How France Built Her Cathedrals: A Study in the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries. Elizabeth Boyle O'Reilly
taught the last two generations at the École des Chartes, the national school par excellence, so M. de Vögué called it. Archives are pored over to trace each link with history, and those monuments which have no authenticated pedigree are compared with those of certain date. Each manuscript date is verified by the analysis of the edifice itself, whose successive campaigns of building are deciphered, since few and far between are the homogeneous churches. Each restoration also is verified. One of the solid bases for archæological exactness is the knowledge of profiles, which are called by the English textbook rib molds, arch molds, pier molds, or base molds. By a comparative analysis of profiles, a monument can now be accurately dated. As keystones were of different types in the various earlier decades of Gothic, they too help to substantiate an edifice.[14]
Churches of one region are contrasted with those of another. The material employed is considered, since the stone of a province causes richness or poverty of sculpture: thus, Brittany’s granite and Auvergne’s lava mean an undeveloped sculpture compared with the fine white limestone districts of the Oise, or in Normandy and Poitou. When practicable, excavations under an edifice can give data concerning previous churches on the site.
M. Jules Quicherat was the first to teach that the history of the Middle Ages architecture was the history of the architect’s fight against the weight and push of the vaulting.[15] Once the right path was blazed, many an able pioneer helped clear the new road—such students as Viollet-le-Duc, de Caumont, Woillez, Prosper Merimée, de Dion, Coutan, de Beaurepaire, Grandmaison, Révoil, Rupricht-Robert, Félix de Verneilh, Anthyme Saint-Paul, Louis Courajod, Buhot de Kersers. At the École des Chartes, Robert de Lasteyrie occupied with distinction the chair held by Quicherat for thirty years, and his pupils, Camille Enlart and Eugène Lefèvre-Pontalis, in their turn, are passing on the high tradition to a younger school. M. Enlart, the director of the museum of comparative sculpture at the Trocadéro, is an authority on Romanesque architecture, and has initiated the study of the spread of Gothic architecture in mediæval Italy, Spain, the North, and the Levant.[16] M. Lefèvre-Pontalis has written a host of erudite monographs; one learns to accept his decisions as final, in so far as the ever-expanding realm of knowledge can be final. He directs the invaluable publications called the Congrès Archéologique de France and the Bulletin Monumental, and he edits those excellent short studies known as the Petites Monographies des grands édifices de la France, which are convenient pocket guides for the serious tourist.[17]
Each year is producing final monographs on the chief churches of France. M. Georges Durand has rendered fitting tribute to Amiens. M. de Farcy has identified himself with Angers, René Merlet with Chartres, Lucien Broche with Laon, and Lucien Bégule with Lyons. MM. Brutails has specialized on Gascony, the Thollier and H. du Ranquet on Auvergne, Labande on Provence, Berthelé on Plantagenet Gothic, André Rhein on Poitou and Anjou, Émile Bonnet on Hérault, Charles Porée on Burgundy, and Louis Demaison on Champagne. Other able students are MM. Bouet, Louis Serbat, Marcel Aubert, Ernest Rupin, Jules de Lahondès, René Fage, Amédée Boinet, Jean Virey, Robert Triger, and Louis Régnier.
Precious texts have been unearthed from the archives by Victor Mortet, Henri Stein, and Eugène Müntz. The sculpture of France has been studied by MM. Robert de Lasteyrie, Émile Lambin, Léon Palustre, Eugène Müntz, Gabriel Fleury, Raymond Koechlin, J. M. de Vasselot, Paul Vitry, Gaston Brière, André Michel, Louis Gonse, and Émile Mâle. The latter three have brought out monumental general works. L’art gothique of Gonse gives the most exact and extended account of the beginning of Gothic, says Anthyme Saint-Paul, who is himself one of the most inspiring masters of mediæval archæology. M. Michel, who is conservator of the national museums, has edited the superb Histoire de l’art, to which leading French scholars have contributed.[18] And the iconography of French cathedrals has received no more magistral treatment than from M. Mâle, to whom is due the credit of establishing the scholastic character of Gothic imagery.[19] His path was cleared by pioneers such as Didron, Crosnier, Martin, and Duchesne.
Happily for the local schools, a bevy of intelligent churchmen have devoted themselves to their regional monuments. I hope I may be pardoned if I do not name each with his ecclesiastical designation, but cite them here simply as savants: the Abbés Eugène Müller (Senlis); Bourassé and Bosseboeuf (Touraine); Ledru (Le Mans); Auber, De la Croix, and Mgr. Barbier de Montault (Poitiers); Chomton (Dijon); Bulteau (Chartres); Abgrall (Brittany); Maurin (Aix-en-Provence); Bouvier (Sens); Cerf (Rheims); Bouxin (Laon); and for the Norman churches, the Abbés Fossey, Porée, Loisel, and Pigéon.
The list might be greatly extended. One can cite only a few. From the pages of such students have been written these chapters, by one who has felt that there must be many travelers who love the old cathedrals of Europe and have wandered among them puzzled by half-understood things, longing to know with exactitude how and when they were built. So it has not seemed a useless task to gather into these ten chapters what the French scholars are relating of their churches. So swiftly do archæological discoveries follow one another to-day, that statements accepted now may be obsolete to-morrow. The makers of history and art books can hope to serve only their hour.
The new school of Christian archæology is redeeming the misrepresented centuries after the year 1000. It is undoing the systematic falsification of history, and is teaching us to read the past other than by the printed page. Not hate, but love, opens new windows in the soul. The study of the churches of France adds flesh and blood to many a mere name in history. One gains a very special liking for little Abbot Suger, most dependable of men, whose life was a succession of big undertakings. One feels reverent affection for that sentinel of the Church and its guide, Bernard of Clairvaux, who said some harsh things of fine churches, all the while that he was feeding the mystic life that made them inevitable. And very real become the bishop builders when one knows their cathedrals. One pores over the old volumes of the Histoire Littéraire de la France, begun by XVII-century Benedictines, and still being continued by the Institute of France, to gather details of good Bishop Fulbert and doughty St. Ives, who built at Chartres; of that distinguished literary man, Bishop Hildebert de Lavardin, who worked at Le Mans; of the well-poised Bishop Maurice de Sully, who raised Notre Dame at Paris; of crusading prelates such as Albéric de Humbert, who began Rheims; and of Nivelon de Chérisy, who built Soissons, and who, on the Fourth Crusade, played a foremost role. One grows to love, above all, the saint-king, Louis, truest hero of la douce France, who illuminated his kingdom with fair churches. And no one can admire St. Louis and not keep a warm corner in his heart for Joinville, his comrade-in-arms, the irresistible seneschal of Champagne.
Crusades and chivalry and all the multicolored aspects of the XII and XIII centuries become clearer to the imagination as one traces the story of the cathedrals of France; scholasticism and the early days of the schools, when Abélard sparred with Guillaume de Champeaux. Very real they all become: Peter the Venerable, good Stephen Harding, St. Thomas Becket, John of Salisbury, St. Edmund Rich, Stephen Langton, St. Dominic, St. Malachy O’Morgair, Innocent III, St. Bonaventure, and St. Thomas Aquinas. France welcomed them all during the two vital centuries when she imposed her literature as well as her architecture on western Europe, when the Paris schools were the intellectual center of the world.
To paint a rose-colored picture of the two best centuries of the Middle Ages would be absurd. They were full of very evil things. There were horrifying episodes in them. “Barbarism tempered by religion; religion disfigured by barbarism,” is the definition of Balmes, the theologian. The inconsistencies were gigantic. The same men who sacked Constantinople in 1204, dealing art a staggering blow, were the very men who in western Europe were building cathedrals. Then, as now, there were many for whom religion served as a convenient cloak for the lower instincts; then, as now, there were many who never lost sight of the higher ideals. Side by side with the evil and the self-seeking should be set the sublime impulses which checked those untutored generations. Do not hide the merciless laying waste of Languedoc by the north, but do not forget that, in the same hour, men had reached an abnegation of self that led them to the African coast as voluntary substitutes for their brother Christians in bondage there.
In the midst of its human infirmities it was an age that aspired: its poets sang of the Holy Grail, its kings and its serfs were saints, there were saint scholars and barons and merchants, there was even a saint lawyer.
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