Mont Saint Michel and Chartres: Ch. 7 - Roses and Apses

Ch. 7 - Roses and Apses

Like all great churches, that are not mere storehouses of theology,
Chartres expressed, besides whatever else it meant, an emotion, the
deepest man ever felt,--the struggle of his own littleness to grasp
the infinite. You may, if you like, figure in it a mathematic
formula of infinity,--the broken arch, our finite idea of space; the
spire, pointing, with its converging lines, to unity beyond space;
the sleepless, restless thrust of the vaults, telling the
unsatisfied, incomplete, overstrained effort of man to rival the
energy, intelligence, and purpose of God. Thomas Aquinas and the
schoolmen tried to put it in words, but their Church is another
chapter. In act, all man's work ends there;--mathematics, physics,
chemistry, dynamics, optics, every sort of machinery science may
invent,--to this favour come at last, as religion and philosophy did
before science was born. All that the centuries can do is to express
the idea differently:--a miracle or a dynamo; a dome or a coal-pit;
a cathedral or a world's fair; and sometimes to confuse the two
expressions together. The world's fair tends more and more
vigorously to express the thought of infinite energy; the great
cathedrals of the Middle Ages always reflected the industries and
interests of a world's fair. Chartres showed it less than Laon or
Paris, for Chartres was never a manufacturing town, but a shrine,
such as Lourdes, where the Virgin was known to have done miracles,
and had been seen in person; but still the shrine turned itself into
a market and created valuable industries. Indeed, this was the chief
objection which Saint Paul made to Ephesus and Saint Bernard to the
cathedrals. They were in some ways more industrial than religious.
The mere masonry and structure made a vast market for labour; the
fixed metalwork and woodwork were another; but the decoration was by
far the greatest. The wood-carving, the glass windows, the
sculpture, inside and out, were done mostly in workshops on the
spot, but besides these fixed objects, precious works of the highest
perfection filled the church treasuries. Their money value was great
then; it is greater now. No world's fair is likely to do better to-
day. After five hundred years of spoliation, these objects fill
museums still, and are bought with avidity at every auction, at
prices continually rising and quality steadily falling, until a bit
of twelfth-century glass would be a trouvaille like an emerald; a
tapestry earlier than 1600 is not for mere tourists to hope; an
enamel, a missal, a crystal, a cup, an embroidery of the Middle Ages
belongs only to our betters, and almost invariably, if not to the
State, to the rich Jews, whose instinctive taste has seized the
whole field of art which rested on their degradation. Royalty and
feudality spent their money rather on arms and clothes. The Church
alone was universal patron, and the Virgin was the dictator of
taste.

With the Virgin's taste, during her regency, critics never find
fault. One cannot know its whole magnificence, but one can accept it
as a matter of faith and trust, as one accepts all her other
miracles without cavilling over small details of fact. The period of
eighteenth-century scepticism about such matters and the bourgeois
taste of Voltaire and Diderot have long since passed, with the
advent of a scientific taste still more miraculous; the whole world
of the Virgin's art, catalogued in the "Dictionnaire du Mobilier
Francais" in six volumes by Viollet-le-Duc; narrated as history by
M. Labarte, M. Molinier, M. Paul Lacroix; catalogued in museums by
M. du Sommerard and a score of others, in works almost as costly as
the subjects,--all the vast variety of bric-a-brac, useful or
ornamental, belonging to the Church, increased enormously by the
insatiable, universal, private demands for imagery, in ivory, wood,
metal, stone, for every room in every house, or hung about every
neck, or stuck on every hat, made a market such as artists never
knew before or since, and such as instantly explains to the
practical American not only the reason for the Church's tenacity of
life, but also the inducements for its plunder. The Virgin
especially required all the resources of art, and the highest. Notre
Dame of Chartres would have laughed at Notre Dame of Paris if she
had detected an economy in her robes; Notre Dame of Rheims or Rouen
would have derided Notre Dame of Amiens if she had shown a feminine,
domestic, maternal turn toward cheapness. The Virgin was never
cheap. Her great ceremonies were as splendid as her rank of Queen in
Heaven and on Earth required; and as her procession wound its way
along the aisles, through the crowd of her subjects, up to the high
altar, it was impossible then, and not altogether easy now, to
resist the rapture of her radiant presence. Many a young person, and
now and then one who is not in first youth, witnessing the sight in
the religious atmosphere of such a church as this, without a
suspicion of susceptibility, has suddenly seen what Paul saw on the
road to Damascus, and has fallen on his face with the crowd,
grovelling at the foot of the Cross, which, for the first time in
his life, he feels.

If you want to know what churches were made for, come down here on
some great festival of the Virgin, and give yourself up to it; but
come alone! That kind of knowledge cannot be taught and can seldom
be shared. We are not now seeking religion; indeed, true religion
generally comes unsought. We are trying only to feel Gothic art. For
us, the world is not a schoolroom or a pulpit, but a stage, and the
stage is the highest yet seen on earth. In this church the old
Romanesque leaps into the Gothic under our eyes; of a sudden,
between the portal and the shrine, the infinite rises into a new
expression, always a rare and excellent miracle in thought. The two
expressions are nowhere far apart; not further than the Mother from
the Son. The new artist drops unwillingly the hand of his father or
his grandfather; he looks back, from every corner of his own work,
to see whether it goes with the old. He will not part with the
western portal or the lancet windows; he holds close to the round
columns of the choir; he would have kept the round arch if he could,
but the round arch was unable to do the work; it could not rise; so
he broke it, lifted the vaulting, threw out flying buttresses, and
satisfied the Virgin's wish.

The matter of Gothic vaulting, with its two weak points, the flying
buttress and the false, wooden shelter-roof, is the bete noire of
the Beaux Arts. The duty of defence does not lie on tourists, who
are at best hardly able to understand what it matters whether a wall
is buttressed without or within, and whether a roof is single or
double. No one objects to the dome of Saint Peter's. No one finds
fault with the Pont Neuf. Yet it is true that the Gothic architect
showed contempt for facts. Since he could not support a heavy stone
vault on his light columns, he built the lightest possible stone
vault and protected it with a wooden shelter-roof which constantly
burned. The lightened vaults were still too heavy for the walls and
columns, so the architect threw out buttress beyond buttress resting
on separate foundations, exposed to extreme inequalities of weather,
and liable to multiplied chances of accident. The results were
certainly disastrous. The roofs burned; the walls yielded.

Flying buttresses were not a necessity. The Merveille had none; the
Angevin school rather affected to do without them; Albi had none;
Assisi stands up independent; but they did give support wherever the
architect wanted it and nowhere else; they were probably cheap; and
they were graceful. Whatever expression they gave to a church, at
least it was not that of a fortress. Amiens and Albi are different
religions. The expression concerns us; the construction concerns the
Beaux Arts. The problem of permanent equilibrium which distresses
the builder of arches is a technical matter which does not worry,
but only amuses, us who sit in the audience and look with delight at
the theatrical stage-decoration of the Gothic vault; the astonishing
feat of building up a skeleton of stone ribs and vertebrae, on which
every pound of weight is adjusted, divided, and carried down from
level to level till it touches ground at a distance as a bird would
alight. If any stone in any part, from apex to foundation, weathers
or gives way, the whole must yield, and the charge for repairs is
probably great, but, on the best building the Ecole des Beaux Arts
can build, the charge for repairs is not to be wholly ignored, and
at least the Cathedral of Chartres, in spite of terribly hard usage,
is as solid to-day as when it was built, and as plumb, without crack
or crevice. Even the towering fragment at Beauvais, poorly built
from the first, which has broken down oftener than most Gothic
structures, and seems ready to crumble again whenever the wind blows
over its windy plains, has managed to survive, after a fashion, six
or seven hundred years, which is all that our generation had a right
to ask.

The vault of Beauvais is nearly one hundred and sixty feet high (48
metres), and was cheaply built. The vault of Saint Peter's at Rome
is nearly one hundred and fifty feet (45 metres). That of Amiens is
one hundred and forty-four feet (44 metres). Rheims, Bourges, and
Chartres are nearly the same height; at the entrance, one hundred
and twenty-two feet. Paris is one hundred and ten feet. The Abbe
Bulteau is responsible for these measurements; but at Chartres, as
in several very old churches, the nave slopes down to the entrance,
because--as is said--pilgrims came in such swarms that they were
obliged to sleep in the church, and the nave had to be sluiced with
water to clean it. The true height of Chartres, at the croisee of
nave and transept, is as near as possible one hundred and twenty
feet (36.55 metres).

The measured height is the least interest of a church. The
architect's business is to make a small building look large, and his
failures are in large buildings which he makes to look small. One
chief beauty of the Gothic is to exaggerate height, and one of its
most curious qualities is its success in imposing an illusion of
size. Without leaving the heart of Paris any one can study this
illusion in the two great churches of Notre Dame and Saint-Sulpice;
for Saint-Sulpice is as lofty as Notre Dame in vaulting, and larger
in its other dimensions, besides being, in its style, a fine
building; yet its Roman arches show, as if they were of the eleventh
century, why the long, clean, unbroken, refined lines of the Gothic,
curving to points, and leading the eye with a sort of compulsion to
the culminating point above, should have made an architectural
triumph that carried all Europe off its feet with delight. The world
had seen nothing to approach it except, perhaps, in the dome of
Sancta Sophia in Constantinople; and the discovery came at a moment
when Europe was making its most united and desperate struggle to
attain the kingdom of Heaven.

According to Viollet-le-Duc, Chartres was the final triumph of the
experiment on a very great scale, for Chartres has never been
altered and never needed to be strengthened. The flying buttresses
of Chartres answered their purpose, and if it were not a matter of
pure construction it would be worth while to read what Viollet-le-
Duc says about them (article, "Arcs-boutants"). The vaulting above
is heavy, about fifteen inches thick; the buttressing had also to be
heavy; and to lighten it, the architect devised an amusing sort of
arcades, applied on his outside buttresses. Throughout the church,
everything was solid beyond all later custom, so that architects
would have to begin by a study of the crypt which came down from the
eleventh century so strongly built that it still carries the church
without a crack in its walls; but if we went down into it, we should
understand nothing; so we will begin, as we did outside, at the
front.

A single glance shows what trouble the architect had with the old
facade and towers, and what temptation to pull them all down. One
cannot quite say that he has spoiled his own church in trying to
save what he could of the old, but if he did not quite spoil it, he
saved it only by the exercise of an amount of intelligence that we
shall never learn enough to feel our incapacity to understand. True
ignorance approaches the infinite more nearly than any amount of
knowledge can do, and, in our case, ignorance is fortified by a
certain element of nineteenth-century indifference which refuses to
be interested in what it cannot understand; a violent reaction from
the thirteenth century which cared little to comprehend anything
except the incomprehensible. The architect at Chartres was required
by the Virgin to provide more space for her worshippers within the
church, without destroying the old portal and fleche which she
loved. That this order came directly from the Virgin, may be taken
for granted. At Chartres, one sees everywhere the Virgin, and
nowhere any rival authority; one sees her give orders, and
architects obey them; but very rarely a hesitation as though the
architect were deciding for himself. In his western front, the
architect has obeyed orders so literally that he has not even taken
the trouble to apologize for leaving unfinished the details which,
if he had been responsible for them, would have been his anxious
care. He has gone to the trouble of moving the heavy doorways
forward, so that the chapels in the towers, which were meant to open
on a porch, now open into the nave, and the nave itself has, in
appearance, two more spans than in the old church; but the work
shows blind obedience, as though he were doing his best to please
the Virgin without trying to please himself. Probably he could in no
case have done much to help the side aisles in their abrupt
collision with the solid walls of the two towers, but he might at
least have brought the vaulting of his two new bays, in the nave,
down to the ground, and finished it. The vaulting is awkward in
these two bays, and yet he has taken great trouble to effect what
seems at first a small matter. Whether the great rose window was an
afterthought or not can never be known, but any one can see with a
glass, and better on the architectural plan, that the vaulting of
the main church was not high enough to admit the great rose, and
that the architect has had to slope his two tower-spans upward. So
great is the height that you cannot see this difference of level
very plainly even with a glass, but on the plans it seems to amount
to several feet; perhaps a metre. The architect has managed to
deceive our eyes, in order to enlarge the rose; but you can see as
plainly as though he were here to tell you, that, like a great
general, he has concentrated his whole energy on the rose, because
the Virgin has told him that the rose symbolized herself, and that
the light and splendour of her appearance in the west were to redeem
all his awkwardnesses.

Of course this idea of the Virgin's interference sounds to you a
mere bit of fancy, and that is an account which may be settled
between the Virgin and you; but even twentieth-century eyes can see
that the rose redeems everything, dominates everything, and gives
character to the whole church.

In view of the difficulties which faced the artist, the rose is
inspired genius,--the kind of genius which Shakespeare showed when
he took some other man's play, and adapted it. Thus far, it shows
its power chiefly by the way it comes forward and takes possession
of the west front, but if you want a foot-rule to measure by, you
may mark that the old, twelfth-century lancet-windows below it are
not exactly in its axis. At the outset, in the original plan of
1090, or thereabouts, the old tower--the southern tower--was given
greater width than the northern. Such inequalities were common in
the early churches, and so is a great deal of dispute in modern
books whether they were accidental or intentional, while no one
denies that they are amusing. In these towers the difference is not
great,--perhaps fourteen or fifteen inches,--but it caused the
architect to correct it, in order to fit his front to the axis of
the church, by throwing his entrance six or seven inches to the
south, and narrowing to that extent the south door and south lancet.
The effect was bad, even then, and went far to ruin the south
window; but when, after the fire of 1194, the architect inserted his
great rose, filling every inch of possible space between the lancet
and the arch of the vault, he made another correction which threw
his rose six or seven inches out of axis with the lancets. Not one
person in a hundred thousand would notice it, here in the interior,
so completely are we under the control of the artist and the Virgin;
but it is a measure of the power of the rose.

Looking farther, one sees that the rose-motive, which so dominates
the west front, is carried round the church, and comes to another
outburst of splendour in the transepts. This leads back to
fenestration on a great scale, which is a terribly ambitious flight
for tourists; all the more, because here the tourist gets little
help from the architect, who, in modern times, has seldom the
opportunity to study the subject at all, and accepts as solved the
problems of early Gothic fenestration. One becomes pedantic and
pretentious at the very sound of the word, which is an intolerable
piece of pedantry in itself; but Chartres is all windows, and its
windows were as triumphant as its Virgin, and were one of her
miracles. One can no more overlook the windows of Chartres than the
glass which is in them. We have already looked at the windows of
Mantes; we have seen what happened to the windows at Paris. Paris
had at one leap risen twenty-five feet higher than Noyon, and even
at Noyon, the architect, about 1150, had been obliged to invent new
fenestration. Paris and Mantes, twenty years later, made another
effort, which proved a failure. Then the architect of Chartres, in
1195, added ten feet more to his vault, and undertook, once for all,
to show how a great cathedral should be lighted. As an architectural
problem, it passes far beyond our powers of understanding, even when
solved; but we can always turn to see what the inevitable Viollet-
le-Duc says about its solution at Chartres:--

Toward the beginning of the thirteenth century, the architect of the
Cathedral of Chartres sought out entirely new window combinations to
light the nave from above. Below, in the side aisles he kept to the
customs of the times; that is, he opened pointed windows which did
not wholly fill the spaces between the piers; he wanted, or was
willing to leave here below, the effect of a wall. But in the upper
part of his building we see that he changed the system; he throws a
round arch directly across from one pier to the next; then, in the
enormous space which remains within each span, he inserts two large
pointed windows surmounted by a great rose ... We recognize in this
construction of Notre Dame de Chartres a boldness, a force, which
contrast with the fumbling of the architects in the Ile de France
and Champagne. For the first time one sees at Chartres the builder
deal frankly with the clerestory, or upper fenestration, occupying
the whole width of the arches, and taking the arch of the vault as
the arch of the window. Simplicity of construction, beauty in form,
strong workmanship, structure true and solid, judicious choice of
material, all the characteristics of good work, unite in this
magnificent specimen of architecture at the beginning of the
thirteenth century.

Viollet-le-Duc does not call attention to a score of other matters
which the architect must have had in his mind, such as the
distribution of light, and the relations of one arrangement with
another: the nave with the aisles, and both with the transepts, and
all with the choir. Following him, we must take the choir
separately, and the aisles and chapels of the apse also. One cannot
hope to understand all the experiments and refinements of the
artist, either in their successes or their failures, but, with
diffidence, one may ask one's self whether the beauty of the
arrangement, as compared with the original arrangement in Paris, did
not consist in retaining the rose-motive throughout, while throwing
the whole upper wall into window. Triumphant as the clerestory
windows are, they owe their charm largely to their roses, as you see
by looking at the same scheme applied on a larger scale on the
transept fronts; and then, by taking stand under the croisee, and
looking at all in succession as a whole.

The rose window was not Gothic but Romanesque, and needed a great
deal of coaxing to feel at home within the pointed arch. At first,
the architects felt the awkwardness so strongly that they avoided it
wherever they could. In the beautiful facade of Laon, one of the
chief beauties is the setting of the rose under a deep round arch.
The western roses of Mantes and Paris are treated in the same way,
although a captious critic might complain that their treatment is
not so effective or so logical. Rheims boldly imprisoned the roses
within the pointed arch; but Amiens, toward 1240, took refuge in the
same square exterior setting that was preferred, in 1200, here at
Chartres; and in the interior of Amiens the round arch of the rose
is the last vault of the nave, seen through a vista of pointed
vaults, as it is here. All these are supposed to be among the chief
beauties of the Gothic facade, although the Gothic architect, if he
had been a man of logic, would have clung to his lines, and put a
pointed window in his front, as in fact he did at Coutances. He felt
the value of the rose in art, and perhaps still more in religion,
for the rose was Mary's emblem. One is fairly sure that the great
Chartres rose of the west front was put there to please her, since
it was to be always before her eyes, the most conspicuous object she
would see from the high altar, and therefore the most carefully
considered ornament in the whole church, outside the choir. The mere
size proves the importance she gave it. The exterior diameter is
nearly forty-four feet (13.36 metres). The nave of Chartres is, next
perhaps to the nave of Angers, the widest of all Gothic naves; about
fifty-three feet (16.31 metres); and the rose takes every inch it
can get of this enormous span. The value of the rose, among
architects of the time, was great, since it was the only part of the
church that Villard de Honnecourt sketched; and since his time, it
has been drawn and redrawn, described and commented by generations
of architects till it has become as classic as the Parthenon.

Yet this Chartres rose is solid, serious, sedate, to a degree
unusual in its own age; it is even more Romanesque than the pure
Romanesque roses. At Beauvais you must stop a moment to look at a
Romanesque rose on the transept of the Church of Saint-Etienne;
Viollet-le-Duc mentions it, with a drawing (article, "Pignon"), as
not earlier than the year 1100, therefore about a century earlier
than the rose of Chartres; it is not properly a rose, but a wheel of
fortune, with figures climbing up and falling over. Another supposed
twelfth-century rose is at Etampes, which goes with that of Laon and
Saint-Leu-d'Esserent and Mantes. The rose of Chartres is so much the
most serious of them all that Viollet-le-Duc has explained it by its
material,--the heavy stone of Bercheres;--but the material was not
allowed to affect the great transept roses, and the architect made
his material yield to his object wherever he thought it worth while.
Standing under the central croisee, you can see all three roses by
simply turning your head. That on the north, the Rose de France, was
built, or planned, between 1200 and 1210, in the reign of Philip
Augustus, since the porch outside, which would be a later
construction, was begun by 1212. The Rose de France is the same in
diameter as the western rose, but lighter, and built of lighter
stone. Opposite the Rose de France stands, on the south front,
Pierre Mauclerc's Rose de Dreux, of the same date, with the same
motive, but even lighter; more like a rose and less like a wheel.
All three roses must have been planned at about the same time,
perhaps by the same architect, within the same workshop; yet the
western rose stands quite apart, as though it had been especially
designed to suit the twelfth-century facade and portal which it
rules. Whether this was really the artist's idea is a question that
needs the artist to answer; but that this is the effect, needs no
expert to prove; it stares one in the face. Within and without, one
feels that the twelfth-century spirit is respected and preserved
with the same religious feeling which obliged the architect to
injure his own work by sparing that of his grandfathers.

Conspicuous, then, in the west front are two feelings:--respect for
the twelfth-century work, and passion for the rose fenestration;
both subordinated to the demand for light. If it worries you to have
to believe that these three things are in fact one; that the
architect is listening, like the stone Abraham, for orders from the
Virgin, while he caresses and sacrifices his child; that Mary and
not her architects built this facade; if the divine intention seems
to you a needless impertinence, you can soon get free from it by
going to any of the later churches, where you will not be forced to
see any work but that of the architect's compasses. According to
Viollet-le-Duc, the inspiration ceased about 1250, or, as the Virgin
would have dated it, on the death of Blanche of Castile in 1252. The
work of Chartres, where her own hand is plainly shown, belongs in
feeling, if not in execution, to the last years of the twelfth
century (1195-1200). The great western rose which gives the motive
for the whole decoration and is repeated in the great roses of the
transepts, marks the Virgin's will,--the taste and knowledge of
"cele qui la rose est des roses," or, if you prefer the Latin of
Adam de Saint-Victor, the hand of her who is "Super rosam rosida."

All this is easy; but if you really cannot see the hand of Mary
herself in these broad and public courts, which were intended, not
for her personal presence, but for the use of her common people, you
had better stop here, and not venture into the choir. Great halls
seem to have been easy architecture. Naves and transepts were not
often failures; facades and even towers and fleches are invariably
more or less successful because they are more or less balanced,
mathematical, calculable products of reason and thought. The most
serious difficulties began only with the choir, and even then did
not become desperate until the architect reached the curve of the
apse, with its impossible vaultings, its complicated lines, its
cross-thrusts, its double problems, internal and external, its
defective roofing and unequal lighting. A perfect Gothic apse was
impossible; an apse that satisfied perfectly its principal objects
was rare; the simplest and cheapest solution was to have no apse at
all, and that was the English scheme, which was tried also at Laon;
a square, flat wall and window. If the hunt for Norman towers
offered a summer's amusement, a hunt for apses would offer an
education, but it would lead far out of France. Indeed, it would be
simpler to begin at once with Sancta Sophia at Constantinople, San
Vitale at Ravenna and Monreale at Palermo, and the churches at
Torcello and Murano, and San Marco at Venice; and admit that no
device has ever equalled the startling and mystical majesty of the
Byzantine half-dome, with its marvellous mosaic Madonna dominating
the church, from the entrance, with her imperial and divine
presence. Unfortunately, the northern churches needed light, and the
northern architects turned their minds to a desperate effort for a
new apse.

The scheme of the cathedral at Laon seems to have been rejected
unanimously; the bare, flat wall at the end of the choir was an
eyesore; it was quite bad enough at the end of the nave, and became
annoying at the end of the transepts, so that at Noyon and Soissons
the architect, with a keen sense of interior form, had rounded the
transept ends; but, though external needs might require a square
transept, the unintelligence of the flat wall became insufferable at
the east end. Neither did the square choir suit the church
ceremonies and processions, or offer the same advantages of
arrangement, as the French understood them. With one voice, the
French architects seem to have rejected the Laon experiment, and
turned back to a solution taken directly from the Romanesque.

Quite early--in the eleventh century--a whole group of churches had
been built in Auvergne,--at Clermont and Issoire, for example,--
possibly by one architect, with a circular apse, breaking out into
five apsidal chapels. Tourists who get down as far south as Toulouse
see another example of this Romanesque apse in the famous Church of
Saint Sernin, of the twelfth century; and few critics take offence
at one's liking it. Indeed, as far as concerns the exterior, one
might even risk thinking it more charming than the exterior of any
Gothic apse ever built. Many of these Romanesque apses of the
eleventh and twelfth centuries still remain in France, showing
themselves in unsuspected parish churches, here and there, but
always a surprise for their quiet, unobtrusive grace, making a
harmony with the Romanesque tower, if there is one, into which they
rise, as at Saint Sernin; but all these churches had only one aisle,
and, in the interior, there came invariable trouble when the vaults
rose in height. The architect of Chartres, in 1200, could get no
direct help from these, or even from Paris which was a beautifully
perfect apse, but had no apsidal chapels. The earliest apse that
could have served as a suggestion for Chartres--or, at least, as a
point of observation for us--was that of the Abbey Church of Saint-
Martin-des-Champs, which we went to see in Paris, and which is said
to date from about 1150.

Here is a circular choir, surrounded by two rows of columns,
irregularly spaced, with circular chapels outside, which seems to
have been more or less what the architect of Chartres, for the
Virgin's purposes, had set his heart on obtaining. Closely following
the scheme of Saint-Martin-des-Champs came the scheme of the Abbey
Church at Vezelay, built about 1160-80. Here the vaulting sprang
directly from the last arch of the choir, as is shown on the plan,
and bearing first on the light columns of the choir, which were
evenly spaced, then fell on a row of heavier columns outside, which
were also evenly spaced, and came to rest at last on massive piers,
between which were five circular chapels. The plan shows at a glance
that this arrangement stretched the second row of columns far apart,
and that a church much larger than Vezelay would need to space them
so much farther apart that the arch uniting them would have to rise
indefinitely; while, if beyond this, another aisle were added
outside, the piers finally would require impossible vaulting.

The problem stood thus when the great cathedrals were undertaken,
and the architect of Paris boldly grappled with the double aisle on
a scale requiring a new scheme. Here, in spite of the most virtuous
resolutions not to be technical, we must attempt a technicality,
because without it, one of the most interesting eccentricities of
Chartres would be lost. Once more, Viollet-le-Duc:--

As the architect did not want to give the interior bays of the apse
spaces between the columns (AA) less than that of the parallel bays
(BB), it followed that the first radiating bay gave a first space
(LMGH) which was difficult to vault, and a second space (HGEF) which
was impossible; for how establish an arch from F to E? Even if
round, its key would have risen much higher than the key of the
pointed archivolt LM. As the second radiating bay opened out still
wider, the difficulty was increased. The builder therefore inserted
the two intermediate pillars O and P between the columns of the
second aisle (H, G, and I); which he supported, in the outside wall
of the church, by one corresponding pier (Q) in the first bay of the
apse, and by two similar piers (R and S) in the second bay.

"There is no need to point out," continued Viollet-le-Duc, as though
he much suspected that there might be need of pointing out, "what
skill this system showed and how much the art of architecture had
already been developed in the Ile de France toward the end of the
twelfth century; to what an extent the unity of arrangement and
style preoccupied the artists of that province."

In fact, the arrangement seems mathematically and technically
perfect. At all events, we know too little to criticize it. Yet one
would much like to be told why it was not repeated by any other
architect or in any other church. Apparently the Parisians
themselves were not quite satisfied with it, since they altered it a
hundred years later, in 1296, in order to build out chapels between
the piers. As the architects of each new cathedral had, in the
interval, insisted on apsidal chapels, one may venture to guess that
the Paris scheme hampered the services.

At Chartres the church services are Mary's own tastes; the church is
Mary; and the chapels are her private rooms. She was not pleased
with the arrangements made for her in her palace at Paris; they were
too architectural; too regular and mathematical; too popular; too
impersonal; and she rather abruptly ordered her architect at
Chartres to go back to the old arrangement. The apse at Paris was
hardly covered with its leading before the architect of Chartres
adopted a totally new plan, which, according to Viollet-le-Duc, does
him little credit, but which was plainly imposed on him, like the
twelfth-century portal. Not only had it nothing of the mathematical
correctness and precision of the Paris scheme, easy to understand
and imitate, but it carried even a sort of violence--a wrench--in
its system, as though the Virgin had said, with her grand Byzantine
air:--I will it!

"At Chartres," said Viollet-le-Duc, "the choir of the Cathedral
presents a plan which does no great honour to its architect. There
is want of accord between the circular apse and the parallel sides
of the sanctuary; the spacings of the columns of the second
collateral are loose (laches); the vaults quite poorly combined; and
in spite of the great width of the spaces between the columns of the
second aisle, the architect had still to narrow those between the
interior columns."

The plan shows that, from the first, the architect must have
deliberately rejected the Paris scheme; he must have begun by
narrowing the spaces between his inner columns; then, with a sort of
violence, he fitted on his second row of columns; and, finally, he
showed his motive by constructing an outer wall of an original or
unusual shape. Any woman would see at once the secret of all this
ingenuity and effort. The Chartres apse, enormous in size and width,
is exquisitely lighted. Here, as everywhere throughout the church,
the windows give the law, but here they actually take place of law.
The Virgin herself saw to the lighting of her own boudoir. According
to Viollet-le-Duc, Chartres differs from all the other great
cathedrals by being built not for its nave or even for its choir,
but for its apse; it was planned not for the people or the court,
but for the Queen; not a church but a shrine; and the shrine is the
apse where the Queen arranged her light to please herself and not
her architect, who had already been sacrificed at the western portal
and who had a free hand only in the nave and transepts where the
Queen never went, and which, from her own apartment, she did not
even see.

This is, in effect, what Viollet-le-Duc says in his professional
language, which is perhaps--or sounds--more reasonable to tourists,
whose imaginations are hardly equal to the effort of fancying a real
deity. Perhaps, indeed, one might get so high as to imagine a real
Bishop of Laon, who should have ordered his architect to build an
enormous hall of religion, to rival the immense abbeys of the day,
and to attract the people, as though it were a clubroom. There they
were to see all the great sights; church ceremonies; theatricals;
political functions; there they were to do business, and frequent
society. They were to feel at home in their church because it was
theirs, and did not belong to a priesthood or to Rome. Jealousy of
Rome was a leading motive of Gothic architecture, and Rome repaid it
in full. The Bishop of Laon conceded at least a transept to custom
or tradition, but the Archbishop of Bourges abolished even the
transept, and the great hall had no special religious expression
except in the circular apse with its chapels which Laon had
abandoned. One can hardly decide whether Laon or Bourges is the more
popular, industrial, political, or, in other words, the less
religious; but the Parisians, as the plan of Viollet-le-Duc has
shown, were quite as advanced as either, and only later altered
their scheme into one that provided chapels for religious service.

Amiens and Beauvais have each seven chapels, but only one aisle, so
that they do not belong in the same class with the apses of Paris,
Bourges, and Chartres, though the plans are worth studying for
comparison, since they show how many-sided the problem was, and how
far from satisfied the architects were with their own schemes. The
most interesting of all, for comparison with Chartres, is Le Mans,
where the apsidal chapels are carried to fanaticism, while the
vaulting seems to be reasonable enough, and the double aisle
successfully managed, if Viollet-le-Duc permits ignorant people to
form an opinion on architectural dogma. For our purposes, the
architectural dogma may stand, and the Paris scheme may be taken for
granted, as alone correct and orthodox; all that Viollet-le-Duc
teaches is that the Chartres scheme is unorthodox, not to say
heretical; and this is the point on which his words are most
interesting.

The church at Chartres belonged not to the people, not to the
priesthood, and not even to Rome; it belonged to the Virgin. "Here
the religious influence appears wholly; three large chapels in the
apse; four others less pronounced; double aisles of great width
round the choir; vast transepts! Here the church ceremonial could
display all its pomp; the choir, more than at Paris, more than at
Bourges, more than at Soissons, and especially more than at Laon, is
the principal object; for it, the church is built."

One who is painfully conscious of ignorance, and who never would
dream of suggesting a correction to anybody, may not venture to
suggest an idea of any sort to an architect; but if it were allowed
to paraphrase Viollet-le-Duc's words into a more or less emotional
or twelfth-century form, one might say, after him, that, compared
with Paris or Laon, the Chartres apse shows the same genius that is
shown in the Chartres rose; the same large mind that overrules,--the
same strong will that defies difficulties. The Chartres apse is as
entertaining as all the other Gothic apses together, because it
overrides the architect. You may, if you really have no imagination
whatever, reject the idea that the Virgin herself made the plan; the
feebleness of our fancy is now congenital, organic, beyond stimulant
or strychnine, and we shrink like sensitive-plants from the touch of
a vision or spirit; but at least one can still sometimes feel a
woman's taste, and in the apse of Chartres one feels nothing else.

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