THE COURT OF THE QUEEN OF HEAVEN
All artists love the sanctuary of the Christian Church, and all
tourists love the rest. The reason becomes clear as one leaves the
choir, and goes back to the broad, open hall of the nave. The choir
was made not for the pilgrim but for the deity, and is as old as
Adam, or perhaps older; at all events old enough to have existed in
complete artistic and theological form, with the whole mystery of
the Trinity, the Mother and Child, and even the Cross, thousands of
years before Christ was born; but the Christian Church not only took
the sanctuary in hand, and gave it a new form, more beautiful and
much more refined than the Romans or Greeks or Egyptians had ever
imagined, but it also added the idea of the nave and transepts, and
developed it into imperial splendour. The pilgrim-tourist feels at
home in the nave because it was built for him; the artist loves the
sanctuary because he built it for God.
Chartres was intended to hold ten thousand people easily, or fifteen
thousand when crowded, and the decoration of this great space,
though not a wholly new problem, had to be treated in a new way.
Sancta Sofia was built by the Emperor Justinian, with all the
resources of the Empire, in a single violent effort, in six years,
and was decorated throughout with mosaics on a general scheme, with
the unity that Empire and Church could give, when they acted
together. The Norman Kings of Sicily, the richest princes of the
twelfth century, were able to carry out a complete work of the most
costly kind, in a single sustained effort from beginning to end,
according to a given plan. Chartres was a local shrine, in an
agricultural province, not even a part of the royal domain, and its
cathedral was the work of society, without much more tie than the
Virgin gave it. Socially Chartres, as far as its stone-work goes,
seems to have been mostly rural; its decoration, in the porches and
transepts, is royal and feudal; in the nave and choir it is chiefly
bourgeois. The want of unity is much less surprising than the unity,
but it is still evident, especially in the glass. The mosaics of
Monreale begin and end; they are a series; their connection is
artistic and theological at once; they have unity. The windows of
Chartres have no sequence, and their charm is in variety, in
individuality, and sometimes even in downright hostility to each
other, reflecting the picturesque society that gave them. They have,
too, the charm that the world has made no attempt to popularize them
for its modern uses, so that, except for the useful little guide-
book of the Abbe Clerval, one can see no clue to the legendary
chaos; one has it to one's self, without much fear of being trampled
upon by critics or Jew dealers in works of art; any Chartres beggar-
woman can still pass a summer's day here, and never once be
mortified by ignorance of things that every dealer in bric-a-brac is
supposed to know.
Yet the artists seem to have begun even here with some idea of
sequence, for the first window in the north aisle, next the new
tower, tells the story of Noah; but the next plunges into the local
history of Chartres, and is devoted to Saint Lubin, a bishop of this
diocese who died in or about the year 556, and was, for some reason,
selected by the Wine-Merchants to represent them, as their
interesting medallions show. Then follow three amusing subjects,
charmingly treated: Saint Eustace, whose story has been told; Joseph
and his brethren; and Saint Nicholas, the most popular saint of the
thirteenth century, both in the Greek and in the Roman Churches. The
sixth and last window on the north aisle of the nave is the New
Alliance.
Opposite these, in the south aisle, the series begins next the tower
with John the Evangelist, followed by Saint Mary Magdalen, given by
the Water-Carriers. The third, the Good Samaritan, given by the
Shoemakers, has a rival at Sens which critics think even better. The
fourth is the Death, Assumption, and Coronation of the Virgin. Then
comes the fifteenth-century Chapel of Vendome, to compare the early
and later glass. The sixth is, or was, devoted to the Virgin's
Miracles at Chartres; but only one complete subject remains.
These windows light the two aisles of the nave and decorate the
lower walls of the church with a mass of colour and variety of line
still practically intact in spite of much injury; but the windows of
the transepts on the same level have almost disappeared, except the
Prodigal Son and a border to what was once a Saint Lawrence, on the
north; and, on the south, part of a window to Saint Apollinaris of
Ravenna, with an interesting hierarchy of angels above:--seraphim
and cherubim with six wings, red and blue; Dominations; Powers;
Principalities; all, except Thrones.
All this seems to be simple enough, at least to the people for whom
the nave was built, and to whom the windows were meant to speak.
There is nothing esoteric here; nothing but what might have suited
the great hall of a great palace. There is no difference in taste
between the Virgin in the choir, and the Water-Carriers by the
doorway. Blanche, the young Queen, liked the same colours, legends,
and lines that her Grocers and Bakers liked. All equally loved the
Virgin. There was not even a social difference. In the choir,
Thibaut, the Count of Chartres, immediate lord of the province, let
himself be put in a dark corner next the Belle Verriere, and left
the Bakers to display their wealth in the most serious spot in the
church, the central window of the central chapel, while in the nave
and transepts all the lower windows that bear signatures were given
by trades, as though that part of the church were abandoned to the
commons. One might suppose that the feudal aristocracy would have
fortified itself in the clerestory and upper windows, but even there
the bourgeoisie invaded them, and you can see, with a glass, the
Pastrycooks and Turners looking across at the Weavers and Curriers
and Money-Changers, and the "Men of Tours." Beneath the throne of
the Mother of God, there was no distinction of gifts; and above it
the distinction favoured the commonalty.
Of the seven immense windows above and around the high altar, which
are designed as one composition, none was given by a prince or a
noble. The Drapers, the Butchers, the Bakers, the Bankers are
charged with the highest duties attached to the Virgin's service.
Apparently neither Saint Louis, nor his father Louis VIII, nor his
mother Blanche, nor his uncle Philippe Hurepel, nor his cousin Saint
Ferdinand of Castile, nor his other cousin Pierre de Dreux, nor the
Duchess Alix of Brittany, cared whether their portraits or armorial
shields were thrust out of sight into corners by Pastrycooks and
Teamsters, or took a whole wall of the church to themselves. The
only relation that connects them is their common relation to the
Virgin, but that is emphatic, and dominates the whole.
It dominates us, too, if we reflect on it, even after seven hundred
years that its meaning has faded. When one looks up to this display
of splendour in the clerestory, and asks what was in the minds of
the people who joined to produce, with such immense effort and at
such self-sacrifice, this astonishing effect, the question seems to
answer itself like an echo. With only half of an atrophied
imagination, in a happy mood we could still see the nave and
transepts filled with ten thousand people on their knees, and the
Virgin, crowned and robed, seating herself on the embroidered
cushion that covered her imperial throne; sparkling with gems;
bearing in her right hand the sceptre, and in her lap the infant
King; but, in the act of seating herself, we should see her pause a
moment to look down with love and sympathy on us,--her people,--who
pack the enormous hall, and throng far out beyond the open portals;
while, an instant later, she glances up to see that her great lords,
spiritual and temporal, the advisers of her judgment, the supports
of her authority, the agents of her will, shall be in place; robed,
mitred, armed; bearing the symbols of her authority and their
office; on horseback, lance in hand; all of them ready at a sign to
carry out a sentence of judgment or an errand of mercy; to touch
with the sceptre or to strike with the sword; and never err.
There they still stand! unchanged, unfaded, as alive and complete as
when they represented the real world, and the people below were the
unreal and ephemeral pageant! Then the reality was the Queen of
Heaven on her throne in the sanctuary, and her court in the glass;
not the queens or princes who were prostrating themselves, with the
crowd, at her feet. These people knew the Virgin as well as they
knew their own mothers; every jewel in her crown, every stitch of
gold-embroidery in her many robes; every colour; every fold; every
expression on the perfectly familiar features of her grave, imperial
face; every care that lurked in the silent sadness of her power;
repeated over and over again, in stone, glass, ivory, enamel, wood;
in every room, at the head of every bed, hanging on every neck,
standing at every street-corner, the Virgin was as familiar to every
one of them as the sun or the seasons; far more familiar than their
own earthly queen or countess, although these were no strangers in
their daily life; familiar from the earliest childhood to the last
agony; in every joy and every sorrow and every danger; in every act
and almost in every thought of life, the Virgin was present with a
reality that never belonged to her Son or to the Trinity, and hardly
to any earthly being, prelate, king, or kaiser; her daily life was
as real to them as their own loyalty which brought to her the best
they had to offer as the return for her boundless sympathy; but
while they knew the Virgin as though she were one of themselves, and
because she had been one of themselves, they were not so familiar
with all the officers of her court at Chartres; and pilgrims from
abroad, like us, must always have looked with curious interest at
the pageant.
Far down the nave, next the western towers, the rank began with
saints, prophets, and martyrs, of all ages and countries; local,
like Saint Lubin; national, like Saint Martin of Tours and Saint
Hilary of Poitiers; popular like Saint Nicholas; militant like Saint
George; without order; symbols like Abraham and Isaac; the Virgin
herself, holding on her lap the Seven Gifts of the Holy Ghost;
Christ with the Alpha and Omega; Moses and Saint Augustine; Saint
Peter; Saint Mary the Egyptian; Saint Jerome; a whole throne-room of
heavenly powers, repeating, within, the pageant carved on the
porches and on the portals without. From the croisee in the centre,
where the crowd is most dense, one sees the whole almost better than
Mary sees it from her high altar, for there all the great rose
windows flash in turn, and the three twelfth-century lancets glow on
the western sun. When the eyes of the throng are directed to the
north, the Rose of France strikes them almost with a physical shock
of colour, and, from the south, the Rose of Dreux challenges the
Rose of France.
Every one knows that there is war between the two! The thirteenth
century has few secrets. There are no outsiders. We are one family
as we are one Church. Every man and woman here, from Mary on her
throne to the beggar on the porch, knows that Pierre de Dreux
detests Blanche of Castile, and that their two windows carry on war
across the very heart of the cathedral. Both unite only in asking
help from Mary; but Blanche is a woman, alone in the world with
young children to protect, and most women incline strongly to
suspect that Mary will never desert her. Pierre, with all his
masculine strength, is no courtier. He wants to rule by force. He
carries the assertion of his sex into the very presence of the Queen
of Heaven.
The year happens to be 1230, when the roses may be supposed just
finished and showing their whole splendour for the first time. Queen
Blanche is forty-three years old, and her son Louis is fifteen.
Blanche is a widow these four years, and Pierre a widower since
1221. Both are regents and guardians for their heirs. They have
necessarily carried their disputes before Mary. Queen Blanche claims
for her son, who is to be Saint Louis, the place of honour at Mary's
right hand; she has taken possession of the north porch outside, and
of the north transept within, and has filled the windows with glass,
as she is filling the porch with statuary. Above is the huge rose;
below are five long windows; and all proclaim the homage that France
renders to the Queen of Heaven.
The Rose of France shows in its centre the Virgin in her majesty,
seated, crowned, holding the sceptre with her right hand, while her
left supports the infant Christ-King on her knees; which shows that
she, too, is acting as regent for her Son. Round her, in a circle,
are twelve medallions; four containing doves; four six-winged angels
or Thrones; four angels of a lower order, but all symbolizing the
gifts and endowments of the Queen of Heaven. Outside these are
twelve more medallions with the Kings of Judah, and a third circle
contains the twelve lesser prophets. So Mary sits, hedged in by all
the divinity that graces earthly or heavenly kings; while between
the two outer circles are twelve quatrefoils bearing on a blue
ground the golden lilies of France; and in each angle below the rose
are four openings, showing alternately the lilies of Louis and the
castles of Blanche. We who are below, the common people, understand
that France claims to protect and defend the Virgin of Chartres, as
her chief vassal, and that this ostentatious profusion of lilies and
castles is intended not in honour of France, but as a demonstration
of loyalty to Notre Dame, and an assertion of her rights as Queen
Regent of Heaven against all comers, but particularly against
Pierre, the rebel, who has the audacity to assert rival rights in
the opposite transept.
Beneath the rose are five long windows, very unlike the twelfth-
century pendants to the western rose. These five windows blaze with
red, and their splendour throws the Virgin above quite into the
background. The artists, who felt that the twelfth-century glass was
too fine and too delicate for the new scale of the church, have not
only enlarged their scale and coarsened their design, but have
coarsened their colour-scheme also, discarding blue in order to
crush us under the earthly majesty of red. These windows, too, bear
the stamp and seal of Blanche's Spanish temper as energetically as
though they bore her portrait. The great central figure, the tallest
and most commanding in the whole church, is not the Virgin, but her
mother Saint Anne, standing erect as on the trumeau of the door
beneath, and holding the infant Mary on her left arm. She wears no
royal crown, but bears a flowered sceptre. The only other difference
between Mary and her mother, that seems intended to strike
attention, is that Mary sits, while her mother stands; but as though
to proclaim still more distinctly that France supports the royal and
divine pretensions of Saint Anne, Queen Blanche has put beneath the
figure a great shield blazoned with the golden lilies on an azure
ground.
With singular insistence on this motive, Saint Anne has at either
hand a royal court of her own, marked as her own by containing only
figures from the Old Testament. Standing next on her right is
Solomon, her Prime Minister, bringing wisdom in worldly counsel, and
trampling on human folly. Beyond Wisdom stands Law, figured by Aaron
with the Book, trampling on the lawless Pharaoh. Opposite them, on
Saint Anne's left, is David, the energy of State, trampling on a
Saul suggesting suspicions of a Saul de Dreux; while last,
Melchisedec who is Faith, tramples on a disobedient Nebuchadnezzar
Mauclerc.
How can we, the common people, help seeing all this, and much more,
when we know that Pierre de Dreux has been for years in constant
strife with the Crown and the Church? He is very valiant and lion-
hearted;--so say the chroniclers, priests though they are;--very
skilful and experienced in war whether by land or sea; very adroit,
with more sense than any other great lord in France; but restless,
factious, and regardless of his word. Brave and bold as the day;
full of courtesy and "largesse"; but very hard on the clergy; a good
Christian but a bad churchman! Certainly the first man of his time,
says Michelet! "I have never found any that sought to do me more ill
than he," says Blanche, and Joinville gives her very words; indeed,
this year, 1230, she has summoned our own Bishop of Chartres among
others to Paris in a court of peers, where Pierre has been found
guilty of treason and deposed. War still continues, but Pierre must
make submission. Blanche has beaten him in politics and in the
field! Let us look round and see how he fares in theology and art!
There is his rose--so beautiful that Blanche may well think it seeks
to do hers ill! As colour, judge for yourselves whether it holds its
own against the flaming self-assertion of the opposite wall! As
subject, it asserts flat defiance of the monarchy of Queen Blanche.
In the central circle, Christ as King is seated on a royal throne,
both arms raised, one holding the golden cup of eternal priesthood,
the other, blessing the world. Two great flambeaux burn beside Him.
The four Apocalyptic figures surround and worship Him; and in the
concentric circles round the central medallion are the angels and
the kings in a blaze of colour, symbolizing the New Jerusalem.
All the force of the Apocalypse is there, and so is some of the
weakness of theology, for, in the five great windows below, Pierre
shows his training in the schools. Four of these windows represent
what is called, for want of a better name, the New Alliance; the
dependence of the New Testament on the Old; but Pierre's choice in
symbols was as masculine as that of Blanche was feminine. In each of
the four windows, a gigantic Evangelist strides the shoulders of a
colossal Prophet. Saint John rides on Ezekiel; Saint Mark bestrides
Daniel; Saint Matthew is on the shoulders of Isaiah; Saint Luke is
carried by Jeremiah. The effect verges on the grotesque. The balance
of Christ's Church seems uncertain. The Evangelists clutch the
Prophets by the hair, and while the synagogue stands firm, the
Church looks small, feeble, and vacillating. The new dispensation
has not the air of mastery either physical or intellectual; the old
gives it all the support it has, and, in the absence of Saint Paul,
both old and new seem little concerned with the sympathies of
Frenchmen. The synagogue is stronger than the Church, but even the
Church is Jew.
That Pierre could ever have meant this is not to be dreamed; but
when the true scholar gets thoroughly to work, his logic is
remorseless, his art is implacable, and his sense of humour is
blighted. In the rose above, Pierre had asserted the exclusive
authority of Christ in the New Jerusalem, and his scheme required
him to show how the Church rested on the Evangelists below, who in
their turn had no visible support except what the Prophets gave
them. Yet the artist may have had a reason for weakening the
Evangelists, because there remained the Virgin! One dares no more
than hint at a motive so disrespectful to the Evangelists; but it is
certainly true that, in the central window, immediately beneath the
Christ, and His chief support, with the four staggering Evangelists
and Prophets on either hand, the Virgin stands, and betrays no sign
of weakness.
The compliment is singularly masculine; a kind of twelfth-century
flattery that might have softened the anger of Blanche herself, if
the Virgin had been her own; but the Virgin of Dreux is not the
Virgin of France. No doubt she still wears her royal crown, and her
head is circled with the halo; her right hand still holds the
flowered sceptre, and her left the infant Christ, but she stands,
and Christ is King. Note, too, that she stands directly opposite to
her mother Saint Anne in the Rose of France, so as to place her one
stage lower than the Virgin of France in the hierarchy. She is the
Saint Anne of France, and shows it. "She is no longer," says the
official Monograph, "that majestic queen who was seated on a throne,
with her feet on the stool of honour; the personages have become
less imposing and the heads show the decadence." She is the Virgin
of Theology; she has her rights, and no more; but she is not the
Virgin of Chartres.
She, too, stands on an altar or pedestal, on which hangs a shield
bearing the ermines, an exact counterpart of the royal shield
beneath Saint Anne. In this excessive display of armorial bearings--
for the two roses above are crowded with them--one likes to think
that these great princes had in their minds not so much the thought
of their own importance--which is a modern sort of religion--as the
thought of their devotion to Mary. The assertion of power and
attachment by one is met by the assertion of equal devotion by the
other, and while both loudly proclaim their homage to the Virgin,
each glares defiance across the church. Pierre meant the Queen of
Heaven to know that, in case of need, her left hand was as good as
her right, and truer; that the ermines were as well able to defend
her as the lilies, and that Brittany would fight her battles as
bravely as France. Whether his meaning carried with it more devotion
to the Virgin or more defiance to France depends a little on the
date of the windows, but, as a mere point of history, every one must
allow that Pierre's promise of allegiance was kept more faithfully
by Brittany than that of Blanche and Saint Louis has been kept by
France.
The date seems to be fixed by the windows themselves. Beneath the
Prophets kneel Pierre and his wife Alix, while their two children,
Yolande and Jean, stand. Alix died in 1221. Jean was born in 1217.
Yolande was affianced in marriage in 1227, while a child, and given
to Queen Blanche to be brought up as the future wife of her younger
son John, then in his eighth year. When John died, Yolande was
contracted to Thibaut of Champagne in 1231, and Blanche is said to
have written to Thibaut in consequence: "Sire Thibauld of Champagne,
I have heard that you have covenanted and promised to take to wife
the daughter of Count Perron of Brittany. Wherefore I charge you, if
you do not wish to lose whatever you possess in the kingdom of
France, not to do it. If you hold dear or love aught in the said
kingdom, do it not." Whether Blanche wrote in these words or not,
she certainly prevented the marriage, and Yolande remained single
until 1238 when she married the Comte de la Marche, who was, by the
way, almost as bitter an enemy of Blanche as Pierre had been; but by
that time both Blanche and Pierre had ceased to be regents.
Yolande's figure in the window is that of a girl, perhaps twelve or
fourteen years old; Jean is younger, certainly not more than eight
or ten years of age; and the appearance of the two children shows
that the window itself should date between 1225 and 1230, the year
when Pierre de Dreux was condemned because he had renounced his
homage to King Louis, declared war on him, and invited the King of
England into France. As already told, Philippe Hurepel de Boulogne,
the Comte de la Marche, Enguerrand de Couci,--nearly all the great
nobles,--had been leagued with Pierre de Dreux since Blanche's
regency began in 1226.
That these transept windows harmonize at all, is due to the Virgin,
not to the donors. At the time they were designed, supposing it to
be during Blanche's regency (1226-36), the passions of these donors
brought France to momentary ruin, and the Virgin in Blanche's Rose
de France, as she looked across the church, could not see a single
friend of Blanche. What is more curious, she saw enemies in plenty,
and in full readiness for battle. We have seen in the centre of the
small rose in the north transept, Philippe Hurepel still waiting her
orders; across the nave, in another small rose of the south
transept, sits Pierre de Dreux on his horse. The upper windows on
the side walls of the choir are very interesting but impossible to
see, even with the best glasses, from the floor of the church. Their
sequence and dates have already been discussed; but their feeling is
shown by the character of the Virgin, who in French territory, next
the north transept, is still the Virgin of France, but in Pierre's
territory, next the Rose de Dreux, becomes again the Virgin of
Dreux, who is absorbed in the Child,--not the Child absorbed in
her,--and accordingly the window shows the chequers and ermines.
The figures, like the stone figures outside, are the earliest of
French art, before any school of painting fairly existed. Among
them, one can see no friend of Blanche. Indeed, outside of her own
immediate family and the Church, Blanche had no friend of much
importance except the famous Thibaut of Champagne, the single member
of the royal family who took her side and suffered for her sake, and
who, as far as books tell, has no window or memorial here. One might
suppose that Thibaut, who loved both Blanche and the Virgin, would
have claimed a place, and perhaps he did; but one seeks him in vain.
If Blanche had friends here, they are gone. Pierre de Dreux, lance
in hand, openly defies her, and it was not on her brother-in-law
Philippe Hurepel that she could depend for defence.
This is the court pageant of the Virgin that shows itself to the
people who are kneeling at high mass. We, the public, whoever we
are,--Chartrain, Breton, Norman, Angevin, Frenchman, Percherain, or
what not,--know our local politics as intimately as our lords do, or
even better, for our imaginations are active, and we do not love
Blanche of Castile. We know how to read the passions that fill the
church. From the north transept Blanche flames out on us in splendid
reds and flings her Spanish castles in our face. From the south
transept Pierre retorts with a brutal energy which shows itself in
the Prophets who serve as battle-chargers and in the Evangelists who
serve as knights,--mounted warriors of faith,--whose great eyes
follow us across the church and defy Saint Anne and her French
shield opposite. Pierre was not effeminate; Blanche was fairly
masculine. Between them, as a matter of sex, we can see little to
choose; and, in any case, it is a family quarrel; they are all
cousins; they are all equals on earth, and none means to submit to
any superior except the Virgin and her Son in heaven. The Virgin is
not afraid. She has seen many troubles worse than this; she knows
how to manage perverse children, and if necessary she will shut them
up in a darker room than ever their mothers kept open for them in
this world. One has only to look at the Virgin to see!
There she is, of course, looking down on us from the great window
above the high altar, where we never forget her presence! Is there a
thought of disturbance there? Around the curve of the choir are
seven great windows, without roses, filling the whole semicircle and
the whole vault, forty-seven feet high, and meant to dominate the
nave as far as the western portal, so that we may never forget how
Mary fills her church without being disturbed by quarrels, and may
understand why Saint Ferdinand and Saint Louis creep out of our
sight, close by the Virgin's side, far up above brawls; and why
France and Brittany hide their ugly or their splendid passions at
the ends of the transepts, out of sight of the high altar where Mary
is to sit in state as Queen with the young King on her lap. In an
instant she will come, but we have a moment still to look about at
the last great decoration of her palace, and see how the artists
have arranged it.
Since the building of Sancta Sofia, no artist has had such a chance.
No doubt, Rheims and Amiens and Bourges and Beauvais, which are now
building, may be even finer, but none of them is yet finished, and
all must take their ideas from here. One would like, before looking
at it, to think over the problem, as though it were new, and so
choose the scheme that would suit us best if the decoration were to
be done for the first time. The architecture is fixed; we have to do
only with the colour of this mass of seven huge windows, forty-seven
feet high, in the clerestory, round the curve of the choir, which
close the vista of the church as viewed from the entrance. This
vista is about three hundred and thirty feet long. The windows rise
above a hundred feet. How ought this vast space to be filled? Should
the perpendicular upward leap of the architecture be followed and
accented by a perpendicular leap of colour? The decorators of the
fifteenth and sixteenth centuries seem to have thought so, and made
perpendicular architectural drawings in yellow that simulated gold,
and lines that ran with the general lines of the building. Many
fifteenth-century windows seem to be made up of florid Gothic
details rising in stages to the vault. No doubt critics complained,
and still complain, that the monotony of this scheme, and its
cheapness of intelligence, were objections; but at least the effect
was light, decorative, and safe. The artist could not go far wrong
and was still at liberty to do beautiful work, as can be seen in any
number of churches scattered broadcast over Europe and swarming in
Paris and France. On the other hand, might not the artist disregard
the architecture and fill the space with a climax of colour? Could
he not unite the Roses of France and Dreux above the high altar in
an overpowering outburst of purples and reds? The seventeenth
century might have preferred to mass clouds and colours, and Michael
Angelo, in the sixteenth, might have known how to do it. What we
want is not the feeling of the artist so much as the feeling of
Chartres. What shall it be--the jewelled brilliancy of the western
windows, or the fierce self-assertion of Pierre Mauclerc, or the
royal splendour of Queen Blanche, or the feminine grace and
decorative refinement of the Charlemagne and Santiago windows in the
apse?
Never again in art was so splendid a problem offered, either before
or since, for the artist of Chartres solved it, as he did the whole
matter of fenestration, and later artists could only offer
variations on his work. You will see them at Bourges and Tours and
in scores of thirteenth and fourteenth and fifteenth and sixteenth
century churches and windows, and perhaps in some of the twentieth
century,--all of them interesting and some of them beautiful,--and
far be it from us, mean and ignorant pilgrims of art, to condemn any
intelligent effort to vary or improve the effect; but we have set
out to seek the feeling, and while we think of art in relation to
ourselves, the sermon of Chartres, from beginning to end, teaches
and preaches and insists and reiterates and hammers into our torpid
minds the moral that the art of the Virgin was not that of her
artists but her own. We inevitably think of our tastes; they thought
instinctively of hers.
In the transepts, Queen Blanche and Duke Perron, in legal possession
of their territory, showed that they were thinking of each other as
well as of the Virgin, and claimed loudly that they ought each to be
first in the Virgin's favour; and they stand there in place, as the
thirteenth century felt them. Subject to their fealty to Mary, the
transepts belonged to them, and if Blanche did not, like Pierre,
assert Herself and her son on the Virgin's window, perhaps she
thought the Virgin would resent Pierre's boldness the more by
contrast with her own good taste. So far as is known, nowhere does
Blanche appear in person at Chartres; she felt herself too near the
Virgin to obtrude a useless image, or she was too deeply religious
to ask anything for herself. A queen who was to have two children
sainted, to intercede for her at Mary's throne, stood in a solitude
almost as unique as that of Mary, and might ignore the raw
brutalities of a man-at-arms; but neither she nor Pierre has carried
the quarrel into Mary's presence, nor has the Virgin condescended
even to seem conscious of their temper. This is the theme of the
artist--the purity, the beauty, the grace, and the infinite
loftiness of Mary's nature, among the things of earth, and above the
clamour of kings.
Therefore, when we, and the crushed crowd of kneeling worshippers
around us, lift our eyes at last after the miracle of the mass, we
see, far above the high altar, high over all the agitation of
prayer, the passion of politics, the anguish of suffering, the
terrors of sin, only the figure of the Virgin in majesty, looking
down on her people, crowned, throned, glorified, with the infant
Christ on her knees. She does not assert herself; probably she
intends to be felt rather than feared. Compared with the Greek
Virgin, as you see her, for example, at Torcello, the Chartres
Virgin is retiring and hardly important enough for the place. She is
not exaggerated either in scale, drawing, or colour. She shows not a
sign of self-consciousness, not an effort for brilliancy, not a
trace of stage effect--hardly even a thought of herself, except that
she is at home, among her own people, where she is loved and known
as well as she knows them. The seven great windows are one
composition; and it is plain that the artist, had he been ordered to
make an exhibition of power, could have overwhelmed us with a storm
of purple, red, yellows, or given us a Virgin of Passion who would
have torn the vault asunder; his ability is never in doubt, and if
he has kept true to the spirit of the western portal and the
twelfth-century, it is because the Virgin of Chartres was the Virgin
of Grace, and ordered him to paint her so. One shudders to think how
a single false note--a suggestion of meanness, in this climax of
line and colour--would bring the whole fabric down in ruins on the
eighteenth-century meanness of the choir below; and one notes,
almost bashfully, the expedients of the artists to quiet their
effects. So the lines of the seven windows are built up, to avoid
the horizontal, and yet not exaggerate the vertical.
The architect counts here for more than the colourist; but the
colour, when you study it, suggests the same restraint. Three great
windows on the Virgin's right, balanced by three more on her left,
show the prophets and precursors of her Son; all architecturally
support and exalt the Virgin, in her celestial atmosphere of blue,
shot with red, calm in the certainty of heaven. Any one who is
prematurely curious to see the difference in treatment between
different centuries should go down to the church of Saint Pierre in
the lower town, and study there the methods of the Renaissance. Then
we can come back to study again the ways of the thirteenth century.
The Virgin will wait; she will not be angry; she knows her power; we
all come back to her in the end.
Or the Renaissance, if one prefers, can wait equally well, while one
kneels with the thirteenth century, and feels the little one still
can feel of what it felt. Technically these apsidal windows have not
received much notice; the books rarely speak of them; travellers
seldom look at them; and their height is such that even with the
best glass, the quality of the work is beyond our power to judge. We
see, and the artists meant that we should see, only the great lines,
the colour, and the Virgin. The mass of suppliants before the choir
look up to the light, clear blues and reds of this great space, and
feel there the celestial peace and beauty of Mary's nature and
abode. There is heaven! and Mary looks down from it, into her
church, where she sees us on our knees, and knows each one of us by
name. There she actually is--not in symbol or in fancy, but in
person, descending on her errands of mercy and listening to each one
of us, as her miracles prove, or satisfying our prayers merely by
her presence which calms our excitement as that of a mother calms
her child. She is there as Queen, not merely as intercessor, and her
power is such that to her the difference between us earthly beings
is nothing. Her quiet, masculine strength enchants us most. Pierre
Mauclerc and Philippe Hurepel and their men-at-arms are afraid of
her, and the Bishop himself is never quite at his ease in her
presence; but to peasants, and beggars, and people in trouble, this
sense of her power and calm is better than active sympathy. People
who suffer beyond the formulas of expression--who are crushed into
silence, and beyond pain--want no display of emotion--no bleeding
heart--no weeping at the foot of the Cross--no hysterics--no
phrases! They want to see God, and to know that He is watching over
His own. How many women are there, in this mass of thirteenth
century suppliants, who have lost children? Probably nearly all, for
the death rate is very high in the conditions of medieval life.
There are thousands of such women here, for it is precisely this
class who come most; and probably every one of them has looked up to
Mary in her great window, and has felt actual certainty, as though
she saw with her own eyes--there, in heaven, while she looked--her
own lost baby playing with the Christ-Child at the Virgin's knee, as
much at home as the saints, and much more at home than the kings.
Before rising from her knees, every one of these women will have
bent down and kissed the stone pavement in gratitude for Mary's
mercy. The earth, she says, is a sorry place, and the best of it is
bad enough, no doubt, even for Queen Blanche and the Duchess Alix
who has had to leave her children here alone; but there above is
Mary in heaven who sees and hears me as I see her, and who keeps my
little boy till I come; so I can wait with patience, more or less!
Saints and prophets and martyrs are all very well, and Christ is
very sublime and just, but Mary knows!
It was very childlike, very foolish, very beautiful, and very true,-
-as art, at least:--so true that everything else shades off into
vulgarity, as you see the Persephone of a Syracusan coin shade off
into the vulgarity of a Roman emperor; as though the heaven that
lies about us in our infancy too quickly takes colours that are not
so much sober as sordid, and would be welcome if no worse than that.
Vulgarity, too, has feeling, and its expression in art has truth and
even pathos, but we shall have time enough in our lives for that,
and all the more because, when we rise from our knees now, we have
finished our pilgrimage. We have done with Chartres. For seven
hundred years Chartres has seen pilgrims, coming and going more or
less like us, and will perhaps see them for another seven hundred
years; but we shall see it no more, and can safely leave the Virgin
in her majesty, with her three great prophets on either hand, as
calm and confident in their own strength and in God's providence as
they were when Saint Louis was born, but looking down from a
deserted heaven, into an empty church, on a dead faith.