Part 1
Transcriber’s Notes:
Underscores “_” before and after a word or phrase indicate _italics_ in the original text. Small capitals have been converted to SOLID capitals. Illustrations and footnotes have been moved so they do not break up paragraphs. Typographical errors have been silently corrected but other variations in spelling and punctuation remain unaltered.
_Note_
_The friendly eyes that read these pages, knowing the pathetic fails relating to their publication, will not be content without a word to tell to other readers the story that will cause one and all to look on the little book in the same sympathetic mood._
_The trips among the scenes of the storied past, here recorded, were taken not so much in search of health as in search of diversion from the sad employment of watching the inexorable approach of mortal disease. The writing was undertaken to occupy a vigorous mind, conscious that its tenement would not long endure._
_Alas! the task was not done before its purpose had been fully completed, and to others was left the duty of reading the final proofs. Such imperfections as may be found should be charged to this account, and all the excellences are to be credited to the brave soul that fought her fight so silently that only a very few closest friends knew of the unequal battle._
_C. S. G._
FLOWERS FROM MEDIÆVAL HISTORY
BY MINNIE D. KELLOGG
_I never can feel sure of any truth but from a clear perception of its beauty. Keats_
ILLUSTRATED
PAUL ELDER AND COMPANY PUBLISHERS·SAN FRANCISCO
COPYRIGHT, 1910 BY PAUL ELDER AND COMPANY
_Contents_
_Page_ _Advertisement_ vii _By Way of Introduction_ xi _Flowers of History from the Romantic Thirteenth Century_ 3 _Mystics as Builders_ 15 _The Golden Madonna of Rheims_ 26 _The Little Old Abbé of Saint Denis and the Imagiers_ 38 _The Mystic Cathedral of Chartres_ 50 _Caen: An Eleventh Century Tableau_ 73 _The Grandniece of the Grand Inquisitor_ 87 _Stray Leaves from Old, Old Books_ 98 _The Romantic Twentieth Century: A Deduction_ 118 _A Word Regarding Bibliography_ 139 _Index_ 143
_Illustrations_
_Facing Page_ _The Abbatical Church of Saint Ouen_ Title _As Art, Early Painting is Often Taken too Seriously; but as Literature, it is Charming_ xiv _The Crucifix in the Town Hall of Rouen_ 4 _The Virgin Greets the Angel of Death_ 8 _Sainte Chapelle_ 10 _Interior of Sainte Chapelle_ 12 _Saint Martin Dividing His Coat, from an Old Antiphone_ 20 _From the Certosa of Pavia_ 22 _Tomb of Dante, Ravenna_ 24 _A Recent Tribute to Clovis and Saint Remi, on the Interior Frieze of the Pantheon, Paris_ 26 _The Flying Buttress_ 32 _The Sculptured Saint Upon a Gothic Cathedral_ 34 _In the Sixteenth Century the French Academy Changed the Name of the Imagiers’ Guild to the Sculptors’_ 42 _A Thirteenth Century Window_ 44 _The Old-Time House of Prayer, which Still Dominates the City of Chartres_ 52 _A Pillar at Chartres_ 54 _A View Through the Portail of Chartres_ 56 _A Detail of the Portail Septentrionale_ 60 _South Portal of Chartres_ 64 _A Page from the Sculptured “Bible of the Laity,” Chartres_ 68 _Altar-piece at Chartres_ 70 _William the Conqueror’s Old Fortress_ 74 _Dinan_ 84 _Old Moats Do Make Such Charming Gardens_ 86 _A Peep Into the Cranium of a Bible Reader in Lope de Vega’s Time_ 88 _The Literal, Limited God of a Fanatic and Father Adam Stock-taking in Eden_ 92 _A Tribute to the Scribes of the Dark Ages_ 100 _The Baptistry Doors_ 102 _A Page from the Bible of Jean Sans Peur_ 110 _Head of Justice, from Fiore’s Group_ 130 _An Ideal of the Gracious Republic of Venice, Paul Veronese_ 134 _A Mediæval Expression of Justice Attended by Archangels, by Fiore_ 136
_Advertisement_
_These accounts all relate to places and objects that the uncommercial traveler may casually run upon at some turn of his way. Subjects mentioned in Baedeker have been considered here reflectively rather than descriptively. Although I do not propose to analyze the soil in which these flowers of history have sprung up, nor to speak of the rank weeds growing by their sides, I have tried not to blight these blossoms with falsehood. Certainly one-half of the truth is as true as the other and it may be infinitely pleasanter. As far as they go, these little historiettes are based upon evidence and authority._
_I want to teach you so much history that your sympathy may grow continually wider and you may be able to realize past generations of men just as you do the present, sorrowing for them when they failed, triumphing with them when they prevailed; for I find this one conviction never changing with me but always increasingy that one cannot live a life manfully without a wide world of sympathy and love to exercise it in._ —_Burne-Jones to His Son._
_Suggested itineraries for cathedral trips in Normandy, giving monuments of the first order only, places readily reached by rail_:
_First. Land at Bologne sur Mer, Amiens, Laon, Rheims, Paris, Saint Denis, Chartres, Caen, Bayeux, Mt. San Michele, embark from Cherbourg._
_Second. Land from England at Dieppe, or from America at Havre, proceed to Rouen, which possesses the most perfect example of later Gothic in the great abbatical Church of Saint Ouen; an excellent example of flamboyant Gothic in Saint Maclou; and a large, irregular but imposing Gothic cathedral on the order of Rheims; thence to Mt. San Michele, most unique of mediæval monuments; thence to Caen and Bayeux near by it, Chartres and Paris. Amiens and Rheims being very similar, and on the order of Chartres and Notre Dame of Paris, are not included in this itinerary. The traveler to whom time is money will be greatly tried by the connections made and lost by the trains in Normandy that stop at small places. Both these itineraries respect the idiosyncrasies of French railroads._
_The motorist, rejoicing in the excellent Norman roads, can combine these itineraries very easily—taking in the cathedrals of Le Mans, Bourg, Beauvais and Coutances. I would especially call his attention to the small but interesting Early Norman church at Dols, and to the walled town of San Malo on the sea, with picturesque little Dinan, fashionable Dinard, and a dirty little fishing village near by._
_By Way of Introduction_
_Modern invention has actually reflected upon ancient history: the railroad, the steam derrick and the photograph have changed our conceptions of the past. Written history is now accepted as its author’s opinion, while tangible records stand forth as facts._
_This attitude brings the Middle Ages particularly near to us, for though its people wrote comparatively little, they were wonderful builders: their art was more literally expressive than the classic; then, too, of course, it is better preserved._
_While the Greeks and Romans were our schoolmasters, the Europeans of the Middle Ages are our ancestors. Their experience foreshadows our own; for however far removed from us in thought and action they may have been, they were akin to us in feeling._
_Though the rude pioneers of Christianity were often intensely cruel, as you follow their history, you may meet with some gentle deed springing from the good seed, even when sown in stony places, with some action in its sweetness and humility entirely beyond the pagan world. In their childish story one may trace the early workings of the Christian ideal. It did not control behavior, nor did it always direct it wisely; morality, being judicial and scientific, implies a certain maturity of mind. Religion is simple; it is unlogical, sentimental and impulsive. Whatever this indefinable instinct may be, it has manifested itself as a spiritualizing force in morality and an initiative force in art._
_Religion has in it a craving for a loveliness beyond all literal perception of the senses; a philosophic mind projects this ideal in contemplation; an artistic mind, in symbol; for, as Michael Angelo explains, “Rash is the thought and vain that maketh beauty from the senses grow.”_
_The Greeks did develop an art from the motif of physical beauty, however, but their statues, executed before art became mature enough to produce that beauty, have no message, while one often catches something high and holy from a very early Christian image. It may radiate from a pretty smile on the face of a crude Madonna, or a graceful upturned head, in a figure entirely destitute of anatomy, which looks as though the simple craftsman had called upon a higher power than knowledge._
_Spiritual beauty being the ideal in Christian art, the image, however rude, which suggests it, makes its appeal in the charmed language of that loving religion._
_Mediæval archives have been ransacked by Protestants for the errors of Catholicism; by political economists, who even penetrate to the Dark Ages in search of the chilly lessons of the dismal science, for wisdom; and between them what a conception we have! But it is not the whole story, for Chaucer assures us the Moyen Age was a fairly livable period, peopled by beings like ourselves; moreover, it was an artistic age which has left us not only a wonderful architecture but two supreme poets._
_Perhaps the fairest chroniclers of such a period are its own artists, great and small, for history has grown too democratic to confine herself to kings, however worthy. She does not find the crude carver voiceless who, in default of skill, surrounds his Madonna with gold and loads her with rude jewels; indeed, she often finds her sweetest flowers growing between the lines of an unskilful brush or chisel._
_Although as painting, mediæval efforts are often taken too seriously, as literature they are charming, for they speak of the good and the beautiful as their Age conceived it. While the written stories of the time were shallow and coarse beyond our endurance, its painters were giving us their accounts of this life and the next (particularly the next). First come bright, pretty colors prettily placed, pretty thoughts of happy angels. Then gold backgrounds give way to skies, and shadows creep onto the canvas. Then they begin to tell stories; so eager they are that they cram four or five pictures into one, dotting the little scenes, by way of parenthesis, into the backgrounds._
_These pictures give the other half of the truth, the tenderer side of the old life and theology. What sympathetic Bible scholars some of the artists became! And, in general, the greatest were the tenderest. Albrecht Dürer’s Evangelists are interesting character studies for all time. He conceives of Saint Mark as a plain, simple enthusiast; of Saint Paul, as a broad-minded, thoughtful man whom he even imagines to be bald. He does not try to make either of them exactly handsome but the way Mark looks up to Paul is most winning. A little later Andrea del Sarto paints a splendid account of the warring doctors of the Church, which shows clearly he saw beyond them: but this takes us into the Renaissance which has been defined as a marriage of the Grecian and the Gothic._
_A strict analysis has come into art and it is creeping into life,—our race childhood is drawing to a close but not without leaving us many things that are sweet to remember._
_We tell our children some of the very same stories that the wandering story-tellers used to relate to good knights and their fair ladies in the old baronial halls,—Cinderella, Beauty and the Beast, or Puss in Boots,—only the knights and their ladies believed them. There is a pathos in mediæval story; it is a tragedy of misdirected effort (as perhaps all history is), only the mediæval tragedy strikes home. Its actors were people of our own blood and of our own Church—our own people only under delusions from which we have emancipated ourselves. To understand their story we must take them as children and listen with them for the imaginary voices that lead them on._
_A veritable allegory of the Age of Faith was presented on the great stage of history in 1212, when two enormous armies of little boys and girls started from France and Germany singing, to march to the Holy Land; if any of these children turned back, none of them seem to have found their old homes._
_As far as is known to history, one child alone returned as an aged pilgrim, to tell the tale,—how the bones of the children strewed the mountainside; how they had been embarked on unseaworthy vessels to be sold into slavery; how few, how very few, ever reached their goal; how few, how very few, ever remained pure and holy._
_Connected with this tragedy was a horrible pope and a horrible doge, but now they seem but foils to the purity of the children, it was all so long ago. And that the mystic beauty of that little legion may live lyrically in our life, the Twentieth Century has set their pathetic march to music in stately oratorio; for pure aspiration is the melody of melodies, the veritable flower of history._
_A certain childish disinterestedness was the tender grace of the Age of Faith,—“the tender grace of a day that is dead.” It must pass from a broader age; taking all factors duly into account even drives it from serious history its proportion is so inconsiderable._
_The life of Saint Francis, who espoused My Lady Poverty, is one of the sweetest examples of mediæval disinterestedness. Viewed literally, the accounts picture a crazy man preaching to birds and fishes, making a bargain with a wolf and injudiciously mortifying his flesh till he became blind and useless. Viewed by the light of their influence his teachings were revolutionary,—they brought new-found energy and sympathy into the Church; yet, at best, they were only the teachings of Christ, without the Savior’s beautiful sanity. Viewed by the results he brought about, Saint Francis must have been one of the profoundest of men, and yet his wisdom, if he had any, was only that of the heart._
_Sabatier has written a life of Francis, at once scholarly, judicious and vivid, but as the Franciscan Father remarked, he wrote the life of Mr. Francis. If you would learn of Saint Francis of blessed memory, you must study by yourself with loving diligence a childish old book which tells of the miracles wrought through the tail of Saint Francis—“The Little Flowers of Saint Francis.” The fruits of history others may put before us, but the passing fragrance of the flowers we must perceive for ourselves._
_I here submit for your interpretation certain incidents that seem to me the outgrowth of the fine feeling of the impulsive Moyen Age._
FLOWERS FROM MEDIÆVAL HISTORY
_Flowers of History From the Romantic Thirteenth Century_
I have borrowed my title from a Thirteenth Century chronicle, of disputed authorship, purporting to be a history of the world, but from 447 A. D. on it is engrossed with the story of England. From this insular partiality of its author I should be inclined to award the work to the English claimant, for what is a flower of history but a phase of the human story which especially charms the writer.
To me the Gothic cathedrals are the flowers of Thirteenth Century history, which era saw every one of the greatest of them building. Their cornerstones may have been laid earlier, and the finishing touches came much later, but they owe their character to that one wonderful century which stands apart through the ages, thus telling its beads.
The written history of the Thirteenth Century is cruel reading, but an age, like a man, has two soul sides, and the better side is always the harder to fathom. The Thirteenth Century opened for France, the native land of the Gothic, with an abominable pope, a selfish king and, nearer at hand, the evil of various tyrannical seigneurs. The great social movement which endowed the French towns with their magnificent cathedrals was apart from those powers and hardly affected by their war or peace.
These great edifices were built by the secular clergy and the townspeople for municipal, as well as religious, purposes. Therein they held councils for deliverance from their feudal lords, lay and ecclesiastic, for in the Thirteenth Century the Third Estate became a political power.
The cathedrals express the patriotism, generosity and civic pride of the freemen of the old towns; they realize the dream of the socialist for the good and the beautiful held in common; the love of the poet for beauty for its own sweet self; and the inspiration of the artist, working at the white heat of a rising art, as surely as the reverence of the age of faith.
In the Low Countries they built city halls at an early date, but the French towns did not need them, for there the cathedrals lent pomp and circumstance to all municipal assemblages. The first States General was held in Notre Dame of Paris.
The early Church had endeared itself to the people in many ways. It entertained the traveler, and it was well that it did, for the public houses were of a very low order; it instructed the children; it ministered to the sick, and, if it was a crazy physician, it was a gentle nurse. The modern hospital, the fairest monument of humanity, is directly descended from the old Hotels-Dieu, where monks and nuns tended the sick. In the cathedral sat the Bishops’ Courts which, the people felt, were more just than the seigneurs. From these old Bishops’ Courts the beautiful French custom has descended of hanging a crucifix back of the judge’s seat in the courts of common law where the symbol, recalling a politic judge washing his hands of the blood of a just man, seems more than a human warning.
Within the consecrated walls of the church was that ever-blessed privilege of the temple—Christian, Pagan, or Jewish—sanctuary, the right of the hunted. Of course it was abused, mercy expects to be; therein it is more divine than human; but in a lawless day sanctuary was an unconscious protest against lynching. We do read of accidents arising from it; a Christian Church at Seez was burned down in an attempt to dislodge a band of thieves, but this embarrassing circumstance reflects on the management of those who burned it rather than upon the church.
A complaint comes down to us from the Thirteenth Century of the would-be popular clergy who allowed their parishioners to dance in their churches and even assisted at these dances and at shows _peu convenable_ given by jugglers and clowns, they themselves playing at chess, all of which goes to show that we must regard these immense churches as meeting houses in the literal sense of the term and allow for the coarseness of the age in considering its amusements. Among other buffooneries, at Laon particularly, which seems to have been very “low church,” we read of the annual _fête des innocents_, in which the choir boys dressed up as priests and went through various antics in the church, which was given up to them for the night, the chapter giving them a supper after. At Laon again there is public complaint of a change having been made in the hour of mass and vespers on account of a miracle play that was given in the church. Lovers of the drama may look leniently upon this arrangement, whereas I suppose the stricter churchmen, when the ecclesiastical supremacy came to be questioned, even in the bishop’s own church, both at Rheims and Laon, said, “I told you so.” By such concessions the clergy induced the citizens to go in with them in building[1] such churches that succeeding generations have called them mad.
Though the evolution of the Gothic is one of the most interesting chapters in the history of architecture, the history of the builders themselves, if we could only have it, might be still more fascinating. Indeed,
“Who builds a church to God and not to fame, Will never mark the marble with his name.”
Hence we do not know who designed some of the noblest monuments of Gothic architecture, but we do catch charming psychological glimpses as we watch the mystical and the practical unconsciously working together for the beautiful in these old cathedrals, which make us wonder how such spiritual designs arose and how the artists who conceived them were able to carry them out. How could an age when kings could hardly read and write, when artists drew like children, evolve such works of art? How could an age so ignorant of physics and the abstract principles of mechanics erect such buildings?
Some hazy legends, fairy tales even, with their grain of truth (that truth which one troweth but cannot prove), and a few scant records, scattered among the archives of such old churches as have escaped the accidents of war and of peace, are really all that is left us with which to picture a beautiful phase of thought and feeling which lured a childish people onward toward art, organization and nationality.
From the old archives of Chartres, which was built so slowly, from the old records of Saint Denis, which was built so quickly, between the lines of the naïve old letters of tactful old bishops who coaxed nobles and workmen alike, as much as they coerced them, thereby raising fabulous sums paid in labor or in gold with which to build such temples that succeeding generations have thought them inspired, we may pick up a few fragments of the untold story of these exquisitely poetic Builders who taught architecture to speak a universal language.