Читать книгу How France Built Her Cathedrals: A Study in the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries - Elizabeth Boyle O'Reilly - Страница 8

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Under the impulse of this monk, truly great in all things, Gothic architecture was born.—Félix de Verneilh (of Abbot Suger).

HE churches built during the evolution from Romanesque to Gothic have been called transitional, a classification which would be most convenient for the amateur, had not archæologists decided it was an equivocal term. They say that, during the short period when “Romanesque and Gothic inhabited under the same roof,” the Romanesque parts of the edifice were placed side by side with the simultaneously built Gothic parts, that there was juxtaposition, but no fusion. Vaults were either barrel, groin, or of the diagonal-rib type; there was no such thing as a transition form of vault. Arches were either round or pointed; there was no such thing as a transition or intermediary form of arch. And since the radical distinction between Romanesque and Gothic is caused by the vaulting, it is correct to call that part of a church where was groin or barrel vault Romanesque, and that part where were used the intersecting ribs Gothic.

The sequence of the passing from Romanesque to Gothic is obscure, because there is a lack of definite dates. From 1110 to 1140, while the intersecting ribs were coming into use in northern France, such a vault was practically the only sign in an edifice of the new movement. The walls still were massive, the windows still were small and round-arched, the sculpture still was coarse and heavy. Then, as the transition advanced, the supports grew lighter, the profiles (those cross-section outlines of ribs, arches, capitals, and bases) grew purer, and the sculpture discarded Byzantine traditions and took nature as its model.

French archæologists have thought that the use of diagonals came about first through the desire to hold up some groin vault, on the point of collapsing, which would seem a very sensible explanation, since the creative genius of the Ile-de-France seems dimly to have apprehended even in the first hour the stupendous possibility to be drawn from a member whose purpose was to concentrate force in order that other parts of the edifice might be relieved. From the initial hour began the evolution of the cardinal organ in the Ile-de-France. Whereas the Lombard architects looked on the diagonals as a mere contrivance, stubbornly keeping their eyes shut to the structural possibilities latent therein. The masons of the Ile-de-France at once began to profile their diagonals graciously, and even before the genius of Suger had coordinated, at St. Denis, all the foregoing progress of the nascent art, craftsmen had occasionally symbolized, as it were, the importance of the intersecting ribs by carving little caryatids for them to rest upon above the capitals; such figurines are to be seen in the Oise region at Bury and at Cambronne.[21]

Mr. Arthur Kingsley Porter’s idea is that the transitional period resolves itself into a series of experiments on the part of the builders to erect a vault with a minimum of centering, and he cites the hollow spires at Loches as an experiment to put up a stone roof without the use of any temporary substructure of wood, which apparently was costly.[22] He thinks that the earlier Gothic vaults were bombé because that form facilitated construction without centering, and that the Lombards dropped their precocious diagonals after 1120, as soon as they had learned how to build domed groin vaults which required no temporary wooden substructures. What is of value in Mr. Porter’s thesis is sure, in time, to pass into French currency; until a majority of French archæologists find his explanation better than their own it is permissible for us to agree with those who are telling the tale of their own national art.

Probably the earliest extant Gothic vaults in the Ile-de-France are those at Acy-en-Multien (Oise) and at Crouy-sur-Ourcq (Seine-et-Marne). Their outline is rectangular. Some intersecting ribs at Rhuis (Oise) are cited by M. Lefèvre-Pontalis as the oldest in the Soissonnais. Diagonals were put up, about 1115, at St. Vaast-de-Longmont (Oise), Orgeval (Seine-et-Oise), Viffort (Aisne), Airaines (Somme), and in other rural churches. The famous ambulatory vaults at Morienval were probably built about 1122. A year or two earlier, perhaps, are the side-aisle vaults of St. Étienne at Beauvais.

Bury (Oise) shows the first extant half dome with ribs. Of the same time, about 1125, are the diagonals at Marolles, St. Vaast-les-Mello, Béthisy-St.-Pierre, Bonneuil-en-Valois, and Bellefontaine, all in the Oise department. Bellefontaine, whose date of 1125 is certain, has helped to place other churches of the transition by comparing their diagonals with its pointed intersecting ribs. Bruyères (Aisne) is about 1130, Poissy (Seine-et-Oise) and Villetertre (Oise) are about 1135, and so are the ribs of St. Martin-des-Champs at Paris. In the Aisne region are Berzy-le-Sec and Laffaux (c. 1140) and in the Oise region is Chelles, building at the hour when Suger undertook St. Denis (Seine), 1140 to 1144. Cambronne (Oise) and Foy-St.-Quentin (Somme) are about 1145. Such churches as Glennes (Aisne), St. Leu d’Esserent (Oise), and, close to the latter, Creuil’s church of St. Évremont were building in 1150; so were Chars (Seine-et-Oise) and, near it, Pontoise,[23] whose ambulatory vaults some claim are prior to those of the procession path of St. Denis, and therefore a link between Morienval and Suger’s abbatial. The big church at St. Germer (Oise) was begun about 1150, though certain of its features are more archaic than St. Denis, built before it. Some of these churches, called transitional, used wall ribs for their diagonals, others omitted them; in some the intersecting ribs were pointed, in others, semicircular.

Mr. John Bilson, who contends that diagonals were used in Normandy some twenty-five years earlier than in the Ile-de-France, considers the early dates for these rural churches improbable, that scarcely any were anterior to St. Denis, that it was a case of little churches following the great churches, not vice versa. The earliest, he thinks, was St. Étienne at Beauvais (c. 1120), significantly close to Normandy. But Normandy did not suspect the value and fecundity of diagonals. That feat of creative genius none can deny to the Ile-de-France.

The traveler can do nothing more enlightening and delightful as a prelude to his journey among French cathedrals than to spend some early spring days exploring the rural churches of the privileged land of the national art which the old geographers chose to picture as an island inclosed by the Seine, the Marne, the Aisne, and the Oise. Numerous churches of the transition lie between Soissons, Senlis, and Beauvais, and once, around Amiens was another such center, but few of the monuments there have survived.[24] Go to Creuil and see, in the ruins of St. Évremont, a rudimentary flying buttress—a quarter arch once hidden under the lean-to roof. No doubt the architect built it with the intention of bracing the upper walls, but since he omitted to brace the flying buttress itself it failed of its purpose. Four miles away, at St. Leu d’Esserent, is an awkward early trial of a Gothic vault in the tribune above the porch, but as the ribs are embedded in the cells, no proper elasticity is achieved. Go to Morienval and study its remarkable essay in spanning a curving section with diagonals. Trace these early steps of the national art, and the meaning of the Gothic bone structure grows plainer.

MORIENVAL[25]

I approve the life of those for whom the city is a prison, who find paradise in solitude, who live by the works of their hands, or who seek to remake their spirit by the sweetness of their contemplative life, who drink of the fountain of life by the lips of their heart, and forget what is behind them to regard only what lies ahead. But neither the most hidden forest nor the highest mountains will give happiness to man, if he has not in himself solitude of the spirit, peace of conscience, upliftings of the heart to God.—Letter of St. Ives, Bishop of Chartres, 1091–1115.

Of the experimental steps which led to Gothic art, the most appealing is the nunnery church of Morienval, a humble forerunner of Amiens Cathedral that has made as much stir in archæological controversy as Périgueux’s cathedral of St. Front itself. Morienval may not be the passionately sought œuvre-initiale, since its vaults, while they betray inexperience, certainly were preceded by still cruder attempts, but it can boast that it is the first Gothic ambulatory extant, and as the curving aisle around the chancel is the most exquisite feature of the great cathedrals, Morienval’s humble first essay of it merits a pilgrimage.

As one approaches the abbey church it does not appear till one is directly over it, so snugly hidden away is the village in a fold of the rolling country that skirts the forest of Compiègne. Perhaps the IX-century nuns who chose the site may have hoped that the marauders of that troublous time might ride by, unconscious of booty so close at hand. With gratitude one learns that the invasion of 1914 has left Morienval unscathed, as well as those other memorials of tentative Gothic, Acy-en-Multien and Crouy-sur-Ourcq.

Because of excellent proportions, the church appears larger than in reality. The exterior is Romanesque. Two time-stained towers of the XI century mark the angles between transept and choir, an arrangement derived from Rhenish churches. At the west façade is a beautiful XII-century tower. It was building while the nuns were proceeding to tear down a decrepit apse in order to erect the present east end of the church. In that new apse appeared the much-discussed early ribs.

A record tells that relics were installed in the church in 1122, and it was probably then that the new works were finished. Ambulatories had come into favor during the first third of the XII century, when need was felt for a suitable corridor for pilgrims to encircle the altar whereon relics were exposed. Now to vault a curving aisle was no easy task, owing to the trapeze shape of each section. Morienval’s ambulatory must have been designed to hold extra altars, since entrance to the aisle is blocked at both ends by the towers, and the passage is so narrow that only one at a time can walk in it. There are no apse chapels. The sculpture is archaic. Some of the capitals show interlacings, and some are of the pleated type popular in Normandy. The diminutive corridor has four small bays whose clumsy intersecting vault ribs are of the size of the average stovepipe. They curve strangely, and two of the keystones are not in the axis of the passageway, nor has elasticity yet been wholly achieved, since the ends of the ribs plunge into the web of the vault.

Over the choir, consisting of one large bay, are intersecting ribs that appear to be posterior to those of the ambulatory. They, too, are rude and large, but are wholly detached from the cells. M. Lefèvre-Pontalis thinks that the ambulatory diagonals are contemporary, and owe their more archaic character to the difficulty of vaulting a curved passage. So swiftly did the early architects acquire skill in the new system of building, that when a chapel was erected on the northern arm of Morienval’s transept, at the end of the XII century, each diagonal had become a single slender torus, virile and graceful.

Of less architectural importance is the Romanesque nave of Morienval, whose meager vault ribs are of the XVII century. The western tower was the prototype of the Romanesque belfries of the region and should be preserved. It is in a deplorable state, propped by beams, which are gayly scaled by the lads who ring the Angelus. Little Morienval has the human touch which the traveler craves. Set in the wall above the XIII-century lord of Viri’s tomb are tablets that commemorate two pastors of this isolated Valois village who were heroes as valiant as any crusader. Their combined ministry covered a hundred and one years. The first died in 1840, after fifty-seven years of service here, “faithful to his duty in times most difficult,” and difficult indeed was a priest’s life during the Revolution. “Pray for his soul,” begs his grateful commune, to which he had bequeathed the presbytery and all his savings.

His successor came to Morienval in his ’twenties, fresh from Paris, his birthplace, and on this dwindling village he expended his energies for forty-five years. Abbé Riaux loved his parishioners like a father, and was, says the memorial tablet, “physician for body as well as soul.” During the cholera of 1849 his self-denial elicited a gold medal from Morienval and the village of Bonneuil, where is another primitive essay of a Gothic vault. “The state of decay of his beautiful church made him suffer,” runs the inscription, so he willed his modest fortune toward its restoration. Happily, he lived long enough to see the church he loved become a savant’s shrine. It was in 1880 that M. Robert de Lasteyrie first drew attention to Morienval as an early step in the tardily understood national art, and MM. Anthyme Saint-Paul, Eugène Lefèvre-Pontalis, and Camille Enlart joined in the debate. The archæologists’ war horse they have called our little Morienval. Such widespread discussion and the good priest’s bequest fortunately brought about a thorough restoration of the choir.

ST. ÉTIENNE AT BEAUVAIS, AND ST. GERMER[26]

Sous le porche de l’église, chacun laisse le fardeau que la vie lui impose. Ici le plus pauvre homme s’élève au rang des grands intellectuels, des poètes, que dis-je? au rang des esprits: il s’installe dans le domaine de la pensée pure et du rêve. Le gémissement d’une vieille femme agenouillée dans l’église de son village est du même accent, traduit la même ignorance, le même pressentiment que la méditation du savant. … De ces parties profondes de l’être, de ce domaine obscur surgissent toutes les puissances créatrices de l’homme.

—Maurice Barrès.[27]

Close in date to Morienval are the aisle vaults of St. Étienne’s nave at Beauvais, the old city that lies on a tributary of the Oise. The intersecting ribs are not quite so stout as those of Morienval, but their ends still plunge into the massive, and they, too, are round-arched; their date is approximately 1120. That they planned at the same time to throw similar diagonals over the principal span is proved by the existent lower structures, but the actual vaults there were not erected till after a fire in 1180. The transverse arches of the aisles are noticeably stilted. This device was to lead to a solution of the problem how to raise the arches framing each vault section to the level of the diagonals’ crown, and thus avoid the excessive doming which is found in the earlier Gothic vaults.

In the XII-century north façade of the transept is an oculus big enough to be called the first rose window; a wheel of fortune it is called, because the images around its circle are an allegory of the fleet passing of man’s greatness. This is one of the very early approaches to pure sculpture. The nave’s two westernmost bays and its façade are of the XI century. Had the original choir of St. Étienne survived, it is thought that its ambulatory would be one of the missing steps connecting the cramped corridor of Morienval with the double procession path of St. Denis. The present choir, a Flamboyant Gothic structure, is famous for its gloriously colored windows, some of which were made by that notable family of local artists who designed the big rose windows of Beauvais Cathedral, Engrand Le Prince and his sons Jean and Nicolas, and his son-in-law Nicolas Le Pot. The latter carved the cathedral’s wooden doors, for versatility was characteristic of the artisan-artists of those days.

Ten miles from Beauvais, a crawling train sets one down in a field whence a two-mile walk leads to the sleepy bourg of St. Germer-en-Flay. The abbey was founded in 655 by Germer, a noble of Dagobert’s court, nephew of St. Ouen the great bishop of Normandy’s capital. To St. Germer’s abbey came William the Conqueror to beg the French king to join him in his proposed descent on England. But Philip I gathered his counselors, and it was decided not to support the Norman duke, since, if he gained England, he would be richer than his own suzerain, the king of France, and if he failed, France would have antagonized the English.

The large abbatial church of St. Germer, if not beautiful, is of archæological interest. Formerly it was thought to be a monument of 1130, but closer study has shown that it was erected during one bout of work from 1150 to 1180. Hard though it was to believe it the contemporary of the cathedrals at Senlis and Noyon, its sculpture is too excellent to have been done earlier. The crocketed capitals of its westernmost bays were never made earlier than 1175. That the church was continued without pause from apse to façade is proved by the unity of profiles and details. Its anachronisms are to be explained because it derived from a side current of Gothic art, out of touch with the swift-moving main stream, which was channeled by Abbot Suger.

The architect of St. Germer showed in the main parts of his church a thorough understanding of the new Gothic vaulting, and at the same time he covered his tribune gallery with Romanesque groins. He made heavy Romanesque piers, and simultaneously he essayed to disencumber the pavement by employing the corbel, or side bracket. The Norman zigzag or chevron design decorates the heavy molding of the pier arches. Over the sanctuary he attempted the inartistic experiment of having his ribs converge, not on a keystone, but directly on a transverse rib. The ribs of the upper vaulting are heavy and ornamented. The pointed arches of the pier arcade are surmounted by round arches, in the tribunes. And between tribune and clearstory are square apertures neither Romanesque nor Gothic.

To meet the thrust of the upper vaulting, some rudimentary flying buttresses were built under the lean-to roof of the tribune galleries, but as they themselves were not braced, they remained ineffectual. The collapse of some of the high vaults caused the addition, later, of the present flying buttresses. The exterior of the church is gaunt, with windows that are small and round-arched. The west façade was wrecked during the Hundred Years’ War, and never restored. Walled-up arches mar the spacious interior. Thick coats of whitewash cover it, and when dust gathers on that make-shift of cleanliness the effect is tawdry. Directly behind the apse of the big abbatial stands a masterpiece of Rayonnant Gothic, a diminutive church whose west façade faces, with awkward closeness, the back of the larger church. As it is connected with the latter’s ambulatory by a glazed passage, it may be regarded as a sort of Lady chapel. Many such imitations of the Sainte-Chapelle of Paris arose, after St. Louis had made his shrine for the crown of thorns. The abbot who put up St. Germer’s glass reliquary was Pierre Wesencourt, who ruled from 1254 to 1272, and it is thought that the king’s own architect designed it. That Louis IX contributed toward it is shown by the fleur-de-lis and the donjons of Castile in the storied windows. Over the altar once stood the alabaster retablo, depicting St. Germain’s life, now in the Musée Cluny, at Paris.

POISSY[28]

Christianity is still for 400,000,000 of human beings the great pair of wings that are indispensable if man is to rise above himself, above humdrum living and shut-in horizons, it is still the spiritual guide to lead him by patience, resignation, and hope to serenity, to lift him by purity, temperance, and goodness to the heights of devotion and self-sacrifice. Always and everywhere for nineteen hundred years as soon as these wings flag or break, public and private manners degenerate. Neither philosophy, reason, nor artistic and literary culture, nor even feudal honor, military and chivalrous, no code, no administration, no government can serve as substitute for it.—H. Taine (1892).

The church of St. Louis, at Poissy, is a link in the normal development of Gothic, and not like St. Germain, a disconcerting anachronism. About 1135 both systems of vaults were here built at one and the same time.

Poissy lies on the Seine slightly above its junction with the classic Oise. A pleasant way to approach it is to walk from St. Germain-en-Laye through the forest, when it is carpeted with anemones. St. Germain’s palace chapel is thought to be the work of Pierre de Montereau. One goes to Poissy in a spirit of pilgrimage, for at its font, in 1215, St. Louis of France was baptized.[29] He held the gift of Christian citizenship he here received above all that the world could bestow. To his intimates he often signed himself Louis of Poissy. His grandfather, Philippe-Auguste, had given the manor of Poissy to his son, on his marriage to Blanche of Castile. Living then in retirement at Poissy was the gentle Agnes of Méran, that aunt of St. Elizabeth of Hungary whom Philippe-Auguste had been forced by Rome’s decree to set aside. When St. Louis was born, on St. Mark’s Day of 1215, in order to spare the young mother, the church bells were silent. The Spanish princess asked the cause, and ordered—gallant woman that she was—that every bell in the town should ring out a joyous carillon because God had given her un beau fils. Shakespeare would inevitably admire Blanche; she was a Shakespearian character:

That daughter there of Spain, the hardy Blanche,

Is near to England; look upon the years

Of Louis the Dauphin and that lovely maid.

If lusty love should go in search of beauty,

Where shall he find it fairer than in Blanche?

If jealous love should go in search of virtue,

Where shall he find it purer than in Blanche?

If love ambitious sought a match of birth,

Whose veins bound richer blood than Lady Blanche?[30]

The wide ambulatory of Poissy is groin-vaulted, but diagonals cover the two oriented apsidioles that open on a false transept, which arrangement of pseudo-transept with chapels was copied soon after at Sens. The three easternmost bays of the nave have retained their primitive intersecting ribs, which are round-arched, decorated, and very broad, as are the transverse arches that separate the vault into sections. Poissy’s sculpture is of an advanced type. Owing to later changes, there is much patchwork in the church.

ST. DENIS-EN-FRANCE[31]

Give all thou canst: high Heaven rejects the lore

Of nicely calculated less or more:

So deemed the man who fashioned for the sense

These lofty pillars, spread this branching roof

Self-poised.

—Wordsworth.

Poissy. An Early Example of Gothic Vaulting (c. 1135)

Finally came the hour of the new architecture’s clear achievement. After all the trial efforts, there now was built, midway in the XII century, a monument which was to wield momentous influence. With the erection of St. Denis, the center of Gothic art may be said to have shifted slightly south, to Paris. From the capital the new movement spread out in systematic progression—each church comprehending better than had its predecessor the principle of thrust and counterthrust, each drawing from it further consequences.

St. Denis did not put a stop abruptly to the coexistence in the same edifice of both systems of vaulting any more than it began immediately the usage of all the consequences of diagonals. Yet none the less the Royal Abbey is rightly called the first Gothic monument, since here first was demonstrated stout-heartedly the advantages of the new system. Abbot Suger was the first to employ the generating member with the full intelligence of its results. “From the moment of St. Denis’ conception, Amiens had become inevitable.”

It was Suger who wedded definitely the pointed arch and the intersecting ribs. He dared to make piers so slender that the beholders were astonished they could carry the weight of a stone roof; he dared to open his walls by windows so large that his choir was called by the people the lantern of St. Denis. The mastery by Suger’s craftsmen of the art of stained glass was to have profound consequences in Gothic structure, since it hastened the suppression of the wall screen between the active members: “Behold I will lay thy stones with fair colors, and thy foundations with sapphires; and I will make thy windows of agates, and thy gates of carbuncles, and all thy borders of pleasant stones.”

Suger has himself told us how the house of God, many-colored as the radiance of precious stones, lifted his soul from the cares of this world to divine meditation, for this Gothic art, whose spiritual appeal he had apprehended as profoundly as he had its structural laws, was most aptly fashioned to be a foretaste of the Beyond, neither touching the baseness of earth nor wholly the serenity of heaven.

Doubtless Suger understood the importance of the dedication day in 1144. He made of it a national ceremony. He started the Gothic movement intrepidly. Before a historic gathering of bishops and barons he demonstrated that a Gothic vault was lighter, more easily built, more economical, and more enduring than any other, and the important men of France went back to their own cities to spread far and wide the lesson they had learned.

In the course of the story of French architecture, fate has most graciously allied certain monuments of prime archæological interest with people or events of historic importance.

Gothic art made its debut in a unique setting. St. Denis was the patron of France, the missionary who first preached Christianity by the Seine, and who there had been martyred in the III century. On Montmartre is the crypt said to have been the burial place of the first Christian martyrs of Paris. In time there rose on the road outside the city a monastery dedicated to St. Denis, and thither were his relics transferred. Each of the three royal lines that have ruled France, Merovingian, Carolingian, and Capetian, chose the abbey of St. Denis as their final resting place and loaded it with favors. The first milestone on the highroad of Gothic art was the famous center of the nation’s life, and the initiator of the new system of building was the maker of the nation’s unity, Abbot Suger.

To Suger may be applied the mediæval term for an architect, Master of Works, maître de l’œuvre. He wrote an account of how he reconstructed his abbey, building it, he says, with the aid of his companions in the community and his brothers in the cloister. The people gave voluntarily of their labor. When a quarry with suitable stone was discovered at Pontoise, the whole countryside—men, women, and children being harnessed to the carts—dragged the blocks in pious enthusiasm to St. Denis.

The tomb of the martyred patron of Paris was a pilgrim shrine from earliest days. The same trait in human nature that, in 1915, sent Americans to gaze reverently at a relic of their national history, the Liberty Bell, when on a two weeks’ journey from the San Francisco Fair to Philadelphia, it was exhibited in different cities, made the early Christians of Gaul flock to revere the relics of the holy man who had brought them the light and liberty of the gospel. Religion then and all through the Middle Ages was fraught with patriotism.

For St. Denis’ abbey a Merovingian church had been built by Dagobert. Pépin and Charlemagne replaced it by a Carolingian church. By the XII century the abbatial had become inadequate for the pilgrim crowds; people were crushed to death on festival days, and Abbot Suger decided to rebuild. He began by demolishing a heavy vestibule which Charlemagne had put up as a kind of tomb over his father’s grave, for Pépin had begged to be buried face downward in penance, before the abbey church. Suger replaced that encumbering porch by what is to-day a narthex, or forechurch, formed by the two westernmost bays of the edifice. In the thirties of the XI century he started the new works. Romanesque feeling lingered in the sculpture, and the stout vault ribs crossed each other in round arches. By 1140 the west façade was finished and ceremoniously consecrated.

A month later, a still greater gathering met at St. Denis for the laying of the corner stone of the choir. To the sound of trumpets, Louis VII descended into the trench prepared for the foundation, and placed the first stone, and as the choir chanted of the jeweled walls of the heavenly city, Lapides pretiosi omnes muri tui, the king, profoundly moved, took from his finger a costly ring and threw it into the mortar, which had been mixed with holy water. Each baron and bishop, as he laid down a stone, did the same. Their vehement faith would turn to literal meaning the Psalmist’s dream of the celestial city.

In his choir, Suger united definitely the pointed arch with the intersecting ribs, and the ribs, now, were not the heavy ones used in his forechurch. All the arches at their crown were brought to the same height by a combination of stilting, pointing, or depressing them. In the outer aisle of his ambulatory, Suger introduced a fifth rib in each vault section, which welded the apse chapels with the procession path. For his inner aisle he employed what is called the broken-rib vault. First, the keystone was planted in the center and from it branched the four ribs, each regardless of making a straight diagonal. This became the generally accepted method for vaulting an ambulatory. Every part of his edifice Suger supervised with untiring energy. Owing to the waste of forest trees for machines of war, none of sufficient girth could be found for the outer roof covering. Suger lay brooding over this one night, then started up impetuously before dawn, took the measurements of the beams needed, and himself went into the dense forest. Before nine that morning he had found a giant tree; by noon ten others, and the timber was hauled in triumph to the abbey.

All France was talking of the new works at St. Denis. Never before had been such a gathering of skilled masons and sculptors, of goldsmiths and glassmakers. St. Denis’ school was to direct the glassmakers’ art through the second half of the XII century. Little is known of the origin of that art; the early basilicas of Christian Gaul had made use of pieces of colored glass framed together, and in the X century figures were represented. No work, however, previous to the XII century has survived. For the earlier fenestration the term “painted glass” is a misnomer, since each piece was colored in the mass, and only a few black lines were applied to denote the features, or the folds of the draperies. The artists of St. Denis obtained their relief effects by a skilled juxtaposition of tones; intensity of hue was increased by the employment of thick rough leaves of glass. Scarcely any white was used; in the ancient windows no spots spring out unpleasantly.

To St. Denis’ school succeeded that of Chartres, which predominated during the first part of the XIII century, while its second half was ruled by the school of Paris, when windows of the Sainte-Chapelle type were the rule. Gradually the craftsmen gave up their sound tradition that a window should be a transparent mosaic, subordinate to its architectural setting. They began to treat a window as an isolated picture and the art declined.

Abbot Suger’s school of glassmakers carried their art to its zenith. Not all the wonders of XIII-century fenestration equaled the unfathomable vibrant blue in the background of XII-century windows—a fugitive mystery whose secret has been entirely lost. The popular fancy was that Suger ground down sapphires to obtain his magic color.

All over the land the church builders desired windows like those of St. Denis. Suger’s own craftsmen went to Chartres to make the three big lancets in that cathedral’s western front. The St. Denis school influenced the superb Crucifixion window in Poitiers Cathedral, and others in the cathedrals of Angers and Le Mans and in the Trinité at Vendôme, also the Tree of Jesse window in York Cathedral. And, had the choir glass of Notre Dame at Paris survived, it would have been of the school of St. Denis.

Suger wrote inscriptions for his abbey windows to make their symbolism clearer. Owing to the vicissitudes of seven hundred years, few of the St. Denis lights have survived. Four are now reset in the central apse chapel and in that to its north. In a medallion at the base of one of these windows Suger himself is represented holding a scroll bearing his name. The medallion figures are of the hieratic Byzantine type. Every window has a closely woven pattern; each losenge has its own border, and a rich jeweled border surrounds the whole lancet. Bracing bars of iron run straight across the pictured story. Slowly, with infinite patience, worked those old XII-century artists, and never has their handicraft been surpassed as sheer splendor of ornamentation.

After three years and three months of passionate work, the choir of St. Denis was finished, and on June 11, 1144, the dedication day, the relics were installed. That date, forever memorable in the annals of architecture, may be called the consecration of the national art. At the ceremony assisted Louis VII with his queen, Aliénor of Aquitaine, whose strange destiny was to make her patroness of that entirely different phase of Gothic called the Plantagenet school. The chief barons were present at the dedication, as well as five archbishops and some fourteen bishops. They looked and wondered, and not a few of them returned home to imitate. The bishops of Noyon and Senlis hastened to rebuild their cathedrals in the new way, and some of Suger’s masons passed into the service of the former prelate. Bishop Geoffrey de Lèves went back to Chartres to build the most beautiful tower in the world, and the sculptors who had made Suger’s western portals (now no longer extant) worked on the three west doors of Chartres.

On the day of St. Denis’ dedication, Abbot Suger, small and frail in person, but towering in personality, was honored on every side. When the abbot of great Cluny, Peter the Venerable, passed from the marvels of the new church to Suger’s narrow cell, he cried out in honest distress: “This man condemns us all. He builds, not for himself, but for God alone!”

Though the last half of Suger’s life was an example of monastic simplicity, not always had he been content with a monk’s cell. Perhaps because of his conversion midway in life, he appeals to us in a more human way. Not that he was converted from evil doings; his purpose always was high. But in his position as St. Denis’ abbot, as a powerful feudal lord, he lived sumptuously, according to the accepted standards of the time. He mixed freely in the world; he directed state affairs for the king to whom he was devoted; he went on embassies; he even led armies. In 1124, when an irate German emperor was marching on Rheims, which he had vowed to destroy, Suger in person led against him some ten thousand of his abbey’s retainers. That was the first time the oriflamme of St. Denis was carried as the national emblem.[32] Suger had grown up in the secular atmosphere of the Royal Abbey, and took its worldliness as a matter of course.

Of peasant parentage himself, he had been brought, a child of ten, to live with the monks, because he already showed exceptional qualities. Among his fellow students in the abbey school was the king’s son, the future Louis VI, and an intimacy began between the two lads destined to continue till death. When Suger became a monk he was sent on notable missions, for he was gifted with tact and good manners, vivacity and charm. Sweetness of disposition, mental energy, courage, and absolute integrity won for him general esteem. Early and often this born lover of things beautiful made the journey into Italy. It was while returning from one of his missions there, in 1122, that he learned of his election as abbot by his fellow monks in St. Denis. Louis VI had come to the throne; henceforth Suger was to lead in all state affairs.

The genius of this son of field workers had pierced to the vital need of the age—unity of government. Only a strong, central administration could cope with the disintegration which was feudalism. For its very existence the feudal system depended on the absence of well-enforced general laws. It was Suger’s strong hand that guided the early steps toward national unity, and king and people worked for it together. Under the king whom Suger served France began her great role of redresser of wrongs. Louis VI was the first to use the title, king of France, not king of the Franks. The ideal of this XII-century statesman was a strong central monarchy, coexistent with a national assembly. His high conception of solidarity was to fructify, within a hundred years, under Philippe-Auguste, the grandson of Suger’s master.

Suger was one of the first in Europe to understand political economy. He laid the base of a sound financial administration. His confirmation of a charter for the townsmen of St. Denis gave security to trade; he relieved the abbey serfs of mainmorte, built a Villeneuve for homeless nomads, and found time to study agriculture scientifically. In his writings we feel the first breath of a national patriotism. A new note in that age of unfettered personal impulse when might meant right, was Suger’s constant reference to “the poor weighed down with taxations,” to “that which has been too long neglected, the care of the surety of laborers, of artisans, and of the poor.” Many a modern politician could well ponder Suger’s censure of the spoils system. “The officers dismissed carry off what they can lay their hands on,” he said, “and those who replace them, fearing to be likewise treated, hasten to steal, to secure their fortune.”

Suger’s pre-eminence in public affairs continued during two reigns. Louis VII, after stumbling some years without guidance, turned to his father’s counselor and, during his absence on the Second Crusade, appointed him regent of France. So masterly was the abbot’s rule that king and people publicly proclaimed him Père de la Patrie. Suger studied the causes of the crusade’s lamentable failure; he felt that forethought and prudence might win success, and, though he was seventy years of age, he began preparations to carry out a crusade at his own expense. Time was not given him again to prove his genius for leadership. When news of his death (1151) reached the court, the king and the Grand Master of the Templars, who was with him, burst into tears. On his grave in the abbey church which he had built they cut the simple inscription, “Here lies Abbot Suger.” No need of panegyric. “The single names are the noblest epitaphs.”

The commanding place held by this monk in the estimation of Europe is vouched for by letters from pope, kings, and many a dignitary. The king of Sicily wrote to beg a line from him; the king of Scotland sent gifts; the bishop of Salisbury made the journey to France expressly to know Suger. By one clear stroke after another—and above all by his own writings—every line of which is of historical value—the picture is filled in of this admirable churchman who was as soundly honest and forceful as the architecture he fostered, and whose delicate, ardent soul accomplished remarkable things with the reasoned orderliness of the art he loved.

Suger’s sudden but thorough conversion is attributed to St. Bernard. Up to middle life he had been a type of those who soar as high as human abilities can reach without super natural aid. Entangled in the mesh of various employments, his soul could not rise to heavenly things. Then the trumpet of Bernard’s reform sounded in Europe. Men’s hearts were set on fire with repentance and aspiration toward the highest. Bernard’s clear eyes read beneath the outer circumstance of Abbot Suger’s life. He saw that here was a good man, capable of becoming a holy one. He wrote fearless words of disapproval. “One would think it was a governor of a province, not of souls,” he wrote, when he saw the abbot of St. Denis ride by with sixty horsemen.

Suger began to scrutinize his manner of life. Grace touched his soul, pomp was laid aside, and he set about his conversion with the same thoroughness that he displayed in all his acts. Before reforming his monastery, he completely reformed himself. With St. Bernard, who was ten years his junior, he was linked in ennobling friendship to the end. “I know profoundly this man,” Bernard wrote of Suger to the pope, “and I know that he is faithful and prudent in temporal things, that he is fervent and humble in things spiritual. If there is any precious vase adorning the palace of the King of Kings, it is the soul of the venerable Suger.” When Suger lay dying, he wrote to St. Bernard: “Could I but see your angelic face before I die, I should go with more confidence.” And Bernard, who was to follow in a year, begged that when Suger reached Paradise he would “think of him before God.”

Yet, if the overwhelming saint could change the whole tenor of Suger’s life, the cultivated little abbot of St. Denis offered a gentle, stubborn opposition to the puritanic ideas of Bernard in the domain of art. “Vanity of vanities,” cried the ascetic, in the well-known open letter in which he denounced the new luxury in church building. Churches were made too long, he complained, too high, and needlessly wide; the capitals were carved with monsters more apt to distract than to lead to pious recollection.

The art lover in St. Denis’ abbey smiled at such iconoclastic vehemence. Suger thought that nothing was too precious for the house of God. He proceeded to erect an abbey church as imposing as a cathedral, and to enrich its treasury with goldsmith work. Over the three gilt-bronze entrance doors of his church he inscribed, “The soul on its earthly pilgrimage rises by material things to contemplate the Divine.” To this day both men have vigorous partisans, and those who set out on a cathedral tour in France are more likely to be on Suger’s side in the controversy.

Suger’s subtle mind reached beyond the ascetic’s maxim. Well he knew that both saint and art patron were needed, well he knew that Bernard of Clairvaux was as instrumental as himself in the formation of the cathedral builders. A living example of Christian perfection, Bernard fortified the faith of all Europe. He might advocate church simplicity, but it was not without cause that his apostolate preceded the most fecund creative period of mankind’s art. His impassioned love of God warmed the imaginations of the men who began the big Gothic churches.

What remains to-day of the XII-century abbatial built by Suger of St. Denis? Comparatively little. The lower parts of the west façade and the two first bays of the nave which form a narthex, or vestibule, are his work. In the choir, his beautiful ambulatory begins at the third bay of the double aisles. There are nine bays of Suger’s processional path, and from them radiate seven apse chapels. The pillars that divide the lovely curving double passage are the very ones which the generous enthusiasm of the people dragged from Pontoise, and, in memory of the little abbot, some will touch those slender columns with reverential gesture. It was Suger who created the disposition of the rond point found in its perfection at St. Denis and copied in the great cathedrals. The crypt also is his work, though its nucleus belonged to an underground shrine built by Abbot Hilduin in the XI century. When Abbot Suger had finished his choir, he proceeded to make a new Gothic transept and nave; but of them scarcely a vestige remains. Some sculpture at the north door of the transept is of the XII century. Whether the construction was faulty, or whether the monks desired a more ample church, there was a total reconstruction of St. Denis’ abbatial, a hundred years after Suger’s day.

THE ST. DENIS OF ST. LOUIS