Part 6

Both processes may be followed through the great sequence of churches between the Seine, the Marne, and the Somme--or might have been a year ago. To-day it is safe to postulate nothing of a dim and ominous future; we know that much of this galaxy has been destroyed after seven centuries of careful cherishing through innumerable wars and revolutions. That all may go is possible, as the power that brought them into existence has gone, though in this case only for a time. Once, however, the great and triumphal progress from Jumièges through Noyon, Senlis, St. Denis, Laon, Paris, Amiens, to its final achievement at Reims, was a complete and visible record of the greatest and most headlong advance toward the real things in Christian civilisation by means of the real things in Christian civilisation history has ever recorded. Five of these--Senlis, Noyon, Laon, Amiens, and Reims lie either within the battle lines that have maintained themselves so long, or at least within sound of the guns; one has been destroyed--Reims; one thus far preserved--Amiens. The fate of the others is in doubt, together with that of all the lands that lie to the east, and the danger of irreparable loss is greater than ever before since the French Revolution.

There was no better place than this once-lovely region, now hidden from view in the lurid smoke and the poisoned fumes of a new and demoniac sort of war, in which to watch the swift growth to a splendid self-consciousness of Gothic architecture. The elements of Gothic organism had been developed in the twelfth century by the great Cluniac-Norman alliance, but this was only a beginning; Gothic quality was still to be achieved, and this consisted largely in three elements--cohesion, economy, and character. The first means the synthetic knitting of everything together, and the giving it dynamic power to develop from within outward; it means making structure absolutely central and comprehensive, but also beautiful; ornament, decoration, remaining something added to it, something of the _bene esse_, though not of the _esse_; deriving from it in every instance, but not necessary to its perfection. The second is the reducing of mass to its logical and structural (and also optical) minimum, bringing into play the forces of accommodation, balance, and active, as opposed to passive, resistance. The third is the hardest to describe or determine, and probably can only be perceived through comparison. It is the differentiation in quality, the

determination of personality, and it is hardly to be defined, though it is instantly perceived.

In the Abbaye aux Hommes, or Cérisy, or St. Georges de Bocherville, we find great majesty and beauty, many elements that are distinctive of true Gothic work and persist through its entire course, but none of these buildings is actually Gothic. In St. Germer de Fly, however, and in Sens and Noyon, while there seems at first little differentiation from the others, the Gothic spirit has found itself and is already working rapidly toward its consummation.

Of the condition of Noyon at the present time we know little; of what this may be in a few months’ time we know less. The town itself was of the oldest, its foundation being Roman, and within its walls Chilperic was buried in 721, while Charlemagne was crowned King of the Franks about thirty years before he became Emperor, and Hugh, first of the Capetian dynasty, was here chosen king in 987. Incidentally, the town was also the birthplace of John Calvin. The ancient cathedral was burned in 1131 and the present work begun shortly after, though it is hard to believe that much of the existing structure antedates the year 1150. The crossing and transepts date from about 1170, the nave about ten years later, while the west front and towers are of the early part of the next century. The certainty and calm assurance of the work is remarkable. Paris, which is later, is full of tentative experiments, but there is no halting here, rather a serene certainty of touch that is perfectly convincing. The plan is curious in that it has transepts with apsidal ends, after the fashion of Rhenish Romanesque, one of the few instances in France. The alternating system is used throughout, and the vault was originally sexpartite; the interior order consists of a low arcade, high triforium, triforium gallery, and a clerestory comprised wholly within the vault lines; round and pointed arches are used indiscriminately, and the flying buttresses are perhaps the earliest that emerged from the protection of the triforium roofs. In the choir, which is earliest in date, the ornament is rude, even rudimentary, though distinctly Gothic in form, but in the nave twenty years has served to change this into work of the most brilliant and classical beauty. In 1293 the whole town was destroyed by fire, and the cathedral wrecked; it was immediately reconstructed, however, and at this time the sexpartite gave place to quadripartite vaulting, while the west front, with its great towers, very noble in their proportions and their powerful buttressing, was completed. This rebuilding and the loss of all the original glass has left Noyon less perfect than many of the neighbouring churches, but it still remained a grave and strikingly solemn example of the transition.

Not far away, past the huge and formidable ruins of Coucy, the greatest castle of the Middle Ages, whose lords haughtily proclaimed, “Roi ne suys, ne prince, ne duc, ne comte aussi: Je suys le Sire de Coucy,” is Laon on its sudden hill. How great the loss has been here we do not know, but the town has been frequently under German bombardment, and the end is not yet. Laon is unique, a masterly work of curious vitality, original, daring, and even rebellious against a growing tradition. In the Middle Ages it was vastly admired, but to us of a day more dull and timorous in architecture, because we have no art of our own and have found so little in life from which we could draw an inspiration, it is less safe and satisfying than such coherent and scholastic work as Amiens or Reims. Begun about 1165, it was finished in 1225, the growth being from the crossing in all directions, for not only is the amazing west front of the central period of Gothic perfection, but the choir as well, for the unique square termination takes the place of a regular chevet which was part of the original design. This square-ended choir is the only one in France, and is thoroughly English in effect; moreover, the transepts have aisles and are the first in France to be so finished, while they have tribunes at the ends after the Norman fashion, and there is a central tower or lantern as well. The towers of Laon are its distinguishing glory, for there are five in all, out of an original seven, all incomplete, not one retaining its spire, but striking and immensely individual. The interior organism is not wholly coherent, for while the vaulting is sexpartite throughout, the system is regular, and was as manifestly intended for quadripartite vaulting as Noyon for sexpartite. The west front is vastly picturesque, if somewhat incoherent, and is clearly a growth from year to year; it lacks both the sublime calm and grandeur of Paris and the faultless organism of Reims, but its detail is as brilliantly conceived as any in France, while its carvings and sculptures are in the same class as the best of Hellas. In the tops of the towers are the well-known stone effigies of oxen, placed there by the builders in recognition of the patient service of the beasts that year after year helped drag the heavy stones from the plain to the top of the hill where the cathedral stands.

In and around Laon were once innumerable religious houses, but nearly all their churches were destroyed during the French Revolution, which annihilated more noble art in five years than had happened in five centuries. St. Martin remains, and is of the middle of the twelfth century, but the church of the Abbey of St. Vincent is wholly destroyed.

South of Laon, and about as far away as Noyon, lies Soissons, an ancient town, famous in history, and containing, until the war, another masterpiece of mediæval art, the cathedral, which already has been made the target of German shells, and has suffered seriously. As a city, it antedated the Roman occupation, was Christianised toward the end of the third century, became a capital of the Merovings, and a notable city of the Carolingian dynasty. The south transept is the oldest part, and dates from about 1175, the choir was finished in 1212, the north transept and nave about 1250. Porter says of the south transept: “This portion of Soissons, one of the most ethereal of all twelfth-century designs, is the highest expression of that fairy-like, Saracenic phase of Gothic art that had first come into being at Noyon. Like Noyon, however, this transept lacks the elements of grandeur which are found in so striking a degree in the nave and choir of this same church of Soissons.” The nave and choir are indeed amongst the noblest creations of Catholic art; for justness and delicacy of proportions, refinement of line, restraint in the placing and determination of ornament, Soissons ranks with Chartres and Bourges. The richness of its vertical lines is unusual, the mouldings clear, powerful, and distinguished in contour, and altogether it has well served for nearly seven centuries as a perfect exemplar of the Christian art of France as its highest point.

Already it has been appallingly shattered, one shell having struck the roof of the north aisle, hurling one of the nave shafts into fragments and obliterating an entire bay. Thus far it has been spared a conflagration, and if the Prussian lines are promptly forced back, it may still be preserved as a wonder for still further generations.

So far as the numberless other great churches of Soissons are concerned, it has for long been too late; they perished, with uncounted others in this region, at the time of the Revolution. Of the vast abbey of St. Jean-des-Vignes nothing remains but the sumptuous west front, cut clear like an architectural “frontispiece” from all the rest, and even this has been further shattered by German gunfire. The royal abbey of Our Lady has become a military barracks, St. Crepin, St. Medard with its famous seven churches, all have vanished, and the loss is irreparable.

Nearer Paris we find Senlis, a further step in architectural development. The town itself is charming, and full of old art and old history. Roman walls, with sixteen towers, still remain, together with fragments of a royal palace of the French kings, from Clovis to Henri IV, with ancient houses, picturesque streets, desecrated churches, and monastic ruins, such as those of the Abbey of Victory, founded by Philip Augustus after the battle of Bouvines, and wrecked, of course, during the Revolution.

The cathedral is curious and fascinating. Set out in 1155 on enormous lines, it was curtailed both in height and length through the failure of adequate funds. It has been rebuilt, extended, supplemented, century after century, until it has become almost an epitome of French architecture from the middle of the twelfth to the middle of the sixteenth century. The southwest tower (its mate is unfinished) is of the thirteenth-century culmination, and surpassed by no other spire in France for subtlety of composition and perfection of detail. One of its crocketed pinnacles has already been shot away, but apparently further danger is well removed, and will become progressively less threatening as the Prussian lines are driven back.

It is, of course, quite impossible even to note all the architectural monuments between the Seine and the frontiers of Belgium. Paris must be wholly left out, for St. Denis, St. Germain l’Auxerois, Notre Dame, and the Ste. Chapelle would justly require a volume to themselves. Rouen, with its cathedral, St. Ouen, St. Maclou, the Palais de Justice, rich with all the lace and embroidery of the flamboyant period, lies now well beyond danger, and so does Beauvais, where the nemesis of worldly pride overtook the lagging spiritual impulse that had made the Middle Ages the climax of Christian civilisation. Châlons-sur-Marne, once threatened, is now reprieved, and its

cathedral, its churches of St. Jean and St. Loup, and its noble and distinguished Church of Our Lady are safe for another period.

Apart from the great architectural monuments are numberless others invaluable in archæology, and forming links in the great Gothic development: St. Etienne of Beauvais, St. Leu d’Esserent, Morienval, Bury, St. Germer, and St. Remi of Reims--the last valuable beyond estimate, with an apse that was unparalleled as a masterpiece of transitional work when Gothic was in its first and finest estate, now wrecked and desecrated by shells that have burst its vaults into crumbled fragments and hurled its perfect windows in showers of splintered glass to the pavements heaped high with the wreck of masonry and of dismembered altars.

And as in the case of the great churches, so in that of the small, from Braisne to Caudebec, they cannot even be catalogued. The whole region was, and is, one of wonderful little parish churches, of all periods, and many of them are now only shapeless ruins. The great abbeys and smaller religious houses are practically gone, scores having fallen prey to the insane fury of the Revolution or the sordid secularism of the Restoration. What we have lost may be seen from countless such lovely and pathetic fragments as St. Wandrille, near Caudebec, given a new fame through the name of Maeterlinck, and so linked with the greater martyrdom of Belgium in these last days. This, like its myriad companions, was architecture of the most singular beauty, the loss of which leaves the world poor, so poor, indeed, that it had at first nothing wherewith to meet the last assault of the enemy. The loss is being made good, the penalty already is paid, and though one could not--one would not--restore or rebuild these silent fragments of exquisitely wrought stone, meshed in tall trees and clambering vines, the vision is possible of new foundations, equal in number to these that are gone, each an expiation and a spiritual guard, each making late reparation for the past, guaranteeing a future immunity from perils of the same nature as those that now shake the world.

VI

AMIENS AND REIMS

Two monuments there are to the east of the Seine that form the realisation of the dim but dominant ideal toward which Christian society in France was tending even from the days of St. Germer and Jumièges, through the intermediate and progressive steps of Noyon, Soissons, Laon-Amiens, and Reims. Equal in fame, counting no others in their own category save only Chartres and Bourges, the one remains, the other has passed for ever.

It is a strange sensation for us to-day to watch from afar the slow and implacable destruction of one of the greatest works of art in the world, for we must go back more than a century to find any catastrophe of a similar nature. What happened then, when half a hundred masterpieces of divinely directed human intelligence and aspiration were reduced to scrap-heaps at the hands of revolution, is very far away, and the irreparable loss is as unknown to-day as it was unappreciated then. We can no more reconstruct for our understanding Cluny, St. Martin of Tours, or Avranches than we can restore the catalogue of the Alexandrian library; mercifully we cannot estimate our loss. Back of this era of annihilation we must go two centuries before we find in England under Henry VIII a similar episode of infamy. The case of Reims is wholly different; there are tens of thousands who knew it for what it was--the crowning manifestation of a crowning civilisation, and for them the loss is personal, poignant, and unexampled, a horror that sophistry cannot palliate nor time destroy.

Of the two great churches, Amiens could more easily have been spared. The word is ill chosen; Amiens in ruins, its exquisite façade with its perfect sculptures seared and shattered by bursting shells and consuming fire, would have been a catastrophe that could only put to the test the most stoical fortitude, but--it is neither Chartres nor Bourges nor Reims, and simply because the perfect balance between all possible elements in great architecture is here trembling toward its overthrow. Gothic art had three controlling forces working toward an unattainable perfection; structural integrity irradiated by consummate invention and an almost divine creative genius; passion for that exalted beauty that is unchangeable and eternal, expressed through new forms at once northern and Catholic; the just balance and intimate interplay of these two impulses. Its virtues, like all virtues, were most easily transmuted into vices, once the controlling balance was overthrown, and each was, in its stimulating possibilities, a constant and irresistible temptation toward excess. In Reims, the beginnings of which antedate Amiens by only a decade, the balance remains true and firm; in Amiens we see the first fatal steps in the development of a purely human (and notably French) logic, toward that intellectual pride, that almost arrogance of self-confidence, that found its nemesis in the unstable marvel of Beauvais.

In an admirable but anonymous little book called “Some French Cathedrals,” the author says: “French Gothic was most rational and most beautiful while it still remembered its Romanesque origin. At Amiens it was just beginning to forget that and to lose itself in dreams of an impossible romance which changed it from architecture into a very wonderful kind of ornamental engineering.” This subtle and significant change you feel everywhere except in the inimitable façade. The interior is too high, the masonry too wire-drawn and tenuous, the chevet too giddy and insecure. It is true that all but the west front has been impossibly restored, so that outwardly little remains of the original work, while the glass is gone from all but the ambulatory windows, leaving the nave a cold blaze of intolerable light. Nevertheless, the fundamental fault is there; the architect intrudes himself in place of the _dévot_, the craft of man supplants the guiding of God; so we have one of the most technically perfect of cathedrals, and one of the least inspired; you must go to the Rhine to find, in Cologne, a more self-conscious and serenely satisfied work, and it is well to make this comparison, for by so doing you realise the real greatness of Amiens, and how it fails only in comparison with the three perfect examples of an art that wholly expresses the great concept of mediæval Catholic philosophy, that in life, as we know it, material and spiritual are inseparable, that their just balance is the true end of man in this phase of existence, and that therefore sacramentalism is of the _esse_ of religion, and as well the law of life.

As a whole, both from within and without, Amiens in a measure fails, but this does not hold

of its several parts. The west front is still a masterpiece of consummate and wholly original design, though the towers have been incongruously (but engagingly) terminated in later centuries. The three great doors, the first and second arcades, and the rose-window story contain more brilliant, spirited, ingenious, and withal beautiful design than any similar work in the world, while the ornament (there is a wild-rose border around the archivolts of the great porches that finds no rival in Greece) and the sculptures reach a level of decorative and emotional significance that marks the time of their production as the crowning moment in human culture and in Christian civilisation.

We turn to Reims--we turn now in reverence to the memory of Reims--in a different spirit. Master Robert of Luzarches was a master, and knew it. Master Robert of Coucy was the servant of a Lord who was greater than he, and knew this also, and was proud of his service. He was just as great an architect as his brother of Amiens, but he worked in a godly fear, and so he built the noblest church in Christendom. This is not to say that its nave order is equal to Chartres, its rhythm and composition equal to Bourges. In every great church from 1175 to 1225 there is some one element or more that is final and unexcelled, but at Reims there was a great consistency, a noble and all-embracing competence, that placed it in a class by itself.

Reims was without a fault; perhaps this made its appeal less poignant and searching than that of the eager and sometimes less-perfect efforts of men more human in their inadequacies. Man is the creature that tries, and it is perhaps only human to feel a reverence that lessens affection for those who seem to transcend the limits that are set to human accomplishment.

Every other cathedral in France is a splendid chronicle, a record of changing times, changing endeavours, changing impulses. Men of varying personalities have wrought out their ideals, year after year, and the result is in each case a great sequence, a glorious approximation. Reims was begun in 1211, on the first anniversary of the burning of its predecessor, and it was finished, manifestly in accordance with an original and predetermined design, within fifty years. The three gables and the upper stories of the western towers are a century later, otherwise the work is consistent and a single conception. The great ideal comprised a crowning group of seven towers, each with its slender spire, none of which was ever completed, and had this majestic scheme been carried out, the church would have been the most complete, as it was the most perfect, of the architectural manifestations of Christianity.

It is impossible to analyse Reims, to describe its vital and exquisite organism, to laud its impeccable scale, its vivid and stimulating originality, to explain the almost incredible competence and beauty of its buttressing, the serene delicacy of its detail, to dwell once more on the glory of its sculpture that ranked with that of Greece, on the splendour of its glass that was rivalled only at Chartres. It is impossible to do this now, for its passing has been too recent and too grievous. Death brings silence for a time to those that knew the dead.

In another chapter I have tried to say something of the sculpture of Reims, a crowning glory where all was glorious, but sculpture does not mean the human figure alone; it covered in the Middle Ages all forms of beauty chiselled out of stone and marble, and the man who wrought the wild-rose design on the archivolts of Amiens was just as great an artist as he who fashioned the Virgin of the south transept, or the “Beau Dieu”; perhaps he was the same man. Gothic “ornament” is quite as beautiful as are Gothic saints and angels, and here at Reims the stone carving was of the finest. Every space of ornament--capital, crocket, boss, frieze, and string-course--was a combination of these great elements: architectural self-restraint and identity with the work as a whole, passionate love for all the beautiful things in nature, joy in doing everything, even the cutting of unseen surfaces, just as well as man could do the work. It is not better than the ornament of Amiens or Chartres; in some passages Amiens seems to have achieved the highest attainable point, but it is of the same quality, and that is enough glory for any church.