Cathedrals and Cloisters of the South of France, Volume 1

o

UTH OF

e the immensity of this "great Sea" to the ancients. To Virgil the adventures of the "pious ?neas" were truly heroic. The western shores of the Mediterranean were then the "end of the earth," and even during the first centuries of our own era, he who ventured outside the Straits of Gibralta

rful. Legend tells that adventurous Ph?nicians and Greeks discovered the French coasts, that N?mes was founded by a Tyrian Hercules, and Marseilles, about 600 B.C., by a Ph?nician trader who married a chief's daughter and settled at the mouth of the Rhone. But these early settlements were merely

ollection of mud huts, which, from its strategic position, he elevated into a camp. The two following centuries, the height of Roman dominion in France, accentuated these differences. The North was governed by the Romans, never assimilated nor civilised by them. The South eagerly absorbed all the culture of the Imperial City; her religions and her pleasures, her beautiful Temples and great Amphitheatres, finally her morals

THE INVULNERAB

fellow-believers in Rome, to hide in subterranean caves and crypts, to endure, to persist, and finally to conquer. In the III and IV centuries many of the great Bishoprics were f

o-Romans were artistic, literary, idle, and luxurious. They fell, first to milder but heretical foes; then to the fierce but orthodox Frank; and the story of succeeding years was a chronicle of wars. Like a great swarm of locusts, the Saracens-conquerors from India to Spain-came upon the South.

he had returned a third time to the South, not as a deliverer, but for pure love of conquest; and by dismantling N?mes, destroying the maritime cities of M

table than their kings-grew to be the real lords of their several domains. History speaks of France from Clovis to the Revolution as a kingdom; but even later than the First Crusade the kingdom lay somewhere between Paris and Lyons; the Royal Domain, not France as we

e her the greatest power of the country. After the decline of Roman culture the Church was the one intellectual, almost peaceful, and totally irresistible force. The great lords scorned learning. An Abbot, quaintly voicing the Church's belief, said that "every letter writ on paper is a sword thrust in the devil's side." When there was cessation of war, the occupation of men, from Clovis' time throughout Medi?valism, was gone. They could not read; they could not write; the joy of hunti

ore than the usual investigation. Even in its small place in the "Cathedrals and Cloist

RLY MARITIME CATHED

forts to systematically and surely establish Christianity, to have founded the first French Bishoprics. This is tradition. But even the history of the II century tells of a venerable, martyred Bishop of Lyons, a disciple of that Polycarp who knew Saint John; and in the III centur

diate. Devotional excesses were less common in the temperate climate of France than under the exciting oriental sun, yet that most bizarre of Eastern fanatics, the "Pillar Saint," had at least one disciple in Gaul. He-the good Brother Wulfailich-began the life of sanctity by climbing a column near Trèves, and prepared himself to stand on it, barefooted, through winter and summer, till, presumably, angels should bear him triumphantly to heaven. Bu

ruth. They were in fact sometimes unfriendly; and more often than not mutually suspicious. For the great Abbot inevitably lived in a Bishop's See; and with human tempers beneath their churchly garb, Abbot and Bishop could not always agree. N

. Into this disorder came the great and holy Benedict, the "learnedly ignorant, the wisely unlearned," the true organiser of Western Monachism. Under his wise "Rules" the Abbey of the VI century was transformed. It became "not only a place of prayer and meditation, but a refuge against barbarism in all its forms. And this home of books and knowledge had departments of all kinds, and its dependencies formed what we would call to-day a '

tecture of France. As their strength grew, their respective churches were built

roduced. The hemicycle became the apse; the gallery, a clerestory; the hall, a central nave. Here the paraphernalia of the new Church were installed. The altar stood in the apse; and between it and the nave, on either side, a pulpit or reading-desk was placed. Bishop and priests sat around the altar, the people in the nave. This disposition of clergy, people, and the furniture of the sacred office is essentially that of the Cathedral of to-day. There were however many amplifications of the first type. The basilica form, T, was enlarged to that of a cross; and increasingly beautiful architectural forms were evolved. Among the first was the tower of the early Itali

diterranean were seats of Bishoprics, we cannot now see all the successive steps of the church architecture of the South. The main e

EARLIER STYLE

light, the ecstasy of worshippers who seemed "to breathe the air of Paradise." And Saint Gregory's is the religious, uncritical spirit of his day, whose interest was in ecclesiastical establishment rather than ecclesiastical architecture. Churches there were in numbers; but they were not architectural achievements. Their building was like the planting of the flag; they were new outposts, signs of an advance of the Faith. With this missionary spirit in the Church, with priests still engaged

d fires of a siege, they were often destroyed by lightning, or decayed by years; and some of the f

ead of devastating their own and their neighbour's country, Christian armies were devastating the Holy Land; doing to the Infidel in the name of their religion what he, in the name of his, had formerly done to them. The capture of Jerusalem had triumphantly en

ligion for the general magnificence of the effort. Among these was communal pride,

ght conception of the Cathedral's place in the living interest of the Middle Ages. For the Bishop's church was in every sense a popular church. The Abbey was built primarily for its monks, and the Abbey-church for their meditation and worship. The French Cathedral was the people's, it was built by their money, not money from an Abbey-coffer. It did not stand, as the Cathedral of England, majestic and apar

LATER STYLE."-R

roads, but even streets were unsafe at night; and after the sun had set he who had gone about freely and carelessly during the day, remained at home or ventured out with much caution. When armies camped about her walls, the city was doubtless much occupied with outside happenings. But when the camp broke up and war was far away, her shoemaker made his shoes, her goldsmith, fine chains and trinkets, her merc

bonne? Who can tell even the name of him who planned the sombre, battlemented walls of Agde, or of that great man who first saw in poetic vision the delicate choir of Saint-Nazaire in Carcassonne? Artists have a well-preserved personality,-cathedral-builders, none. Robert of Luzarches who conceived the "Parthenon of all Gothic architecture," and the man who

OF SAINT-NAZAIRE."-C

Strange as it may seem none of these have had so powerful an influence as the invention of printing. The first printing-press was made in the middle of the XV century,-after the conception of the great Cathedrals. In an earlier age, when the greates

that would do credit to the most ardent theological student. At N?mes, by no means the richest church in carvings, there are besides the Last Judgment and the reward of the Evil and the Righteous,-which even a superficial Christian should know,-many of the stories of the Book of Genesis. At Arles, there is the Dream of Jacob, the Dream of Joseph, the Annunciation,

e, her evolution of a transplanted style, and long knew no other. She had grown accustomed to give northward,-not to receive; and it was the reign of Saint Louis before she began to assimilate the architectural ideas of the Isle de France and to build in the Gothic

rison is idle." Who shall decide between the fir-trees and the olives-between the beautiful order of a northern forest and the strange, astounding luxuriance of the southern tangle? Which is the better choice-the well-told tale of the

THE SOUTH."-E