Part 2

Saint Denis, which immediately antedated the great Gothic churches of Northern France, is a stately mansion with a steeple at its side, but the Gothic cathedrals are Christian temples every inch; their design itself is consecrate. Their lines and harmonies however varied, however bizarre, always resolve at last into some ideal of reverence, while their solemn beauty speaks a various language. From crypt to steeple the Gothic church is a Christian metaphor. Its ground plan is the Cross, while the huge cathedral with all its worshipers is but a standard bearer for loftier crosses borne upon its towers and spires.

From the bulwarks of their massive foundations, laid in the Dark Ages, these old churches deliberately grew more ornate, carrying with them countless generations of architects growing steadily in pride and skill until it only required a burst of popular enthusiasm to bring forth the artistic revolution of the Thirteenth Century. Again (but not in wrath) the old churches were demolished simply because they were no longer the noblest possible treasure houses for their precious relics. Then it was that the gentle, mystical, French monarch, who maintained his court so simply, purchased “The Crown of Thorns” from the mercenary Venetians, into whose hands it had fallen through a chattel mortgage given by those who had acquired it as a spoil of war.

Never were the rites of the church so descriptive, so picturesque, so splendid, as in the Thirteenth Century. Barefooted and in penitential garb, but followed by a band of light, a great procession of worshipers, each carrying a candle, the king and his brother met the supreme relic and bore it tenderly onward to the Royal Chapel in Paris and all the cities, towns and hamlets through which they passed were reverently illuminated.

Then Saint Louis entreated the great architects of his realm, whose genius was already proven, to strive to design a reliquary even worthy of the Crown of Thorns, and in five years the beautiful Sainte Chapelle arose: like other poetry this lovely chapel was born of a passionate yearning.

If the cathedrals are epics of architecture, the Sainte Chapelle is a sonnet, a masterpiece of single-minded expression, the purity of whose design established a standard. No cathedral could be finished on its original plan; it was necessarily too long in building; but the model which was to harmonize the labors of successive builders may be sought in the little Sainte Chapelle of Paris which sprang from the Crown of Thorns.

As every great work of art mirrors a human heart, reflecting that of which its author took no note as clearly as that which stirred his conscious being, so the Sainte Chapelle reflects Saint Louis and Saint Louis reflects the Age of Faith. He was its poet who wrote in deeds.

It is not strange that Louis IX was canonized for he was in perfect accord with the ideals of his age, asceticism, chivalry, humility and regality; and too, he was a great builder.

Saint Louis built the Sainte Chapelle to hold that which did not physically exist; but as with the pen of a recording angel, on this tablet of stone he wrote a message from the better self of his age to all humanity.

Though history repeats, the history of the Gothic is as unique as that architecture itself; when otherwise men were trammeled body and soul its builders were free to create, to vary or to destroy.

In the nineteenth century, when travel became general (“he who runs may read”), certain gentle readers like Corroyer, Hugo, Rodin, Ruskin, and most accurate of all, Viollet-le-Duc, interpreted this marvelous architecture of the Moyen Age to the multitude.

“They builded better than they knew; they wrought in sad sincerity,” vaguely exclaimed the philosopher.

“They built as well as they knew; they built in glad sincerity,” observed the architect.

Rodin reminds us that it is a mistake to imagine that the religious conceptions of that day were able to bring forth architectural masterpieces any more than that the religious conceptions of today are responsible for the defects in modern structures.

The Gothic cathedrals are epics of labor. They grew up under the hands of many designers and builders, who were learning as they worked. Democracy echoes through these noble buildings into which were wrought the hope, the promise and the enthusiasm of a rising people.

To the inartistic eighteenth century, whose mission was to fight tyranny, political and religious, these ornate structures seemed the meaningless labor of a downtrodden people. I doubt if logicians like Voltaire and Gibbon realized the elevating joy of passionate giving that came to some of the poorest donors. Think of a guild of pastry cooks presenting a magnificent window to the Church, their Mother! No less a building than the Cathedral of Chartres!

Never were the lovely things of the Age of Faith more beloved than in the present Age of Doubt. We are trying to restore the noblest of the old cathedrals, stone for stone, and to lure back the sweetest prayers and truest penance confided to their walls to spiritualize their resurrection.

Never were the maiden efforts of Christian art more tenderly approached than in the technical twentieth century, when they are studied alike by Catholic, Protestant and Jew. The old theology has been very severely picked over, but underneath its mouldy leaves, like trailing arbutus in the spring, the “Little Flowers of St. Francis” peep up. The nineteenth century concerned itself with the errors of the Mediæval Church, but the twentieth especially reads the gentler side related by the artists, and sometimes we catch hallowed messages from the pure in heart who have almost seen God.

_Mystics as Builders_

We order the temples still standing destroyed that in their exact place may be raised the sign of the Christian religion. Decree of Valentinian III.

In the tribunal of history the Christian iconoclasts have been dealt with somewhat in the manner of defendants in damage suits. If a cow is killed by a railroad, is it not naturally assumed to have been a Durham? If a statue was destroyed by a fanatic why not put in a claim for a Phidias? As a matter of fact, by the time the early Christians came into power the art of the day of Pericles had been copied for over seven hundred years. Of art, what worse could be said!

Grecian art neither rose nor fell in a generation nor was it childless; original, though minor schools, Hellenic to the core, sprang up in the Grecian colonies and to the end the art and artists of Rome were Greeks. But during the later Roman Empire the degenerate Grecian artist commissioned by the degenerate Roman patron was simply cumbering the earth. Oh, yes, in those luxurious days they patronized art as rich men should, as rich men do. The houses of Herculaneum and Pompeii teemed with articles of virtu. It was not statues the world of art needed, it was ideals.

In art, it is the individual point of view that counts even if it be only that of the destroyer. Since art reflects life and life means change, the iconoclast has his place. A race, or more often the meeting of two races, may develop a school of art; it reaches its perfection in the work of a few genii of its golden age; to them it is given to embody the highest and best that was in the myriad of artists who have taught them and their teachers. Spellbound by its own perfection, this art can move no farther. The multitude seek to preserve it, for its value has been interpreted to them in quotations of the exchange. Artists are satisfied to copy it, and thereby artists they gradually cease to be. The destroyer comes,—fire, fanatic, whirlwind, victor or worm—the bulk and body of that art perishes, but the ideal, being a fruit of the spirit, lives. The final ruling of Grecian architecture is still proclaimed from the Parthenon, while headless and armless the lone “Winged Victory” might immortalize the action of Grecian sculpture, the poetry of Grecian thought.

Since architecture is the most national of the arts, its movements are the easiest to trace. Sometimes we actually detect the designer following in the footsteps of the iconoclast. Indeed, the most successful patron architecture has known, the Catholic Church, commenced as a destroyer.

In the south of France ecclesiastical architecture remained essentially classic until the Renaissance. This was largely due to one great sixth century bishop, Patiens de Lyons, who repaired the old temples and rebuilt anew on their lines so successfully that the people proudly said they could not tell the new from the old; but in the north of Gaul, where Martin of Tours and his followers had made a clean sweep of the pagan temples and their old influence, architectural and spiritual, an absolutely new style of church building developed. It is there that to this day we turn for the purest Gothic.

Of this Martin we have some little history, hazy though it be. He was a rude barbarian of the Roman legion, under the Emperor Julian, who embraced Christianity and brought the glad tidings to Tours. With a soldier’s idea of conquest he demolished the temples of false gods, like other superstitious converts; but he contended that to make the victory complete, at least an altar to the true God should mark the very spot; and he is credited with six religious foundations, one having been a church for the laity in the town of Tours. The present age might canonize Martin for a deed overlooked by his most ardent, early eulogists. He and Saint Ambrose protested against the “new heresy” of two Spanish bishops who put a gnostic to death for his heretical opinions.

Hagiology, however, abounds in records of Saint Martin, for he became the best beloved saint of old Gaul.

It is natural that those who read the Roman Catholic breviary literally should doubt it somewhat. They fail to realize that the history of a saint lies entirely between the lines of the account. The sacred lesson taught by this life reëchoes in his antiphones, responses, versicles and lessons, until he stands before his followers as a type of certain virtues. Thus Saint Sebastian stands for Christian courage; though his body is pierced with arrows and his hands are tied, he is always represented looking bravely up to Heaven: torture is immaterial to him: he is sustained by faith. Saint Gregory, gentlest of pastors, greatest of popes, is represented with the emblem of the Holy Ghost, the dove, perched upon his shoulder; Saint Jerome, who translated the Scriptures, with the Book in his hand; he generally has an angel near-by him.

Two little pictures stand out in Saint Martin’s iconography. In one, Saint Martin cuts his cloak in half with his sword to divide it with a beggar and beholds the Savior abundantly clad in half of it; and in the other, Saint Martin evokes the spectre of a pretended martyr worshiped in Tours, who comes to life and admits that he was hanged for crime, wherefore Saint Martin demolishes his shrine.

To the early Church the relic was everything. Of course it should be pure and holy. In it there was inspiration. Above the grave of some dear saint or, perhaps, only to his memory, a shrine would arise, and from these shrines, like flowers from seed, churches grew. A crypt might be made to hold some hallowed dust, where services might be held. This was reminiscent of the Roman catacombs where the first Christians, believing literally in the resurrection of the body, had laid their dead, and where, unseen by the unsympathetic world, they had met for holy communion. The crypts of the early Church were the mortal resting-places of friendly immortals at the great court above who, in their robes of light, might plead acceptably for those who would so reverently approach the heavenly throne through spirits purer than their own. Of course, these pleaders must be very pure to turn their shrines to altars. What spiritual value had a pretty, paltry tomb honoring an unholy spirit?

Roman civilization was materialistic, but not so this new religion of Jesus of Nazareth. Now, if things holy could pervade and hallow a building, why should not things unholy defile it?

We may trace this idea carried out so literally, so picturesquely, so almost logically in the legends of Martin of Tours, that we actually sympathize with the destructive old bishop. Blindly defending the dream that was in him, he actually stands first in that long line of ecclesiastical builders who, in the fulness of time, jointly brought forth Gothic architecture.

When Saint Martin put his rude followers to work building houses for their new faith he must have established a certain amount of unity and order among them. Could there have been a better way to attach his crude converts to their Church than to induce them to work upon it?

While Saint Martin was building at Tours, the Dark Ages were setting in, when men of action became marauders, preying upon others; men of thought became monks, praying for themselves; humanity went backwards, and history ceased from very shame. But through it all there were a few perplexed old bishops who, whatever their failings may have been, tried to do something for their fellows. However, in that lawless day, they had to defend rather than expand Christianity, and even protect its churches, for pagans, too, might be honest iconoclasts!

The best thing the Dark Ages did for civilization was to learn the builders’ trade and teach it to a great many people. It was a general service, for to make a people industrious is, sooner or later, to make them skilful and law-abiding.

It is curious that Saint Martin who, even while he was a bishop, lodged in a hut covered with boughs, should head the great line of builders who jointly and severally developed French Gothic. In standing for the integrity of the relic, which was literally the seed of early Christian art, Saint Martin gave a new and a higher impetus to life, and with it, very indirectly, to art. Seventy years after Martin’s death, to his blessed memory Saint Perpetuas built “the most beautiful church in existence,” at least so Gregory of Tours affirms. We will not inquire on what lines, for this was at the beginning of the Dark Ages, when nothing beautiful was made.

A supreme recognition of the bold old iconoclast comes to us from devotees of the classic; from certain artists and connoisseurs of the Renaissance. This unexpected tribute to iconoclasm is published upon a monument far removed from old Gaul in time and place, in ideal and execution.

In a monastery dowered with the gold of two reigning dynasties of tyrants, dowered by the genius of two reigning dynasties of painters and sculptors, amid surroundings perhaps the richest in the world, where fifty monks might dream away their lives in silence, in that lordly and exclusive playhouse for the soul of the Renaissance, wherein the exuberance of the Gothic takes on the maturity of the Renaissance in an elaboration which for once does not cloy,—in the Certosa di Pavia we find a tribute to crude, old Saint Martin, the iconoclast.

On a mural of one of the side chapels of this Certosa behold him represented in the garb of a fifteenth century monk, with his sanctity emphasized by a large, glittering nimbus, to which the aerial perspective of the otherwise maturely realistic painting is deliberately sacrificed, calmly superintending a gilded youth of the Renaissance while he smashes a fine Grecian statue! How did this rude act find endorsement in a temple of art? How did the coarsest of the saints win a place in the heart of the Renaissance? Was it because in him they saw a reflection of the subtlest honesty of Art, that god of the Renaissance? Was it because, above all else, Saint Martin especially stood for the integrity of the ideal?

Though this little scene on the chapel wall may have been simply historic in its import, nothing is plainer than that the picture is intended to honor an uncompromising bishop of the early Church.

Through the confusion that disintegrated empire, Saint Martin was a rude standard-bearer of two ideals broad enough to rebuild nations—Sincerity and Brotherhood. “First he wrought and after that he taught”—and first the spirit of his teaching was put into rude pictures, because in Gaul so few people could read and still fewer could condense an idea into forceful words.

It was long, long after an angel had appeared and carried Saint Martin’s soul in the form of a child straight to God, as a gentle old writer attests, that a modern geologist voiced the fundamental idea of the best beloved saint of old Gaul, “An honest god is the noblest work of man.”

But the past, as well as the present, has its peculiar eloquence wherewith to honor the dead. Over one of the oldest Christian altars spared to us by time, in solemn, enduring mosaic, big and simple, stands Saint Martin leading a line of saints to Christ. And this great hieratic on the wall of an old church of old Ravenna describes, as no language of the present may, an early builder of the great mystic Church which “rests upon the brawny trunks of heroes ... whose spans and arches are the joined hands of comrades ... and whose heights and spaces are inscribed by the numberless musings of all the dreamers of the world.”

_The Golden Madonna of Rheims_

Late in the fifth century, while the confusion of the Dark Ages reigned supreme, the Christian bishop of the Remi was at work on the discouraging task of rebuilding his church after pagan depredations at Rheims, when the great joy was vouchsafed to him of baptizing Clovis, the ruler of the largest Teutonic State of the age.

Saint Remi recommended Clovis to adore that which he had burned and to burn that which he had adored, that the work of judicious destruction might continue. Clovis sent offerings to all the sanctuaries, particularly to that of the old soldier Saint Martin. Three thousand Franks were baptized; Clovis exchanged the three toads on his shield for the fleur-de-lis, and France became Christian _toute de suite_. Then Saint Remi dreamt of great things yet to come: of a king and a people governed by the Church of Christ, temporally and spiritually. And he interpreted this dream to the people by a charming symbol: he explained how the Holy Ghost, the Heavenly Dove, had brought from above some spiritual oil with which to anoint Clovis at his baptism. But to make the idea clear to these many men of childish minds and many _patois_, he showed them a little ampulla filled with oil, which, he explained, “the Dove” had brought to him from Heaven to grace the baptism of their chief. And they decided to keep the oil that was left in the ampulla for great occasions, like coronations. This wonderful ointment united the Crown and the Church as long as it lasted. During the Revolution a sansculotte shattered the old vessel. Orthodoxy claimed to have caught one drop and encased it in a beautiful new vase; it was used again, but its efficacy was no more. And not long thereafter the French people decided to do without coronations, or monasteries, but they still love Clovis and Saint Remi.

Civilization is much indebted to the early bishops and a goodly number of them have been canonized. The monastic clergy were the snobs of the Church, securely selfish in the magnificent fastnesses they erected for themselves in the skies; condescending comfortably to pray for those that fed them (though who knows but they even shirked that obligation), while the secular clergy were working out, amid inspiration and error, the foundations of a Christian civilization. The idea of the early bishops that the Church ought to rule the world was a natural and an honest mistake. The later bishops were quite a different class. The stout little church of Saint Remi near Rheims pleads still for its brave old bishop, though as a building it is eclipsed by the great cathedral of the city.

The dynasty of Clovis passed away and the next reigning house came in with Pepin. He had good reason to approve of the Church as an institution, for it had early played into his hand. Had not the Abbé of Saint Denis journeyed to Rome to secure the papal confirmation of his crown? And had not Pope Stephen, while enjoying the protection of that same abbey, anointed Charlemagne, his little son? On this was based the succession. With his own good sword Charlemagne defended it and brought a semblance of order to the land of the Gaul and the Frank; and, genius that he was, he anticipated, in his interest in architecture, the genius of his great people. But it was rather Charlemagne’s attitude toward church building and letters that told, in the long run, than any literal achievement in them during this time. However, from the reign of his youngest son, Louis the Pious, we may trace the steady, consistent growth of an original order of building which culminated in the unparalleled Gothic of Northern France.

By that time the nobility had built so many sanctuaries in their domains that they had to be interdicted from establishing useless private foundations and, in a more democratic spirit, sixteen or seventeen churches, all edifices of dignity, were begun. Then Bishop Ebbon saw a golden opportunity to build a magnificent cathedral on the long-hallowed soil of Rheims. There the Druid had raised his altar, there the Roman his temple, which may have absorbed the old Druid’s stones into its walls as it had his old gods into its adaptive bosom, to fall, in its turn, a mightier pile, from which the Christian built again and again as he grew in skill. Indeed, beyond their generation the people of Rheims were experienced builders. In addition to all the stone quarried by varied worshipers of the long past at Rheims, Louis the Pious put at Ebbon’s service the materials of the city wall and sent him his favorite architect—Rumald. And it was found that the new cathedral protected the city better than the old walls. _La paix religieuse_ turned away many an invader. One golden cup from the altar bought off the Norsemen (not that it turned their hearts); they swooped down upon Chartres instead.

The old chroniclers assure us that this early Cathedral of Rheims was the finest in the realm. It must have beggared description, for what manner of building it was none of them seem to say. But they tell of its wonderful altar of Our Lady, covered with gold and studded with gems, upon which stood a glorious virgin made of solid gold. That impressed them. Was this altar built with the loot of war? Was it built in remorse, or, worse, in mercenary superstition? Or was it lavished like the woman’s precious ointment upon our Savior? This much it certainly was,—a united tribute of the material to the immaterial, coming from many men of many minds.

It was about this time that the Virgin became so peculiarly near and dear to the Catholic world. They loaded her with jewels and appealed to her as one of themselves, human, though divinely so. They painted her on the inside of their jewel boxes that she might turn the heart of the thief; they appealed to her in embarrassing human situations and loved her as a helpful, pitying woman who brought religion home to them.