A FLIGHT TO THE NORTH-EAST
There are several ways of leaving Paris by motor without touching even
the fringe of what, were it like other cities, would be called its
slums. Going, for instance, southward or south-westward, one may emerge
from the alleys of the Bois near the Pont de Suresnes and, crossing the
river, pass through the park of Saint Cloud to Versailles, or through
the suburbs of Rueil and Le Vésinet to the forest of Saint Germain.
These miraculous escapes from the toils of a great city give one a
dearer impression of the breadth with which it is planned, and of the
civic order and elegance pervading its whole system; yet for that very
reason there is perhaps more interest in a slow progress through one
of the great industrial quarters such as must be crossed to reach the
country lying to the northeast of Paris.
To start on a bright spring morning from the Place du Palais
Bourbon, and follow the tide of traffic along the quays of the left
bank, passing the splendid masses of the Louvre and Notre Dame,
the Conciergerie and the Sainte Chapelle; to skirt the blossoming
borders of the Jardin des Plantes, and cross the Seine at the Pont
d’Austerlitz, getting a long glimpse down its silver reaches till they
divide to envelope the Cité; and then to enter by the Boulevard Diderot
on the long stretch of the Avenue Daumesnil, which leads straight to
the Porte Dorée of Vincennes--to follow this route at the leisurely
pace necessitated by the dense flow of traffic, is to get a memorable
idea of the large way in which Paris deals with some of her municipal
problems.
The Avenue Daumesnil, in particular, with its interminable warehouses
and cheap shops and _guinguettes_, would anywhere else be the prey of
grime and sordidness. Instead, it is spacious, clean, and prosaic only
by contrast to the elegance of the thoroughfares preceding it; and at
the Porte Dorée it gives one over to the charming alleys of a park
as well-tended and far more beautiful than the Bois de Boulogne--a
park offering the luxury of its romantic lawns and lakes for the sole
delectation of the packed industrial quarters that surround it.
The woods of this wonderful Bois de Vincennes are real woods, full of
blue-bells and lilies of the valley; and as one flies through them
in the freshness of the May morning, Paris seems already far behind,
a mere fading streak of factory-smoke on the horizon. One loses all
thought of it when, beyond Vincennes, the road crosses the Marne at
Joinville-sur-Pont. Thence it passes through a succession of bright
semi-suburban villages, with glimpses, here and there, of low white
châteaux or of little grey churches behind rows of clipped horn-beam;
climbing at length into an open hilly country, through which it follows
the windings of the Marne to Meaux.
Bossuet’s diocesan seat is a town of somewhat dull exterior, with
a Gothic cathedral which has suffered cruelly at the hands of the
reformers; for, by an odd turn of fate, before becoming the eyrie
of the “Eagle,” it was one of the principal centres of Huguenot
activity--an activity deplorably commemorated in the ravaged exterior
of the church.
From Meaux to Rheims the country grows in charm, with a slightly
English quality in its rolling spaces and rounded clumps of trees;
but nothing could be more un-English than the grey-white villages,
than the stony squares bordered by clipped horn-beams, the granite
market-crosses, the round-apsed churches with their pointed bell-towers.
One of these villages, Braisne, stands out in memory by virtue of its
very unusual church. This tall narrow structure, with its curious
western front, so oddly buttressed and tapering, and rising alone and
fragmentary among the orchards and kitchen-gardens of a silent shrunken
hamlet, is the pathetic survival of a powerful abbey, once dominating
its surroundings, but now existing only as the parish church of the
knot of sleepy houses about it.
A stranger and less explicable vestige of the past is found not far
off in the curious walled village of Bazoches, which, though lying in
the plain, must have been a small feudal domain, since it still shows
its stout mediæval defences and half-fallen gate-towers tufted with
wallflowers and wild shrubs. The distinguishing fact about Bazoches is
that it is not a dwindled town, with desert spaces between the walls
and a surviving nucleus of houses: its girdle of stone fits as closely
as a finger-ring, and whatever were its past glories they must have
been contained in the same small compass that suffices it to-day.
Beyond Braisne the country is less hilly, the pastures are replaced by
vineyards, and the road runs across a wide plain to Rheims. The extent
of the town, and its modern manufacturing outskirts, make its distant
silhouette less characteristic than that of Bourges or Chartres, which
are still so subordinated to the central mass of their cathedrals. At
Rheims the cathedral comes on one unexpectedly, in the centre of the
town; but once seen it enters into the imagination, less startlingly
but perhaps more completely, more pervasively, than any other of the
great Gothic monuments of France. This sense of being possessed by
it, subdued to it, is perhaps partly due--at least in the case of the
simple tourist--to the happy, the unparalleled fact, that the inn at
Rheims stands immediately opposite the cathedral--so that, admitted at
once to full communion with its incomparable west front, one returns,
after each excursion, to renew and deepen the relation, to become
reabsorbed in it without any conscious effort of attention.
There are two ways of feeling those arts--such as sculpture, painting
and architecture--which appeal first to the eye: the technical, and
what must perhaps be called the sentimental way. The specialist does
not recognise the validity of the latter criterion, and derision is
always busy with the uncritical judgments of those who have ventured
to interpret in terms of another art the great plastic achievements.
The man, in short, who measures the beauty of a cathedral not by its
structural detail consciously analysed, but by its total effect in
indirectly stimulating his sensations, in setting up a movement of
associated ideas, is classed--and who shall say unjustly?--as no better
than the reader who should pretend to rejoice in the music of Lycidas
without understanding the meaning of its words. There is hardly a
way of controverting the axiom that thought and its formulation are
indivisible, or the deduction that, therefore, the only critic capable
of appreciating the beauty of a great work of architecture is he who
can resolve it into its component parts, understand the relation
they bear to each other, and not only reconstruct them mentally, but
conceive of them in a different relation, and visualise the total
result of such modifications.
Assuredly--yet in those arts that lie between the bounds of thought and
sense, and leaning distinctly toward the latter, is there not room for
another, a lesser yet legitimate order of appreciation--for the kind of
confused atavistic enjoyment that is made up of historical association,
of a sense of mass and harmony, of the relation of the building to the
sky above it, to the lights and shadows it creates about it--deeper
than all, of a blind sense in the blood of its old racial power, the
things it meant to far-off minds of which ours are the oft-dissolved
and reconstituted fragments? Such enjoyment, to be of any value even
to the mind that feels it, must be based indeed on an approximate
acquaintance with the conditions producing the building, the structural
theories that led up to it, their meaning, their evolution, their
relation to the moral and mental growth of the builders--indeed, it
may be affirmed that this amount of familiarity with the past is
necessary to any genuine æsthetic enjoyment. But even this leaves the
enjoyment under the slur of being merely “amateurish,” and therefore
in need of a somewhat courageous defence by those who, unequipped for
technical verdicts, have yet found a more than transient satisfaction
in impressions of this mixed and nebulous order.
Such a defence is furnished, to a degree elsewhere unmatched, by the
exceptional closeness of intercourse to which propinquity admits the
traveller at Rheims. Here is the great Presence on one’s threshold--in
one’s window: surprised at dawn in the mystery of its re-birth
from darkness; contemplated at mid-day in the distinctness of its
accumulated detail, its complex ritual of stone; absorbed into the
mind, into the heart, again at darkness--felt lastly and most deeply
under the midnight sky, as a mystery of harmony and order no less
secret and majestic than the curves of the stars in their orbits.
Such pleasures, at any rate, whatever their value as contributions
to special lines of knowledge, enrich the æsthetic consciousness,
prepare it for fresh and perhaps more definite impressions, enlarge
its sense of the underlying relation between art and life, between all
the manifold and contradictory expressions of human energy, and leave
it thus more prepared to defend its own attitude, to see how, in one
sense--a sense not excluding, but in a way enveloping and fertilising
all the specialised forms of technical competence--_Gefühl ist alles_.
* * * * *
It is one of the wonders of this rich northeastern district that
the traveller may pass, in a few hours, and through a region full
of minor interest, to another great manifestation of mediæval
strength: the fortress of Coucy. Two such contrasting specimens of the
vigour--individual and collective--of that tremendous age are hardly
elsewhere, in France, to be found in such close neighbourhood; and it
adds to the interest of both to know that Coucy was a fief of Rheims,
bestowed by its Archbishop on a knight who had distinguished himself
in the First Crusade. It was a great-grandson of this Enguerrand de
Boves who built the central keep and the walls; but the castle was
farther enlarged and adorned when, at the beginning of the fifteenth
century, it passed into the possession of Louis d’Orléans, the brother
of Charles VI.
It is doubly interesting to see Coucy after Carcassonne, because
the two fortresses present the opposite extremes of feudal secular
architecture, Carcassonne being the chief surviving example of a
large walled town with a comparatively small central castle, while
at Coucy the castle is the predominating feature, both in size and
site, and the town no more than a handful of houses within the outer
circuit of its defences. Both strongholds are of course situated on
steep heights, and that of Coucy, though it rises from slopes clad in
foliage, and therefore less stern of outline than the dry southern rock
of Carcassonne, stands no less superbly than its rival. In fact there
is perhaps no single point from which Carcassonne produces quite such
an effect of concentrated power as the keep and castle-towers of Coucy
squaring themselves on their western ridge. Yet such comparisons are
unprofitable, because the two fortresses were designed for purposes
so different, and under such different conditions, that the one is
necessarily most vigorous where the other had the least need for a
display of strength.
Coucy, in its present fallen state, gains incalculably from the charm
of its surroundings--the lovely country enfolding it in woods and
streams, the shaded walks beneath its ivy-hung ramparts, and above all
the distinct and exquisite physiognomy of the tiny old town which these
ramparts enclose. The contrast between the humble yet stout old stone
houses ranged, as it were, below the salt, and the castle throned on
its dais of rock at one end of the enclosure, seems to sum up the whole
social system of the Middle Ages as luminously and concisely as Taine’s
famous category. Coucy has the extraordinary archæological value of a
place that has never outgrown the special institutions producing it:
the hands of the clock have stopped at the most characteristic moment
of its existence; and so impressive, even to the unhistorical mind, is
its compact and vivid “exteriorisation” of a great phase of history,
that one wonders and shudders at, and finally almost comes to admire,
the superhuman stolidity of the successful merchant who has planted,
on the same ledge as the castle, and almost parallel with its Titanic
towers, a neatly turreted suburban villa, the sole attempt of modern
Coucy to give the retort to its overwhelming past.
* * * * *
Taking Coucy as a centre, the traveller may, within a few hours,
extraordinarily vary his impressions, since the remarkable group of
monuments distributed over the triangular bit of France between Paris,
Rheims and Saint Quentin, comprises a characteristic example of almost
every architectural period from the early Middle Ages till the close of
the eighteenth century--the extremes being sometimes in as close touch
as Tracy-le-Val and Prémontré.
Turning first to the west, through a country of rolling fields and
wooded heights, vaguely English in its freedom from the devouring
agriculture of the centre, one comes on the most English impression
in France--the towers of Noyon rising above a girdle of orchards and
meadows. Noyon, indeed, to the end, maintains in one this illusion--so
softly misted with verdure, so lacking in the sharp edges of the
dry stony French town, it seems, by its old street-architecture
of cross-beams and stucco, by the smoothly turfed setting of the
cathedral, and the crowning surprise of a genuine “close” at its back,
to corroborate at every step the explorer’s first impression.
In the cathedral, indeed, one is no longer in England--though still
without being very definitely in France. For the interior of Noyon,
built at a time when northern art was still groping for its specific
expression, is a thing apart in cathedral architecture, one of those
fortunate variations from which, in the world of art as of nature, new
forms are sometimes developed. That in this case the variation remained
sterile, while it makes, no doubt, for a more exclusive enjoyment of
Noyon, leaves one conjecturing on the failure to transmit itself of
so original and successful an experiment. The deviation consists,
principally, in the fact that the transept ends of Noyon are rounded,
so that they form, in conjunction with the choir, a kind of apsidal
trefoil of the most studied and consummate grace. The instinctive use
of the word _grace_ perhaps explains as well as anything the failure
of Noyon to repeat itself (save once, half-heartedly, in the south
transept of Soissons). Grace at the expense of strength is, especially
from without, the total result of this unique blending of curves,
this prodigal repetition of an effect that, to produce its deepest
impression, should be used singly, and only as the culmination, the
ecstatic flowering, of a vigorous assemblage of straight lines.
But within the church, and especially from the point where the
sweep of both transepts may be seen flowing into the curves of the
choir, one is too deeply penetrated by the grace to feel in it any
latent weakness. For pure loveliness of line nothing in northern
church architecture--not even the long bold sweep of Canterbury
choir--surpasses the complex pattern of the east end of Noyon. And in
the detail of the interior construction the free, almost careless,
mingling of the round and the pointed arch heightens the effect of
Noyon as of something experimental, fugitive, not to come again--the
blue flower, as it were, of the Gothic garden--an experiment which
seems to express the fantasy of a single mind rather than such
collective endeavour as brought forth the great secular churches of the
Middle Ages.
While Noyon offers, in its general setting, and in certain
architectural peculiarities, suggestions so specifically English, the
type of its chief civic monument seems drawn from that Burgundian
region where the passing of Gothic into Renaissance forms found so
rich and picturesque an expression. The Hôtel de Ville of Noyon, built
in the middle of the fifteenth century, is a charming product of that
transitional moment which was at its best in the treatment of municipal
buildings, since domestic architecture was still cramped, and driven
to an overcrowding of detail, by the lingering habit of semi-defensive
construction. In the creation of the town-hall the new art could throw
off feudal restraints, and the architect of the graceful, ornate yet
sober building at Noyon--with its two façades so equally “composed” as
wholes, so lingered over and caressed in every part--has united all the
freedom of the new spirit with the patient care for detail that marked
the old.
[Illustration: NOYON: HÔTEL DE VILLE]
At Saint Quentin, not far to the northwest of Noyon, a town-hall of
more imposing dimensions suggests other architectural affinities. This
part of France is close to the Low Countries, and Flemish influences
have overflowed the borders. The late Gothic Hôtel de Ville at Saint
Quentin, with its elaborately composed façade surmounted by three
pointed gables, was completed at a period when, in other parts of
France, Renaissance forms were rapidly superseding the earlier style.
But here the Gothic lingers, as it did in the Low Countries, in a rich
yet sober and sturdy form of civic architecture which suits the moist
grey skies, the flat fields, the absence of any abrupt or delicate
lines in the landscape. Saint Quentin, a large dull manufacturing town,
with a nucleus of picturesque buildings grouped about its town-hall and
its deplorably renovated collegiate church, has a tone so distinctively
northern and provincial, that its other distinguishing possession--the
collection of portraits by the great _pastelliste_ Latour--seems almost
as much expatriated as though it were actually beyond the frontier. It
is difficult to conceive of the most expert interpreter of the Parisian
face as forming his style on physiognomies observed in the sleepy
streets and along the sluggish canals of Saint Quentin; and the return
of his pictures to his birthplace, if it has a certain historical
fitness, somehow suggests a violent psychological dislocation, and
makes one regard the vivid countenances lining the walls of the Musée
Lécuyer as those of _émigrés_ yearning to be back across the border.
For Latour worked in the Attic age when the least remoteness from Paris
was exile; and one may reasonably fancy the unmistakable likeness
between all his sitters to be the result of the strong centralising
pressure which left the French face no choice between Parisianism and
barbarism.
[Illustration: ST. QUENTIN: HÔTEL DE VILLE]
One’s first impression on entering this singular portrait gallery
is of coming into a _salon_ where all the habitués have taken the
same tone, where the angles of difference have been so rubbed down
that personalities are as hard to differentiate as in a group of
Orientals. The connecting link which unites a company ranging from
Vernezobre, the colour-dealer, to Madame la Dauphine, from the buffoon
Manelli to the Academician Duclos--this unifying trait is found in
the fixed smile on the lips of all the sitters. It is curious,
and a little disconcerting, on first entering, to see faces of such
marked individuality--from the rough unshorn Vernezobre to the mincing
Camargo--overrun by the same simper of “good company”--so disconcerting
that only by eliminating the universal Cupid’s-bow mouth, and trying to
see the other features without it, can one do justice to the vigorous
and penetrating portraiture of Latour. Then indeed the pictures affirm
themselves as “documents,” and the artist’s technical skill in varying
his methods with the type of his sitters becomes only less interesting
than the psychological insight of which, after all, it is a partial
expression. One’s attention is at first absorbed by the high personal
interest of the portraits; but when this has been allowed for, the
general conclusion resulting from their collective study is that,
even in that day of feminine ascendancy, the man’s face, not only
plastically but psychologically, was a far finer “subject” than the
woman’s. Latour had before his easel some of the most distinguished
examples of both; and how the men triumph and stand out, how Rousseau
and d’Alembert, Maurice de Saxe and the matchless Vernezobre
overshadow and efface all the Camargos and Dauphinesses, the Favarts
and Pompadours of the varied feminine assortment! Only one little
ghostly nameless creature--a model, a dancer, the catalogue uncertainly
conjectures--detaches herself from the polite assemblage as if impaled
with quivering wings on the sharp pencil of the portraitist. One
wonders if she knew she had been caught....
* * * * *
The short run from Saint Quentin to Laon carries one, through charming
scenery, from the Low Countries into a region distinctively French,
but with such a touch of romance as Turner saw in the sober French
landscape when he did his “Rivers and Harbours.” Laon, the great
cathedral town of the north-east, is not seated on a river; but
the ridge that carries it rises so abruptly from the plain, and so
simulates the enclosing curves of a bay, that, as we approached it, the
silvery light on the spring fields at its base seemed like the shimmer
of water.
Seen from the road to Saint Quentin, Laon is one of the stateliest
hill-towns of France--indeed it suggests rivalry with the high-perched
Umbrian cities rather than with any nearer neighbours. At one extremity
of the strangely hooked cliff, the two ends of which bend toward each
other like a thumb and forefinger, stands the ruined abbey church
of Saint Vincent, now a part of the arsenal; at the other rises the
citadel, behind which are grouped the cathedral and episcopal palace;
and the apex of the triangle, between these pronged extremities, is
occupied by the church of Saint Martin, which lifts its Romanesque
towers above the remains of a Premonstratensian abbey. In the sheltered
hollow enclosed between the thumb and forefinger lies the _Cuve de
Saint Vincent_, a garden district of extraordinary fertility, and
beyond it the interminable plain flows away toward the Belgian frontier.
To the advantage of this site Laon adds the possession of
well-preserved ramparts, of two or three fortified gates to which
clusters of old houses have ingeniously attached themselves, and above
all of its seven-towered cathedral--a cathedral now no longer, though
its apse still adjoins an ancient group of diocesan buildings, from the
cloistered court of which one obtains the finest impression of the
lateral mass of the monument.
Notre Dame of Laon ranks in size among the “secondary” French
cathedrals; but both in composition and in detail it occupies a place
in architecture as distinctive as its natural setting, and perhaps no
higher praise can be awarded it than to say that, like the church of
Vézelay, it is worthy of the site it occupies.
[Illustration: LAON: GENERAL VIEW OF THE TOWN AND CATHEDRAL]
The seven towers of Laon are its most notable ornament; no other
cathedral roof of France bears such a glorious crown. Four only of
the towers have received their upper tiers of arcades; but the others
rise high enough above the roof-ridge to break its outline with
their massive buttresses and pyramidal capping. The taller four are
distinguished by the originality of their upper stories, of which
the intermediate one is octagonal, and broken up into four groups
of arches of extreme lightness and vigour, separated by stilted
round-arched openings which are carried through to the upper tier of
the tower. At the west end of the church, the open niches formed by the
octagonal sally of the tower-arcades are filled by colossal stone oxen,
modelled with a bold realism, and advancing from their high-perched
stalls almost as triumphantly as the brazen horses above the door of
Saint Mark’s.
These effigies are supposed to commemorate the services of the patient
beasts who dragged the stone for the cathedral up the cruel hill of
Laon; and looking up at their silhouettes, projected ponderously
against the blue, one is inclined to see in them a symbol of mediæval
church-building--of the moral and material cost at which Christianity
reared its monuments.
The oxen of Laon and the angels of Saint Père sous Vézelay might
indeed be said to stand for the two chief factors in this unparalleled
outburst of religious activity--the visionary passion that aroused
it, and the painful expenditure of human and animal labour that made
the vision a reality. When one reads of the rapidity with which many
of these prodigious works were executed, of the fever of devotion
that flamed in whole communities, one has, under the gladness and
exaltation, glimpses of a drudgery as unceasing and inconceivable as
that of the pyramid-builders, and out of which, perhaps, have grown the
more vigorous, the stabler fibres of European character--and one feels
that the triumphing oxen of Laon, though they stand for so vast a sum
of dull, unrewarded, unintelligible toil, have on the whole done more
for civilisation than the angels of Saint Père.
* * * * *
At Soissons, an old city saturated with Roman and Merovingian memories,
Gothic art again triumphs, but in a different and a milder strain.
The short run from Laon to Soissons, through a gently undulating
landscape, prepares one for these softer impressions. The Gallo-Roman
city has neither the proud site nor the defensive outline of Laon. It
lies in the valley of the Aisne, in a circle of wooded hills, with
the river winding peaceably between the old town and its faubourg of
Saint Vaast. Passing through this faubourg, and crossing the Aisne,
one is caught in a maze of narrow streets, which lead up tortuously
to the cathedral square. The pressure of surrounding houses makes it
difficult to get a comprehensive view of the church, but one receives,
in narrow glimpses through the clipped limes of the market-place, a
general impression of grace and sobriety that somehow precludes any
strong individual effect. The cathedral of Soissons is indeed chiefly
remarkable for its repetition of the rounded transepts of Noyon; though
in this case (for reasons which it would be interesting to learn) the
round end, while receiving the farther development of an aisle and
triforium, has been applied only to one transept.
The thought of Soissons, however, at least in the mind of the passing
impressionist, must remain chiefly associated with that rarest creation
of the late Gothic of the north-east, the façade of Saint Jean des
Vignes. This church, which formed part of a monastic settlement in the
outskirts of the town, is now almost in ruins, and of the abbatial
buildings around it there remain only two admirable fragments of the
cloister arcade, and the abbot’s house, built at a much later date.
So complete is the outline of the beautiful west front that one would
hardly guess the ruin of the nave but for the blue sky showing through
the vast circle of the central rose, from which every fragment of
tracery has been stripped. Yet one can pardon even that inhumanity
to the destroyers who respected the towers--those incomparable
towers, so harmonious in their divergences, so typical of that lost
secret of mediæval art--the preservation of symmetry in unlikeness.
These western towers of Saint Jean, rising strongly on each side of
the central door, and reinforcing the airy elegance of the façade
by their vigorous vertical buttressing, break, at the level of the
upper gable, into pyramidal masses of differing height and breadth,
one more boldly tapering, the other more massive and complex, yet
preserving in a few essential features--the placing of the openings,
the correspondence of strong horizontal lines--a unity that dominates
their differences and binds them into harmony with the whole façade. It
is sad, on passing through the gaping western doorway, to find one’s
self on a bit of waste ground strewn with fragments of sculpture and
masonry--sadder still to have the desolation emphasized by coming here
on a bit of Gothic cloister, there on a still more distinctive specimen
of Renaissance arcading. The quality of these surviving fragments
indicates how great must have been the interest, both æsthetic and
historical, of this beautiful ruin, and revives the vain wish that,
in some remote corner of Europe, invasion and civil war might have
spared at least one complete example of a great monastic colony,
enabling one to visualise the humaner side of that mediæval life which
Carcassonne evokes in its militant aspect.
[Illustration: SOISSONS: RUINED CHURCH OF SAINT-JEAN-DES-VIGNES]
* * * * *
The return from Soissons to Paris holds out so many delightful
alternatives, in respect both of scenery and architecture, that, in
April especially, the traveller may be excused for wavering between
Compiègne and Senlis, between Beauvais and Saint Leu d’Esserent.
Perhaps the road which traverses Senlis and Saint Leu, just because it
offers less exceptional impressions, brings one closer to the heart of
old France, to its inexhaustible store of sober and familiar beauty.
Senlis, for instance, is only a small sleepy town, with two or three
churches of minor interest--with that the guide-book might dismiss it;
but had there been anything in all our wanderings quite comparable to
the impression produced by that little cathedral in its quiet square--a
monument so compact yet noble, so embroidered with delicate detail,
above all so sunned-over with a wonderful golden lichen that it seems
like a dim old jewel-casket from which the gilding is almost worn?
The other churches of Senlis, enclosed, like the cathedral, in the
circuit of half-ruined walls that make a miniature _cité_ of the inner
town, have something of the exquisite quality of its central monument.
Both, as it happens, have been secularised, and Saint Pierre, the
later and more ornate of the two buildings, has suffered the irony
of being converted into a market, while Saint Frambourg, an ancient
collegiate church, has sunk to the uses of a storage warehouse. In each
case, access to the interior is sometimes hard to obtain; but the two
façades, one so delicate in its early Gothic reticence, the other so
prodigal of the last graces of the style, carry on almost unbrokenly
the architectural chronicle which begins with the Romanesque cathedral;
and the neglect, so painful to witness in the interior, has given them
a surface-tone almost rich enough to atone for the cost at which it has
been acquired.
* * * * *
If, on leaving Senlis, one turns westward, skirting the wooded glades
of Chantilly, and crossing the park at the foot of the “Canal de la
Manche,” one comes presently into the valley of the Oise and, a few
kilomètres farther on, the village of Saint Leu d’Esserent lifts its
terraced church above the river.
The site of Saint Leu is that of the little peaked Mediterranean
towns: there is something defensive, defiant, in the way it grasps its
hill-side and lifts its church up like a shield. The town owes this
crowning ornament--and doubtless also its own slender existence--to
the founding here, in the eleventh century, of a great Cluniac abbey,
of which certain Romanesque arcades and a fortified gate may be
traced among the débris behind the apse. Of the original church there
survives only a round-arched tower, to which, in the latter half of the
twelfth century, was added what is perhaps the most homogeneous, and
assuredly the most beautiful, early Gothic structure in France. The
peculiar interest of this church of Saint Leu--apart from its intrinsic
nobility of design--lies in the fact of its being, so curiously, the
counterpart, the other side of the shield, of the church of Vézelay.
For, as at Vézelay one felt beneath the weight of the round openings
the impatient stirrings of the pointed arch, so here at Saint Leu,
where the latter form at last triumphs, its soaring movement is still
held down by the close-knit Romanesque frame of the church. It is hard
to define the cause of this impression, since at Saint Leu the pointed
style has quite freed itself, structurally, from Romanesque _entraves_,
all the chief elements of later Gothic construction being blent there
in so harmonious a composition that, as Mr. Charles Moore has pointed
out, the church might stand for a perfect example of “unadorned
Gothic.” All that later art could do toward the elaboration of such a
style was to add ornament, enlarge openings, and lighten the masses.
But by the doing of just that, the immense static value of the earlier
proportions was lost--and the distinction of Saint Leu is that it
blends, in perfect measure, Gothic lightness with Romanesque tenacity.
Of this the inside of the church is no less illustrative than its
exterior. Though the western bays of the nave were built later than its
eastern portion, they end in a narthex on the lines of the outer porch
of Vézelay, surmounted by a gallery from which the great sweep of the
aisles and triforium may be felt in all its grandeur. For, despite
the moderate proportions of the church, grandeur and reserve are its
dominating qualities--within and without it has attained the classic
balance that great art at all times has its own ways of reaching.
* * * * *
Westward from Saint Leu, the valley of the Oise, fruitful but
somewhat shadeless, winds on toward Paris through pleasant riverside
towns--Beaumont, l’Isle-Adam, and the ancient city of Pontoise; and
beyond the latter, at a point where the river flings a large loop to
the west, one may turn east again and, crossing the forest of Saint
Germain, descend on Paris through the long shadows of the park of Saint
Cloud.
Transcriber’s Notes
Punctuation and spelling were made consistent when a predominant
preference was found in this book; otherwise they were not changed.
Simple typographical errors were corrected.
Incorrect and missing accent marks on some French words were remedied;
otherwise, the spelling of non-English words was not checked.
Ambiguous hyphens at the ends of lines were retained; occurrences of
inconsistent hyphenation have not been changed.
The captions in the List of Illustrations were italicized in the
original book. For visual clarity, that is not indicated in the
Plain Text version of this eBook.
End of Project Gutenberg's A Motor-Flight Through France, by Edith Wharton