peers were doing the same sort of thing;
conquering England, the Holy Land, even
gaining the throne of the Eastern Empire;
but the hardy Hautevilles are the best ex-
ponent of Norman force, since they show
how, in a single family, the ardour of ac-
tion is not confined to one alone but extends
itself through all.
[in]
THE SUBSTANCE OF GOTHIC
Of the Cistercian reformation I must
speak more at length, since it was the chief
agent in effecting the change from the Nor-
man to the Gothic principle in architecture.
Monasticism, of the type established it
would seem, once for all, by St. Benedict
of Nursia in the sixth century, is an essen-
tial element in Christian civilization, re-
curring ever and again when the things
against which it contends have achieved
supremacy and brought society to the point
of ruin. In the sixth, the eleventh, and the
sixteenth centuries it had its most brilliant
manifestations, and already it is preparing
again for its identical office of social regen-
eration. It is, however, human in its con-
stitution, and subject to the general law of
degeneration, therefore it is constantly laps-
ing from its ideals, its standards, and its
prescribed modes of action. If its work
is not accomplished before this inevitable
retrogression sets in, then another order
comes into existence to continue the labour
under a new impulse of righteousness. The
work of the Middle Ages was not accom-
plished before the Order of Cluny, that had
made the Normans the most potent forces
in Europe, surrendered to the gravitational
[113]
THE EPOCH OF TRANSITION
peril of the world, and became rich, self-
indulgent, morally lax. By the end of the
eleventh century the Benedictines of Cluny
had made the art they had re-created a
thing of luxury, splendour, and inordinate
expense. Cathedrals, abbeys, and churches
were vast, massive, elaborate in design, opu-
lent in sculpture and colour and gold. The
vestments for the sacred offices, the altar
vessels and ornaments, the Mass books and
shrines and reliquaries were of a Byzantine
luxury in their wealth of gold and silver
and precious stones. Art took the place of
ethic; ease and luxury and license came in
the stead of self-denial, holy poverty, and
missionary zeal. Nevertheless the work
was only half done; therefore St. Robert
of Molesme was moved to a reform that
should be a return to Apostolic righteous-
ness and zeal, the Order of Citeaux being
the result. It was a glorious return to the
Benedictinism of St. Benedict himself, and
at once old men and young flocked to the
Cistercian monasteries in such numbers that
fathers and mothers and wives tried to hide
or place under restraint the boys and men of
their families in order that they might not
yield to the overwhelming call of the clois-
[113]
THE SUBSTANCE OF GOTHIC
ter. Within a few years of the founding,
St. Bernard became a monk of the new
order, and then the situation became worse,
for now men were neither to hold nor to
bind, and secular society was decimated.
The result was not, however, what might
have been feared by the eugenists of the
time (if there were any), for the imposi-
tion of the law of celibacy on tens of thou-
sands of the best of both sexes could not
depress the standard, and character waxed
even finer and more vigorous for several
generations.
The effect on architecture was immedi-
ate and fundamental: hitherto, with all its
magnificence it had been structurally static,
a style of inertia. In the Roman basilica
the principle of dead loads held practically
throughout, for the thrust of the narrow
aisle arches was negligible, that of the tri-
umphal arch taken up by the lateral walls
of the transept, that of the dome of the apse
by its own thick walls. The domical church
of the East was indeed active in every part,
but with little concentration of thrusts, and
the varied and incessant push was met by
counteracting masses of inert masonry and
walls of enormous thickness. The same
[114]
THE EPOCH OF TRANSITION
principles held in Normandy and England :
as arches widened in span the walls grew
thicker and more massive, the abutments
more ponderous. With the adoption of
cross vaulting of masonry the resulting con-
centration of weight and thrusts was ignored
and the intervening wall areas were thick-
ened equally with the local abutments.
Five-foot walls became almost a minimum,
and the thickness was sometimes increased
up to eight or ten feet. Of course the re-
sult was the necessity of providing huge
masses of masonry, expensive in themselves
and very tempting to carvers and decorators.
It cannot be denied that these vast and
massive structures have a power and dig-
nity all their own, as, for example, Peter-
borough, Ely, Durham, and they were
so well liked that in England they gener-
ally resisted the advent of the new Gothic
fashion of construction, while accepting its
outward forms, and for this reason English
Gothic achieved little of the structural logic
and economy of France. On the whole,
however, the magnificent Norman style was
intolerable to the Cistercian puritans, and
at their instigation the master builders of
the time strove to find a solution that, while
[115]
THE SUBSTANCE OF GOTHIC
sacrificing nothing of beauty, should yet
reduce the initial cost. The success of this
effort was triumphant, but it was due to
the entrance into the field of a new racial
element different alike from the Italianized
Lombards of the south and the Christian-
ized Vikings of Normandy. This new ele-
ment was that of the Franks of the He de
France, who, under the spur of the Cister-
cians, brought to bear on the structural
problem the acute intellect, the creative in-
genuity, and the unfailing logic that were
their everlasting contribution to the great
and glorious unity we know as the French
people. Under their hands architecture
was made over, for their quick wit and
ready ingenuity soon showed them that by
concentrating loads, thrusts, and abutments
they could reduce the bulk of their masonry
by half, and furthermore, that there were
certain physical laws that might be discov-
ered by experiment, if not on a priori
grounds, and that these laws might be used
to determine lines of energy, weights of
resistance, and factors of safety. In a word
they brought pure science to bear on the
question, not as master but as servant, in
which respect they differed radically from
[116]
THE EPOCH OF TRANSITION
the devotee of science of today. In time
the whole thing turned into a game, and
the master builder became obsessed by his
science, to the peril of his art as well as of
his buildings themselves, but for an hun-
dred and fifty years the just balance was
maintained before Beauvais closed the
chapter in calamity.
The ribbed and pointed vault had already
been worked out, and so had the two forms
of sexpartite vaulting, in the abbeys of
Caen. The next step was the adoption of
the oblong vault area. In the Abbaye des
Dames the vault, though comparatively late,
is undeniably a survival of the earliest form
of high vault, for it is simply a great inter-
secting vault of equal sides, the transverse
crown being reinforced and supported by
an arch with its spandrels filled in by a thin
wall of stone manifestly an evidence of
doubt on the part of the builders as to the
stability of so large a quadripartite vault
as is necessary to span a nave always twice
the width of the aisle. Incidentally it is
also a first step to the oblong area. The
vault of the Abbaye aux Hommes is a
clumsy approach to the true sexpartite
vault, for here the masonry springs back
[117]
THE SUBSTANCE OF GOTHIC
on either side from the intermediate wall
to meet the main curves of the square
vault, so forming exterior wall surfaces
into which an arched window would ac-
commodate itself without offence. Of
course, as soon as the oblong areas which
naturally followed from the perfected sex-
partite form were generally adopted, the
alternating system was given up, and the
regular order of Gothic columniation de-
termined for all time. Simultaneously the
device of stilting was introduced, whereby
sharply pointed arches were avoided and
the full thrust of the vault brought to bear
along a single vertical line above the vault
shafts a thing as beautiful as it was me-
chanically perfect, for it resulted in that
warping of the vault surfaces which is one
of the most subtle charms of French Gothic
architecture.
The problem of receiving these concen-
trated thrusts had been partially solved in
Normandy: the old Roman device of huge
masses of masonry, or rather transverse
walls, adopted at Sant' Ambrogio, had been
abandoned, and in his Abbaye aux Hommes
Lanf ranc had substituted the half of a barrel
vault running the length of the aisle and
[n8]
THE EPOCH OF TRANSITION
abutting against the nave wall. This was
effective but illogical, for only a small part
of the buttressing arch received any thrust
whatever. Almost immediately, therefore,
as in the Abbaye des Dames, the intervening
areas were cut away and only the arch at
each pier remained. This of course was a
true flying buttress, but it was still concealed
below the aisle roof, hence the clerestory
was restricted in height to the wall area
of the vault alone. At Noyon, about the
middle of the century, and apparently for
the first time, the abutting arch emerged
into the open air and the flying buttress with
all its possibilities had come into its own.
We have now, you will perceive, nearly
all the elements of the Gothic organism : the
cruciform plan with wide transepts and
deep choir, the vertical order of arcade,
triforium and clerestory, pointed arches,
ribbed and stilted vaults with oblong com-
partments, concentrated loads and thrusts,
direct abutments, with the flying buttress
in posse, and the intervening walls reduced
by half in thickness; articulation expressed
by compound piers and arches, with vault
shafts well grounded from vault to floor,
lofty proportions, complex compositions of
[119]
THE SUBSTANCE OF GOTHIC
light and shade. All this has worked itself
out in the interior of the church; outwardly
little change is apparent, for Gothic growth
was exclusively from within outward, as it
was essentially a logical and an organic
growth. We have, it is true, even at Jumi-
eges, the great west towers, with the other
over the crossing always favoured in Nor-
mandy and therefore in England even to the
end of the Middle Ages, but apart from
such large and general forms the exterior,
even of almost fully developed Gothic struc-
tures, still remains, to all intents and pur-
poses, that of a Norman church.
In the meantime the great architectural
idea of the chevet, or polygonal apse with
its single or double encircling aisle and
radiating chapels, forming as it does the
great structural and artistic glory of the
style, and the point where, intellectually,
all the vivid logic of the French master
builders shows itself at its highest per-
fection, had been slowly evolving after
a curiously entertaining fashion. When
the domical church of Constantinople,
Ravenna, and Aix-la-Chapelle was finally
superseded by the western and more ancient
basilican plan, it was not wholly abandoned,
[120]
THE EPOCH OF TRANSITION
for its possibilities were too great. First
of all, the final form of a domed polygon
surrounded by a vaulted aisle with shallow
projecting bays or apses, was cut in halves
and added to the cross-shaped basilica; then
it was subjected to the process of concen-
tration, articulation, and scientific refine-
ment that was taking place in the remainder
of the fabric, and we obtain the astonishing
sequence: a Roman calidarium, Bosrah,
Ravenna, Aix-la-Chapelle, St. Martin at
Tours, St. Germer de Fly, St. Denis, Char-
tres, Amiens, and Le Mans. A very inter-
esting, evidence of the plausibility of this
theory, not, I think, heretofore noted, is the
apse of the abbey church at Essen, dated
about 1040, which is simply three sides of
Charlemagne's chapel at Aix applied to the
end of a Romanesque basilican church. We
still lack, of course, the Gothic spirit as it
showed itself aesthetically, and without this,
no matter how highly developed may be our
Gothic structural form, we have not the
whole of Gothic, for this is a spirit as well
as an organic system of building. The ef-
fort has been made as I believe, both
unwisely and unsuccessfully to confine
the word " Gothic " exclusively to that
[iar]
THE SUBSTANCE OF GOTHIC
work which is perfect in its structural sys-
tem and its organic form, according to the
highest point reached at any time in these
directions. This mechanistic and even
pedantic method of criticism is of the nine-
teenth century type of analytical and mate-
rialistic mentality, and I doubt if it can
maintain itself much longer. Gothic con-
struction is indeed the most highly articu-
lated, the most vividly intelligent, and the
most scientifically exact ever devised by
man, but it is only a part of Gothic archi-
tecture, which is as well the expression of
an entirely new social and devotional spirit,
engendered by a peculiar, beneficent, and
dynamic energy in the world of the west,
and expressed through new forms of beauty
that have no historic prototypes. The
greatest Gothic monuments are such as
Chartres and Amiens and Rheims, but all
other structures, whether civil or secular,
produced between 1 150 and 1400 under the
influence of Mediaeval culture, by the races
of the north, are equally Gothic, whether
the full structural system is present in all
its integrity, or only indifferently, or even
not at all.
The sequence of development as recorded
[122]
THE EPOCH OF TRANSITION
in existing buildings is approximately this:
Bury, St. Leu d'Esserent, St. Germer de
Fly, St. Denis, after which Gothic is fully,
firmly, and finally developed. The space
of time involved is from 1125 to 1140,-
surely the most astonishing fifteen years in
architectural history. In the nave of Bury,
begun in 1125, we find the pointed arch
used consistently, with ribbed, stilted, and
oblong vaults, all handled clumsily and with
hesitation, but with undoubted conviction.
St. Germer de Fly, begun five years later,
is almost as amazing a portent as was Jumi-
eges for its own time, for it was appar-
ently without a prototype, yet here we find
all the elements of Bury handled with per-
fect assurance, and as well a complete ar-
ticulation of shafting, a chevet very well
worked out, the second story gallery re-
duced to the limits of a true triforium, and
all the loftiness of line and grace of propor-
tions that we associate with perfected
Gothic. Its flying buttresses are still con-
cealed below the triforium roof, therefore
the clerestory is largely blank wall with
small pointed windows confined between
the spring and the crest of the vaults. Out-
wardly the church is still sturdily Norman.
[123]
THE SUBSTANCE OF GOTHIC
Five years later the great Abbot Suger
built his fine new Abbey of St. Denis, leav-
ing us, fortunately, a brilliant and enthusi-
astic account of his aims and his methods.
The church was consecrated in 1140; it
was immediately followed by Sens, Noyon,
Paris, and Laon, and stands, therefore, as
marking the point when the vital new tend-
ency reached its fulfilment and Mediaeval-
ism achieved its perfect form of expression.
Of the original work of Suger only the west
front and the ambulatories of the chevet
remain, for a century later all the rest of
the church was rebuilt in the fully devel-
oped Gothic manner, forming one of the
great examples of the perfected style. From
what remains, however, and from the ad-
mirable old abbot's proud narrative, it is
evident that at last all sense of hesitation
and uncertainty had disappeared; Bury and
St. Germer de Fly took their places as the
last of the Norman mode in which the spirit
of the new Gothic was working hiddenly;
St. Denis itself crossed the dividing line and
became the first of the great sequence of the
monuments of Catholic Christianity that
ended only with the advent of the new
paganism.
[124]
THE EPOCH OF TRANSITION
It was not that any new devices were in-
troduced, for there were none to be dis-
covered ; it was rather that the power that
was working for self-expression at last ac-
quired its adequate master craftsmen who
worked now with confidence and convic-
tion, with a high intelligence irradiated by
a kind of divine inspiration, refining and
perfecting, articulating and co-ordinating
all that a century of devoted and progres-
sive effort had brought to their hands.
Now first the Gothic spirit bores itself
through from within, outward, the last of
the old static Norman is consumed away,
and the great progress begins that was to
find its apotheosis, just an hundred years
later, in the Cathedral of Our Lady of
Rheims, destined to stand in all its unap-
proachable majesty century after century,
while the spirit that had created it died
away amongst men and the new power in
the world worked its will amongst all na-
tions and all peoples; destined at last to be
given into the hands of those who best had
learned the lesson of this new power and
applied its methods, who blasted it with
their own consummate engines of destruc-
tion and left it shattered, scorched, and
[125]
THE SUBSTANCE OF GOTHIC
desecrated, but with its eternal fabric still
intact. Even so, under the same assaults,
the everlasting power that brought it into
being still stands, shattered, scorched, and
desecrated, but, like Rheims, ultimately in-
destructible, and destined again to redemp-
tion and regeneration.
[126]
LECTURE V
THE MEDIAEVAL SYNTHESIS
I HAVE tried in the last two lectures to
show how, first in Lombardy, then in Nor-
mandy, and all within the limits of a cen-
tury, the essential structural elements of a
potential Gothic were being invented or re-
discovered, until at last, under Lanfranc,
the material was assembled and made ready
for that finger-touch of creative vitality that
was to transform a casual assembling into
coherency, and transfigure it with a new
spirit of unexampled power and of beauty
unapproachable. In the same way, as I
have endeavoured to make clear, an identi-
cal process was being followed in civil and
ecclesiastical society. Out of equal dark-
ness came equal light, and this new day
made possible the artistic transformation
that was now to take place. Feudalism had
created a new society made up of human
units linked by the human bonds of per-
sonal attachment and reciprocal duties and
[127]
THE SUBSTANCE OF GOTHIC
privileges. Out of this admirable social
scheme came an added impulse toward the
ideals of service, obedience, loyalty, honour,
chivalry. Monasticism had grown from a
protest into a world-wide agency of service,
rebuilding the ruined fabric of education
and art, creating anew a vast but always
human agency of charity, mercy, and hos-
pitality. The guild system, working on
from self-protecting alliances of traders,
had extended itself to every existing form
of industry and commerce, always, as in
other domains, of human and manageable
scale, until the workman held a position of
self-respect and of independence, with an
assurance of just and certain compensation,
such as he had never held before and has
failed to achieve since. In the south, where
the lingering tradition of a dead imperial-
ism prevented the normal development of
feudalism, the crescent spirit of independ-
ence and co-operation made itself visible
through the free communes or city-states,
where again the basis of association was
human in its scale in place of the vast
material aggregate of force and military
power of the preceding epoch, and of the
vague abstractions of political dogmatism,
[128]
THE MEDIEVAL SYNTHESIS
philosophical theory, and empty shibbo-
leths of that which was to follow.
The ardent and restless spirit of the north
had opened up new lines of pilgrimage and
adventure through Europe, across the Med-
iterranean, into the mysterious fastnesses of
Africa, Arabia, Syria, the Levant, even into
the frozen north of the heathen tribes, and
the wonder of a doubly mysterious Asia.
The crusades had stirred the spirit of Nor-
mandy, Flanders, France, the Rhineland,
England, and opened up new possibilities
of adventure, conquest, treasure, commer-
cial gain, while the paynim principalities
in the south and the decadent empires of
the East were a living incentive to the ex-
panding vigour and the overriding ambi-
tion of the uncontrollable races of the north.
With the humanizing of society came an
identical humanizing of religion and of
philosophy. During the patristic days the
Church had been so busy in determining
in exact form the verbal symbols of essen-
tial dogma, and in beating down one plau-
sible heresy after another, that the natural
process of devotional development had been
held back, and the latent humanism in the
original deposit of the Faith came but
[129]
THE SUBSTANCE OF GOTHIC
slowly into view and operation. For five
centuries, however, the humanizing process
had been going on, and by the opening of
the thirteenth century the Church had
adapted its system of worship to the eternal
and unchangeable demands of the human
soul, until it met these at every point. I
do not mean to say that anything novel in
doctrine was added; it was rather that new
spiritual possibilities were revealing them-
selves through dogmas and practices exist-
ing from the beginning, and that new forms
of devotion grew up to intensify the appeal
of doctrines that dated from the time of the
Apostles themselves. For example, the in-
vocation of the saints and prayers for the
dead are recorded even in the catacombs
and were a part of original Christianity;
now, however, the new impulse of human
and personal relationship took hold of the
ancient doctrines and established a sense of
intimate kinship between the individual on
the one hand and the hierarchy of angels
and archangels, the saints and martyrs, the
dead of every family, on the other. This
new spiritual intimacy served to bring the
divine and the unseen down closer to earth,
while lifting man and his common life into
[130]
THE MEDIAEVAL SYNTHESIS
closer communion with the whole company
of heaven. In the same way the Mass had
been, certainly since the post- Apostolic age,
both Communion and Sacrifice; now, how-
ever, the latter quality was increasingly em-
phasized and the inevitable corollary of the
sacramental presence of Christ in the con-
secrated species resulted, in the time of
Charlemagne, in the clear enunciation of
the doctrine of Transubstantiation, though
the final definition was not to be determined
for many centuries.
An identical process was going on in
philosophy, whereby the aloof and abstruse
orientalism of the Eastern and Alexandrian
schools, and the massive yet precise intel-
lectualism of St. Augustine, were being
fused in a comprehensive sacramentalism
that was at the same time definitive, since
it was an intellectual approximation to an
intelligible exposition of the fundamental
law of all life, and of unusual appeal
through its perfect adaptation to the needs
and desires and aspirations of the human
soul. This singularly human yet equally
exalted philosophy seems to me to find its
full flower in Hugh of St. Victor, with
St. Anselm and St. Bernard as particular
[131]
THE SUBSTANCE OF GOTHIC
exponents of certain of its more limited
aspects.
The dominating influence, then, which
determines and emphasizes Medievalism,
is a very real humanism that is in fact the
antithesis of that fictitious humanism of the
Renaissance which has usurped the name.
It moulds and transmits and fixes in definite
form every thought and action of the time,
and is as fundamental in controlling artistic
development as in establishing the nature
of the religion, the philosophy, the social
system of the Middle Ages. While it re-
sulted in the most perfectly balanced
scheme of life that is of record, it was by
its very nature peculiarly susceptible of
abuse. As the inevitable tendency of mys-
ticism is ever further and further away
from the earth into the impalpable ether,
until Hugh of St. Victor is merged into
St. Bonaventure and so into Hildegarde of
Bingen and Fritz Thauler: as the inevitable
tendency of pure intellectualism is from St.
Thomas Aquinas ever lower and lower
through Calvin and Herbert Spencer to the