How France Built Her Cathedrals: A Study in the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries. Elizabeth Boyle O'Reilly

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СКАЧАТЬ Remi’s abbey church that it is thought the architect of the Champagne abbatial proceeded to Soissons later; there are the same profiles, the same plan, the same encircling frieze of sculpture. At Soissons, the architect had grown bolder and dared to diminish his supports. To have made Soissons’ curving wall of arches and colonnettes proves him to have been, not only well practiced in mason-craft, but a man of genius who had visions. He here created a thing apart. The exterior of the transept’s arm is unimpressive and plain; the lower windows are round-arched. Inside, the pointed arch reigns, however. “The king’s daughter is all glorious within.”

      The prelate who built Soissons Cathedral was a remarkable personage and played a foremost part on the Fourth Crusade. Villehardouin tells us that it was Bishop Nivelon de Chérisy who was sent as an envoy to Innocent III, when against papal commands the Crusaders had turned aside to capture the Christian city of Zara on the Dalmatian coast. The bishop-ambassador found the pope at Viterbo and obtained from him the raising of the excommunication on condition that the knights should proceed direct to Palestine. We all know how, a second time, they went filibustering. Among the first to scale the walls of Constantinople was Nivelon de Chérisy; with him was the bishop of Troyes. When the chief barons met to elect the first Latin emperor of Constantinople, it was Bishop Nivelon who passed out to the waiting crowd to announce that Baldwin of Flanders had been chosen—Baldwin who began the Cloth Hall at Ypres—and it was he who crowned Baldwin in St. Sophia. When that new emperor was captured by the Bulgars the bishop of Soissons returned to Europe for aid.

      All the time that he was absent in the Holy Land Nivelon had devoted the revenues of his see toward the renewal of the cathedral. Strangely enough, it was this same prelate who also built Soissons’ choir, which in scale and plan differs so radically from the transept arm. The fleeting hour of Primary Gothic was over. The new art was moving forward swiftly; irresistible the development of its principles and impossible at such a time that the work of one decade could be similar to the decade preceding it unless, as at Laon, the primitive plan was insistently adhered to. Whoever the master that designed Soissons’ choir and nave, he incorporated the perfect transept into his bigger church with reverence. Not to dwarf it was his main care, for he bowed before the touch of perfection in his predecessor’s work, and sought to give to his own monument, different though it was, a like clarity and noble simplicity. Examine the skill with which choir and nave are joined to the small transept arm. It is lower than they, it has four vertical stories to their three, and yet no discrepancy is felt. It was as if the new builder said: “Here is a miracle of force and grace, done in a fugitive hour never to be recaptured. Let us enshrine it fittingly.”

      In 1212 services were held in the finished choir. The nave proceeded without interruption and was in use in the first years of St. Louis’ reign. Probably the final touches were given to it by that bishop of Soissons of whom Joinville tells, Mgr. Jacques de Castel, fort et vaillant homme, who started with the king on the crusade of 1248. After Mansourah’s battle and the disastrous retreat toward Damietta good Bishop Jacques felt such a desire “to go to God” that he rushed alone to attack the infidels, whose swords soon “dispatched him to God’s company with the martyrs.”

      Singular good taste has at all times guided the builders of Soissons. The XIV century decided to make a northern arm to the transept; and as if to avoid all hint of rivalry with its peerless neighbor, the new structure was finished by a flat end wall without a portal.

      The cylinder piers of Soissons choir and nave are a distinguishing trait of the church interior, neither too high nor too short. Before each is engaged a slender shaft which rises to the level of the springing and causes the edifice to appear more lofty than its reality. Everywhere, in the church, the fitting of the stones was done with peculiar nicety, though the picking out of the mortar lines in black, a recent innovation, was a sad mistake. In the choir and nave the clearstory windows were an advance on those of Chartres, their model, for the lights were made longer, and the oculus, above the twin lancets, smaller, which gave greater compactness to the whole composition. St. Gereon at Cologne copied these windows. Marburg’s church also was aided by Soissons.

      The talc of this desolate city during the World War is heartrending. The Germans first entered Soissons on September 1, 1914. The mayor had fled. But an admirable woman, Madame Macherez, the widow of a senator, went to the état-major of the Prussians and assumed the responsibility to keep order among the civilians: “Le maire c’est moi.” Already the poets of France have enshrined the memory of this heroine of sixty winters who saved her city from pillage:

      Le regard bleu comme strié de lave

       De Jeanne Macherez qui nous sauva Soissons.

       Ah! la vieille brave!

      For ten days the Germans occupied the town. The first battle of the Marne caused their departure on September 12th. Then a French reverse in January, 1915, let them draw near enough to the city to bring it within the range of fire, and such was its tragic fate till the Germans’ strategic retreat in the spring of 1917. The enemy had intrenched himself solidly in the vast quarries on the left bank of the Aisne, and month after month poured his fire on desolated Soissons. Then came the final grand act of the war. Rolling forward in overwhelming numbers in March, 1918, the invaders drove the French troops from Soissons after a desperate resistance in the streets. There they encamped until the first days of the following August, when the French army re-entered the smoking ruins of a dead city over which stood a phantom cathedral.

      Noyon, Senlis, Sens, Laon, and Soisson, are with Notre Dame of Paris the first cathedrals of the national art. They are far from being the complete list of Primary Gothic monuments, which includes such churches as the Trinité at Vendôme, two churches at Étampes,[63] the collegiate of Notre Dame at Mantes, the Trinité at Fécamp, and Lisieux Cathedral. There are the two towers built in an hour of religious enthusiasm: the clocher vieux at Chartres and the belfry of St. Romain at Rouen. The nave of Angers Cathedral is the Primary Gothic of the Plantagenet school.

      The Attica of Gothic art is the Ile-de-France, and where Picardy touches it on the north, and Champagne on the south. In that land filled with never-to-be-forgotten churches speaks the clarity of French genius in its classic simplicity. The beauty of such churches comes from their rightness of proportion, that quality which gives the most enduring joy in architecture, beyond all richness of detail or startling effect. From such churches one learns the difference between the architect born and the architect made. The supreme quality of proportion must be innate; it is never acquired. The artist blessed with it may only produce a small masterpiece, such a church as that of St. Yved of Braine or a St. Leu-d’Esserent, but one is sure that he would not exchange the glow which his work gave him for the fame of building even a Strasbourg.

      It is in the early-Gothic churches of the Ile-de-France that the taste is best purified and trained. There the sense of beauty is spiritualized. In them art gives an entity to what is ethereal, art seems to make tangible what is impalpable. In them the heart feels the loveliness of the space inclosed as the eye rejoices in the inclosing walls. There is something of poignancy in such churches. Standing in all the promise of their youth, of the youth of the greatest architecture the world ever produced, they gravely admonish us that beauty even as theirs is but a momentary lifting of the veil. To such churches the memory returns with nostalgic regret amid the magnificence of the Gothic expansion, when the leaves opened wide to show the golden pollen. But the sadness which the early-Gothic churches of France rouse in the soul, is it not the stumbling name we give to an eternal Hope? “There are no hours in this cathedral,” wrote Rodin of Soissons; “there is Eternity.”[64]

      THE ABBATIALS OF ST. REMI AT RHEIMS, AND NOTRE DAME AT CHÂLONS-SUR-MARNE[65]

      There are two things for which all the Faithful ought to resist unto blood, Justice and Liberty.—Pierre de Celle, Abbot of St. Remi (1162–81).

      Before closing our crowded chapter on Primary Gothic cathedrals, let us add a few СКАЧАТЬ