

Interior of Saint Chapelle.
“Much more than the ogive, the grotto, the cavern,
the window, is the essential of Gothic
architecture.”—August Rodin.

To the inartistic eighteenth century, whose mission was to fight tyranny, political and religious, these ornate structures seemed the meaningless labor of a downtrodden people. I doubt if logicians like Voltaire and Gibbon realized the elevating joy of passionate giving that came to some of the poorest donors. Think of a guild of pastry cooks presenting a magnificent window to the Church, their Mother! No less a building than the Cathedral of Chartres!

Never were the lovely things of the Age of Faith more beloved than in the present Age of Doubt. We are trying to restore the noblest of the old cathedrals, stone for stone, and to lure back the sweetest prayers and truest penance confided to their walls to spiritualize their resurrection.

Never were the maiden efforts of Christian art more tenderly approached than in the technical twentieth century, when they are studied alike by Catholic, Protestant and Jew. The old theology has been very severely picked over, but underneath its mouldy leaves, like trailing arbutus in the spring, the “Little Flowers of St. Francis” peep up. The nineteenth century concerned itself with the errors of the Mediæval Church, but the twentieth especially reads the gentler side related by the artists, and sometimes we catch hallowed messages from the pure in heart who have almost seen God.

Mystics as Builders

We order the temples still standing destroyed that in their exact place may be raised the sign of the Christian religion. Decree of Valentinian III.

In the tribunal of history the Christian iconoclasts have been dealt with somewhat in the manner of defendants in damage suits. If a cow is killed by a railroad, is it not naturally assumed to have been a Durham? If a statue was destroyed by a fanatic why not put in a claim for a Phidias? As a matter of fact, by the time the early Christians came into power the art of the day of Pericles had been copied for over seven hundred years. Of art, what worse could be said!

Grecian art neither rose nor fell in a generation nor was it childless; original, though minor schools, Hellenic to the core, sprang up in the Grecian colonies and to the end the art and artists of Rome were Greeks. But during the later Roman Empire the degenerate Grecian artist commissioned by the degenerate Roman patron was simply cumbering the earth. Oh, yes, in those luxurious days they patronized art as rich men should, as rich men do. The houses of Herculaneum and Pompeii teemed with articles of virtu. It was not statues the world of art needed, it was ideals.

In art, it is the individual point of view that counts even if it be only that of the destroyer. Since art reflects life and life means change, the iconoclast has his place. A race, or more often the meeting of two races, may develop a school of art; it reaches its perfection in the work of a few genii of its golden age; to them it is given to embody the highest and best that was in the myriad of artists who have taught them and their teachers. Spellbound by its own perfection, this art can move no farther. The multitude seek to preserve it, for its value has been interpreted to them in quotations of the exchange. Artists are satisfied to copy it, and thereby artists they gradually cease to be. The destroyer comes,—fire, fanatic, whirlwind, victor or worm—the bulk and body of that art perishes, but the ideal, being a fruit of the spirit, lives. The final ruling of Grecian architecture is still proclaimed from the Parthenon, while headless and armless the lone “Winged Victory” might immortalize the action of Grecian sculpture, the poetry of Grecian thought.

Since architecture is the most national of the arts, its movements are the easiest to trace. Sometimes we actually detect the designer following in the footsteps of the iconoclast. Indeed, the most successful patron architecture has known, the Catholic Church, commenced as a destroyer.

In the south of France ecclesiastical architecture remained essentially classic until the Renaissance. This was largely due to one great sixth century bishop, Patiens de Lyons, who repaired the old temples and rebuilt anew on their lines so successfully that the people proudly said they could not tell the new from the old; but in the north of Gaul, where Martin of Tours and his followers had made a clean sweep of the pagan temples and their old influence, architectural and spiritual, an absolutely new style of church building developed. It is there that to this day we turn for the purest Gothic.

Of this Martin we have some little history, hazy though it be. He was a rude barbarian of the Roman legion, under the Emperor Julian, who embraced Christianity and brought the glad tidings to Tours. With a soldier’s idea of conquest he demolished the temples of false gods, like other superstitious converts; but he contended that to make the victory complete, at least an altar to the true God should mark the very spot; and he is credited with six religious foundations, one having been a church for the laity in the town of Tours. The present age might canonize Martin for a deed overlooked by his most ardent, early eulogists. He and Saint Ambrose protested against the “new heresy” of two Spanish bishops who put a gnostic to death for his heretical opinions.

Hagiology, however, abounds in records of Saint Martin, for he became the best beloved saint of old Gaul.

It is natural that those who read the Roman Catholic breviary literally should doubt it somewhat. They fail to realize that the history of a saint lies entirely between the lines of the account. The sacred lesson taught by this life reëchoes in his antiphones, responses, versicles and lessons, until he stands before his followers as a type of certain virtues. Thus Saint Sebastian stands for Christian courage; though his body is pierced with arrows and his hands are tied, he is always represented looking bravely up to Heaven: torture is immaterial to him: he is sustained by faith. Saint Gregory, gentlest of pastors, greatest of popes, is represented with the emblem of the Holy Ghost, the dove, perched upon his shoulder; Saint Jerome, who translated the Scriptures, with the Book in his hand; he generally has an angel near-by him.

Two little pictures stand out in Saint Martin’s iconography. In one, [Saint Martin cuts his cloak in half] with his sword to divide it with a beggar and beholds the Savior abundantly clad in half of it; and in the other, Saint Martin evokes the spectre of a pretended martyr worshiped in Tours, who comes to life and admits that he was hanged for crime, wherefore Saint Martin demolishes his shrine.

To the early Church the relic was everything. Of course it should be pure and holy. In it there was inspiration. Above the grave of some dear saint or, perhaps, only to his memory, a shrine would arise, and from these shrines, like flowers from seed, churches grew. A crypt might be made to hold some hallowed dust, where services might be held. This was reminiscent of the Roman catacombs where the first Christians, believing literally in the resurrection of the body, had laid their dead, and where, unseen by the unsympathetic world, they had met for holy communion. The crypts of the early Church were the mortal resting-places of friendly immortals at the great court above who, in their robes of light, might plead acceptably for those who would so reverently approach the heavenly throne through spirits purer than their own. Of course, these pleaders must be very pure to turn their shrines to altars. What spiritual value had a pretty, paltry tomb honoring an unholy spirit?

Roman civilization was materialistic, but not so this new religion of Jesus of Nazareth. Now, if things holy could pervade and hallow a building, why should not things unholy defile it?

We may trace this idea carried out so literally, so picturesquely, so almost logically in the legends of Martin of Tours, that we actually sympathize with the destructive old bishop. Blindly defending the dream that was in him, he actually stands first in that long line of ecclesiastical builders who, in the fulness of time, jointly brought forth Gothic architecture.

Saint Martin Dividing His Coat,
from an Old Antiphone.

When Saint Martin put his rude followers to work building houses for their new faith he must have established a certain amount of unity and order among them. Could there have been a better way to attach his crude converts to their Church than to induce them to work upon it?

While Saint Martin was building at Tours, the Dark Ages were setting in, when men of action became marauders, preying upon others; men of thought became monks, praying for themselves; humanity went backwards, and history ceased from very shame. But through it all there were a few perplexed old bishops who, whatever their failings may have been, tried to do something for their fellows. However, in that lawless day, they had to defend rather than expand Christianity, and even protect its churches, for pagans, too, might be honest iconoclasts!

The best thing the Dark Ages did for civilization was to learn the builders’ trade and teach it to a great many people. It was a general service, for to make a people industrious is, sooner or later, to make them skilful and law-abiding.

It is curious that Saint Martin who, even while he was a bishop, lodged in a hut covered with boughs, should head the great line of builders who jointly and severally developed French Gothic. In standing for the integrity of the relic, which was literally the seed of early Christian art, Saint Martin gave a new and a higher impetus to life, and with it, very indirectly, to art. Seventy years after Martin’s death, to his blessed memory Saint Perpetuas built “the most beautiful church in existence,” at least so Gregory of Tours affirms. We will not inquire on what lines, for this was at the beginning of the Dark Ages, when nothing beautiful was made.

A supreme recognition of the bold old iconoclast comes to us from devotees of the classic; from certain artists and connoisseurs of the Renaissance. This unexpected tribute to iconoclasm is published upon a monument far removed from old Gaul in time and place, in ideal and execution.

From the Certosa of Pavia.
One of the Most Elaborate Monuments
of Catholicism.

In a monastery dowered with the gold of two reigning dynasties of tyrants, dowered by the genius of two reigning dynasties of painters and sculptors, amid surroundings perhaps the richest in the world, where fifty monks might dream away their lives in silence, in that lordly and exclusive playhouse for the soul of the Renaissance, wherein the exuberance of the Gothic takes on the maturity of the Renaissance in an elaboration which for once does not cloy,—in the [Certosa di Pavia] we find a tribute to crude, old Saint Martin, the iconoclast.

On a mural of one of the side chapels of this Certosa behold him represented in the garb of a fifteenth century monk, with his sanctity emphasized by a large, glittering nimbus, to which the aerial perspective of the otherwise maturely realistic painting is deliberately sacrificed, calmly superintending a gilded youth of the Renaissance while he smashes a fine Grecian statue! How did this rude act find endorsement in a temple of art? How did the coarsest of the saints win a place in the heart of the Renaissance? Was it because in him they saw a reflection of the subtlest honesty of Art, that god of the Renaissance? Was it because, above all else, Saint Martin especially stood for the integrity of the ideal?

Though this little scene on the chapel wall may have been simply historic in its import, nothing is plainer than that the picture is intended to honor an uncompromising bishop of the early Church.

Through the confusion that disintegrated empire, Saint Martin was a rude standard-bearer of two ideals broad enough to rebuild nations—Sincerity and Brotherhood. “First he wrought and after that he taught”—and first the spirit of his teaching was put into rude pictures, because in Gaul so few people could read and still fewer could condense an idea into forceful words.

It was long, long after an angel had appeared and carried Saint Martin’s soul in the form of a child straight to God, as a gentle old writer attests, that a modern geologist voiced the fundamental idea of the best beloved saint of old Gaul, “An honest god is the noblest work of man.”

The Last Resting Place of
the Great Poet of Mediævalism—Tomb
of Dante, Ravenna.

But the past, as well as the present, has its peculiar eloquence wherewith to honor the dead. Over one of the oldest Christian altars spared to us by time, in solemn, enduring mosaic, big and simple, stands Saint Martin leading a line of saints to Christ. And this great hieratic on the wall of an old church of old Ravenna describes, as no language of the present may, an early builder of the great mystic Church which “rests upon the brawny trunks of heroes ... whose spans and arches are the joined hands of comrades ... and whose heights and spaces are inscribed by the numberless musings of all the dreamers of the world.”

The Golden Madonna
of Rheims

Late in the fifth century, while the confusion of the Dark Ages reigned supreme, the Christian bishop of the Remi was at work on the discouraging task of rebuilding his church after pagan depredations at Rheims, when the great joy was vouchsafed to him of baptizing Clovis, the ruler of the largest Teutonic State of the age.

A Recent Tribute to Clovis and Saint Remi on the
Interior Frieze of the Pantheon, Paris.

Saint Remi recommended Clovis to adore that which he had burned and to burn that which he had adored, that the work of judicious destruction might continue. Clovis sent offerings to all the sanctuaries, particularly to that of the old soldier Saint Martin. Three thousand Franks were baptized; Clovis exchanged the three toads on his shield for the fleur-de-lis, and France became Christian toute de suite. Then Saint Remi dreamt of great things yet to come: of a king and a people governed by the Church of Christ, temporally and spiritually. And he interpreted this dream to the people by a charming symbol: he explained how the Holy Ghost, the Heavenly Dove, had brought from above some spiritual oil with which to anoint [Clovis at his baptism]. But to make the idea clear to these many men of childish minds and many patois, he showed them a little ampulla filled with oil, which, he explained, “the Dove” had brought to him from Heaven to grace the baptism of their chief. And they decided to keep the oil that was left in the ampulla for great occasions, like coronations. This wonderful ointment united the Crown and the Church as long as it lasted. During the Revolution a sansculotte shattered the old vessel. Orthodoxy claimed to have caught one drop and encased it in a beautiful new vase; it was used again, but its efficacy was no more. And not long thereafter the French people decided to do without coronations, or monasteries, but they still love Clovis and Saint Remi.

Civilization is much indebted to the early bishops and a goodly number of them have been canonized. The monastic clergy were the snobs of the Church, securely selfish in the magnificent fastnesses they erected for themselves in the skies; condescending comfortably to pray for those that fed them (though who knows but they even shirked that obligation), while the secular clergy were working out, amid inspiration and error, the foundations of a Christian civilization. The idea of the early bishops that the Church ought to rule the world was a natural and an honest mistake. The later bishops were quite a different class. The stout little church of Saint Remi near Rheims pleads still for its brave old bishop, though as a building it is eclipsed by the great cathedral of the city.

The dynasty of Clovis passed away and the next reigning house came in with Pepin. He had good reason to approve of the Church as an institution, for it had early played into his hand. Had not the Abbé of Saint Denis journeyed to Rome to secure the papal confirmation of his crown? And had not Pope Stephen, while enjoying the protection of that same abbey, anointed Charlemagne, his little son? On this was based the succession. With his own good sword Charlemagne defended it and brought a semblance of order to the land of the Gaul and the Frank; and, genius that he was, he anticipated, in his interest in architecture, the genius of his great people. But it was rather Charlemagne’s attitude toward church building and letters that told, in the long run, than any literal achievement in them during this time. However, from the reign of his youngest son, Louis the Pious, we may trace the steady, consistent growth of an original order of building which culminated in the unparalleled Gothic of Northern France.

By that time the nobility had built so many sanctuaries in their domains that they had to be interdicted from establishing useless private foundations and, in a more democratic spirit, sixteen or seventeen churches, all edifices of dignity, were begun. Then Bishop Ebbon saw a golden opportunity to build a magnificent cathedral on the long-hallowed soil of Rheims. There the Druid had raised his altar, there the Roman his temple, which may have absorbed the old Druid’s stones into its walls as it had his old gods into its adaptive bosom, to fall, in its turn, a mightier pile, from which the Christian built again and again as he grew in skill. Indeed, beyond their generation the people of Rheims were experienced builders. In addition to all the stone quarried by varied worshipers of the long past at Rheims, Louis the Pious put at Ebbon’s service the materials of the city wall and sent him his favorite architect—Rumald. And it was found that the new cathedral protected the city better than the old walls. La paix religieuse turned away many an invader. One golden cup from the altar bought off the Norsemen (not that it turned their hearts); they swooped down upon Chartres instead.

The old chroniclers assure us that this early Cathedral of Rheims was the finest in the realm. It must have beggared description, for what manner of building it was none of them seem to say. But they tell of its wonderful altar of Our Lady, covered with gold and studded with gems, upon which stood a glorious virgin made of solid gold. That impressed them. Was this altar built with the loot of war? Was it built in remorse, or, worse, in mercenary superstition? Or was it lavished like the woman’s precious ointment upon our Savior? This much it certainly was,—a united tribute of the material to the immaterial, coming from many men of many minds.

It was about this time that the Virgin became so peculiarly near and dear to the Catholic world. They loaded her with jewels and appealed to her as one of themselves, human, though divinely so. They painted her on the inside of their jewel boxes that she might turn the heart of the thief; they appealed to her in embarrassing human situations and loved her as a helpful, pitying woman who brought religion home to them.

In due time this golden Virgin of Rheims, so imposing, so splendid to her rude worshipers, gently made way for a line of tenderer virgins who were gradually infusing sweetness and skill into those who sought to spiritualize wood and stone into a suggestion of the mother of Christ. When the old ninth century church at Rheims was burned it is supposed that the barbarians’ gold was minted to rebuild the cathedral. Or shall we say that, purified by fire, the golden Virgin arose again and again from her ashes to rebuild her shrine in maturer beauty?

After many fires, in 1212 the present Cathedral of Rheims was commenced upon the old, old crypt; before the middle of the century the main body of the church was complete, and once again the Cathedral of Rheims was the finest in the realm! In 1903 a vote was taken for the noblest Gothic monument, and the returns, as always before, were, “the Cathedral of Rheims.”

Through the Dark Ages the people of Rheims had not built in vain. Effort after effort was destroyed, it is true, but like the golden virgin it was minted to rebuild anew.

Did the Idea of that Beautiful
Structural Device, the Flying Buttress, Come, Like an
Angel Vision, to Some Baffled Architect in
Answer to Work and Prayer?

Lacking the mathematical knowledge, which is the mainstay of the modern architect, these early builders must have learned empirically, that is, in the school of defeat—but, too, there are triumphs there. Did the idea of the [beautiful flying buttress] (which is simply a constructive device to strengthen walls pierced by enormous windows) come suddenly to some baffled old architect, as from the lips of an angel, in answer to work and prayer? These old builders of Rheims leave us no written word, but there is a great Florentine architect who is a little more communicative; he leaves a discreet hint or two of his method of reasoning and also of securing contracts. Regarding the construction of the projected dome of the Cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore, which the public regarded as impracticable, Brunelleschi writes: “Yet, remembering that this is a temple consecrated to God and the Virgin, I confidently trust that for a work executed in their honor, they will not fail to infuse knowledge where it is wanting and will bestow strength, wisdom and genius on him who shall be the author of such a project. But how can I help you, seeing that the work is not mine? I tell you plainly that, if it belonged to me, my courage and power would, beyond all doubt, suffice to discover means whereby the work might be effected without so many difficulties, but as yet I have not reflected on the matter to any extent.” And when he got the contract and reflected, he turned to the “parent past”—he went to Rome, where the vaulting of the Parthenon taught him to vault that lovelier Florentine dome which “clasps the ancient to the modern world.”

The builders of the Gothic were in some ways more original than the builders of the Renaissance; they evolved their own bracing; thus gradually at Rheims, the “Athens of the Middle Ages,” a great cathedral grew up that ranks with the Parthenon.

The Greek had the subtlest of languages in which to speak of the good and the beautiful, while where the greatest Gothic churches were designed there was only a corrupt dead language and a partially developed living one; but the subtle poets of Chartres, Rheims, Amiens, Rouen, Bourges and Laon built strongly into their cathedrals the sweetest things they had to say. When the Parthenon was constructed Athens was so wealthy that it was one of the glories of Pericles that he was able to spend so much so well upon the greatest capital in the world. Rheims was simply, as the Middle Ages went, a rich see, and the Middle Ages were wretchedly poor, yet her cathedral is the more elaborate building of the two. To the end of time it is a monument of civic and religious enthusiasm; and, as we seek the human story, so elusively suggested through the marvelous pile, we realize at least how great a thing it is for each worker to give, in perfect self-effacement, of his best. The decorations of the mighty temple are so exquisitely subservient to the great whole that the handiwork of the gifted imagier, with that of his weaker brother, the one serving as a foil to the other, holds together like their prayers in the noble harmony of the great church. Gothic sculpture is for all sorts and conditions of men, but least of all for artists. It speaks its simple lesson distinctly. It is not sculpture for sculpture’s sake, but rather for decoration and lyric expression. Its emaciated saint betokens sacrifice; literally and figuratively he fills his place in the long, narrow niche, annihilating himself for the great church as a Catholic priest should.

The Sculptured Saint Upon a
Gothic Cathedral Fills His Place in the Long,
Narrow Niche, Annihilating Himself for the Great
Church, as a Devotee Should.

Would you know how the Gothic affects a sculptor?

Says August Rodin: “Life is made up of strength and grace; the Gothic gives us this; its influence has entered into my blood and grown into my being.”

Nowadays, when all “the world travels,” schools of art do not grow up in little communities; intellectual boundaries are in no way geographic, and the moral effect of one man on another is hidden from view. But on the walls of the old mediæval churches a simpler people, as their work improved, show their direct obligations to one another.

The Gothic cathedrals which served as [Bibles for the laity] (who, as a rule, could not read print) are now the most veracious chronicles of the period that we possess. Their statements cannot be gainsaid, however variously they may be understood. If some of the last judgments sculptured on their walls, with half of the figures marching toward heaven and the other half (very similar in appearance) moving serenely toward hell, are rather too didactic for this age of doubt, between the lines of these great stone volumes a gentle reader finds countless beautiful stories, much more convincingly told, of artists and artisans working away with smiles on their faces, carving Bible stories under the direction of the clergy; devising figures to personify the virtues and vices; inserting little angels here and there to fill out the design, while the best artist is rewarded with the sweet honor of carving the Madonna.

The barbarian’s gold pays interest yet; the spirit of the bequest is not changed;—a united tribute of the material to the spiritual coming from many men of many minds. The old golden Madonna is patroness still of the five thousand statues of the Cathedral of Rheims, whose mute lips speak so various a language. They tell of a day that is dead and of a day that is eternal; they speak of substance and of spirit; of error and of intuition; of things human and of things divine. Indeed,

“Of every work of art the silent part is best, Of all expression, that which cannot be expressed.”

The Little Old
Abbé of Saint Denis and the
Imagiers

Early in the twelfth century, within the hospitable walls of the old Abbey of Saint Denis, a prince and a charity child grew up together; there a love, almost romantic, developed between them. When the prince became king and embarked upon a crusade he left the reins of government in the hands of his old comrade, who in the meantime had become the Abbé of Saint Denis and was, incidentally, one of the cleverest of politicians. Suger paid the royal debts (democratic good pay seems to have been an ideal with him), and called the realm to order so successfully that statesmen came from afar to study his very novel methods, for the crusades had set the people traveling. On his return the king graciously greeted his regent as “father of his country.” Suger, not to be outdone, instituted a somewhat legendary liturgy to be celebrated annually at Saint Denis commemorating the merits of Louis the Lusty (or Louis the Fat, as we call him).

Was this liturgy so different from the campaign songs we sing now? It was really more called for, since enthusiasm over the royal person is one of the legitimate tools of monarchy, and Louis VI is an early monarch who deserves credit for abetting the gradual advance of France from a feudality to a veritable kingdom.

Suger, individually, did not stand too greatly in awe of royalty, for he peremptorily ordered Louis VII to come back from the “Holy Wars” to attend to his mundane duties, and be it credited to that monarch that he graciously obeyed the old friend of his father.

Suger is the most interesting personality that comes down to us from France of the twelfth century. Though a few characteristic anecdotes are told of him, we know him most intimately as the builder of Saint Denis and the far-seeing friend of the arts and crafts. It was said that he was a good goldsmith, and his sympathy with skilled labor lends color to the statement; but however hazy our other impressions of Suger may be, we know how he loved the old Abbey of Saint Denis—“sa mère et sa nourrice.” As a churchman he loved the blessed spot to which the angels had escorted brave old Saint Denis, when, after his martyrdom, he picked up his head and walked along with them unto the place “where he now resteth by his election and the puveance of God. And there was heard so grete and swete a melody of angels that many that heard it byleuyd in oure lorde.” He loved the old building that Dagobert, the Robin Hood of French monarchs, had built so royally, almost five hundred years before his day, for the poor and lowly, and for which the pleasant Saint Eloi, patron of goldsmiths, singing as he worked, had made the wondrously beautiful old reliquary; and as a man of literary feeling, he loved the old Abbey as his Alma Mater. But the diocese had grown, and on festal days so pressing were the crowds who would touch the holy relics of Saint Denis that good people were continually being trodden underfoot by eager and other worldly worshipers. So Suger decided to enlarge the church. He did not touch the dear old choir of Saint Denis: that was consecrated to God and, too, it was tenderly hallowed to man by many human associations; but he decided to add to it a great nave.

Of course at first the crowds vigorously abetted him, humbly harnessing themselves together like beasts of burden to draw the stone from the quarry. The trumpet sounded; banners were unfurled, and the procession marched; except for the murmur of those who confessed their sins to God, silence reigned. When the concourse arrived at the holy site, the multitude burst forth into a song of praise. Their sins once disposed of, the ardor of the multitude may have flagged, for we read of the busy little Abbé leaving the cares of state to go himself to the forests in search of the big timber others had not the enthusiasm to find.

That the very earth might pay its tribute to the blessed martyr, Suger studded the new golden screen in front of the tomb of Saint Denis with gems from “every land of the world,” and then the little old Abbé conceived of a still higher tribute: he gathered skill from “every country in the world” (his world was small, it is true); he gave to these skilled craftsmen the honor of working on “the Church, his Mother”; besides, they taught in the layman’s school of architecture, which he established in the yard of the old abbey.

To the amazement of the world, in that day of serfdom, Suger voluntarily paid his workmen and paid them by the week; and with the force and intensity that was in him, he advanced architecture as much in the ten years he was rebuilding Saint Denis as others had done in a hundred. The influence of his school of architecture still lives. It was one of our earliest instances of systematic training for the laity, and those who would trace the Italian Renaissance to French and classic sources, attach especial importance to the imagiers of Saint Denis.

An immense number of statues, varying greatly in excellence, were made during the Middle Ages to decorate the churches. In our meagre records of the period, we even come across instances of peasants traveling far and spending their all to secure an especially beautiful Madonna, and we are assured of miraculous rewards, spiritual and temporal, coming to them from it. Actually, through the enthusiasm and liberality of these rude people, miracles of art have wrought their magical effect upon the imagination of generations and generations of men. These imagiers became so numerous that they formed a powerful guild in which a race of sculptors was born and bred. While Sculpture was merely the hand-maiden and scribe of Architecture, her craftsmen were called imagiers. But the imagiers became so expert that in the seventeenth century the French Academy changed the name of their order to the “Sculptor’s Guild.”

In the Sixteenth Century the
French Academy Changed the Name of the
Imagiers’ Guild to the Sculptors’.

That the imagier loved the cathedral which he was dowering with what talent he possessed is most likely; for, added to the simple conscientiousness, alike in all ages, of the worker who loves his craft and respects himself, was the intensity of the Age of Faith.

Gothic art may have been lived more generally even than Grecian, for it was the only intellectual outlet of its age. Much of its symbolism is now a dead language. We guess at the meaning of the gargoyles and grotesques, and draw liberal interpretations from the lips of the smiling angels who spoke more familiarly to a childish people; but when we count the decorative kings and bishops ranged in rows upon the grand façades, their supremacy over the souls, bodies and estates of men, of which we know so well, seems the myth of myths. However, we can read some of the old carvings, which had nothing in particular to say at the time they were made, like a book. Hybrid designs on pillars, capitals and cornices speak of the chivalrous meeting of the east and the west on the broad field of art. They bring up pictures of the rude crusaders overpowered by their first view of oriental elaboration, and we smile to see how it set them imitating, or, better still, adapting, and how the arts of war may bring about the arts of peace; for, in the fulness of time, those who strive, achieve, if not for themselves and their cause, for others and perhaps for a better cause.

Another art made great strides during the rebuilding of Saint Denis,—the glass-maker’s. We read about Vitrearii as far back as Charlemagne’s time. The [windows] they made were glass mosaics, held together with lead instead of stucco, forming little gem-like pictures above the holy altars, which told sacred stories beautifully, for in this way many scenes could be connected on one window; besides, color, like music, takes the emotions captive. One must examine a statue to realize it, but, in the phrase of the studio, color “sings.” A childish old chronicler relates that the retainers of Godfrey of Bouillon were obliged almost to tear him away from the churches, so absorbed was he in gazing on the windows. Was it through beautiful windows that the mystic aspiration of the mute minor poets of the cloister was finally reflected upon the man of action who took the first step, all unconsciously, toward the deliverance of his age from its dark, narrow bondage?

A Continuous Story, Related on a
Thirteenth Century Window.

As a soldier, Godfrey de Bouillon had answered the call of the pilgrims who demanded protection; as a soldier, he had kept the peace (when there was any to keep). He was the one early crusader of whom we have record, who seems to have had the slightest idea of the fitness of things; indeed, in feeling, he was as truly a poet as a soldier. “So, day after day, in silence and in peace, with equal measure and just sale, did the Duke and the people pass through the realms of Hungary,” writes an astonished old chronicler, for Godfrey de Bouillon had paid the way of his army to the Holy City—an unheard of idea in warfare! How quixotic he must have seemed!

Language has changed since those windows spoke to Godfrey of Bouillon. But when a general stops on his line of march for higher council and then steers so true through the darkest day toward a faint, far-distant light, must he not have seen through the glass darkly?

It was but a few years after this “parfit gentil” knight passed away before he was as dear a hero of romance as King Arthur had become after many centuries, so little was there in his life for men to forget, so much that was sweet to dream upon. I suppose his story must have been related many times in beautiful glass, though as the panes grew larger and finer they told their stories less personally; but gallant knights on windows far and near are still reflecting an ideal that came to the First Baron of Jerusalem through the old church’s windows. Might it not be said of these old church builders, who builds from the heart feeds three: himself, his hungry neighbor, and Me?

To make [windows] like those of Saint Denis, an orderly, organized factory was necessary, and organization was the crying need of that age. Another astonished old chronicler repeats, that in those days of serfdom Suger paid his glass-workers. But the men learned their rights more readily than the chroniclers. Thereafter we constantly run upon the records of powerful workmen’s unions or guilds. In fact, we read of them later on the glass itself. These splendid church windows were, of course, very costly, and then, as now, they were usually presented to the churches. We find the guilds are the proud donors of many of them; two fine old church windows come down to us proudly representing some imagiers and glass-makers at their work, those guilds having thus elected to “with the angels stand.”

Complaints of the luxury of the church also come down. Saint Bernard declares “their stones were gilded with the money of the needy and wretched to charm the eyes of the rich” (but had the poor no eyes?). Being against the government by temperament, Saint Bernard especially abominated the royal Abbey of Saint Denis. He complained of the “unclean apes and befowled tigers” upon which Suger’s imagiers developed their skill, and it is written (how the writer arrived at the scene he does not explain) that as Suger’s confessor, Bernard commanded him to divest his mind of mundane cares and to dream only of the heavenly Jerusalem.

But the world weighed on Suger as long as he remained in it: his dream was of two splendid powers, England and France, separated, but living in peace! Suger was not in favor of crusades. He was the one ecclesiastic who would subject the clergy as well as the laity to royal authority, rendering unto Cæsar that which was Cæsar’s. Though a priest, in his political methods Suger was a broad, true and practical patriot, and if, unlike Saint Bernard, he was not adapted for canonization, he was a hero to his private secretary and to his king; and he still is a hero to the modern student of architecture, or of economics.

Into the very walls of his big and simple old church the “little old Abbé” built his big and simple sermon. It read: “Let us have good, honest, beautiful work, doing honor alike to God and man. Let us train our craftsmen, pay them and respect them.”

Though Saint Denis may lack the mystical beauty of the best Gothic, so noble and satisfactory is its design that the nineteenth century could do no better than to restore it.

Though Suger’s economics were very simple, the twentieth century has found no better platform: “Pay your workmen voluntarily, and summon all, from the king down, into their respective fields of labor; only when they all respond, we shall have a lovelier church than the old Abbey of Saint Denis.”

The Mystic Cathedral of
[Chartres]

The Episcopal Church recognizes three distinct divisions: the High Church, or mystical element that, words failing, would speak by symbols; the Low Church, that would say what it means and mean what it says; and the Broad Church, that would set aside details and seek in religion a general harmony.

Though they are not so formally defined, these same divisions, being based on human temperaments, exist in other sects so literally that the same symbols have met with the identical adoption and objection. About 205, Tertullian ridiculed the use of candles on the altars of the early church, and Lactance took up the subject some hundred years later. Thereafter Saint Jerome laid these still troublesome candles at the door of the laity, especially of the women. However, the symbol and the women conquered.

In this desultory search of ours for hints of the social history of the old French cathedral builders, we meet with the high and low church elements which seem, though this idea may be fanciful, to have influenced the appearance even of their respective churches. There is the grandly simple and direct architecture, the Cathedral of Laon, which inclined to Low Church, allowing its votaries considerable latitude, and the symbolically ornate [cathedral at Chartres], which from remote ages has been a noted shrine of mysticism. Its site was holy ground to the early Christian and perhaps to the Druids before him. Tradition has it that even to them on this hallowed spot came a prophecy of the Messiah. (If it did, it probably came from some Jewish source in the days of the Romans.)

There is a charming story, more than legend, if less than history, of “Notre Dame Sous Terre” of Chartres. While most of the early Christians, in a spirit of hatred, were destroying false gods and their shrines, some pioneers of Christianity found in a grotto at Chartres a figure which had been worshiped by the Druids, resembling their own Madonna, whereby, to these gentle priests, she seemed doubly hallowed. Accepting her grotto as already consecrate, they located their high altar there, upon it reinstated the old Madonna of the Druids, and in a humble spirit, along with their simple converts, they bowed down before her, for upon them had descended that sovereign reverence which appreciates another man’s god.

From the time this old druidic figure was raised upon a Christian altar to this day, first honors have been accorded to her shrine. Before her or her representative have bowed, weary and footsore, every one of the French kings, from Clovis to Louis XV, as well as innumerable other pilgrims, rich or poor, gathered from every land of Christendom by the democracy of the church.

Even the revolutionists recognized this “First Lady of Chartres,” for while they lumped other relics together in general destruction they paid Notre Dame Sous Terre the back-handed compliment of a special bonfire at the cathedral door.

The Old-Time House of Prayer, which Still
Dominates the City of Chartres.

The sansculottes have passed away without individual record, but a charmingly carved representative of the old Notre Dame Sous Terre still occupies the most venerated shrine of Chartres; while its old-time spirit of church hospitality yet pervades the noble cathedral that has developed above her grotto, her clergy still smile kindly upon the pilgrim and the stranger, even though his interest in their church be solely artistic. They seem to say: “Take from our old cathedral what you may, surely her beauty is pure and holy.”

True religious art can but lead to some phase of piety, as August Rodin declares that all true art must. It may be but a chance title; however, the latest book on French Gothic speaks of “Chartres, the House of Prayer”; but certainly the feeling which has been lavished on this spot, the passionate generosity of devotees through long ages, has brought forth one of the most sacredly beautiful churches in the world.

Now let us investigate literally the claims of Notre Dame Sous Terre. Recent excavations prove that the present Cathedral of Chartres is built over a grotto, where the Druids probably held their services. In excavating under and around the choir of the cathedral, vestiges of ancient altars and idols were unearthed which prove conclusively that the symbols of the heathen were not cleared away violently. The policy of Rome tended toward religious tolerance; the gods of the Romans often mixed peaceably in the temples with the gods of the people Rome conquered, hence the cult of the Virgin might have existed along with that of the pagan gods.

In the early days of Christianity the Virgin was not given the prominence she acquired after the eighth century; this figure known as the druidic Madonna may even have represented some sweet, motherly goddess of another name. Symbols are elastic, therein lies their supreme value; they may be all things to all men. Words always have brought division to the church; symbols, unity. The wisest and kindest of the early bishops had the most grace in translating the old symbols of their converts into the picturesque language of their new church. For instance, Gregory the Great changed the pagan memorial custom of putting food on graves on a certain fête-day to bringing flowers for the graves and praying for the dead on All Souls Day. The early Christian missionaries at Chartres may have believed this figure to be a Madonna or they may have translated it into one. Indeed, it is not the genuineness of the figure itself that is the point of this story; it is the attitude of the Chartrians toward it.

Saint Martin, Saint Jerome
and Saint Gregory, as They Stand Forth on
a Pillar at Chartres.

From the character of the Gallo-Romaine substructure of the Chapel of Saint Lubin in the crypt of Chartres, the list of the early bishops of that diocese and the general history of the evangelization of Gaul, it is inferred that ever since the beginning of the fourth century a bishop’s church has stood on the site of the present cathedral. Mingled with all the superstition of its age there was a certain tolerant broad-church element maintained at Chartres from the first. Perhaps that made the church so peculiarly dear to the people of France, for though the French kings were crowned at Rheims and buried at Saint Denis, Chartres seems the most intimately associated with their lives. It is written that after his conversion Clovis stopped there for further instruction, and Gibbon observes his measures were sometimes moderated by the milder genius of Rome and Christianity. The Carlovingian kings were very partial to Chartres. Charles the Bald, who comes down to us familiarly as a church builder through an old picture in which he holds a cast of a cathedral in his hand, conferred the most precious of relics upon Chartres—the Sancta Camisia of the Virgin! Robert the Pious contributed a sapphire. Within her mystic walls sensible Louis the Fat pardoned his enemies; there Philippe le Bel, Charles le Bel and Philippe de Valois gave thanks for their victories, childishly presenting their armor and their beloved war-horses to this Church, their Mother. Saint Louis marched barefooted about twenty-one miles to endow Chartres with her beautiful [Portail Septentrionale]. And when Henry IV changed his religion, let us believe with the really good intention of bringing about a little peace on earth to Frenchmen, he elected to be consecrated at Chartres, “by reason of the peculiar devotion of his ancestors, the Dukes of Vendome, to the old cathedral, the most ancient in Christendom.” There were reasons why he could not conveniently have been crowned at Rheims like other French kings, that city being hostile to him. But Henry IV always had a clever and sufficient answer.

To return to the material story of the old bishops’ church near the well of Saint Lubin, our first dated record takes us back into a feudal war. In 743, Hanald duc d’Aquitaine, fighting the Comte de Chartres, burned the town cathedral; but when he realized what he had done he retired to a monastery to do penance all the rest of his days. Was it in superstition? Was it in true repentance? Did he burn the church by accident? That might have been. The simple piety of the Dark Ages that would build “The House of God” for all time rendered the churches the strongest of buildings, and defensive armies often resorted to them; then, too, there were spiritual objections to attacking a church. This factor was sometimes over-estimated.

A View Through the Portail of
Chartres, which Louis IX Walked Barefooted
Twenty-one Miles to Present, in a Lowly
Spirit, to the Church.

The [Cathedral of Chartres] was rebuilt, only to be burned down one hundred and fifteen years after by the Normans. During this siege the non-combatants of the town confidently took refuge in the cathedral with their bishop instead of buying off the pirates with gold from the Holy Altar as the people of Rheims had done (they are all gone now and God knows which did best). Unexpectedly, neither church nor bishop impressed the Normans, who overturned the city walls, burned the buildings, massacred the bishop, and every one else who came in their way; but after the Normans left, the Chartrians had the cold comfort of gathering their dead and laying them away beside the Well of Saint Lubin and “through the merits of those there reposing a crowd of miracles were wrought.” About this period the disease we now know as erysipelas came to be highly respected. In France it was called le mal des ardents; in England, the “sacred fire”; for, one thousand years ago processions like those that now visit Lourdes were pressing on to Chartres to drink of the holy spring. The world moves, but somewhat in a groove. At this Lourdes of the Dark Ages the afflicted were tended by nuns, but we find a certain telltale regulation:—after nine days (ample time for blood poisoning to develop unmistakably) the sick must go home, “cured or not.”

Was medical practice then so much worse than ours during the Rebellion, when old rags of the nation were collected and all sorts and conditions of women scraped them into lint full of germs for the wounded soldiers? But if the church was a crazy physician, she was a gentle nurse. She established a chivalry toward the sick that no Cervantes would laugh away. It lives in medical ethics, and the quixotic obligation of the doctor to leave no stone unturned for his patient has been the foundation of medical science. Some of the old Hotels-Dieu of blessed name and memory have developed into up-to-date hospitals and medical schools, like Charing Cross Hospital, London, which still enjoys its mediæval benefice, while modern hospitals, in general, are moral descendants of the old ideal.

Again the old Church of Chartres was rebuilt, again to stand for a little over a century. This building had the satisfaction (may we not use the figure, for the mediæval church was very human) of seeing the Normans, under Rollo, defeated by an army marching under its blessed standard, the Sancta Camisia of the Virgin borne aloft as a banner. But later, Rollo married the daughter of Charles the Simple, settled down in Normandy, presented his castle to the see of the Bishop of Chartres and adopted the Christian religion. A double victory for the church! Many of the first Norman converts were baptized a dozen times, for the sake of excitement or for the white garment given them at the ceremony. Thereafter the funeral of Rollo was rendered doubly memorable by the slaughter of one hundred captives and rich gifts to the monasteries.

In spite of the Sancta Camisia, in spite of all the remains of all of the martyrs that had been aggregating in the martyrium under the church for seven hundred years, in 962 Richard of Normandy burned the cathedral with the town. But the relics had not been powerless, for this was the last pagan outbreak. The church had the holy triumph of Christianizing her adversaries, and the martyrium, between the excellence of its building material, the water of the spring of Saint Lubin near by, and “the merits of those there reposing,” remained intact and was found in the excavations of 1901; but the spring is gone; it was probably diverted by the foundations of the present cathedral.

Though a paralyzing conviction had come upon the people, Bishop Vulpard immediately started to rebuild. It had somehow been very generally decided that the world would come to an end in the year 1000, so near at hand.

How did this private information regarding the future affect the multitude? They probably took it riotously,—at least, such has been the experience in times of plague and horror, when it seemed that the race was about to be wiped out. Indeed, it is only for others that the saner, better life is led—best of all, unconsciously led.

A Detail of the Portail Septentrionale.

We do know that at that time church building flagged. Ah, be it credited to these old builders, they worked for others rather than themselves! Nevertheless, the latter part of the tenth century is the day of vast and massive crypts of which Chartres is one of the noblest examples. Let us hope that brave old Vulpard lived to see it under way.

History has very little to say of the delusion regarding the year 1000, except that it shows that the church gained ground therefrom. Many persons thought it well to present their goods to the churches since they could not use them much longer themselves. Scarce as records are, we have one instance of the church helping the world out of one of the dilemmas arising from this misunderstanding. We do know positively that the valuables of the Church of Saint Benignus of Dijon were all sold to relieve the famine of the year 1001. Probably the ground had not been sown the previous autumn.

However often it has fallen from grace, in the main the Christian Church has won its way by service. However often its services have been mistaken, it has maintained the ideal that the Christian should serve the world.

Instead of the world’s coming to an end according to their schedule, to the astonishment of the Chartrians, lightning singled out their holy church and burned it to the ground. Some of the more or less logically inclined suggested that some of the pilgrims might have been guilty of indiscretions within its consecrated walls and thus have brought down this celestial disaster.

The church had a particularly charming bishop at that time who arose to the astonishing occasion and called for help from the whole religious world regardless of nationality. He might be known as the successful correspondent of history. We still have some of his letters. The one to Cnut, King of England and Denmark, is certainly a flower of history, showing, as it does, the sympathy of a great king with a great scholar (as the times went) and a great movement. Fulbert writes, in acknowledgment of Cnut’s donation to his building fund: “When we saw the offering which you deigned to send us, we admired at once your astonishing wisdom and religious spirit; your wisdom, in that you, a prince, divided from us by language and by sea, are zealously concerned not only with the things around you but also with things that touch us; in your religious spirit, in that you, of whom we have heard speak as a pagan king, show yourself a very Christian and generous benefactor of churches and servants of God. We render lively thanks to the King of kings through whose mercy your gifts have descended upon us, and we beseech Him to make your reign happy and prosperous, to deliver your soul from all sin.” The result of Fulbert’s appeals proves that Christianity had established a brotherhood on earth. Though much of Fulbert’s structure was burned within ten years the church inherits both spiritually and materially from him; his crypt is left and it gives lines to the splendid church we know. Saint Thierry rebuilt the upper church, and it grew in beauty under Saint Ivo, who succeeded in getting the ear of Mathilda of England. Not that Saint Ivo was a snob, for in his time we may see among the records timely rebukes to royalty and dignified acknowledgment of the services of individual workmen upon the mighty edifice. After all, there is nothing sweeter than the “widow’s mite.” A great deal is said by social historians about the tax upon the communities for these splendid churches, but they overlook the joy of public giving, which also moulds and unites a people.

And now this wonderful old church, which echoes from tower to crypt with the human story, commences to speak picturesquely of the wild Holy Wars. The heavy Dark Ages developed its crypt. The body of the church passed through many metamorphoses in the time intervening until a period of the greatest religious enthusiasm crowned the cathedral with its marvelous towers.

A Thirteenth Century Statement
of the Liability of Pride to Have a Fall
Solemnly Proclaimed on the South
Portal of Chartres.

In all history is there a movement more extraordinary, more far-reaching, more curious than the crusades? They are about as surprising to a reader today as they were to the Emperor of Constantinople when the first disorderly army appeared at his gates. The monk, Guibert, who, at least, seemed to have more grasp of the subject than any other contemporary writer, ingeniously suggested that “God invented the crusades as a new way for his laity to atone for their sins and merit salvation.” Certainly they thus atoned for the great sin of inertia. No army, I suppose, was ever more confident, more surprised or more disappointed than that of the crusaders. However, this much is to be said in favor of Guibert’s hypothesis. From that time forth the laity took their place in the march of civilization. They arose and left the Dark Ages behind. New views were forced upon them at the point of the sword,—most needed of all, new civic ideals.

Separation and longing and the sweet sorrow of parting awoke the spirit of poetry, the craving for beauty; and all this new thought and feeling was soon to blossom forth in the one art, whose metier the people had already learned,—architecture.

Through a long admixture of races, by the twelfth century (hardly before it) there had arisen in Gaul genuine Frenchmen, who from the beginning were most artistic artisans and most enthusiastic partisans. They spent more on their crusades and on their churches than their neighbors, and they were to reap the rewards of extravagance, always more imposing than those of economy. Money poured into the church alike from those who went to the Holy Land, and from those who thus excused themselves from going. Incidentally the Holy Wars diverted a disorderly element of nobles and serfs from France to Palestine. During the period of the crusades the Cathedral of Chartres suffered from two fires just sixty years apart; thus in rebuilding, the overflowing religious excitement of the era came to be lavished upon the very stones of the cathedral.

In 1134 a great fire in the town of Chartres damaged the cathedral so far as to make it necessary to restore the façade. In spite of their own losses the Chartrians decided that their church should be finer than ever. She should have two connected towers, instead of one separated from the building as before. And the design they here evolved has become standard.

To effect these grand restorations the workmen formed themselves into permanent guilds. One especially which devoted itself to working on the cathedral was honorably known as the “Logeurs du Bon Dieu.” And the nobles who had watched the workmen growing in grace and in skill, raising themselves as they raised the temple, were finally seized with a strange and humble enthusiasm which can only be convincingly described by eye-witnesses.

“In this same year” (1144), writes Robert Du Mont, “at Chartre men began to harness themselves to carts laden with stones, wood and other things, and drag them to the site of the church, the towers of which were then a-building.”

Says Abbé Haimon: “Who has ever seen or heard in all the ages of the past that kings, princes and lords, mighty in their generation, swollen with riches and honor, that men and women, I say, of noble birth, have bowed their haughty necks to the yoke and harnessed themselves to carts like beasts of burden, and drawn them laden with wine, corn, oil, stone or wood and other things needful for the maintenance of life or the construction of the church, even to the doors of the asylum of Christ.”

“Mighty are the works of the Lord,” exclaims Hugh of Rouen (ready to use the example). “At Chartres men have begun, in all humility, to drag carts and vehicles of all sorts to aid the building of the cathedral, and their humility has been rewarded by miracles. The fame of these events has been heard everywhere and at last roused this Normandy of ours. Our countrymen, therefore, after receiving our blessing, have set out for that place and then fulfilled their vows. They return with the resolution to imitate these Chartrians, and a great number of the faithful of our diocese and the dioceses of our province have begun to work at the Cathedral, their Mother.”

But since it is the spirit that makes the action fine, the services of these builders were accepted only under the triple condition of confession, penitence and reconciliation with their enemies; they delivered their offerings in tears, while disciplining themselves with blows.

George Eliot speaks of a common feeling of good-will among a mass of men affecting her like music; to such music the incomparable tower of Chartres was built, and a later age sees tears transformed to pearls when another great fire destroyed the old part of the cathedral, and they had, in rebuilding, to live up to their splendid new façade.

A Page from the
Sculptured “Bible of the Laity,”
Chartres.

The cardinal assembled the people of Chartres around the smoking ruins of their dear old church and persuaded them to forget their personal losses and to think only of rebuilding the House of God; and the people, united by the strongest of bonds, a common disaster, arose again to work for the common good, and again Christians from far and near sent in their donations. The old chroniclers say that the very Holy Virgin multiplied her miracles. One of them we still have before us. It was then and there that an architect, whose name is forgotten but whose genius is immortal, perfected the cathedral type of thirteenth century Gothic. All designers of Gothic churches still do him homage; all lovers of Gothic architecture still sing his praise.

And the old church at Chartres grew on, gently developing her people on many lines. She watched her imagiers grow into sculptors, her glass-workers into painters, the more or less serfs of the soil develop into workmen, then guildsmen and free burghers of the town; of this they themselves have written upon her very walls. About half of the windows of the cathedral we find were presented by the guilds; the other half by kings, princes and seigneurs, lay and ecclesiastic. The glass of Chartres, by the way, is considered the finest in the world.

The eighteenth century was a bad day for churches in France; the general contempt in the air for the past led them to destroy the “barbarians’ art,” which was good, to make way for their own, which happened to be bad. The Cathedral of Chartres, as ever so truly in touch with the times, suffered from the artists in the early part of the century, while in 1793 the revolutionists invaded it. They buried the relics and appraised the barbarians’ statues at 100 francs. Then the next idea was to knock down the cathedral, which they found was not so easy; so they concluded to transform it into a Temple of Reason, wherein they behaved most unreasonably. Somebody started to destroy the immense [group of the Assumption] on the grand altar. It represents the Virgin on an embankment of clouds with her arms extended and her figure coming toward the congregation. Her “pied-à-terre” of clouds (excuse the hibernicism) is upheld by angels and every face and attitude in the group is full of aspiration and action. Although as sculpture, this group is not of the first order, as allegory, it is perfect. A bright idea occurred to an architect present; he put the Phrygian cap upon the head of the Virgin and a lance in her hand, and the old symbol became the new; with her arms open to the world and her eyes turned a little above it, the Virgin of Chartres became a beautiful emblem of liberty. I wonder if she impressed any of the wild congregation before her; not long thereafter Napoleon observed that “Chartres was no place for an atheist.”

Altar-piece at Chartres.
The Virgin who once Wore a Liberty Cap

In about six months the church managed to reinstate itself in its old stronghold, though the Revolutionary Commission of public works (or rather the commission for the destruction of public works) had had the impertinence to strip the lead from the cathedral roof to make its ammunition.

But the old church was built to weather all storms, and so was the French nation. The revolutionists besieged the Louvre and turned it into a public art gallery. The republic has quietly advanced much farther in its right of eminent domain and taken under its enlightened protection all the great monuments of architecture in all fair France. Nothing is more charming than the enthusiasm throughout the land, extending even to the simplest people, over these “national monuments.” As the building of them long ago formed a bond of union with the communes, so the love of them now forms a bond of union with the nation. Fostered in their shadows, French genius was able to bring forth at need architects capable of restoring them almost to their pristine beauty, a beauty which, growing out of mystic relics, seems fraught with a relic’s power through love and awe to lead men on. May its magic transform these Roman Catholic cathedrals of the Age of Faith into Holy Catholic churches of the Age of Doubt!

In the nineteenth century James Russell Lowell wrote a poem containing some lovely lines on the Cathedral of Chartres, but if a twentieth century poet approach the theme he will treat it in a more Catholic spirit, for the messages of these venerable fanes must grow broader and gentler as time goes on. A greater poet than Lowell said: “I never can feel sure of any truth but from a clear perception of its beauty.” From this idea he framed his invocation to beauty, which applies alike to a Grecian urn and to the Cathedral of Chartres:

“Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe Than ours, a friend[2] to man, to whom thou say’st, ‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty,’—that is all Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.”

Caen:
An Eleventh Century
Tableau

Two hours from Cherbourg, as the motor flies, lies the old town of Caen, founded by William the Conqueror.

A curious peace reigns in this [old fortress], with the drawbridge down, and the moat a [bower of trees and flowers]: the peace of consummated action; the returns are all in, and you may receive them according to your humor, for the burning questions of other days have faded into dreamy generalities.

Were all those wild centuries of struggle and warfare vain? Or is the old Greek battle-cry, “Now let us go forward, whether we shall give glory to other men, or other men to us,” the normal note of primitive manhood? Were Rollo the Norseman and William the Norman, following the war-gods fiercer than they, commissioned by fate to lead great armies across the great waters, and, sailing under sealed orders, to found two great nations and one great language? Or are all things vanity?

Perhaps, after receiving the children’s children of his loyal subjects, who may have crossed a certain wide ocean unknown to him to attend the great Court of History that William the Norman holds at Caen, the Shades of the Conqueror growing more familiar might conduct the musing cortége into the beautiful abbey near-by, which he built in expiation of the love-match he made in defiance of the church.

I wonder here if the old king might not laughingly recall the story of his first meeting with Lanfranc.

William the Conqueror’s
Old Fortress; the Chains are said to be
the Originals.

Like other forceful men, William married upon his own responsibility. Accordingly, the Pope not only excommunicated him, but laid various bans upon his realm. Such bans were once marvelously inconvenient, to say the least. William fought the church valiantly for six years. It may have been then that he got his measure of the uses and abuses of that institution, which, in the long run, proved most valuable to England. Among others, Lanfranc, Prior of Bec, became a target for William’s displeasure and was ordered to leave his monastery. Lanfranc started forth forlornly enough on a lame horse. Thus caparisoned, he met the furious Duke William. Lanfranc had but one weapon at his command—tact. He approached the great duke, saying, “I am obeying your command as quickly as I can. I will obey faster if you will give me a better horse.” William was blessed with humor. He impressed Lanfranc into his service then and there, and made him his friend forever: the Conqueror could make good friends. Then he sent Lanfranc to make his peace with the Holy See. Understanding William’s passion for building, Lanfranc, the peacemaker, arranged that William and Mathilda should each build an abbey in expiation of their marriage. And William and Mathilda performed their contract so royally that France has lately restored their abbeys, line for line, as national monuments.[3] Thus a tableau of Caen, as the Conqueror saw it, actually lies before twentieth century eyes.

Ah, put yourself in his place! I never knew a traveler to leave this old town without becoming attached to its founder. The strong, orderly, noble and logical Norman buildings express the old Conqueror at his best; at Caen one prefers his older, gentler, more unique title of William, the builder, for, indeed, many have conquered in England, but William I built up his conquest.

In this interesting old Norman church, with its suspicion of the pointed arch (probably the earliest instance) pointing toward the unparalleled Gothic that developed in Normandy, one feels like congratulating the old Conqueror, both as lover and architect, and reinstating his old claim to romance, even though modern research has discovered that he was not a very gentle knight.

William I was no saint; but why should he have been one? Professional saints were only too common in his day: he was but a strong, direct man in a most superstitious, childish and indirect age. Is not the position of one who can stand alone through his age heroic enough?

What a curious world the old Conqueror lived in! A world of professional marauders and their soldiers, of professional saints and their serfs; with a confusion of fighting barons, lay and ecclesiastic, some or the most interesting bishops being no mean warriors; and worst of all, a lot of begging friars producing little but corruption. To the day of his death, the Conqueror makes no apology for his wars in Normandy. There he was simply holding his own. The behavior of the wild and worldly barons was not all he had to contend with; there were also the visions and the notions of the unworldly clergy, who, with intent, more or less good, more or less self-seeking, interfered absolutely with good government, and William’s tact and breadth with them, considered at a time when it is easy to be wise, nearly one thousand years after the event, is astonishing. It fell to his lot to deal with that peculiarly well-intentioned pope, Gregory VII, who, by his ability to conceive and carry out his well-intentioned policy, worked such incalculable evil. Spain is struggling with his Shades today.