[TRANSLATOR’S
NOTE.—The following lines from the Encyclopaedia
Britannica will explain M. Faure's preference for the words
"ogive" and "ogival" as against the more common but less
precise word "Gothic," in speaking of the architecture dealt with in
this chapter and the next.
"A
very great step in advance was made by the invention or application of diagonal
ribs under the intersection of the plain groined vault. This association of
strengthening ribs in a cross form to each bay of the structure forms the
ogive, the characteristic form from which the alternative name of Gothic,
'ogival,' has been derived. . . The word 'Gothic' was applied by Italian
writers of the Renaissance to buildings later than Roman. What we now call
'Gothic' the same writers called 'Modern.' Later the word came to mean the art
which filled the whole interval between the Roman period and the Renaissance,
and then, last of all, when the Byzantine and Romanesque forms were defined,
Gothic became the art which intervened between the Romanesque era and the
Renaissance."]
View the scanned original illustrations
View the scanned original illustrations
I
THE
Semitic spirit, at the decline of the old world, tried to conquer Europe
through the apostles of Christ, as it was to take possession of western Asia
and of Africa through the knights of Islam. But through the desert, the bare
sky, and life without movement the religion of Mohammed remained near to its
sources. It could easily retain its original form and spiritualize everything,
even to its expression in plastics. Europe offered to the Jewish idea an
outline less suited to it. The contact with the cultivated land, with the
woods, with the running waters, with the clouds, and with mobile and living
form, was to impose on the religion of Saint Paul a sensuous and concrete form
which turned the idea from its original direction, little by little, and was to
bring the peoples of the Occident back to the course of their natural destiny.
It is
true that the impress had been made. The Jewish apostolate, through the power
for penetration which it derived from its disinterested faith, carried with it
a disappointing dualism, but at the same time it peopled the inner solitude of
the masses who had been forgotten by the civilizations of the past. Its
pitiless insistence on justice fortified the social instinct in them. And it is
thanks to this that the Greek spirit and the Semitic spirit slowly brought
about in the crucible of the Occident an accord of which Aeschylus had the
presentiment and for which Jesus had the desire.
Had
Christianity remained as Saint Paul desired it and as the fathers of the Church
defined it, it must needs have turned its back upon the plastic interpretations
of the ideas which it introduced. But as it wished to live, it obeyed the law
which compels us to give to our emotions the form of the things that we see. In
Rome, while it was groping in the shadow, trying to tear its doctrine from the
confused mass of the old myths, graven and painted figures were appearing, from
the first century onward, upon the walls of the Catacombs. They announced new
gods, to be sure, but their form remained pagan, even Greek, most often, for it
was the Oriental slave who propagated the religion of Galilee in Rome. Grown
clumsy in the hands of the poor people, the art which, above the street level,
builds thermae and amphitheaters, which covers villas with frescoes and gardens
with statues, hesitates in the darkness underground. The soul of the people
will not be silent until the day when official Christianity emerges from
beneath the soil to take possession of the Roman basilicas and decorate them
with pompous emblems. It will require ten centuries of seclusion before it
finds its real expression and compels the upper classes to return to the deeper
life and to embrace the hope which has been set free.
The
organization of the new theocracy, the repeated invasions of the barbarians,
hunger, torpor, and the frightful misery of the world between the fall of the
Empire and the time of the Crusades, did not permit any people of western
Europe to take root in its soil. In return, although every human tide carried
away the new cities built on the newly made ruins, the tribes descending from
the north succumbed, little by little, to the domination of the moral unity
inherent in the Christian idea for which the trappings of the ancient
civilizations offered an imposing framework. Over the heads of the peoples in
their unhappiness, the instinct of the military chiefs, who had rallied to the
letter of organized Christianity, brings them into alliance with the higher
clergy, whose spirit, through contact with the warrior class, becomes more and
more harsh. When Gregory the Great, some years after Justinian, ordered the
destruction of what remained of the old libraries and of the temple of the
ancient gods, he consecrated the accord of Rome with the barbarians. The soul
of antiquity was dead, indeed. The monarchies of the Orient gather up its last
echoes, the monasteries stir up its dust.
The
religious communities had remained, up to the Crusades, the only isles of light
in darkened Europe. The cloistered luxury of a chosen few, a hothouse
civilization, was the representative of sixty centuries of effort, of
sensibility, of living realizations. Thebes, Memphis, Babylon, Athens, Rome,
and Alexandria were contained within the four walls of a monastery, in old
manuscripts thumbed by the hard men who opposed the necessary counterpoise of
the Rule, to the frightful impulses of a world that had fallen back to the primitive
state. But it was around these walls, in these out-of-the-way valleys, away
from the great highways which saw the massacres that, here and there, the
people of the countryside were assembling to shape the future. The north of
Gaul during the Merovingian period had no other centers of activity in the
chaos of manners, races, and languages that hovered over this agony of the
burning cities and the ruined harvests.
In the
south, on the contrary, tradition was still profoundly alive. The aqueducts, the
arenas, the thermae, and the temples were still erect in the landscape that is
silvered by the forests of olive trees. The amphitheaters still opened their
pure curve to the light. The sculptured sarcophagi were in their accustomed
place, bordering the roads shaded by the plane trees that are whitened by
winter when it despoils them of their leaves and that remain white under the
dust of summer. On this burnt earth of southern France, which outlines itself
against the sky with the sure lines that one finds again beside the bays of
Greece, Gallo-Roman art united quite naturally the positivism of Rome, Hellenic
elegance, and the fresh vitality of the Gauls. It declined but little, if at
all, upon the passage of the Arabs, who were adopted by this burning soil.
Nothing could arrest its fever. Under its violent sun, the blood of nomadic
Asia mingled with that of Greco-Latin Gaul. It was a strange, cruel, perverse
world, but one of intense, irrepressible life; its ideal was one of equality
and it was freer and more extensive than the remainder of France when the
division of the empire of Charlemagne had separated it from the north, which
was beginning to discuss its problem of Frankish or Norman domination.
When an
orgy of love and blood craves the excitement that results from the nervous
tension of the higher culture, when morbid sensuality and exasperated
intelligence arise from the same ground, the lightning that flashes from their
meeting sets fires burning, and their flame leaps high into the air, fed by all
the winds that blow, by the dust they bring, and by the debris of green wood
and dead wood alike which they hurl into the blaze together. A hybrid and
convulsive art emerges from the earth, a trifle frail, but so glowing in its
intensity that its onrush leaves a groove that cannot be effaced. The trail of
fire passed over Provence, surrounded Toulouse, and ascended to the plateau of
central France. The antique columns were set up again round the nervous and
clumsy bas-reliefs that were painfully inscribed within the rigid curve of the
portals. Byzantium and Islam deposited their ferment and their spark in the
heart of the material that still retained its memory of the Romans; and the
Crusades brought back to the stones, stirring in their new animation, a disordered
tribute of memories of Greece and the Syrian world, and, with these, the more
distant echo of Persia and India. When the Clunisians set to work upon the
stones, about the eleventh century, and erected them according to Norman and
Scandinavian ideas, which we see also in the heavy jewels that bear the trace
of the oldest traditions of Asia, the great Romanesque style crystallized
suddenly, to become, in the hands of the monks, the purest architectural
expression of organized Christianity.
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