Читать книгу Flowers from Mediæval History - Minnie D. Kellogg - Страница 5

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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.

The Crucifix, the Eternal Warning, Built into the Very Walls of the Old Courtroom in the Town Hall of Rouen.

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.

The Middle Ages Dealt Much in Allegory. The Virgin Greets the Angel of Death.—A Sermon in Marble.

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.

Sainte Chapelle, which Sprang from the Crown of Thorns.

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.

Interior of Saint Chapelle. “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.