Transcriber’s Notes:
Underscores “_” before and after a word or phrase indicate _italics_
in the original text.
Small capitals have been converted to SOLID capitals.
Illustrations and footnotes have been moved so they do not break up
paragraphs.
Typographical errors have been silently corrected but other variations
in spelling and punctuation remain unaltered.
_Note_
_The friendly eyes that read these pages, knowing the pathetic fails
relating to their publication, will not be content without a word to
tell to other readers the story that will cause one and all to look on
the little book in the same sympathetic mood._
_The trips among the scenes of the storied past, here recorded, were
taken not so much in search of health as in search of diversion from
the sad employment of watching the inexorable approach of mortal
disease. The writing was undertaken to occupy a vigorous mind,
conscious that its tenement would not long endure._
_Alas! the task was not done before its purpose had been fully
completed, and to others was left the duty of reading the final proofs.
Such imperfections as may be found should be charged to this account,
and all the excellences are to be credited to the brave soul that
fought her fight so silently that only a very few closest friends knew
of the unequal battle._
_C. S. G._
[Illustration: _The Abbatical Church of Saint Ouen is Perhaps the Most
Perfect Example of the Gothic in its Full Maturity_]
FLOWERS FROM MEDIÆVAL HISTORY
BY
MINNIE D. KELLOGG
_I never can feel
sure of any truth but from
a clear perception
of its beauty.
Keats_
ILLUSTRATED
PAUL ELDER AND COMPANY
PUBLISHERS·SAN FRANCISCO
COPYRIGHT, 1910
BY PAUL ELDER AND COMPANY
_Contents_
_Page_
_Advertisement_ vii
_By Way of Introduction_ xi
_Flowers of History from the Romantic Thirteenth Century_ 3
_Mystics as Builders_ 15
_The Golden Madonna of Rheims_ 26
_The Little Old Abbé of Saint Denis and the Imagiers_ 38
_The Mystic Cathedral of Chartres_ 50
_Caen: An Eleventh Century Tableau_ 73
_The Grandniece of the Grand Inquisitor_ 87
_Stray Leaves from Old, Old Books_ 98
_The Romantic Twentieth Century: A Deduction_ 118
_A Word Regarding Bibliography_ 139
_Index_ 143
_Illustrations_
_Facing Page_
_The Abbatical Church of Saint Ouen_ Title
_As Art, Early Painting is Often Taken too Seriously;
but as Literature, it is Charming_ xiv
_The Crucifix in the Town Hall of Rouen_ 4
_The Virgin Greets the Angel of Death_ 8
_Sainte Chapelle_ 10
_Interior of Sainte Chapelle_ 12
_Saint Martin Dividing His Coat, from an Old Antiphone_ 20
_From the Certosa of Pavia_ 22
_Tomb of Dante, Ravenna_ 24
_A Recent Tribute to Clovis and Saint Remi, on the Interior
Frieze of the Pantheon, Paris_ 26
_The Flying Buttress_ 32
_The Sculptured Saint Upon a Gothic Cathedral_ 34
_In the Sixteenth Century the French Academy Changed the
Name of the Imagiers’ Guild to the Sculptors’_ 42
_A Thirteenth Century Window_ 44
_The Old-Time House of Prayer, which Still Dominates the
City of Chartres_ 52
_A Pillar at Chartres_ 54
_A View Through the Portail of Chartres_ 56
_A Detail of the Portail Septentrionale_ 60
_South Portal of Chartres_ 64
_A Page from the Sculptured “Bible of the Laity,” Chartres_ 68
_Altar-piece at Chartres_ 70
_William the Conqueror’s Old Fortress_ 74
_Dinan_ 84
_Old Moats Do Make Such Charming Gardens_ 86
_A Peep Into the Cranium of a Bible Reader in
Lope de Vega’s Time_ 88
_The Literal, Limited God of a Fanatic and Father Adam
Stock-taking in Eden_ 92
_A Tribute to the Scribes of the Dark Ages_ 100
_The Baptistry Doors_ 102
_A Page from the Bible of Jean Sans Peur_ 110
_Head of Justice, from Fiore’s Group_ 130
_An Ideal of the Gracious Republic of Venice,
Paul Veronese_ 134
_A Mediæval Expression of Justice Attended by Archangels,
by Fiore_ 136
_Advertisement_
_These accounts all relate to places and objects that the uncommercial
traveler may casually run upon at some turn of his way. Subjects
mentioned in Baedeker have been considered here reflectively rather
than descriptively. Although I do not propose to analyze the soil in
which these flowers of history have sprung up, nor to speak of the rank
weeds growing by their sides, I have tried not to blight these blossoms
with falsehood. Certainly one-half of the truth is as true as the other
and it may be infinitely pleasanter. As far as they go, these little
historiettes are based upon evidence and authority._
_I want to teach you so much history that your
sympathy may grow continually wider and you may be
able to realize past generations of men just as you
do the present, sorrowing for them when they failed,
triumphing with them when they prevailed; for I find
this one conviction never changing with me but always
increasingy that one cannot live a life manfully
without a wide world of sympathy and love to exercise
it in._
—_Burne-Jones to His Son._
_Suggested itineraries for cathedral trips in Normandy, giving
monuments of the first order only, places readily reached by rail_:
_First. Land at Bologne sur Mer, Amiens, Laon, Rheims, Paris, Saint
Denis, Chartres, Caen, Bayeux, Mt. San Michele, embark from Cherbourg._
_Second. Land from England at Dieppe, or from America at Havre, proceed
to Rouen, which possesses the most perfect example of later Gothic
in the great abbatical Church of Saint Ouen; an excellent example of
flamboyant Gothic in Saint Maclou; and a large, irregular but imposing
Gothic cathedral on the order of Rheims; thence to Mt. San Michele,
most unique of mediæval monuments; thence to Caen and Bayeux near by
it, Chartres and Paris. Amiens and Rheims being very similar, and on
the order of Chartres and Notre Dame of Paris, are not included in this
itinerary. The traveler to whom time is money will be greatly tried
by the connections made and lost by the trains in Normandy that stop
at small places. Both these itineraries respect the idiosyncrasies of
French railroads._
_The motorist, rejoicing in the excellent Norman roads, can combine
these itineraries very easily—taking in the cathedrals of Le Mans,
Bourg, Beauvais and Coutances. I would especially call his attention
to the small but interesting Early Norman church at Dols, and to the
walled town of San Malo on the sea, with picturesque little Dinan,
fashionable Dinard, and a dirty little fishing village near by._
_By Way of Introduction_
_Modern invention has actually reflected upon ancient history: the
railroad, the steam derrick and the photograph have changed our
conceptions of the past. Written history is now accepted as its
author’s opinion, while tangible records stand forth as facts._
_This attitude brings the Middle Ages particularly near to us, for
though its people wrote comparatively little, they were wonderful
builders: their art was more literally expressive than the classic;
then, too, of course, it is better preserved._
_While the Greeks and Romans were our schoolmasters, the Europeans of
the Middle Ages are our ancestors. Their experience foreshadows our
own; for however far removed from us in thought and action they may
have been, they were akin to us in feeling._
_Though the rude pioneers of Christianity were often intensely cruel,
as you follow their history, you may meet with some gentle deed
springing from the good seed, even when sown in stony places, with
some action in its sweetness and humility entirely beyond the pagan
world. In their childish story one may trace the early workings of the
Christian ideal. It did not control behavior, nor did it always direct
it wisely; morality, being judicial and scientific, implies a certain
maturity of mind. Religion is simple; it is unlogical, sentimental and
impulsive. Whatever this indefinable instinct may be, it has manifested
itself as a spiritualizing force in morality and an initiative force in
art._
_Religion has in it a craving for a loveliness beyond all literal
perception of the senses; a philosophic mind projects this ideal in
contemplation; an artistic mind, in symbol; for, as Michael Angelo
explains, “Rash is the thought and vain that maketh beauty from the
senses grow.”_
_The Greeks did develop an art from the motif of physical beauty,
however, but their statues, executed before art became mature enough to
produce that beauty, have no message, while one often catches something
high and holy from a very early Christian image. It may radiate from
a pretty smile on the face of a crude Madonna, or a graceful upturned
head, in a figure entirely destitute of anatomy, which looks as though
the simple craftsman had called upon a higher power than knowledge._
_Spiritual beauty being the ideal in Christian art, the image, however
rude, which suggests it, makes its appeal in the charmed language of
that loving religion._
_Mediæval archives have been ransacked by Protestants for the errors
of Catholicism; by political economists, who even penetrate to the
Dark Ages in search of the chilly lessons of the dismal science, for
wisdom; and between them what a conception we have! But it is not the
whole story, for Chaucer assures us the Moyen Age was a fairly livable
period, peopled by beings like ourselves; moreover, it was an artistic
age which has left us not only a wonderful architecture but two supreme
poets._
_Perhaps the fairest chroniclers of such a period are its own artists,
great and small, for history has grown too democratic to confine
herself to kings, however worthy. She does not find the crude carver
voiceless who, in default of skill, surrounds his Madonna with gold
and loads her with rude jewels; indeed, she often finds her sweetest
flowers growing between the lines of an unskilful brush or chisel._
_Although as painting, mediæval efforts are often taken too seriously,
as literature they are charming, for they speak of the good and the
beautiful as their Age conceived it. While the written stories of
the time were shallow and coarse beyond our endurance, its painters
were giving us their accounts of this life and the next (particularly
the next). First come bright, pretty colors prettily placed, pretty
thoughts of happy angels. Then gold backgrounds give way to skies, and
shadows creep onto the canvas. Then they begin to tell stories; so
eager they are that they cram four or five pictures into one, dotting
the little scenes, by way of parenthesis, into the backgrounds._
_These pictures give the other half of the truth, the tenderer side
of the old life and theology. What sympathetic Bible scholars some of
the artists became! And, in general, the greatest were the tenderest.
Albrecht Dürer’s Evangelists are interesting character studies for all
time. He conceives of Saint Mark as a plain, simple enthusiast; of
Saint Paul, as a broad-minded, thoughtful man whom he even imagines to
be bald. He does not try to make either of them exactly handsome but
the way Mark looks up to Paul is most winning. A little later Andrea
del Sarto paints a splendid account of the warring doctors of the
Church, which shows clearly he saw beyond them: but this takes us into
the Renaissance which has been defined as a marriage of the Grecian and
the Gothic._
[Illustration: _As Art, Early Painting is Often Taken too Seriously;
but as Literature, it is Charming._]
_A strict analysis has come into art and it is creeping into life,—our
race childhood is drawing to a close but not without leaving us many
things that are sweet to remember._
_We tell our children some of the very same stories that the wandering
story-tellers used to relate to good knights and their fair ladies in
the old baronial halls,—Cinderella, Beauty and the Beast, or Puss in
Boots,—only the knights and their ladies believed them. There is a
pathos in mediæval story; it is a tragedy of misdirected effort (as
perhaps all history is), only the mediæval tragedy strikes home. Its
actors were people of our own blood and of our own Church—our own
people only under delusions from which we have emancipated ourselves.
To understand their story we must take them as children and listen with
them for the imaginary voices that lead them on._
_A veritable allegory of the Age of Faith was presented on the great
stage of history in 1212, when two enormous armies of little boys and
girls started from France and Germany singing, to march to the Holy
Land; if any of these children turned back, none of them seem to have
found their old homes._
_As far as is known to history, one child alone returned as an aged
pilgrim, to tell the tale,—how the bones of the children strewed the
mountainside; how they had been embarked on unseaworthy vessels to be
sold into slavery; how few, how very few, ever reached their goal; how
few, how very few, ever remained pure and holy._
_Connected with this tragedy was a horrible pope and a horrible doge,
but now they seem but foils to the purity of the children, it was all
so long ago. And that the mystic beauty of that little legion may live
lyrically in our life, the Twentieth Century has set their pathetic
march to music in stately oratorio; for pure aspiration is the melody
of melodies, the veritable flower of history._
_A certain childish disinterestedness was the tender grace of the Age
of Faith,—“the tender grace of a day that is dead.” It must pass from a
broader age; taking all factors duly into account even drives it from
serious history its proportion is so inconsiderable._
_The life of Saint Francis, who espoused My Lady Poverty, is one of
the sweetest examples of mediæval disinterestedness. Viewed literally,
the accounts picture a crazy man preaching to birds and fishes, making
a bargain with a wolf and injudiciously mortifying his flesh till
he became blind and useless. Viewed by the light of their influence
his teachings were revolutionary,—they brought new-found energy and
sympathy into the Church; yet, at best, they were only the teachings of
Christ, without the Savior’s beautiful sanity. Viewed by the results he
brought about, Saint Francis must have been one of the profoundest of
men, and yet his wisdom, if he had any, was only that of the heart._
_Sabatier has written a life of Francis, at once scholarly, judicious
and vivid, but as the Franciscan Father remarked, he wrote the life of
Mr. Francis. If you would learn of Saint Francis of blessed memory, you
must study by yourself with loving diligence a childish old book which
tells of the miracles wrought through the tail of Saint Francis—“The
Little Flowers of Saint Francis.” The fruits of history others may put
before us, but the passing fragrance of the flowers we must perceive
for ourselves._
_I here submit for your interpretation certain incidents that seem to
me the outgrowth of the fine feeling of the impulsive Moyen Age._
FLOWERS FROM MEDIÆVAL HISTORY
_Flowers of History From the Romantic Thirteenth Century_
I have borrowed my title from a Thirteenth Century chronicle, of
disputed authorship, purporting to be a history of the world, but from
447 A. D. on it is engrossed with the story of England. From this
insular partiality of its author I should be inclined to award the work
to the English claimant, for what is a flower of history but a phase of
the human story which especially charms the writer.
To me the Gothic cathedrals are the flowers of Thirteenth Century
history, which era saw every one of the greatest of them building.
Their cornerstones may have been laid earlier, and the finishing
touches came much later, but they owe their character to that one
wonderful century which stands apart through the ages, thus telling its
beads.
The written history of the Thirteenth Century is cruel reading, but
an age, like a man, has two soul sides, and the better side is always
the harder to fathom. The Thirteenth Century opened for France, the
native land of the Gothic, with an abominable pope, a selfish king and,
nearer at hand, the evil of various tyrannical seigneurs. The great
social movement which endowed the French towns with their magnificent
cathedrals was apart from those powers and hardly affected by their war
or peace.
These great edifices were built by the secular clergy and the
townspeople for municipal, as well as religious, purposes. Therein
they held councils for deliverance from their feudal lords, lay and
ecclesiastic, for in the Thirteenth Century the Third Estate became a
political power.
The cathedrals express the patriotism, generosity and civic pride of
the freemen of the old towns; they realize the dream of the socialist
for the good and the beautiful held in common; the love of the poet
for beauty for its own sweet self; and the inspiration of the artist,
working at the white heat of a rising art, as surely as the reverence
of the age of faith.
[Illustration: _The Crucifix, the Eternal Warning, Built into the Very
Walls of the Old Courtroom in the Town Hall of Rouen._]
In the Low Countries they built city halls at an early date, but the
French towns did not need them, for there the cathedrals lent pomp and
circumstance to all municipal assemblages. The first States General was
held in Notre Dame of Paris.
The early Church had endeared itself to the people in many ways.
It entertained the traveler, and it was well that it did, for the
public houses were of a very low order; it instructed the children;
it ministered to the sick, and, if it was a crazy physician, it was a
gentle nurse. The modern hospital, the fairest monument of humanity,
is directly descended from the old Hotels-Dieu, where monks and nuns
tended the sick. In the cathedral sat the Bishops’ Courts which, the
people felt, were more just than the seigneurs. From these old Bishops’
Courts the beautiful French custom has descended of hanging a crucifix
back of the judge’s seat in the courts of common law where the symbol,
recalling a politic judge washing his hands of the blood of a just man,
seems more than a human warning.
Within the consecrated walls of the church was that ever-blessed
privilege of the temple—Christian, Pagan, or Jewish—sanctuary, the
right of the hunted. Of course it was abused, mercy expects to be;
therein it is more divine than human; but in a lawless day sanctuary
was an unconscious protest against lynching. We do read of accidents
arising from it; a Christian Church at Seez was burned down in
an attempt to dislodge a band of thieves, but this embarrassing
circumstance reflects on the management of those who burned it rather
than upon the church.
A complaint comes down to us from the Thirteenth Century of the
would-be popular clergy who allowed their parishioners to dance in
their churches and even assisted at these dances and at shows _peu
convenable_ given by jugglers and clowns, they themselves playing at
chess, all of which goes to show that we must regard these immense
churches as meeting houses in the literal sense of the term and allow
for the coarseness of the age in considering its amusements. Among
other buffooneries, at Laon particularly, which seems to have been very
“low church,” we read of the annual _fête des innocents_, in which
the choir boys dressed up as priests and went through various antics
in the church, which was given up to them for the night, the chapter
giving them a supper after. At Laon again there is public complaint of
a change having been made in the hour of mass and vespers on account
of a miracle play that was given in the church. Lovers of the drama may
look leniently upon this arrangement, whereas I suppose the stricter
churchmen, when the ecclesiastical supremacy came to be questioned,
even in the bishop’s own church, both at Rheims and Laon, said, “I told
you so.” By such concessions the clergy induced the citizens to go in
with them in building[1] such churches that succeeding generations have
called them mad.
Though the evolution of the Gothic is one of the most interesting
chapters in the history of architecture, the history of the builders
themselves, if we could only have it, might be still more fascinating.
Indeed,
“Who builds a church to God and not to fame,
Will never mark the marble with his name.”
Hence we do not know who designed some of the noblest monuments of
Gothic architecture, but we do catch charming psychological glimpses
as we watch the mystical and the practical unconsciously working
together for the beautiful in these old cathedrals, which make us
wonder how such spiritual designs arose and how the artists who
conceived them were able to carry them out. How could an age when kings
could hardly read and write, when artists drew like children, evolve
such works of art? How could an age so ignorant of physics and the
abstract principles of mechanics erect such buildings?
Some hazy legends, fairy tales even, with their grain of truth (that
truth which one troweth but cannot prove), and a few scant records,
scattered among the archives of such old churches as have escaped the
accidents of war and of peace, are really all that is left us with
which to picture a beautiful phase of thought and feeling which lured a
childish people onward toward art, organization and nationality.
From the old archives of Chartres, which was built so slowly, from
the old records of Saint Denis, which was built so quickly, between
the lines of the naïve old letters of tactful old bishops who coaxed
nobles and workmen alike, as much as they coerced them, thereby raising
fabulous sums paid in labor or in gold with which to build such temples
that succeeding generations have thought them inspired, we may pick
up a few fragments of the untold story of these exquisitely poetic
Builders who taught architecture to speak a universal language.
[Illustration: _The Middle Ages Dealt Much in Allegory. The Virgin
Greets the Angel of Death.—A Sermon in Marble._]
Saint Denis, which immediately antedated the great Gothic churches
of Northern France, is a stately mansion with a steeple at its side,
but the Gothic cathedrals are Christian temples every inch; their
design itself is consecrate. Their lines and harmonies however varied,
however bizarre, always resolve at last into some ideal of reverence,
while their solemn beauty speaks a various language. From crypt to
steeple the Gothic church is a Christian metaphor. Its ground plan is
the Cross, while the huge cathedral with all its worshipers is but a
standard bearer for loftier crosses borne upon its towers and spires.
From the bulwarks of their massive foundations, laid in the Dark Ages,
these old churches deliberately grew more ornate, carrying with them
countless generations of architects growing steadily in pride and skill
until it only required a burst of popular enthusiasm to bring forth
the artistic revolution of the Thirteenth Century. Again (but not in
wrath) the old churches were demolished simply because they were no
longer the noblest possible treasure houses for their precious relics.
Then it was that the gentle, mystical, French monarch, who maintained
his court so simply, purchased “The Crown of Thorns” from the mercenary
Venetians, into whose hands it had fallen through a chattel mortgage
given by those who had acquired it as a spoil of war.
Never were the rites of the church so descriptive, so picturesque, so
splendid, as in the Thirteenth Century. Barefooted and in penitential
garb, but followed by a band of light, a great procession of worshipers,
each carrying a candle, the king and his brother met the supreme relic
and bore it tenderly onward to the Royal Chapel in Paris and all the
cities, towns and hamlets through which they passed were reverently
illuminated.
Then Saint Louis entreated the great architects of his realm, whose
genius was already proven, to strive to design a reliquary even worthy
of the Crown of Thorns, and in five years the beautiful Sainte Chapelle
arose: like other poetry this lovely chapel was born of a passionate
yearning.
[Illustration: _Sainte Chapelle, which Sprang from the Crown of
Thorns._]
If the cathedrals are epics of architecture, the Sainte Chapelle is a
sonnet, a masterpiece of single-minded expression, the purity of whose
design established a standard. No cathedral could be finished on its
original plan; it was necessarily too long in building; but the model
which was to harmonize the labors of successive builders may be sought
in the little Sainte Chapelle of Paris which sprang from the Crown of
Thorns.
As every great work of art mirrors a human heart, reflecting that of
which its author took no note as clearly as that which stirred his
conscious being, so the Sainte Chapelle reflects Saint Louis and Saint
Louis reflects the Age of Faith. He was its poet who wrote in deeds.
It is not strange that Louis IX was canonized for he was in perfect
accord with the ideals of his age, asceticism, chivalry, humility and
regality; and too, he was a great builder.
Saint Louis built the Sainte Chapelle to hold that which did not
physically exist; but as with the pen of a recording angel, on this
tablet of stone he wrote a message from the better self of his age to
all humanity.
Though history repeats, the history of the Gothic is as unique as that
architecture itself; when otherwise men were trammeled body and soul
its builders were free to create, to vary or to destroy.
In the nineteenth century, when travel became general (“he who runs
may read”), certain gentle readers like Corroyer, Hugo, Rodin, Ruskin,
and most accurate of all, Viollet-le-Duc, interpreted this marvelous
architecture of the Moyen Age to the multitude.
“They builded better than they knew; they wrought in sad sincerity,”
vaguely exclaimed the philosopher.
“They built as well as they knew; they built in glad sincerity,”
observed the architect.
Rodin reminds us that it is a mistake to imagine that the religious
conceptions of that day were able to bring forth architectural
masterpieces any more than that the religious conceptions of today are
responsible for the defects in modern structures.
The Gothic cathedrals are epics of labor. They grew up under the hands
of many designers and builders, who were learning as they worked.
Democracy echoes through these noble buildings into which were wrought
the hope, the promise and the enthusiasm of a rising people.
[Illustration: _Interior of Saint Chapelle._
“_Much more than the ogive, the grotto, the cavern, the window, is the
essential of Gothic architecture._”—_August Rodin._]
To the inartistic eighteenth century, whose mission was to fight
tyranny, political and religious, these ornate structures seemed the
meaningless labor of a downtrodden people. I doubt if logicians like
Voltaire and Gibbon realized the elevating joy of passionate giving
that came to some of the poorest donors. Think of a guild of pastry
cooks presenting a magnificent window to the Church, their Mother! No
less a building than the Cathedral of Chartres!
Never were the lovely things of the Age of Faith more beloved than in
the present Age of Doubt. We are trying to restore the noblest of the
old cathedrals, stone for stone, and to lure back the sweetest prayers
and truest penance confided to their walls to spiritualize their
resurrection.
Never were the maiden efforts of Christian art more tenderly approached
than in the technical twentieth century, when they are studied alike by
Catholic, Protestant and Jew. The old theology has been very severely
picked over, but underneath its mouldy leaves, like trailing arbutus
in the spring, the “Little Flowers of St. Francis” peep up. The
nineteenth century concerned itself with the errors of the Mediæval
Church, but the twentieth especially reads the gentler side related by
the artists, and sometimes we catch hallowed messages from the pure in
heart who have almost seen God.
_Mystics as Builders_
We order the temples still standing destroyed that in their exact place
may be raised the sign of the Christian religion. Decree of Valentinian
III.
In the tribunal of history the Christian iconoclasts have been dealt
with somewhat in the manner of defendants in damage suits. If a cow
is killed by a railroad, is it not naturally assumed to have been a
Durham? If a statue was destroyed by a fanatic why not put in a claim
for a Phidias? As a matter of fact, by the time the early Christians
came into power the art of the day of Pericles had been copied for over
seven hundred years. Of art, what worse could be said!
Grecian art neither rose nor fell in a generation nor was it childless;
original, though minor schools, Hellenic to the core, sprang up in
the Grecian colonies and to the end the art and artists of Rome were
Greeks. But during the later Roman Empire the degenerate Grecian
artist commissioned by the degenerate Roman patron was simply cumbering
the earth. Oh, yes, in those luxurious days they patronized art as
rich men should, as rich men do. The houses of Herculaneum and Pompeii
teemed with articles of virtu. It was not statues the world of art
needed, it was ideals.
In art, it is the individual point of view that counts even if it be
only that of the destroyer. Since art reflects life and life means
change, the iconoclast has his place. A race, or more often the meeting
of two races, may develop a school of art; it reaches its perfection
in the work of a few genii of its golden age; to them it is given to
embody the highest and best that was in the myriad of artists who have
taught them and their teachers. Spellbound by its own perfection,
this art can move no farther. The multitude seek to preserve it, for
its value has been interpreted to them in quotations of the exchange.
Artists are satisfied to copy it, and thereby artists they gradually
cease to be. The destroyer comes,—fire, fanatic, whirlwind, victor or
worm—the bulk and body of that art perishes, but the ideal, being a
fruit of the spirit, lives. The final ruling of Grecian architecture
is still proclaimed from the Parthenon, while headless and armless
the lone “Winged Victory” might immortalize the action of Grecian
sculpture, the poetry of Grecian thought.
Since architecture is the most national of the arts, its movements
are the easiest to trace. Sometimes we actually detect the designer
following in the footsteps of the iconoclast. Indeed, the most
successful patron architecture has known, the Catholic Church,
commenced as a destroyer.
In the south of France ecclesiastical architecture remained essentially
classic until the Renaissance. This was largely due to one great sixth
century bishop, Patiens de Lyons, who repaired the old temples and
rebuilt anew on their lines so successfully that the people proudly
said they could not tell the new from the old; but in the north of
Gaul, where Martin of Tours and his followers had made a clean sweep of
the pagan temples and their old influence, architectural and spiritual,
an absolutely new style of church building developed. It is there that
to this day we turn for the purest Gothic.
Of this Martin we have some little history, hazy though it be. He was
a rude barbarian of the Roman legion, under the Emperor Julian, who
embraced Christianity and brought the glad tidings to Tours. With a
soldier’s idea of conquest he demolished the temples of false gods,
like other superstitious converts; but he contended that to make the
victory complete, at least an altar to the true God should mark the
very spot; and he is credited with six religious foundations, one
having been a church for the laity in the town of Tours. The present
age might canonize Martin for a deed overlooked by his most ardent,
early eulogists. He and Saint Ambrose protested against the “new
heresy” of two Spanish bishops who put a gnostic to death for his
heretical opinions.
Hagiology, however, abounds in records of Saint Martin, for he became
the best beloved saint of old Gaul.
It is natural that those who read the Roman Catholic breviary literally
should doubt it somewhat. They fail to realize that the history of a
saint lies entirely between the lines of the account. The sacred lesson
taught by this life reëchoes in his antiphones, responses, versicles
and lessons, until he stands before his followers as a type of certain
virtues. Thus Saint Sebastian stands for Christian courage; though
his body is pierced with arrows and his hands are tied, he is always
represented looking bravely up to Heaven: torture is immaterial to him:
he is sustained by faith. Saint Gregory, gentlest of pastors, greatest
of popes, is represented with the emblem of the Holy Ghost, the dove,
perched upon his shoulder; Saint Jerome, who translated the Scriptures,
with the Book in his hand; he generally has an angel near-by him.
Two little pictures stand out in Saint Martin’s iconography. In one,
Saint Martin cuts his cloak in half with his sword to divide it with a
beggar and beholds the Savior abundantly clad in half of it; and in the
other, Saint Martin evokes the spectre of a pretended martyr worshiped
in Tours, who comes to life and admits that he was hanged for crime,
wherefore Saint Martin demolishes his shrine.
To the early Church the relic was everything. Of course it should be
pure and holy. In it there was inspiration. Above the grave of some
dear saint or, perhaps, only to his memory, a shrine would arise, and
from these shrines, like flowers from seed, churches grew. A crypt
might be made to hold some hallowed dust, where services might be
held. This was reminiscent of the Roman catacombs where the first
Christians, believing literally in the resurrection of the body, had
laid their dead, and where, unseen by the unsympathetic world, they
had met for holy communion. The crypts of the early Church were the
mortal resting-places of friendly immortals at the great court above
who, in their robes of light, might plead acceptably for those who
would so reverently approach the heavenly throne through spirits purer
than their own. Of course, these pleaders must be very pure to turn
their shrines to altars. What spiritual value had a pretty, paltry tomb
honoring an unholy spirit?
Roman civilization was materialistic, but not so this new religion
of Jesus of Nazareth. Now, if things holy could pervade and hallow a
building, why should not things unholy defile it?
We may trace this idea carried out so literally, so picturesquely, so
almost logically in the legends of Martin of Tours, that we actually
sympathize with the destructive old bishop. Blindly defending the
dream that was in him, he actually stands first in that long line of
ecclesiastical builders who, in the fulness of time, jointly brought
forth Gothic architecture.
[Illustration: _Saint Martin Dividing His Coat, from an Old
Antiphone._]
When Saint Martin put his rude followers to work building houses for
their new faith he must have established a certain amount of unity and
order among them. Could there have been a better way to attach his
crude converts to their Church than to induce them to work upon it?
While Saint Martin was building at Tours, the Dark Ages were setting
in, when men of action became marauders, preying upon others; men of
thought became monks, praying for themselves; humanity went backwards,
and history ceased from very shame. But through it all there were a few
perplexed old bishops who, whatever their failings may have been, tried
to do something for their fellows. However, in that lawless day, they
had to defend rather than expand Christianity, and even protect its
churches, for pagans, too, might be honest iconoclasts!
The best thing the Dark Ages did for civilization was to learn the
builders’ trade and teach it to a great many people. It was a general
service, for to make a people industrious is, sooner or later, to make
them skilful and law-abiding.
It is curious that Saint Martin who, even while he was a bishop, lodged
in a hut covered with boughs, should head the great line of builders
who jointly and severally developed French Gothic. In standing for the
integrity of the relic, which was literally the seed of early Christian
art, Saint Martin gave a new and a higher impetus to life, and with
it, very indirectly, to art. Seventy years after Martin’s death, to
his blessed memory Saint Perpetuas built “the most beautiful church in
existence,” at least so Gregory of Tours affirms. We will not inquire
on what lines, for this was at the beginning of the Dark Ages, when
nothing beautiful was made.
A supreme recognition of the bold old iconoclast comes to us from
devotees of the classic; from certain artists and connoisseurs of the
Renaissance. This unexpected tribute to iconoclasm is published upon
a monument far removed from old Gaul in time and place, in ideal and
execution.
[Illustration: _From the Certosa of Pavia. One of the Most Elaborate
Monuments of Catholicism._]
In a monastery dowered with the gold of two reigning dynasties of
tyrants, dowered by the genius of two reigning dynasties of painters
and sculptors, amid surroundings perhaps the richest in the world,
where fifty monks might dream away their lives in silence, in that
lordly and exclusive playhouse for the soul of the Renaissance, wherein
the exuberance of the Gothic takes on the maturity of the Renaissance
in an elaboration which for once does not cloy,—in the Certosa di Pavia
we find a tribute to crude, old Saint Martin, the iconoclast.
On a mural of one of the side chapels of this Certosa behold him
represented in the garb of a fifteenth century monk, with his sanctity
emphasized by a large, glittering nimbus, to which the aerial
perspective of the otherwise maturely realistic painting is deliberately
sacrificed, calmly superintending a gilded youth of the Renaissance
while he smashes a fine Grecian statue! How did this rude act find
endorsement in a temple of art? How did the coarsest of the saints
win a place in the heart of the Renaissance? Was it because in him
they saw a reflection of the subtlest honesty of Art, that god of the
Renaissance? Was it because, above all else, Saint Martin especially
stood for the integrity of the ideal?
Though this little scene on the chapel wall may have been simply
historic in its import, nothing is plainer than that the picture is
intended to honor an uncompromising bishop of the early Church.
Through the confusion that disintegrated empire, Saint Martin
was a rude standard-bearer of two ideals broad enough to rebuild
nations—Sincerity and Brotherhood. “First he wrought and after that
he taught”—and first the spirit of his teaching was put into rude
pictures, because in Gaul so few people could read and still fewer
could condense an idea into forceful words.
It was long, long after an angel had appeared and carried Saint
Martin’s soul in the form of a child straight to God, as a gentle old
writer attests, that a modern geologist voiced the fundamental idea of
the best beloved saint of old Gaul, “An honest god is the noblest work
of man.”
[Illustration: _The Last Resting Place of the Great Poet of
Mediævalism—Tomb of Dante, Ravenna._]
But the past, as well as the present, has its peculiar eloquence
wherewith to honor the dead. Over one of the oldest Christian altars
spared to us by time, in solemn, enduring mosaic, big and simple,
stands Saint Martin leading a line of saints to Christ. And this great
hieratic on the wall of an old church of old Ravenna describes, as
no language of the present may, an early builder of the great mystic
Church which “rests upon the brawny trunks of heroes ... whose spans
and arches are the joined hands of comrades ... and whose heights and
spaces are inscribed by the numberless musings of all the dreamers of
the world.”
_The Golden Madonna of Rheims_
Late in the fifth century, while the confusion of the Dark Ages
reigned supreme, the Christian bishop of the Remi was at work on the
discouraging task of rebuilding his church after pagan depredations at
Rheims, when the great joy was vouchsafed to him of baptizing Clovis,
the ruler of the largest Teutonic State of the age.
[Illustration: _A Recent Tribute to Clovis and Saint Remi on the
Interior Frieze of the Pantheon, Paris._]
Saint Remi recommended Clovis to adore that which he had burned and to
burn that which he had adored, that the work of judicious destruction
might continue. Clovis sent offerings to all the sanctuaries,
particularly to that of the old soldier Saint Martin. Three thousand
Franks were baptized; Clovis exchanged the three toads on his shield
for the fleur-de-lis, and France became Christian _toute de suite_.
Then Saint Remi dreamt of great things yet to come: of a king and a
people governed by the Church of Christ, temporally and spiritually.
And he interpreted this dream to the people by a charming symbol: he
explained how the Holy Ghost, the Heavenly Dove, had brought from
above some spiritual oil with which to anoint Clovis at his baptism.
But to make the idea clear to these many men of childish minds and
many _patois_, he showed them a little ampulla filled with oil, which,
he explained, “the Dove” had brought to him from Heaven to grace the
baptism of their chief. And they decided to keep the oil that was left
in the ampulla for great occasions, like coronations. This wonderful
ointment united the Crown and the Church as long as it lasted. During
the Revolution a sansculotte shattered the old vessel. Orthodoxy
claimed to have caught one drop and encased it in a beautiful new
vase; it was used again, but its efficacy was no more. And not long
thereafter the French people decided to do without coronations, or
monasteries, but they still love Clovis and Saint Remi.
Civilization is much indebted to the early bishops and a goodly number
of them have been canonized. The monastic clergy were the snobs of the
Church, securely selfish in the magnificent fastnesses they erected for
themselves in the skies; condescending comfortably to pray for those
that fed them (though who knows but they even shirked that obligation),
while the secular clergy were working out, amid inspiration and error,
the foundations of a Christian civilization. The idea of the early
bishops that the Church ought to rule the world was a natural and an
honest mistake. The later bishops were quite a different class. The
stout little church of Saint Remi near Rheims pleads still for its
brave old bishop, though as a building it is eclipsed by the great
cathedral of the city.
The dynasty of Clovis passed away and the next reigning house came
in with Pepin. He had good reason to approve of the Church as an
institution, for it had early played into his hand. Had not the Abbé
of Saint Denis journeyed to Rome to secure the papal confirmation of
his crown? And had not Pope Stephen, while enjoying the protection of
that same abbey, anointed Charlemagne, his little son? On this was
based the succession. With his own good sword Charlemagne defended
it and brought a semblance of order to the land of the Gaul and
the Frank; and, genius that he was, he anticipated, in his interest
in architecture, the genius of his great people. But it was rather
Charlemagne’s attitude toward church building and letters that told, in
the long run, than any literal achievement in them during this time.
However, from the reign of his youngest son, Louis the Pious, we may
trace the steady, consistent growth of an original order of building
which culminated in the unparalleled Gothic of Northern France.
By that time the nobility had built so many sanctuaries in their
domains that they had to be interdicted from establishing useless
private foundations and, in a more democratic spirit, sixteen or
seventeen churches, all edifices of dignity, were begun. Then Bishop
Ebbon saw a golden opportunity to build a magnificent cathedral on the
long-hallowed soil of Rheims. There the Druid had raised his altar,
there the Roman his temple, which may have absorbed the old Druid’s
stones into its walls as it had his old gods into its adaptive bosom,
to fall, in its turn, a mightier pile, from which the Christian built
again and again as he grew in skill. Indeed, beyond their generation
the people of Rheims were experienced builders. In addition to all
the stone quarried by varied worshipers of the long past at Rheims,
Louis the Pious put at Ebbon’s service the materials of the city wall
and sent him his favorite architect—Rumald. And it was found that the
new cathedral protected the city better than the old walls. _La paix
religieuse_ turned away many an invader. One golden cup from the altar
bought off the Norsemen (not that it turned their hearts); they swooped
down upon Chartres instead.
The old chroniclers assure us that this early Cathedral of Rheims was
the finest in the realm. It must have beggared description, for what
manner of building it was none of them seem to say. But they tell of
its wonderful altar of Our Lady, covered with gold and studded with
gems, upon which stood a glorious virgin made of solid gold. That
impressed them. Was this altar built with the loot of war? Was it
built in remorse, or, worse, in mercenary superstition? Or was it
lavished like the woman’s precious ointment upon our Savior? This much
it certainly was,—a united tribute of the material to the immaterial,
coming from many men of many minds.
It was about this time that the Virgin became so peculiarly near and
dear to the Catholic world. They loaded her with jewels and appealed to
her as one of themselves, human, though divinely so. They painted her
on the inside of their jewel boxes that she might turn the heart of the
thief; they appealed to her in embarrassing human situations and loved
her as a helpful, pitying woman who brought religion home to them.
In due time this golden Virgin of Rheims, so imposing, so splendid to
her rude worshipers, gently made way for a line of tenderer virgins who
were gradually infusing sweetness and skill into those who sought to
spiritualize wood and stone into a suggestion of the mother of Christ.
When the old ninth century church at Rheims was burned it is supposed
that the barbarians’ gold was minted to rebuild the cathedral. Or shall
we say that, purified by fire, the golden Virgin arose again and again
from her ashes to rebuild her shrine in maturer beauty?
After many fires, in 1212 the present Cathedral of Rheims was commenced
upon the old, old crypt; before the middle of the century the main
body of the church was complete, and once again the Cathedral of
Rheims was the finest in the realm! In 1903 a vote was taken for the
noblest Gothic monument, and the returns, as always before, were, “the
Cathedral of Rheims.”
Through the Dark Ages the people of Rheims had not built in vain.
Effort after effort was destroyed, it is true, but like the golden
virgin it was minted to rebuild anew.
[Illustration: _Did the Idea of that Beautiful Structural Device, the
Flying Buttress, Come, Like an Angel Vision, to Some Baffled Architect
in Answer to Work and Prayer?_]