Era of the Great Cathedrals, Chartres, Rheims, Amiens
_I stood before the triple northern porch_
_Where dedicated shapes of saints and kings,_
_Stern faces bleared with immemorial watch,_
_Looked down benignly grave, and seemed to say:_
_"Ye come and go incessant, we remain_
_Safe in the hallowed quiets of the past._
_Be reverent, ye who flit and are forgot_
_Of faith so nobly realized as this."_
--JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL, _The Cathedral_.
Of the four master cathedrals of France, that of Paris was begun first.
Thirty years later, in 1194, the cornerstone of Chartres was laid, that
of Rheims in 1211, and that of Amiens in 1220. In the case of Chartres,
Rheims, and Amiens, rebuilding was undertaken when fire had destroyed
their Romanesque cathedrals. All four of these great churches have the
same patroness, Our Lady, "the glorious mother of God, our advocate
against our enemy of hell"--thus those generations spoke of her of whom
Dante chanted: "Lady, thou art so great, and hast such worth that if
there be who would have grace, yet betaketh not himself to thee, his
longing seeketh to fly without wings."[104]
It is difficult for many a modern mind to understand the passion of
spiritual chivalry felt by the generations that built cathedrals for her
whom they called their sovereign lady, but unless some comprehension of
that mystic ideal is grasped no complete sympathy for mediæval art is
possible. Mr. George Santayana, who would renew our sense of the moral
identity of all the ages, may see in the mediæval devotion to Our Lady a
development of Platonic love, which he calls the transformation of the
love of beauty into the worship of an ideal beauty, the transformation
of the love of a creature into the love of God. All love is to lead to
God. All true beauty leads to the idea of perfection, said Michael
Angelo, who practiced Platonism, even as had Dante, who was of the very
essence of the great scholastic century that built Chartres, Rheims, and
Amiens.
THE CATHEDRAL OF CHARTRES[105]
Discipline is indispensable to art.--GEORGE SANTAYANA.[106]
Chartres was Our Lady's shrine in a peculiar way, her "special chamber."
A local tradition, so old that it reached back to the dimmest past, told
of a prophecy concerning a virgin mother, pronounced by the Druids, a
hundred years before the Christian era on the site where Chartres now
stands, and in the cathedral first built on the revered spot the bishop
retained a pagan well which from time immemorial had been honored by the
populace. That Puits des Saints-Forts has been included in the crypt of
each succeeding cathedral of Chartres. Finally some priggish
XVII-century prelates looked with disfavor on the policy, advocated by
the apostle of the gentiles, to make use of the ancient superstition for
the spread of the true faith. So the pagan well was filled in, and trace
of it was lost till M. René Merlet discovered it in 1900 and had it
excavated.
That Chartres was a meeting place of the Druids, we know from Cæsar, and
the XIII-century sons of the Gauls, as if in souvenir, carved the
druidical oak leaf freely upon the present cathedral. Is it fanciful to
feel that in the grave forest stillness of Chartres' interior lingers
much of the theocratic nostalgia that forever haunts the Celt? In
druidic times priest, teacher, and lawmaker were honored above brute
force of arms. The present crypt of Chartres includes part of the
Gallo-Roman walls. The V-century Merovingian cathedral abutted on the
city ramparts. Then came wars which in part demolished the town walls,
so that the reconstructed church was able to extend itself beyond the
ramparts. It was doubtless after the Norman inroads that was built, in
the IX century, the chapel of St. Lupus which forms the core of the
present crypt. The Carolingian cathedral of Chartres was destroyed by a
terrible fire in 1020.
Now, in 1020, the see of Chartres was occupied by one of the notable
bishops of French history, Fulbert (1007-29), revered of the people, a
scholar enamored of the life of study, though the events of that
agitated age forced him to play an active part in the national life.
Like Abbot Suger, he was of lowly extraction. He had studied in the
cathedral school of Rheims, made notable by Archbishop Gerbert, who
later became Sylvester II, the pope of the year 1000. Fulbert, too, like
his master, was a versatile genius--doctor in medicine as well as
theologian, and one of the first to take up the new musical system of
the Benedictine Guy d'Arezzo. He made the cathedral school of Chartres a
center of learning, and men who were to be the leaders of the age were
his pupils. Like Socrates, he taught his disciples as they paced up and
down the cathedral precincts. In his exhortations there was an
appealing tenderness that had a singular power in moving men's hearts,
and letters from his pupils still exist, complaining of the exile they
felt when separated from him.[107]
To rebuild his cathedral, Bishop Fulbert gave up his own revenues. Gifts
poured in from the kings of England and Denmark, from the bishop's
schoolmate of Rheims, the good and cultivated King Robert of France,
from the Duke of Aquitaine, who donated the treasure accumulated in St.
Hilary's abbatial at Poitiers. The work was pushed forward with such
energy that after four years Bishop Fulbert was able to write that, by
winter, his lower church would be vaulted.
The present magnificent crypt under Chartres Cathedral is the very one
built by St. Fulbert. It is the most extensive crypt in France. Its
soundly constructed groin vaults stood firm when, two hundred years
later, the upper church was destroyed by fire. In times of public
calamity the people have fled to Fulbert's subterranean passages, and
the devotion of generations has hallowed his shrine. If you would know
the soul of this mystic cathedral, gather at dawn with the silent
worshipers who choose that hour to kneel daily in the secluded intimacy
of Notre-Dame-sous-Terre. The true hour for Chartres is not at noontime,
when the tourists flock to the empty church, but in the morning with the
dawn.[108]
Fulbert's Romanesque cathedral was finished in the same XI century by
St. Ives of Chartres, another born leader of the nation, who righted
many abuses. He dared stand up against Philip I himself, because of the
king's adulterous marriage with the beautiful Bertrada de Montfort,
stolen from the Count of Anjou. The bishop wrote thus to the king,
refusing to attend his wedding, "out of respect for my own conscience,
which I wish to keep pure before God, and because I would retain the
good repute by which a priest of Christ should honor himself before the
faithful. I would rather be flung into the bottom of the sea, with a
millstone round my neck, than be a stumbling block to the weak. Nor do I
fail in the fidelity I owe you, in speaking thus to you, but rather I
give you proof of it, for I believe that you are risking your immortal
soul and are putting your crown in jeopardy." The king's answer was to
throw him into prison and to pillage his church.
Bishop Ives, in 1095, attended the preaching of the First Crusade at
Clermont, after which he accompanied Urban II to the Council of Tours.
Scarcely a big event of his day or a leading personage that he was
unassociated with, and the three hundred of his letters which are extant
form a valuable contribution to history. Twice was the exiled St. Anselm
of Canterbury his guest, and in 1107 Paschal II--the pope who built the
upper church of S. Clemente at Rome--stopped with him in Chartres.
Bishop Ives had been a pupil at Bec, of the celebrated Lanfranc, so he
was fully competent to keep up the prestige of his cathedral school.
The Romanesque basilica, begun by Fulbert and finished by Bishop Ives,
lasted for over two hundred years. The present northwest tower was
started probably in 1134, when the nave's western bays had been damaged
by fire. Following a pre-Romanesque tradition, the tower was placed a
little distance before the church, apart from it, and so it remained for
some ten years. Then, one day in June, 1144, the eloquent Bishop
Geoffrey de Lèves, successor of St. Ives, was the guest of the abbot of
St. Denis during the dedication of Suger's abbatial, and what he there
saw of the new system of building made him determined to reconstruct
his own church of Chartres. Being an excellent administrator, he was
able to start the new works immediately.
Within a year was begun the southwest tower of Chartres (1145), which
many hold to be the most beautiful in the world. While it was building,
the side aisles of Fulbert's basilica were lengthened to meet both
western towers. That the one to the south never was intended to stand
isolated is shown by the absence of windows on the two sides where it
joins the church, whereas the tower to the north had windows on all four
sides. While these works were in progress St. Bernard came to Chartres
to preach the Second Crusade. He and Bishop Geoffrey had recently
traveled together through Aquitaine, combating the Cartharist heresy.
It was Geoffrey de Lèves who accompanied the future Louis VII to
Bordeaux for his marriage with Aliénor of Aquitaine, and when the death
of the king suddenly called Louis away, he left his bride in the care of
the bishop of Chartres. Geoffrey was long the sincere defender of
Abélard, though finally he disapproved of what was overhardy in his
doctrine; with Peter of Cluny he held that the errors of the brilliant
schoolman were of the head rather than the heart.
Two often-quoted ancient records described the surge of religious fervor
which raised the western end of Chartres Cathedral. In 1145 the
archbishop of Rouen wrote to the bishop of Amiens to relate how the
people of his diocese, knights and ladies, townspeople and peasants,
went in a spirit of penitence to Chartres, there to help in the new work
of Notre Dame. No one could join the pilgrimage who had not confessed,
and renounced all enmities and revenges. As the quarries were some miles
from the city, it was a heavy task to drag in the big stones. In that
same 1145 Abbot Haimon of St. Pierre-sur-Dives in Normandy, wrote to
some monks in England to picture the scenes at Chartres: "Whoever heard
tell in times past of powerful princes brought up in honors and wealth,
of noble men and women bending their proud necks to the harness of
carts, and like beasts of burden dragging stones, cement, wood, to
build the abode of Christ? And while men of all ranks drag these heavy
loads--so great the weight that sometimes a thousand are attached to one
wagon--they march in such silence that not a murmur is heard. When they
halt by the roadside, only the confessing of sins, and prayer, humbly
suppliant, ascend to God. If anyone is so hardened as to refuse to
pardon his enemies, he is detached from the cart and refused
companionship in that holy company. When they have reached the church
they arrange the wagons about it like a spiritual camp, and during the
whole night they celebrate the watch by hymns and canticles."
It was not long after this wave of enthusiasm that the Portal Royal was
begun, probably about 1155, though some have placed those three western
doors earlier and some later. As they resembled the doors of St. Denis
(now destroyed), they were made, doubtlessly, within ten or fifteen
years of Suger's work. By 1175 cracks appeared in the new west
foundations, and the three doors were moved forward, stone by stone, and
placed on a line with the towers. In their first position, set back
between the advancing towers, they had shown to better advantage, but it
is to the advance of Chartres' western façade that we owe the
preservation of its priceless glass and sculpture.
At the time of these changes the bishop of Chartres was John of
Salisbury (1176-80), perhaps the most learned man of his century, and
certainly one of the wisest, sincerest, and most likable men who ever
lived. In his works this humanist advocated a proper use of dialectics,
as opposed to the sterile subtlety then increasing among scholars. His
stand on the problem which agitated the thinkers then--how our ideas
correspond to things existing outside our intellect--was one of moderate
realism. Abélard had led up to such an outlook, and the scholastics of
the XIII century, notably Aquinas, also classed themselves as moderate
realists. John of Salisbury possessed what the French call _esprit_, and
he poked some fun at the hair-splitting in the schools. Hebrew and
Greek he knew, and his Latin was of good literary quality, which was
rather an exception among scholastic writers.
When Thomas Becket was raised to the see of Canterbury, his friend, John
of Salisbury, became his chief adviser, and though the latter held
principles equally firm, he endeavored to curb the primate's excess of
zeal. Through the years of Becket's exile, John lived in France,
returned with his archbishop to England, and witnessed his martyrdom in
Canterbury Cathedral. At Sens he, too, must have watched with interest
that cathedral building, being himself an artist and modeler in clay.
Sens' archbishop, Guillaume de Champagne, admired the balanced character
and solid scholarship of the Englishman, and after the Canterbury
tragedy proposed him for the see of Chartres. No one could have
appreciated better than John of Salisbury the strange charm and beauty
of the column statues which one by one were moved to a new position at
his cathedral's west doors while he governed this see.
And no one was more fitted to comprehend the glory of the three
XII-century windows, also dismounted and reset in those years, than John
of Salisbury's successor at Chartres, his intimate of many years past,
Pierre de Celle, who, while abbot of St. Remi at Rheims, had adorned the
lovely Primary Gothic choir he built there with admirable colored
lights. The south tower was crowned with its mighty spire in his day,
and he paved the streets of Chartres and raised the town walls. Both
these best types of scholastic authors were interested in maintaining
the high repute of their cathedral school. As Pierre de Celle died in
1183, he was spared the sight of his cathedral's destruction.
On the night of June 10, 1194, a terrible conflagration wiped out
Fulbert's Romanesque basilica. To its cavernous crypt the clerks bore
the treasured relics, and after three days emerged, when the fire was
spent. Only the crypt and the more recent west façade, with its two
towers, escaped destruction; the north tower at the time still lacked
its upper stories.
On the smoking ruins the pope's legate made an appeal to the people's
generosity, and once again Chartres presented the devotional scenes of
1145. Bishop and canons gave up three years of their revenue, and pious
confraternities dragged in the big stones. Those passionate rivals,
Richard Coeur-de-Lion and Philippe-Auguste, were donors. Thus every
part of Chartres Cathedral has been raised by the hands and hearts of
faith, and surely the personality which builders impart to their work
breathes here in a piety of the soul that not all the science of later
times has ever been able to simulate. _Non est hic aliud nisi Domus Dei
et porta coeli._
The new cathedral went forward apace; early in the XIII century the big
west rose was added to the much-transformed façade. By 1224 the upper
vaulting was entirely closed in. The formal dedication was postponed
till 1260, to allow for the completion of the two elaborate porches
before the transept's doors. To that delayed consecration came St. Louis
and his court.
The name of the architect of Chartres is unknown, but its unity of plan
is proof that it emanated from the brain of one man. The choir had
double aisles, the nave a single one. It is believed that to the absence
of side chapels in the nave is due the exceptionally good acoustic
properties of this church in which the preacher's voice carries to every
part. Unknown, too, is the architect of the tower built in the dawn of
Gothic art, two generations before the present cathedral. The veriest
amateur as he gazes at it is conscious that he has before him one of the
supreme things of France.
The more closely the _clocher vieux_ is analyzed, the more it becomes a
touchstone by which will be judged other towers. A miracle of just
gradation, it sprang in one jet from the brain of a man of genius. With
a pleasurable sense of harmony the eye travels from the base to the tip
of the spire. Proportion, not ornament, is the secret of its
transcendent influence. The width is right--and so many towers fail
there--the division of the stories is right, and radiantly right is
that crucial point, the transition from the vertical square shaft to
the inclined octagonal spire, accomplished here by means of dormers and
turrets. An innovator was the architect of Chartres' belfry when he
placed open windows in the gables. To obviate any monotonous optical
effect, he made a ridge down each inclined plane of the spire, which
spire is a massive pyramid forming almost half of the tower's height.
Its bare nobility surpasses the richer open stonework of the spire to
the north.
[Illustration: _The Cathedral of Chartres (1194-1240). The Southern
Aspect_]
It is confusing that the north tower at Chartres façade should be called
the _clocher neuf_ because of its Flamboyant Gothic upper stories, for
its lower Romanesque parts were built before the _clocher vieux_. When
towers were rising in every part of France as the XVI century opened,
the chapter of Chartres Cathedral invited a local architect, Jean de
Texier, called Jean de Beauce,[109] to complete their truncated
northern tower, whose temporary top had just been consumed by fire. Jean
de Beauce saw that the XIII-century rose window had crowded the south
belfry. While the rose was making, a new story had been added to the
north tower. To that tower he decided to add still another story before
he topped it with an elaborate lacework spire. In consequence the
_clocher neuf_ is out of all proportion to its mate. Nor does it carry
the eye smoothly from soil to tip; its renewals are abrupt. However, if
it lacks subtlety, its crown is none the less a strikingly effective
monument of the final phase of Gothic architecture. The spire is
adjusted to the shaft by means of little flying buttresses which spring
from the angle and face turrets, and help to unify the design.
Some human vanity the north tower of Chartres displays, but no arrogant
pride, no Renaissance pretentiousness. And in the inscription
commemorating its renewal still breathes the reverential, loving,
personal note of the Middle Ages:
"I was once built of lead, till after the fire on the feast of St. Anne,
six o'clock in the evening, 1506, Messires the Chapter ordered me
rebuilt in stone. In my necessity good people helped me. May God be
gracious to them."
Under his belfry tower, Jehan de Beauce built a pretty pavilion to
regulate its chimes. Sculptor as well as architect, he designed the
sumptuous screen about the choir, on whose exterior wall is portrayed
the life of Our Lord in groups made during seven generations. The oldest
and best scenes are those in the south aisle nearest the transept.
The mystery plays gave to the iconography of the late XV century its
realistic character. In these sculpture panels at Chartres, not only
were the costumes of the religious theater copied, but the stage
settings. A group was represented in a room, whereas in earlier work the
sacred personages "stood with a sort of spiritualized detachment, clad
in the long tunic of no country, of no time, the very vestment itself
for the life eternal."[110]
One of the earlier scenes of Chartres' choir screen presents Our Lady
seated in the cosiest of interiors, like a XVI-century housewife, a
reticule by her side and a chaplet, which last touch was a charming
anachronism. She sews serenely while poor distracted St. Joseph dreams.
A complete contrast to this human Virgin Mother is a XIII-century lancet
across the aisle from it--the much-venerated
Notre-Dame-de-la-belle-verrière, a mother of God, the austere symbolic
Throne of Solomon, almost uncanny in her solemn passiveness. In some of
the later groups sculptured on the outer walls of the choir screen
appears the icy hand of the Renaissance, though the setting remained
Gothic throughout.
The two decorative glories of Chartres Cathedral are its sculptured
portals and its wealth of stained glass, "an assemblage unique in
Europe, the thought of the Middle Ages made visible." Though over ten
thousand personages are represented, decoration is kept subordinate to
structure with an instinct for discipline inherent in the best Gothic
art.
For the archæologist, the three western doors are of prime importance,
last of the Romanesque, first of the Gothic portals, call them whichever
you wish. To speak of a transition is to be metaphysical, employing
words for what has no existence in reality, since there was no break in
the sequence of sculpture from the first imaged portals of French
Romanesque art, at Beaulieu, Moissac, Autun and Vézelay to those at Le
Mans and Chartres, and to that masterpiece of Gothic sculpture, the
portal of Our Lady under the northwest tower of Paris Cathedral.
For the making of his three western doors at Chartres, Bishop Geoffrey
de Lèves must have obtained workers from his friend, Abbot Suger of St.
Denis. Archaic enough seem these kings and queens with their strange,
haunting faces, their slim, parallel feet, with their slender figures
more architectural than sculptural as they stand against the pillars to
which they conform, yet none the less they show freedom from the
stereotyped Byzantine traditions. The attitudes are less rigid than in
previous column statues, and personality is dawning in the faces. The
Madonna is own sister of the Eastern empress of St. Anne's door at
Paris, made about fifteen years later under Bishop Maurice de Sully.
The "celestial portal" of Chartres portrayed the life of Christ from his
birth to his ascension. At the northern doors of the transept was set
forth the Creation, to the coming of the Messiah, and Our Lady was
especially honored. And the southern portal commemorated from the coming
of the Lord to his second advent at the Last Judgment. It was the custom
to represent this last scene at the west façade, where it might be
illumined by the setting sun of the world's final day, the _dies iræ_
long dreaded. But since the west portal of Chartres had followed a
Romanesque tradition by carving in its place of honor a Christ in the
elliptical aureole of eternity, accompanied by the symbols of the four
evangelists, the Last Judgment was relegated to the transept's south
entrance.
Between the two lateral portals of Chartres there is little choice. In
them Gothic sculpture appears in full bloom. Each is a national
heritage. In the first plan of the transept the entrances lacked their
magnificent porches begun as afterthoughts (about 1240), but so well
adjusted to the doors that they appear to be of the same date. Among
the seven hundred statues at the northern entrance, some show that they
were portrait studies, but it is mere hypothesis to give names to them.
Not a statue was placed haphazard. A prearranged dogmatic scheme was
consistently followed, since to the mediæval mind art was before all
else a teacher. Our Lady stands at the central door, accompanied by ten
big figures representing Melchisedek, Abraham, Moses, Samuel, and David
on her right, and Isaac, Jeremiah, Simeon, John the Baptist, and St.
Peter on her left. They are the patriarchs who prefigured her Son and
the prophets who foretold Him, and the two who witnessed His coming, one
as foreteller, the other to be His symbol in the future. Each
personified a period of history: "Fathers of the people, pillars of
humanity, contemporaries of the first days of the world, they seem to
belong to another humanity than ours. They are to be counted among the
most extraordinary images of the Middle Ages." It is inevitable that M.
Mâle be quoted on all points of mediæval iconography.
Usually under each large statue was carved a pedestal scene having some
connection with it. Thus beneath the Queen of Sheba is a negro; beneath
Balaam, his ass. At the south porch, under St. Jerome, translator of the
Bible, is the Synagogue with bandaged eyes, and under St. Gregory the
Great is a crouching scribe, who cranes his neck to see the saint, for
the legend was that one day as the pope dictated to his secretary, a
long pause came, and the scribe peeped through the curtain that hung
between them and saw a dove perched on the saint's shoulder, symbolic of
the Holy Spirit directing him. St. George and St. Theodore garbed as
crusaders are the only youthful images at the south porch, and must have
been studied from some of St. Louis' knights.
At her entranceways Chartres set forth the calendar of months in small
medallioned allegories, and here and at Amiens, Paris, and Rheims was
given a complete system of moral philosophy through the contrast of
virtues with vices. On the north façade of Chartres is carved "Libertas"
under the image of a virtue. Bishop John of Salisbury would have
approved this: "For there is nothing more glorious than freedom," he
wrote, "save virtue, if indeed freedom may be rightly severed from
virtue, for all who know anything know that true freedom has no other
source."
In structural technique the fenestration of Chartres was a stride
forward, and both the cathedrals of Paris and Soissons learned
immediately from its clearstory arrangement--the first attempt to fill
with colored glass the entire space between the active wall shafts. "In
certain parts of the cathedral of Chartres," says M. Mâle, "is a
magnificent amplitude, a superabundance of power. Each of the nave's
windows is surmounted by an immense rose as wide as the bay, a
conception as proud as ever an architect realized. It is one of those
flashes of genius such as came to Michael Angelo. Those great orbs of
light, those wheels of fire that dart sparkling rays are one of the
beauties of the cathedral."[111]
Notre Dame has preserved over two hundred of the ancient, imaged
windows. The oldest and the best are three large lancets under the
western rose which, like the Royal Portal beneath them, are the work of
Suger's craftsmen who came here from St. Denis. One of these noted
windows relates the childhood of Christ, another His Passion and
Resurrection, and the third is a tree of Jesse, similar to one in St.
Denis.[112] The iron bars supporting the sheet of glass do not conform
to the outline of the medallions, hence it is somewhat more difficult to
decipher the scenes than in XIII-century work. None the less, these, the
oldest windows of the cathedral, are the peer of any colored glass ever
made, because of their inherent genius for decorative effect and their
conscientious workmanship. Many a pen has tried--in vain--to describe
the marvelous deep blue which blends together the other colors--the
streaky ruby, the emerald green, the sea-green white, the brownish
purple and pink, the yellow pot metal.
Even after the opening of the XIII century the St. Denis school exerted
influence, as is shown by the Charlemagne-Roland windows in Chartres'
ambulatory, whose outline was taken from a crusader window of Suger's
abbey. The majority of Chartres' windows belong to the early XIII
century, when the city was mistress of the vitrine art and supplied the
cathedrals of Bourges, Rouen, Sens, Laon, Auxerre, Tours, Le Mans,
Poitiers, and even Canterbury. In the nave's north aisle, the St.
Eustace window (the third) is held to be of faultless artistry. The
large lancets which light the aisles scintillate as with precious
jewels. Only some five or six have floral scrolls filling the spaces
between the medallions and the deep border that surrounds each window;
in France a geometric pattern for such interstices was more frequent.
At the base of each window is what is called its signature--a medallion
which usually represents the avocation of the donors, whether kings,
knights, priests, butchers, shoemakers, furriers, or water carriers.
Thus below the Charlemagne-Roland windows tradesmen display rich fur
mantles, and we know that the _pelletiers_ were the donors. Splendid
were the gifts of the old artisan guilds. The tanners presented an
apse-chapel window in honor of St. Thomas Becket, the vintners one that
related the story of Noe, planter of vines. An overpowering sensation it
must have been for those mediæval workmen to worship beneath the vaults
they themselves had helped to build, under the windows they had
contributed. Kings and knights were their fellow donors, but in the
cathedrals of France the gifts of the lowly were the most plentiful, a
Christian quality which endured till the XVI-century disunion.
To Chartres St. Louis gave a window in honor of St. Denis, patron of his
kingdom. The splendid red northern rose, "The Rose of France," is a
glorification of Our Lady. The donjons of Castile adorn it in honor of
the queen regent. Directly opposite is the big south rose presented by
Blanche's enemy, Pierre Mauclerc, who tried to kidnap Louis IX from his
mother, but who was to die fighting the infidels under his cousin the
king, as did Pierre de Courtenay, another donor of a window at Chartres.
Pierre de Dreux, it is said, began the porch before the southern
entrance to commemorate his marriage with the heiress of Brittany, a
granddaughter of Henry II, Plantagenet. Like every door of this church
of the resplendent entranceways, it is a mass of sculpture. Mauclerc was
grandson of the builder of St. Yved at Braine, and brother of Archbishop
Henri de Dreux, who donated windows to his cathedral at Rheims. Below
the Dreux rose at Chartres, four of the Prophets are borne on the
shoulders of the four Evangelists, for never could those generations,
enamored of symmetry, resist the opportunity to weave together the Old
and New Testaments.
A first cousin of St. Louis, Ferdinand III, the saint-conqueror of
Seville and Cordova, donated to Chartres a window commemorating the
patron of Spain. Three times was St. James honored here, so popular was
the Santiago Compostela pilgrimage. St. Martin and St. Nicolas of Bari
are also commemorated, the former some seven times, for it pleased the
voyagers to noted shrines to record their travels. By pilgrimages French
art and song spread in Italy and Spain.
Single monumental figures of prophet or saint were used in the
clearstory windows instead of small medallions, which would be
indistinct when viewed at such a height. Although most of the windows in
the cathedral belong to the XIII century, the XV century is represented
in the Vendôme chapel, begun in 1417 by Louis de Bourbon, an ancestor of
Henry IV. Much white was then employed for the better lighting of the
church, and the straight saddle-bars of Suger's time were again made use
of.
No attempt was made for perspective in the earlier glass, which was
treated like a translucent mosaic: relief was obtained by the skilled
juxtaposition of tones. The old workers had taught themselves many of
the secrets of optics. They knew that designs on a background of
blue--an expansive color--should be larger than those on red--an
absorbent. They knew that blue was a sedative, that red excited the
vision, and that yellow stopped contours, hence it was to be employed in
borders.
It is not of technique that one thinks when standing face to face with
the windows of Chartres. "Create in me a new heart, O God!" one murmurs
when gazing at them. When at noon the sun renders the colors dazzling
and bewildering, the cathedral seems to be chanting "_Sanctus! Sanctus!
Sanctus!_" with the seraphim proclaiming that the whole earth is full of
the glory of the Lord. Live coals from heaven's high altar are the
windows of Chartres, then, cleansing us of our iniquities; and seeing
with our eyes we see, and hearing with our ears we hear, and
understanding with our heart we comprehend the vision and are converted
and healed.
When evening blots out the rest of the church, and in luminous obscurity
the windows hang ethereally in space, they are psalms of intercession
and penitence. To gaze at such windows is to pray, think the Levites who
serve in this temple. At sunset it is no unusual sight to see a young
student of theology seated with his back to the choir, his forgotten
breviary open on his knee, gazing spellbound at the western lancets, in
his face a rapt reverence, indicating that his soul is in prayer. Each
evening the windows of Abbot Suger's craftsmen hymn the suave and lovely
_Te Lucis ante_ which ushers in night's purity. A mediæval cathedral was
designed for the Real Presence, and without that soul of all ritual it
stands bereft. Windows such as Chartres' proclaim the miracle of the
Tabernacle as symbolically as do those pillars of humanity sculptured by
the northern doors, Melchisedek and Peter, types of the Christ, each
holding a chalice, or as do the transept's outspread arms that recall
the sacrifice on Calvary, renewed daily in the sacrifice of the Mass.
That Chartres Cathedral has preserved its wealth of colored glass is
proof that it came gently through the ages; moreover, it was constructed
solidly, being a pioneer in the use of flying buttresses with double
arches united by an arcature. Its lower walls never were weakened by the
insertion of side chapels, those customary XIV-century additions. That
academic period built at Chartres merely the semi-detached chapel of St.
Piat, to which a stair ascends from the ambulatory. In the XVIII century
some well-intentioned but misguided canons of the cathedral lined their
sanctuary with neo-classic marbles and stucco, and cluttered the plain
wall spaces over the pier arches with needless ornament.
In the time of the Revolution, the entire demolition of the big church
was proposed, but happily the embarrassment of how to dispose of such a
mountain of stone prevented the vandalism. Lead was stripped from the
roof to make bullets and pennies. In the XIX century the vast timber
covering of the masonry vaults, called _la forêt_, was burned, but the
new steep-pitched roof covered with lead has taken on a greenish hue
that blends well with the ancient gray stones.
The easy hill of the town serves as pedestal for Chartres Cathedral.
Walk through the little city, whose air of cold propriety is very
typical of French provincial life, pass through the Porte Guillaume, and
from the boulevard beside the stream study the chief edifice of this
Beauce which is "the granary of France." Observe how salient are the
transept arms. Another Romanesque trait is the placing of two
towers--unfinished here--between choir and transept. What Huysmans
called the _maigreur distinguée_ of youth is a characteristic of this
church. In Rheims, the next begun of the big Gothic cathedrals, is no
trace of youth's structural plainness.
As you sit by the stream watching Notre Dame of Chartres, its Flamboyant
Gothic tower, perfect of its kind, seems to ride imperiously over the
nave; none the less it will be the weather-beaten southwest tower on
which the eye will linger longest. Though it was designed to accompany a
church of lesser proportions, though it labors under the disadvantage
of being overtopped by its sister beacon, nothing can diminish its
unparalleled unity. Virile, virginal, aërial, majestic, venerable in
youth and youthful in its venerable age, the _clocher vieux_ of Chartres
is one of the supreme things of the national art, "full of sweet dreams
and health and quiet breathing."
THE CATHEDRAL OF RHEIMS[113]
The nation that made a compact with God at the baptismal font of
Rheims will be converted and will return to her first vocation. Her
errors may not go unpunished, but the child of such virtues, of so
many sighs, of so many tears, will not perish. A day will come, and
we hope it may not long tarry, when France, like Saul on the road
to Damascus, will be enveloped in a supernal light whence will
proceed a voice, asking: "Why persecutest thou me? Rise up and wash
the stains that disfigure thee. Go, first-born of the Church,
predestined nation, race of election, go carry as in the past my
name before all the peoples and before all the kings of the
earth."--Address of POPE PIUS X, in 1912, to the visiting French
cardinals.
The other two of the four great cathedrals have no setting equal to the
hill pedestal of Chartres or to the river island of Notre Dame of Paris.
Seldom is a French cathedral surrounded by the pleasant precincts and
cloisters preserved by the English minsters, and Rheims Cathedral is no
exception in its abrupt rise from flat city streets. Its druidical
massiveness can easily dispense with a pedestal. Rheims imposes itself.
Even in the night its prodigy of magnificence endures. "The huge
bas-relief is always there in the darkness," wrote Rodin. "I cannot
distinguish it, but I feel it. Its beauty persists. It triumphs over
shadows and forces me to admire its powerful black harmony. It fills my
window, it almost hides the sky. How explain why, even when enveloped in
night, this cathedral loses nothing of its beauty? Does the power of
that beauty transcend the senses, that the eye sees what it sees not?...
_O Nuit! tu es plus grande ici que partout ailleurs!_"[114]
The "masters of the living stone" who built Rheims Cathedral are known
to us to-day. Their names were commemorated in a labyrinth that once
formed part of the nave's pavement, a drawing of which has been
unearthed by M. Louis Demaison. The obliterated figure in the middle of
the labyrinth no doubt represented the bishop who laid the foundation
stone. He was Albéric de Humbert, formerly archdeacon of Notre Dame at
Paris while the bishops Maurice and Eudes de Sully were raising that
cathedral. Builder and crusader, Albéric was a true product of his age.
He marched into Languedoc, in 1208, to chastise the Albigensian
heretics; he attended Innocent III's great Council of the Lateran in
1214, and when he ventured again to the East to take part in the crusade
of Jean de Brienne, he was captured by Saracens and ransomed by the
Spanish knights of Calatrava. He died on the return journey, 1218.
For a man of such energy, it could have been with slight regret that he
witnessed, in May, 1210, the destruction by fire of the decrepit church
he had inherited, one of whose builders had been Archbishop Hincmar in
the IX century. That early cathedral of Rheims had been redressed with a
façade by Archbishop Sampson, a friend of Abbot Suger's, and among the
prelates who attended the memorable dedication of St. Denis. His Primary
Gothic work, wiped out in the conflagration of 1210, was a loss indeed
for art.
Bishop Albéric de Humbert set vigorously to work, and within a year of
the fire had laid the corner stone of the present cathedral (1211). By
1241 services were held in the finished choir. An archbishop of the
Dreux line (1227-40) gave windows to the upper apse, and although he and
the townsfolk were at bitter odds, the building of the great church by
both prelate and people went on unabated. The imperious Henri de Dreux,
like Pierre Mauclerc, the donor of Chartres' south rose, was a grandson
of that brother of King Louis VII who built the beautiful church of St.
Yved at Braine on the highway between Rheims and Soissons. While the
cathedral of Rheims was building, another of its archbishops was a
Joinville, and in 1270 its sixtieth ruler died on St. Louis' last
crusade.
The plan of the cathedral was made by Jean d'Orbais, who had watched the
erection of the abbatial (1180) in his native town of Orbais,[115] a
church modeled on the choir of St. Remi which the celebrated schoolman
Pierre de Celle had built from 1170 to 1180. Thus Orbais is the
intermediary between the big abbey church of Rheims and Rheims
Cathedral.
For twenty years Jean d'Orbais directed the works at Rheims, so stated
the inscription in the labyrinth; and on his death Jean de Loup became
directing architect for sixteen years (1231-47), during which the
transept and its portals were constructed. The third architect, Gaucher
de Rheims (1250-59), began the west portals and worked on the nave. In
his precious notebook, Villard de Honnecourt sketched a bay of the nave
before 1250. The fourth master-of-works at Rheims, whose name was
inscribed in the labyrinth, was Bernard de Soissons. He worked here for
thirty-five years; the inscription states that he made five bays of the
nave--no doubt the westernmost ones--and that he opened the big O, the
rose window of twelve mammoth petals that flowers in the west façade,
and is one of the most beautiful designs of the age. By the end of the
XIII century, therefore, Rheims Cathedral was completed in its main
parts. Carried on with scarcely a pause, and always after the original
plan of Jean d'Orbais, the great church kept its unity throughout. The
first four architects who during a century had directed the works were
succeeded by Robert de Coucy, to whom for a time was erroneously
attributed the original plan, but who really continued to build the
elaborate west façade.
That frontispiece of Rheims Cathedral, with its cloud of witnesses, is a
culmination of Gothic art. Some have called it a work of the XIV
century, but the labyrinth, set in the pavement before Robert de Coucy's
day, distinctly attributed the placing of the big rose window to Bernard
de Soissons, who was in the city till 1298. Also a text of 1299 refers
to one of the west towers, and the armor worn in the David-Goliath group
of the gable is of the 1280 type. All critics acknowledge that the big
statues of the portals belong in main part to the golden period of
Gothic sculpture, and were done between 1250 and 1260.[116] The images
under the southwest tower had been prepared about thirty years earlier,
in the time of Jean d'Orbais. The façade of Rheims inspired many a later
Gothic frontispiece--Meaux, Tours, Rouen, Troyes, and Abbeville.
The cathedral went on perfecting itself in detail, and was nearing a
complete finish when, four months after the raising of the siege of
Orléans, Jeanne d'Arc brought her king to be crowned in the city where
two hundred years earlier St. Louis had been anointed. Three gentlemen
of Anjou wrote a letter to the queen of Charles VII, Marie of Anjou, and
to her mother, Jolande of Aragon, to describe the ceremonies at Rheims
on that fifth day of August, 1429. As the crown was set on the king's
head trumpets rang out, till it seemed that the vaults would crack, and
every man cried "_Noël!_" and drew his sword. A fair sight it was to see
the gallant bearing of Jeanne the Maid as she stood by the king, holding
the banner she cherished more than the sword.
At her trial in Rouen even her standard was used against her. "Why,"
asked her judges, "was your banner carried into the church of Rheims to
the consecration rather than those of the other captains?" And Jeanne
made one of her ringing answers: "It had been in the fray, surely there
was good reason it should be at the victory"--_à la peine ... à
l'honneur_--her phrase was to become a proverb of France.[117] Jeanne
liked fair play. In her army she would tolerate no pillage, nor eat of
food which she thought had been so obtained. But then Jeanne had no
_Kultur_. She was merely an unlettered peasant girl of the Middle Ages,
who called it plain thieving to carry off household goods in an invaded
country. For her good friends of Rheims _la bonne Lorraine_ kept a warm
place in her memory, as her letter to them showed: "_Mes chiers et bons
amis les bons et loyaulx Franxois de la cité de Rains, Jehanne la
Pucelle vous faict à savoir de ses nouvelles ... je vous promect et
certiffy que je ne vous abandonneray poinct_."
Not many years after that national hour of rejoicing the cathedral of
Rheims suffered a disaster which put a stop to further construction;
henceforth only restorations went on. In 1481 some careless plumbers set
on fire the timber overroof and the molten lead ran like a river into
the streets. Many a citizen perished in the effort to check the flames.
The stone roof of the cathedral stood firm, justifying those generations
whose life struggle had been the problem how to cover their churches
enduringly. Though all France contributed, the huge edifice was never to
be crowned by the six spires of Jean d'Orbais' plan; yet even as it is,
Rheims presents the ideal exterior of a Gothic cathedral.
The main façade was made most appropriately a thing of pomp and
circumstance, regal and gorgeous for the royal coronations. No need to
hang such walls with tapestries for the feast. The three deep portals
were united as one by means of an unbroken line of thirty or more large
images, deriving from similar arrays at Chartres and Amiens, but
possessing a pronounced indigenous genius. In the groups of the
Annunciation and the Presentation the Blessed Virgin is a figure of
spotless purity, meek and infinitely touching in her little mantle that
falls in straight simplicity from her slender shoulders. "By humility
the holy Virgin merited to become the mother of God," was the answer
given by St. Isabelle of France, the only sister of St. Louis, when
asked why she named her convent at Longchamp, L'Humilité-Notre-Dame. A
very different Virgin is that in the Visitation group. She and St.
Elizabeth are draped voluminously like stately Roman matrons. Those two
statues (imitated by Bamburg Cathedral in 1280) must have been inspired
by some work of antiquity, of which Rheims possessed a number. Classic
influences in the imagery of northern France during the Middle Ages was
transitory, however. First and last mediæval sculpture was a
building-stone sculpture.
In the eyes and on the lips of a few of the entranceway statues hovered
a half-smile, a fleeting, rare expression which, long centuries before,
the Greek sculptors preceding Phidias had achieved. Again, at the
Renaissance, Da Vinci was obsessed by the same expression, "born of a
miracle, meant to gladden men's souls forever." To-day, the angel image
La Sourire stands headless at the portal under the north tower.
Not only was the west frontispiece of Rheims unique, but its transept
façades would have distinguished any cathedral. One of the three doors
of the north façade is composed of fragments from a monument which had
been in the Romanesque metropolitan burned in 1210. The middle door
commemorates local saints, for cathedrals were historians and linked the
generations with that continuance of tradition which makes the strength
of a race. To honor their spiritual forefathers was held to be
patriotism by those believing generations. At both west and north
façades was an image of St. Nicaise, the eleventh bishop of Rheims, who
had been martyred as he knelt by his cathedral door. Tradition relates
that he was reciting the Psalmist's words, "My soul is bowed to earth,"
when the Vandals struck off his head, and that the severed head finished
the verse: "Verify me, O Lord, according to thy word."[118]
The fifteenth bishop (459-533), St. Remigius, apostle of the Franks, is
honored by a statue. In the cathedral of his day he baptized Clovis, and
thus made France the first orthodox Christian kingdom of the West, since
Gaul's other conquerors had fallen into the Arian heresy. Many an
archbishop of Rheims played a foremost part in the life of the nation.
The military prowess of Turpin, the twenty-seventh prelate here, is
related in the _Chanson de Roland_.[119] The forty-first archbishop was
the learned Gerbert, who died Pope Sylvester II (1003). He made the
cathedral school famous, among his pupils being the king's son and
Bishop Fulbert of Chartres.
One of the students in Rheims in that age was St. Bruno of Cologne,
founder of the Carthusian Order. For long years he directed the
cathedral school, guiding the people during the misrule of a scandalous
archbishop. A pupil of his at Rheims became Urban II, who instigated the
First Crusade. And a century later one of his ablest and holiest sons,
St. Hugh of Avalon, built the cathedral choir of Lincoln, as well as its
small transept, and part of the big transept--the oldest examples of
Early-English Gothic. In 1180, the archbishop of Rheims, Guillaume de
Champagne, crowned as king his nephew, Philippe-Auguste. Only those
shepherds of the flock who attained to canonized sainthood were honored
by statues at the church entrances.
The Beau Dieu of Rheims of most benign majesty is the central image of
the transept's northern façade. Surmounting it is a Last Judgment that
speaks well for the honesty of the clerics whose pupils were the
sculptors. Here at the king's own basilica, whither he came for the most
brilliant hour of his life, was sculptured a crowned monarch, as the
front figure, marching to hell, and behind him walked a bishop. No
pharisees were the men of the XIII century. Sin was sin, and all men
were equal before sin's punishment.
There are statues on the towers of that same north frontispiece to which
names have been given. One has been called Philippe-Auguste, and it
certainly was a portrait study, whether or not it represented the most
able monarch of the feudal ages, the victor of Bouvines, who tripled the
area of France and under whom was begun almost every Gothic cathedral in
the land. The name of his grandson, St. Louis, has been given to another
image. In a niche of the façade stands a charming Eve holding a very
mediæval serpent.
One can merely indicate, in passing, the astounding wealth of
Rheims--five thousand images whose verve and fecundity are marvelous.
"If your heart is right, all creatures will be for you a book of holy
doctrine," so they dared to carve clown, dog, cat, or sheep on pinnacle,
or in hidden nook, and their flora was as generous as their fauna. A
local botanist has found that every leaf growing to-day by the roadsides
was reproduced in the cathedral. It was only natural that in Champagne
the vine leaf should be popular; on one of the capitals of the nave a
pleasant vintage scene is represented.
If the gorgeous west approaches of the Cathedral-Royal were suited for
earthly pageantry, its eastern end paid homage, in holier simplicity, to
the Spiritual King. Around the exterior wall of the apse was set a guard
of angels, each carrying an emblem of the Passion, or of its symbol, the
Mass--chalice, censer, missal, spear--and the procession met at the
Christ image placed in the center of the curving wall. The ordinance
was derived from Byzantine art. Many an artist has said of the apse
sculpture of Rheims that the Greeks can show no lovelier work. A few
years later, more angelic thrones, dominations, and powers were set
around this, the Cathedral of the Angels. A seraphic sentry adorned each
buttress and at the same time increased its counterbutting force, and
were agents toward the swifter grounding of the load.
And now, having touched superficially on the exterior of this
inexhaustible church, let us step inside its imaged doors. On the inner
wall of the three western portals is an elaborate decoration found
nowhere else. Tier upon tier of statues shrined in foliage-covered
niches rise to the level of the triforium. Never has a wall been more
glorified both within and without. Lavish leaf ornamentation forms the
capitals of the piers. Each pier consists of a circular shaft cantoned
by four lesser columns; the capitals of the latter are divided into two
stories because their diameter is less--a skillful contrivance that
solves the difficulty of grouping pillars of different sizes.
[Illustration: _The Angel Apse of Rheims (c. 1220)_]
The nave of Rheims was never weakened by the addition of side chapels,
which always diminishes the integrity of an edifice. In fact, the lower
walls[120] as well as the piers were made oversolid for what they bear,
since it had not yet been learned how to apply exactly the right
counterforce to the pressure of the vaulting. Amiens was to be the first
to achieve that perfect equilibrium.
The interior proportions of Rheims are harmonious; the side aisles are
relatively right with the central vessel, and the nave leads up well to
the sanctuary, which, inside and out, is beyond criticism. As a whole,
however, the interior of this cathedral has not the slender upwardness
of Amiens nor the ascetic holiness of Chartres. It stands more than it
soars. It praises the deity in another fashion than does the mystic
cathedral. The keynote here is a right-minded human splendor. Robust and
majestic, this is the church for state pageants, the regal temple for
national festivals.
Alas! poor battle-worn Rheims! Alas for the _bons et loyaulx Franxois de
la cité de Rains!_ Has Jehanne la Purcelle forgotten her promise never
to abandon you?
Mourant en plein martyre avec vivacité ...
Masquant sous sa visière une efficacité ...
Jetant toute une armée aux pieds de la prière....
So wrote the poet who fell on the field of honor, in September, 1914, of
St. Jeanne, whose martyrdom was a victory; so he might have written of
Rheims Cathedral. Again a sublime holocaust was needed for the saving of
the soul of France.
RHEIMS SINCE 1914
How doth the city sit solitary that was full of people. How is she
become a widow, she that was great among the nations.--JERIMIAH:
_Lamentations_.
Designer infinite!
Ah! must Thou char the wood e'er Thou canst limn with it?
--FRANCIS THOMPSON, _The Hound of Heaven_.
In the first days of September, 1914, after the battle of the Marne, the
Germans evacuated Rheims, which they had occupied for little over a
week. Before they quitted the city, some cans of inflammable liquids,
with bundles of straw, were set on the roof of the cathedral, and there
they were found and made note of officially by Frenchmen who ascended
the towers to hang out the Red Cross flag. The destruction of Rheims
Cathedral was planned deliberately and in cold blood it was carried out.
No military excuse for the crime is possible, since General Joffre made
a formal statement that at no time were the church towers used as posts
of observation.
From the heights a few miles away the enemy opened fire on the city. It
is said that Baron von Plattenburg ordered the bombardment. General von
Haeringen is also cited as an executioner of Rheims Cathedral. On
September 17th and 18th the church was riddled with projectiles. Between
dawn and sunset, on September 19th, over five hundred of them struck the
mammoth church. About four o'clock on that fateful day, Saturday,
September 19, 1914, the timber roof caught fire from an inflammable
bomb. In less than an hour flames were devouring the wooden scaffolding
which, by ill luck, because of repairs in progress, framed part of the
edifice. Fire lapped and calcined the outer walls, obliterating the
kings and the angels and the saints, wiping out all the loving
handicraft of the old stonecutters. Once again molten lead ran in the
streets of Rheims. Fire lapped the sculptured screen inside the western
doors, and the lovely lavish chiseling has become a blurred, amorphous
mass. Projectiles tore through the gaping windows and crashed against
the opposite walls. Some of the burning timber from the overroof fell
through the apertures of the vault's keystones and ignited the straw
spread on the pavement for the wounded German soldiers who had been left
behind when the invaders evacuated the city.
Let an eyewitness relate the burning of Rheims Cathedral: "It stood
enveloped in flames, one towering flame itself. Before the outrage
something surged unchained at the root of our being. Our cathedral! Our
hearts broke as we watched its desecration. An aged woman of the city
intoned solemnly: 'This will bode them no good!' ('_Ca ne leur portera
pas bonheur!_') We stood in groups watching with fierce anger the
conflagration. We walked, we spoke, but like automatons, for our souls
were groaning with anguish. Our cathedral! _Première page de France!
Geste des aïeux! Legs des siècles devenant aujourd'hui, en ce poignant
martyre, l'hostie nationale!_" Suddenly word came that the German
wounded inside the church must be saved. The archpriest of the
cathedral, Canon Landrieux (to-day a bishop), called for aid from the
onlookers. He was answered by angry murmurs: "What! must we then risk
our lives to save these bombarders of hospitals, these incendiaries of
cathedrals?" Then a young girl's voice rose, trembling with tears: "_On
est de France, nous autres!_" And instantly men stepped forward to aid
the heroic priest save their enemies from the flaming furnace.
Poor martyred Rheims! Its once illuminated western front is battered and
corroded past restoral, and is falling flake by flake. With a touch of
the finger the stone crumbles into dust. The towers are mutilated. One
after another the rapt and fearless angels on the buttresses have been
toppled down. As the incessant rain of fire and iron came from the
northeast, the transept's northern entranceway is wrecked--its historic
statues mere unsightly stumps. Never again will the hardy lesson of the
Last Judgment be preached at the ruined portal.
No more will the triple-winged seraphim chant hosannas in the great
western rose. No coming generations of travelers will carry away an
undying memory of the sunset hour in the great church, when the western
inclosure became a resplendent sheet of flame, and those who paced up
and down the basilica gazed with awe at that majestic spectacle of Art
and Faith. The XIII-century windows of the clearstory are pulverized;
scarcely a fragment is left of the forty lancets of the nave where, in
superimposed rows, the kings of France stood, with the archbishops who
had crowned them, big-eyed barbaric images, so intense of hue that one
remembers them as blood-red rubies. The loss of the windows of Rheims
has been expressed poignantly by Pierre Loti, who spent a Sunday in
October, 1915, in the cathedral. He found the silence of death within
its ravaged walls that for centuries had echoed the music of the
liturgy. Only a cold wind now and then made fitful psalmody. When it
blew strongly he could hear a patter as of delicate light pearls. It was
the falling to oblivion of what still remained of the ancient windows.
The hammer of Odin and of Thor has gone on beating down relentlessly the
national church, and a Berlin poet has sung, exultantly: "The bells
sound no more in the two-towered Dom. We have closed with lead, O
Rheims, thy house of idolatry." Rheims was hated of old. In its
cathedral of 1119 Calixtus II, of the blood of the Capetians, had
excommunicated the would-be autocrat of Europe, the German emperor, who
had proved himself an unnatural son, a treacherous neighbor, and one who
laid sacrilegious hands on holy things. As the pope pronounced the
sentence the four hundred prelates gathered in the cathedral dashed down
their candles. Yes, Rheims was hated.
Every check to the invader's troops in the trenches was immediately
revenged on the defenseless church. _Rheims Cathedral bombarded_ became
a tragically recurrent line in the war's official bulletin. On October
14, 1914, a hole, meters wide, was torn in the most beautiful of Gothic
apses. On February 21 and 22, 1915, the bombardment surpassed in
savagery the horrors of the fateful September 19th. On March 29, 1915, a
German airship dropped inflammable bombs on the choir, and before many
months of this rain of iron and fire the masonry roof began to give way.
During the half year preceding the armistice a veritable avalanche of
shells fell on the stricken city, where remained only a few hundred of
its hundred and thirty thousand inhabitants. From June 15 to June 28,
1918, over sixteen thousand shells fell on Rheims, and, strange to tell,
amid it all Dubois' statue of Jeanne d'Arc mounted on her charger on the
cathedral parvis stood unscathed.[121] On July 5th eight shells crashed
into the western entrances; and so on runs the sinister record.
"We wait for a chastisement equal to the crime," is the word of Enlart,
the archæologist. And the world's heart echoes the verdict. When on that
fatal September day of 1914, the staggering almost unbelievable report
first spread over France, "Rheims Cathedral is in flames"--many a strong
man wept on the streets of French cities, and throughout the tragic
night of the conflagration the French soldiers, camped over the plains
for miles, watched in anguish the destruction of their patrimony, of
their ancestress cathedral, _l'holocauste de la patrie_. In Jeanne's
century it had taken a long and cruel war and the sacrifice of her who
was the incarnation of France to remake the stricken soul of the nation,
and again an overwhelming martyrdom was needed to set right the grievous
_pitié_ there was in the country of France.
The city of Rheims is to-day a shapeless mass, resembling a place
wrecked by ancient barbarism. The archiepiscopal palace, whose
two-storied chapel was built by the same hands that laid the choir
stones of Notre Dame, is entirely demolished. The cathedral, though
ravaged irreparably, still towers above the ruined city. Had Amiens been
subjected to the same bombardment as Rheims, it would have collapsed
long ago. It is the surplus strength of Rheims' foundations, somewhat
criticized by architects, that has saved the church from utter
destruction. Notre Dame of Rheims was built for eternity.
The mystic wonder of the severed head of St. Nicaise has been repeated.
Immolated Rheims has stirred anew the latent crusading blood. "Honor"
and "sacrifice" and all the brave words of the days of chivalry are
again on the lips of Frenchmen, and many a scoffer has been beaten to
his knees by the same spirit which actuated the generations who built
the cathedrals and, building them, welded a nation's unity. Those who
committed the sacrilege of Rheims forgot that when mankind is robbed of
a heritage it sets the criminal in the pillory of history. To-day Rheims
Cathedral lies wounded on the field of honor; Rheims Cathedral is
forever the symbol of a people's resurrection. _À la peine!... À
l'honneur!_
AMIENS CATHEDRAL[122]
There have been, in humanity's story, only two great schools of
art--that of Greece, and that of the Gothic era. For only then was
expressed the ideas and the religious spirit of the peoples that
gave birth to them. The Greeks rendered the Pagan spirit, the Pagan
emotion; they left us the Parthenon. The Gothic School rendered the
Christian idea, the Christian spirit. It has left us Notre Dame of
Amiens.--ÉMILE LAMBIN.[123]
The terrors and the thunder of the World War menaced Amiens through the
long four years, but the grand doctrinal temple, almost superhuman in
its majesty, was spared the fate of Rheims, Soissons, and the noble
church of St. Martin at Ipres, begun in the same twelvemonth as itself.
The statues at the portals of Amiens have seen pass the great personages
of the mediæval centuries. The kings of this world felt honored to visit
the church of Our Lady and St. Firman. Its reconciliation Mass put the
seal on a treaty of goodwill between France and England, and united the
English ruler with his rebellious people; St. Louis, the peace maker,
prayed in its sanctuary. On its very enemies it imposed veneration. When
Charles le Téméraire attacked the city in 1471 he ordered his troops to
respect the cathedral.
While the upper vaulting of Chartres was being finished and the choir of
Rheims was building, there was laid the first stone of Notre Dame of
Amiens in 1220. Amiens is the Gothic cathedral par excellence,
recognized from the first as a masterpiece--the Parthenon of Gothic--and
immediately taken as a model. The cathedrals of Tours and of Troyes,
already begun, were now continued like the big church of Picardy. The
Sainte-Chapelle in Paris was modeled on the Lady chapel of Amiens. The
cathedrals of Clermont, Narbonne, Rodez, and Limoges are "daughters of
Amiens." Its influence extended to the church of St. Sauveur at Bruges,
to the cathedral of Prague, and to the choir of Cologne, the latter
being almost a replica.[124]
Amiens carried the Gothic principle of equilibrium farther than Rheims.
The aisles were made higher, the bays wider, the points of ground
support fewer, and the piers less heavy. No energy was wasted. Each part
was made just strong enough. To go beyond this culminating point of
constructive boldness was inevitably to decline.
No one has better summed up the amplitude of this inspired church than
M. Georges Durand, its latest historian, whose monograph is a model: "A
vast space inundated with air and light has here been covered by stone
vaults, as light and solid as possible; those vaults have been raised to
a height never before attained; no longer any walls; the solidity of the
edifice is assured by a play of pushes and resistances; flying
buttresses exactly meeting the necessary spot to counterbut the great
vault; the system of equilibrium perfectly known, and applied with a
rigor and audacity unbelievable; the least possible sharpness given to
transverse arches; the collaterals raised to a great height--all
contribute to give this interior its expression of immensity."
Amiens is a "triumphal chant." The "vast space inclosed" produces an
impression that is confounding. When first you step inside the western
doors of Amiens, you pause in awe. The emotion felt has the efficacy of
a prayer.
The edifice is prodigious and appears so; only St. Sophia, Cologne
Cathedral, and St. Peter's at Rome cover larger areas. Now in St.
Peter's each detail was enlarged in proportion to the giant scale
chosen; thus, a cherub would have a thigh the size of an elephant's. The
result is that the great church appears less than its real size. The
method of the mediæval architect was precisely opposite. He saw no
advantage in making his edifice appear smaller than it really was. He
observed that no matter how big a tree might grow, its leaves were no
larger than those on smaller trees. The mediæval architect took for his
scale of measurement the height of man. His doorways were made for man
to walk under. In the bases of his piers, in the triforium arches, in
the normal size of his sculpted flora and fauna, he recalled to the eye
the scale of a man, his chosen _échelle_: "And he measured the wall
thereof ... the measure of a man, which is of an angel."[125] No matter
how large a Gothic church might be, the statues decorating it did not
increase in scale. To those who prefer a cathedral of the north there
will always seem to be a touch of the artificial, of the _tour de force_
in St. Peter's.
The name of the master mind who designed the cathedral of Picardy was
Robert de Lusarches, recorded in a labyrinth formerly in the nave's
pavement, as were his two successors, Thomas de Cormont and his son
Renaud. The occasion for a new structure was the fire of 1218 which
partly destroyed the Romanesque cathedral. As its old choir was
preserved sufficiently to serve for a while longer, the new cathedral
was begun by the nave, not the usual procedure. The nave rose in one
supreme effort; from start to finish its plan never deviated. It has
been taken as the typical masterpiece. "The façade of Paris, the tower
of Chartres, the sculpture of Rheims, the nave of Amiens" is a popular
summing up.
[Illustration: _The Transept of Amiens Cathedral (1220-1280)_]
By 1236 the nave of Amiens was finished, whereupon the Romanesque choir
was replaced by a Gothic one whose plan had been drawn by Robert de
Lusarches at the same time with that of the nave. His feeling for
proportion was unfaltering; the relation between every part of his
church is perfect. The interior elevation in three vertical stories was
to become classic--a pier arcade--which is one-third of the entire
height, and of the remaining upper wall a clearstory which occupies
two-thirds and a triforium one-third. The church is three times as wide
as the side aisle is high, and height and span correlate with length.
Subtlety of calculation is seen everywhere. The perspective view became
a kind of classic type. As you gaze down the church toward the curving
east wall which closes the vista, you see beneath the pier arcades of
the _sanctum sanctorum_ the windows of the apse chapels behind; they
appear to fill the apertures symmetrically, whereas at Beauvais, where
the side aisle is exceedingly high, the windows of the chapels rise to
merely half the height of the pier arches. The cathedrals of Tours and
Clermont followed the more satisfactory arrangement of Amiens.
In the last days of Gothic architecture the dislike of the horizontal
line was to be carried to such an extent that even the capitals, which
the custom of all nations had approved for three thousand years, were
eliminated. At Amiens a sane balance was kept. Under its triforium runs
a deeply carved band of foliage broken only at the triumphal arches of
the transept-crossing. Only there does the ascending line rise
unobstructed from pavement to vault. And yet no church ever soared more
confidently. The very hall-mark of genius is Amiens' strong horizontal
leaf garland--just the needed touch to give variety to regularity as
grandiose as this. In the nave the frieze was cut before the posing of
the stones, but in the choir the sculpture was done _in situ_.
The fenestration of this cathedral of St. Louis' reign shows the
national art in its prime. The glazed triforium is a kind of pedestal
for the clearstory, with which it is bound in a single composition by
means of continuous mullions. The original glass was of the
Sainte-Chapelle type, made by the Paris school which led in the second
half of the XIII century, and were it still in existence the interior of
Amiens would be a gorgeous sight. Only vestiges have survived; in some
of the choir chapels are patchwork panels of ancient fragments. No one
denies that the light enters this cathedral too profusely for the mystic
seclusion beloved of the soul.
The prelate who laid the foundation stone of Amiens in 1220 was Evrard
de Fouilloy, cousin of that archbishop of the great house of Joinville
who was a builder at Rheims. Intimate with Innocent III, connoisseur in
notable men, the bishop of Amiens was one of the many building prelates
who attended the Lateran Council whose séances must often have appeared
like an _Amis des Cathédrales_ reunion. Bishop Evrard's splendid bronze
tomb, cast at one flow, escaped the smelting pot of the Revolution, and
with that of his successor, Geoffrey d'Eu, who chanted the first Mass in
his cathedral in 1236, the year of his death, is now placed under the
pier arcades of the nave. "Here lies Evrard," runs the inscription, "a
man compassionate to the afflicted, the widows' protector, the orphans'
guardian, who fed the people, who laid the foundations of this
structure, to whose care the city was given." The hand of the bishop is
raised in a grave gesture of power. The image of Geoffrey d'Eu is less
personal. "Bright-shining man of Eu," runs his epitaph, "by whom the
throne of Amiens rose into immensity." The saintly bishop used to
encourage even the beggars to give their penny toward raising the new
house of God.
By 1245 bells were placed in the western towers; then came a lull in the
work, from 1247 to 1257, for the bishop had accompanied St. Louis to the
holy wars. Louis IX was in Amiens on several occasions and his
Sainte-Chapelle at Paris proved his admiration for the classic church.
As the XIII century closed, a chapel was added to Amiens by her bishop,
the learned Guillaume de Mâcon, a personal friend of St. Louis, and
present at his death in Tunis, 1270. The son and successor of Louis IX
sent Guillaume to Rome to solicit his father's canonization. During the
XIV century other side chapels were added, and in the one erected by
Bishop La Grange, from 1373 to 1375, appeared for the first time in
France some of the characteristics of Flamboyant Gothic--the flame
tracery and ramified vaulting. As early as 1270, however, Amiens had
made a sporadic use of supplementary ribs, in the square over the
transept-crossing, employing them there, no doubt, in order to break up
the immense expanses of infilling.
Though the cathedral of Amiens has lost its stained glass, it has
retained that other glory of decorative art--its sculpture. The three
western entrance arches, in nine orders, are sovereign compositions.
Probably as a scheme of dogmatic theology Amiens is even more complete
than Chartres or Rheims. The main façade, with its strong buttress lines
unbroken from ground to tower, would be the grandest of all the Gothic
frontispieces had it been completed as first planned. But only in its
lower stories is it of the XIII century, and the towers scarcely rise
above the enormous parallelogram.
At the trumeau of the central door stands _le Beau Dieu_ of Amiens, of
stronger personality than that of Rheims, a Christ of the West more than
the East. "He is the master, wise, steadfast, fraternal, with the
patience and the human sympathy that comprehend man's eternal
weaknesses."[126] He treads on monsters that symbolize Satan and Sin:
"Thou shalt walk upon the asp and the basilisk; the lion and the dragon
shalt thou trample under foot."[127] About him stand the best loved of
all the saints, the apostles--plain, primitive men in whose upturned
foreheads shines the serenity of certitude. We are His witnesses, they
seem to be saying, and our testimony we sealed _usque ad sanguinem_:
"That which we have seen and have heard we declare unto you...." "We
were eyewitnesses of His greatness...." "This Voice we heard brought
from heaven...." "These things we write to you that you may rejoice and
your joy be full." The prophets and patriarchs at Amiens' portals lack
the assurance of joy which shines in the faces of the humble men chosen
for the hierarchy of the New Law; the earlier ones had not themselves
seen and heard and touched.
Never was the meaning of the Messiah's coming set forth more sublimely
than in this archetype cathedral. The soul of the Middle Ages had
brooded over the Gospels till it had pierced to their spiritual sense.
"The house of the Lord built upon the foundation of the apostles and
prophets, Jesus Christ himself being the chief corner stone in whom all
the building being framed together, growing up into an holy temple in
the Lord."[128]
When the apostles were placed at the cathedral doors, the tradition was
to have St. Peter stand to the right of his Master, and St. Paul to the
left; the latter was substituted for Matthias, elected to Judas' place.
St. Peter, tonsured, carried the key and a cross; his beard was short
and curly. St. Paul bore a sword, since his Roman citizenship had saved
him from death by crucifixion; he was represented with a bald forehead
and a long beard. St. Andrew carried the peculiar-shaped cross on which
he died; St. Bartholomew a knife, emblem of his martyrdom.
At the western doors of Amiens is an Annunciation group in which the
Virgin is the prototype of the gentle _Ancilla Domini_ at Rheims. The
St. Elizabeth of the Visitation group is a noble aged woman; the St.
Simeon of the Presentation has been called the _Nunc dimittis_ in
person. Local saints are in a position of honor at the right-hand door,
the chief here being St. Firman, the first bishop of Amiens, and the
pioneer who preached the Word in Picardy, where he was martyred in 289.
On his tomb rose the first cathedral of the city. His statue at the
trumeau is a masterpiece of its period.
In his _Bible of Amiens_,[129] Ruskin gives enlightening
interpretations of the quatrefoils adorning the wall under the big
images at the western entrance. Little genre studies of agricultural
life typify the seasons, and the vices and virtues are rendered with
movement and subtlety. There is a connection between certain of the
small bas-reliefs and the large statues standing above them.
About 1288 they carved the images at the transept's southern portal.
Fifty years had elapsed since the making of the western entrance, and
already the early reverential awe had passed away. Our Lady is now shown
as a radiant young matron whose smile is somewhat mannered, but to call
the charming _vierge dorée_ "the soubrette of Picardy," as did Ruskin,
is an absurd exaggeration. The apostles are no longer of the ideal type.
They are mediæval schoolmen, debating some point of dialectics.
Each century was to add to the sculpture of Amiens. André Beauneveu, an
illustrious French-Flemish master, made buttress statues of Charles V
and his sons, realistic portrait work. The king was one of the four
Valois brothers who were, with the Avignon popes, the chief art patrons
of the XIV century. As Amiens Cathedral suffered comparatively little
during the two cataclysms which emptied the churches of France, it is
still a museum of treasures. When, in 1562, the Huguenots, sword in
hand, rushed into the church to shatter the altars, the town's tocsin
sounded and the citizens assembled in such numbers that they saved their
church. Again, during the Revolution, when brutal soldiery began to
mutilate the choir screen's groups, the women of Amiens who lived about
the cathedral lustily beat the vandals with chairs. Of course the
Revolution set up here the usual altar with its living Goddess of
Reason, Marat's bust was honored, and over the portal was inscribed the
grandiloquent boast: "Fanaticism is destroyed: Truth triumphs."
The tombs, bas-reliefs, and paintings were left intact, as well as the
famous carved stalls finished in 1522. In the choir-screen sculpture of
XVI-century Gothic the Renaissance had only just begun to appear. St.
Firman's mission was related quaintly--no prudery shown in the scene of
the baptism of Amiens' first Christians. The life of St. John the
Baptist was set forth because crusaders had brought his relics to this
church from Constantinople. The tourist guide enjoys leading his clients
behind Amiens' sanctuary to show them a plump little cupid weeping a
marble tear over the tomb of some good canon who founded a local
orphanage. M. Durand remarks that for one who appreciates the
magnificent bronze tombs of the bishop-builders, or the realistic
late-Gothic groups of the choir screen, there are ten who are moved by
that banal little _ange pleurant_.
In the transept are some marble slabs inscribed with the names of the
presidents of a religious-literary association called Puy-Notre-Dame.
Such Puys (from podium, or platform) were poetic contests that sprang up
in the XIV century, with the disappearance of the wandering minstrels,
and they led in turn to a real literary movement.[130] At Amiens it was
the custom each year for a new picture in honor of Notre Dame to be
presented to her church, and at the festival a poem was read in her
praise. Eventually statues were substituted for pictures, which explains
the wealth of XVII-century sculpture in the side chapels and aisles of
Amiens Cathedral. A number of the ancient paintings have been placed in
the Museum of the city, whose walls have been embellished by Puvis de
Chavannes' _Ave Picardia nutrix_.