How France Built Her Cathedrals: A Study in the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries. Elizabeth Boyle O'Reilly
literature, our political freedom, our prosperous trade.
Now in the making of these infinitely precious things, France played the leading role. Put partisan feeling aside and acknowledge it honestly. “I believe,” said Ruskin, in a lecture at Edinburgh, in 1853, even before the new science of mediæval archæology was formulated, “that the French nation in the XII and XIII centuries was the greatest nation in the world, and that the French not only invented Gothic architecture, but carried it to its noblest developments.”
French Gothic churches are a fountainhead, and should rank first. Because of them we have Westminster, Ely, and Lincoln, we had Tintern, Melrose, Mellifont, Holycross. They built the Burgos, Toledo, León, Seville, and Belem, which have given wings to the soul of the Peninsula. Because of the French cathedrals we have Cologne, Magdeburg, and Halberstadt, Vienna, Prague, Upsala, Siena, Florence, and Milan.
By her lyrics, her epics, and her architecture, France was the inspiration of Europe in the XII and XIII centuries. With his sword, the crusader carried compass and rule. Those indefatigable wanderers, Cluny, Cîteaux, and the men of Prémontré and Chartreuse carried with them the chisel and the Book. Then as now the commercial traveler was a valiant propagandist; in 1181 a cloth merchant of Assisi, returned from trading in France, where he had seen the cathedral of Lyons rising, or perhaps that of Paris, or that of Poitiers, and he had passed under wonderful new-imaged portals in the Midi and in Burgundy; so, in memory of beautiful things, he chose to call the son born to him, Francis, and the boy grew up to love and to chant the lyrics of France and named himself “God’s little troubadour.”
Backward and forward has moved the ebb and flow of races and their arts. When Celts from conquered Britain passed over to Armorica they carried with them the Arthurian cycle; Teutonic tribes, strong in bone and tissue, poured into Gaul a very avalanche; masterful Norsemen populated the seacoasts; and before the recording of time the Oriental and the Latin had made their home in the land between the northern seas and the big inland water of commerce. Does such history seem too remote to be of emotional value? Are personalities lacking? Not so in the missionary days of Columbanus and Benedict, first hewers of the cathedrals’ foundation blocks, for never came a great movement of building activity that did not tread in the steps of spiritual regeneration. Your forefathers and my forefathers came into France to help her, to bring her art and letters in her dark hour. They came to teach and they came to learn, to succor and to find refuge. They came in the persons of Celtic Columbanus, Brieuc, Malo, Fiacre, Malachy, and holy Laurence buried at Eu, as English Alcuin, Stephen Harding, John of Salisbury, and Saint Edmund Rich buried at Pontigny. They came as German Radegund and the saintly Bruno and Norbert, as Italian Benedict, Fortunatus, Hildebrand, William of Volpiano, Lanfranc, Anselm, Aquinas, and Bonaventure, as Spanish Dominic, and Portuguese Anthony. They came from Egypt with Maurice and his Thebans, from the Levant with Irenæus and Giles, from Hungary with Martin the soldier. And the story of each one of them is recorded in the churches that stand in France to-day. Without architecture we would have forgotten them.
With the ebbing and flowing of the tide in the affairs of men, a day arrived when the big people and the little people of Normandy, Poitou, Anjou, and Flanders passed in large numbers into Great Britain and Ireland in the wake of the Conqueror and of Henry Plantagenet, so that the very names we bear are those of the cathedral builders.
Who has not watched the widening ripples of water spread from a center? Even so is each one of us a center whence in ever-widening circles stretch out our progenitors, embracing more and more men, more and more women, rippling over the pitiful barricades of 1793, sweeping over the factions of 1562, till by the time the widening ripple has reached the age of St. Louis, the age of Suger, it is scientifically impossible that we, in our very own forefathers, were not building some of the eighty cathedrals and three hundred great minsters with which France was then clothing herself as with a white mantle of churches. We were chatelaine, and burgher’s wife, we were villein’s daughter and knight’s son, and side by side we harnessed ourselves to carts and dragged in the blocks for the tower at Chartres and the belfry at Rouen, and the canticles we sang during our voluntary servitude passed into the stones and are still chanting there—if only we would listen. No visionary notion this, but science and history. By architecture we remember.
Of our kin was the bishop who sacrificed his revenue to rear God’s house. Of our kin were the architects, masters of the living stone, who with inspiration conceived their shrines of Notre Dame and were trained soundly enough in mason craft to achieve their dreams; of our kin were the artisans who put up the serene images at cathedral doors for the edification of the people, and chiseled with warm, loving touches the running bramble of the roadside. Even botany is to be learned in mediæval cathedrals. Not a leaf that grows in Champagne to-day but was carved on the walls of Rheims seven hundred years ago. Against the big capitals of Paris Cathedral they laid the broad plantain leaf of the marshy Oise, then, seeing around them that indigenous acanthus, the uncurling fern, they carved it, too, and as they grew adept with chisel they wrought ivy and vine leaf, parsley and holly, and in time, intoxicated with their skill, they undercut the rich foliage and serrated the lobes and curled the leaf edges, till summer ran riot in stone and the architectural line was well-nigh lost sight of in sheer joy of nature’s glad livery.
The cathedrals of France are an enduring appeal to man’s high faculty of imagination. In them we go crusading again. We scale the walls of Constantinople with doughty Bishop Nivelon, builder of Soissons Cathedral, we are ransomed from Saracen captivity with Bishop Albéric, builder of Rheims. We repent of our black feudal deeds with Fulk Nerra, and when we have finished our footsore penances in Holy Land, we punish ourselves in our purses, raising costly abbeys in Anjou and Touraine. On our Eastern pilgrimage we have seen visions of Oriental color, and, remembering them, we lighten our sober churches of the north with translucent mosaic tapestries. We dot our Western land with circular Holy Sepulcher temples. It is said that Suger, builder of the first great Gothic church in the world, maker of jeweled windows over which science sighs in despair of emulation, used eagerly to inquire of travelers returned from the East had they seen aught, even in St. Sophia itself, to surpass his St. Denis’. We are rightly sure that our new art surpasses all others. We may borrow, but our borrowings are creations.
By architecture in happy promiscuity we crowd to the international fairs of Champagne. We elbow and we jostle to see what our diligent brothers, the art-loving Flemish burghers, have brought for exchange, or what things beautiful the merchants from south of the Alps have to barter. To-day, at Troyes, we are astounded by the gathering of art treasures in that lesser-known city, and we wonder at the mighty rampart walls at Provins. Then we remember. It is architecture that will not let us forget what efficient traders we were in the XIII century.
By architecture we are Benedictines at Cluny, white monks at Fontenay, of Prémontré at Braine. Again we pace in meditative cloisters, we tuck up our robes to delve in mother earth to make the desert bloom, we illumine parchment pages, we teach the plain-chant to children, we cast bells, each with its own entity, each a living voice for the people, named with its own name.
By architecture we are one of the thousands athirst for knowledge, who gather at the feet of abstruse debaters in the schools of Bec, Auxerre, Rheims, Orléans, Laon, Chartres and Paris, king’s son seated on the rush-strewn pavements next to peasant’s son, both equally convinced that the most thrilling of all sciences are philosophy and theology. Books are scarce; as yet no printing press; we must wander far to gather crumbs of learning; our strong young brains are intact, prepared for service by long ages of active bone and muscle; with avidity we seize on problems so knotty that the learned ones of 1920 fear to touch them. “The time of big theories is the time of big results.” It is we, in the person of the Scholastics who built Paris Cathedral, and Laon, the intellectual—churches disciplined, sober and strong. It is we the multitudinous scholars of the Middle Ages who built Chartres, the wise mystic, and opalescent Auxerre, and Châlons on the Marne of Victory. And lest the hungry generations tread us down, we inscribed our loved subtleties on their walls, and at their portals placed images of the Liberal Arts.
By architecture we join one side or the other in the eternal struggle of Might and Right. Sometimes in atonement we spend the revenues secured by heedless Might on minster or cathedral. By pain and struggle we have won our