Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres
by
Henry Adams

Part 3 out of 8



meaning, that is to say, a meaning which each one of us can consider
private property reserved for our own amusement, and from which the
public is excluded; yet, in truth, in the Virgin's churches the
public is never excluded, but invited. The Virgin even had the
additional charm to the public that she was popularly supposed to
have no very marked fancy for priests as such; she was a queen, a
woman, and a mother, functions, all, which priests could not
perform. Accordingly, she seems to have had little taste for
mysteries of any sort, and even the symbols that seem most
mysterious were clear to every old peasant-woman in her church. The
most pleasing and promising of them all is the woman's figure you
saw on the front of the cathedral in Paris; her eyes bandaged; her
head bent down; her crown falling; without cloak or royal robe;
holding in her hand a guidon or banner with its staff broken in more
than one place. On the opposite pier stands another woman, with
royal mantle, erect and commanding. The symbol is so graceful that
one is quite eager to know its meaning; but every child in the
Middle Ages would have instantly told you that the woman with the
falling crown meant only the Jewish Synagogue, as the one with the
royal robe meant the Church of Christ.

Another matter for which the female taste seemed not much to care
was theology in the metaphysical sense. Mary troubled herself little
about theology except when she retired into the south transept with
Pierre de Dreux. Even there one finds little said about the Trinity,
always the most metaphysical subtlety of the Church. Indeed, you
might find much amusement here in searching the cathedral for any
distinct expression at all of the Trinity as a dogma recognized by
Mary.

One cannot take seriously the idea that the three doors, the three
portals, and the three aisles express the Trinity, because, in the
first place, there was no rule about it; churches might have what
portals and aisles they pleased; both Paris and Bourges have five;
the doors themselves are not allotted to the three members of the
Trinity, nor are the portals; while another more serious objection
is that the side doors and aisles are not of equal importance with
the central, but mere adjuncts and dependencies, so that the
architect who had misled the ignorant public into accepting so black
a heresy would have deserved the stake, and would probably have gone
to it. Even this suggestion of trinity is wanting in the transepts,
which have only one aisle, and in the choir, which has five, as well
as five or seven chapels, and, as far as an ignorant mind can
penetrate, no triplets whatever. Occasionally, no doubt, you will
discover in some sculpture or window, a symbol of the Trinity, but
this discovery itself amounts to an admission of its absence as a
controlling idea, for the ordinary worshipper must have been at
least as blind as we are, and to him, as to us, it would have seemed
a wholly subordinate detail. Even if the Trinity, too, is anywhere
expressed, you will hardly find here an attempt to explain its
metaphysical meaning--not even a mystic triangle.

The church is wholly given up to the Mother and the Son. The Father
seldom appears; the Holy Ghost still more rarely. At least, this is
the impression made on an ordinary visitor who has no motive to be
orthodox; and it must have been the same with the thirteenth-century
worshipper who came here with his mind absorbed in the perfections
of Mary. Chartres represents, not the Trinity, but the identity of
the Mother and Son. The Son represents the Trinity, which is thus
absorbed in the Mother. The idea is not orthodox, but this is no
affair of ours. The Church watches over its own.

The Virgin's wants and tastes, positive and negative, ought now to
be clear enough to enable you to feel the artist's sincerity in
trying to satisfy them; but first you have still to convince
yourselves of the people's sincerity in employing the artists. This
point is the easiest of all, for the evidence is express. In the
year 1145 when the old fleche was begun,--the year before Saint
Bernard preached the second crusade at Vezelay,--Abbot Haimon, of
Saint-Pierre-sur-Dives in Normandy, wrote to the monks of Tutbury
Abbey in England a famous letter to tell of the great work which the
Virgin was doing in France and which began at the Church of
Chartres. "Hujus sacrae institutionis ritus apud Carnotensem
ecclesiam est inchoatus." From Chartres it had spread through
Normandy, where it produced among other things the beautiful spire
which we saw at Saint-Pierre-sur-Dives. "Postremo per totam fere
Normanniam longe lateque convaluit ac loca per singula Matri
misericordiae dicata praecipue occupavit." The movement affected
especially the places devoted to Mary, but ran through all Normandy,
far and wide. Of all Mary's miracles, the best attested, next to the
preservation of her church, is the building of it; not so much
because it surprises us as because it surprised even more the people
of the time and the men who were its instruments. Such deep popular
movements are always surprising, and at Chartres the miracle seems
to have occurred three times, coinciding more or less with the dates
of the crusades, and taking the organization of a crusade, as
Archibishop Hugo of Rouen described it in a letter to Bishop Thierry
of Amiens. The most interesting part of this letter is the evident
astonishment of the writer, who might be talking to us to-day, so
modern is he:--

The inhabitants of Chartres have combined to aid in the construction
of their church by transporting the materials; our Lord has rewarded
their humble zeal by miracles which have roused the Normans to
imitate the piety of their neighbours ... Since then the faithful of
our diocese and of other neighbouring regions have formed
associations for the same object; they admit no one into their
company unless he has been to confession, has renounced enmities and
revenges, and has reconciled himself with his enemies. That done,
they elect a chief, under whose direction they conduct their waggons
in silence and with humility.

The quarries at Bercheres-l'Eveque are about five miles from
Chartres. The stone is excessively hard, and was cut in blocks of
considerable size, as you can see for yourselves; blocks which
required great effort to transport and lay in place. The work was
done with feverish rapidity, as it still shows, but it is the
solidist building of the age, and without a sign of weakness yet.
The Abbot told, with more surprise than pride, of the spirit which
was built into the cathedral with the stone:--Who has ever seen!--
Who has ever heard tell, in times past, that powerful princes of the
world, that men brought up in honour and in wealth, that nobles, men
and women, have bent their proud and haughty necks to the harness of
carts, and that, like beasts of burden, they have dragged to the
abode of Christ these waggons, loaded with wines, grains, oil,
stone, wood, and all that is necessary for the wants of life, or for
the construction of the church? But while they draw these burdens,
there is one thing admirable to observe; it is that often when a
thousand persons and more are attached to the chariots,--so great is
the difficulty,--yet they march in such silence that not a murmur is
heard, and truly if one did not see the thing with one's eyes, one
might believe that among such a multitude there was hardly a person
present. When they halt on the road, nothing is heard but the
confession of sins, and pure and suppliant prayer to God to obtain
pardon. At the voice of the priests who exhort their hearts to
peace, they forget all hatred, discord is thrown far aside, debts
are remitted, the unity of hearts is established.

But if any one is so far advanced in evil as to be unwilling to
pardon an offender, or if he rejects the counsel of the priest who
has piously advised him, his offering is instantly thrown from the
wagon as impure, and he himself ignominiously and shamefully
excluded from the society of the holy. There one sees the priests
who preside over each chariot exhort every one to penitence, to
confession of faults, to the resolution of better life! There one
sees old people, young people, little children, calling on the Lord
with a suppliant voice, and uttering to Him, from the depth of the
heart, sobs and sighs with words of glory and praise! After the
people, warned by the sound of trumpets and the sight of banners,
have resumed their road, the march is made with such ease that no
obstacle can retard it ... When they have reached the church they
arrange the wagons about it like a spiritual camp, and during the
whole night they celebrate the watch by hymns and canticles. On each
waggon they light tapers and lamps; they place there the infirm and
sick, and bring them the precious relics of the Saints for their
relief. Afterwards the priests and clerics close the ceremony by
processions which the people follow with devout heart, imploring the
clemency of the Lord and of his Blessed Mother for the recovery of
the sick.

Of course, the Virgin was actually and constantly present during all
this labour, and gave her assistance to it, but you would get no
light on the architecture from listening to an account of her
miracles, nor do they heighten the effect of popular faith. Without
the conviction of her personal presence, men would not have been
inspired; but, to us, it is rather the inspiration of the art which
proves the Virgin's presence, and we can better see the conviction
of it in the work than in the words. Every day, as the work went on,
the Virgin was present, directing the architects, and it is this
direction that we are going to study, if you have now got a
realizing sense of what it meant. Without this sense, the church is
dead. Most persons of a deeply religious nature would tell you
emphatically that nine churches out of ten actually were dead-born,
after the thirteenth century, and that church architecture became a
pure matter of mechanism and mathematics; but that is a question for
you to decide when you come to it; and the pleasure consists not in
seeing the death, but in feeling the life.

Now let us look about!



CHAPTER VII

ROSES AND APSES

Like all great churches, that are not mere storehouses of theology,
Chartres expressed, besides whatever else it meant, an emotion, the
deepest man ever felt,--the struggle of his own littleness to grasp
the infinite. You may, if you like, figure in it a mathematic
formula of infinity,--the broken arch, our finite idea of space; the
spire, pointing, with its converging lines, to unity beyond space;
the sleepless, restless thrust of the vaults, telling the
unsatisfied, incomplete, overstrained effort of man to rival the
energy, intelligence, and purpose of God. Thomas Aquinas and the
schoolmen tried to put it in words, but their Church is another
chapter. In act, all man's work ends there;--mathematics, physics,
chemistry, dynamics, optics, every sort of machinery science may
invent,--to this favour come at last, as religion and philosophy did
before science was born. All that the centuries can do is to express
the idea differently:--a miracle or a dynamo; a dome or a coal-pit;
a cathedral or a world's fair; and sometimes to confuse the two
expressions together. The world's fair tends more and more
vigorously to express the thought of infinite energy; the great
cathedrals of the Middle Ages always reflected the industries and
interests of a world's fair. Chartres showed it less than Laon or
Paris, for Chartres was never a manufacturing town, but a shrine,
such as Lourdes, where the Virgin was known to have done miracles,
and had been seen in person; but still the shrine turned itself into
a market and created valuable industries. Indeed, this was the chief
objection which Saint Paul made to Ephesus and Saint Bernard to the
cathedrals. They were in some ways more industrial than religious.
The mere masonry and structure made a vast market for labour; the
fixed metalwork and woodwork were another; but the decoration was by
far the greatest. The wood-carving, the glass windows, the
sculpture, inside and out, were done mostly in workshops on the
spot, but besides these fixed objects, precious works of the highest
perfection filled the church treasuries. Their money value was great
then; it is greater now. No world's fair is likely to do better to-
day. After five hundred years of spoliation, these objects fill
museums still, and are bought with avidity at every auction, at
prices continually rising and quality steadily falling, until a bit
of twelfth-century glass would be a trouvaille like an emerald; a
tapestry earlier than 1600 is not for mere tourists to hope; an
enamel, a missal, a crystal, a cup, an embroidery of the Middle Ages
belongs only to our betters, and almost invariably, if not to the
State, to the rich Jews, whose instinctive taste has seized the
whole field of art which rested on their degradation. Royalty and
feudality spent their money rather on arms and clothes. The Church
alone was universal patron, and the Virgin was the dictator of
taste.

With the Virgin's taste, during her regency, critics never find
fault. One cannot know its whole magnificence, but one can accept it
as a matter of faith and trust, as one accepts all her other
miracles without cavilling over small details of fact. The period of
eighteenth-century scepticism about such matters and the bourgeois
taste of Voltaire and Diderot have long since passed, with the
advent of a scientific taste still more miraculous; the whole world
of the Virgin's art, catalogued in the "Dictionnaire du Mobilier
Francais" in six volumes by Viollet-le-Duc; narrated as history by
M. Labarte, M. Molinier, M. Paul Lacroix; catalogued in museums by
M. du Sommerard and a score of others, in works almost as costly as
the subjects,--all the vast variety of bric-a-brac, useful or
ornamental, belonging to the Church, increased enormously by the
insatiable, universal, private demands for imagery, in ivory, wood,
metal, stone, for every room in every house, or hung about every
neck, or stuck on every hat, made a market such as artists never
knew before or since, and such as instantly explains to the
practical American not only the reason for the Church's tenacity of
life, but also the inducements for its plunder. The Virgin
especially required all the resources of art, and the highest. Notre
Dame of Chartres would have laughed at Notre Dame of Paris if she
had detected an economy in her robes; Notre Dame of Rheims or Rouen
would have derided Notre Dame of Amiens if she had shown a feminine,
domestic, maternal turn toward cheapness. The Virgin was never
cheap. Her great ceremonies were as splendid as her rank of Queen in
Heaven and on Earth required; and as her procession wound its way
along the aisles, through the crowd of her subjects, up to the high
altar, it was impossible then, and not altogether easy now, to
resist the rapture of her radiant presence. Many a young person, and
now and then one who is not in first youth, witnessing the sight in
the religious atmosphere of such a church as this, without a
suspicion of susceptibility, has suddenly seen what Paul saw on the
road to Damascus, and has fallen on his face with the crowd,
grovelling at the foot of the Cross, which, for the first time in
his life, he feels.

If you want to know what churches were made for, come down here on
some great festival of the Virgin, and give yourself up to it; but
come alone! That kind of knowledge cannot be taught and can seldom
be shared. We are not now seeking religion; indeed, true religion
generally comes unsought. We are trying only to feel Gothic art. For
us, the world is not a schoolroom or a pulpit, but a stage, and the
stage is the highest yet seen on earth. In this church the old
Romanesque leaps into the Gothic under our eyes; of a sudden,
between the portal and the shrine, the infinite rises into a new
expression, always a rare and excellent miracle in thought. The two
expressions are nowhere far apart; not further than the Mother from
the Son. The new artist drops unwillingly the hand of his father or
his grandfather; he looks back, from every corner of his own work,
to see whether it goes with the old. He will not part with the
western portal or the lancet windows; he holds close to the round
columns of the choir; he would have kept the round arch if he could,
but the round arch was unable to do the work; it could not rise; so
he broke it, lifted the vaulting, threw out flying buttresses, and
satisfied the Virgin's wish.

The matter of Gothic vaulting, with its two weak points, the flying
buttress and the false, wooden shelter-roof, is the bete noire of
the Beaux Arts. The duty of defence does not lie on tourists, who
are at best hardly able to understand what it matters whether a wall
is buttressed without or within, and whether a roof is single or
double. No one objects to the dome of Saint Peter's. No one finds
fault with the Pont Neuf. Yet it is true that the Gothic architect
showed contempt for facts. Since he could not support a heavy stone
vault on his light columns, he built the lightest possible stone
vault and protected it with a wooden shelter-roof which constantly
burned. The lightened vaults were still too heavy for the walls and
columns, so the architect threw out buttress beyond buttress resting
on separate foundations, exposed to extreme inequalities of weather,
and liable to multiplied chances of accident. The results were
certainly disastrous. The roofs burned; the walls yielded.

Flying buttresses were not a necessity. The Merveille had none; the
Angevin school rather affected to do without them; Albi had none;
Assisi stands up independent; but they did give support wherever the
architect wanted it and nowhere else; they were probably cheap; and
they were graceful. Whatever expression they gave to a church, at
least it was not that of a fortress. Amiens and Albi are different
religions. The expression concerns us; the construction concerns the
Beaux Arts. The problem of permanent equilibrium which distresses
the builder of arches is a technical matter which does not worry,
but only amuses, us who sit in the audience and look with delight at
the theatrical stage-decoration of the Gothic vault; the astonishing
feat of building up a skeleton of stone ribs and vertebrae, on which
every pound of weight is adjusted, divided, and carried down from
level to level till it touches ground at a distance as a bird would
alight. If any stone in any part, from apex to foundation, weathers
or gives way, the whole must yield, and the charge for repairs is
probably great, but, on the best building the Ecole des Beaux Arts
can build, the charge for repairs is not to be wholly ignored, and
at least the Cathedral of Chartres, in spite of terribly hard usage,
is as solid to-day as when it was built, and as plumb, without crack
or crevice. Even the towering fragment at Beauvais, poorly built
from the first, which has broken down oftener than most Gothic
structures, and seems ready to crumble again whenever the wind blows
over its windy plains, has managed to survive, after a fashion, six
or seven hundred years, which is all that our generation had a right
to ask.

The vault of Beauvais is nearly one hundred and sixty feet high (48
metres), and was cheaply built. The vault of Saint Peter's at Rome
is nearly one hundred and fifty feet (45 metres). That of Amiens is
one hundred and forty-four feet (44 metres). Rheims, Bourges, and
Chartres are nearly the same height; at the entrance, one hundred
and twenty-two feet. Paris is one hundred and ten feet. The Abbe
Bulteau is responsible for these measurements; but at Chartres, as
in several very old churches, the nave slopes down to the entrance,
because--as is said--pilgrims came in such swarms that they were
obliged to sleep in the church, and the nave had to be sluiced with
water to clean it. The true height of Chartres, at the croisee of
nave and transept, is as near as possible one hundred and twenty
feet (36.55 metres).

The measured height is the least interest of a church. The
architect's business is to make a small building look large, and his
failures are in large buildings which he makes to look small. One
chief beauty of the Gothic is to exaggerate height, and one of its
most curious qualities is its success in imposing an illusion of
size. Without leaving the heart of Paris any one can study this
illusion in the two great churches of Notre Dame and Saint-Sulpice;
for Saint-Sulpice is as lofty as Notre Dame in vaulting, and larger
in its other dimensions, besides being, in its style, a fine
building; yet its Roman arches show, as if they were of the eleventh
century, why the long, clean, unbroken, refined lines of the Gothic,
curving to points, and leading the eye with a sort of compulsion to
the culminating point above, should have made an architectural
triumph that carried all Europe off its feet with delight. The world
had seen nothing to approach it except, perhaps, in the dome of
Sancta Sophia in Constantinople; and the discovery came at a moment
when Europe was making its most united and desperate struggle to
attain the kingdom of Heaven.

According to Viollet-le-Duc, Chartres was the final triumph of the
experiment on a very great scale, for Chartres has never been
altered and never needed to be strengthened. The flying buttresses
of Chartres answered their purpose, and if it were not a matter of
pure construction it would be worth while to read what Viollet-le-
Duc says about them (article, "Arcs-boutants"). The vaulting above
is heavy, about fifteen inches thick; the buttressing had also to be
heavy; and to lighten it, the architect devised an amusing sort of
arcades, applied on his outside buttresses. Throughout the church,
everything was solid beyond all later custom, so that architects
would have to begin by a study of the crypt which came down from the
eleventh century so strongly built that it still carries the church
without a crack in its walls; but if we went down into it, we should
understand nothing; so we will begin, as we did outside, at the
front.

A single glance shows what trouble the architect had with the old
facade and towers, and what temptation to pull them all down. One
cannot quite say that he has spoiled his own church in trying to
save what he could of the old, but if he did not quite spoil it, he
saved it only by the exercise of an amount of intelligence that we
shall never learn enough to feel our incapacity to understand. True
ignorance approaches the infinite more nearly than any amount of
knowledge can do, and, in our case, ignorance is fortified by a
certain element of nineteenth-century indifference which refuses to
be interested in what it cannot understand; a violent reaction from
the thirteenth century which cared little to comprehend anything
except the incomprehensible. The architect at Chartres was required
by the Virgin to provide more space for her worshippers within the
church, without destroying the old portal and fleche which she
loved. That this order came directly from the Virgin, may be taken
for granted. At Chartres, one sees everywhere the Virgin, and
nowhere any rival authority; one sees her give orders, and
architects obey them; but very rarely a hesitation as though the
architect were deciding for himself. In his western front, the
architect has obeyed orders so literally that he has not even taken
the trouble to apologize for leaving unfinished the details which,
if he had been responsible for them, would have been his anxious
care. He has gone to the trouble of moving the heavy doorways
forward, so that the chapels in the towers, which were meant to open
on a porch, now open into the nave, and the nave itself has, in
appearance, two more spans than in the old church; but the work
shows blind obedience, as though he were doing his best to please
the Virgin without trying to please himself. Probably he could in no
case have done much to help the side aisles in their abrupt
collision with the solid walls of the two towers, but he might at
least have brought the vaulting of his two new bays, in the nave,
down to the ground, and finished it. The vaulting is awkward in
these two bays, and yet he has taken great trouble to effect what
seems at first a small matter. Whether the great rose window was an
afterthought or not can never be known, but any one can see with a
glass, and better on the architectural plan, that the vaulting of
the main church was not high enough to admit the great rose, and
that the architect has had to slope his two tower-spans upward. So
great is the height that you cannot see this difference of level
very plainly even with a glass, but on the plans it seems to amount
to several feet; perhaps a metre. The architect has managed to
deceive our eyes, in order to enlarge the rose; but you can see as
plainly as though he were here to tell you, that, like a great
general, he has concentrated his whole energy on the rose, because
the Virgin has told him that the rose symbolized herself, and that
the light and splendour of her appearance in the west were to redeem
all his awkwardnesses.

Of course this idea of the Virgin's interference sounds to you a
mere bit of fancy, and that is an account which may be settled
between the Virgin and you; but even twentieth-century eyes can see
that the rose redeems everything, dominates everything, and gives
character to the whole church.

In view of the difficulties which faced the artist, the rose is
inspired genius,--the kind of genius which Shakespeare showed when
he took some other man's play, and adapted it. Thus far, it shows
its power chiefly by the way it comes forward and takes possession
of the west front, but if you want a foot-rule to measure by, you
may mark that the old, twelfth-century lancet-windows below it are
not exactly in its axis. At the outset, in the original plan of
1090, or thereabouts, the old tower--the southern tower--was given
greater width than the northern. Such inequalities were common in
the early churches, and so is a great deal of dispute in modern
books whether they were accidental or intentional, while no one
denies that they are amusing. In these towers the difference is not
great,--perhaps fourteen or fifteen inches,--but it caused the
architect to correct it, in order to fit his front to the axis of
the church, by throwing his entrance six or seven inches to the
south, and narrowing to that extent the south door and south lancet.
The effect was bad, even then, and went far to ruin the south
window; but when, after the fire of 1194, the architect inserted his
great rose, filling every inch of possible space between the lancet
and the arch of the vault, he made another correction which threw
his rose six or seven inches out of axis with the lancets. Not one
person in a hundred thousand would notice it, here in the interior,
so completely are we under the control of the artist and the Virgin;
but it is a measure of the power of the rose.

Looking farther, one sees that the rose-motive, which so dominates
the west front, is carried round the church, and comes to another
outburst of splendour in the transepts. This leads back to
fenestration on a great scale, which is a terribly ambitious flight
for tourists; all the more, because here the tourist gets little
help from the architect, who, in modern times, has seldom the
opportunity to study the subject at all, and accepts as solved the
problems of early Gothic fenestration. One becomes pedantic and
pretentious at the very sound of the word, which is an intolerable
piece of pedantry in itself; but Chartres is all windows, and its
windows were as triumphant as its Virgin, and were one of her
miracles. One can no more overlook the windows of Chartres than the
glass which is in them. We have already looked at the windows of
Mantes; we have seen what happened to the windows at Paris. Paris
had at one leap risen twenty-five feet higher than Noyon, and even
at Noyon, the architect, about 1150, had been obliged to invent new
fenestration. Paris and Mantes, twenty years later, made another
effort, which proved a failure. Then the architect of Chartres, in
1195, added ten feet more to his vault, and undertook, once for all,
to show how a great cathedral should be lighted. As an architectural
problem, it passes far beyond our powers of understanding, even when
solved; but we can always turn to see what the inevitable Viollet-
le-Duc says about its solution at Chartres:--

Toward the beginning of the thirteenth century, the architect of the
Cathedral of Chartres sought out entirely new window combinations to
light the nave from above. Below, in the side aisles he kept to the
customs of the times; that is, he opened pointed windows which did
not wholly fill the spaces between the piers; he wanted, or was
willing to leave here below, the effect of a wall. But in the upper
part of his building we see that he changed the system; he throws a
round arch directly across from one pier to the next; then, in the
enormous space which remains within each span, he inserts two large
pointed windows surmounted by a great rose ... We recognize in this
construction of Notre Dame de Chartres a boldness, a force, which
contrast with the fumbling of the architects in the Ile de France
and Champagne. For the first time one sees at Chartres the builder
deal frankly with the clerestory, or upper fenestration, occupying
the whole width of the arches, and taking the arch of the vault as
the arch of the window. Simplicity of construction, beauty in form,
strong workmanship, structure true and solid, judicious choice of
material, all the characteristics of good work, unite in this
magnificent specimen of architecture at the beginning of the
thirteenth century.

Viollet-le-Duc does not call attention to a score of other matters
which the architect must have had in his mind, such as the
distribution of light, and the relations of one arrangement with
another: the nave with the aisles, and both with the transepts, and
all with the choir. Following him, we must take the choir
separately, and the aisles and chapels of the apse also. One cannot
hope to understand all the experiments and refinements of the
artist, either in their successes or their failures, but, with
diffidence, one may ask one's self whether the beauty of the
arrangement, as compared with the original arrangement in Paris, did
not consist in retaining the rose-motive throughout, while throwing
the whole upper wall into window. Triumphant as the clerestory
windows are, they owe their charm largely to their roses, as you see
by looking at the same scheme applied on a larger scale on the
transept fronts; and then, by taking stand under the croisee, and
looking at all in succession as a whole.

The rose window was not Gothic but Romanesque, and needed a great
deal of coaxing to feel at home within the pointed arch. At first,
the architects felt the awkwardness so strongly that they avoided it
wherever they could. In the beautiful facade of Laon, one of the
chief beauties is the setting of the rose under a deep round arch.
The western roses of Mantes and Paris are treated in the same way,
although a captious critic might complain that their treatment is
not so effective or so logical. Rheims boldly imprisoned the roses
within the pointed arch; but Amiens, toward 1240, took refuge in the
same square exterior setting that was preferred, in 1200, here at
Chartres; and in the interior of Amiens the round arch of the rose
is the last vault of the nave, seen through a vista of pointed
vaults, as it is here. All these are supposed to be among the chief
beauties of the Gothic facade, although the Gothic architect, if he
had been a man of logic, would have clung to his lines, and put a
pointed window in his front, as in fact he did at Coutances. He felt
the value of the rose in art, and perhaps still more in religion,
for the rose was Mary's emblem. One is fairly sure that the great
Chartres rose of the west front was put there to please her, since
it was to be always before her eyes, the most conspicuous object she
would see from the high altar, and therefore the most carefully
considered ornament in the whole church, outside the choir. The mere
size proves the importance she gave it. The exterior diameter is
nearly forty-four feet (13.36 metres). The nave of Chartres is, next
perhaps to the nave of Angers, the widest of all Gothic naves; about
fifty-three feet (16.31 metres); and the rose takes every inch it
can get of this enormous span. The value of the rose, among
architects of the time, was great, since it was the only part of the
church that Villard de Honnecourt sketched; and since his time, it
has been drawn and redrawn, described and commented by generations
of architects till it has become as classic as the Parthenon.

Yet this Chartres rose is solid, serious, sedate, to a degree
unusual in its own age; it is even more Romanesque than the pure
Romanesque roses. At Beauvais you must stop a moment to look at a
Romanesque rose on the transept of the Church of Saint-Etienne;
Viollet-le-Duc mentions it, with a drawing (article, "Pignon"), as
not earlier than the year 1100, therefore about a century earlier
than the rose of Chartres; it is not properly a rose, but a wheel of
fortune, with figures climbing up and falling over. Another supposed
twelfth-century rose is at Etampes, which goes with that of Laon and
Saint-Leu-d'Esserent and Mantes. The rose of Chartres is so much the
most serious of them all that Viollet-le-Duc has explained it by its
material,--the heavy stone of Bercheres;--but the material was not
allowed to affect the great transept roses, and the architect made
his material yield to his object wherever he thought it worth while.
Standing under the central croisee, you can see all three roses by
simply turning your head. That on the north, the Rose de France, was
built, or planned, between 1200 and 1210, in the reign of Philip
Augustus, since the porch outside, which would be a later
construction, was begun by 1212. The Rose de France is the same in
diameter as the western rose, but lighter, and built of lighter
stone. Opposite the Rose de France stands, on the south front,
Pierre Mauclerc's Rose de Dreux, of the same date, with the same
motive, but even lighter; more like a rose and less like a wheel.
All three roses must have been planned at about the same time,
perhaps by the same architect, within the same workshop; yet the
western rose stands quite apart, as though it had been especially
designed to suit the twelfth-century facade and portal which it
rules. Whether this was really the artist's idea is a question that
needs the artist to answer; but that this is the effect, needs no
expert to prove; it stares one in the face. Within and without, one
feels that the twelfth-century spirit is respected and preserved
with the same religious feeling which obliged the architect to
injure his own work by sparing that of his grandfathers.

Conspicuous, then, in the west front are two feelings:--respect for
the twelfth-century work, and passion for the rose fenestration;
both subordinated to the demand for light. If it worries you to have
to believe that these three things are in fact one; that the
architect is listening, like the stone Abraham, for orders from the
Virgin, while he caresses and sacrifices his child; that Mary and
not her architects built this facade; if the divine intention seems
to you a needless impertinence, you can soon get free from it by
going to any of the later churches, where you will not be forced to
see any work but that of the architect's compasses. According to
Viollet-le-Duc, the inspiration ceased about 1250, or, as the Virgin
would have dated it, on the death of Blanche of Castile in 1252. The
work of Chartres, where her own hand is plainly shown, belongs in
feeling, if not in execution, to the last years of the twelfth
century (1195-1200). The great western rose which gives the motive
for the whole decoration and is repeated in the great roses of the
transepts, marks the Virgin's will,--the taste and knowledge of
"cele qui la rose est des roses," or, if you prefer the Latin of
Adam de Saint-Victor, the hand of her who is "Super rosam rosida."

All this is easy; but if you really cannot see the hand of Mary
herself in these broad and public courts, which were intended, not
for her personal presence, but for the use of her common people, you
had better stop here, and not venture into the choir. Great halls
seem to have been easy architecture. Naves and transepts were not
often failures; facades and even towers and fleches are invariably
more or less successful because they are more or less balanced,
mathematical, calculable products of reason and thought. The most
serious difficulties began only with the choir, and even then did
not become desperate until the architect reached the curve of the
apse, with its impossible vaultings, its complicated lines, its
cross-thrusts, its double problems, internal and external, its
defective roofing and unequal lighting. A perfect Gothic apse was
impossible; an apse that satisfied perfectly its principal objects
was rare; the simplest and cheapest solution was to have no apse at
all, and that was the English scheme, which was tried also at Laon;
a square, flat wall and window. If the hunt for Norman towers
offered a summer's amusement, a hunt for apses would offer an
education, but it would lead far out of France. Indeed, it would be
simpler to begin at once with Sancta Sophia at Constantinople, San
Vitale at Ravenna and Monreale at Palermo, and the churches at
Torcello and Murano, and San Marco at Venice; and admit that no
device has ever equalled the startling and mystical majesty of the
Byzantine half-dome, with its marvellous mosaic Madonna dominating
the church, from the entrance, with her imperial and divine
presence. Unfortunately, the northern churches needed light, and the
northern architects turned their minds to a desperate effort for a
new apse.

The scheme of the cathedral at Laon seems to have been rejected
unanimously; the bare, flat wall at the end of the choir was an
eyesore; it was quite bad enough at the end of the nave, and became
annoying at the end of the transepts, so that at Noyon and Soissons
the architect, with a keen sense of interior form, had rounded the
transept ends; but, though external needs might require a square
transept, the unintelligence of the flat wall became insufferable at
the east end. Neither did the square choir suit the church
ceremonies and processions, or offer the same advantages of
arrangement, as the French understood them. With one voice, the
French architects seem to have rejected the Laon experiment, and
turned back to a solution taken directly from the Romanesque.

[Illustration with caption: SAINT-MARTIN-DES-CHAMPS]

Quite early--in the eleventh century--a whole group of churches had
been built in Auvergne,--at Clermont and Issoire, for example,--
possibly by one architect, with a circular apse, breaking out into
five apsidal chapels. Tourists who get down as far south as Toulouse
see another example of this Romanesque apse in the famous Church of
Saint Sernin, of the twelfth century; and few critics take offence
at one's liking it. Indeed, as far as concerns the exterior, one
might even risk thinking it more charming than the exterior of any
Gothic apse ever built. Many of these Romanesque apses of the
eleventh and twelfth centuries still remain in France, showing
themselves in unsuspected parish churches, here and there, but
always a surprise for their quiet, unobtrusive grace, making a
harmony with the Romanesque tower, if there is one, into which they
rise, as at Saint Sernin; but all these churches had only one aisle,
and, in the interior, there came invariable trouble when the vaults
rose in height. The architect of Chartres, in 1200, could get no
direct help from these, or even from Paris which was a beautifully
perfect apse, but had no apsidal chapels. The earliest apse that
could have served as a suggestion for Chartres--or, at least, as a
point of observation for us--was that of the Abbey Church of Saint-
Martin-des-Champs, which we went to see in Paris, and which is said
to date from about 1150.

Here is a circular choir, surrounded by two rows of columns,
irregularly spaced, with circular chapels outside, which seems to
have been more or less what the architect of Chartres, for the
Virgin's purposes, had set his heart on obtaining. Closely following
the scheme of Saint-Martin-des-Champs came the scheme of the Abbey
Church at Vezelay, built about 1160-80. Here the vaulting sprang
directly from the last arch of the choir, as is shown on the plan,
and bearing first on the light columns of the choir, which were
evenly spaced, then fell on a row of heavier columns outside, which
were also evenly spaced, and came to rest at last on massive piers,
between which were five circular chapels. The plan shows at a glance
that this arrangement stretched the second row of columns far apart,
and that a church much larger than Vezelay would need to space them
so much farther apart that the arch uniting them would have to rise
indefinitely; while, if beyond this, another aisle were added
outside, the piers finally would require impossible vaulting.

[Illustration with caption: VEZELAY]

The problem stood thus when the great cathedrals were undertaken,
and the architect of Paris boldly grappled with the double aisle on
a scale requiring a new scheme. Here, in spite of the most virtuous
resolutions not to be technical, we must attempt a technicality,
because without it, one of the most interesting eccentricities of
Chartres would be lost. Once more, Viollet-le-Duc:--

As the architect did not want to give the interior bays of the apse
spaces between the columns (AA) less than that of the parallel bays
(BB), it followed that the first radiating bay gave a first space
(LMGH) which was difficult to vault, and a second space (HGEF) which
was impossible; for how establish an arch from F to E? Even if
round, its key would have risen much higher than the key of the
pointed archivolt LM. As the second radiating bay opened out still
wider, the difficulty was increased. The builder therefore inserted
the two intermediate pillars O and P between the columns of the
second aisle (H, G, and I); which he supported, in the outside wall
of the church, by one corresponding pier (Q) in the first bay of the
apse, and by two similar piers (R and S) in the second bay.

[Illustration with caption: NOTRE DAME DE PARIS]

"There is no need to point out," continued Viollet-le-Duc, as though
he much suspected that there might be need of pointing out, "what
skill this system showed and how much the art of architecture had
already been developed in the Ile de France toward the end of the
twelfth century; to what an extent the unity of arrangement and
style preoccupied the artists of that province."

In fact, the arrangement seems mathematically and technically
perfect. At all events, we know too little to criticize it. Yet one
would much like to be told why it was not repeated by any other
architect or in any other church. Apparently the Parisians
themselves were not quite satisfied with it, since they altered it a
hundred years later, in 1296, in order to build out chapels between
the piers. As the architects of each new cathedral had, in the
interval, insisted on apsidal chapels, one may venture to guess that
the Paris scheme hampered the services.

At Chartres the church services are Mary's own tastes; the church is
Mary; and the chapels are her private rooms. She was not pleased
with the arrangements made for her in her palace at Paris; they were
too architectural; too regular and mathematical; too popular; too
impersonal; and she rather abruptly ordered her architect at
Chartres to go back to the old arrangement. The apse at Paris was
hardly covered with its leading before the architect of Chartres
adopted a totally new plan, which, according to Viollet-le-Duc, does
him little credit, but which was plainly imposed on him, like the
twelfth-century portal. Not only had it nothing of the mathematical
correctness and precision of the Paris scheme, easy to understand
and imitate, but it carried even a sort of violence--a wrench--in
its system, as though the Virgin had said, with her grand Byzantine
air:--I will it!

[Illustration with caption: CHARTRES]

"At Chartres," said Viollet-le-Duc, "the choir of the Cathedral
presents a plan which does no great honour to its architect. There
is want of accord between the circular apse and the parallel sides
of the sanctuary; the spacings of the columns of the second
collateral are loose (laches); the vaults quite poorly combined; and
in spite of the great width of the spaces between the columns of the
second aisle, the architect had still to narrow those between the
interior columns."

The plan shows that, from the first, the architect must have
deliberately rejected the Paris scheme; he must have begun by
narrowing the spaces between his inner columns; then, with a sort of
violence, he fitted on his second row of columns; and, finally, he
showed his motive by constructing an outer wall of an original or
unusual shape. Any woman would see at once the secret of all this
ingenuity and effort. The Chartres apse, enormous in size and width,
is exquisitely lighted. Here, as everywhere throughout the church,
the windows give the law, but here they actually take place of law.
The Virgin herself saw to the lighting of her own boudoir. According
to Viollet-le-Duc, Chartres differs from all the other great
cathedrals by being built not for its nave or even for its choir,
but for its apse; it was planned not for the people or the court,
but for the Queen; not a church but a shrine; and the shrine is the
apse where the Queen arranged her light to please herself and not
her architect, who had already been sacrificed at the western portal
and who had a free hand only in the nave and transepts where the
Queen never went, and which, from her own apartment, she did not
even see.

[Illustration with caption: LAON]

This is, in effect, what Viollet-le-Duc says in his professional
language, which is perhaps--or sounds--more reasonable to tourists,
whose imaginations are hardly equal to the effort of fancying a real
deity. Perhaps, indeed, one might get so high as to imagine a real
Bishop of Laon, who should have ordered his architect to build an
enormous hall of religion, to rival the immense abbeys of the day,
and to attract the people, as though it were a clubroom. There they
were to see all the great sights; church ceremonies; theatricals;
political functions; there they were to do business, and frequent
society. They were to feel at home in their church because it was
theirs, and did not belong to a priesthood or to Rome. Jealousy of
Rome was a leading motive of Gothic architecture, and Rome repaid it
in full. The Bishop of Laon conceded at least a transept to custom
or tradition, but the Archbishop of Bourges abolished even the
transept, and the great hall had no special religious expression
except in the circular apse with its chapels which Laon had
abandoned. One can hardly decide whether Laon or Bourges is the more
popular, industrial, political, or, in other words, the less
religious; but the Parisians, as the plan of Viollet-le-Duc has
shown, were quite as advanced as either, and only later altered
their scheme into one that provided chapels for religious service.

[Illustration with caption: BOURGES]

[Illustration with caption: AMIENS]

Amiens and Beauvais have each seven chapels, but only one aisle, so
that they do not belong in the same class with the apses of Paris,
Bourges, and Chartres, though the plans are worth studying for
comparison, since they show how many-sided the problem was, and how
far from satisfied the architects were with their own schemes. The
most interesting of all, for comparison with Chartres, is Le Mans,
where the apsidal chapels are carried to fanaticism, while the
vaulting seems to be reasonable enough, and the double aisle
successfully managed, if Viollet-le-Duc permits ignorant people to
form an opinion on architectural dogma. For our purposes, the
architectural dogma may stand, and the Paris scheme may be taken for
granted, as alone correct and orthodox; all that Viollet-le-Duc
teaches is that the Chartres scheme is unorthodox, not to say
heretical; and this is the point on which his words are most
interesting.

[Illustration with caption: BEAUVAIS]

The church at Chartres belonged not to the people, not to the
priesthood, and not even to Rome; it belonged to the Virgin. "Here
the religious influence appears wholly; three large chapels in the
apse; four others less pronounced; double aisles of great width
round the choir; vast transepts! Here the church ceremonial could
display all its pomp; the choir, more than at Paris, more than at
Bourges, more than at Soissons, and especially more than at Laon, is
the principal object; for it, the church is built."

[Illustration with caption: LE MANS]

One who is painfully conscious of ignorance, and who never would
dream of suggesting a correction to anybody, may not venture to
suggest an idea of any sort to an architect; but if it were allowed
to paraphrase Viollet-le-Duc's words into a more or less emotional
or twelfth-century form, one might say, after him, that, compared
with Paris or Laon, the Chartres apse shows the same genius that is
shown in the Chartres rose; the same large mind that overrules,--the
same strong will that defies difficulties. The Chartres apse is as
entertaining as all the other Gothic apses together, because it
overrides the architect. You may, if you really have no imagination
whatever, reject the idea that the Virgin herself made the plan; the
feebleness of our fancy is now congenital, organic, beyond stimulant
or strychnine, and we shrink like sensitive-plants from the touch of
a vision or spirit; but at least one can still sometimes feel a
woman's taste, and in the apse of Chartres one feels nothing else.

[Illustration with caption: CHARTRES]



CHAPTER VIII

THE TWELFTH-CENTURY GLASS

At last we are face to face with the crowning glory of Chartres.
Other churches have glass,--quantities of it, and very fine,--but we
have been trying to catch a glimpse of the glory which stands behind
the glass of Chartres, and gives it quality and feeling of its own.
For once the architect is useless and his explanations are pitiable;
the painter helps still less; and the decorator, unless he works in
glass, is the poorest guide of all, while, if he works in glass, he
is sure to lead wrong; and all of them may toil until Pierre
Mauclerc's stone Christ comes to life, and condemns them among the
unpardonable sinners on the southern portal, but neither they nor
any other artist will ever create another Chartres. You had better
stop here, once for all, unless you are willing to feel that
Chartres was made what it is, not by artist, but by the Virgin.

If this imperial presence is stamped on the architecture and the
sculpture with an energy not to be mistaken, it radiates through the
glass with a light and colour that actually blind the true servant
of Mary. One becomes, sometimes, a little incoherent in talking
about it; one is ashamed to be as extravagant as one wants to be;
one has no business to labour painfully to explain and prove to
one's self what is as clear as the sun in the sky; one loses temper
in reasoning about what can only be felt, and what ought to be felt
instantly, as it was in the twelfth century, even by the truie qui
file and the ane qui vielle. Any one should feel it that wishes; any
one who does not wish to feel it can let it alone. Still, it may be
that not one tourist in a hundred--perhaps not one in a thousand of
the English-speaking race--does feel it, or can feel it even when
explained to him, for we have lost many senses.

Therefore, let us plod on, laboriously proving God, although, even
to Saint Bernard and Pascal, God was incapable of proof; and using
such material as the books furnish for help. It is not much. The
French have been shockingly negligent of their greatest artistic
glory. One knows not even where to seek. One must go to the National
Library and beg as a special favour permission to look at the
monumental work of M. Lasteyrie, if one wishes to make even a
beginning of the study of French glass. Fortunately there exists a
fragment of a great work which the Government began, but never
completed, upon Chartres; and another, quite indispensable, but not
official, upon Bourges; while Viollet-le-Duc's article "Vitrail"
serves as guide to the whole. Ottin's book "Le Vitrail" is
convenient. Male's volume "L'Art Religieux" is essential. In
English, Westlake's "History of Design" is helpful. Perhaps, after
reading all that is readable, the best hope will be to provide the
best glasses with the largest possible field; and, choosing an hour
when the church is empty, take seat about halfway up the nave,
facing toward the western entrance with a morning light, so that the
glass of the western windows shall not stand in direct sun.

The glass of the three lancets is the oldest in the cathedral. If
the portal beneath it, with the sculpture, was built in the twenty
or thirty years before 1150, the glass could not be much later. It
goes with the Abbe Suger's glass at Saint-Denis, which was surely
made as early as 1140-50, since the Abbe was a long time at work on
it, before he died in 1152. Their perfection proves, what his
biographer asserted, that the Abbe Suger spent many years as well as
much money on his windows at Saint-Denis, and the specialists affirm
that the three lancets at Chartres are quite as good as what remains
of Suger's work. Viollet-le-Duc and M. Paul Durand, the Government
expert, are positive that this glass is the finest ever made, as far
as record exists; and that the northern lancet representing the Tree
of Jesse stands at the head of all glasswork whatever. The windows
claim, therefore, to be the most splendid colour decoration the
world ever saw, since no other material, neither silk nor gold, and
no opaque colour laid on with a brush, can compare with translucent
glass, and even the Ravenna mosaics or Chinese porcelains are
darkness beside them.

The claim may not be modest, but it is none of ours. Viollet-le-Duc
must answer for his own sins, and he chose the lancet window of the
Tree of Jesse for the subject of his lecture on glass in general, as
the most complete and perfect example of this greatest decorative
art. Once more, in following him, one is dragged, in spite of one's
self, into technique, and, what is worse, into a colour world whose
technique was forgotten five hundred years ago. Viollet-le-Duc tried
to recover it. "After studying our best French windows," he
cautiously suggests that "one might maintain," as their secret of
harmony, that "the first condition for an artist in glass is to know
how to manage blue. The blue is the light in windows, and light has
value only by opposition." The radiating power of blue is,
therefore, the starting-point, and on this matter Viollet-le-Duc has
much to say which a student would need to master; but a tourist
never should study, or he ceases to be a tourist; and it is enough
for us if we know that, to get the value they wanted, the artists
hatched their blues with lines, covered their surface with figures
as though with screens, and tied their blue within its own field
with narrow circlets of white or yellow, which, in their turn, were
beaded to fasten the blue still more firmly in its place. We have
chiefly to remember the law that blue is light:--

But also it is that luminous colour which gives value to all others.
If you compose a window in which there shall be no blue, you will
get a dirty or dull (blafard) or crude surface which the eye will
instantly avoid; but if you put a few touches of blue among all
these tones, you will immediately get striking effects if not
skilfully conceived harmony. So the composition of blue glass
singularly preoccupied the glassworkers of the twelfth and
thirteenth centuries. If there is only one red, two yellows, two or
three purples, and two or three greens at the most, there are
infinite shades of blue, ... and these blues are placed with a very
delicate observation of the effects they should produce on other
tones, and other tones on them.

Viollet-le-Duc took the window of the Tree of Jesse as his first
illustration of the rule, for the reason that its blue ground is one
continuous strip from top to bottom, with the subordinate red on
either side, and a border uniting the whole so plainly that no one
can fail to see its object or its method.

The blue tone of the principal subject [that is to say, the ground
of the Tree of Jesse] has commanded the tonality of all the rest.
This medium was necessary to enable the luminous splendour to
display its energy. This primary condition had dictated the red
ground for the prophets, and the return to the blue on reaching the
outside semicircular band. To give full value both to the vigour of
the red, and to the radiating transparency of the blue, the ground
of the corners is put in emerald green; but then, in the corners
themselves, the blue is recalled and is given an additional solidity
of value by the delicate ornamentation of the squares.

This translation is very free, but one who wants to know these
windows must read the whole article, and read it here in the church,
the Dictionary in one hand, and binocle in the other, for the
binocle is more important than the Dictionary when it reaches the
complicated border which repeats in detail the colour-scheme of the
centre:--

The border repeats all the tones allotted to the principal subjects,
but by small fragments, so that this border, with an effect both
solid and powerful, shall not enter into rivalry with the large
arrangements of the central parts.

One would think this simple enough; easily tested on any illuminated
manuscript, Arab, Persian, or Byzantine; verified by any Oriental
rug, old or new; freely illustrated by any Chinese pattern on a Ming
jar, or cloisonne vase; and offering a kind of alphabet for the
shop-window of a Paris modiste. A strong red; a strong and a weak
yellow; a strong and a weak purple; a strong and a weak green, are
all to be tied together, given their values, and held in their
places by blue. The thing seems simpler still when it appears that
perspective is forbidden, and that these glass windows of the
twelfth and thirteenth centuries, like Oriental rugs, imply a flat
surface, a wall which must not be treated as open. The twelfth-
century glassworker would sooner have worn a landscape on his back
than have costumed his church with it; he would as soon have
decorated his floors with painted holes as his walls. He wanted to
keep the coloured window flat, like a rug hung on the wall.

The radiation of translucent colours in windows cannot be modified
by the artist; all his talent consists in profiting by it, according
to a given harmonic scheme on a single plane, like a rug, but not
according to an effect of aerial perspective. Do what you like, a
glass window never does and never can represent anything but a plane
surface; its real virtues even exist only on that condition. Every
attempt to present several planes to the eye is fatal to the harmony
of colour, without producing any illusion in the spectator ...
Translucid painting can propose as its object only a design
supporting as energetically as possible a harmony of colours.

Whether this law is absolute you can tell best by looking at modern
glass which is mostly perspective; but, whether you like it or not,
the matter of perspective does not enter into a twelfth-century
window more than into a Japanese picture, and may be ignored. The
decoration of the twelfth century, as far as concerns us, was
intended only for one plane, and a window was another form of rug or
embroidery or mosaic, hung on the wall for colour,--simple
decoration to be seen as a whole. If the Tree of Jesse teaches
anything at all, it is that the artist thought first of controlling
his light, but he wanted to do it not in order to dim the colours;
on the contrary, he toiled, like a jeweller setting diamonds and
rubies, to increase their splendour. If his use of blue teaches this
lesson, his use of green proves it. The outside border of the Tree
of Jesse is a sort of sample which our schoolmaster Viollet-le-Duc
sets, from which he requires us to study out the scheme, beginning
with the treatment of light, and ending with the value of the
emerald green ground in the corners.

Complicated as the border of the Tree of Jesse is, it has its mates
in the borders of the two other twelfth-century windows, and a few
of the thirteenth-century in the side aisles; but the southern of
the three lancets shows how the artists dealt with a difficulty that
upset their rule. The border of the southern window does not count
as it should; something is wrong with it and a little study shows
that the builder, and not the glassworker, was to blame. Owing to
his miscalculation--if it was really a miscalculation--in the width
of the southern tower, the builder economized six or eight inches in
the southern door and lancet, which was enough to destroy the
balance between the colour-values, as masses, of the south and north
windows. The artist was obliged to choose whether he would sacrifice
the centre or the border of his southern window, and decided that
the windows could not be made to balance if he narrowed the centre,
but that he must balance them by enriching the centre, and
sacrificing the border. He has filled the centre with medallions as
rich as he could make them, and these he has surrounded with
borders, which are also enriched to the utmost; but these medallions
with their borders spread across the whole window, and when you
search with the binocle for the outside border, you see its pattern
clearly only at the top and bottom. On the sides, at intervals of
about two feet, the medallions cover and interrupt it; but this is
partly corrected by making the border, where it is seen, so rich as
to surpass any other in the cathedral, even that of the Tree of
Jesse. Whether the artist has succeeded or not is a question for
other artists--or for you, if you please--to decide; but apparently
he did succeed, since no one has ever noticed the difficulty or the
device.

The southern lancet represents the Passion of Christ. Granting to
Viollet-le-Duc that the unbroken vertical colour-scheme of the Tree
of Jesse made the more effective window, one might still ask whether
the medallion-scheme is not the more interesting. Once past the
workshop, there can be no question about it; the Tree of Jesse has
the least interest of all the three windows. A genealogical tree has
little value, artistic or other, except to those who belong in its
branches, and the Tree of Jesse was put there, not to please us, but
to please the Virgin. The Passion window was also put there to
please her, but it tells a story, and does it in a way that has more
novelty than the subject. The draughtsman who chalked out the design
on the whitened table that served for his sketch-board was either a
Greek, or had before him a Byzantine missal, or enamel or ivory. The
first medallion on these legendary windows is the lower left-hand
one, which begins the story or legend; here it represents Christ
after the manner of the Greek Church. In the next medallion is the
Last Supper; the fish on the dish is Greek. In the middle of the
window, with the help of the binocle, you will see a Crucifixion, or
even two, for on the left is Christ on the Cross, and on the right a
Descent from the Cross; in this is the figure of man pulling out
with pincers the nails which fasten Christ's feet; a figure unknown
to Western religious art. The Noli Me Tangere, on the right, near
the top, has a sort of Greek character. All the critics, especially
M. Paul Durand, have noticed this Byzantine look, which is even more
marked in the Suger window at Saint-Denis, so as to suggest that
both are by the same hand, and that the hand of a Greek. If the
artist was really a Greek, he has done work more beautiful than any
left at Byzantium, and very far finer than anything in the beautiful
work at Cairo, but although the figures and subjects are more or
less Greek, like the sculptures on the portal, the art seems to be
French.

Look at the central window! Naturally, there sits the Virgin, with
her genealogical tree on her left, and her Son's testimony on her
right to prove her double divinity. She is seated in the long halo;
as, on the western portal, directly beneath her, her Son is
represented in stone, Her crown and head, as well as that of the
Child, are fourteenth-century restorations more or less like the
original; but her cushioned throne and her robes of imperial state,
as well as the flowered sceptre in either hand, are as old as the
sculpture of the portal, and redolent of the first crusade. On
either side of her, the Sun and the Moon offer praise; her two
Archangels, Michael and Gabriel, with resplendent wings, offer not
incense as in later times, but the two sceptres of spiritual and
temporal power; while the Child in her lap repeats His Mother's
action and even her features and expression. At first sight, one
would take for granted that all this was pure Byzantium, and perhaps
it is; but it has rather the look of Byzantium gallicized, and
carried up to a poetic French ideal. At Saint-Denis the little
figure of the Abbe Suger at the feet of the Virgin has a very
Oriental look, and in the twin medallion the Virgin resembles
greatly the Virgin of Chartres, yet, for us, until some specialist
shows us the Byzantine original, the work is as thoroughly French as
the fleches of the churches.

Byzantine art is altogether another chapter, and, if we could but
take a season to study it in Byzantium, we might get great
amusement; but the art of Chartres, even in 1100, was French and
perfectly French, as the architecture shows, and the glass is even
more French than the architecture, as you can detect in many other
ways. Perhaps the surest evidence is the glass itself. The men who
made it were not professionals but amateurs, who may have had some
knowledge of enamelling, but who worked like jewellers, unused to
glass, and with the refinement that a reliquary or a crozier
required. The cost of these windows must have been extravagant; one
is almost surprised that they are not set in gold rather than in
lead. The Abbe Suger shirked neither trouble nor expense, and the
only serious piece of evidence that this artist was a Greek is given
by his biographer who unconsciously shows that the artist cheated
him: "He sought carefully for makers of windows and workmen in glass
of exquisite quality, especially in that made of sapphires in great
abundance that were pulverized and melted up in the glass to give it
the blue colour which he delighted to admire." The "materia
saphirorum" was evidently something precious,--as precious as crude
sapphires would have been,--and the words imply beyond question that
the artist asked for sapphires and that Suger paid for them; yet all
specialists agree that the stone known as sapphire, if ground, could
not produce translucent colour at all. The blue which Suger loved,
and which is probably the same as that of these Chartres windows,
cannot be made out of sapphires. Probably the "materia saphirorum"
means cobalt only, but whatever it was, the glassmakers seem to
agree that this glass of 1140-50 is the best ever made. M. Paul
Durand in his official report of 1881 said that these windows, both
artistically and mechanically, were of the highest class: "I will
also call attention to the fact that the glass and the execution of
the painting are, materially speaking, of a quality much superior to
windows of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Having passed
several months in contact with these precious works when I copied
them, I was able to convince myself of their superiority in every
particular, especially in the upper parts of the three windows." He
said that they were perfect and irreproachable. The true enthusiast
in glass would in the depths of his heart like to say outright that
these three windows are worth more than all that the French have
since done in colour, from that day to this; but the matter concerns
us chiefly because it shows how French the experiment was, and how
Suger's taste and wealth made it possible.

Certain it is, too, that the southern window--the Passion--was made
on the spot, or near by, and fitted for the particular space with
care proportionate to its cost. All are marked by the hand of the
Chartres Virgin. They are executed not merely for her, but by her.
At Saint-Denis the Abbe Suger appeared,--it is true that he was
prostrate at her feet, but still he appeared. At Chartres no one--no
suggestion of a human agency--was allowed to appear; the Virgin
permitted no one to approach her, even to adore. She is enthroned
above, as Queen and Empress and Mother, with the symbols of
exclusive and universal power. Below her, she permitted the world to
see the glories of her earthly life;--the Annunciation, Visitation,
and Nativity; the Magi; King Herod; the Journey to Egypt; and the
single medallion, which shows the gods of Egypt falling from their
pedestals at her coming, is more entertaining than a whole picture-
gallery of oil paintings.

In all France there exist barely a dozen good specimens of twelfth-
century glass. Besides these windows at Chartres and the fragments
at Saint-Denis, there are windows at Le Mans and Angers and bits at
Vendome, Chalons, Poitiers, Rheims, and Bourges; here and there one
happens on other pieces, but the earliest is the best, because the
glass-makers were new at the work and spent on it an infinite amount
of trouble and money which they found to be unnecessary as they
gained experience. Even in 1200 the value of these windows was so
well understood, relatively to new ones, that they were preserved
with the greatest care. The effort to make such windows was never
repeated. Their jewelled perfection did not suit the scale of the
vast churches of the thirteenth century. By turning your head toward
the windows of the side aisles, you can see the criticism which the
later artists passed on the old work. They found it too refined, too
brilliant, too jewel-like for the size of the new cathedral; the
play of light and colour allowed the eye too little repose; indeed,
the eye could not see their whole beauty, and half their value was
thrown away in this huge stone setting. At best they must have
seemed astray on the bleak, cold, windy plain of Beauce,--homesick
for Palestine or Cairo,--yearning for Monreale or Venice,--but this
is not our affair, and, under the protection of the Empress Virgin,
Saint Bernard himself could have afforded to sin even to drunkenness
of colour. With trifling expense of imagination one can still catch
a glimpse of the crusades in the glory of the glass. The longer one
looks into it, the more overpowering it becomes, until one begins
almost to feel an echo of what our two hundred and fifty million
arithmetical ancestors, drunk with the passion of youth and the
splendour of the Virgin, have been calling to us from Mont-Saint-
Michel and Chartres. No words and no wine could revive their
emotions so vividly as they glow in the purity of the colours; the
limpidity of the blues; the depth of the red; the intensity of the
green; the complicated harmonies; the sparkle and splendour of the
light; and the quiet and certain strength of the mass.

With too strong direct sun the windows are said to suffer, and
become a cluster of jewels--a delirium of coloured light. The lines,
too, have different degrees of merit. These criticisms seldom strike
a chance traveller, but he invariably makes the discovery that the
designs within the medallions are childish. He may easily correct
them, if he likes, and see what would happen to the window; but
although this is the alphabet of art, and we are past spelling words
of one syllable, the criticism teaches at least one lesson.
Primitive man seems to have had a natural colour-sense, instinctive
like the scent of a dog. Society has no right to feel it as a moral
reproach to be told that it has reached an age when it can no longer
depend, as in childhood, on its taste, or smell, or sight, or
hearing, or memory; the fact seems likely enough, and in no way
sinful; yet society always denies it, and is invariably angry about
it; and, therefore, one had better not say it. On the other hand, we
can leave Delacroix and his school to fight out the battle they
began against Ingres and his school, in French art, nearly a hundred
years ago, which turned in substance on the same point. Ingres held
that the first motive in colour-decoration was line, and that a
picture which was well drawn was well enough coloured. Society
seemed, on the whole, to agree with him. Society in the twelfth
century agreed with Delacroix. The French held then that the first
point in colour-decoration was colour, and they never hesitated to
put their colour where they wanted it, or cared whether a green
camel or a pink lion looked like a dog or a donkey provided they got
their harmony or value. Everything except colour was sacrificed to
line in the large sense, but details of drawing were conventional
and subordinate. So we laugh to see a knight with a blue face, on a
green horse, that looks as though drawn by a four-year-old child,
and probably the artist laughed, too; but he was a colourist, and
never sacrificed his colour for a laugh.

We tourists assume commonly that he knew no better. In our simple
faith in ourselves, great hope abides, for it shows an earnestness
hardly less than that of the crusaders; but in the matter of colour
one is perhaps less convinced, or more open to curiosity. No school
of colour exists in our world to-day, while the Middle Ages had a
dozen; but it is certainly true that these twelfth-century windows
break the French tradition. They had no antecedent, and no fit
succession. All the authorities dwell on their exceptional
character. One is sorely tempted to suspect that they were in some
way an accident; that such an art could not have sprung, in such
perfection, out of nothing, had it been really French; that it must
have had its home elsewhere--on the Rhine--in Italy--in Byzantium--
or in Bagdad.

The same controversy has raged for near two hundred years over the
Gothic arch, and everything else mediaeval, down to the philosophy
of the schools. The generation that lived during the first and
second crusades tried a number of original experiments, besides
capturing Jerusalem. Among other things, it produced the western
portal of Chartres, with its statuary, its glass, and its fleche, as
a by-play; as it produced Abelard, Saint Bernard, and Christian of
Troyes, whose acquaintance we have still to make. It took ideas
wherever it found them;--from Germany, Italy, Spain, Constantinople,
Palestine, or from the source which has always attracted the French
mind like a magnet--from ancient Greece. That it actually did take
the ideas, no one disputes, except perhaps patriots who hold that
even the ideas were original; but to most students the ideas need to
be accounted for less than the taste with which they were handled,
and the quickness with which they were developed. That the taste was
French, you can see in the architecture, or you will see if ever you
meet the Gothic elsewhere; that it seized and developed an idea
quickly, you have seen in the arch, the fleche, the porch, and the
windows, as well as in the glass; but what we do not comprehend, and
never shall, is the appetite behind all this; the greed for novelty:
the fun of life. Every one who has lived since the sixteenth century
has felt deep distrust of every one who lived before it, and of
every one who believed in the Middle Ages. True it is that the last
thirteenth-century artist died a long time before our planet began
its present rate of revolution; it had to come to rest, and begin
again; but this does not prevent astonishment that the twelfth-
century planet revolved so fast. The pointed arch not only came as
an idea into France, but it was developed into a system of
architecture and covered the country with buildings on a scale of
height never before attempted except by the dome, with an
expenditure of wealth that would make a railway system look cheap,
all in a space of about fifty years; the glass came with it, and
went with it, at least as far as concerns us; but, if you need other
evidence, you can consult Renan, who is the highest authority: "One
of the most singular phenomena of the literary history of the Middle
Ages," says Renan of Averroes, "is the activity of the intellectual
commerce, and the rapidity with which books were spread from one end
of Europe to the other. The philosophy of Abelard during his
lifetime (1100-42) had penetrated to the ends of Italy. The French
poetry of the trouveres counted within less than a century
translations into German, Swedish, Norwegian, Icelandic, Flemish,
Dutch, Bohemian, Italian, Spanish"; and he might have added that
England needed no translation, but helped to compose the poetry, not
being at that time so insular as she afterwards became. "Such or
such a work, composed in Morocco or in Cairo, was known at Paris and
at Cologne in less time than it would need in our days for a German
book of capital importance to pass the Rhine"; and Renan wrote this
in 1852 when German books of capital importance were revolutionizing
the literary world.

One is apt to forget the smallness of Europe, and how quickly it
could always be crossed. In summer weather, with fair winds, one can
sail from Alexandria or from Syria, to Sicily, or even to Spain and
France, in perfect safety and with ample room for freight, as easily
now as one could do it then, without the aid of steam; but one does
not now carry freight of philosophy, poetry, or art. The world still
struggles for unity, but by different methods, weapons, and thought.
The mercantile exchanges which surprised Renan, and which have
puzzled historians, were in ideas. The twelfth century was as greedy
for them in one shape as the nineteenth century in another. France
paid for them dearly, and repented for centuries; but what creates
surprise to the point of incredulity is her hunger for them, the
youthful gluttony with which she devoured them, the infallible taste
with which she dressed them out. The restless appetite that snatched
at the pointed arch, the stone fleche, the coloured glass, the
illuminated missal, the chanson and roman and pastorelle, the
fragments of Aristotle, the glosses of Avicenne, was nothing
compared with the genius which instantly gave form and flower to
them all.

This episode merely means that the French twelfth-century artist may
be supposed to have known his business, and if he produced a
grotesque, or a green-faced Saint, or a blue castle, or a syllogism,
or a song, that he did it with a notion of the effect he had in
mind. The glass window was to him a whole,--a mass,--and its details
were his amusement; for the twelfth-century Frenchman enjoyed his
fun, though it was sometimes rather heavy for modern French taste,
and less refined than the Church liked. These three twelfth-century
windows, like their contemporary portal outside, and the fleche that
goes with them, are the ideals of enthusiasts of mediaeval art; they
are above the level of all known art, in religious form; they are
inspired; they are divine! This is the claim of Chartres and its
Virgin. Actually, the French artist, whether architect, sculptor, or
painter in glass, did rise here above his usual level. He knew it
when he did it, and probably he attributed it, as we do, to the
Virgin; for these works of his were hardly fifty years old when the
rest of the old church was burned; and already the artist felt the
virtue gone out of him. He could not do so well in 1200 as he did in
1150; and the Virgin was not so near.

The proof of it--or, if you prefer to think so, the proof against
it--is before our eyes on the wall above the lancet windows. When
Villard de Honnecourt came to Chartres, he seized at once on the
western rose as his study, although the two other roses were
probably there, in all their beauty and lightness. He saw in the
western rose some quality of construction which interested him; and,
in fact, the western rose is one of the flowers of architecture
which reveals its beauties slowly without end; but its chief beauty
is the feeling which unites it with the portal, the lancets, and the
fleche. The glassworker here in the interior had the same task to
perform. The glass of the lancets was fifty years old when the glass
for the rose was planned; perhaps it was seventy, for the exact
dates are unknown, but it does not matter, for the greater the
interval, the more interesting is the treatment. Whatever the date,
the glass of the western rose cannot be much earlier or much later
than that of the other roses, or that of the choir, and yet you see
at a glance that it is quite differently treated. On such matters
one must, of course, submit to the opinion of artists, which one
does the more readily because they always disagree; but until the
artists tell us better, we may please ourselves by fancying that the
glass of the rose was intended to harmonize with that of the
lancets, and unite it with the thirteenth-century glass of the nave
and transepts. Among all the thirteenth-century windows the western
rose alone seems to affect a rivalry in brilliancy with the lancets,
and carries it so far that the separate medallions and pictures are
quite lost,--especially in direct sunshine,--blending in a confused
effect of opals, in a delirium of colour and light, with a result
like a cluster of stones in jewelry. Assuming as one must, in want
of the artist's instruction, that he knew what he wanted to do, and
did it, one must take for granted that he treated the rose as a
whole, and aimed at giving it harmony with the three precious
windows beneath. The effect is that of a single large ornament; a
round breastpin, or what is now called a sunburst, of jewels, with
three large pendants beneath.

We are ignorant tourists, liable to much error in trying to seek
motives in artists who worked seven hundred years ago for a society
which thought and felt in forms quite unlike ours, but the medieval
pilgrim was more ignorant than we, and much simpler in mind; if the
idea of an ornament occurs to us, it certainly occurred to him, and
still more to the glassworker whose business was to excite his
illusions. An artist, if good for anything, foresees what his public
will see; and what his public will see is what he ought to have
intended--the measure of his genius. If the public sees more than he
himself did, this is his credit; if less, this is his fault. No
matter how simple or ignorant we are, we ought to feel a discord or
a harmony where the artist meant us to feel it, and when we see a
motive, we conclude that other people have seen it before us, and
that it must, therefore, have been intended. Neither of the transept
roses is treated like this one; neither has the effect of a personal
ornament; neither is treated as a jewel. No one knew so well as the
artist that such treatment must give the effect of a jewel. The
Roses of France and of Dreux bear indelibly and flagrantly the
character of France and Dreux; on the western rose is stamped with
greater refinement but equal decision the character of a much
greater power than either of them.

No artist would have ventured to put up, before the eyes of Mary in
Majesty, above the windows so dear to her, any object that she had
not herself commanded. Whether a miracle was necessary, or whether
genius was enough, is a point of casuistry which you can settle with
Albertus Magnus or Saint Bernard, and which you will understand as
little when settled as before; but for us, beyond the futilities of
unnecessary doubt, the Virgin designed this rose; not perhaps in
quite the same perfect spirit in which she designed the lancets, but
still wholly for her own pleasure and as her own idea. She placed
upon the breast of her Church--which symbolized herself--a jewel so
gorgeous that no earthly majesty could bear comparison with it, and
which no other heavenly majesty has rivalled. As one watches the
light play on it, one is still overcome by the glories of the
jewelled rose and its three gemmed pendants; one feels a little of
the effect she meant it to produce even on infidels, Moors, and
heretics, but infinitely more on the men who feared and the women
who adored her;--not to dwell too long upon it, one admits that hers
is the only Church. One would admit anything that she should
require. If you had only the soul of a shrimp, you would crawl, like
the Abbe Suger, to kiss her feet.

Unfortunately she is gone, or comes here now so very rarely that we
never shall see her; but her genius remains as individual here as
the genius of Blanche of Castile and Pierre de Dreux in the
transepts. That the three lancets were her own taste, as distinctly
as the Trianon was the taste of Louis XIV, is self-evident. They
represent all that was dearest to her; her Son's glory on her right;
her own beautiful life in the middle; her royal ancestry on her
left: the story of her divine right, thrice-told. The pictures are
all personal, like family portraits. Above them the man who worked
in 1200 to carry out the harmony, and to satisfy the Virgin's
wishes, has filled his rose with a dozen or two little compositions
in glass, which reveal their subjects only to the best powers of a
binocle. Looking carefully, one discovers at last that this gorgeous
combination of all the hues of Paradise contains or hides a Last
Judgment--the one subject carefully excluded from the old work, and
probably not existing on the south portal for another twenty years.
If the scheme of the western rose dates from 1200, as is reasonable
to suppose, this Last Judgment is the oldest in the church, and
makes a link between the theology of the first crusade, beneath, and
the theology of Pierre Mauclerc in the south porch. The churchman is
the only true and final judge on his own doctrine, and we neither
know nor care to know the facts; but we are as good judges as he of
the feeling, and we are at full liberty to feel that such a Last
Judgment as this was never seen before or since by churchman or
heretic, unless by virtue of the heresy which held that the true
Christian must be happy in being damned since such is the will of
God. That this blaze of heavenly light was intended, either by the
Virgin or by her workmen, to convey ideas of terror or pain, is a
notion which the Church might possibly preach, but which we sinners
knew to be false in the thirteenth century as well as we know it
now. Never in all these seven hundred years has one of us looked up
at this rose without feeling it to be Our Lady's promise of
Paradise.

Here as everywhere else throughout the church, one feels the
Virgin's presence, with no other thought than her majesty and grace.
To the Virgin and to her suppliants, as to us, who though outcasts
in other churches can still hope in hers, the Last Judgment was not
a symbol of God's justice or man's corruption, but of her own
infinite mercy. The Trinity judged, through Christ;--Christ loved
and pardoned, through her. She wielded the last and highest power on
earth and in hell. In the glow and beauty of her nature, the light
of her Son's infinite love shone as the sunlight through the glass,
turning the Last Judgment itself into the highest proof of her
divine and supreme authority. The rudest ruffian of the Middle Ages,
when he looked at this Last Judgment, laughed; for what was the Last
Judgment to her! An ornament, a plaything, a pleasure! a jewelled
decoration which she wore on her breast! Her chief joy was to
pardon; her eternal instinct was to love; her deepest passion was
pity! On her imperial heart the flames of hell showed only the
opaline colours of heaven. Christ the Trinity might judge as much as
He pleased, but Christ the Mother would rescue; and her servants
could look boldly into the flames.

If you, or even our friends the priests who still serve Mary's
shrine, suspect that there is some exaggeration in this language, it
will only oblige you to admit presently that there is none; but for
the moment we are busy with glass rather than with faith, and there
is a world of glass here still to study. Technically, we are done
with it. The technique of the thirteenth century comes naturally and
only too easily out of that of the twelfth. Artistically, the motive
remains the same, since it is always the Virgin; but although the
Virgin of Chartres is always the Virgin of Majesty, there are
degrees in the assertion of her majesty even here, which affect the
art, and qualify its feeling. Before stepping down to the thirteenth
century, one should look at these changes of the Virgin's royal
presence.

First and most important as record is the stone Virgin on the south
door of the western portal, which we studied, with her Byzantine
Court; and the second, also in stone, is of the same period, on one
of the carved capitals of the portal, representing the Adoration of
the Magi. The third is the glass Virgin at the top of the central
lancet. All three are undoubted twelfth-century work; and you can
see another at Paris, on the same door of Notre Dame, and still more
on Abbe Suger's window at Saint-Denis, and, later, within a
beautiful grisaille at Auxerre; but all represent the same figure; a
Queen, enthroned, crowned, with the symbols of royal power, holding
in her lap the infant King whose guardian she is. Without pretending
to know what special crown she bears, we can assume, till corrected,
that it is the Carlovingian imperial, not the Byzantine. The Trinity
nowhere appears except as implied in the Christ. At the utmost, a
mystic hand may symbolize the Father. The Virgin as represented by
the artists of the twelfth century in the Ile de France and at
Chartres seems to be wholly French in spite of the Greek atmosphere
of her workmanship. One might almost insist that she is blonde, full
in face, large in figure, dazzlingly beautiful, and not more than
thirty years of age. The Child never seems to be more than five.

You are equally free to see a Southern or Eastern type in her face,
and perhaps the glass suggests a dark type, but the face of the
Virgin on the central lancet is a fourteenth-century restoration
which may or may not reproduce the original, while all the other
Virgins represented in glass, except one, belong to the thirteenth
century. The possible exception is a well-known figure called Notre-
Dame-de-la-Belle-Verriere in the choir next the south transept. A
strange, almost uncanny feeling seems to haunt this window,
heightened by the veneration in which it was long held as a shrine,
though it is now deserted for Notre-Dame-du-Pilier on the opposite
side of the choir. The charm is partly due to the beauty of the
scheme of the angels, supporting, saluting, and incensing the Virgin
and Child with singular grace and exquisite feeling, but rather that
of the thirteenth than of the twelfth century. Here, too, the face
of the Virgin is not ancient. Apparently the original glass was
injured by time or accident, and the colours were covered or renewed
by a simple drawing in oil. Elsewhere the colour is thought to be
particularly good, and the window is a favourite mine of motives for
artists to exploit, but to us its chief interest is its singular
depth of feeling. The Empress Mother sits full-face, on a rich
throne and dais, with the Child on her lap, repeating her attitude
except that her hands support His shoulders. She wears her crown;
her feet rest on a stool, and both stool, rug, robe, and throne are
as rich as colour and decoration can make them. At last a dove
appears, with the rays of the Holy Ghost. Imperial as the Virgin is,
it is no longer quite the unlimited empire of the western lancet.
The aureole encircles her head only; she holds no sceptre; the Holy
Ghost seems to give her support which she did not need before, while
Saint Gabriel and Saint Michael, her archangels, with their symbols
of power, have disappeared. Exquisite as the angels are who surround
and bear up her throne, they assert no authority. The window itself
is not a single composition; the panels below seem inserted later
merely to fill up the space; six represent the Marriage of Cana, and
the three at the bottom show a grotesque little demon tempting
Christ in the Desert. The effect of the whole, in this angle which
is almost always dark or filled with shadow, is deep and sad, as
though the Empress felt her authority fail, and had come down from
the western portal to reproach us for neglect. The face is haunting.
Perhaps its force may be due to nearness, for this is the only
instance in glass of her descending so low that we can almost touch
her, and see what the twelfth century instinctively felt in the
features which, even in their beatitude, were serious and almost sad
under the austere responsibilities of infinite pity and power.

No doubt the window is very old, or perhaps an imitation or
reproduction of one which was much older, but to the pilgrim its
interest lies mostly in its personality, and there it stands alone.
Although the Virgin reappears again and again in the lower windows,-
-as in those on either side of the Belle-Verriere; in the remnant of
window representing her miracles at Chartres, in the south aisle
next the transept; in the fifteenth-century window of the chapel of
Vendome which follows; and in the third window which follows that of
Vendome and represents her coronation,--she does not show herself
again in all her majesty till we look up to the high windows above.
There we shall find her in her splendour on her throne, above the
high altar, and still more conspicuously in the Rose of France in
the north transept. Still again she is enthroned in the first window
of the choir next the north transept. Elsewhere we can see her
standing, but never does she come down to us in the full splendour
of her presence. Yet wherever we find her at Chartres, and of
whatever period, she is always Queen. Her expression and attitude
are always calm and commanding. She never calls for sympathy by
hysterical appeals to our feelings; she does not even altogether
command, but rather accepts the voluntary, unquestioning,
unhesitating, instinctive faith, love, and devotion of mankind. She
will accept ours, and we have not the heart to refuse it; we have
not even the right, for we are her guests.



CHAPTER IX

THE LEGENDARY WINDOWS

One's first visit to a great cathedral is like one's first visit to
the British Museum; the only intelligent idea is to follow the order
of time, but the museum is a chaos in time, and the cathedral is
generally all of one and the same time. At Chartres, after finishing
with the twelfth century, everything is of the thirteenth. To catch
even an order in time, one must first know what part of the
thirteenth-century church was oldest. The books say it was the
choir. After the fire of 1194, the pilgrims used the great crypt as
a church where services were maintained; but the builders must have
begun with the central piers and the choir, because the choir was
the only essential part of the church. Nave and transepts might be
suppressed, but without a choir the church was useless, and in a
shrine, such as Chartres, the choir was the whole church. Toward the
choir, then, the priest or artist looks first; and, since dates are
useful, the choir must be dated. The same popular enthusiasm, which
had broken out in 1145, revived in 1195 to help the rebuilding; and
the work was pressed forward with the same feverish haste, so that
ten years should have been ample to provide for the choir, if for
nothing more; and services may have been resumed there as early as
the year 1206; certainly in 1210. Probably the windows were designed
and put in hand as soon as the architect gave the measurements, and
any one who intended to give a window would have been apt to choose
one of the spaces in the apse, in Mary's own presence, next the
sanctuary.

The first of the choir windows to demand a date is the Belle-
Verriere, which is commonly classed as early thirteenth-century, and
may go with the two windows next it, one of which--the so-called
Zodiac window--bears a singularly interesting inscription: "COMES
TEOBALDUS DAT...AD PRECES COMIXIS PTICENSIS." If Shakespeare could
write the tragedy of "King John," we cannot admit ourselves not to
have read it, and this inscription might be a part of the play. The
"pagus perticensis" lies a short drive to the west, some fifteen or
twenty miles on the road to Le Mans, and in history is known as the
Comte du Perche, although its memory is now preserved chiefly by its
famous breed of Percheron horses. Probably the horse also dates from
the crusades, and may have carried Richard Coeur-de-Lion, but in any
case the count of that day was a vassal of Richard, and one of his
intimate friends, whose memory is preserved forever by a single line
in Richard's prison-song:--

Mes compaignons cui j'amoie et cui j'aim,
Ces dou Caheu et ces dou Percherain.


In 1194, when Richard Coeur-de-Lion wrote these verses, the Comte du
Perche was Geoffrey III, who had been a companion of Richard on his
crusade in 1192, where, according to the Chronicle, "he shewed
himself but a timid man"; which seems scarcely likely in a companion
of Richard; but it is not of him that the Chartres window speaks,
except as the son of Mahaut or Matilda of Champagne who was a sister
of Alix of Champagne, Queen of France. The Table shows, therefore,
that Geoffroi's son and successor as the Comte du Perche--Thomas--
was second cousin of Louis the Lion, known as King Louis VIII of
France. They were probably of much the same age.

If this were all, one might carry it in one's head for a while, but
the relationship which dominates the history of this period was that
of all these great ruling families with Richard Coeur-de-Lion and
his brother John, nicknamed Lackland, both of whom in succession
were the most powerful Frenchmen in France. The Table shows that
their mother Eleanor of Guienne, the first Queen of Louis VII, bore
him two daughters, one of whom, Alix, married, about 1164, the Count
Thibaut of Chartres and Blois, while the other, Mary, married the
great Count of Champagne. Both of them being half-sisters of Coeur-
de-Lion and John, their children were nephews or half-nephews,
indiscriminately, of all the reigning monarchs, and Coeur-de-Lion
immortalized one of them by a line in his prison-song, as he
immortalized Le Perche:--

Je nel di pas de celi de Chartain,
La mere Loeis.


"Loeis," therefore, or Count Louis of Chatres, was not only nephew
of Coeur-de-Lion and John Lackland, but was also, like Count Thomas
of Le Perche, a second cousin of Louis VIII. Feudally and personally
he was directly attached to Coeur-de-Lion rather than to Philip
Augustus.

If society in the twelfth century could follow the effects of these
relationships, personal and feudal, it was cleverer than society in
the twentieth; but so much is simple: Louis of France, Thibaut of
Chartres, and Thomas of Le Perche, were cousins and close friends in
the year 1215, and all were devoted to the Virgin of Chartres.
Judging from the character of Louis's future queen, Blanche of
Castile, their wives were, if possible, more devoted still; and in
that year Blanche gave birth to Saint Louis, who seems to have been
the most devoted of all.

Meanwhile their favourite uncle, Coeur-de-Lion, had died in the year
1199. Thibaut's great-grandmother, Eleanor of Guienne, died in 1202.
King John, left to himself, rapidly accumulated enemies innumerable,
abroad and at home. In 1203, Philip Augustus confiscated all the
fiefs he held from the French Crown, and in 1204 seized Normandy.
John sank rapidly from worse to worst, until at last the English
barons rose and forced him to grant their Magna Carta at Runnimede
in 1215.

The year 1215 was, therefore, a year to be remembered at Chartres,
as at Mont-Saint-Michel; one of the most convenient dates in
history. Every one is supposed, even now, to know what happened
then, to give another violent wrench to society, like the Norman
Conquest in 1066. John turned on the barons and broke them down;
they sent to

[Genealogical chart showing the relationships among England,
Champagne and Chartres and France and La Perche.]

France for help, and offered the crown of England to young Louis,
whose father, Philip Augustus, called a council which pledged
support to Louis. Naturally the Comte du Perche and the Comte de
Chartres must have pledged their support, among the foremost, to go
with Louis to England. He was then twenty-nine years old; they were
probably somewhat younger.

The Zodiac window, with its inscription, was the immediate result.
The usual authority that figures in the histories is Roger of
Wendover, but much the more amusing for our purpose is a garrulous
Frenchman known as the Menestrel de Rheims who wrote some fifty
years later. After telling in his delightful thirteenth-century
French, how the English barons sent hostages to Louis, "et mes sires
Loueys les fit bien gardeir et honourablement," the Menestrel
continued:--

Et assembla granz genz par amours, et par deniers, et par lignage.
Et fu avec lui li cuens dou Perche, et li cuens de Montfort, et li
cuens de Chartres, et li cuens de Monbleart, et mes sires Enjorrans
de Couci, et mout d'autre grant seigneur dont je ne parole mie.

The Comte de Chartres, therefore, may be supposed to have gone with
the Comte du Perche, and to have witnessed the disaster at Lincoln
which took place May 20, 1217, after King John's death:--

Et li cuens dou Perche faisait l'avantgarde, et courut tout leiz des
portes; et la garnisons de laienz issi hors et leur coururent sus;
et i ot asseiz trait et lancie; et chevaus morz et chevaliers
abatuz, et gent a pie morz et navreiz. Et li cuens dou Perche i fu
morz par un ribaut qui li leva le pan dou hauberc, et l'ocist d'un
coutel; et fu desconfite l'avantgarde par la mort le conte. Et quant
mes sires Loueys le sot, si ot graigneur duel qu'il eust onques, car
il estoit ses prochains ami de char.

Such language would be spoiled by translation. For us it is enough
to know that the "ribaut" who lifted the "pan," or skirt, of the
Count's "hauberc" or coat-of-mail, as he sat on his horse refusing
to surrender to English traitors, and stabbed him from below with a
knife, may have been an invention of the Menestrel; or the knight
who pierced with his lance through the visor to the brain, may have
been an invention of Roger of Wendover; but in either case, Count
Thomas du Perche lost his life at Lincoln, May 20, 1217, to the
deepest regret of his cousin Louis the Lion as well as of the Count
Thibaut of Chartres, whom he charged to put up a window for him in
honour of the Virgin.

The window must have been ordered at once, because Count Thibaut,
"le Jeune ou le Lepreux," died himself within a year, April 22,
1218, thus giving an exact date for one of the choir windows.
Probably it was one of the latest, because the earliest to be
provided would have been certainly those of the central apsidal
chapel. According to the rule laid down by Viollet-le-Duc, the
windows in which blue strongly predominates, like the Saint
Sylvester, are likely to be earlier than those with a prevailing
tone of red. We must take for granted that some of these great
legendary windows were in place as early as 1210, because, in
October of that year, Philip Augustus attended mass here. There are
some two dozen of these windows in the choir alone, each of which
may well have represented a year's work in the slow processes of
that day, and we can hardly suppose that the workshops of 1200 were
on a scale such as to allow of more than two to have been in hand at
once. Thirty or forty years later, when the Sainte Chapelle was
built, the workshops must have been vastly enlarged, but with the
enlargement, the glass deteriorated. Therefore, if the architecture
were so far advanced in the year 1200 as to allow of beginning work
on the glass, in the apse, the year 1225 is none too late to allow
for its completion in the choir.

Dates are stupidly annoying;--what we want is not dates but taste;--
yet we are uncomfortable without them. Except the Perche window,
none of the lower ones in the choir helps at all; but the clere-
story is more useful. There they run in pairs, each pair surmounted
by a rose. The first pair (numbers 27 and 28) next the north
transept, shows the Virgin of France, supported, according to the
Abbes Bulteau and Clerval, by the arms of Bishop Reynault de Moucon,
who was Bishop of Chartres at the time of the great fire in 1194 and
died in 1217. The window number 28 shows two groups of peasants on
pilgrimage; below, on his knees, Robert of Berou, as donor:
"ROBERTUS DE BEROU: CARN. CANCELLARIUS." The Cartulary of the
Cathedral contains an entry (Bulteau, i, 123): "The 26th February,
1216, died Robert de Berou, Chancellor, who has given us a window."
The Cartulary mentions several previous gifts of windows by canons
or other dignitaries of the Church in the year 1215.

Next follow, or once followed, a pair of windows (numbers 29 and 30)
which were removed by the sculptor Bridan, in 1788, in order to
obtain light for his statuary below. The donor was "DOMINA JOHANNES
BAPTISTA," who, we are told, was Jeanne de Dammartin; and the window
was given in memory, or in honour, of her marriage to Ferdinand of
Castile in 1237. Jeanne was a very great lady, daughter of the Comte
d'Aumale and Marie de Ponthieu. Her father affianced her in 1235 to
the King of England, Henry III, and even caused the marriage to be
celebrated by proxy, but Queen Blanche broke it off, as she had
forbidden, in 1231, that of Yolande of Britanny. She relented so far
as to allow Jeanne in 1237 to marry Ferdinand of Castile, who still
sits on horseback in the next rose: "REX CASTILLAE." He won the
crown of Castile in 1217 and died in 1252, when Queen Jeanne
returned to Abbeville and then, at latest, put up this window at
Chartres in memory of her husband.

The windows numbers 31 and 32 are the subject of much dispute, but
whether the donors were Jean de Chatillon or the three children of
Thibaut le Grand of Champagne, they must equally belong to the later
series of 1260-70, rather than to the earlier of 1210-20. The same
thing is or was true of the next pair, numbers 33 and 34, which were
removed in 1773, but the record says that at the bottom of number 34
was the figure of Saint Louis's son, Louis of France, who died in
1260, before his father, who still rides in the rose above.

Thus the north side of the choir shows a series of windows that
precisely cover the lifetime of Saint Louis (1215-70). The south
side begins, next the apse, with windows numbers 35 and 36, which
belong, according to the Comte d'Armancourt, to the family of
Montfort, whose ruined castle crowns the hill of Montfort l'Amaury,
on the road to Paris, some forty kilometres northeast of Chartres.
Every one is supposed to know the story of Simon de Montfort who was
killed before Toulouse in 1218. Simon left two sons, Amaury and
Simon. The sculptor Bridan put an end also to the window of Amaury,
but in the rose, Amaury, according to the Abbes, still rides on a
white horse. Amaury's history is well known. He was made Constable
of France by Queen Blanche in 1231; went on crusade in 1239; was
captured by the infidels, taken to Babylon, ransomed, and in
returning to France, died at Otranto in 1241. For that age Amaury
was but a commonplace person, totally overshadowed by his brother
Simon, who went to England, married King John's daughter Eleanor,
and became almost king himself as Earl of Leicester. At your leisure
you can read Matthew Paris's dramatic account of him and of his
death at the battle of Evesham, August 5, 1265. He was perhaps the
last of the very great men of the thirteenth century, excepting
Saint Louis himself, who lived a few years longer. M. d'Armancourt
insists that it is the great Earl of Leicester who rides with his
visor up, in full armour, on a brown horse, in the rose above the
windows numbers 37 and 38. In any case, the windows would be later
than 1240.

The next pair of windows, numbers 39 and 40, also removed in 1788,
still offer, in their rose, the figure of a member of the Courtenay
family. Gibbon was so much attracted by the romance of the
Courtenays as to make an amusing digression on the subject which
does not concern us or the cathedral except so far as it tells us
that the Courtenays, like so many other benefactors of Chartres
Cathedral, belonged to the royal blood. Louis-le-Gros, who died in
1137, besides his son Louis-le-Jeune, who married Eleanor of Guienne
in that year, had a younger son, Pierre, whom he married to Isabel
de Courtenay, and who, like Philip Hurepel, took the title of his
wife. Pierre had a son, Pierre II, who was a cousin of Philip
Augustus, and became the hero of the most lurid tragedy of the time.
Chosen Emperor of Constantinople in 1216, to succeed his brothers-
in-law Henry and Baldwin, he tried to march across Illyria and
Macedonia, from Durazzo opposite Brindisi, with a little army of
five thousand men, and instantly disappeared forever. The Epirotes
captured him in the summer of 1217, and from that moment nothing is
known of his fate.

On the whole, this catastrophe was perhaps the grimmest of all the
Shakespearean tragedies of the thirteenth century; and one would
like to think that the Chartres window was a memorial of this
Pierre, who was a cousin of France and an emperor without empire;
but M. d'Armancourt insists that the window was given in memory not
of this Pierre, but of his nephew, another Pierre de Courtenay,
Seigneur de Conches, who went on crusade with Saint Louis in 1249 to
Egypt, and died shortly before the defeat and captivity of the King,
on February 8, 1250. His brother Raoul, Seigneur d'Illiers, who died
in 1271, is said to be donor of the next window, number 40. The date
of the Courtenay windows should therefore be no earlier than the
death of Saint Louis in 1270; yet one would like to know what has
become of another Courtenay window left by the first Pierre's son-
in-law, Gaucher or Gaultier of Bar-sur-Seine, who seems to have been
Vicomte de Chartres, and who, dying before Damietta in 1218, made a
will leaving to Notre Dame de Chartres thirty silver marks, "de
quibus fieri debet miles montatus super equum suum." Not only would
this mounted knight on horseback supply an early date for these
interesting figures, but would fix also the cost, for a mark
contained eight ounces of silver, and was worth ten sous, or half a
livre. We shall presently see that Aucassins gave twenty sous, or a
livre, for a strong ox, so that the "miles montatus super equum
suum" in glass was equivalent to fifteen oxen if it were money of
Paris, which is far from certain.

This is an economical problem which belongs to experts, but the
historical value of these early evidences is still something,--
perhaps still as much as ten sous. All the windows tend to the same
conclusion. Even the last pair, numbers 41 and 42, offer three
personal clues which lead to the same result:--the arms of Bouchard
de Marly who died in 1226, almost at the same time as Louis VIII; a
certain Colinus or Colin, "de camera Regis," who was alive in 1225;
and Robert of Beaumont in the rose, who seems to be a Beaumont of Le
Perche, of whom little or nothing is as yet certainly known. As a
general rule, there are two series of windows, one figuring the
companions or followers of Louis VIII (1215-26); the other, friends
or companions of Saint Louis (1226-70), Queen Blanche uniting both.
What helps to hold the sequences in a certain order, is that the
choir was complete, and services regularly resumed there, in 1210,
while in 1220 the transept and nave were finished and vaulted. For
the apside windows, therefore, we will assume, subject to
correction, a date from 1200 to 1225 for their design and
workmanship; for the transept, 1220 to 1236; and for the nave a
general tendency to the actual reign of Saint Louis from 1236 to
1270. Since there is a deal of later glass scattered everywhere
among the earlier, the margin of error is great; but by keeping the
reign of Louis VIII and its personages distinct from that of Louis
IX and his generation, we can be fairly sure of our main facts.
Meanwhile the Sainte Chapelle in Paris, wholly built and completed
between 1240 and 1248, offers a standard of comparison for the
legendary windows.

The choir of Chartres is as long as the nave, and much broader,
besides that the apse was planned with seven circular projections
which greatly increased the window space, so that the guidebook
reckons thirty-seven windows. A number of these are grisailles, and
the true amateur of glass considers the grisailles to be as well
worth study as the legendary windows. They are a decoration which
has no particular concern with churches, and no distinct religious
meaning, but, it seems, a religious value which Viollet-le-Duc is at
some trouble to explain; and, since his explanation is not very
technical, we can look at it, before looking at the legends:--

The colouration of the windows had the advantage of throwing on the
opaque walls a veil, or coloured glazing, of extreme delicacy,
always assuming that the coloured windows themselves were
harmoniously toned. Whether their resources did not permit the
artists to adopt a complete system of coloured glass, or whether
they wanted to get daylight in purer quality into their interiors,--
whatever may have been their reasons,--they resorted to this
beautiful grisaille decoration which is also a colouring harmony
obtained by the aid of a long experience in the effects of light on
translucent surfaces. Many of our churches retain grisaille windows
filling either all, or only a part, of their bays. In the latter
case, the grisailles are reserved for the side windows which are
meant to be seen obliquely, and in that case the coloured glass
fills the bays of the fond, the apsidal openings which are meant to
be seen in face from a distance. These lateral grisailles are still
opaque enough to prevent the solar rays which pass through them from
lighting the coloured windows on the reverse side; yet, at certain
hours of the day, these solar rays throw a pearly light on the
coloured windows which gives them indescribable transparence and
refinement of tones. The lateral windows in the choir of the Auxerre
Cathedral, half-grisaille, half-coloured, throw on the wholly
coloured apsidal window, by this means, a glazing the softness of
which one can hardly conceive. The opaline light which comes through
these lateral bays, and makes a sort of veil, transparent in the
extreme, under the lofty vaulting, is crossed by the brilliant tones
of the windows behind, which give the play of precious stones. The
solid outlines then seem to waver like objects seen through a sheet
of clear water. Distances change their values, and take depths in
which the eye gets lost. With every hour of the day these effects
are altered, and always with new harmonies which one never tires of
trying to understand; but the deeper one's study goes, the more
astounded one becomes before the experience acquired by these
artists, whose theories on the effects of colour, assuming that they
had any, are unknown to us and whom the most kindly-disposed among
us treat as simple children.

You can read the rest for yourselves. Grisaille is a separate branch
of colour-decoration which belongs with the whole system of lighting
and fenetrage, and will have to remain a closed book because the
feeling and experience which explained it once are lost, and we
cannot recover either. Such things must have been always felt rather
than reasoned, like the irregularities in plan of the builders; the
best work of the best times shows the same subtlety of sense as the
dog shows in retrieving, or the bee in flying, but which tourists
have lost. All we can do is to note that the grisailles were
intended to have values. They were among the refinements of light
and colour with which the apse of Chartres is so crowded that one
must be content to feel what one can, and let the rest go.

Understand, we cannot! nothing proves that the greatest artists who
ever lived have, in a logical sense, understood! or that omnipotence
has ever understood! or that the utmost power of expression has ever
been capable of expressing more than the reaction of one energy on
another, but not of two on two; and when one sits here, in the
central axis of this complicated apse, one sees, in mere light
alone, the reaction of hundreds of energies, although time has left
only a wreck of what the artist put here. One of the best window
spaces is wholly filled up by the fourteenth-century doorway to the
chapel of Saint Piat, and only by looking at the two windows which
correspond on the north does a curious inquirer get a notion of the
probable loss. The same chapel more or less blocks the light of
three other principal windows. The sun, the dust, the acids of
dripping water, and the other works of time, have in seven hundred
years corroded or worn away or altered the glass, especially on the
south side. Windows have been darkened by time and mutilated by
wilful injury. Scores of the panels are wholly restored, modern
reproductions or imitations. Even after all this loss, the glass is
probably the best-preserved, or perhaps the only preserved part of
the decoration in colour, for we never shall know the colour-
decoration of the vaults, the walls, the columns, or the floors.
Only one point is fairly sure;--that on festivals, if not at other
times, every foot of space was covered in some way or another,
throughout the apse, with colour; either paint or tapestry or
embroidery or Byzantine brocades and Oriental stuffs or rugs, lining
the walls, covering the altars, and hiding the floor. Occasionally
you happen upon illuminated manuscripts showing the interiors of
chapels with their colour-decoration; but everything has perished
here except the glass.

If one may judge from the glass of later centuries, the first
impression from the thirteenth-century windows ought to be
disappointment. You should find them too effeminate, too soft, too
small, and above all not particularly religious. Indeed, except for
the nominal subjects of the legends, one sees nothing religious
about them; the medallions, when studied with the binocle, turn out
to be less religious than decorative. Saint Michael would not have
felt at home here, and Saint Bernard would have turned from them
with disapproval; but when they were put up, Saint Bernard was long
dead, and Saint Michael had yielded his place to the Virgin. This
apse is all for her. At its entrance she sat, on either side, in the
Belle-Verriere or as Our Lady of the Pillar, to receive the secrets
and the prayers of suppliants who wished to address her directly in
person; there she bent down to our level, resumed her humanity, and
felt our griefs and passions. Within, where the cross-lights fell
through the wide columned space behind the high altar, was her


 


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