THE TWELFTH-CENTURY GLASS
At last we are face to face with the crowning glory of Chartres.
Other churches have glass,--quantities of it, and very fine,--but we
have been trying to catch a glimpse of the glory which stands behind
the glass of Chartres, and gives it quality and feeling of its own.
For once the architect is useless and his explanations are pitiable;
the painter helps still less; and the decorator, unless he works in
glass, is the poorest guide of all, while, if he works in glass, he
is sure to lead wrong; and all of them may toil until Pierre
Mauclerc's stone Christ comes to life, and condemns them among the
unpardonable sinners on the southern portal, but neither they nor
any other artist will ever create another Chartres. You had better
stop here, once for all, unless you are willing to feel that
Chartres was made what it is, not by artist, but by the Virgin.
If this imperial presence is stamped on the architecture and the
sculpture with an energy not to be mistaken, it radiates through the
glass with a light and colour that actually blind the true servant
of Mary. One becomes, sometimes, a little incoherent in talking
about it; one is ashamed to be as extravagant as one wants to be;
one has no business to labour painfully to explain and prove to
one's self what is as clear as the sun in the sky; one loses temper
in reasoning about what can only be felt, and what ought to be felt
instantly, as it was in the twelfth century, even by the truie qui
file and the ane qui vielle. Any one should feel it that wishes; any
one who does not wish to feel it can let it alone. Still, it may be
that not one tourist in a hundred--perhaps not one in a thousand of
the English-speaking race--does feel it, or can feel it even when
explained to him, for we have lost many senses.
Therefore, let us plod on, laboriously proving God, although, even
to Saint Bernard and Pascal, God was incapable of proof; and using
such material as the books furnish for help. It is not much. The
French have been shockingly negligent of their greatest artistic
glory. One knows not even where to seek. One must go to the National
Library and beg as a special favour permission to look at the
monumental work of M. Lasteyrie, if one wishes to make even a
beginning of the study of French glass. Fortunately there exists a
fragment of a great work which the Government began, but never
completed, upon Chartres; and another, quite indispensable, but not
official, upon Bourges; while Viollet-le-Duc's article "Vitrail"
serves as guide to the whole. Ottin's book "Le Vitrail" is
convenient. Male's volume "L'Art Religieux" is essential. In
English, Westlake's "History of Design" is helpful. Perhaps, after
reading all that is readable, the best hope will be to provide the
best glasses with the largest possible field; and, choosing an hour
when the church is empty, take seat about halfway up the nave,
facing toward the western entrance with a morning light, so that the
glass of the western windows shall not stand in direct sun.
The glass of the three lancets is the oldest in the cathedral. If
the portal beneath it, with the sculpture, was built in the twenty
or thirty years before 1150, the glass could not be much later. It
goes with the Abbe Suger's glass at Saint-Denis, which was surely
made as early as 1140-50, since the Abbe was a long time at work on
it, before he died in 1152. Their perfection proves, what his
biographer asserted, that the Abbe Suger spent many years as well as
much money on his windows at Saint-Denis, and the specialists affirm
that the three lancets at Chartres are quite as good as what remains
of Suger's work. Viollet-le-Duc and M. Paul Durand, the Government
expert, are positive that this glass is the finest ever made, as far
as record exists; and that the northern lancet representing the Tree
of Jesse stands at the head of all glasswork whatever. The windows
claim, therefore, to be the most splendid colour decoration the
world ever saw, since no other material, neither silk nor gold, and
no opaque colour laid on with a brush, can compare with translucent
glass, and even the Ravenna mosaics or Chinese porcelains are
darkness beside them.
The claim may not be modest, but it is none of ours. Viollet-le-Duc
must answer for his own sins, and he chose the lancet window of the
Tree of Jesse for the subject of his lecture on glass in general, as
the most complete and perfect example of this greatest decorative
art. Once more, in following him, one is dragged, in spite of one's
self, into technique, and, what is worse, into a colour world whose
technique was forgotten five hundred years ago. Viollet-le-Duc tried
to recover it. "After studying our best French windows," he
cautiously suggests that "one might maintain," as their secret of
harmony, that "the first condition for an artist in glass is to know
how to manage blue. The blue is the light in windows, and light has
value only by opposition." The radiating power of blue is,
therefore, the starting-point, and on this matter Viollet-le-Duc has
much to say which a student would need to master; but a tourist
never should study, or he ceases to be a tourist; and it is enough
for us if we know that, to get the value they wanted, the artists
hatched their blues with lines, covered their surface with figures
as though with screens, and tied their blue within its own field
with narrow circlets of white or yellow, which, in their turn, were
beaded to fasten the blue still more firmly in its place. We have
chiefly to remember the law that blue is light:--
But also it is that luminous colour which gives value to all others.
If you compose a window in which there shall be no blue, you will
get a dirty or dull (blafard) or crude surface which the eye will
instantly avoid; but if you put a few touches of blue among all
these tones, you will immediately get striking effects if not
skilfully conceived harmony. So the composition of blue glass
singularly preoccupied the glassworkers of the twelfth and
thirteenth centuries. If there is only one red, two yellows, two or
three purples, and two or three greens at the most, there are
infinite shades of blue, ... and these blues are placed with a very
delicate observation of the effects they should produce on other
tones, and other tones on them.
Viollet-le-Duc took the window of the Tree of Jesse as his first
illustration of the rule, for the reason that its blue ground is one
continuous strip from top to bottom, with the subordinate red on
either side, and a border uniting the whole so plainly that no one
can fail to see its object or its method.
The blue tone of the principal subject [that is to say, the ground
of the Tree of Jesse] has commanded the tonality of all the rest.
This medium was necessary to enable the luminous splendour to
display its energy. This primary condition had dictated the red
ground for the prophets, and the return to the blue on reaching the
outside semicircular band. To give full value both to the vigour of
the red, and to the radiating transparency of the blue, the ground
of the corners is put in emerald green; but then, in the corners
themselves, the blue is recalled and is given an additional solidity
of value by the delicate ornamentation of the squares.
This translation is very free, but one who wants to know these
windows must read the whole article, and read it here in the church,
the Dictionary in one hand, and binocle in the other, for the
binocle is more important than the Dictionary when it reaches the
complicated border which repeats in detail the colour-scheme of the
centre:--
The border repeats all the tones allotted to the principal subjects,
but by small fragments, so that this border, with an effect both
solid and powerful, shall not enter into rivalry with the large
arrangements of the central parts.
One would think this simple enough; easily tested on any illuminated
manuscript, Arab, Persian, or Byzantine; verified by any Oriental
rug, old or new; freely illustrated by any Chinese pattern on a Ming
jar, or cloisonne vase; and offering a kind of alphabet for the
shop-window of a Paris modiste. A strong red; a strong and a weak
yellow; a strong and a weak purple; a strong and a weak green, are
all to be tied together, given their values, and held in their
places by blue. The thing seems simpler still when it appears that
perspective is forbidden, and that these glass windows of the
twelfth and thirteenth centuries, like Oriental rugs, imply a flat
surface, a wall which must not be treated as open. The twelfth-
century glassworker would sooner have worn a landscape on his back
than have costumed his church with it; he would as soon have
decorated his floors with painted holes as his walls. He wanted to
keep the coloured window flat, like a rug hung on the wall.
The radiation of translucent colours in windows cannot be modified
by the artist; all his talent consists in profiting by it, according
to a given harmonic scheme on a single plane, like a rug, but not
according to an effect of aerial perspective. Do what you like, a
glass window never does and never can represent anything but a plane
surface; its real virtues even exist only on that condition. Every
attempt to present several planes to the eye is fatal to the harmony
of colour, without producing any illusion in the spectator ...
Translucid painting can propose as its object only a design
supporting as energetically as possible a harmony of colours.
Whether this law is absolute you can tell best by looking at modern
glass which is mostly perspective; but, whether you like it or not,
the matter of perspective does not enter into a twelfth-century
window more than into a Japanese picture, and may be ignored. The
decoration of the twelfth century, as far as concerns us, was
intended only for one plane, and a window was another form of rug or
embroidery or mosaic, hung on the wall for colour,--simple
decoration to be seen as a whole. If the Tree of Jesse teaches
anything at all, it is that the artist thought first of controlling
his light, but he wanted to do it not in order to dim the colours;
on the contrary, he toiled, like a jeweller setting diamonds and
rubies, to increase their splendour. If his use of blue teaches this
lesson, his use of green proves it. The outside border of the Tree
of Jesse is a sort of sample which our schoolmaster Viollet-le-Duc
sets, from which he requires us to study out the scheme, beginning
with the treatment of light, and ending with the value of the
emerald green ground in the corners.
Complicated as the border of the Tree of Jesse is, it has its mates
in the borders of the two other twelfth-century windows, and a few
of the thirteenth-century in the side aisles; but the southern of
the three lancets shows how the artists dealt with a difficulty that
upset their rule. The border of the southern window does not count
as it should; something is wrong with it and a little study shows
that the builder, and not the glassworker, was to blame. Owing to
his miscalculation--if it was really a miscalculation--in the width
of the southern tower, the builder economized six or eight inches in
the southern door and lancet, which was enough to destroy the
balance between the colour-values, as masses, of the south and north
windows. The artist was obliged to choose whether he would sacrifice
the centre or the border of his southern window, and decided that
the windows could not be made to balance if he narrowed the centre,
but that he must balance them by enriching the centre, and
sacrificing the border. He has filled the centre with medallions as
rich as he could make them, and these he has surrounded with
borders, which are also enriched to the utmost; but these medallions
with their borders spread across the whole window, and when you
search with the binocle for the outside border, you see its pattern
clearly only at the top and bottom. On the sides, at intervals of
about two feet, the medallions cover and interrupt it; but this is
partly corrected by making the border, where it is seen, so rich as
to surpass any other in the cathedral, even that of the Tree of
Jesse. Whether the artist has succeeded or not is a question for
other artists--or for you, if you please--to decide; but apparently
he did succeed, since no one has ever noticed the difficulty or the
device.
The southern lancet represents the Passion of Christ. Granting to
Viollet-le-Duc that the unbroken vertical colour-scheme of the Tree
of Jesse made the more effective window, one might still ask whether
the medallion-scheme is not the more interesting. Once past the
workshop, there can be no question about it; the Tree of Jesse has
the least interest of all the three windows. A genealogical tree has
little value, artistic or other, except to those who belong in its
branches, and the Tree of Jesse was put there, not to please us, but
to please the Virgin. The Passion window was also put there to
please her, but it tells a story, and does it in a way that has more
novelty than the subject. The draughtsman who chalked out the design
on the whitened table that served for his sketch-board was either a
Greek, or had before him a Byzantine missal, or enamel or ivory. The
first medallion on these legendary windows is the lower left-hand
one, which begins the story or legend; here it represents Christ
after the manner of the Greek Church. In the next medallion is the
Last Supper; the fish on the dish is Greek. In the middle of the
window, with the help of the binocle, you will see a Crucifixion, or
even two, for on the left is Christ on the Cross, and on the right a
Descent from the Cross; in this is the figure of man pulling out
with pincers the nails which fasten Christ's feet; a figure unknown
to Western religious art. The Noli Me Tangere, on the right, near
the top, has a sort of Greek character. All the critics, especially
M. Paul Durand, have noticed this Byzantine look, which is even more
marked in the Suger window at Saint-Denis, so as to suggest that
both are by the same hand, and that the hand of a Greek. If the
artist was really a Greek, he has done work more beautiful than any
left at Byzantium, and very far finer than anything in the beautiful
work at Cairo, but although the figures and subjects are more or
less Greek, like the sculptures on the portal, the art seems to be
French.
Look at the central window! Naturally, there sits the Virgin, with
her genealogical tree on her left, and her Son's testimony on her
right to prove her double divinity. She is seated in the long halo;
as, on the western portal, directly beneath her, her Son is
represented in stone, Her crown and head, as well as that of the
Child, are fourteenth-century restorations more or less like the
original; but her cushioned throne and her robes of imperial state,
as well as the flowered sceptre in either hand, are as old as the
sculpture of the portal, and redolent of the first crusade. On
either side of her, the Sun and the Moon offer praise; her two
Archangels, Michael and Gabriel, with resplendent wings, offer not
incense as in later times, but the two sceptres of spiritual and
temporal power; while the Child in her lap repeats His Mother's
action and even her features and expression. At first sight, one
would take for granted that all this was pure Byzantium, and perhaps
it is; but it has rather the look of Byzantium gallicized, and
carried up to a poetic French ideal. At Saint-Denis the little
figure of the Abbe Suger at the feet of the Virgin has a very
Oriental look, and in the twin medallion the Virgin resembles
greatly the Virgin of Chartres, yet, for us, until some specialist
shows us the Byzantine original, the work is as thoroughly French as
the fleches of the churches.
Byzantine art is altogether another chapter, and, if we could but
take a season to study it in Byzantium, we might get great
amusement; but the art of Chartres, even in 1100, was French and
perfectly French, as the architecture shows, and the glass is even
more French than the architecture, as you can detect in many other
ways. Perhaps the surest evidence is the glass itself. The men who
made it were not professionals but amateurs, who may have had some
knowledge of enamelling, but who worked like jewellers, unused to
glass, and with the refinement that a reliquary or a crozier
required. The cost of these windows must have been extravagant; one
is almost surprised that they are not set in gold rather than in
lead. The Abbe Suger shirked neither trouble nor expense, and the
only serious piece of evidence that this artist was a Greek is given
by his biographer who unconsciously shows that the artist cheated
him: "He sought carefully for makers of windows and workmen in glass
of exquisite quality, especially in that made of sapphires in great
abundance that were pulverized and melted up in the glass to give it
the blue colour which he delighted to admire." The "materia
saphirorum" was evidently something precious,--as precious as crude
sapphires would have been,--and the words imply beyond question that
the artist asked for sapphires and that Suger paid for them; yet all
specialists agree that the stone known as sapphire, if ground, could
not produce translucent colour at all. The blue which Suger loved,
and which is probably the same as that of these Chartres windows,
cannot be made out of sapphires. Probably the "materia saphirorum"
means cobalt only, but whatever it was, the glassmakers seem to
agree that this glass of 1140-50 is the best ever made. M. Paul
Durand in his official report of 1881 said that these windows, both
artistically and mechanically, were of the highest class: "I will
also call attention to the fact that the glass and the execution of
the painting are, materially speaking, of a quality much superior to
windows of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Having passed
several months in contact with these precious works when I copied
them, I was able to convince myself of their superiority in every
particular, especially in the upper parts of the three windows." He
said that they were perfect and irreproachable. The true enthusiast
in glass would in the depths of his heart like to say outright that
these three windows are worth more than all that the French have
since done in colour, from that day to this; but the matter concerns
us chiefly because it shows how French the experiment was, and how
Suger's taste and wealth made it possible.
Certain it is, too, that the southern window--the Passion--was made
on the spot, or near by, and fitted for the particular space with
care proportionate to its cost. All are marked by the hand of the
Chartres Virgin. They are executed not merely for her, but by her.
At Saint-Denis the Abbe Suger appeared,--it is true that he was
prostrate at her feet, but still he appeared. At Chartres no one--no
suggestion of a human agency--was allowed to appear; the Virgin
permitted no one to approach her, even to adore. She is enthroned
above, as Queen and Empress and Mother, with the symbols of
exclusive and universal power. Below her, she permitted the world to
see the glories of her earthly life;--the Annunciation, Visitation,
and Nativity; the Magi; King Herod; the Journey to Egypt; and the
single medallion, which shows the gods of Egypt falling from their
pedestals at her coming, is more entertaining than a whole picture-
gallery of oil paintings.
In all France there exist barely a dozen good specimens of twelfth-
century glass. Besides these windows at Chartres and the fragments
at Saint-Denis, there are windows at Le Mans and Angers and bits at
Vendome, Chalons, Poitiers, Rheims, and Bourges; here and there one
happens on other pieces, but the earliest is the best, because the
glass-makers were new at the work and spent on it an infinite amount
of trouble and money which they found to be unnecessary as they
gained experience. Even in 1200 the value of these windows was so
well understood, relatively to new ones, that they were preserved
with the greatest care. The effort to make such windows was never
repeated. Their jewelled perfection did not suit the scale of the
vast churches of the thirteenth century. By turning your head toward
the windows of the side aisles, you can see the criticism which the
later artists passed on the old work. They found it too refined, too
brilliant, too jewel-like for the size of the new cathedral; the
play of light and colour allowed the eye too little repose; indeed,
the eye could not see their whole beauty, and half their value was
thrown away in this huge stone setting. At best they must have
seemed astray on the bleak, cold, windy plain of Beauce,--homesick
for Palestine or Cairo,--yearning for Monreale or Venice,--but this
is not our affair, and, under the protection of the Empress Virgin,
Saint Bernard himself could have afforded to sin even to drunkenness
of colour. With trifling expense of imagination one can still catch
a glimpse of the crusades in the glory of the glass. The longer one
looks into it, the more overpowering it becomes, until one begins
almost to feel an echo of what our two hundred and fifty million
arithmetical ancestors, drunk with the passion of youth and the
splendour of the Virgin, have been calling to us from Mont-Saint-
Michel and Chartres. No words and no wine could revive their
emotions so vividly as they glow in the purity of the colours; the
limpidity of the blues; the depth of the red; the intensity of the
green; the complicated harmonies; the sparkle and splendour of the
light; and the quiet and certain strength of the mass.
With too strong direct sun the windows are said to suffer, and
become a cluster of jewels--a delirium of coloured light. The lines,
too, have different degrees of merit. These criticisms seldom strike
a chance traveller, but he invariably makes the discovery that the
designs within the medallions are childish. He may easily correct
them, if he likes, and see what would happen to the window; but
although this is the alphabet of art, and we are past spelling words
of one syllable, the criticism teaches at least one lesson.
Primitive man seems to have had a natural colour-sense, instinctive
like the scent of a dog. Society has no right to feel it as a moral
reproach to be told that it has reached an age when it can no longer
depend, as in childhood, on its taste, or smell, or sight, or
hearing, or memory; the fact seems likely enough, and in no way
sinful; yet society always denies it, and is invariably angry about
it; and, therefore, one had better not say it. On the other hand, we
can leave Delacroix and his school to fight out the battle they
began against Ingres and his school, in French art, nearly a hundred
years ago, which turned in substance on the same point. Ingres held
that the first motive in colour-decoration was line, and that a
picture which was well drawn was well enough coloured. Society
seemed, on the whole, to agree with him. Society in the twelfth
century agreed with Delacroix. The French held then that the first
point in colour-decoration was colour, and they never hesitated to
put their colour where they wanted it, or cared whether a green
camel or a pink lion looked like a dog or a donkey provided they got
their harmony or value. Everything except colour was sacrificed to
line in the large sense, but details of drawing were conventional
and subordinate. So we laugh to see a knight with a blue face, on a
green horse, that looks as though drawn by a four-year-old child,
and probably the artist laughed, too; but he was a colourist, and
never sacrificed his colour for a laugh.
We tourists assume commonly that he knew no better. In our simple
faith in ourselves, great hope abides, for it shows an earnestness
hardly less than that of the crusaders; but in the matter of colour
one is perhaps less convinced, or more open to curiosity. No school
of colour exists in our world to-day, while the Middle Ages had a
dozen; but it is certainly true that these twelfth-century windows
break the French tradition. They had no antecedent, and no fit
succession. All the authorities dwell on their exceptional
character. One is sorely tempted to suspect that they were in some
way an accident; that such an art could not have sprung, in such
perfection, out of nothing, had it been really French; that it must
have had its home elsewhere--on the Rhine--in Italy--in Byzantium--
or in Bagdad.
The same controversy has raged for near two hundred years over the
Gothic arch, and everything else mediaeval, down to the philosophy
of the schools. The generation that lived during the first and
second crusades tried a number of original experiments, besides
capturing Jerusalem. Among other things, it produced the western
portal of Chartres, with its statuary, its glass, and its fleche, as
a by-play; as it produced Abelard, Saint Bernard, and Christian of
Troyes, whose acquaintance we have still to make. It took ideas
wherever it found them;--from Germany, Italy, Spain, Constantinople,
Palestine, or from the source which has always attracted the French
mind like a magnet--from ancient Greece. That it actually did take
the ideas, no one disputes, except perhaps patriots who hold that
even the ideas were original; but to most students the ideas need to
be accounted for less than the taste with which they were handled,
and the quickness with which they were developed. That the taste was
French, you can see in the architecture, or you will see if ever you
meet the Gothic elsewhere; that it seized and developed an idea
quickly, you have seen in the arch, the fleche, the porch, and the
windows, as well as in the glass; but what we do not comprehend, and
never shall, is the appetite behind all this; the greed for novelty:
the fun of life. Every one who has lived since the sixteenth century
has felt deep distrust of every one who lived before it, and of
every one who believed in the Middle Ages. True it is that the last
thirteenth-century artist died a long time before our planet began
its present rate of revolution; it had to come to rest, and begin
again; but this does not prevent astonishment that the twelfth-
century planet revolved so fast. The pointed arch not only came as
an idea into France, but it was developed into a system of
architecture and covered the country with buildings on a scale of
height never before attempted except by the dome, with an
expenditure of wealth that would make a railway system look cheap,
all in a space of about fifty years; the glass came with it, and
went with it, at least as far as concerns us; but, if you need other
evidence, you can consult Renan, who is the highest authority: "One
of the most singular phenomena of the literary history of the Middle
Ages," says Renan of Averroes, "is the activity of the intellectual
commerce, and the rapidity with which books were spread from one end
of Europe to the other. The philosophy of Abelard during his
lifetime (1100-42) had penetrated to the ends of Italy. The French
poetry of the trouveres counted within less than a century
translations into German, Swedish, Norwegian, Icelandic, Flemish,
Dutch, Bohemian, Italian, Spanish"; and he might have added that
England needed no translation, but helped to compose the poetry, not
being at that time so insular as she afterwards became. "Such or
such a work, composed in Morocco or in Cairo, was known at Paris and
at Cologne in less time than it would need in our days for a German
book of capital importance to pass the Rhine"; and Renan wrote this
in 1852 when German books of capital importance were revolutionizing
the literary world.
One is apt to forget the smallness of Europe, and how quickly it
could always be crossed. In summer weather, with fair winds, one can
sail from Alexandria or from Syria, to Sicily, or even to Spain and
France, in perfect safety and with ample room for freight, as easily
now as one could do it then, without the aid of steam; but one does
not now carry freight of philosophy, poetry, or art. The world still
struggles for unity, but by different methods, weapons, and thought.
The mercantile exchanges which surprised Renan, and which have
puzzled historians, were in ideas. The twelfth century was as greedy
for them in one shape as the nineteenth century in another. France
paid for them dearly, and repented for centuries; but what creates
surprise to the point of incredulity is her hunger for them, the
youthful gluttony with which she devoured them, the infallible taste
with which she dressed them out. The restless appetite that snatched
at the pointed arch, the stone fleche, the coloured glass, the
illuminated missal, the chanson and roman and pastorelle, the
fragments of Aristotle, the glosses of Avicenne, was nothing
compared with the genius which instantly gave form and flower to
them all.
This episode merely means that the French twelfth-century artist may
be supposed to have known his business, and if he produced a
grotesque, or a green-faced Saint, or a blue castle, or a syllogism,
or a song, that he did it with a notion of the effect he had in
mind. The glass window was to him a whole,--a mass,--and its details
were his amusement; for the twelfth-century Frenchman enjoyed his
fun, though it was sometimes rather heavy for modern French taste,
and less refined than the Church liked. These three twelfth-century
windows, like their contemporary portal outside, and the fleche that
goes with them, are the ideals of enthusiasts of mediaeval art; they
are above the level of all known art, in religious form; they are
inspired; they are divine! This is the claim of Chartres and its
Virgin. Actually, the French artist, whether architect, sculptor, or
painter in glass, did rise here above his usual level. He knew it
when he did it, and probably he attributed it, as we do, to the
Virgin; for these works of his were hardly fifty years old when the
rest of the old church was burned; and already the artist felt the
virtue gone out of him. He could not do so well in 1200 as he did in
1150; and the Virgin was not so near.
The proof of it--or, if you prefer to think so, the proof against
it--is before our eyes on the wall above the lancet windows. When
Villard de Honnecourt came to Chartres, he seized at once on the
western rose as his study, although the two other roses were
probably there, in all their beauty and lightness. He saw in the
western rose some quality of construction which interested him; and,
in fact, the western rose is one of the flowers of architecture
which reveals its beauties slowly without end; but its chief beauty
is the feeling which unites it with the portal, the lancets, and the
fleche. The glassworker here in the interior had the same task to
perform. The glass of the lancets was fifty years old when the glass
for the rose was planned; perhaps it was seventy, for the exact
dates are unknown, but it does not matter, for the greater the
interval, the more interesting is the treatment. Whatever the date,
the glass of the western rose cannot be much earlier or much later
than that of the other roses, or that of the choir, and yet you see
at a glance that it is quite differently treated. On such matters
one must, of course, submit to the opinion of artists, which one
does the more readily because they always disagree; but until the
artists tell us better, we may please ourselves by fancying that the
glass of the rose was intended to harmonize with that of the
lancets, and unite it with the thirteenth-century glass of the nave
and transepts. Among all the thirteenth-century windows the western
rose alone seems to affect a rivalry in brilliancy with the lancets,
and carries it so far that the separate medallions and pictures are
quite lost,--especially in direct sunshine,--blending in a confused
effect of opals, in a delirium of colour and light, with a result
like a cluster of stones in jewelry. Assuming as one must, in want
of the artist's instruction, that he knew what he wanted to do, and
did it, one must take for granted that he treated the rose as a
whole, and aimed at giving it harmony with the three precious
windows beneath. The effect is that of a single large ornament; a
round breastpin, or what is now called a sunburst, of jewels, with
three large pendants beneath.
We are ignorant tourists, liable to much error in trying to seek
motives in artists who worked seven hundred years ago for a society
which thought and felt in forms quite unlike ours, but the medieval
pilgrim was more ignorant than we, and much simpler in mind; if the
idea of an ornament occurs to us, it certainly occurred to him, and
still more to the glassworker whose business was to excite his
illusions. An artist, if good for anything, foresees what his public
will see; and what his public will see is what he ought to have
intended--the measure of his genius. If the public sees more than he
himself did, this is his credit; if less, this is his fault. No
matter how simple or ignorant we are, we ought to feel a discord or
a harmony where the artist meant us to feel it, and when we see a
motive, we conclude that other people have seen it before us, and
that it must, therefore, have been intended. Neither of the transept
roses is treated like this one; neither has the effect of a personal
ornament; neither is treated as a jewel. No one knew so well as the
artist that such treatment must give the effect of a jewel. The
Roses of France and of Dreux bear indelibly and flagrantly the
character of France and Dreux; on the western rose is stamped with
greater refinement but equal decision the character of a much
greater power than either of them.
No artist would have ventured to put up, before the eyes of Mary in
Majesty, above the windows so dear to her, any object that she had
not herself commanded. Whether a miracle was necessary, or whether
genius was enough, is a point of casuistry which you can settle with
Albertus Magnus or Saint Bernard, and which you will understand as
little when settled as before; but for us, beyond the futilities of
unnecessary doubt, the Virgin designed this rose; not perhaps in
quite the same perfect spirit in which she designed the lancets, but
still wholly for her own pleasure and as her own idea. She placed
upon the breast of her Church--which symbolized herself--a jewel so
gorgeous that no earthly majesty could bear comparison with it, and
which no other heavenly majesty has rivalled. As one watches the
light play on it, one is still overcome by the glories of the
jewelled rose and its three gemmed pendants; one feels a little of
the effect she meant it to produce even on infidels, Moors, and
heretics, but infinitely more on the men who feared and the women
who adored her;--not to dwell too long upon it, one admits that hers
is the only Church. One would admit anything that she should
require. If you had only the soul of a shrimp, you would crawl, like
the Abbe Suger, to kiss her feet.
Unfortunately she is gone, or comes here now so very rarely that we
never shall see her; but her genius remains as individual here as
the genius of Blanche of Castile and Pierre de Dreux in the
transepts. That the three lancets were her own taste, as distinctly
as the Trianon was the taste of Louis XIV, is self-evident. They
represent all that was dearest to her; her Son's glory on her right;
her own beautiful life in the middle; her royal ancestry on her
left: the story of her divine right, thrice-told. The pictures are
all personal, like family portraits. Above them the man who worked
in 1200 to carry out the harmony, and to satisfy the Virgin's
wishes, has filled his rose with a dozen or two little compositions
in glass, which reveal their subjects only to the best powers of a
binocle. Looking carefully, one discovers at last that this gorgeous
combination of all the hues of Paradise contains or hides a Last
Judgment--the one subject carefully excluded from the old work, and
probably not existing on the south portal for another twenty years.
If the scheme of the western rose dates from 1200, as is reasonable
to suppose, this Last Judgment is the oldest in the church, and
makes a link between the theology of the first crusade, beneath, and
the theology of Pierre Mauclerc in the south porch. The churchman is
the only true and final judge on his own doctrine, and we neither
know nor care to know the facts; but we are as good judges as he of
the feeling, and we are at full liberty to feel that such a Last
Judgment as this was never seen before or since by churchman or
heretic, unless by virtue of the heresy which held that the true
Christian must be happy in being damned since such is the will of
God. That this blaze of heavenly light was intended, either by the
Virgin or by her workmen, to convey ideas of terror or pain, is a
notion which the Church might possibly preach, but which we sinners
knew to be false in the thirteenth century as well as we know it
now. Never in all these seven hundred years has one of us looked up
at this rose without feeling it to be Our Lady's promise of
Paradise.
Here as everywhere else throughout the church, one feels the
Virgin's presence, with no other thought than her majesty and grace.
To the Virgin and to her suppliants, as to us, who though outcasts
in other churches can still hope in hers, the Last Judgment was not
a symbol of God's justice or man's corruption, but of her own
infinite mercy. The Trinity judged, through Christ;--Christ loved
and pardoned, through her. She wielded the last and highest power on
earth and in hell. In the glow and beauty of her nature, the light
of her Son's infinite love shone as the sunlight through the glass,
turning the Last Judgment itself into the highest proof of her
divine and supreme authority. The rudest ruffian of the Middle Ages,
when he looked at this Last Judgment, laughed; for what was the Last
Judgment to her! An ornament, a plaything, a pleasure! a jewelled
decoration which she wore on her breast! Her chief joy was to
pardon; her eternal instinct was to love; her deepest passion was
pity! On her imperial heart the flames of hell showed only the
opaline colours of heaven. Christ the Trinity might judge as much as
He pleased, but Christ the Mother would rescue; and her servants
could look boldly into the flames.
If you, or even our friends the priests who still serve Mary's
shrine, suspect that there is some exaggeration in this language, it
will only oblige you to admit presently that there is none; but for
the moment we are busy with glass rather than with faith, and there
is a world of glass here still to study. Technically, we are done
with it. The technique of the thirteenth century comes naturally and
only too easily out of that of the twelfth. Artistically, the motive
remains the same, since it is always the Virgin; but although the
Virgin of Chartres is always the Virgin of Majesty, there are
degrees in the assertion of her majesty even here, which affect the
art, and qualify its feeling. Before stepping down to the thirteenth
century, one should look at these changes of the Virgin's royal
presence.
First and most important as record is the stone Virgin on the south
door of the western portal, which we studied, with her Byzantine
Court; and the second, also in stone, is of the same period, on one
of the carved capitals of the portal, representing the Adoration of
the Magi. The third is the glass Virgin at the top of the central
lancet. All three are undoubted twelfth-century work; and you can
see another at Paris, on the same door of Notre Dame, and still more
on Abbe Suger's window at Saint-Denis, and, later, within a
beautiful grisaille at Auxerre; but all represent the same figure; a
Queen, enthroned, crowned, with the symbols of royal power, holding
in her lap the infant King whose guardian she is. Without pretending
to know what special crown she bears, we can assume, till corrected,
that it is the Carlovingian imperial, not the Byzantine. The Trinity
nowhere appears except as implied in the Christ. At the utmost, a
mystic hand may symbolize the Father. The Virgin as represented by
the artists of the twelfth century in the Ile de France and at
Chartres seems to be wholly French in spite of the Greek atmosphere
of her workmanship. One might almost insist that she is blonde, full
in face, large in figure, dazzlingly beautiful, and not more than
thirty years of age. The Child never seems to be more than five.
You are equally free to see a Southern or Eastern type in her face,
and perhaps the glass suggests a dark type, but the face of the
Virgin on the central lancet is a fourteenth-century restoration
which may or may not reproduce the original, while all the other
Virgins represented in glass, except one, belong to the thirteenth
century. The possible exception is a well-known figure called Notre-
Dame-de-la-Belle-Verriere in the choir next the south transept. A
strange, almost uncanny feeling seems to haunt this window,
heightened by the veneration in which it was long held as a shrine,
though it is now deserted for Notre-Dame-du-Pilier on the opposite
side of the choir. The charm is partly due to the beauty of the
scheme of the angels, supporting, saluting, and incensing the Virgin
and Child with singular grace and exquisite feeling, but rather that
of the thirteenth than of the twelfth century. Here, too, the face
of the Virgin is not ancient. Apparently the original glass was
injured by time or accident, and the colours were covered or renewed
by a simple drawing in oil. Elsewhere the colour is thought to be
particularly good, and the window is a favourite mine of motives for
artists to exploit, but to us its chief interest is its singular
depth of feeling. The Empress Mother sits full-face, on a rich
throne and dais, with the Child on her lap, repeating her attitude
except that her hands support His shoulders. She wears her crown;
her feet rest on a stool, and both stool, rug, robe, and throne are
as rich as colour and decoration can make them. At last a dove
appears, with the rays of the Holy Ghost. Imperial as the Virgin is,
it is no longer quite the unlimited empire of the western lancet.
The aureole encircles her head only; she holds no sceptre; the Holy
Ghost seems to give her support which she did not need before, while
Saint Gabriel and Saint Michael, her archangels, with their symbols
of power, have disappeared. Exquisite as the angels are who surround
and bear up her throne, they assert no authority. The window itself
is not a single composition; the panels below seem inserted later
merely to fill up the space; six represent the Marriage of Cana, and
the three at the bottom show a grotesque little demon tempting
Christ in the Desert. The effect of the whole, in this angle which
is almost always dark or filled with shadow, is deep and sad, as
though the Empress felt her authority fail, and had come down from
the western portal to reproach us for neglect. The face is haunting.
Perhaps its force may be due to nearness, for this is the only
instance in glass of her descending so low that we can almost touch
her, and see what the twelfth century instinctively felt in the
features which, even in their beatitude, were serious and almost sad
under the austere responsibilities of infinite pity and power.
No doubt the window is very old, or perhaps an imitation or
reproduction of one which was much older, but to the pilgrim its
interest lies mostly in its personality, and there it stands alone.
Although the Virgin reappears again and again in the lower windows,-
-as in those on either side of the Belle-Verriere; in the remnant of
window representing her miracles at Chartres, in the south aisle
next the transept; in the fifteenth-century window of the chapel of
Vendome which follows; and in the third window which follows that of
Vendome and represents her coronation,--she does not show herself
again in all her majesty till we look up to the high windows above.
There we shall find her in her splendour on her throne, above the
high altar, and still more conspicuously in the Rose of France in
the north transept. Still again she is enthroned in the first window
of the choir next the north transept. Elsewhere we can see her
standing, but never does she come down to us in the full splendour
of her presence. Yet wherever we find her at Chartres, and of
whatever period, she is always Queen. Her expression and attitude
are always calm and commanding. She never calls for sympathy by
hysterical appeals to our feelings; she does not even altogether
command, but rather accepts the voluntary, unquestioning,
unhesitating, instinctive faith, love, and devotion of mankind. She
will accept ours, and we have not the heart to refuse it; we have
not even the right, for we are her guests.