Multitudes in every generation have felt at least the aesthetic charm

of the rites of the Catholic Church. For Pascal, on the other hand,

a certain weariness, a certain puerility, a certain unprofitableness

in them is but an extra trial of faith. He seems to have little

sense of the beauty of holiness. And for his sombre, trenchant,

precipitous philosophy there could be no middle terms; irresistible

election, irresistible reprobation; only sometimes extremes meet, and

again it may be the trial of faith that the justified seem as

loveless and unlovely as the reprobate. Abêtissez-vous! A nature,

you may think, that would magnify things to the utmost, nurse, expand

them beyond their natural bounds by his [88] reflex action upon them.

Thus revelation is to be received on evidence, indeed, but an

evidence conclusive only on a presupposition or series of

presuppositions, evidence that is supplemented by an act of

imagination, or by the grace of faith, shall we say? At any rate,

the fact is, that the genius of the great reasoner, of this great

master of the abstract and deductive sciences, turned theologian,

carrying the methods of thought there formed into the things of

faith, was after all of the imaginative order. Now hear what he says

of imagination: Cette faculté trompeuse, qui semble nous être donnée

exprès pour nous induire à une erreur nécessaire. That has a sort of

necessity in it. What he says has again the air of Montaigne, and he

says much of the same kind: Cette superbe puissance ennemie de la

raison, combien toutes les richesses de la terre sont insuffisantes

sans son consentement. The imagination has the disposition of all

things: Elle fait la beauté, la justice, et le bonheur, qui est le

tout du monde. L'imagination dispose de tout. And what we have here

to note is its extraordinary power in himself. Strong in him as the

reasoning faculty, so to speak, it administered the reasoning faculty

in him à son grbut he was unaware of it, that power d'autant plus

fourbe qu'elle ne l'est pas toujours. Hidden under the apparent

rigidity of his favourite studies, imagination, even in them, played

a large part. Physics, mathematics were with him largely matters of

intuition, anticipation, [89] precocious discovery, short cuts,

superb guessing. It was the inventive element in his work and his

way of putting things that surprised those best able to judge. He

might have discovered the mathematical sciences for himself, it is

alleged, had his father, as he once had a mind to do, withheld him

from instruction in them.

About the time when he was bidding adieu to the world, Pascal had an

accident. As he drove round a corner on the Seine side to cross the

bridge at Neuilly, the horses were precipitated down the bank into

the water. Pascal escaped, but with a nervous shock, a certain

hallucination, from which he never recovered. As he walked or sat he

was apt to perceive a yawning depth beside him; would set stick or

chair there to reassure himself. We are now told, indeed, that that

circumstance has been greatly exaggerated. But how true to Pascal's

temper, as revealed in his work, that alarmed precipitous character

in it! Intellectually the abyss was evermore at his side. Nous

avons, he observes, un autre principe d'erreur, les maladies. Now in

him the imagination itself was like a physical malady, troubling,

disturbing, or in active collusion with it. . . .

NOTES

62. *Published in the Contemporary Review, Feb. 1895, and now

reprinted by the kind permission of the proprietors.

76. +Transliteration: pathos.

80. *The words here cited are, however, from Psalm cxviii., the

cxvii. of the Vulgate, and not from Pascal's favourite Psalm.

(C.L.S.) +C.L.S. stands for Charles Shadwell, editor of the original

volume.

ART NOTES IN NORTH ITALY*

[90] TITIAN, as we see him in what some have thought his noblest

work, the large altar-piece, dated 1522, his forty-fifth year, of SS.

Nazaro e Celso, at Brescia, is certainly a religious--a great,

religious painter. The famous Gabriel of the Annunciation, aflight,

in all the effortless energy of an angel indeed, and Sebastian,

adapted, it was said, from an ancient statue, yet as novel in design

as if Titian had been the first to handle that so familiar figure in

old religious art--may represent for us a vast and varied amount of

work--in which he expands to their utmost artistic compass the

earlier religious dreams of Mantegna and the Bellini, affording

sufficient proof how sacred themes could rouse his imagination, and

all his manual skill, to heroic efforts. But he is also the painter

of the Venus of the Tribune and the Triumph of Bacchus; and such

frank acceptance of the voluptuous paganism of the Renaissance, the

motive of a large proportion of his work, [91] might make us think

that religion, grandly dramatic as was his conception of it, can have

been for him only one of many pictorial attitudes. There are however

painters of that date who, while their work is great enough to be

connected (perhaps groundlessly) with Titian's personal influence, or

directly attributed to his hand, possess at least this psychological

interest, that about their religiousness there can be no question.

Their work is to be looked for mainly in and about the two sub-alpine

towns of Brescia and Bergamo; in the former of which it becomes

definable as a school--the school of Moretto, in whom the perfected

art of the later Renaissance is to be seen in union with a

catholicism as convinced, towards the middle of the sixteenth

century, as that of Giotto or Angelico.

Moretto of Brescia, for instance, is one of the few painters who have

fully understood the artistic opportunities of the subject of Saint

Paul, for whom, for the most part, art has found only the

conventional trappings of a Roman soldier (a soldier, as being in

charge of those prisoners to Damascus), or a somewhat commonplace old

age. Moretto also makes him a nobly accoutred soldier--the rim of

the helmet, thrown backward in his fall to the earth, rings the head

already with a faint circle of glory--but a soldier still in

possession of all those resources of unspoiled youth which he is

ready to offer in a [92] moment to the truth that has just dawned

visibly upon him. The terrified horse, very grandly designed, leaps

high against the suddenly darkened sky above the distant horizon of

Damascus, with all Moretto's peculiar understanding of the power of

black and white. But what signs the picture inalienably as Moretto's

own is the thought of the saint himself, at the moment of his

recovery from the stroke of Heaven. The pure, pale, beardless face,

in noble profile, might have had for its immediate model some

military monk of a later age, yet it breathes all the joy and

confidence of the Apostle who knows in a single flash of time that he

has found the veritable captain of his soul. It is indeed the Paul

whose genius of conviction has so greatly moved the minds of men--the

soldier who, bringing his prisoners "bound to Damascus," is become

the soldier of Jesus Christ.

Moretto's picture has found its place (in a dark recess, alas!) in

the Church of Santa Maria presso San Celso, in the suburbs of Milan,

hard by the site of the old Roman cemetery, where Ambrose, at a

moment when in one of his many conflicts a "sign" was needed, found

the bodies of Nazarus and Celsus, youthful patrician martyrs in the

reign of Nero, overflowing now with miraculous powers, their blood

still fresh upon them--conspersa recenti sanguine. The body of Saint

Nazarus he removed into the city: that of Saint Celsus remained

within the little sanctuary [93] which still bears his name, and

beside which, in the fifteenth century, arose the glorious Church of

the Madonna, with spacious atrium after the Ambrosian manner, a

façade richly sculptured in the style of the Renaissance, and

sumptuously adorned within. Behind the massive silver tabernacle of

the altar of the miraculous picture which gave its origin to this

splendid building, the rare visitor, peeping as into some sacred

bird-nest, detects one of the loveliest works of Luini, a small, but

exquisitely finished "Holy Family." Among the fine pictures around

are works by two other very notable religious painters of the cinque-

cento. Both alike, Ferrari and Borgognone, may seem to have

introduced into fiery Italian latitudes a certain northern

temperature, and somewhat twilight, French, or Flemish, or German,

thoughts. Ferrari, coming from the neighbourhood of Varallo, after

work at Vercelli and Novara, returns thither to labour, as both

sculptor and painter, in the "stations" of the Sacro Monte, at a form

of religious art which would seem to have some natural kinship with

the temper of a mountain people. It is as if the living actors in

the "Passion Play" of Oberammergau had been transformed into almost

illusive groups in painted terra-cotta. The scenes of the Last

Supper, of the Martyrdom of the Innocents, of the Raising of Jairus'

daughter, for instance, are certainly touching in the naïve piety of

their life-sized realism. But Gaudenzio Ferrari had many [94]

helpmates at the Sacro Monte; and his lovelier work is in the

Franciscan Church at the foot of the hill, and in those two, truly

Italian, far-off towns of the Lombard plain. Even in his great,

many-storied fresco in the Franciscan Church at Varallo there are

traces of a somewhat barbaric hankering after solid form; the armour

of the Roman soldiers, for example, is raised and gilt. It is as if

this serious soul, going back to his mountain home, had lapsed again

into mountain "grotesque," with touches also, in truth, of a

peculiarly northern poetry--a mystic poetry, which now and again, in

his treatment, for instance, of angel forms and faces, reminds one of

Blake. There is something of it certainly in the little white

spectral soul of the penitent thief making its escape from the

dishonoured body along the beam of his cross.

The contrast is a vigorous one when, in the space of a few hours, the

traveller finds himself at Vercelli, half-stifled in its thick

pressing crop of pumpkins and mulberry trees. The expression of the

prophet occurs to him: "A lodge in a garden of cucumbers." Garden of

cucumbers and half-tropical flowers, it has invaded the quiet open

spaces of the town. Search through them, through the almost

cloistral streets, for the Church of the Umiliati; and there, amid

the soft garden-shadows of the choir, you may find the sentiment of

the neighbourhood expressed with great refinement in what is perhaps

[95] the masterpiece of Ferrari, "Our Lady of the Fruit-garden," as

we might say--attended by twelve life-sized saints and the monkish

donors of the picture. The remarkable proportions of the tall panel,

up which the green-stuff is climbing thickly above the mitres and

sacred garniture of those sacred personages, lend themselves

harmoniously to the gigantic stature of Saint Christopher in the

foreground as the patron saint of the church. With the savour of

this picture in his memory, the visitor will look eagerly in some

half-dozen neighbouring churches and deserted conventual places for

certain other works from Ferrari's hand; and so, leaving the place

under the influence of his delicate religious ideal, may seem to have

been listening to much exquisite church-music there, violins and the

like, on that perfectly silent afternoon--such music as he may still

really hear on Sundays at the neighbouring town of Novara, famed for

it from of old. Here, again, the art of Gaudenzio Ferrari reigns.

Gaudenzio! It is the name of the saintly prelate on whom his pencil

was many times employed, First Bishop of Novara, and patron of the

magnificent basilica hard by which still covers his body, whose

earthly presence in cope and mitre Ferrari has commemorated in the

altar-piece of the "Marriage of St. Catherine," with its refined

richness of colour, like a bank of real flowers blooming there, and

like nothing else around it in the [96] vast duomo of old Roman

architecture, now heavily masked in modern stucco. The solemn

mountains, under the closer shadow of which his genius put on a

northern hue, are far away, telling at Novara only as the grandly

theatrical background to an entirely lowland life. And here, as at

Vercelli so at Novara, Ferrari is not less graciously Italian than

Luini himself.

If the name of Luini's master, Borgognone, is no proof of northern

extraction, a northern temper is nevertheless a marked element of his

genius--something of the patience, especially, of the masters of

Dijon or Bruges, nowhere more clearly than in the two groups of male

and female heads in the National Gallery, family groups, painted in

the attitude of worship, with a lowly religious sincerity which may

remind us of the contemporary work of M. Legros. Like those northern

masters, he accepts piously, but can refine, what "has no

comeliness." And yet perhaps no painter has so adequately presented

that purely personal beauty (for which, indeed, even profane painters

for the most part have seemed to care very little) as Borgognone in

the two deacons, Stephen and Laurence, who, in one of the altar-

pieces of the Certosa, assist at the throne of Syrus, ancient,

sainted, First Bishop of Pavia--stately youths in quite imperial

dalmatics of black and gold. An indefatigable worker at many forms

of religious art, here and elsewhere, assisting at last in the [97]

carving and inlaying of the rich marble façade of the Certosa, the

rich carved and inlaid wood-work of Santa Maria at Bergamo, he is

seen perhaps at his best, certainly in his most significantly

religious mood, in the Church of the Incoronata at Lodi, especially

in one picture there, the "Presentation of Christ in the Temple."

The experienced visitor knows what to expect in the sacristies of the

great Italian churches; the smaller, choicer works of Luini, say, of

Della Robbia or Mino of Fiesole, the superb ambries and drawers and

presses of old oak or cedar, the still untouched morsel of fresco--

like sacred priestly thoughts visibly lingering there in the half-

light. Well! the little octagonal Church of the Incoronata is like

one of these sacristies. The work of Bramante--you see it, as it is

so rarely one's luck to do, with its furniture and internal

decoration complete and unchanged, the coloured pavement, the

colouring which covers the walls, the elegant little organ of

Domenico da Lucca (1507), the altar-screens with their dainty rows of

brass cherubs. In Borgognone's picture of the "Presentation," there

the place is, essentially as we see it to-day. The ceremony,

invested with all the sentiment of a Christian sacrament, takes place

in this very church, this "Temple" of the Incoronata where you are

standing, reflected on the dimly glorious wall, as in a mirror.

Borgognone in his picture has [98] but added in long legend, letter

by letter, on the fascia below the cupola, the Song of Simeon.

The Incoronata however is, after all, the monument less of Ambrogio

Borgognone than of the gifted Piazza family:--Callisto, himself born

at Lodi, his father, his uncle, his brothers, his son Fulvio, working

there in three generations, under marked religious influence, and

with so much power and grace that, quite gratuitously, portions of

their work have been attributed to the master-hand of Titian, in some

imaginary visit here to these painters, who were in truth the

disciples of another--Romanino of Brescia. At Lodi, the lustre of

Scipione Piazza is lost in that of Callisto, his elder brother; but

he might worthily be included in a list of painters memorable for a

single picture, such pictures as the solemn Madonna of Pierino del

Vaga, in the Duomo of Pisa, or the Holy Family of Pellegrino Piola,

in the Goldsmiths' Street at Genoa. A single picture, a single

figure in a picture, signed and dated, over the altar of Saint

Clement, in the Church of San Spirito, at Bergamo, might preserve the

fame of Scipione Piazza, who did not live to be old. The figure is

that of the youthful Clement of Rome himself, "who had seen the

blessed Apostles," writing at the dictation of Saint Paul. For a

moment he looks away from the letters of the book with all the

wistful intelligence of a boy softly touched already by the radiancy

of the [99] celestial Wisdom. "Her ways are ways of pleasantness!"

That is the lesson this winsome, docile, spotless creature--ingenui

vultus puer ingenuique pudoris--younger brother or cousin of

Borgognone's noble deacons at the Certosa--seems put there to teach

us. And in this church, indeed, as it happens, Scipione's work is

side by side with work of his.

It is here, in fact, at Bergamo and at Brescia, that the late

survival of a really convinced religious spirit becomes a striking

fact in the history of Italian art. Vercelli and Novara, though

famous for their mountain neighbourhood, enjoy but a distant and

occasional view of Monte Rosa and its companions; and even then those

awful stairways to tracts of airy sunlight may seem hardly real. But

the beauty of the twin sub-alpine towns further eastward is shaped by

the circumstance that mountain and plain meet almost in their

streets, very effectively for all purposes of the picturesque.

Brescia, immediately below the "Falcon of Lombardy" (so they called

its masterful fortress on the last ledge of the Piè di Monte), to

which you may now ascend by gentle turfed paths, to watch the purple

mystery of evening mount gradually from the great plain up the

mountain-walls close at hand, is as level as a church pavement, home-

like, with a kind of easy walking from point to point about it, rare

in Italian towns--a town full of walled gardens, giving even to [100]

its smaller habitations the retirement of their more sumptuous

neighbours, and a certain English air. You may peep into them,

pacing its broad streets, from the blaze of which you are glad to

escape into the dim and sometimes gloomy churches, the twilight

sacristies, rich with carved and coloured woodwork. The art of

Romanino still lights up one of the darkest of those churches with

the altar-piece which is perhaps his most expressive and noblest

work. The veritable blue sky itself seems to be breaking into the

dark-cornered, low-vaulted, Gothic sanctuary of the Barefoot

Brethren, around the Virgin and Child, the bowed, adoring figures of

Bonaventura, Saint Francis, Saint Antony, the youthful majesty of

Saint Louis, to keep for ever in memory--not the King of France

however, in spite of the fleurs-de-lys on his cope of azure, but

Louis, Bishop of Toulouse. A Rubens in Italy! you may think, if you

care to rove from the delightful fact before you after vague

supposititious alliances--something between Titian and Rubens!

Certainly, Romanino's bold, contrasted colouring anticipates

something of the northern freshness of Rubens. But while the

peculiarity of the work of Rubens is a sense of momentary transition,

as if the colours were even now melting in it, Romanino's canvas

bears rather the steady glory of broad Italian noonday; while he is

distinguished also for a remarkable clearness of [101] design, which

has perhaps something to do, is certainly congruous with, a markedly

religious sentiment, like that of Angelico or Perugino, lingering

still in the soul of this Brescian painter towards the middle of the

sixteenth century.

Romanino and Moretto, the two great masters of Brescia in successive

generations, both alike inspired above all else by the majesty, the

majestic beauty, of religion--its persons, its events, every

circumstance that belongs to it--are to be seen in friendly rivalry,

though with ten years' difference of age between them, in the Church

of San Giovanni Evangelista; Romanino approaching there, as near as

he might, in a certain candle-lighted scene, to that harmony in

black, white, and grey preferred by the younger painter. Before this

or that example of Moretto's work, in that admirably composed picture

of Saint Paul's Conversion, for instance, you might think of him as

but a very noble designer in grisaille. A more detailed study would

convince you that, whatever its component elements, there is a very

complex tone which almost exclusively belongs to him; the "Saint

Ursula" finally, that he is a great, though very peculiar colourist--

a lord of colour who, while he knows the colour resources that may

lie even in black and white, has really included every delicate hue

whatever in that faded "silver grey," which yet lingers in one's

memory as their final effect. For some admirers indeed he is

definable [102] as a kind of really sanctified Titian. It must be

admitted, however, that whereas Titian sometimes lost a little of

himself in the greatness of his designs, or committed their

execution, in part, to others, Moretto, in his work, is always all

there--thorough, steady, even, in his workmanship. That, again, was

a result of his late-surviving religious conscience. And here, as in

other instances, the supposed influence of the greater master is only

a supposition. As a matter of fact, at least in his earlier life,

Moretto made no visit to Venice; developed his genius at home, under

such conditions for development as were afforded by the example of

the earlier masters of Brescia itself; left his work there

abundantly, and almost there alone, as the thoroughly representative

product of a charming place. In the little Church of San Clemente he

is still "at home" to his lovers; an intimately religious artist,

full of cheerfulness, of joy. Upon the airy galleries of his great

altar-piece, the angels dance against the sky above the Mother and

the Child; Saint Clement, patron of the church, being attendant in

pontifical white, with Dominic, Catherine, the Magdalen, and good,

big-faced Saint Florian in complete armour, benign and strong. He

knows many a saint not in the Roman breviary. Was there a single

sweet-sounding name without its martyr patron? Lucia, Agnes, Agatha,

Barbara, Cecilia--holy women, dignified, high-bred, intelligent--

[103] have an altar of their own; and here, as in that festal high

altar-piece, the spectator may note yet another artistic alliance,

something of the pale effulgence of Correggio--an approach, at least,

to that peculiar treatment of light and shade, and a pre-occupation

with certain tricks therein of nature itself, by which Correggio

touches Rembrandt on the one hand, Da Vinci on the other. Here, in

Moretto's work, you may think that manner more delightful, perhaps

because more refined, than in Correggio himself. Those pensive,

tarnished, silver side-lights, like mere reflexions of natural

sunshine, may be noticed indeed in many another painter of that day,

in Lanini, for instance, at the National Gallery. In his "Nativity"

at the Brera, Procaccini of Verona almost anticipates Correggio's

Heilige Nacht. It is, in truth, the first step in the decomposition

of light, a touch of decadence, of sunset, along the whole horizon of

North-Italian art. It is, however, as the painter of the white-

stoled Ursula and her companions that the great master of Brescia is

most likely to remain in the memory of the visitor; with this fact,

above all, clearly impressed on it, that Moretto had attained full

intelligence of all the pictorial powers of white. In the clearness,

the cleanliness, the hieratic distinction, of this earnest and

deeply-felt composition, there is something "pre-Raphaelite"; as also

in a certain liturgical formality in the grouping of the virgins--the

[104] looks, "all one way," of the closely-ranged faces; while in the

long folds of the drapery we may see something of the severe grace of

early Tuscan sculpture--something of severity in the long, thin,

emphatic shadows. For the light is high, as with the level lights of

early morning, the air of which ruffles the banners borne by Ursula

in her two hands, her virgin companions laying their hands also upon

the tall staves, as if taking share, with a good will, in her self-

dedication, with all the hazard of battle. They bring us,

appropriately, close to the grave of this manly yet so virginal

painter, born in the year 1500, dead at forty-seven.

Of Moretto and Romanino, whose works thus light up, or refine, the

dark churches of Brescia and its neighbourhood, Romanino is scarcely

to be seen beyond it. The National Gallery, however, is rich in

Moretto's work, with two of his rare poetic portraits; and if the

large altar-picture would hardly tell his secret to one who had not

studied him at Brescia, in those who already know him it will awake

many a reminiscence of his art at its best. The three white mitres,

for instance, grandly painted towards the centre of the picture, at

the feet of Saint Bernardino of Siena--the three bishoprics refused

by that lowly saint--may remind one of the great white mitre which,

in the genial picture of Saint Nicholas, in the Miracoli at Brescia,

one of the children, who as delightfully+ [105] unconventional

acolytes accompany their beloved patron into the presence of the

Madonna, carries along so willingly, laughing almost, with pleasure

and pride, at his part in so great a function. In the altar-piece at

the National Gallery those white mitres form the key-note from which

the pale, cloistral splendours of the whole picture radiate. You see

what a wealth of enjoyable colour Moretto, for one, can bring out of

monkish habits in themselves sad enough, and receive a new lesson in

the artistic value of reserve.

Rarer still (the single work of Romanino, it is said, to be seen out

of Italy) is the elaborate composition in five parts on the opposite

side of the doorway. Painted for the high-altar of one of the many

churches of Brescia, it seems to have passed into secular hands about

a century ago. Alessandro, patron of the church, one of the many

youthful patrician converts Italy reveres from the ranks of the Roman

army, stands there on one side, with ample crimson banner superbly

furled about his lustrous black armour, and on the other--Saint

Jerome, Romanino's own namesake--neither more nor less than the

familiar, self-tormenting anchorite; for few painters (Bellini, to

some degree, in his picture of the saint's study) have perceived the

rare pictorial opportunities of Jerome; Jerome with the true cradle

of the Lord, first of Christian antiquaries, author of the fragrant

Vulgate version of the [106] Scriptures. Alessandro and Jerome

support the Mother and the Child in the central place. But the

loveliest subjects of this fine group of compositions are in the

corners above, half-length, life-sized figures--Gaudioso, Bishop of

Brescia, above Saint Jerome; above Alessandro, Saint Filippo Benizzi,

meek founder of the Order of Servites to which that church at Brescia

belonged, with his lily, and in the right hand a book; and what a

book! It was another very different painter, Giuseppe Caletti, of

Cremona, who, for the truth and beauty of his drawing of them, gained

the title of the "Painter of Books." But if you wish to see what can

be made of the leaves, the vellum cover, of a book, observe that in

Saint Philip's hand.--The writer? the contents? you ask: What may

they be? and whence did it come?--out of embalmed sacristy, or

antique coffin of some early Brescian martyr, or, through that bright

space of blue Italian sky, from the hands of an angel, like his

Annunciation lily, or the book received in the Apocalypse by John the

Divine? It is one of those old saints, Gaudioso (at home in every

church in Brescia), who looks out with full face from the opposite

corner of the altar-piece, from a background which, though it might

be the new heaven over a new earth, is in truth only the proper,

breathable air of Italy. As we see him here, Saint Gaudioso is one

of the more exquisite treasures of our National Gallery. It was thus

that at the magic [107] touch of Romanino's art the dim, early,

hunted-down Brescian church of the primitive centuries, crushed into

the dust, it might seem, was "brought to her king," out of those old

dark crypts, "in raiment of needle-work"--the delicate, richly

folded, pontifical white vestments, the mitre and staff and gloves,

and rich jewelled cope, blue or green. The face, of remarkable

beauty after a type which all feel though it is actually rare in art,

is probably a portrait of some distinguished churchman of Romanino's

own day; a second Gaudioso, perhaps, setting that later Brescian

church to rights after the terrible French occupation in the

painter's own time, as his saintly predecessor, the Gaudioso of the

earlier century here commemorated, had done after the invasion of the

Goths. The eloquent eyes are open upon some glorious vision. "He

hath made us kings and priests!" they seem to say for him, as the

clean, sensitive lips might do so eloquently. Beauty and Holiness

had "kissed each other," as in Borgognone's imperial deacons at the

Certosa. At the Renaissance the world might seem to have parted them

again. But here certainly, once more, Catholicism and the

Renaissance, religion and culture, holiness and beauty, might seem

reconciled, by one who had conceived neither after any feeble way, in

a gifted person. Here at least, by the skill of Romanino's hand, the

obscure martyr of the crypts shines as a [108] saint of the later

Renaissance, with a sanctity of which the elegant world itself would

hardly escape the fascination, and which reminds one how the great

Apostle Saint Paul has made courtesy part of the content of the

Divine charity itself. A Rubens in Italy!--so Romanino has been

called. In this gracious presence we might think that, like Rubens

also, he had been a courtier.

NOTES

90. *Published in the New Review, Nov. 1890, and now reprinted by the

kind permission of the proprietors.

NOTRE-DAME D'AMIENS*

[109] THE greatest and purest of Gothic churches, Notre-Dame

d'Amiens, illustrates, by its fine qualities, a characteristic

secular movement of the beginning of the thirteenth century.

Philosophic writers of French history have explained how, in that and

in the two preceding centuries, a great number of the more important

towns in eastern and northern France rose against the feudal

establishment, and developed severally the local and municipal life

of the commune. To guarantee their independence therein they

obtained charters from their formal superiors. The Charter of Amiens

served as the model for many other communes. Notre-Dame d'Amiens is

the church of a commune. In that century of Saint Francis, of Saint

Louis, they were still religious. But over against monastic

interests, as identified with a central authority--king, emperor, or

pope--they pushed forward the local, and, so to call it, secular

authority of their [110] bishops, the flower of the "secular clergy"

in all its mundane astuteness, ready enough to make their way as the

natural Protectors of such townships. The people of Amiens, for

instance, under a powerful episcopal patron, invested their civic

pride in a vast cathedral, outrivalling neighbours, as being in

effect their parochial church, and promoted there the new,

revolutionary, Gothic manner, at the expense of the derivative and

traditional, Roman or Romanesque, style, the imperial style, of the

great monastic churches. Nay, those grand and beautiful people's

churches of the thirteenth century, churches pre-eminently of "Our

Lady," concurred also with certain novel humanistic movements of

religion itself at that period, above all with the expansion of what

is reassuring and popular in the worship of Mary, as a tender and

accessible, though almost irresistible, intercessor with her severe

and awful Son.

Hence the splendour, the space, the novelty, of the great French

cathedrals in the first Pointed style, monuments for the most part of

the artistic genius of laymen, significant pre-eminently of that

Queen of Gothic churches at Amiens. In most cases those early

Pointed churches are entangled, here or there, by the constructions

of the old round-arched style, the heavy, Norman or other, Romanesque

chapel or aisle, side by side, though in strong contrast with, the

soaring new Gothic of nave or transept. But of that older [111]

manner of the round arch, the plein-cintre, Amiens has nowhere, or

almost nowhere, a trace. The Pointed style, fully pronounced, but in

all the purity of its first period, found here its completest

expression. And while those venerable, Romanesque, profoundly

characteristic, monastic churches, the gregarious product of long

centuries, are for the most part anonymous, as if to illustrate from

the first a certain personal tendency which came in with the Gothic

manner, we know the name of the architect under whom, in the year

A.D. 1220, the building of the church of Amiens began--a layman,

Robert de Luzarches.

Light and space--floods of light, space for a vast congregation, for

all the people of Amiens, for their movements, with something like

the height and width of heaven itself enclosed above them to breathe

in;--you see at a glance that this is what the ingenuity of the

Pointed method of building has here secured. For breadth, for the

easy flow of a processional torrent, there is nothing like the

"ambulatory," the aisle of the choir and transepts. And the entire

area is on one level. There are here no flights of steps upward, as

at Canterbury, no descending to dark crypts, as in so many Italian

churches--a few low, broad steps to gain the choir, two or three to

the high altar. To a large extent the old pavement remains, though

almost worn-out by the footsteps of centuries. Priceless, though not

composed of precious material, it gains its effect [112] by ingenuity

and variety in the patterning, zig-zags, chequers, mazes, prevailing

respectively, in white and grey, in great square, alternate spaces--

the original floor of a medieval church for once untouched. The

massive square bases of the pillars of a Romanesque church, harshly

angular, obstruct, sometimes cruelly, the standing, the movements, of

a multitude of persons. To carry such a multitude conveniently round

them is the matter-of-fact motive of the gradual chiselling away, the

softening of the angles, the graceful compassing, of the Gothic base,

till in our own Perpendicular period it all but disappears. You may

study that tendency appropriately in the one church of Amiens; for

such in effect Notre-Dame has always been. That circumstance is

illustrated by the great font, the oldest thing here, an oblong

trough, perhaps an ancient saintly coffin, with four quaint prophetic

figures at the angles, carved from a single block of stone. To it,

as to the baptistery of an Italian town, not so long since all the

babes of Amiens used to come for christening.

Strange as it may seem, in this "queen" of Gothic churches, l'église

ogivale par excellence, there is nothing of mystery in the vision,

which yet surprises, over and over again, the eye of the visitor who

enters at the western doorway. From the flagstone at one's foot to

the distant keystone of the chevet, noblest of its species-- [113]

reminding you of how many largely graceful things, sails of a ship in

the wind, and the like!--at one view the whole is visible,

intelligible;--the integrity of the first design; how later additions

affixed themselves thereto; how the rich ornament gathered upon it;

the increasing richness of the choir; its glazed triforium; the

realms of light which expand in the chapels beyond; the astonishing

boldness of the vault, the astonishing lightness of what keeps it

above one; the unity, yet the variety of perspective. There is no

mystery here, and indeed no repose. Like the age which projected it,

like the impulsive communal movement which was here its motive, the

Pointed style at Amiens is full of excitement. Go, for repose, to

classic work, with the simple vertical law of pressure downwards, or

to its Lombard, Rhenish, or Norman derivatives. Here, rather, you

are conscious restlessly of that sustained equilibrium of oblique

pressure on all sides, which is the essence of the hazardous Gothic

construction, a construction of which the "flying buttress" is the

most significant feature. Across the clear glass of the great

windows of the triforium you see it, feel it, at its Atlas-work

audaciously. "A pleasant thing it is to behold the sun" those first

Gothic builders would seem to have said to themselves; and at Amiens,

for instance, the walls have disappeared; the entire building is

composed of its windows. Those who built it [114] might have had for

their one and only purpose to enclose as large a space as possible

with the given material.

No; the peculiar Gothic buttress, with its double, triple, fourfold

flights, while it makes such marvels possible, securing light and

space and graceful effect, relieving the pillars within of their

massiveness, is not a restful architectural feature. Consolidation

of matter naturally on the move, security for settlement in a very

complex system of construction--that is avowedly a part of the Gothic

situation, the Gothic problem. With the genius which contended,

though not always quite successfully, with this difficult problem,

came also novel aesthetic effect, a whole volume of delightful

aesthetic effects. For the mere melody of Greek architecture, for

the sense as it were of music in the opposition of successive sounds,

you got harmony, the richer music generated by opposition of sounds

in one and the same moment; and were gainers. And then, in contrast

with the classic manner, and the Romanesque survivals from it, the

vast complexity of the Gothic style seemed, as if consciously, to

correspond to the richness, the expressiveness, the thousandfold

influence of the Catholic religion, in the thirteenth century still

in natural movement in every direction. The later Gothic of the

fifteenth and sixteenth centuries tended to conceal, as it now took

for granted, the structural use of the buttress, for [115] example;

seemed to turn it into a mere occasion for ornament, not always

pleasantly:--while the ornament was out of place, the structure

failed. Such falsity is far enough away from what at Amiens is

really of the thirteenth century. In this pre-eminently "secular"

church, the execution, in all the defiance of its method, is direct,

frank, clearly apparent, with the result not only of reassuring the

intelligence, but of keeping one's curiosity also continually on the

alert, as we linger in these restless aisles.

The integrity of the edifice, together with its volume of light, has

indeed been diminished by the addition of a range of chapels, beyond

the proper limits of the aisles, north and south. Not a part of the

original design, these chapels were formed for private uses in the

fourteenth century, by the device of walling in and vaulting the open

spaces between the great buttresses of the nave. Under the broad but

subdued sunshine which falls through range upon range of windows,

reflected from white wall and roof and gallery, soothing to the eye,

while it allows you to see the delicate carved work in all its

refinement of touch, it is only as an after-thought, an artificial

after-thought, that you regret the lost stained glass, or the

vanished mural colour, if such to any large extent there ever were.

The best stained glass is often that stained by weather, by centuries

of weather, [116] and we may well be grateful for the amazing

cheerfulness of the interior of Amiens, as we actually find it.

Windows of the richest remain, indeed, in the apsidal chapels; and

the rose-windows of the transepts are known, from the prevailing

tones of their stained glass, as Fire and Water, the western rose

symbolising in like manner Earth and Air, as respectively green and

blue. But there is no reason to suppose that the interior was ever

so darkened as to prevent one's seeing, really and clearly, the

dainty ornament, which from the first abounded here; the floriated

architectural detail; the broad band of flowers and foliage, thick

and deep and purely sculptured, above the arches of nave and choir

and transepts, and wreathing itself continuously round the embedded

piers which support the roof; with the woodwork, the illuminated

metal, the magnificent tombs, the jewellers' work in the chapels.

One precious, early thirteenth-century window of grisaille remains,

exquisite in itself, interesting as evidence of the sort of

decoration which originally filled the larger number of the windows.

Grisaille, with its lace-work of transparent grey, set here and there

with a ruby, a sapphire, a gemmed medallion, interrupts the clear

light on things hardly more than the plain glass, of which indeed

such windows are mainly composed. The finely designed frames of iron

for the support of the glass, in the windows from which even [117]

this decoration is gone, still remain, to the delight of those who

are knowing in the matter.

Very ancient light, this seems, at any rate, as if it had been lying

imprisoned thus for long centuries; were in fact the light over which

the great vault originally closed, now become almost substance of

thought, one might fancy,--a mental object or medium. We are

reminded that after all we must of necessity look on the great

churches of the Middle Age with other eyes than those who built or

first worshipped in them; that there is something verily worth

having, and a just equivalent for something else lost, in the mere

effect of time, and that the salt of all aesthetic study is in the

question,--What, precisely what, is this to me? You and I, perhaps,

should not care much for the mural colouring of a medieval church,

could we see it as it was; might think it crude, and in the way.

What little remains of it at Amiens has parted, indeed, in the course

of ages, with its shrillness and its coarse grain. And in this

matter certainly, in view of Gothic polychrome, our difference from

the people of the thirteenth century is radical. We have, as it was

very unlikely they should have, a curiosity, a very pleasurable

curiosity, in the mere working of the stone they built with, and in

the minute facts of their construction, which their colouring, and

the layer of plaster it involved, disguised or hid. We may think

that in architecture stone is the most beautiful [118] of all things.

Modern hands have replaced the colour on some of the tombs here--the

effigies, the tabernacles above--skilfully as may be, and have but

deprived them of their dignity. Medieval colouring, in fact, must

have improved steadily, as it decayed, almost till there came to be

no question of colour at all. In architecture, close as it is to

men's lives and their history, the visible result of time is a large

factor in the realised aesthetic value, and what a true architect

will in due measure always trust to. A false restoration only

frustrates the proper ripening of his work.

If we may credit our modern eyes, then, those old, very secular

builders aimed at, they achieved, an immense cheerfulness in their

great church, with a purpose which still pursued them into their

minuter decoration. The conventional vegetation of the Romanesque,

its blendings of human or animal with vegetable form, in cornice or

capital, have given way here, in the first Pointed style, to a

pleasanter, because more natural, mode of fancy; to veritable forms

of vegetable life, flower or leaf, from meadow and woodside, though

still indeed with a certain survival of the grotesque in a confusion

of the leaf with the flower, which the subsequent Decorated period

will wholly purge away in its perfect garden-borders. It was not

with monastic artists and artisans that the sheds and workshops

around Amiens Cathedral were filled, [119] as it rose from its

foundations through fifty years; and those lay schools of art, with

their communistic sentiment, to which in the thirteenth century the

great episcopal builders must needs resort, would in the natural

course of things tend towards naturalism. The subordinate arts also

were no longer at the monastic stage, borrowing inspiration

exclusively from the experiences of the cloister, but belonged to

guilds of laymen--smiths, painters, sculptors. The great

confederation of the "city," the commune, subdivided itself into

confederations of citizens. In the natural objects of the first

Pointed style there is the freshness as of nature itself, seen and

felt for the first time; as if, in contrast, those older cloistral

workmen had but fed their imagination in an embarrassed, imprisoned,

and really decadent manner, or mere reminiscence of, or prescriptions

about, things visible.

Congruous again with the popularity of the builders of Amiens, of

their motives, is the wealth, the freedom and abundance, of popular,

almost secular, teaching, here afforded, in the carving especially,

within and without; an open Bible, in place of later legend, as at

monastic Vézelay,--the Bible treated as a book about men and women,

and other persons equally real, but blent with lessons, with the

liveliest observations, on the lives of men as they were then and

now, what they do, and how they do it, or did it then, and on the

doings of nature [120] which so greatly influence what man does;

together with certain impressive metaphysical and moral ideas, a sort

of popular scholastic philosophy, or as if it were the virtues and

vices Aristotle defines, or the characters of Theophrastus,

translated into stone. Above all, it is to be observed that as a

result of this spirit, this "free" spirit, in it, art has at last

become personal. The artist, as such, appears at Amiens, as

elsewhere, in the thirteenth century; and, by making his personal way

of conception and execution prevail there, renders his own work vivid

and organic, and apt to catch the interest of other people. He is no

longer a Byzantine, but a Greek--an unconscious Greek. Proof of this

is in the famous Beau-Dieu of Amiens, as they call that benign,

almost classically proportioned figure, on the central pillar of the

great west doorway; though in fact neither that, nor anything else on

the west front of Amiens, is quite the best work here. For that we

must look rather to the sculpture of the portal of the south

transept, called, from a certain image there, Portail de la Vierge

dorée, gilded at the expense of some unknown devout person at the

beginning of the last century. A presentation of the mystic, the

delicately miraculous, story of Saint Honoré, eighth Bishop of

Amiens, and his companions, with its voices, its intuitions, and

celestial intimations, it has evoked a correspondent method of work

at once [121] naïve and nicely expressive. The rose, or roue, above

it, carries on the outer rim seventeen personages, ascending and

descending--another piece of popular philosophy--the wheel of

fortune, or of human life.

And they were great brass-founders, surely, who at that early day

modelled and cast the tombs of the Bishops Evrard and Geoffrey, vast

plates of massive black bronze in half-relief, like abstract thoughts

of those grand old prelatic persons. The tomb of Evrard, who laid

the foundations (qui fundamenta hujus basilicae locavit), is not

quite as it was. Formerly it was sunk in the pavement, while the

tomb of Bishop Geoffrey opposite (it was he closed in the mighty

vault of the nave: hanc basilicam culmen usque perduxit), itself

vaulted-over the space of the grave beneath. The supreme excellence

of those original workmen, the journeymen of Robert de Luzarches and

his successor, would seem indeed to have inspired others, who have

been at their best here, down to the days of Louis the Fourteenth.

It prompted, we may think, a high level of execution, through many

revolutions of taste in such matters; in the marvellous furniture of

the choir, for instance, like a whole wood, say a thicket of old

hawthorn, with its curved topmost branches spared, slowly transformed

by the labour of a whole family of artists, during fourteen years,

into the stalls, in number one hundred and ten, with nearly four

[122] thousand figures. Yet they are but on a level with the

Flamboyant carved and coloured enclosures of the choir, with the

histories of John the Baptist, whose face-bones are here preserved,

and of Saint Firmin--popular saint, who protects the houses of Amiens

from fire. Even the screens of forged iron around the sanctuary,

work of the seventeenth century, appear actually to soar, in their

way, in concert with the airy Gothic structure; to let the daylight

pass as it will; to have come, they too, from smiths, odd as it may

seem at just that time, with some touch of inspiration in them. In

the beginning of the fifteenth century they had reared against a

certain bald space of wall, between the great portal and the western

"rose," an organ, a lofty, many-chambered, veritable house of church-

music, rich in azure and gold, finished above at a later day, not

incongruously, in the quaint, pretty manner of Henri-Deux. And those

who are interested in the curiosities of ritual, of the old

provincial Gallican "uses," will be surprised to find one where they

might least have expected it. The reserved Eucharist still hangs

suspended in a pyx, formed like a dove, in the midst of that

lamentable "glory" of the eighteenth century in the central bay of

the sanctuary, all the poor, gaudy, gilt rays converging towards it.

There are days in the year in which the great church is still

literally filled with reverent worshippers, and if you come late to

service you push the [123] doors in vain against the closely serried

shoulders of the good people of Amiens, one and all in black for

church-holiday attire. Then, one and all, they intone the Tantum

ergo (did it ever sound so in the Middle Ages?) as the Eucharist,

after a long procession, rises once more into its resting-place.

If the Greeks, as at least one of them says, really believed there

could be no true beauty without bigness, that thought certainly is

most specious in regard to architecture; and the thirteenth-century

church of Amiens is one of the three or four largest buildings in the

world, out of all proportion to any Greek building, both in that and

in the multitude of its external sculpture. The chapels of the nave

are embellished without by a double range of single figures, or

groups, commemorative of the persons, the mysteries, to which they

are respectively dedicated--the gigantic form of Christopher, the

Mystery of the Annunciation.

The builders of the church seem to have projected no very noticeable

towers; though it is conventional to regret their absence, especially

with visitors from England, where indeed cathedral and other towers

are apt to be good, and really make their mark. Robert de Luzarches

and his successors aimed rather at the domical outline, with its

central point at the centre of the church, in the spire or flèche.

The existing spire is a wonderful mass of carpentry [124] of the

beginning of the sixteenth century, at which time the lead that

carefully wraps every part of it was heavily gilt. The great western

towers are lost in the west front, the grandest, perhaps the

earliest, example of its species--three profound, sculptured portals;

a double gallery above, the upper gallery carrying colossal images of

twenty-two kings of the House of Judah, ancestors of Our Lady; then

the great rose; above it the ringers' gallery, half masking the gable

of the nave, and uniting at their top-most storeys the twin, but not

exactly equal or similar, towers, oddly oblong in plan, as if never

intended to carry pyramids or spires. They overlook an immense

distance in those flat, peat-digging, black and green regions, with

rather cheerless rivers, and are the centre of an architectural

region wider still--of a group to which Soissons, far beyond the

woods of Compiègne, belongs, with St. Quentin, and, towards the west,

a too ambitious rival, Beauvais, which has stood however--what we now

see of it--for six centuries.

It is a spare, rather sad world at most times that Notre-Dame

d'Amiens thus broods over; a country with little else to be proud of;

the sort of world, in fact, which makes the range of conceptions

embodied in these cliffs of quarried and carved stone all the more

welcome as a hopeful complement to the meagreness of most people's

present existence, and its apparent ending in a [125] sparely built

coffin under the flinty soil, and grey, driving sea-winds. In Notre-

Dame, therefore, and her sisters, there is not only a common method

of construction, a single definable type, different from that of

other French latitudes, but a correspondent common sentiment also;

something which speaks, amid an immense achievement just here of what

is beautiful and great, of the necessity of an immense effort in the

natural course of things, of what you may see quaintly designed in

one of those hieroglyphic carvings--radix de terra sitienti: "a root

out of a dry ground."

NOTES

109. *Published in the Nineteenth Century, March 1894, and now

reprinted by the kind permission of the proprietors.

VÉZELAY*

[126] As you discern the long unbroken line of its roof, low-pitched

for France, above the cottages and willow-shaded streams of the

place, you might think the abbey church of Pontigny, the largest

Cistercian church now remaining, only a great farm-building. On a

nearer view there is something unpretending, something pleasantly

English, in the plain grey walls, pierced with long "lancet" windows,

as if they overlooked the lowlands of Essex, or the meadows of Kent

or Berkshire, the sort of country from which came those saintly

exiles of our race who made the cloisters of Pontigny famous, and one

of whom, Saint Edmund of Abingdon, Saint-Edme, still lies enshrined

here. The country which the sons of Saint Bernard choose for their

abode is in fact but a patch of scanty pasture-land in the midst of a

heady wine-district. Like its majestic Cluniac rivals, the church

has its western portico, elegant in structure but of comparatively

humble [127] proportions, under a plain roof of tiles, pent-wise.

Within, a heavy coat of white-wash seems befitting to the simple

forms of the "Transition," or quite earliest "Pointed," style, to its

remarkable continence of spirit, its uniformity, and cleanness of

build. The long prospect of nave and choir ends, however, with a

sort of graceful smallness, in a chevet of seven closely packed,

narrow bays. It is like a nun's church, or like a nun's coif.

The church of Pontigny, representative generally of the churches of

the Cistercian order, including some of the loveliest early English

ones, was in truth significant of a reaction, a reaction against

monasticism itself, as it had come to be in the order of Cluny, the

genius of which found its proper expression in the imperious, but

half-barbaric, splendours of the richest form of the Romanesque, the

monastic style pre-eminently, as we may still see it at La Charité-

sur-Loire, at Saint-Benoît, above all, on the hill of Vézelay. Saint

Bernard, who had lent his immense influence to the order of Cîteaux

by way of a monastic reform, though he had a genius for hymns and was

in other ways an eminent religious poet, and though he gave new life

to the expiring romance of the crusades, was, as regards the visible

world, much of a Puritan. Was it he who, wrapt in thought upon the

world unseen, walked along the shores of Lake Leman without observing

it?--the eternal snows he might have taken for the walls of the New

Jerusalem; the blue waves he [128] might have fancied its pavement of

sapphire. In the churches, the worship, of his new order he required

simplicity, and even severity, being fortunate in finding so winsome

an exponent of that principle as the early Gothic of Pontigny, or of

the first Cistercian church, now destroyed, at Cîteaux itself.

Strangely enough, while Bernard's own temper of mind was a survival

from the past (we see this in his contest with Abelard), hierarchic,

reactionary, suspicious of novelty, the architectural style of his

preference was largely of secular origin. It had a large share in

that inventive and innovating genius, that expansion of the natural

human soul, to which the art, the literature, the religious movements

of the thirteenth century in France, as in Italy, where it ends with

Dante, bear witness.

In particular, Bernard had protested against the sculpture, rich and

fantastic, but gloomy, it might be indecent, developed more

abundantly than anywhere else in the churches of Burgundy, and

especially in those of the Cluniac order. "What is the use," he

asks, "of those grotesque monsters in painting and sculpture?" and

almost certainly he had in mind the marvellous carved work at

Vézelay, whither doubtless he came often--for example on Good Friday,

1146, to preach, as we know, the second crusade in the presence of

Louis the Seventh. He too might have wept at the sight of the doomed

multitude (one in ten, it is said, returned from the Holy [129]

Land), as its enthusiasm, under the charm of his fiery eloquence,

rose to the height of his purpose. Even the aisles of Vézelay were

not sufficient for the multitude of his hearers, and he preached to

them in the open air, from a rock still pointed out on the hillside.

Armies indeed have been encamped many times on the slopes and meadows

of the valley of the Cure, now to all seeming so impregnably

tranquil. The Cluniac order even then had already declined from its

first intention; and that decline became especially visible in the

Abbey of Vézelay itself not long after Bernard's day. Its majestic

immoveable church was complete by the middle of the twelfth century.

And there it still stands in spite of many a threat, while the

conventual buildings around it have disappeared; and the institution

it represented--secularised at its own request at the Reformation--

had dwindled almost to nothing at all, till in the last century the

last Abbot built himself, in place of the old Gothic lodging below

those solemn walls, a sort of Château Gaillard, a dainty abode in the

manner of Louis Quinze--swept away that too at the Revolution--where

the great oaks now flourish, with the rooks and squirrels.

Yet the order of Cluny, in its time, in that dark period of the

eleventh and twelfth centuries, had deserved well of those to whom

religion, and art, and social order are precious. The Cluniacs had

in fact represented monasticism in the most [130] legitimate form of

its activity; and, if the church of Vézelay was not quite the

grandest of their churches, it is certainly the grandest of them

which remains. It is also typical in character. As Notre-Dame

d'Amiens is pre-eminently the church of the city, of a commune, so

the Madeleine of Vézelay is typically the church of a monastery.

The monastic style proper, then, in its peculiar power and influence,

was Romanesque, and with the Cluniac order; and here perhaps better

than anywhere else we may understand what it really came to, what was

its effect on the spirits, the imagination.

As at Pontigny, the Cistercians, for the most part, built their

churches in lowly valleys, according to the intention of their

founder. The representative church of the Cluniacs, on the other

hand, lies amid the closely piled houses of the little town, which it

protected and could punish, on a steep hill-top, like a long massive

chest there, heavy above you, as you climb slowly the winding road,

the old unchanged pathway of Saint Bernard. In days gone by it

threatened the surrounding neighbourhood with four boldly built

towers; had then also a spire at the crossing; and must have been at

that time like a more magnificent version of the buildings which

still crown the hill of Laon. Externally, the proportions, the

squareness, of the nave (west and east, the vast narthex or porch,

and the [131] Gothic choir, rise above its roof-line), remind one of

another great Romanesque church at home--of the nave of Winchester,

out of which Wykeham carved his richly panelled Perpendicular

interior.

At Vézelay however, the Romanesque, the Romanesque of Burgundy, alike

in the first conception of the whole structure, and in the actual

locking together of its big stones, its masses of almost unbroken

masonry, its inertia, figures as of more imperial character, and

nearer to the Romans of old, than its feebler kindred in England or

Normandy. We seem to have before us here a Romanesque architecture,

studied, not from Roman basilicas or Roman temples, but from the

arenas, the colossal gateways, the triumphal arches, of the people of

empire, such as remain even now, not in the South of France only.

The simple "flying," or rather leaning and almost couchant,

buttresses, quadrants of a circle, might be parts of a Roman

aqueduct. In contrast to the lightsome Gothic manner of the last

quarter of the twelfth century (as we shall presently find it here

too, like an escape for the eye, for the temper, out of some grim

underworld into genial daylight), the Cluniac church might seem a

still active instrument of the iron tyranny of Rome, of its tyranny

over the animal spirits. As the ghost of ancient Rome still lingers

"over the grave thereof," in the papacy, the hierarchy, so is it with

the material structures [132] also, the Cluniac and other Romanesque

churches, which most emphatically express the hierarchical, the papal

system. There is something about this church of Vézelay, in the

long-sustained patience of which it tells, that brings to mind the

labour of slaves, whose occasional Fescennine licence and fresh

memories of a barbaric life also find expression, now and again, in

the strange sculpture of the place. Yet here for once, around a

great French church, there is the kindly repose of English

"precincts," and the country which this monastic acropolis overlooks

southwards is a very pleasant one, as we emerge from the shadows of--

yes! of that peculiarly sad place--a country all the pleasanter by

reason of the toil upon it, performed, or exacted from others, by the

monks, through long centuries; Le Morvan, with its distant blue hills

and broken foreground, the vineyards, the patches of woodland, the

roads winding into their cool shadows; though in truth the fortress-

like outline of the monastic church and the sombre hue of its

material lend themselves most readily to the effects of a stormy sky.

By a door, which in the great days opened from a magnificent

cloister, you enter what might seem itself but the ambulatory of a

cloister, superbly vaulted and long and regular, and built of huge

stones of a metallic colour. It is the southern aisle of the nave, a

nave of ten bays, the grandest Romanesque interior in France, [133]

perhaps in the world. In its mortified light the very soul of

monasticism, Roman and half-military, as the completest outcome of a

religion of threats, seems to descend upon one. Monasticism is

indeed the product of many various tendencies of the religious soul,

one or another of which may very properly connect itself with the

Pointed style, as we saw in those lightsome aisles of Pontigny, so

expressive of the purity, the lowly sweetness, of the soul of

Bernard. But it is here at Vézelay, in this iron place, that

monasticism in its central, its historically most significant

purpose, presents itself as most completely at home. There is no

triforium. The monotonous cloistral length of wall above the long-

drawn series of stately round arches, is unbroken save by a plain

small window in each bay, placed as high as possible just below the

cornice, as a mere after-thought, you might fancy. Those windows

were probably unglazed, and closed only with wooden shutters as

occasion required. Furnished with the stained glass of the period,

they would have left the place almost in darkness, giving doubtless

full effect to the monkish candle-light in any case needful here. An

almost perfect cradle-roof, tunnel-like from end to end of the long

central aisle, adds by its simplicity of form to the magnificent

unity of effect. The bearing-arches, which span it from bay to bay,

being parti-coloured, with voussures of alternate white and a kind of

grey or green, [134] being also somewhat flat at the keystone, and

literally eccentric, have, at least for English eyes, something of a

Saracenic or other Oriental character. Again, it is as if the

architects--the engineers--who worked here, had seen things undreamt

of by other Romanesque builders, the builders in England and

Normandy.

Here then, scarcely relieving the almost savage character of the

work, abundant on tympanum and doorway without, above all on the

immense capitals of the nave within, is the sculpture which offended

Bernard. A sumptuous band of it, a carved guipure of singular

boldness, passes continuously round the arches, and along the

cornices from bay to bay, and with the large bossy tendency of the

ornament throughout may be regarded as typical of Burgundian

richness. Of sculptured capitals, to like, or to dislike with Saint

Bernard, there are nearly a hundred, unwearied in variety, unique in

the energy of their conception, full of wild promise in their coarse

execution, cruel, you might say, in the realisation of human form and

features. Irresistibly they rivet attention.

The subjects are for the most part Scriptural, chosen apparently as

being apt for strongly satiric treatment, the suicide of Judas, the

fall of Goliath. The legend of Saint Benedict, naturally at home in

a Benedictine church, presented the sculptor with a series of

forcible grotesques ready-made. Some monkish story, [135] half

moral, half facetious, perhaps a little coarse, like that of Sainte

Eugénie, from time to time makes variety; or an example of the

punishment of the wicked by men or by devils, who play a large, and

to themselves thoroughly enjoyable and merry, part here. The

sculptor would seem to have witnessed the punishment of the

blasphemer; how adroitly the executioner planted knee on the

culprit's bosom, as he lay on the ground, and out came the sinful

tongue, to meet the iron pincers. The minds of those who worked thus

seem to have been almost insanely preoccupied just then with the

human countenance, but by no means exclusively in its pleasantness or

dignity. Bold, crude, original, their work indicates delight in the

power of reproducing fact, curiosity in it, but little or no sense of

beauty. The humanity therefore here presented, as in the Cluniac

sculpture generally, is wholly unconventional. M. Viollet-le-Duc

thinks he can trace in it individual types still actually existing in

the peasantry of Le Morvan. Man and morality, however, disappearing

at intervals, the acanthine capitals have a kind of later Venetian

beauty about them, as the Venetian birds also, the conventional

peacocks, or birds wholly of fantasy, amid the long fantastic

foliage. There are still however no true flowers of the field here.

There is pity, it must be confessed, on the other hand, and the

delicacy, the beauty, which that always brings [136] with it, where

Jephtha peeps at the dead daughter's face, lifting timidly the great

leaves that cover it; in the hanging body of Absalom; in the child

carried away by the eagle, his long frock twisted in the wind as he

goes. The parents run out in dismay, and the devil grins, not

because it is the punishment of the child or of them; but because he

is the author of all mischief everywhere, as the monkish carver

conceived--so far wholesomely.

We must remember that any sculpture less emphatic would have been

ineffective, because practically invisible, in this sombre place.

But at the west end there is an escape for the eye, for the soul,

towards the unhindered, natural, afternoon sun; not however into the

outer and open air, but through an arcade of three bold round arches,

high above the great closed western doors, into a somewhat broader

and loftier place than this, a reservoir of light, a veritable camera

lucida. The light is that which lies below the vault and within the

tribunes of the famous narthex (as they say), the vast fore-church or

vestibule, into which the nave is prolonged. A remarkable feature of

many Cluniac churches, the great western porch, on a scale which is

approached in England only at Peterborough, is found also in some of

the churches of the Cistercians. It is characteristic, in fact,

rather of Burgundy than of either of those religious orders

especially.

[137] At Pontigny itself, for instance, there is a good one; and a

very early one at Paray-le-Monial. Saint-Père-sous-Vézelay, daughter

of the great church, in the vale below, has a late Gothic example;

Semur also, with fantastic lodges above it. The cathedral of Autun,

a secular church in rivalry of the "religious," presents, by way of

such western porch or vestibule, two entire bays of the nave,

unglazed, with the vast western arch open to the air; the west front,

with its rich portals, being thrown back into the depths of the great

fore-church thus produced.

The narthex of Vézelay, the largest of these singular structures, is

glazed, and closed towards the west by what is now the façade. It is

itself in fact a great church, a nave of three magnificent bays, and

of three aisles, with a spacious triforium. With their fantastic

sculpture, sheltered thus from accident and weather, in all its

original freshness, the great portals of the primitive façade serve

now for doorways, as a second, solemn, door of entrance, to the

church proper within. The very structure of the place, and its

relation to the main edifice, indicate that it was for use on

occasion, when, at certain great feasts, that of the Magdalen

especially, to whom the church of Vézelay is dedicated, the monastery

was swollen with pilgrims, too poor, too numerous, to be lodged in

the town, come hither to worship before the [138] relics of the

friend of Jesus, enshrined in a low-vaulted crypt, the floor of which

is the natural rocky surface of the hill-top. It may be that the

pilgrims were permitted to lie for the night, not only on the

pavement, but (if so favoured) in the high and dry chamber formed by

the spacious triforium over the north aisle, awaiting an early Mass.

The primitive west front, then, had become but a wall of partition;

and above its central portal, where the round arched west windows had

been, ran now a kind of broad, arcaded tribune, in full view of the

entire length of the church. In the midst of it stood an altar; and

here perhaps, the priest who officiated being visible to the whole

assembled multitude east and west, the early Mass was said.

The great vestibule was finished about forty years after the

completion of the nave, towards the middle of the twelfth century.

And here, in the great pier-arches, and in the eastern bay of the

vault, still with the large masonry, the large, flat, unmoulded

surfaces, and amid the fantastic carvings of the Romanesque building

about it, the Pointed style, determined yet discreet, makes itself

felt--makes itself felt by appearing, if not for the first time, yet

for the first time in the organic or systematic development of French

architecture. Not in the unambitious façade of Saint-Denis, nor in

the austere aisles of Sens, but at Vézelay, in this grandiose fabric,

so worthy of the event, Viollet-le-Duc would [139] fain see the

birthplace of the Pointed style. Here at last, with no sense of

contrast, but by way of veritable "transition," and as if by its own

matured strength, the round arch breaks into the double curve, les

arcs brisés, with a wonderful access of grace. And the imaginative

effect is forthwith enlarged. Beyond, far beyond, what is actually

presented to the eye in that peculiar curvature, its mysterious

grace, and by the stateliness, the elevation of the ogival method of

vaulting, the imagination is stirred to present one with what belongs

properly to it alone. The masonry, though large, is nicely fitted; a

large light is admitted through the now fully pronounced Gothic

windows towards the west. At Amiens we found the Gothic spirit,

reigning there exclusively, to be a restless one. At Vézelay, where

it breathes for the first time amid the heavy masses of the old

imperial style, it breathes the very genius of monastic repose. And

then, whereas at Amiens, and still more at Beauvais, at Saint-

Quentin, you wonder how these monuments of the past can have endured

so long, in strictly monastic Vézelay you have a sense of freshness,

such as, in spite of their ruin, we perceive in the buildings of

Greece. We enjoy here not so much, as at Amiens, the sentiment of

antiquity, but that of eternal duration.

But let me place you once more where we stood for a while, on

entering by the doorway [140] in the midst of the long southern

aisle. Cross the aisle, and gather now in one view the perspective

of the whole. Away on the left hand the eye is drawn upward to the

tranquil light of the vaults of the fore-church, seeming doubtless

the more spacious because partly concealed from us by the wall of

partition below. But on the right hand, towards the east, as if with

the set purpose of a striking architectural contrast, an instruction

as to the place of this or that manner in the architectural series,

the long, tunnel-like, military work of the Romanesque nave opens

wide into the exhilarating daylight of choir and transepts, in the

sort of Gothic Bernard would have welcomed, with a vault rising now

high above the roof-line of the body of the church, sicut lilium

excelsum. The simple flowers, the flora, of the early Pointed style,

which could never have looked at home as an element in the half-

savage decoration of the nave, seem to be growing here upon the

sheaves of slender, reedy pillars, as if naturally in the carved

stone. Even here indeed, Roman, or Romanesque, taste still lingers

proudly in the monolith columns of the chevet. Externally, we may

note with what dexterity the Gothic choir has been inserted into its

place, below and within the great buttresses of the earlier

Romanesque one.

Visitors to the great church of Assisi have sometimes found a kind of

parable in the threefold [141] ascent from the dark crypt where the

body of Saint Francis lies, through the gloomy "lower" church, into

the height and breadth, the physical and symbolic "illumination," of

the church above. At Vézelay that kind of contrast suggests itself

in one view; the hopeful, but transitory, glory upon which one

enters; the long, darksome, central avenue; the "open vision" into

which it conducts us. As a symbol of resurrection, its choir is a

fitting diadem to the church of the Magdalen, whose remains the monks

meant it to cover.

And yet, after all, notwithstanding this assertion of the superiority

(are we so to call it?) of the new Gothic way, perhaps by the very

force of contrast, the Madeleine of Vézelay is still pre-eminently a

Romanesque, and thereby the typically monastic, church. In spite of

restoration even, as we linger here, the impression of the monastic

Middle Age, of a very exclusive monasticism, that has verily turned

its back upon common life, jealously closed inward upon itself, is a

singularly weighty one; the more so because, as the peasant said when

asked the way to an old sanctuary that had fallen to the occupation

of farm-labourers, and was now deserted even by them: Maintenant il

n'y a personne là.

NOTES

126. *Published in the Nineteenth Century, June 1894, and now

reprinted by the kind permission of the proprietors.

APOLLO IN PICARDY*

[142] "CONSECUTIVE upon Apollo in all his solar fervour and

effulgence," says a writer of Teutonic proclivities, "we may discern

even among the Greeks themselves, elusively, as would be natural with

such a being, almost like a mock sun amid the mists, the northern or

ultra-northern sun-god. In hints and fragments the lexicographers

and others have told us something of this Hyperborean Apollo, fancies

about him which evidence some knowledge of the Land of the Midnight

Sun, of the sun's ways among the Laplanders, of a hoary summer

breathing very softly on the violet beds, or say, the London-pride

and crab-apples, provided for those meagre people, somewhere amid the

remoteness of their icy seas. In such wise Apollo had already

anticipated his sad fortunes in the Middle Age as a god definitely in

exile, driven north of the Alps, and even here ever in flight before

the summer. Summer indeed he leaves now to the management of [143]

others, finding his way from France and Germany to still paler

countries, yet making or taking with him always a certain seductive

summer-in-winter, though also with a divine or titanic regret, a

titanic revolt in his heart, and consequent inversion at times of his

old beneficent and properly solar doings. For his favours, his

fallacious good-humour, which has in truth a touch of malign magic

about it, he makes men pay sometimes a terrible price, and is in fact

a devil!"

Devilry, devil's work:--traces of such you might fancy were to be

found in a certain manuscript volume taken from an old monastic

library in France at the Revolution. It presented a strange example

of a cold and very reasonable spirit disturbed suddenly, thrown off

its balance, as by a violent beam, a blaze of new light, revealing,

as it glanced here and there, a hundred truths unguessed at before,

yet a curse, as it turned out, to its receiver, in dividing

hopelessly against itself the well-ordered kingdom of his thought.

Twelfth volume of a dry enough treatise on mathematics, applied,

still with no relaxation of strict method, to astronomy and music, it

should have concluded that work, and therewith the second period of

the life of its author, by drawing tight together the threads of a

long and intricate argument. In effect however, it began, or, in

perturbed manner, and as [144] with throes of childbirth, seemed the

preparation for, an argument of an entirely new and disparate

species, such as would demand a new period of life also, if it might

be, for its due expansion.

But with what confusion, what baffling inequalities! How afflicting

to the mind's eye! It was a veritable "solar storm"--this

illumination, which had burst at the last moment upon the strenuous,

self-possessed, much-honoured monastic student, as he sat down

peacefully to write the last formal chapters of his work ere he

betook himself to its well-earned practical reward as superior, with

lordship and mitre and ring, of the abbey whose music and calendar

his mathematical knowledge had qualified him to reform. The very

shape of Volume Twelve, pieced together of quite irregularly formed

pages, was a solecism. It could never be bound. In truth, the man

himself, and what passed with him in one particular space of time,

had invaded a matter, which is nothing if not entirely abstract and

impersonal. Indirectly the volume was the record of an episode, an

interlude, an interpolated page of life. And whereas in the earlier

volumes you found by way of illustration no more than the simplest

indispensable diagrams, the scribe's hand had strayed here into mazy

borders, long spaces of hieroglyph, and as it were veritable pictures

of the theoretic elements of his subject. Soft wintry auroras seemed

to play behind whole pages of crabbed textual writing, line and

figure [145] bending, breathing, flaming, in, to lovely

"arrangements" that were like music made visible; till writing and

writer changed suddenly, "to one thing constant never," after the

known manner of madmen in such work. Finally, the whole matter broke

off with an unfinished word, as a later hand testified, adding the

date of the author's death, "deliquio animi."

He had been brought to the monastery as a little child; was bred

there; had never yet left it, busy and satisfied through youth and

early manhood; was grown almost as necessary a part of the community

as the stones of its material abode, as a pillar of the great tower

he ascended to watch the movement of the stars. The structure of a

fortified medieval town barred in those who belonged to it very

effectively. High monastic walls intrenched the monk still further.

From the summit of the tower you looked straight down into the deep

narrow streets, upon the houses (in one of which Prior Saint-Jean was

born) climbing as high as they dared for breathing space within that

narrow compass. But you saw also the green breadth of Normandy and

Picardy, this way and that; felt on your face the free air of a still

wider realm beyond what was seen. The reviving scent of it, the mere

sight of the flowers brought thence, of the country produce at the

convent gate, stirred the ordinary monkish soul with desires,

sometimes with efforts, to be sent on duty there. Prior [146] Saint-

Jean, on the other hand, shuddered at the view, at the thoughts it

suggested to him; thoughts of unhallowed wild places, where the old

heathen had worshipped "stocks and stones," and where their

wickedness might still survive them in something worse than

mischievous tricks of nature, such as you might read of in Ovid,

whose verses, however, he for his part had never so much as touched

with a finger. He gave thanks rather, that his vocation to the

abstract sciences had kept him far apart from the whole crew of

miscreant poets--Abode of demons.

Thither nevertheless he was now to depart, sent to the Grange or

Obedience of Notre-Dame De-Pratis by the aged Abbot (about to resign

in his favour) for the benefit of his body's health, a little

impaired at last by long intellectual effort, yet so invaluable to

the community. But let him beware! whispered his dearest friend, who

shared those strange misgivings, let him "take heed to his ways" when

he was come to that place. "The mere contact of one's feet with its

soil might change one." And that same night, disturbed perhaps by

thoughts of the coming journey with which his brain was full, Prior

Saint-Jean himself dreamed vividly, as he had been little used to do.

He saw the very place in which he lay (he knew it! his little inner

cell, the brown doors, the white breadth of wall, the black crucifix

upon it) alight, alight [147] softly; and looking, as he fancied,

from the window, saw also a low circlet of soundless flame, waving,

licking daintily up the black sky, but harmless, beautiful, closing

in upon that round dark space in the midst, which was the earth. He

seemed to feel upon his shoulder just then the touch of his friend

beside him. "It is hell-fire!" he said.

The Prior took with him a very youthful though devoted companion--

Hyacinthus, the pet of the community. They laughed admiringly at the

rebellious masses of his black hair, with blue in the depths of it,

like the wings of the swallow, which refused to conform to the

monkish pattern. It only grew twofold, crown upon crown, after the

half-yearly shaving. And he was as neat and serviceable as he was

delightful to be with. Prior Saint-Jean, then, and the boy started

before daybreak for the long journey; onwards, till darkness, a soft

twilight rather, was around them again. How unlike a winter night it

seemed, the further they went through the endless, lonely, turf-grown

tracts, and along the edge of a valley, at length--vallis monachorum,

monksvale--taken aback by its sudden steepness and depth, as of an

immense oval cup sunken in the grassy upland, over which a golden

moon now shone broadly. Ah! there it was at last, the white Grange,

the white gable of the chapel apart amid a few scattered white

gravestones, the white flocks crouched about on the hoar-frost, [148]

like the white clouds, packed somewhat heavily on the horizon, and

nacrés as the clouds of June, with their own light and heat in them,

in their hollows, you might fancy.

From the very first, the atmosphere, the light, the influence of

things, seemed different from what they knew; and how distant already

the dark buildings of their home! Was there the breath of surviving

summer blossom on the air? Now and then came a gentle, comfortable

bleating from the folds, and themselves slept soundly at last in the

great open upper chamber of the Grange; were awakened by the sound of

thunder. Strange, in the late November night! It had parted,

however, with its torrid fierceness; modulated by distance, seemed to

break away into musical notes. And the lightning lingered along with

it, but glancing softly; was in truth an aurora, such as persisted

month after month on the northern sky as they sojourned here. Like

Prospero's enchanted island, the whole place was "full of noises."

The wind it might have been, passing over metallic strings, but that

they were audible even when the night was breathless.

So like veritable music, however, were they on that first night that,

upon reflexion, the Prior climbed softly the winding stair down which

they appeared to flow, to the great solar among the beams of the

roof, where the farm produce lay stored. A flood of moonlight now

fell through the unshuttered dormer-windows; and, [149] under the

glow of a lamp hanging from the low rafters, Prior Saint-Jean seemed

to be looking for the first time on the human form, on the old Adam

fresh from his Maker's hand. A servant of the house, or farm-

labourer, perhaps!--fallen asleep there by chance on the fleeces

heaped like golden stuff high in all the corners of the place. A

serf! But what unserflike ease, how lordly, or godlike rather, in

the posture! Could one fancy a single curve bettered in the rich,

warm, white limbs; in the haughty features of the face, with the

golden hair, tied in a mystic knot, fallen down across the inspired

brow? And yet what gentle sweetness also in the natural movement of

the bosom, the throat, the lips, of the sleeper! Could that be

diabolical, and really spotted with unseen evil, which was so

spotless to the eye? The rude sandals of the monastic serf lay

beside him apart, and all around was of the roughest, excepting only

two strange objects lying within reach (even in their own renowned

treasury Prior Saint-Jean had not seen the like of them), a harp, or

some such instrument, of silver-gilt once, but the gold had mostly

passed from it, and a bow, fashioned somehow of the same precious

substance. The very form of these things filled his mind with

inexplicable misgivings. He repeated a befitting collect, and trod

softly away.

It was in truth but a rude place to which they were come. But, after

life in the [150] monastery, the severe discipline of which the Prior

himself had done much to restore, there was luxury in the free, self-

chosen hours, the irregular fare, in doing pretty much as one

pleased, in the sweet novelties of the country; to the boy Hyacinth

especially, who forgot himself, or rather found his true self for the

first time. Girding up his heavy frock, which he laid aside erelong

altogether to go in his coarse linen smock only, he seemed a monastic

novice no longer; yet, in his natural gladness, was found more

companionable than ever by his senior, surprised, delighted, for his

part, at the fresh springing of his brain, the spring of his

footsteps over the close greensward, as if smoothed by the art of

man. Cause of his renewed health, or concurrent with its effects,

the air here might have been that of a veritable paradise, still

unspoiled. "Could there be unnatural magic," he asked himself again,

"any secret evil, lurking in these tranquil vale-sides, in their

sweet low pastures, in the belt of scattered woodland above them, in

the rills of pure water which lisped from the open down beyond?"

Making what was really a boy's experience, he had a wholly boyish

delight in his holiday, and certainly did not reflect how much we

beget for ourselves in what we see and feel, nor how far a certain

diffused music in the very breath of the place was the creation of

his own ear or brain.

[151] That strange enigmatic owner of the harp and the bow, whom he

had found sleeping so divinely, actually waited on them the next

morning with all obsequiousness, stirred the great fire of peat,

adjusted duly their monkish attire, laid their meal. It seemed an

odd thing to be served thus, like St. Jerome by the lion, as if by

some imperiously beautiful wild animal tamed. You hesitated to

permit, were a little afraid of, his services. Their silent tonsured

porter himself, contrast grim enough to any creature of that kind,

had been so far seduced as to permit him to sleep there in the

Grange, as he loved to do, instead of in ruder, rougher quarters;

and, coaxed into odd garrulity on this one matter, told the new-

comers the little he knew, with much also that he only suspected,

about him; among other things, as to the origin of those precious

objects, which might have belonged to some sanctuary or noble house,

found thus in the possession of a mere labourer, who is no Frenchman,

but a pagan, or gipsy, white as he looks, from far south or east, and

who works or plays furtively, by night for the most part, returning

to sleep awhile before daybreak. The other herdsmen of the valley

are bond-servants, but he a hireling at will, though coming regularly

at a certain season. He has come thus for any number of years past,

though seemingly never grown older (as the speaker reflects), singing

his way meagrely from farm to farm, to the sound of [152] his harp.

His name?--It was scarcely a name at all, in the diffident syllables

he uttered in answer to that question, on first coming there; but of

names known to them it came nearest to a malignant one in Scripture,

Apollyon. Apollyon had a just discernible tonsure, but probably no

right to it.

Well skilled in architecture, Prior Saint-Jean was set, by way of a

holiday task, to superintend the completion of the great monastic

barn then in building. The visitor admires it still; perhaps

supposes it, with its noble aisle, though set north and south, to be

a desecrated church. If he be an expert in such matters, he will

remark a sort of classical harmony in its broad, very simple

proportions, with a certain suppression of Gothic emphasis, more

especially in that peculiarly Gothic feature, the buttresses,

scarcely marking the unbroken, windowless walls, which rise very

straight, taking the sun placidly. The silver-grey stone, cut, if it

came from this neighbourhood at all, from some now forgotten quarry,

has the fine, close-grained texture of antique marble. The great

northern gable is almost a classic pediment. The horizontal lines of

plinth and ridge and cornice are kept unbroken, the roof of sea-grey

slates being pitched less angularly than is usual in this rainy

clime. A welcome contrast, the Prior thought it, to the sort of

architectural nightmare he came from. He found the structure already

more than half- [153] way up, the low squat pillars ready for their

capitals.

Yes! it must have so happened often in the Middle Age, as you feel

convinced, in looking sometimes at medieval building. Style must

have changed under the very hands of men who were no wilful

innovators. Thus it was here, in the later work of Prior Saint-Jean,

all unconsciously. The mysterious harper sat there always, at the

topmost point achieved; played, idly enough it might seem, on his

precious instrument, but kept in fact the hard taxed workmen

literally in tune, working for once with a ready will, and, so to

speak, with really inventive hands--working expeditiously, in this

favourable weather, till far into the night, as they joined unbidden

in a chorus, which hushed, or rather turned to music, the noise of

their chipping. It was hardly noise at all, even in the night-time.

Now and again Brother Apollyon descended nimbly to surprise them, at

an opportune moment, by the display of an immense strength. A great

cheer exploded suddenly, as single-handed he heaved a massive stone

into its place. He seemed to have no sense of weight: "Put there by

the devil!" the modern villager assures you.

With a change then, not so much of style as of temper, of management,

in the application of acknowledged rules, Prior Saint-Jean shaping

only, adapting, simplifying, partly with a view [154] to economy, not

the heavy stones only, but the heavy manner of using them, turned

light. With no pronounced ornamentation, it is as if in the upper

story ponderous root and stem blossomed gracefully, blossomed in

cornice and capital and pliant arch-line, as vigorous as they were

graceful, and rose on high quickly. Almost suddenly tie-beam and

rafter knit themselves together into the stone, and the dark, dry,

roomy place was closed in securely to this day. Mere audible music,

certainly, had counted for something in the operations of an art,

held at its best (as we know) to be a sort of music made visible.

That idle singer, one might fancy, by an art beyond art, had

attracted beams and stones into their fit places. And there, sure

enough, he still sits, as a final decorative touch, by way of apex on

the gable which looks northward, though much weather-worn, and with

an ugly gap between the shoulder and the fingers on the harp,* as if,

literally, he had cut off his right hand and put it from him:--King

David, or an angel? guesses the careless tourist. The space below

has been lettered. After a little puzzling you recognise there the

relics of a familiar verse from a Latin psalm Nisi Dominus

aedificaverit domum,+ and the rest: inscribed as well as may be in

Greek characters. Prior Saint-Jean caused it to be so inscribed,

absurdly, during his last days there.

[155] And is not the human body, too, a building, with architectural

laws, a structure, tending by the very forces which primarily held it

together to drop asunder in time? Not in vain, it seemed, had Prior

Saint-Jean come to this mystic place for the improvement of his

body's health. Thenceforth that fleshly tabernacle had housed him,

had housed his cunning, overwrought and excitable soul, ever the

better day by day, and he began to feel his bodily health to be a

positive quality or force, the presence near him of that singular

being having surely something to do with this result. He and his

fascinations, his music, himself, might at least be taken for an

embodiment of all those genial influences of earth and sky, and the

easy ways of living here, which made him turn, with less of an effort

than he had known for many years past, to his daily tasks, and sink

so regularly, so immediately, to wholesome rest on returning from

them. It was as if Brother Apollyon himself abhorred the spectacle

of distress, and mainly for his own satisfaction charmed away other

people's maladies. The mere touch of that ice-cold hand, laid on the

feverish brow, when the Prior lapsed from time to time into his

former troubles, certainly calmed the respiration of a troubled

sleeper. Was there magic in it, not wholly natural? The hand might

have been a dead one. But then, was it surprising, after all, that

the [156] methods of curing men's maladies, as being in very deed the

fruit of sin, should have something strange and unlooked-for about

them, like some of those Old Testament healings and purifications

which the Prior's biblical lore suggested to him? Yet Brother

Apollyon, if their surly Janitor, in his less kindly moments, spoke

truly, himself greatly needed purification, being not only a thief,

but a homicide in hiding from the law. Nay, once, on his annual

return from southern or eastern lands, he had been observed on his

way along the streets of the great town literally scattering the

seeds of disease till his serpent-skin bag was empty. And within

seven days the "black death" was there, reaping its thousands. As a

wise man declared, he who can best cure disease can also most

cunningly engender it.

In short, these creatures of rule, these "regulars," the Prior and

his companion, were come in contact for the first time in their lives

with the power of untutored natural impulse, of natural inspiration.

The boy experienced it immediately in the games which suited his

years, but which he had never so much as seen before; as his superior

was to undergo its influence by-and-by in serious study. By night

chiefly, in its long, continuous twilights, Hyacinth became really a

boy at last, with immense gaiety; eyes, hands and feet awake,

expanding, as he raced his comrade over the [157] turf, with the

conical Druidic stone for a goal, or wrestled lithely enough with

him, though as with a rock; or, taking the silver bow in hand for a

moment, transfixed a mark, next a bird, on the bough, on the wing,

shedding blood for the first time, with a boy's delight, a boy's

remorse. Friend Apollyon seemed able to draw the wild animals too,

to share their sport, yet not altogether kindly. Tired, surfeited,

he destroys them when his game with them is at an end; breaks the

toy; deftly snaps asunder the fragile back. Though all alike would

come at his call, or the sound of his harp, he had his preferences;

and warred in the night-time, as if on principle, against the

creatures of the day. The small furry thing he pierced with his

arrow fled to him nevertheless caressingly, with broken limb, to die

palpitating in his hand. In this wonderful season, the migratory

birds, from Norway, from Britain beyond the seas, came there as usual

on the north wind, with sudden tumult of wings; but went that year no

further, and by Christmas-time had built their nests, filling that

belt of woodland around the vale with the chatter of their business

and love quarrels. In turn they drew after them strangers no one

here had ever known before; the like of which Hyacinth, who knew his

bestiary, had never seen even in a picture. The wild-cat, the wild-

swan--the boy peeped on these wonders as they floated over the vale,

or [158] glided with unwonted confidence over its turf, under the

moonlight, or that frequent continuous aurora which was not the dawn.

Even the modest rivulets of the hill-side felt that influence, and

"lisped" no longer, but babbled as they leapt, like mountain streams,

exposing their rocky bed. Were they angry, as they ran red sometimes

with blood-drops from the stricken bird caught there by rock or

bough, as it fell with rent breast among the waves?

But say, think, what you might against him, the pagan outlaw was

worth his hire as a herdsman; seemingly loved his sheep; was an

"affectionate shepherd"; cured their diseases; brought them easily to

the birth, and if they strayed afar would bring them back tenderly

upon his shoulders. Monastic persons would have seen that image many

times before. Yet if Apollyon looked like the great carved figure

over the low doorway of their place of penitence at home, that could

be but an accident, or perhaps a deceit; so closely akin to those

soulless creatures did he still seem to the wondering Prior,--

immersed in, or actually a part of, that irredeemable natural world

he had dreaded so greatly ere he came hither. And was he after all

making terms with it now, in the seductive person of this mysterious

being--man or demon--suspected of murder; who has an air of

unfathomable evil about him as from a distant but ineffaceable past,

and a sort of heathen [159] understanding with the dark realm of

matter; who is bringing the simple people, the women and lovesick

lads, back to those caves and cromlechs and blasted trees, resorts of

old godless secret-telling? And still he has all his own way with

beasts and man, with the Prior himself, much as all alike distrust

him.

Most conspicuous in the little group of buildings, a feudal tower of

goodly white stone, cylindrical and smoothly polished without to

hinder the ascent of creeping things, and snugly plastered within to

resist the damp, was the pigeon-house--a veritable feudal tower, a

veritable feudal plaisance of birds, which the common people dared

not so much as ruffle. About a thousand of them were housed there,

each in its little chamber, encouraged to grow plump, and to breed,

in perfect self-content. From perch to perch of the great axle-tree

in the centre, monastic feet might climb, gentle monastic hands pass

round to every tiny compartment in turn. The arms of the monastery

were carved on the keystone of the doorway, and the tower finished in

a conical roof, with becoming aerial gaillardise, with pretty dormer-

windows for the inmates to pass in and out, little balconies for

brooding in the sun, little awnings to protect them from rough

breezes, and a great weather-vane, on which the birds crowded for the

chance of a ride. If the peasants of that day, whose small fields

they plundered, noting all this, perhaps [160] envied the birds

dumbly, for the brethren, on the other hand, it was a constant

delight to watch the feathered brotherhood, which supplied likewise

their daintiest fare. Who then, what hawk, or wild-cat, or other

savage beast, had ravaged it so wantonly, so very cruelly destroyed

the bright creatures in a single night--broken backs, rent away

limbs, pierced the wings? And what was that object there below? The

silver harp surely, lying broken likewise on the sanded floor,

soaking in the pale milky blood and torn plumage.

Apollyon sobbed and wept audibly as he went about his ordinary doings

next day, for once fully, though very sadly, awake in it; and towards

evening, when the villagers came to the Prior to confess themselves,

the Feast of the Nativity being now at hand, he too came along with

them in his place meekly, like any other penitent, touched the

lustral water devoutly, knew all the ways, seemed to desire

absolution from some guilt of blood heavier than the slaughter of

beast or bird. The Prior and his attendant, on their side, are

reminded that by this time they have wellnigh forgotten the monastic

duties still incumbent upon them, especially in that matter of the

"Offices." On the vigil of the feast, however, Brother Apollyon

himself summoned the devout to Midnight Mass with the great bell,

which had hung silent for a generation, wedged in immoveably by a

beam of [161] the cradle fallen out of its place. With an immense

effort of strength he relieved it, hitched the bell back upon its

wheel; the thick rust cracked on the hinges, and the strokes tolled

forth betimes, with a hundred querulous, quaint creatures, bats and

owls, circling stupidly in the waves of sound, but allowed to settle

back again undisturbedly into their beds.

People and priest, the Prior, vested as well as might be, with

Hyacinth as "server," come in due course, all alike amazed to find

that frozen neglected place, with its low-browed vault and narrow

windows, alight, and as if warmed with flowers from a summer more

radiant far than that of France, with ilex and laurel--gilt laurel--

by way of holly and box. Prior Saint-Jean felt that he had never

really seen flowers before. Somewhat later they and the like of them

seemed to have grown into and over his brain; to have degraded the

scientific and abstract outlines of things into a tangle of useless

ornament. Whence were they procured? From what height, or hellish

depth perhaps? Apollyon, who entered the chapel just then, as if

quite naturally, though with a bleating lamb in his bosom ("dropped"

thus early in that wonderful season) by way of an offering, took his

place at the altar's very foot, and drawing forth his harp, now

restrung, at the right moment, turned to real silvery music the

hoarse Gloria in Excelsis of those rude worshippers, still [162]

shrinking from him, while they listened in a little circle, as he

stood there in his outlandish attire of skins strangely spotted and

striped. With that however the Mass broke off unconsummated. The

Prior felt obliged to desist from the sacred office, and had left the

altar hurriedly.

But Brother Apollyon put his strange attire aside next day, and in a

much-worn monk's frock, drawn forth from a dark corner, came with

them, still like a Penitent, when they turned once more to their

neglected studies somewhat sadly. See them then, after a collect for

"Light" repeated by Hyacinth, skull-cap in hand, seated at their

desks in the little scriptorium, panelled off from their living-room

on the first floor, while the Prior makes an effort to recover the

last thought of his long-suspended work, in the execution of which

the boy is to assist with his skilful pen. The great glazed windows

remain open; admit, as if already on the soft air of spring, what

seems like a stream of flowery odours, the entire moonlit scene, with

the thorn bushes on the vale-side prematurely bursting into blossom,

and the sound of birds and flocks emphasising the deep silence of the

night.

Apollyon then, as if by habit, as he had shared all their occupations

of late, had taken his seat beside them, meekly enough, at first with

the manner of a mere suppliant for the [163] crumbs of their high

studies. But, straightway again, he surprises by more than racing

forward incredibly on the road to facts, and from facts to luminous

doctrine; Prior Saint-Jean himself, in comparison, seeming to lag

incompetently behind. He can but wonder at this strange scholar's

knowledge of a distant past, evidenced in his familiarity (it was as

if he might once have spoken them) with the dead languages in which

their text-books are written. There was more surely than the utmost

merely natural acuteness in his guesses as to the words intended by

those crabbed contractions, of their meaning, in his sense of

allusions and the like. An ineffaceable memory it might rather seem

of the entire world of which those languages had been the living

speech, once more vividly awake under the Prior's cross- questioning,

and now more than supplementing his own laborious search.

And at last something of the same kind happens with himself. Had he,

on his way hither from the convent, passed unwittingly through some

river or rivulet of Lethe, that had carried away from him all his so

carefully accumulated intellectual baggage of fact and theory? The

hard and abstract laws, or theory of the laws, of music, of the

stars, of mechanical structure, in hard and abstract formulae, adding

to the abstract austerity of the man, seemed to have deserted him; to

be revived in him again [164] however, at the contact of this

extraordinary pupil or fellow-inquirer, though in a very different

guise or attitude towards himself, as matters no longer to be

reasoned upon and understood, but to be seen rather, to be looked at

and heard. Did not he see the angle of the earth's axis with the

ecliptic, the deflexions of the stars from their proper orbits with

fatal results here below, and the earth--wicked, unscriptural truth!-

-moving round the sun, and those flashes of the eternal and unorbed

light such as bring water, flowers, living things, out of the rocks,

the dust? The singing of the planets: he could hear it, and might in

time effect its notation. Having seen and heard, he might erelong

speak also, truly and with authority, on such matters. Could one but

arrest it for one's self, for final transference to others, on the

written or printed page--this beam of insight, or of inspiration!

Alas! one result of its coming was that it encouraged delay. If he

set hand to the page, the firm halo, here a moment since, was gone,

had flitted capriciously to the wall; passed next through the window,

to the wall of the garden; was dancing back in another moment upon

the innermost walls of one's own miserable brain, to swell there--

that astounding white light!--rising steadily in the cup, the mental

receptacle, till it overflowed, and he lay faint and drowning in it.

Or he rose above it, as above a great liquid surface, and hung

giddily over it--light, [165] simple, and absolute--ere he fell. Or

there was a battle between light and darkness around him, with no way

of escape from the baffling strokes, the lightning flashes; flashes

of blindness one might rather call them. In truth, the intuitions of

the night (for they worked still, or tried to work, by night) became

the sickly nightmares of the day, in which Prior Saint-Jean slept, or

tried to sleep, or lay sometimes in a trance without food for many

hours, from which he would spring up suddenly to crowd, against time,

as much as he could into his book with pen or brush; winged flowers,

or stars with human limbs and faces, still intruding themselves, or

mere notes of light and darkness from the actual horizon. There it

all is still in the faded gold and colours of the ancient volume--

"Prior Saint-Jean's folly":--till on a sudden the hand collapses, as

he becomes aware of that real, prosaic, broad daylight lying harsh

upon the page, making his delicately toned auroras seem but a patch

of grey, and himself for a moment, with a sigh of disgust, of self-

reproach, to be his old unimpassioned monastic self once more.

The boy, for his part, was grown at last full of misgiving. He

ponders how he may get the Prior away, or escape by himself, find his

way back to the convent and report his master's condition, his

strange loss of memory for names and the like, his illusions about

himself and [166] others. And he is more than ever distrustful now

of his late beloved playmate, who quietly obstructs any movement of

the kind, and has undertaken, at the Prior's entreaty, to draw down

the moon from the sky, for some shameful price, known to the

magicians of that day.

Yet Apollyon, at all events, would still play as gaily as ever on

occasion. Hitherto they had played as young animals do; without

playthings namely, applying hand or foot only to their games. But it

happened about this time that a grave was dug, a grave of unusual

depth, to be ready, in that fiery plaguesome weather, the first heat

of veritable summer come suddenly, for the body of an ancient

villager then at the point of death. In the drowsy afternoon

Hyacinth awakes Apollyon, to see the strange thing he has found at

the grave-side, among the gravel and yellow bones cast up there. He

had wrested it with difficulty from the hands of the half-crippled

gravedigger, at eighty still excitable by the mere touch of metal.

The like of it had indeed been found before, within living memory, in

this place of immemorial use as a graveyard--"Devil's penny-pieces"

people called them. Five such lay hidden already in a dark corner of

the chapel, to keep them from superstitious employment. To-day they

came out of hiding at last. Apollyon knew the use of the thing at a

glance; had put an expert hand to it forthwith; poises the [167]

discus; sets it wheeling. How easily it spins round under one's arm,

in the groove of the bent fingers, slips thence smoothly like a knife

flung from its sheath, as if for a course of perpetual motion!

Splendescit eundo: it seems to burn as it goes. It is heavier many

times than it looks, and sharp-edged. By night they have scoured and

polished the corroded surfaces. Apollyon promises Hyacinth and

himself rare sport in the cool of the evening--an evening however, as

it turned out, not less breathless than the day.

In the great heat Apollyon had flung aside, as if for ever, the last

sorry remnant of his workman's attire, and challenged the boy to do

the same. On the moonlit turf there, crouching, right foot foremost,

and with face turned backwards to the disk in his right hand, his

whole body, in that moment of rest, full of the circular motion he is

about to commit to it, he seemed--beautiful pale spectre--to shine

from within with a light of his own, like that of the glow-worm in

the thicket, or the dead and rotten roots of the old trees. And as

if they had a proper motion of their own in them, the disks, the

quoits, ran, amid the delighted shouts and laughter of the boy, as he

follows, scarcely less swift, to score the points of their contact

with the grass. Again and again they recommence, forgetful of the

hours; while the death-bell cries out harshly for the grave's

occupant, and [168] the corpse itself is borne along stealthily not

far from them, and, unnoticed by either, the entire aspect of things

has changed. Under the overcast sky it is in darkness they are

playing, by guess and touch chiefly; and suddenly an icy blast of

wind has lifted the roof from the old chapel, the trees are moaning

in wild circular motion, and their devil's penny-piece, when Apollyon

throws it for the last time, is itself but a twirling leaf in the

wind, till it sinks edgewise, sawing through the boy's face, uplifted

in the dark to trace it, crushing in the tender skull upon the brain.

His shout of laughter is turned in an instant to a cry of pain, of

reproach; and in that which echoed it--an immense cry, as from the

very heart of ancient tragedy, over the Picard wolds--it was as if

that half-extinguished deity, its proper immensity, its old greatness

and power, were restored for a moment. The villagers in their beds

wondered. It was like the sound of some natural catastrophe.

The storm which followed was still in possession, still moving

tearfully among the poplar groves, though it had spent its heat and

thunder. The last drops of the blood of Hyacinth still trickled

through the thick masses of dark hair, where the tonsure had been.

An abundant rain, mingling with the copious purple stream, had

coloured the grass all around where the corpse lay, stealing afar in

tiny channels.

[169] So it was, when Apollyon, reduced in the morning light to his

smaller self, came with the other people of the Grange to gaze, to

enquire, and found the Prior already there, speechless. Clearly this

was no lightning stroke; and Apollyon straightway conceives certain

very human fears that, coming upon those antecedent suspicions of

himself, the boy's death may be thought the result of intention on

his part. He proposes to bury the body at once, with no delay for

religious rites, in that still uncovered grave, the bearers having

fled from it in the tempest.

And next day, fulfilling his annual custom, he went his way

northward, without a word of farewell to Prior Saint-Jean, whom he

leaves in fact under suspicion of murder. From the profound slumber

which had followed the excitements of yesterday, the Prior awoke amid

the sound of voices, the voices of the peasants singing no Christian

song, certainly, but a song which Apollyon himself had taught them,

to dismiss him on his journey. For, strange or not as it might be,

they loved him, perhaps in spite of themselves; would certainly

protect him at any risk. Prior Saint-Jean arose, and looked forth--

with wonder. A brief spell of sunshine amid the rain had clothed the

vale with a marvel of blue flowers, if it were not rather with

remnants of the blue sky itself, fallen among the woods there. But

there too, in the little courtyard, [170] the officers of justice

are already in waiting to take him, on the charge of having caused

the death of his young server by violence, in a fit of mania, induced

by dissolute living in that solitary place. One hitherto so

prosperous in life would, of course, have his enemies.

The monastic authorities, however, claim him from the secular power,

to correct his offence in their own way, and with friendly

interpretation of the facts. Madness, however wicked, being still

madness, Prior, now simple Brother, Saint-Jean, is detained in a

sufficiently cheerful apartment, in a region of the atmosphere likely

to restore lost wits, whence indeed he can still see the country--

vallis monachorum. The one desire which from time to time fitfully

rouses him again to animation for a few moments is to return thither.

Here then he remains in peace, ostensibly for the completion of his

great work. He never again set pen to it, consistent and clear now

on nothing save that longing to be once more at the Grange, that he

may get well, or die and be well so. He is like the damned spirit,

think some of the brethren, saying "I will return to the house whence

I came out." Gazing thither daily for many hours, he would mistake

mere blue distance, when that was visible, for blue flowers, for

hyacinths, and wept at the sight; though blue, as he observed, was

the colour of Holy Mary's gown on the illuminated page, the colour of

hope, of merciful [171] omnipresent deity. The necessary permission

came with difficulty, just too late. Brother Saint-Jean died,

standing upright with an effort to gaze forth once more, amid the

preparations for his departure.

NOTES

142. *Published in Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Nov. 1893, and now

reprinted by the kind permission of the proprietors.

154. *Or sundial, as some maintain, though turned from the south.