Chapter I: Front Matter (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.

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.

“_Much more than the ogive, the grotto, the cavern, the window, is the essential of Gothic architecture._”—_August Rodin._]

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.

In due time this golden Virgin of Rheims, so imposing, so splendid to her rude worshipers, gently made way for a line of tenderer virgins who were gradually infusing sweetness and skill into those who sought to spiritualize wood and stone into a suggestion of the mother of Christ. When the old ninth century church at Rheims was burned it is supposed that the barbarians’ gold was minted to rebuild the cathedral. Or shall we say that, purified by fire, the golden Virgin arose again and again from her ashes to rebuild her shrine in maturer beauty?

After many fires, in 1212 the present Cathedral of Rheims was commenced upon the old, old crypt; before the middle of the century the main body of the church was complete, and once again the Cathedral of Rheims was the finest in the realm! In 1903 a vote was taken for the noblest Gothic monument, and the returns, as always before, were, “the Cathedral of Rheims.”

Through the Dark Ages the people of Rheims had not built in vain. Effort after effort was destroyed, it is true, but like the golden virgin it was minted to rebuild anew.

Lacking the mathematical knowledge, which is the mainstay of the modern architect, these early builders must have learned empirically, that is, in the school of defeat—but, too, there are triumphs there. Did the idea of the beautiful flying buttress (which is simply a constructive device to strengthen walls pierced by enormous windows) come suddenly to some baffled old architect, as from the lips of an angel, in answer to work and prayer? These old builders of Rheims leave us no written word, but there is a great Florentine architect who is a little more communicative; he leaves a discreet hint or two of his method of reasoning and also of securing contracts. Regarding the construction of the projected dome of the Cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore, which the public regarded as impracticable, Brunelleschi writes: “Yet, remembering that this is a temple consecrated to God and the Virgin, I confidently trust that for a work executed in their honor, they will not fail to infuse knowledge where it is wanting and will bestow strength, wisdom and genius on him who shall be the author of such a project. But how can I help you, seeing that the work is not mine? I tell you plainly that, if it belonged to me, my courage and power would, beyond all doubt, suffice to discover means whereby the work might be effected without so many difficulties, but as yet I have not reflected on the matter to any extent.” And when he got the contract and reflected, he turned to the “parent past”—he went to Rome, where the vaulting of the Parthenon taught him to vault that lovelier Florentine dome which “clasps the ancient to the modern world.”

The builders of the Gothic were in some ways more original than the builders of the Renaissance; they evolved their own bracing; thus gradually at Rheims, the “Athens of the Middle Ages,” a great cathedral grew up that ranks with the Parthenon.

The Greek had the subtlest of languages in which to speak of the good and the beautiful, while where the greatest Gothic churches were designed there was only a corrupt dead language and a partially developed living one; but the subtle poets of Chartres, Rheims, Amiens, Rouen, Bourges and Laon built strongly into their cathedrals the sweetest things they had to say. When the Parthenon was constructed Athens was so wealthy that it was one of the glories of Pericles that he was able to spend so much so well upon the greatest capital in the world. Rheims was simply, as the Middle Ages went, a rich see, and the Middle Ages were wretchedly poor, yet her cathedral is the more elaborate building of the two. To the end of time it is a monument of civic and religious enthusiasm; and, as we seek the human story, so elusively suggested through the marvelous pile, we realize at least how great a thing it is for each worker to give, in perfect self-effacement, of his best. The decorations of the mighty temple are so exquisitely subservient to the great whole that the handiwork of the gifted _imagier_, with that of his weaker brother, the one serving as a foil to the other, holds together like their prayers in the noble harmony of the great church. Gothic sculpture is for all sorts and conditions of men, but least of all for artists. It speaks its simple lesson distinctly. It is not sculpture for sculpture’s sake, but rather for decoration and lyric expression. Its emaciated saint betokens sacrifice; literally and figuratively he fills his place in the long, narrow niche, annihilating himself for the great church as a Catholic priest should.

Would you know how the Gothic affects a sculptor?

Says August Rodin: “Life is made up of strength and grace; the Gothic gives us this; its influence has entered into my blood and grown into my being.”

Nowadays, when all “the world travels,” schools of art do not grow up in little communities; intellectual boundaries are in no way geographic, and the moral effect of one man on another is hidden from view. But on the walls of the old mediæval churches a simpler people, as their work improved, show their direct obligations to one another.

The Gothic cathedrals which served as Bibles for the laity (who, as a rule, could not read print) are now the most veracious chronicles of the period that we possess. Their statements cannot be gainsaid, however variously they may be understood. If some of the last judgments sculptured on their walls, with half of the figures marching toward heaven and the other half (very similar in appearance) moving serenely toward hell, are rather too didactic for this age of doubt, between the lines of these great stone volumes a gentle reader finds countless beautiful stories, much more convincingly told, of artists and artisans working away with smiles on their faces, carving Bible stories under the direction of the clergy; devising figures to personify the virtues and vices; inserting little angels here and there to fill out the design, while the best artist is rewarded with the sweet honor of carving the Madonna.

The barbarian’s gold pays interest yet; the spirit of the bequest is not changed;—a united tribute of the material to the spiritual coming from many men of many minds. The old golden Madonna is patroness still of the five thousand statues of the Cathedral of Rheims, whose mute lips speak so various a language. They tell of a day that is dead and of a day that is eternal; they speak of substance and of spirit; of error and of intuition; of things human and of things divine. Indeed,

“Of every work of art the silent part is best,
Of all expression, that which cannot be expressed.”

_The Little Old Abbé of Saint Denis and the Imagiers_

Early in the twelfth century, within the hospitable walls of the old Abbey of Saint Denis, a prince and a charity child grew up together; there a love, almost romantic, developed between them. When the prince became king and embarked upon a crusade he left the reins of government in the hands of his old comrade, who in the meantime had become the Abbé of Saint Denis and was, incidentally, one of the cleverest of politicians. Suger paid the royal debts (democratic good pay seems to have been an ideal with him), and called the realm to order so successfully that statesmen came from afar to study his very novel methods, for the crusades had set the people traveling. On his return the king graciously greeted his regent as “father of his country.” Suger, not to be outdone, instituted a somewhat legendary liturgy to be celebrated annually at Saint Denis commemorating the merits of Louis the Lusty (or Louis the Fat, as we call him).