Ver.10/04/01*END*
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GASTON DE LATOUR: AN UNFINISHED ROMANCE
WALTER PATER
1. A Clerk in Orders: 1-25
2. Our Lady's Church: 26-47
3. Modernity: 48-72
4. Peach-Blossom and Wine: 73-90
5. Suspended Judgment: 91-115
6. Shadows of Events: 116-131
7. The Lower Pantheism: 132-end
I. A CLERK IN ORDERS
The white walls of the Château of Deux-manoirs, with its precincts,
composed, before its dismantling at the Revolution, the one prominent
object which towards the southwest broke the pleasant level of La
Beauce, the great corn-land of central France. Abode in those days
of the family of Latour, nesting there century after century, it
recorded significantly the effectiveness of their brotherly union,
less by way of invasion of the rights of others than by the
improvement of all gentler sentiments within. From the sumptuous
monuments of their last resting-place, backwards to every object
which had encircled them in that warmer and more lightsome home it
was visible they had cared for so much, even in some peculiarities of
the very ground-plan of the house itself--everywhere was the token of
their anxious estimate of all those incidents of man's pathway
through the world [2] which knit the wayfarers thereon most closely
together.
Why this irregularity of ground-plan?--the traveller would ask;
recognising indeed a certain distinction in its actual effect on the
eye, and suspecting perhaps some conscious aim at such effect on the
part of the builders of the place in an age indulgent of
architectural caprices. And the traditional answer to the question,
true for once, still showed the race of Latour making much, making
the most, of the sympathetic ties of human life. The work, in large
measure, of Gaston de Latour, it was left unfinished at his death,
some time about the year 1594. That it was never completed could
hardly be attributed to any lack of means, or of interest; for it is
plain that to the period of the Revolution, after which its scanty
remnants passed into humble occupation (a few circular turrets, a
crenellated curtain wall, giving a random touch of dignity to some
ordinary farm-buildings) the place had been scrupulously maintained.
It might seem to have been a kind of reverence rather that had
allowed the work to remain untouched for future ages precisely at
this point in its growth.
And the expert architectural mind, peeping acutely into recondite
motives and half-accomplished purposes in such matters, could detect
the circumstance which had determined that so noticeable peculiarity
of ground-plan. Its kernel was not, as in most similar buildings of
that date, [3] a feudal fortress, but an unfortified manor-house--a
double manoir--two houses, oddly associated at a right angle. Far
back in the Middle Age, said a not uncertain tradition, here had been
the one point of contact between two estates, intricately interlocked
with alien domain, as, in the course of generations, the family of
Latour, and another, had added field to field. In the single lonely
manor then existing two brothers had grown up; and the time came when
the marriage of the younger to the heiress of those neighbouring
lands would divide two perfect friends. Regretting over-night so
dislocating a change it was the elder who, as the drowsy hours flowed
away in manifold recollection beside the fire, now suggested to the
younger, himself already wistfully recalling, as from the past, the
kindly motion and noise of the place like a sort of audible sunlight,
the building of a second manor-house--the Château d'Amour, as it came
to be called--that the two families, in what should be as nearly as
possible one abode, might take their fortunes together.
Of somewhat finer construction than the rough walls of the older
manor, the Château d'Amour stood, amid the change of years, as a
visible record of all the accumulated sense of human existence among
its occupants. The old walls, the old apartments, of those two
associated houses still existed, with some obvious additions, beneath
the delicate, fantastic surfaces of the château [4] of the sixteenth
century. Its singularity of outline was the very symbol of the
religion of the family in the race of Latour, still full of loyalty
to the old home, as its numerous outgrowths took hold here and there
around. A race with some prominent characteristics ineradicable in
the grain, they went to raise the human level about them by a
transfer of blood, far from involving any social decadence in
themselves. A peculiar local variety of character, of manners, in
that district of La Beauce, surprised the more observant visitor who
might find his way into farmhouse or humble presbytery of its
scattered townships. And as for those who kept up the central
tradition of their house, they were true to the soil, coming back,
under whatever obstacles, from court, from cloister, from distant
crusade, to the visible spot where the memory of their kindred was
liveliest and most exact--a memory, touched so solemnly with a
conscience of the intimacies of life, its significant events, its
contacts and partings, that to themselves it was like a second sacred
history.
It was a great day, amid all their quiet days, for the people of
Deux-manoirs--one of the later days of August. The event, which
would mark it always in the life of one of them, called into play all
that was most expressive in that well-defined family character: it
was at once the recognition of what they valued most in past years,
and an assertion of will, or hope, for the [5] future, accordant
thereto. Far away in Paris the young King Charles the Ninth, in his
fourteenth year, had been just declared of age. Here, in the church
of Saint Hubert, church of their parish, and of their immemorial
patronage, though it lay at a considerable distance from their abode,
the chiefs of the house of Latour, attended by many of its dependents
and less important members, were standing ready, around the last hope
of their old age--the grandparents, their aged brothers and sisters,
certain aged ecclesiastics of their kindred, wont to be called to the
family councils.
They had set out on foot, after a votive mass said early in the old
chapel of the manor, to assist at the ceremony of the day.
Distinguishable from afar by unusual height in proportion to its
breadth within, the church of Saint Hubert had an atmosphere, a
daylight, to itself. Its stained glass, work of the same hands that
had wrought for the cathedral of Chartres, admitted only an almost
angry ray of purple or crimson, here or there, across the dark, roomy
spaces. The heart, the heart of youth at least, sank, as one
entered, stepping warily out of the sunshine over the sepulchral
stones which formed the entire pavement of the church, a great
blazonry of family history from age to age for indefatigable eyes.
An abundance of almost life-sized sculpture clung to the pillars,
lurked in the angles, seemed, with those symbolical gestures, and
mystic faces [6] ready to speak their parts, to be almost in motion
through the gloom. Many years after, Gaston de Latour, an enemy of
all Gothic darkness or heaviness, returning to his home full of a
later taste, changed all that. A thicket of airy spires rose above
the sanctuary; the blind triforium broke into one continuous window;
the heavy masses of stone were pared down with wonderful dexterity of
hand, till not a hand's-breadth remained uncovered by delicate
tracery, as from the fair white roof, touched sparingly with gold,
down to the subterranean chapel of Saint Taurin, where the peasants
of La Beauce came to pray for rain, not a space was left unsearched
by cheerful daylight, refined, but hardly dimmed at all, by painted
glass mimicking the clearness of the open sky. In the sombre old
church all was in stately order now: the dusky, jewelled reliquaries,
the ancient devotional ornaments from the manor--much-prized family
possessions, sufficient to furnish the whole array of a great
ecclesiastical function like this--the lights burning, flowers
everywhere, gathered amid the last handfuls of the harvest by the
peasant-women, who came to present their children for the happy
chance of an episcopal blessing.
And the almost exclusively aged people, in all their old personal
adornments, which now so rarely saw the light, forming the central
group, expectant around the young seigneur they had conducted hither,
seemed of one piece with [7] those mystic figures, the old, armour-
clad monumental effigies, the carved and painted imageries which ran
round the outer circuit of the choir--a version of the biblical
history, for the reading of those who loitered on their way from
chapel to chapel. There was Joseph's dream, with the tall sheaves of
the elder brethren bowing to Joseph's sheaf, like these aged heads
around the youthful aspirant of to-day. There was Jacob going on his
mysterious way, met by, conversing with, wrestling with, the Angels
of God--rescuing the promise of his race from the "profane" Esau.
There was the mother of Samuel, and, in long white ephod, the much-
desired, early-consecrated child, who had inherited her religious
capacity; and David, with something of his extraordinary genius for
divine things written on his countenance; onward, to the sacred
persons of the Annunciation, with the golden lily in the silver cup,
only lately set in its place. With dress, expression, nay! the very
incidents themselves innocently adapted to the actual habits and
associations of the age which had produced them, these figures of the
old Jewish history seemed about to take their places, for the
imparting of a divine sanction, among the living actors of the day.
One and all spoke of ready concurrence with religious motions, a
ready apprehension of, and concurrence with, the provisions of a
certain divine scheme for the improvement of one's opportunities in
the world.
[8] Would that dark-haired, fair-skinned lad concur, in his turn, and
be always true to his present purpose--Gaston de Latour, standing
thus, almost the only youthful thing, amid the witness of these
imposing, meditative, masks and faces? Could his guardians have read
below the white propriety of the youth, duly arrayed for dedication,
with the lighted candle in his right hand and the surplice folded
over his left shoulder, he might sorely have disturbed their placid
but somewhat narrow ruminations, with the germs of what was strange
to or beyond them. Certain of those shrewd old ecclesiastics had in
fact detected that the devout lad, so visibly impressed, was not
altogether after their kind; that, together with many characteristics
obviously inherited, he possessed--had caught perhaps from some
ancestor unrepresented here--some other potencies of nature, which
might not always combine so accordantly as to-day with the mental
requisites of an occasion such as this. One of them, indeed, touched
notwithstanding by his manifest piety just then, shortly afterwards
recommended him a little prayer "for peace" from the Vespers of the
Roman Breviary--for the harmony of his heart with itself; advice
which, except for a very short period, he ever afterwards followed,
saying it every evening of his life.
Yet it was the lad's own election which had led him to this first
step in a career that might take him out of the world and end the
race of [9] Latour altogether. Approaching their fourscore years,
and realising almost suddenly the situation of the young Gaston, left
there alone, out of what had been a large, much-promising, resonant
household, they wished otherwise, but did not try to change his
early-pronounced preference for the ecclesiastical calling. When he
determined to seek the clericature, his proposal made a demand on all
their old-fashioned religious sentiment. But the fund was a deep
one, and their acquiescence in the result entire. He might indeed
use his privilege of "orders" only as the stepping-stone to material
advancement in a church which seemed to have gone over wholly to the
world, and of which at that time one half the benefices were
practically in the hands of laymen. But, actually, the event came to
be a dedication on their part, not unlike those old biblical ones--an
offering in old age of the single precious thing left them; the
grandchild, whose hair would presently fall under the very shears
which, a hundred years before, had turned an earlier, brilliant,
Gaston de Latour into a monk.
Charles Guillard, Bishop of Chartres, a courtly, vivacious prelate,
whose quick eyes seemed to note at a glance the whole assembly, one
and all, while his lips moved silently, arrived at last, and the rite
began with the singing of the Office for the Ninth Hour. It was like
a stream of water crossing unexpectedly a dusty way--Mirabilia
testimonia tua! In psalm and antiphon, inexhaustibly [10] fresh, the
soul seemed to be taking refuge, at that undevout hour, from the
sordid languor and the mean business of men's lives, in contemplation
of the unfaltering vigour of the divine righteousness, which had
still those who sought it, not only watchful in the night but alert
in the drowsy afternoon. Yes! there was the sheep astray, sicut ovis
quae periit--the physical world; with its lusty ministers, at work,
or sleeping for a while amid the stubble, their faces upturned to the
August sun--the world so importunately visible, intruding a little
way, with its floating odours, in that semicircle of heat across the
old over-written pavement at the great open door, upon the mysteries
within. Seen from the incense-laden sanctuary, where the bishop was
assuming one by one the pontifical ornaments, La Beauce, like a many-
coloured carpet spread under the great dome, with the white double
house-front quivering afar through the heat, though it looked as if
you might touch with the hand its distant spaces, was for a moment
the unreal thing. Gaston alone, with all his mystic preoccupations,
by the privilege of youth, seemed to belong to both, and link the
visionary company about him to the external scene.
The rite with which the Roman Church "makes a clerk," aims certainly
at no low measure of difference from the coarser world around him, in
its supposed scholar: and in this case the [11] aspirant (the precise
claims of the situation being well considered) had no misgiving.
Discreetly, and with full attention, he answers Adsum! when his name
is called, and advances manfully; though he kneels meekly enough, and
remains, with his head bowed forward, at the knees of the seated
bishop who recites the appointed prayers, between the anthems and
responses of his Schola, or attendant singers--Might he be saved from
mental blindness! Might he put on the new man, even as his outward
guise was changed! Might he keep the religious habit for ever! who
had thus hastened to lay down the hair of his head for the divine
love. "The Lord is my inheritance" whispers Gaston distinctly, as
the locks fall, cut from the thickly-grown, black head, in five
places, "after the fashion of Christ's crown," the shears in the
episcopal hands sounding aloud, amid the silence of the curious
spectators. From the same hands, in due order, the fair surplice
ripples down over him. "This is the generation of them that seek
Him," the choir sings: "The Lord Himself is the portion of my
inheritance and my cup." It was the Church's eloquent way of bidding
unrestricted expansion to the youthful heart in its timely purpose to
seek the best, to abide among the things of the spirit.
The prospect from their cheerful, unenclosed road, like a white scarf
flung across the land, as [12] the party returned home in the late
August afternoon, was clear and dry and distant. The great barns at
the wayside had their doors thrown back, displaying the dark, cool
space within. The farmsteads seemed almost tenantless, the villagers
being still at work over the immense harvest-field. Crazy bells
startled them, striking out the hour from behind, over a deserted
churchyard. Still and tenantless also seemed the manor as they
approached, door and window lying open upon the court for the
coolness; or rather it was as if at their approach certain spectral
occupants started back out of the daylight--"Why depart, dear
ghosts?" was what the grandparents would have cried. They had more
in common with that immaterial world than with flesh and blood.
There was room for the existing household, enough and to spare, in
one of the two old houses. That other, the Château d'Amour, remained
for Gaston, at first as a delightful, half-known abode of wonders,
though with some childish fear; afterwards, as a delightful nursery
of refined or fantastic sentiment, as he recalled, in this chamber or
that, its old tenants and their doings, from the affectionate
brothers, onwards--above all, how in one room long ago Gabrielle de
Latour had died of joy.
With minds full of their recent business it was difficult to go back
to common occupations; as darkness came on, the impressions of the
day did but return again more vividly and concentrate [13] themselves
upon the inward sense. Observance, loyal concurrence in some high
purpose for him, passive waiting on the hand one might miss in the
darkness, with the gift or gifts therein of which he had the
presentiment, and upon the due acceptance of which the true fortune
of life would turn; these were the hereditary traits alert in Gaston,
as he lay awake in the absolute, moon-lit, stillness, his outward ear
attentive for the wandering footsteps which, through that wide,
lightly-accentuated country, often came and went about the house,
with weird suggestions of a dim passage to and fro, and of an
infinite distance. He would rise, as the footsteps halted perhaps
below his window, to answer the questions of the travellers,
pilgrims, or labourers who had missed their way from farm to farm, or
halting soldier seeking guidance; terrible or terror-stricken
companies sometimes, rudely or piteously importunate to be let in--
for it was the period of the Religious Wars, flaming up here and
there over France, and never quite put out, during forty years.
Once, in the beginning of these troubles (he was then a child,
leaning from the window, as a sound of rickety, small wheels
approached) the enquiry came in broken French, "Voulez-vous donner
direction?" from a German, one of the mercenaries of the Duc de
Guise, hired for service in a civil strife of France, drawing wearily
a crippled companion, so far from home. [14] The memory of it,
awakening a thousand strange fancies, had remained by him, as a
witness to the power of fortuitous circumstance over the imagination.
One night there had come a noise of horns, and presently King Charles
himself was standing in the courtyard, belated, and far enough now
from troublesome company, as he hunted the rich-fleshed game of La
Beauce through the endless corn. He entered, with a relish for the
pleasant cleanliness of the place, expressed in a shrill strain of
half-religious oaths, like flashes of hell-fire to Gaston's suddenly-
awakened sense. It was the invincible nature of the royal lad to
speak, and feel, on these mad, alto notes, and not unbecoming in a
good catholic; for Huguenots never swore, and these were subtly
theological oaths. Well! the grandparents repressed as best they
could their apprehensions as to what other hunters, what other
disconcerting incident, might follow; for catholic France very
generally believed that the Huguenot leaders had a scheme for
possessing themselves of the person of the young king, known to be
mentally pliable. Meanwhile they led him to their daintiest
apartment, with great silver flambeaux, that he might wash off the
blood with which not his hands only were covered; for he hunted also
with the eagerness of a madman--steeped in blood. He lay there for a
few hours, after supping very familiarly on his own birds, Gaston
rising from [15] his bed to look on at a distance, and, afterwards,
on his knee, serving the rose-water dish and spiced wine, as the
night passed in reassuring silence; Charles himself, as usual, keenly
enjoying this "gipsy" incident, with the supper after that unexpected
fashion, among strange people, he hardly knew where. He was very
pale, like some cunning Italian work in wax or ivory, of partly
satiric character, endued by magic or crafty mechanism with vivacious
movement. But as he sat thus, ever for the most part the unhappy
plaything of other people's humours, escaped for a moment out of a
world of demoniac politicians, the pensive atmosphere around seemed
gradually to change him, touching his wild temper, pleasantly,
profitably, so that he took down from the wall and struck out the
notes of a lute, and fell to talking of verses, leaving a stanza of
his own scratched with a diamond on the window-pane--lines simpler-
hearted, and more full of nature than were common at that day.
The life of Gaston de Latour was almost to coincide with the duration
of the Religious Wars. The earliest public event of his memory was
that famous siege of Orleans from which the young Henri de Guise rode
away the head of his restless family, tormented now still further by
the reality or the pretence of filial duty, seeking vengeance on the
treacherous murder of his father. Following a long period of quiet
progress--the tranquil and tolerant years of the [16] Renaissance--
the religious war took possession of, and pushed to strangely
confused issues, a society somewhat distraught by an artificial
aesthetic culture; and filled with wild passions, wildly-dramatic
personalities, a scene already singularly attractive by its artistic
beauty. A heady religious fanaticism was worked by every prominent
egotist in turn, pondering on his chances, in the event of the
extinction of the house of Valois with the three sons of Catherine de
Medici, born unsound, and doomed by astrological prediction. The old
manors, which had exchanged their towers for summer-houses under the
softening influence of Renaissance fashions, found themselves once
more medievally insecure amid a vagrant warfare of foreign
mercenaries and armed peasants. It was a curiously refined people
who now took down the armour, hanging high on the wall for decoration
among newer things so little warlike.
A difficult age, certainly, for scrupulous spirits to move in! A
perplexed network of partizan or personal interests underlay, and
furnished the really directing forces in, a supposed Armageddon of
contending religious convictions. The wisest perhaps, like Michel de
L'Hôpital, withdrew themselves from a conflict, in which not a single
actor has the air of quite pure intentions; while religion, itself
the assumed ground of quarrel, seems appreciable all the while only
by abstraction from the parties, the leaders, at once violent [17]
and cunning, who are most pretentious in the assertion of its rival
claims. What there was of religion was in hiding, perhaps, with the
so-called "Political" party, professedly almost indifferent to it,
but which had at least something of humanity on its side, and some
chance of that placidity of mind in which alone the business of the
spirit can be done. The new sect of "Papists" were not the true
catholics: there was little of the virtue of the martyr in militant
Calvinism. It is not a catholic historian who notes with profound
regret "that inauspicious day," in the year 1562, Gaston's tenth
year, "when the work of devastation began, which was to strip from
France that antique garniture of religious art which later ages have
not been able to replace." Axe and hammer at the carved work sounded
from one end of France to the other.
It was a peculiarity of this age of terror, that every one, including
Charles the Ninth himself, dreaded what the accident of war might
make, not merely of his enemies, but of temporary allies and
pretended friends, in an evenly balanced but very complex strife--of
merely personal rivals also, in some matter which had nothing to do
with the assumed motives of that strife. Gaston de Latour passing on
his country way one night, with a sudden flash of fierce words two
young men burst from the doors of a road-side tavern. The brothers
are quarrelling about [18] the division, lately effected there, of
their dead father's morsel of land. "I shall hate you till death!"
cries the younger, bounding away in the darkness; and two atheists
part, to take opposite sides in the supposed strife of Catholic and
Huguenot.
The deeds of violence which occupy the foreground of French history
during the reigns of Catherine's sons might indeed lead one to fancy
that little human kindness could have remained in France,--a
fanatical civil war of forty years, that no place at all could have
been left for the quiet building of character. Contempt for human
life, taught us every day by nature, and alas! by man himself:--all
war intensifies that. But the more permanent forces, alike of human
nature and of the natural world, are on the whole in the interest of
tranquillity and sanity, and of the sentiments proper to man. Like
all good catholic children, Gaston had shuddered at the name of
Adretz, of Briquemaut with his great necklace of priests' ears, of
that dark and fugitive Montgomeri, the slayer, as some would have it
the assassin, of a king, now active, and almost ubiquitous, on the
Huguenot side. Still, at Deux-manoirs, this warfare, seething up
from time to time so wildly in this or that district of France, was
for the most part only sensible in incidents we might think
picturesque, were they told with that intention; delightful enough,
certainly, to the curiosity of a boy, in whose [19] mind nevertheless
they deepened a native impressibility to the sorrow and hazard that
are constant and necessary in human life, especially for the poor.
The troubles of "that poor people of France"--burden of all its
righteous rulers, from Saint Lewis downwards--these, at all events,
would not be lessened by the struggle of Guise and Condé and Bourbon
and Valois, of the Valois with each other, of those four brilliant
young princes of the name of Henry. The weak would but suffer
somewhat more than was usual, in the interest of the strong. If you
were not sure whether that gleaming of the sun in the vast distance
flashed from swords or sickles, whether that far-off curl of smoke
rose from stubble-fire or village-steeple, to protect which the
peasants, still lovers of their churches, would arm themselves, women
and all, with fork and scythe,--still, those peasants used their
scythes, in due season, for reaping their leagues of cornland, and
slept with faces as tranquil as ever towards the sky, for their
noonday rest. In effect, since peace is always in some measure
dependent on one's own seeking, disturbing forces do but fray their
way along somewhat narrow paths over the great spaces of the quiet
realm of nature. La Beauce, vast enough to present at once every
phase of weather, its one landmark the twin spires of Chartres,
salient as the finger of a dial, guiding, by their change of
perspective, victor or vanquished on his way, offered room enough
[20] for the business both of peace and war to those enamoured of
either. When Gaston, after a brief absence, was unable to find his
child's garden-bed, that was only because in a fine June the corn had
grown tall so quickly, through which he was presently led to it, with
all its garish sweets undisturbed: and it was with the ancient
growths of mind--customs, beliefs, mental preferences--as with the
natural world.
It may be understood that there was a certain rudeness about the old
manor, left almost untouched from age to age, with a loyalty which
paid little or no heed to changes of fashion. The Château d'Amour,
indeed, as the work of a later age, refined somewhat upon the rough
feudal architecture; and the daintier taste had centred itself in
particular upon one apartment, a veritable woman's apartment, with an
effect in some degree anticipating the achievement of Gaston's own
century, in which the apparatus of daily life became so eloquent of
the moods of those to whom it ministered. It was the chamber of
Gabrielle de Latour, who had died of joy. Here certainly she had
watched, at these windows, during ten whole years, for the return of
her beloved husband from a disastrous battle in the East, till
against all expectation she beheld him crossing the court at last.
Immense privilege! Immense distinction! Again and again Gaston
tried to master the paradox, at times, in deep concentration of mind,
seemed [21] almost to touch the point of that wonderful moment.
Hither, as to an oratory, a religious place, the finer spirits of her
kin had always found their way, to leave behind them there the more
intimate relics of themselves. To Gaston its influence imparted
early a taste for delicate things as being indispensable in all his
pleasures to come; and, from the very first, with the appetite for
some great distinguishing passion, the peculiar genius of his age
seeming already awake spontaneously within him. Here, at least, had
been one of those grand passions, such as were needed to give life
its true meaning and effect. Conscious of that rudeness in his home,
and feeding a strong natural instinct for outward beauty hitherto on
what was barely sufficient, he found for himself in this perfumed
place the centre of a fanciful world, reaching out to who could tell
what refined passages of existence in that great world beyond, of
which the echoes seemed to light here amid the stillness. On his
first visit one pensive afternoon, fitting the lately attained key in
the lock, he seemed to have drawn upon himself, yet hardly to have
disturbed, the meditations of its former occupant. A century of
unhindered summers had taken the heat from its colours--the couches,
the curtains half shading the windows, which the rain in the south-
west wind just then touched so softly. That great passion of old had
been also a dainty love, leaving [22] its impress everywhere in this
magic apartment, on the musical instruments, the books lying where
they might have fallen from the hands of the listless reader so long
since, the fragrance which the lad's movement stirred around him.
And there, on one of the windows, were the verses of King Charles,
who had slept here, as in the most courtly resting-place of the
house. On certain nights Gaston himself was not afraid to steal from
his own bed to lie in it, though still too healthy a sleeper to be
visited by the appropriate dreams he so greatly longed for.
A nature, instinctively religious, which would readily discover and
give their full value to all such facts of experience as might be
conformable thereto! But what would be the relation of this
religious sensibility to sensibilities of another kind, now awaking
in the young Gaston, as he mused in this dreamy place, surrounded by
the books, the furniture, almost the very presence of the past, which
had already found tongues to speak of a still living humanity--
somewhere, somewhere, in the world!--waiting for him in the distance,
or perchance already on its way, to explain, by its own plenary
beauty and power, why wine and roses and the languorous summer
afternoons were so delightful. So far indeed, the imaginative heat,
that might one day enter into dangerous rivalry with simple old-
fashioned faith, was blent harmoniously with it. They [23] were
hardly distinguishable elements of an amiable character, susceptible
generally to the poetic side of things--two neighbourly apprehensions
of a single ideal.
The great passions, the fervid sentiments, of which Gaston dreamed as
the true realisation of life, have not always softened men's natures:
they have been compatible with many cruelties, as in the lost spirits
of that very age. They may overflow, on the other hand, in more
equable natures, through the concurrence of happier circumstance,
into that universal sympathy which lends a kind of amorous power to
the homeliest charities. So it seemed likely to be with Gaston de
Latour. Sorrow came along with beauty, a rival of its intricate
omnipresence in life. In the sudden tremor of an aged voice, the
handling of a forgotten toy, a childish drawing, in the tacit
observance of a day, he became aware suddenly of the great stream of
human tears falling always through the shadows of the world. For
once the darling of old age actually more than responded in full to
its tenderness. In the isolation of his life there had been little
demand for sympathy on the part of those anywhere near his own age.
So much the larger was the fund of superfluous affection which went
forth, with a delicacy not less than their own, to meet the
sympathies of the aged people who cherished him. In him, their old,
almost forgotten sorrows bled anew.
[24] Variety of affection, in a household in which many relations had
lived together, had brought variety of sorrow. But they were well-
nigh healed now--those once so poignant griefs--the scars remaining
only as deeper lines of natural expression. It was visible, to their
surprise, that he penetrated the motive of the mass said so solemnly,
in violet, on the Innocents' Day, and understood why they wept at the
triumphant antiphons:--"My soul is escaped as a bird out of the snare
of the fowler!"--thinking intently of the little tombs which had
recorded carefully almost the minutes of children's lives, Elizabeth
de Latour, Cornélius de Latour, aged so many years, days, hours.
Yes! the cold pavement under one's feet had once been molten lava.
Surely the resources of sorrow were large in things! The fact must
be duly marked and provided for, with due estimate of his own
susceptibility thereto, in his scheme of life. Might he pass through
the world, unriven by sorrows such as those! And already it was as
if he stept softly over the earth, not to outrage its so abundant
latent sensibilities.
The beauty of the world and its sorrow, solaced a little by religious
faith, itself so beautiful a thing; these were the chief impressions
with which he made his way outwards, at first only in longer rambles,
as physical strength increased, over his native plains, whereon, as
we have seen, the cruel warfare of that age had [25] aggravated at a
thousand points the everyday appeal of suffering humanity. The vast
level, stretching thirty miles from east to west, thirty from north
to south:--perhaps the reader may think little of its resources for
the seeker after natural beauty, or its capacity to develope the
imagination. A world, he may fancy, in which there could be no
shadows, at best not too cheerful colours. In truth, it was all
accent, so to speak. But then, surely, all the finer influences of
every language depend mostly on accent; and he has but to think of it
as Gaston actually lived in it to find a singularly companionable
soul there. Gaston, at least, needed but to go far enough across it
for those inward oppositions to cease, which already at times beset
him; to feel at one with himself again, under the influence of a
scene which had for him something of the character of the sea--its
changefulness, its infinity, its pathos in the toiling human life
that traversed it. Featureless, if you will, it was always under the
guidance of its ample sky. Scowling back sometimes moodily enough,
but almost never without a remnant of fine weather, about August it
was for the most part cloudless. And then truly, under its blue
dome, the great plain would as it were "laugh and sing," in a kind of
absoluteness of sympathy with the sun.
II. OUR LADY'S CHURCH
"I had almost said even as they."
[26] Like a ship for ever a-sail in the distance, thought the child,
everywhere the great church of Chartres was visible, with the passing
light or shadow upon its grey, weather-beaten surfaces. The people
of La Beauce were proud, and would talk often of its rich store of
sacred furniture, the wonder-working relics of "Our Lady under the
Earth," and her sacred veil or shift, which kings and princes came to
visit, returning with a likeness thereof, replete in miraculous
virtue, for their own wearing. The busy fancy of Gaston, multiplying
this chance hearsay, had set the whole interior in array--a dim,
spacious, fragrant place, afloat with golden lights. Lit up over the
autumn fields at evening, the distant spires suggested the splendour
within, with so strong an imaginative effect, that he seemed scarcely
to know whether it was through the mental or bodily eye that he
beheld. When he came [27] thither at last, like many another well-
born youth, to join the episcopal household as a kind of half-
clerical page, he found (as happens in the actual testing of our
ideals) at once more and less than he had supposed; and his earlier
vision was a thing he could never precisely recover, or disentangle
from the supervening reality. What he saw, certainly, was greater
far in mere physical proportion, and incommensurable at first by
anything he knew--the volume of the wrought detail, the mass of the
component members, the bigness of the actual stones of the masonry,
contrary to the usual Gothic manner, and as if in reminiscence of
those old Druidic piles amid which the Virgin of Chartres had been
adored, long before the birth of Christ, by a mystic race, possessed
of some prophetic sense of the grace in store for her. Through
repeated dangers good-fortune has saved that unrivalled treasure of
stained glass; and then, as now, the word "awful," so often applied
to Gothic aisles, was for once really applicable. You enter, looking
perhaps for a few minutes' cool shelter from the summer noonday; and
the placid sunshine of La Beauce seems to have been transformed in a
moment into imperious, angry fire.
It was not in summer, however, that Gaston first set foot there; he
saw the beautiful city for the first time as if sheathed austerely in
repellent armour. In his most genial subsequent impressions of the
place there was always a lingering [28] trace of that famous frost
through which he made his way, wary of petrifying contact against
things without, to the great western portal, on Candlemas morning.
The sad, patient images by the doorways of the crowded church seemed
suffering now chiefly from the cold. It was almost like a funeral--
the penitential violet, the wandering taper-light, of this half-
lenten feast of Purification. His new companions, at the head and in
the rear of the long procession, forced every one, even the Lord
Bishop himself, to move apace, bustling along, cross-bearer and
acolyte, in their odd little copes, out of the bitter air, which made
the jolly life Gaston now entered on, around the great fire of their
hall in the episcopal palace, seem all the more winsome.
Notre-Dame de Chartres! It was a world to explore, as if one
explored the entire Middle Age; it was also one unending, elaborate,
religious function--a life, or a continuous drama, to take one's part
in. Dependent on its structural completeness, on its wealth of well-
preserved ornament, on its unity in variety, perhaps on some
undefinable operation of genius, beyond, but concurrently with, all
these, the church of Chartres has still the gift of a unique power of
impressing. In comparison, the other famous churches of France, at
Amiens for instance, at Rheims or Beauvais, may seem but formal, and
to a large extent reproducible, effects of mere architectural rule on
a gigantic scale. The [29] somewhat Gothic soul of Gaston relished
there something strange, or even bizarre, in the very manner in which
the building set itself, so broadly couchant, upon the earth; in the
natural richness of tone on the masonry within; in its vast echoing
roof of timber, the "forest," as it was called; in the mysterious
maze traced upon its pavement; its maze-like crypt, centering in the
shrine of the sibylline Notre-Dame, itself a natural or very
primitive grotto or cave. A few years were still to pass ere
sacrilegious hands despoiled it on a religious pretext:--the catholic
church must pay, even with the molten gold of her sanctuaries, the
price of her defence in the civil war. At present, it was such a
treasure-house of medieval jewellery as we have to make a very
systematic effort even to imagine. The still extant register of its
furniture and sacred apparel leaves the soul of the ecclesiologist
athirst.
And it had another very remarkable difference from almost all Gothic
churches: there were no graves there. Its emptiness in this respect
is due to no revolutionary or Huguenot desecration. Once indeed,
about this very time, a popular military leader had been interred
with honour, within the precinct of the high altar itself. But not
long afterwards, said the reverend canons, resenting on the part of
their immaculate patroness this intrusion, the corpse itself, ill at
ease, had protested, lifting up its hands above [30] the surface of
the pavement, as if to beg interment elsewhere; and Gaston could
remember assisting, awakened suddenly one night, at the removal of
the remains to a more ordinary place of sepulture.
And yet that lavish display of jewellers' work on the altars, in the
chapels, the sacristies, of Our Lady's Church, was but a framing for
little else than dead people's bones. To Gaston, a piteous soul,
with a touch also of that grim humour which, as we know, holds of
pity, relic-worship came naturally. At Deux-manoirs too there had
been relics, including certain broken children's toys and some rude
childish drawings, taken forth now and then with almost religious
veneration, with trembling hands and renewal of old grief, to his
wondering awe at the greatness of men's sorrows. Yes! the pavement
under one's feet had once been, might become again for him, molten
lava. The look, the manner, of those who exposed these things, had
been a revelation. The abundant relics of the church of Chartres
were for the most part perished remnants of the poor human body
itself; but, appertaining to persons long ago and of a far-off,
immeasurable kind of sanctity, stimulated a more indifferent sort of
curiosity, and seemed to bring the distant, the impossible, as with
tangible evidence of fact, close to one's side. It was in one's
hand--the finger of an Evangelist! The crowned head of Saint Lubin,
bishop of Chartres [31] long centuries since, but still able to
preserve its wheat-stacks from fire; bones of the "Maries," with some
of the earth from their grave; these, and the like of these, was what
the curious eye discerned in the recesses of those variously
contrived reliquaries, great and small, glittering so profusely about
the dusky church, itself ministering, by its very shadows, to a
certain appetite in the soul of Gaston for dimness--for a dim place
like this--such as he had often prefigured to himself, albeit with
some suspicion of what might seem a preference for darkness.
Physical twilight we most of us love, in its season. To him, that
perpetual twilight came in close identity with its moral or
intellectual counterpart, as the welcome requisite for that part of
the soul which loves twilight, and is, in truth, never quite at rest
out of it, through some congenital uneasiness or distress, perhaps,
in its processes of vision.
As complex, yet not less perfectly united under a single leading
motive,--its sister volume, was the ritual order of Notre-Dame de
Chartres, a year-long dramatic action, in which every one had, and
knew, his part--the drama or "mystery" of Redemption, to the
necessities of which the great church had shaped itself. All those
various "offices" which, in Pontifical, Missal and Breviary, devout
imagination had elaborated from age to age with such a range of
spiritual colour and light and shade, with so much poetic tact in
quotation, such a depth of insight into [32] the Christian soul, had
joined themselves harmoniously together, one office ending only where
another began, in the perpetual worship of this mother of churches,
which had also its own picturesque peculiarities of "use," proud of
its maternal privilege therein. And the music rose--warmed,
expanded, or fell silent altogether--as the order of the year, the
colours, the whole expression of things changed, gathering around the
full mystic effulgence of the pontiff in his own person, while the
sacred theme deepened at the great ecclesiastical seasons, when the
aisles overflowed with a vast multitude, and like a court, combed,
starched, rustling around him, Gaston and his fellows "served"
Monseigneur--they, zealous, ubiquitous, more prominent than ever,
though for the most part profoundly irreverent, and, notwithstanding
that, one and all, with what disdain of the untonsured laity!
Well! what was of the past there--the actual stones of the temple and
that sacred liturgical order--entered readily enough into Gaston's
mental kingdom, filling places prepared by the anticipations of his
tranquil, dream-struck youth. It was the present, the uncalculated
present, which now disturbed the complacent habit of his thoughts,
proposing itself, importunately, in the living forms of his immediate
companions, in the great clerical body of which he was become a part,
in the people of Chartres itself (none the less animated because
provincial) as [33] a thing, alien at a thousand points from his
preconceptions of life, to be judged by him, to be rejected or
located within. How vivid, how delightful, they were!--the other
forty-nine of the fifty lads who had come hither, after the old-
fashioned way, to serve in the household of Monseigneur by way of an
"institution" in learning and good manners, as to which a grave
national assembly, more than three centuries before the States-
General of 1789, had judged French youth of quality somewhat
behindhand, recommending king and nobles to take better care for the
future of their education, "to the end that, enlightened and
moralised, they might know their duties, and be less likely to abuse
their privileges."
And how becomingly that cleric pride, that self-respecting quiet, sat
upon their high-bred figures, their angelic, unspoiled faces,
saddened transiently as they came under the religious spell for a
moment. As for Gaston, they welcomed him with perfect friendliness,
kept their best side foremost for an hour, and would not leave his
very dreams. In absolute unconsciousness, they had brought from
their remote old homes all varieties of hereditary gifts, vices,
distinctions, dark fates, mercy, cruelty, madness. Appetite and
vanity abounded, but with an abundant superficial grace, befitting a
generation which, as by some aesthetic sense in the air, made the
most of the pleasant outsides of life. All the [34] various traits
of the dying Middle Age were still in evidence among them, in all
their crude effectiveness; only, blent, like rusty old armour
wreathed in flowers, with the peculiar fopperies of the time,
shrewdly divined from a distance, as happens with competent youth.
To be in Paris itself, amid the full, delightful, fragrance of those
dainty visible things which Huguenots despised:--that, surely, were
the sum of good-fortune! Half-clerical, they loved nevertheless the
touch of steel; had a laughing joy in trifling with its latent soul
of destruction. In mimicry of the great world, they had their
leaders, so inscrutably self-imposed:--instinctively, they felt and
underwent that mystery of leadership, with its consequent heats of
spirit, its tides and changes of influence.