Of these assembled arts, that of stained glass can still be seen in its perfection at Chartres, and the same was true only a few years ago of Reims. Bourges has much, also Troyes and Poitiers, while a few scattered windows are to be found here and there. It was a great art and the only quite new one devised under Christianity. Its glory came in the thirteenth century and lasted well into the fourteenth, when it began to degenerate into the pictorial, so losing its character and most of its beauty. There is no better study of the great glass of the Middle Ages than that in Henry Adams' "Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres." The glory of this unique art has only achieved general recognition during the last twenty years, but the sculpture of the time still lacks due appreciation. At its best it forms one of the great schools of sculpture, not unworthy to stand with that of Greece and that of the early Renaissance. The statues and carvings of Vezelay are pure design, quite without realism, and mingled of Byzantine and Celtic elements; those of Chartres are monumental in their hieratic formalism, but with Senlis, Laon, Reims and Amiens we come to perfectly balanced and competent work, which is at the same time almost Greek in its nobility of mass and line, poignantly human in its tenderness, humour and appeal, and full of the purest and most exalted devotion.

The once omnipresent painting has practically disappeared, except for early work of the eleventh and twelfth centuries in central and southern France, now almost faded away, while the arts of enamel, of the gold-smith, of wood carving, of embroidery and tapestry weaving, hardly fall within the scope of this chapter. It would be a pleasure to take up the great allied arts of music, liturgics and dramatic ceremonial, but these also are beyond the limits of the present consideration and are dealt with elsewhere in this volume; they are mentioned here for the sake of indicating the multiplicity of the arts of the time and the manner in which all were combined by architecture into an united whole.

It is sometimes said that the churches of the Middle Ages were "the Bible of the people." This is true in a way although the book itself was sufficiently available to those who could read. The wealth of art taught more by symbol than by exact representation. Everything was symbolic in the Christian religion and its arts, from the days of the catacombs down to the Reformation. It is well to read Émile Mâle's "Religious Art in France" just to see how this quality penetrated and enlivened everything that was done. Realism and literalism only came in with the sixteenth century, and with their advent the element of poetry disappeared from art, which shortly died when it was bereft of this life-giving breath.

There are two matters connected with Gothic architecture that may be associated with this quality of symbolism, and of late both have caused considerable discussion. It is of course a fact that all Christian architecture, from the Lombards to the Renaissance, scrupulously, and sometimes violently, avoids all mechanical regularity; horizontal lines are seldom parallel, the spaces between columns are not the same, the chancel is frequently diverted several degrees from the axis of the nave, string courses and cornices do not follow horizontal lines but rise and dip in long curves, while even the verticals of the columns and walls slope outward; even the floor is not level but pitches upwards toward the altar. These irregularities have long been known, and Professor Goodyear has been largely instrumental in demonstrating that they are neither the result of carelessness and incapacity nor of the work of time. They are certainly intentional, and the question is raised as to the intent. It seems probable that the Roman building guilds had inherited something of the old Greek principle of "refinements," and that these were handed down to their illiterate successors in the Dark Ages, who misconstrued them and subjected them to extreme distortion. When the Lombards began building in the eleventh century they adhered to this practice, exaggerating it still

more, with the result that their first churches are incredibly irregular in plan and elevation. The good sense of the Norman and the logic of the French put a stop to the practice, but with the latter there was a clear return to a more moderate irregularity, and the reason for this probably was that they were too good artists to endure for a moment the dryness and rigidity of anything approaching the mechanical. In other words they were finding for themselves the secret and the value of the old Greek refinements. With this went probably a consciousness of the fact that this same mechanical exactness would work against good acoustics, so there was a practical as well as an aesthetic reason for the subtle variations that occur in all the best Gothic.

The other point is, whether the Mediaeval builders determined their proportions in accordance with some formulae either mathematical or mystical. That these proportions are marvellously fine is admitted, and the modern mind seeks for some scientific basis, or rather mathematical explanation. As it is easy to prove anything by means of an arbitrary cypher, after the fashion of the Shakespeare-Bacon controversy, so is it equally easy to draw geometrical lines with a triangle and a pair of compasses over a few well-chosen drawings and prove that this architectural cypher also fits. This seems an unnecessary and probably a misleading device. There is some subtle relation between good proportions on the one hand and geometrical figures and mathematical formulae on the other; what probably occurred was that the builders felt this rightness of proportion by a sort of instinct, and that therefore their compositions fit roughly into these mathematical or geometrical conditions, but it is most improbable that the matter was determined in accordance with formulated and standardized laws. The great results achieved in the architecture of the Middle Ages are due to experiment and to native instinct, not to the application of those mechanical methods which are the product of the last century.

IX. THE LAST OF FRENCH GOTHIC

The crest of Mediaeval civilization and Mediaeval art came during the last quarter of the thirteenth century, and then the curve began to decline. The fall of Jerusalem in 1305, the capture of the Papacy by the French crown and the exile of the Popes at Avignon in 1309 were blows from which society could hardly recover, while the opening of the Hundred Years' War between England and France, in 1328, brought in an era of catastrophe. For a century Christian art in France declined, but in the midst of wide desolation something new appeared without warning, and almost at the very moment when Ste. Jeanne d'Arc was born, who was herself to save France for another period. Flamboyant Gothic begins with Pierre de Craon's Church of Notre-Dame-de-l'Epine near Reims, dating from 1418, and continues to the church at Brou about a century later, and includes many small, exquisite churches such as Caudebec and Saint-Maclou, Rouen, towers like that of the west front of the cathedral in the same city, and more chapels and porches than one could name. In the very midst of terror and misery a whole people turned to beauty as a sort of saving grace. The style is this; sheer beauty, rioting in exuberance and the most consummate craftsmanship. It is not really a style at all but a wonderful scheme of decoration. After the expulsion of the English, France recovered rapidly, and while religion declined, wealth enormously increased through revived industry and commerce. No more great churches were built, but secular architecture made great strides, filling the towns with the fanciful, high-gabled, elaborately carved and painted houses of the wealthy burghers, and the countryside with endless châteaux and villas of the most varied, picturesque and even fantastic design. The house of Jacques Coeur in Bourges, one of the first of the great bankers and financiers, is a good example of the great town-house, while Eu, Chateaudun and Chénonceaux are types of the splendid castles of the nobles.

This was also a period of brilliant advance for all the

other arts, particularly that of the workers in metals, the wood carvers and the weavers of tapestry. Throughout the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries this latter art went on from one triumph to another, though the most perfect of the work was produced in Flanders. It was now that painting became modern and secular, and the true French school came into existence. Constantly the new influence of the Renaissance out of Italy is permeating architecture and all the other arts, sometimes with results that are both bizarre and entertaining. Under Francis I there is a brief period when the old Gothic and the new classic merge in a certain unity, as in Saint-Jacques, Dieppe, and with the accession of Henry IV in 1589, the Renaissance assumes full control.

Before this, however, there came the last rapturous outburst in the shape of the Cathedral of Beauvais. In conception and intent it was the most superb and stupendous church in Christendom; taller than Amiens by far, more slender and graceful than Bourges, richer in design and ornament than Reims. It was a monument of sublime aspiration and of an almost insolent self-confidence. From the time of the Abbot of Saint-Denis men had been striving to express the inexpressible, now they determined to accomplish the impossible. The choir, crossing and transepts rose to dizzy heights in the air, reinforced by buttresses that were slim towers, carved and ornamented like a piece of jewelry, and with vaults almost invisible supported by slim columns like lily stems. No sooner was the wonder accomplished than it fell down, and was promptly rebuilt with added columns and reinforcements, and a spire over the crossing five hundred feet high. Then this also collapsed, and the end had come. The central tower was never rebuilt, the vast nave never even begun, and so the fragment stands, a monument to an ambition that o'erleaped itself, but to an aspiration that could disregard material things altogether to its own undoing in the end.

It is a far cry from this faery imagining of the North to the