Cecil Headlam

“ At Chartres, throughout the whole vast expanse of jewelled lights, there is scarcely one that is not early, and there are very few that are not of the thirteenth century.
Consider the list of them now as they have come down to us across the ages, in spite of fires and sieges, artists and vandals, cleansing and restoring, in spite of the winds that sweep across La Beauce and the desire of the people to read: in spite even of the eighteenth-century architects and their eagerness to throw daylight upon their abominable deeds. ”

“ When the noonday sun is darting his angry rays across the aisles, or soft rain-laden beams streak the spaces with stripes of bloom; when the shades of evening have begun to fall, or when the dawn is gathering strength, and is now lighting the dim distances of the vast nave, you may sit and gaze round on those windows. You watch the wine-red, the blood-red, the yellow and the brown of the Rose of France and the lancet lights beneath, till the memory of all other beauty upon earth fades in the intoxication of that stupendous colouring. ”

“ These pilgrims were but one wave on the ocean of Catholic devotion: pilgrims, whether kings like Charles, coming to replace an image disfigured by profane Huguenots, or courtiers bringing with them the very presence and perfume of the Paris of their day, or pious wanderers from the remotest provinces of France and from strange lands beyond the seas, scholars from the universities and weather-beaten travellers from the New Continent, with outlandish offerings to Our Lady, they wash forever against the hospitable shores of Chartres, and break peacefully upon the gray cliffs of the Cathedral. ”

“ The Cathedral is truly a Bible in stone. And just as in the sculptured porches the mediæval masons carved in a symbolic type, which the illiterate could read, the story of the Pentateuch and the Gospels; just as in their jewelled windows the monkish glaziers told again the same Bible story for all to see and understand, so it would seem that here in Chartres, the architects also, but by fortune rather than design, have symbolised in stone the Old Testament and the New. ”

“ In any other town its glass alone would bring pilgrims from afar. For not only are the thirty-six great lancet windows of rare beauty, being filled, to a great extent, with thirteenth and fourteenth-century glass, but the impression which they give you on first entering the church is almost unique. The apse is ablaze with colour, the triforium of the choir glazed, chiefly in grisaille, and the delicate triforium of the nave is topped by huge lights of colour and grisaille, which are interrupted by hardly any framework of stone. ”

“ By bringing the western façade flush with the western extremities of the towers he was enabled to increase the length of that nave, which he made to leap heavenwards with almost the same joyous spring as that of Amiens, and the length and breadth, and height and strength of that nave, with its massive piers, its splendid vaulting, and its jewelled windows casting their purple and crimson rays across its dark roomy spaces, and the dim distances of the mysterious aisles, render Chartres ‘awful’ in a manner seldom or never elsewhere achieved by Gothic architect. ”

“ For Chartres was the Lourdes of the Middle Ages. The maimed and the halt recovered their powers, leapt from the waggons and flung away their crutches; the blind received their sight, the sick were healed, and all joined, after returning thanks before the altar, in the task of building the house of their Redeemer.
You see their work, you behold the material in which they wrought, as you stand before the western façade [58] and gaze in wonder; for the stones, it seems, have become intelligent, and matter is here spiritualised. ”

“ She is clad in bright vestments of azure, and, like the Virgin who appeared to the peasant girl at Lourdes, she has about her head an aureole of blue. Deep tones of red and brown form the background of the window from which the figure of the Madonna stands out, so that you might almost believe that she is about to step through into the dark aisles of the Cathedral that is hers. ”

“ It is the granary of France. Le blé c’est la Beauce et la Beauce c’est Chartres. [2]
And on every side of it, spread out in the summer time like a many-coloured carpet under the great dome of the sky, stretch the cornfields, cut by the black lines of the railway, or by the straight, disheartening lengths of roads which run beyond the distant horizon of monotonous level, to Dreux, to Orléans, to Paris. The twin spires of Chartres are the only landmark. The sole beauty in this country must be found in its fecundity ”

“ As I struggle through Old Palace Yard I often wonder whether it is in the House of Commons or in the Chapter-house of the Abbey that Discord is so busily engaged, for the wind here, as in Chartres and at Kill-Cannon Corner at Lincoln, is always waiting outside, a truly Gothic draught! ”

“ You turn at last, and, since no memory, however vivid, can retain to the full the impression of the beauty of that glass, you are startled into another ecstasy. For you have forgotten that there can be other windows as beautiful. You cannot believe that there are other colours as exquisite, until you see once more those blues and greens, ultramarines and peacock blues and azures, and those fiery reds which shine in upon the astonished sight from the windows of the south transept and the aisles. ”

“ Then from the distant cloister came forth the architect, and artists and, at the voice of a bishop calling for aid, the sacred work began. The peasants quarried stone and brought material, the young men dressed it, and the masons raised the lofty piers and fashioned the groined roof beneath the eye of the ‘master of the work.’ The pilgrims would sojourn, perhaps, for a year in the town, labouring with such ardour that when the light failed they would often continue by the light of torches. ”

“ The Cathedral offers to the student of glass a perfect model, not indeed of detail, for upon the path which leads to the perfection of detail the thirteenth-century glazier had still many steps to take, but of effects in decorative colouring. In the rose you have a confused effect of colour, in which there is not any too definite form to spoil the charm of the broken bits of colour upon the senses. ”

“ There he had been the friend and fellow-student of Anselm, who in later years paid him a visit at Chartres, on his way from Canterbury to Rome. The characters of the two men, as revealed by their lives and letters, are much alike in their sweetness and their strength. S. Ives was a man before his time; in every way superior to his century. A scholar, he was also a man of action, a statesman of indomitable will, a theologian of surpassing acumen and enthusiasm. He did not, like Fulbert, found a school of philosophy, but he made of his monks practical philosophers. ”

“ In the S. Sylvester window, to the right of the entrance to the Chapel of S. Piat, and in the S. Chéron window of the Chapel of the Sacred Heart of Mary, the old glass painters have well represented the masons of Notre-Dame. Here is a beardless dresser of stone, there a sculptor with his rough, pointed cap. The iron hardness of the miraculous stone yields to the untiring application of chisel and mallet, and beneath their ceaseless blows its formless mass by degrees becomes shapely. Above the workers appears the chapel in which the window now is. ”

“ In that amazing window of the south transept the prophets of the former dispensation are portrayed carrying on their shoulders the naïve evangelists. Similarly the builders have made the Romanesque crypt to carry the Gothic upper church, and the old tower, eloquent of Byzantine art, massive and superb, confronts the joyous, soaring sister who has sprung up, from like foundations, at his side, the last effort, or rather the last amusement, of that Gothic art which is typical of aspirations that are justified, of a faith that is fulfilled. ”

“ When news was brought to Chartres of the seizure of their bishop, people and clergy alike rose to arms to rescue him. But he wrote forbidding them to use violence for his sake. ‘War,’ he said, ‘is for wolves, not for shepherds. I did not obtain my bishopric by arms, and by arms I do not care to recover it.’ In like manner he restrained the nobles who were eager to fight against the King in his defence, and, for fear of stirring up rebellion, he refused for a long time to publish the letters which the Pope had despatched, denouncing the scandalous marriage of Philippe. ”

“ In the background four other masons, shaven and clad like the common people, are busy shaping the statues of kings—the very statues which now, representing the ancestors of Christ, stand in the porch without. The statue is as yet only blocked out: the artist is beginning to model it with his chisel. His companion the while, warm with his past exertions, is drinking. The royal statue begins to be distinguishable. The eyes and the mouth are leaping into life: the crown is being adorned with pearls, the sceptre decorated, the robe and mantle draped, the hands modelled. ”

“ The buttresses of the nave, again, are amazingly heavy and massive, as if the workmen were still afraid to trust them to support the thrust of the vaulting of the roof at so great a height. This is borne by flying buttresses of enormous solidity, composed of an upper and a lower section, which are strengthened in turn by an arcade. The arcading is remarkable for its rugged grace, its masculine beauty. ”

“ He is there, clad in an antique mantle, which falls in a cascade of folds about His naked feet, a bearded Christ, with long, straight hair, and an expression of sweet gravity, and the artist has succeeded somehow in convincing us that this is the Christ expected and foretold, fulfilling the past as He will fulfil the future, and reigning for ever in time upon earth, and hereafter for ever beyond time in heaven. Above Him two angels hold a large crown, destined for the eternal King of the Ages. ”

“ The cloister we know was the only refuge of art; the monasteries the sole asylums for those who would study science. And to those peaceable retreats painters, sculptors, artists perforce retired to practise, to invent, to teach the secrets of their trade; secrets, alas! of colour among them, which have been irretrievably lost to this scientific generation. We know, for instance, that in the Monastery of Tiron, which S. Bernard founded on lands given to him for that purpose by S. Ives, more than five hundred artists of one sort or another were to be found. ”

“ For them the flesh was only desirable when it exhaled the odour of virtue, when it was inspired by the sympathetic sadness which springs from the consciousness of frailty and resignation to the burdens of this life, combined with a burning desire for the eternal life to come, or when it was rendered sweet by the holy joyousness of spirit which springs from peace, pity and love. ”

“ For Jehan de Beauce, being an architect and not a sculptor, was responsible only for the framework, and not for the groups of figures. But that framework is a masterpiece of delicate grace and prolific imagination. A wealth of ornament, of foliage and arabesques, of mythical personages and fantastic beasts, covers the base and the innumerable columns about it. The stone openwork above and the canopies are exquisite in their lightness and finish. Before he died in 1529 Jehan de Beauce had passed completely under the influence of the Renaissance. ”

“ Last and not least permanent of the effects of the Crusades was the influence exercised by the East upon art. The Porche Royal of the Cathedral, and the stained glass windows which are the glory of Chartres, would not have been as they are had Peter the Hermit never led his hundred thousand pilgrims to destruction, or if Bohémond, Prince of Antioch, had not taken the Cross in the sanctuary of Notre-Dame. ”

“ For a bishop, Gasselin was indeed a bishop, potent in prayer and skilled in that art of destroying the human species which is war. He put his trust in Heaven, but did not disdain human succour. He summoned the Dukes of Burgundy and France to his aid. Then, on the day when he learnt that they were at hand, he left the walls on which he had kept watch and ward in prayer, and, ‘tout esploré et larmoyant,’ called the people to the Cathedral. There he first celebrated Mass and offered supplications; next, leaving the altar, he gave absolution to the multitude. ”

“ Vices were portrayed in order to illustrate their punishment. ‘Let faithful souls but see the Passion of Our Lord represented,’ says an old writer, ‘and rarely will they fail to be filled with compunction and to raise their eyes to heaven.’ To the impressionable, childlike, illiterate men of the Middle Ages, accordingly, the clergy taught the lessons of dogma and belief through the personages of drama or the medium of art. The sculpted bays of a porch or the storied windows of a nave were a lesson for the ignorant, a sermon for the believer, appealing through the eyes to the heart. ”

“ Faith catches in a chalice the blood of a lamb upon the altar, whilst Infidelity, with bandaged eyes, cowers below; the hands of Hope are clasped and she gazes heavenward, but Despair lies at her feet and has plunged a sword into her breast; Charity gives her garment to clothe the naked, but Avarice plays with pieces of gold and hides them about her person; Humility holds in her hand a dove, which is her symbol, and at her feet Pride has fallen. These Virtues and Vices are succeeded by a row of twelve queenly figures, which symbolise the Fruits of the Spirit. ”

“ The first time that the traveller beholds the porches of Chartres he is filled with admiration for the exquisite effect of the whole, and afterwards for the exquisite details of which that whole is composed. He may, if he is of an imaginative temperament, fall into some reverie and picture to himself a host of historic fantasies.
But later he will begin to realise that the sculpture which had pleased his eye and inspired his dreams is not a mere ornament of the building. ”

“ The artists of the twelfth century have not been careful in this matter: the object of their fecund imagination and their exquisite workmanship has been this only—the majestic expression of the burning faith within them.
One name only, that of Clement, the Chartrain glazier (Clemens, vitrearius Carnotensis) , found on a window in the Cathedral of Rouen, has come down to us. And Clement, it is supposed, designed the window which recounts the legend of S. Martin. That name alone survives out of all the artists whose work has for over seven hundred years been the admiration of all Europe! ”

“ The dry fact of history probably is that the approach of Robert, Duke of France, with the aid of the Duke of Burgundy and the Count of Poitiers, compelled Rollo’s men, who were anxious lest their return should be cut off and were disheartened already by their failure to take Paris, to retire when they failed to take Chartres at the first assault. But the traditional account is certainly more picturesque. At the crisis of the siege it was to the Bishop Gasselin, ‘a holy man, glorious and just and true,’ that all men looked for comfort and courage. ”