Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres
By Henry Adams
With an introduction by Ralph Adams Cram
Editor's Note
From the moment when, through the courtesy of my friend Barrett
Wendell, I came first to know Mr. Henry Adams's book, Mont-Saint-
Michel and Chartres, I was profoundly convinced that this privately
printed, jealously guarded volume should be withdrawn from its
hiding-place amongst the bibliographical treasures of collectors and
amateurs and given that wide publicity demanded alike by its
intrinsic nature and the cause it could so admirably serve.
To say that the book was a revelation is inadequately to express a
fact; at once all the theology, philosophy, and mysticism, the
politics, sociology, and economics, the romance, literature, and art
of that greatest epoch of Christian civilization became fused in the
alembic of an unique insight and precipitated by the dynamic force
of a personal and distinguished style. A judgment that might well
have been biased by personal inclination received the endorsement of
many in two continents, more competent to pass judgment, better able
to speak with authority; and so fortified, I had the honour of
saying to Mr. Adams, in the autumn of 1912, that the American
Institute of Architects asked the distinguished privilege of
arranging for the publication of an edition for general sale, under
its own imprimatur. The result is the volume now made available for
public circulation.
In justice to Mr. Adams, it should be said that such publication is,
in his opinion, unnecessary and uncalled-for, a conclusion in which
neither the American Institute of Architects, the publishers, nor
the Editor concurs. Furthermore, the form in which the book is
presented is no affair of the author, who, in giving reluctant
consent to publication, expressly stipulated that he should have no
part or parcel in carrying out so mad a venture of faith,--as he
estimated the project of giving his book to the public.
In this, and for once, his judgment is at fault. Mont-Saint-Michel
and Chartres is one of the most distinguished contributions to
literature and one of the most valuable adjuncts to the study of
mediaevalism America thus far has produced. The rediscovery of this
great epoch of Christian civilization has had issue in many and
valuable works on its religion, its philosophy, its economics, its
politics, and its art, but in nearly every instance, whichever field
has been traversed has been considered almost as an isolated
phenomenon, with insufficient reference to the other aspects of an
era that was singularly united and at one with itself. Hugh of Saint
Victor and Saint Thomas Aquinas are fully comprehensible only in
their relationship to Saint Anselm, Saint Bernard, and the
development of Catholic dogma and life; feudalism, the crusades, the
guilds and communes weave themselves into this same religious
development and into the vicissitudes of crescent nationalities;
Dante, the cathedral builders, the painters, sculptors, and music
masters, all are closely knit into the warp and woof of philosophy,
statecraft, economics, and religious devotion;--indeed, it may be
said that the Middle Ages, more than any other recorded epoch of
history, must be considered en bloc, as a period of consistent unity
as highly emphasized as was its dynamic force.
It is unnecessary to say that Mr. Adams deals with the art of the
Middle Ages after this fashion: he is not of those who would
determine every element in art from its material antecedents. He
realizes very fully that its essential element, the thing that
differentiates it from the art that preceded and that which
followed, is its spiritual impulse; the manifestation may have been,
and probably was, more or less accidental, but that which makes
Chartres Cathedral and its glass, the sculptures of Rheims, the Dies
Irae, Aucassin and Nicolette, the Song of Roland, the Arthurian
Legends, great art and unique, is neither their technical mastery
nor their fidelity to the enduring laws of all great art,--though
these are singular in their perfection,--but rather the peculiar
spiritual impulse which informed the time, and by its intensity, its
penetrating power, and its dynamic force wrought a rounded and
complete civilization and manifested this through a thousand varied
channels.
Greater, perhaps, even than his grasp of the singular entirety of
mediaeval civilization, is Mr. Adams's power of merging himself in a
long dead time, of thinking and feeling with the men and women
thereof, and so breathing on the dead bones of antiquity that again
they clothe themselves with flesh and vesture, call back their
severed souls, and live again, not only to the consciousness of the
reader, but before his very eyes. And it is not a thin simulacrum he
raises by some doubtful alchemy: it is no phantasm of the past that
shines dimly before us in these magical pages; it is the very time
itself in which we are merged. We forgather with the Abbot and his
monks, and the crusaders and pilgrims in the Shrine of the
Archangel: we pay our devoirs to the fair French Queens,--Blanche of
Castile, Eleanor of Aquitaine, Mary of Champagne,--fighting their
battles for them as liege servants: we dispute with Abelard, Thomas
of Aquino, Duns the Scotsman: we take our parts in the Court of
Love, or sing the sublime and sounding praises of God with the
Canons of Saint Victor: our eyes opened at last, and after many days
we kneel before Our Lady of Pity, asking her intercession for her
lax but loyal devotees. Seven centuries dissolve and vanish away,
being as they were not, and the thirteenth century lives less for us
than we live in it and are a part of its gaiety and light-
heartedness, its youthful ardour and abounding action, its childlike
simplicity and frankness, its normal and healthy and all-embracing
devotion.
And it is well for us to have this experience. Apart from the
desirable transformation it effects in preconceived and curiously
erroneous superstitions as to one of the greatest eras in all
history, it is vastly heartening and exhilarating. If it gives new
and not always flattering standards for the judgment of contemporary
men and things, so does it establish new ideals, new goals for
attainment. To live for a day in a world that built Chartres
Cathedral, even if it makes the living in a world that creates the
"Black Country" of England or an Iron City of America less a thing
of joy and gladness than before, equally opens up the far prospect
of another thirteenth century in the times that are to come and
urges to ardent action toward its attainment.
But apart from this, the deepest value of Mont-Saint-Michel and
Chartres, its importance as a revelation of the eternal glory of
mediaeval art and the elements that brought it into being is not
lightly to be expressed. To every artist, whatever his chosen form
of expression, it must appear unique and invaluable, and to none
more than the architect, who, familiar at last with its beauties,
its power, and its teaching force, can only applaud the action of
the American Institute of Architects in making Mr. Adams an Honorary
Member, as one who has rendered distinguished services to the art,
and voice his gratitude that it has brought the book within his
reach and given it publicity before the world.
Whitehall, Sudbury, Massachusetts, June, 1913.
CONTENTS
PREFACE
I. SAINT MICHIEL DE LA MER DEL PERIL
II. LA CHANSON DE ROLAND
III. THE MERVEILLE
IV. NORMANDY AND THE ILE DE FRANCE
V. TOWERS AND PORTALS
VI. THE VIRGIN OF CHARTRES
VII. ROSES AND APSES
VIII. THE TWELFTH-CENTURY GLASS
IX. THE LEGENDARY WINDOWS
X. THE COURT OF THE QUEEN OF HEAVEN
XI. THE THREE QUEENS
XII. NICOLETTE AND MARION
XIII. LES MIRACLES DE NOTRE DAME
XIV. ABELARD
XV. THE MYSTICS
XVI. SAINT THOMAS AQUINAS
Preface
[December, 1904.]
Some old Elizabethan play or poem contains the lines:--
. . . Who reads me, when I am ashes,
Is my son in wishes . . . . . . . . .
The relationship, between reader and writer, of son and father, may
have existed in Queen Elizabeth's time, but is much too close to be
true for ours. The utmost that any writer could hope of his readers
now is that they should consent to regard themselves as nephews, and
even then he would expect only a more or less civil refusal from
most of them. Indeed, if he had reached a certain age, he would have
observed that nephews, as a social class, no longer read at all, and
that there is only one familiar instance recorded of a nephew who
read his uncle. The exception tends rather to support the rule,
since it needed a Macaulay to produce, and two volumes to record it.
Finally, the metre does not permit it. One may not say: "Who reads
me, when I am ashes, is my nephew in wishes."
The same objections do not apply to the word "niece." The change
restores the verse, and, to a very great degree, the fact. Nieces
have been known to read in early youth, and in some cases may have
read their uncles. The relationship, too, is convenient and easy,
capable of being anything or nothing, at the will of either party,
like a Mohammedan or Polynesian or American marriage. No valid
objection can be offered to this choice in the verse. Niece let it
be!
The following lines, then, are written for nieces, or for those who
are willing, for those, to be nieces in wish. For convenience of
travel in France, where hotels, in out-of-the-way places, are
sometimes wanting in space as well as luxury, the nieces shall count
as one only. As many more may come as like, but one niece is enough
for the uncle to talk to, and one niece is much more likely than two
to listen. One niece is also more likely than two to carry a kodak
and take interest in it, since she has nothing else, except her
uncle, to interest her, and instances occur when she takes interest
neither in the uncle nor in the journey. One cannot assume, even in
a niece, too emotional a nature, but one may assume a kodak.
The party, then, with such variations of detail as may suit its
tastes, has sailed from New York, let us say, early in June for an
entire summer in France. One pleasant June morning it has landed at
Cherbourg or Havre and takes the train across Normandy to Pontorson,
where, with the evening light, the tourists drive along the
chaussee, over the sands or through the tide, till they stop at
Madame Poulard's famous hotel within the Gate of the Mount.
The uncle talks:--
CHAPTER I
SAINT MICHIEL DE LA MER DEL PERIL
The Archangel loved heights. Standing on the summit of the tower
that crowned his church, wings upspread, sword uplifted, the devil
crawling beneath, and the cock, symbol of eternal vigilance, perched
on his mailed foot, Saint Michael held a place of his own in heaven
and on earth which seems, in the eleventh century, to leave hardly
room for the Virgin of the Crypt at Chartres, still less for the
Beau Christ of the thirteenth century at Amiens. The Archangel
stands for Church and State, and both militant. He is the conqueror
of Satan, the mightiest of all created spirits, the nearest to God.
His place was where the danger was greatest; therefore you find him
here. For the same reason he was, while the pagan danger lasted, the
patron saint of France. So the Normans, when they were converted to
Christianity, put themselves under his powerful protection. So he
stood for centuries on his Mount in Peril of the Sea, watching
across the tremor of the immense ocean,-immensi tremor oceani,-as
Louis XI, inspired for once to poetry, inscribed on the collar of
the Order of Saint Michael which he created. So soldiers, nobles,
and monarchs went on pilgrimage to his shrine; so the common people
followed, and still follow, like ourselves.
The church stands high on the summit of this granite rock, and on
its west front is the platform, to which the tourist ought first to
climb. From the edge of this platform, the eye plunges down, two
hundred and thirty-five feet, to the wide sands or the wider ocean,
as the tides recede or advance, under an infinite sky, over a
restless sea, which even we tourists can understand and feel without
books or guides; but when we turn from the western view, and look at
the church door, thirty or forty yards from the parapet where we
stand, one needs to be eight centuries old to know what this mass of
encrusted architecture meant to its builders, and even then one must
still learn to feel it. The man who wanders into the twelfth century
is lost, unless he can grow prematurely young.
One can do it, as one can play with children. Wordsworth, whose
practical sense equalled his intuitive genius, carefully limited us
to "a season of calm weather," which is certainly best; but granting
a fair frame of mind, one can still "have sight of that immortal
sea" which brought us hither from the twelfth century; one can even
travel thither and see the children sporting on the shore. Our sense
is partially atrophied from disuse, but it is still alive, at least
in old people, who alone, as a class, have the time to be young.
One needs only to be old enough in order to be as young as one will.
From the top of this Abbey Church one looks across the bay to
Avranches, and towards Coutances and the Cotentin,--the Constantinus
pagus,--whose shore, facing us, recalls the coast of New England.
The relation between the granite of one coast and that of the
other may be fanciful, but the relation between the people who live
on each is as hard and practical a fact as the granite itself. When
one enters the church, one notes first the four great triumphal
piers or columns, at the intersection of the nave and transepts, and
on looking into M. Corroyer's architectural study which is the chief
source of all one's acquaintance with the Mount, one learns that
these piers were constructed in 1058. Four out of five American
tourists will instantly recall the only date of mediaeval history
they ever knew, the date of the Norman Conquest. Eight years after
these piers were built, in 1066, Duke William of Normandy raised an
army of forty thousand men in these parts, and in northern France,
whom he took to England, where they mostly stayed. For a hundred and
fifty years, until 1204, Normandy and England were united; the
Norman peasant went freely to England with his lord, spiritual or
temporal; the Norman woman, a very capable person, followed her
husband or her parents; Normans held nearly all the English fiefs;
filled the English Church; crowded the English Court; created the
English law; and we know that French was still currently spoken in
England as late as 1400, or thereabouts, "After the scole of
Stratford atte bowe." The aristocratic Norman names still survive in
part, and if we look up their origin here we shall generally find
them in villages so remote and insignificant that their place can
hardly be found on any ordinary map; but the common people had no
surnames, and cannot be traced, although for every noble whose name
or blood survived in England or in Normandy, we must reckon hundreds
of peasants. Since the generation which followed William to England
in 1066, we can reckon twenty-eight or thirty from father to son,
and, if you care to figure up the sum, you will find that you had
about two hundred and fifty million arithmetical ancestors living in
the middle of the eleventh century. The whole population of England
and northern France may then have numbered five million, but if it
were fifty it would not much affect the certainty that, if you have
any English blood at all, you have also Norman. If we could go back
and live again in all our two hundred and fifty million arithmetical
ancestors of the eleventh century, we should find ourselves doing
many surprising things, but among the rest we should pretty
certainly be ploughing most of the fields of the Cotentin and
Calvados; going to mass in every parish church in Normandy;
rendering military service to every lord, spiritual or temporal, in
all this region; and helping to build the Abbey Church at Mont-
Saint-Michel. From the roof of the Cathedral of Coutances over
yonder, one may look away over the hills and woods, the farms and
fields of Normandy, and so familiar, so homelike are they, one can
almost take oath that in this, or the other, or in all, one knew
life once and has never so fully known it since.
Never so fully known it since! For we of the eleventh century, hard-
headed, close-fisted, grasping, shrewd, as we were, and as Normans
are still said to be, stood more fully in the centre of the world's
movement than our English descendants ever did. We were a part, and
a great part, of the Church, of France, and of Europe. The Leos and
Gregories of the tenth and eleventh centuries leaned on us in their
great struggle for reform. Our Duke Richard-Sans-Peur, in 966,
turned the old canons out of the Mount in order to bring here the
highest influence of the time, the Benedictine monks of Monte
Cassino. Richard II, grandfather of William the Conqueror, began
this Abbey Church in 1020, and helped Abbot Hildebert to build it.
When William the Conqueror in 1066 set out to conquer England, Pope
Alexander II stood behind him and blessed his banner. From that
moment our Norman Dukes cast the Kings of France into the shade. Our
activity was not limited to northern Europe, or even confined by
Anjou and Gascony. When we stop at Coutances, we will drive out to
Hauteville to see where Tancred came from, whose sons Robert and
Roger were conquering Naples and Sicily at the time when the Abbey
Church was building on the Mount. Normans were everywhere in 1066,
and everywhere in the lead of their age. We were a serious race. If
you want other proof of it, besides our record in war and in
politics, you have only to look at our art. Religious art is the
measure of human depth and sincerity; any triviality, any weakness,
cries aloud. If this church on the Mount is not proof enough of
Norman character, we will stop at Coutances for a wider view. Then
we will go to Caen and Bayeux. From there, it would almost be worth
our while to leap at once to Palermo. It was in the year 1131 or
thereabouts that Roger began the Cathedral at Cefalu and the Chapel
Royal at Palermo; it was about the year 1174 that his grandson
William began the Cathedral of Monreale. No art--either Greek or
Byzantine, Italian or Arab--has ever created two religious types so
beautiful, so serious, so impressive, and yet so different, as Mont-
Saint-Michel watching over its northern ocean, and Monreale, looking
down over its forests of orange and lemon, on Palermo and the
Sicilian seas.
Down nearly to the end of the twelfth century the Norman was fairly
master of the world in architecture as in arms, although the
thirteenth century belonged to France, and we must look for its
glories on the Seine and Marne and Loire; but for the present we are
in the eleventh century,--tenants of the Duke or of the Church or of
small feudal lords who take their names from the neighbourhood,--
Beaumont, Carteret, Greville, Percy, Pierpont,--who, at the Duke's
bidding, will each call out his tenants, perhaps ten men-at-arms
with their attendants, to fight in Brittany, or in the Vexin toward
Paris, or on the great campaign for the conquest of England which is
to come within ten years,--the greatest military effort that has
been made in western Europe since Charlemagne and Roland were
defeated at Roncesvalles three hundred years ago. For the moment, we
are helping to quarry granite for the Abbey Church, and to haul it
to the Mount, or load it on our boat. We never fail to make our
annual pilgrimage to the Mount on the Archangel's Day, October 16.
We expect to be called out for a new campaign which Duke William
threatens against Brittany, and we hear stories that Harold the
Saxon, the powerful Earl of Wessex in England, is a guest, or, as
some say, a prisoner or a hostage, at the Duke's Court, and will go
with us on the campaign. The year is 1058.
All this time we have been standing on the parvis, looking out over
the sea and sands which are as good eleventh-century landscape as
they ever were; or turning at times towards the church door which is
the pons seclorum, the bridge of ages, between us and our ancestors.
Now that we have made an attempt, such as it is, to get our minds
into a condition to cross the bridge without breaking down in the
effort, we enter the church and stand face to face with eleventh-
century architecture; a ground-plan which dates from 1020; a central
tower, or its piers, dating from 1058; and a church completed in
1135. France can offer few buildings of this importance equally old,
with dates so exact. Perhaps the closest parallel to Mont-Saint-
Michel is Saint-Benoit-sur-Loire, above Orleans, which seems to have
been a shrine almost as popular as the Mount, at the same time.
Chartres was also a famous shrine, but of the Virgin, and the west
porch of Chartres, which is to be our peculiar pilgrimage, was a
hundred years later than the ground-plan of Mont-Saint-Michel,
although Chartres porch is the usual starting-point of northern
French art. Queen Matilda's Abbaye-aux-Dames, now the Church of the
Trinity, at Caen, dates from 1066. Saint Sernin at Toulouse, the
porch of the Abbey Church at Moissac, Notre-Dame-du-Port at
Clermont, the Abbey Church at Vezelay, are all said to be twelfth-
century. Even San Marco at Venice was new in 1020.
Yet in 1020 Norman art was already too ambitious. Certainly nine
hundred years leave their traces on granite as well as on other
material, but the granite of Abbot Hildebert would have stood
securely enough, if the Abbot had not asked too much from it.
Perhaps he asked too much from the Archangel, for the thought of the
Archangel's superiority was clearly the inspiration of his plan. The
apex of the granite rock rose like a sugar-loaf two hundred and
forty feet (73.6 metres) above mean sea-level. Instead of cutting
the summit away to give his church a secure rock foundation, which
would have sacrificed about thirty feet of height, the Abbot took
the apex of the rock for his level, and on all sides built out
foundations of masonry to support the walls of his church. The apex
of the rock is the floor of the croisee, the intersection of nave
and transept. On this solid foundation the Abbot rested the chief
weight of the church, which was the central tower, supported by the
four great piers which still stand; but from the croisee in the
centre westward to the parapet of the platform, the Abbot filled the
whole space with masonry, and his successors built out still
farther, until some two hundred feet of stonework ends now in a
perpendicular wall of eighty feet or more. In this space are several
ranges of chambers, but the structure might perhaps have proved
strong enough to support the light Romanesque front which was usual
in the eleventh century, had not fashions in architecture changed in
the great epoch of building, a hundred and fifty years later, when
Abbot Robert de Torigny thought proper to reconstruct the west
front, and build out two towers on its flanks. The towers were no
doubt beautiful, if one may judge from the towers of Bayeux and
Coutances, but their weight broke down the vaulting beneath, and one
of them fell in 1300. In 1618 the whole facade began to give way,
and in 1776 not only the facade but also three of the seven spans of
the nave were pulled down. Of Abbot Hildebert's nave, only four
arches remain.
Still, the overmastering strength of the eleventh century is stamped
on a great scale here, not only in the four spans of the nave, and
in the transepts, but chiefly in the triumphal columns of the
croisee. No one is likely to forget what Norman architecture was,
who takes the trouble to pass once through this fragment of its
earliest bloom. The dimensions are not great, though greater than
safe construction warranted. Abbot Hildebert's whole church did not
exceed two hundred and thirty feet in length in the interior, and
the span of the triumphal arch was only about twenty-three feet, if
the books can be trusted. The nave of the Abbaye-aux-Dames appears
to have about the same width, and probably neither of them was meant
to be vaulted. The roof was of timber, and about sixty-three feet
high at its apex. Compared with the great churches of the thirteenth
century, this building is modest, but its size is not what matters
to us. Its style is the starting-point of all our future travels.
Here is your first eleventh-century church! How does it affect you?
Serious and simple to excess! is it not? Young people rarely enjoy
it. They prefer the Gothic, even as you see it here, looking at us
from the choir, through the great Norman arch. No doubt they are
right, since they are young: but men and women who have lived long
and are tired,--who want rest,--who have done with aspirations and
ambition,--whose life has been a broken arch,--feel this repose and
self-restraint as they feel nothing else. The quiet strength of
these curved lines, the solid support of these heavy columns, the
moderate proportions, even the modified lights, the absence of
display, of effort, of self-consciousness, satisfy them as no other
art does. They come back to it to rest, after a long circle of
pilgrimage,--the cradle of rest from which their ancestors started.
Even here they find the repose none too deep.
Indeed, when you look longer at it, you begin to doubt whether there
is any repose in it at all,--whether it is not the most unreposeful
thought ever put into architectural form. Perched on the extreme
point of this abrupt rock, the Church Militant with its aspirant
Archangel stands high above the world, and seems to threaten heaven
itself. The idea is the stronger and more restless because the
Church of Saint Michael is surrounded and protected by the world and
the society over which it rises, as Duke William rested on his
barons and their men. Neither the Saint nor the Duke was troubled by
doubts about his mission. Church and State, Soul and Body, God and
Man, are all one at Mont-Saint-Michel, and the business of all is to
fight, each in his own way, or to stand guard for each other.
Neither Church nor State is intellectual, or learned, or even strict
in dogma. Here we do not feel the Trinity at all; the Virgin but
little; Christ hardly more; we feel only the Archangel and the Unity
of God. We have little logic here, and simple faith, but we have
energy. We cannot do many things which are done in the centre of
civilization, at Byzantium, but we can fight, and we can build a
church. No doubt we think first of the church, and next of our
temporal lord; only in the last instance do we think of our private
affairs, and our private affairs sometimes suffer for it; but we
reckon the affairs of Church and State to be ours, too, and we carry
this idea very far. Our church on the Mount is ambitious, restless,
striving for effect; our conquest of England, with which the Duke is
infatuated, is more ambitious still; but all this is a trifle to the
outburst which is coming in the next generation; and Saint Michael
on his Mount expresses it all.
Taking architecture as an expression of energy, we can some day
compare Mont-Saint-Michel with Beauvais, and draw from the
comparison whatever moral suits our frame of mind; but you should
first note that here, in the eleventh century, the Church, however
simple-minded or unschooled, was not cheap. Its self-respect is
worth noticing, because it was short-lived in its art. Mont-Saint-
Michel, throughout, even up to the delicate and intricate stonework
of its cloisters, is built of granite. The crypts and substructures
are as well constructed as the surfaces most exposed to view. When
we get to Chartres, which is largely a twelfth-century work, you
will see that the cathedral there, too, is superbly built, of the
hardest and heaviest stone within reach, which has nowhere settled
or given way; while, beneath, you will find a crypt that rivals the
church above. The thirteenth century did not build so. The great
cathedrals after 1200 show economy, and sometimes worse. The world
grew cheap, as worlds must.
You may like it all the better for being less serious, less heroic,
less militant, and more what the French call bourgeois, just as you
may like the style of Louis XV better than that of Louis XIV,--
Madame du Barry better than Madame de Montespan,--for taste is free,
and all styles are good which amuse; but since we are now beginning
with the earliest, in order to step down gracefully to the stage,
whatever it is, where you prefer to stop, we must try to understand
a little of the kind of energy which Norman art expressed, or would
have expressed if it had thought in our modes. The only word which
describes the Norman style is the French word naif. Littre says that
naif comes from natif, as vulgar comes from vulgus, as though native
traits must be simple, and commonness must be vulgar. Both these
derivative meanings were strange to the eleventh century. Naivete
was simply natural and vulgarity was merely coarse. Norman naivete
was not different in kind from the naivete of Burgundy or Gascony or
Lombardy, but it was slightly different in expression, as you will
see when you travel south. Here at Mont-Saint-Michel we have only a
mutilated trunk of an eleventh-century church to judge by. We have
not even a facade, and shall have to stop at some Norman village--at
Thaon or Ouistreham--to find a west front which might suit the Abbey
here, but wherever we find it we shall find something a little more
serious, more military, and more practical than you will meet in
other Romanesque work, farther south. So, too, the central tower or
lantern--the most striking feature of Norman churches--has fallen
here at Mont-Saint-Michel, and we shall have to replace it from
Cerisy-la-Foret, and Lessay, and Falaise. We shall find much to say
about the value of the lantern on a Norman church, and the singular
power it expresses. We shall have still more to say of the towers
which flank the west front of Norman churches, but these are mostly
twelfth-century, and will lead us far beyond Coutances and Bayeux,
from fleche to fleche, till we come to the fleche of all fleches, at
Chartres.
We shall have a whole chapter of study, too, over the eleventh-
century apse, but here at Mont-Saint-Michel, Abbot Hildebert's choir
went the way of his nave and tower. He built out even more boldly to
the east than to the west, and although the choir stood for some
four hundred years, which is a sufficient life for most
architecture, the foundations gave way at last, and it fell in 1421,
in the midst of the English wars, and remained a ruin until 1450.
Then it was rebuilt, a monument of the last days of the Gothic, so
that now, standing at the western door, you can look down the
church, and see the two limits of mediaeval architecture married
together,--the earliest Norman and the latest French. Through the
Romanesque arches of 1058, you look into the exuberant choir of
latest Gothic, finished in 1521. Although the two structures are
some five hundred years apart, they live pleasantly together. The
Gothic died gracefully in France. The choir is charming,--far more
charming than the nave, as the beautiful woman is more charming than
the elderly man. One need not quarrel about styles of beauty, as
long as the man and woman are evidently satisfied and love and
admire each other still, with all the solidity of faith to hold them
up; but, at least, one cannot help seeing, as one looks from the
older to the younger style, that whatever the woman's sixteenth-
century charm may be, it is not the man's eleventh-century trait of
naivete;--far from it! The simple, serious, silent dignity and
energy of the eleventh century have gone. Something more complicated
stands in their place; graceful, self-conscious, rhetorical, and
beautiful as perfect rhetoric, with its clearness, light, and line,
and the wealth of tracery that verges on the florid.
The crypt of the same period, beneath, is almost finer still, and
even in seriousness stands up boldly by the side of the Romanesque;
but we have no time to run off into the sixteenth century: we have
still to learn the alphabet of art in France. One must live deep
into the eleventh century in order to understand the twelfth, and
even after passing years in the twelfth, we shall find the
thirteenth in many ways a world of its own, with a beauty not always
inherited, and sometimes not bequeathed. At the Mount we can go no
farther into the eleventh as far as concerns architecture. We shall
have to follow the Romanesque to Caen and so up the Seine to the Ile
de France, and across to the Loire and the Rhone, far to the South
where its home lay. All the other eleventh-century work has been
destroyed here or built over, except at one point, on the level of
the splendid crypt we just turned from, called the Gros Piliers,
beneath the choir.
There, according to M. Corroyer, in a corner between great
constructions of the twelfth century and the vast Merveille of the
thirteenth, the old refectory of the eleventh was left as a passage
from one group of buildings to the other. Below it is the kitchen of
Hildebert. Above, on the level of the church, was the dormitory.
These eleventh-century abbatial buildings faced north and west, and
are close to the present parvis, opposite the last arch of the nave.
The lower levels of Hildebert's plan served as supports or
buttresses to the church above, and must therefore be older than the
nave; probably older than the triumphal piers of 1058.
Hildebert planned them in 1020, and died after carrying his plans
out so far that they could be completed by Abbot Ralph de Beaumont,
who was especially selected by Duke William in 1048, "more for his
high birth than for his merits." Ralph de Beaumont died in 1060, and
was succeeded by Abbot Ranulph, an especial favourite of Duchess
Matilda, and held in high esteem by Duke William. The list of names
shows how much social importance was attributed to the place. The
Abbot's duties included that of entertainment on a great scale. The
Mount was one of the most famous shrines of northern Europe. We are
free to take for granted that all the great people of Normandy slept
at the Mount and, supposing M. Corroyer to be right, that they dined
in this room, between 1050, when the building must have been in use,
down to 1122 when the new abbatial quarters were built.
How far the monastic rules restricted social habits is a matter for
antiquaries to settle if they can, and how far those rules were
observed in the case of great secular princes; but the eleventh
century was not very strict, and the rule of the Benedictines was
always mild, until the Cistercians and Saint Bernard stiffened its
discipline toward 1120. Even then the Church showed strong leanings
toward secular poetry and popular tastes. The drama belonged to it
almost exclusively, and the Mysteries and Miracle plays which were
acted under its patronage often contained nothing of religion except
the miracle. The greatest poem of the eleventh century was the
"Chanson de Roland," and of that the Church took a sort of
possession. At Chartres we shall find Charlemagne and Roland dear to
the Virgin, and at about the same time, as far away as at Assisi in
the Perugian country, Saint Francis himself--the nearest approach
the Western world ever made to an Oriental incarnation of the divine
essence--loved the French romans, and typified himself in the
"Chanson de Roland." With Mont-Saint-Michel, the "Chanson de Roland"
is almost one. The "Chanson" is in poetry what the Mount is in
architecture. Without the "Chanson," one cannot approach the feeling
which the eleventh century built into the Archangel's church.
Probably there was never a day, certainly never a week, during
several centuries, when portions of the "Chanson" were not sung, or
recited, at the Mount, and if there was one room where it was most
at home, this one, supposing it to be the old refectory, claims to
be the place.