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Then the native soil, that which the peoples knew no longer, their roots having been torn from it in every generation by some human tempest—the native soil rose to the heart of its races. At the same time, the profound movement which cast the mystic and miserable Occident upon the rich Orient, sent flowing back upon the Occident the life of wonderful lands, of other faiths, of other legends, of other customs, and the powerful, confused sensation of a material world and a world of the soul broadening while changing in appearances, and of a universe that would not be contained within the limits of revealed religion.
Then the native soil, that which the peoples knew no longer, their roots having been torn from it in every generation by some human tempest—the native soil rose to the heart of its races. At the same time, the profound movement which cast the mystic and miserable Occident upon the rich Orient, sent flowing back upon the Occident the life of wonderful lands, of other faiths, of other legends, of other customs, and the powerful, confused sensation of a material world and a world of the soul broadening while changing in appearances, and of a universe that would not be contained within the limits of revealed religion.
The
earth quivers with pride. Almost at the same hour, appear the Republic of
Florence and the Universities of Palermo, of Bologna, of Paris. In the very
bosom of the Church there are born spirits more religious than the Church, and
they subject dogma to a courageous examination. Abelard, the Christian, denies
original sin, contests the divinity of Jesus, exalts once more the dignity of
the senses, and tries to establish—from antiquity to the Middle Ages, by the
impartial study of ancient philosophy and of the doctrine of the fathers—the
unity of the human spirit. Four years after his death, his disciple Arnaldo da
Brescia proclaims the Republic in Rome. Such a life animates men's hearts,
which Catholicism, carried along with it, discusses, interprets, criticizes—and
the dead letter recoils before the living spirit. For the first and the last
time in its history, Catholicism follows that profound movement which, from
time to time, reveals to a privileged people the conquests it has made during
its silence. At the hour when it looks into itself to observe the rising flood
of life, it does not perceive what is happening in the strongest cities of
northern France. Sometimes supported by the monarchy that feels them to be a
bulwark against the lords. Le Mans first, and Cambrai, then Noyon, Laon, Sens,
Amiens, Soissons, Rheims, and Beauvais transform themselves into free communes
by the refusal to pay taxes, by proscriptions, and by insurrection, sword in
hand. Those were the days when the cadavers of bishops were dragged through the
streets.
It
matters little that the incentive of the movement toward the commune was the
material interest of the people. Opposed to the spirit of the Christianity of
the Councils, which made obedience the fundamental principle, the spirit of
France, which, by way of the Renaissance and the Encyclopaedia, was to reach
the Revolution—the spirit of France revealed itself in this movement with a
youth and a strength that it never again possessed. For two hundred years it
gave to the cities of the Ile-de-France, of Picardy, and of Champagne, a richly
flourishing civilization, confused in its appearances, but of an inner rhythm
so powerful that it constrained feudalism to take refuge in the country, where
it brought about the Jacquerie two or three centuries later, and—under pretext
of exterminating heresy—to fall upon the cities of the south, whose culture and
growing free spirit it crushed. This was the terrible ransom of the liberty of
the north. The foci of energy were still too scattered on our soil, the
antagonism among the provinces was too sharp for the people to be able to feel
solidarity in itself everywhere and in a co-ordinated effort to overthrow the
political powers which it still needed to protect itself against the enemy from
without.
Filled
with the eager life that had been restrained for so long a time the French
Commune assigned to each person the work for which he was best fitted. It was
an association of strong corporations representing every stratum of society,
wherein individual temperaments obeyed no other rules than those of the
spontaneous harmony we see in the woods—made up of a hundred thousand trees
which plunge into the same soil, are watered by the same rains and fertilized
by the same winds. The Commune entered history with a power that gives it that
character of necessity which we now recognize as the "Greek miracle"
and the "Jewish miracle." The art, formidable and one that expressed
it, was born with it in France, and died with it there. It was the French soul
delivered into its own keeping for the first and the last time. The peoples
whom it penetrated with its vitalizing force could accept it and adapt it to
their needs—they could not touch its inner principle without, at the same time,
ruining its national and social significance. Between the Vosges, the English
Channel, and the Loire it was really life, order, truth. It was the barn and
the farm and the house of the cities which silhouetted the lacework of its
carving and its pinnacles against the sky, the narrow house of earth and of
wood bordering the round-backed bridges and the tortuous lanes. It was the
thick wall that bit into the rock, the high wall as clear-cut as consciousness,
the haughty refuge that dominated the sea, the egoistic abbey where slow lives
wore away, to the rhythm of the hours of the church services. It was the little
country church around which a few huts were gathered at the foot of the curtain
wall under the dungeon that, for ten generations of men, prevented the long and
fertile contact of those who lived in its shadow with those whom it confined.
It was the great cathedral. It was strength, it was the dream and the need, the
belly, the heart, and the armor. The same spontaneous harmony was everywhere,
issuing from the desire of the people and burning out at the same time that it
did. The crenelated towers, proclaimed, to be sure, in the face of the
productive commune, the apparently antagonistic principle of the right of
conquest. But with it they proclaimed the same principle of life: they were
built by the master mason who directed the work of the cathedral. And the
cathedral was born with the communes, grew during their time of maturity,
covered itself with statues and stained glass, and then languished and ceased
to grow when they declined and died. Noyon, Soissons, Laon, Rheims, Amiens,
Sens, Beauvais—wherever we find a great commune the great cathedral appears,
vast and bold in the proportion that the commune is well armed and well
established, and in proportion to the vitality of the communal spirit.
The
cities of France, during two centuries of relative peace, had torn down their
walls. Their houses spread all along the rivers and the roads; the neighboring
forests were cleared away. In observing the new organs that grew little by little
from the re-formed social body—to build dwellings, to pave the streets and
stretch chains there, to bring vegetables and wood from the country, to kill
animals and shear them, to tan leather and forge iron—men saw that their common
interests in these activities increased their strength. The concentration of
the social forces made possible the birth of that wonderful hope which is born
spontaneously in an organism, when all its elements harmonize in the mind which
is directed toward a practical purpose that lies within reach. All the guilds
together felt that from their instinct there was germinating an ever-growing
imperious desire which, for its satisfaction, demanded the creation of a
central organ that should summarize the effort whose power and necessity were
expressed in the ensemble of the Commune. The church of the clergy was too
narrow and too dark, the crowd that was rising with the sound of a sea begged
for a church of its own; it felt in itself the courage and the knowledge
necessary to build that church to its own stature. Its desire was to have the
whole great work of building pass, with the material and the moral life, from
the hands of the cloistered monk into those of the living people. No longer
should the poor folk who lived in the shadow of the monasteries enter in fear
at the hour of the service to hear the voice of the Church in the darkness of
the low vault. The Church should be the common house, the storehouse of
abundance, the labor exchange, and the popular theater; it should be the
sonorous and luminous house which the flood of mankind could invade at any
hour, a great vessel, capable of containing the whole city, the ark filled with
tumult on market days, with dances on feast days, with the sound of the tocsin
on the days of revolt, with singing on church days, with the voice of the
people on all days. [The greater part of the ideas expressed in this chapter
have already been defended with profound logic and authority by Viollet-le-Duc
in his Dictionnaire d'Architecture.
It must be said, however, that his writing suffers from an excess of laical
narrowness.]
Some of
these great temples, to be sure, spring from the pavement amid the silence of
the crowds—in Paris, in Bourges, in Chartres, where the communal spirit did not
conquer. But Bourges is a city royal and under the sword of the king; its
workers, enriched by the court, escaped the power of the feudal lord. Without
anxiety or remorse, the cathedral of Bourges spread out the holiday splendor of
its porticos at the base of its enormous, irregular mass. In Paris, also a city
royal, Notre Dame covers itself with statues and magnifies the light of the day
by the rose windows of its transepts at the moment when the citizens and the
merchants strive for freedom. At Chartres, whether the vision of the pure
façade and the spire dominates us or whether, on passing through the nave, we
are gripped by the sensation of poignant mystery, we know well that we are in
the presence of an obscure tragedy of the heart. The prodigious harmony has something
disenchanted about it, something in which one divines the torment of an
imprisoned conscience. How could Roman austerity tolerate in its shadow the
radiance, given forth by the sensuous glory of the race of statues which guards
the enigma of the nave? Here theocratic will clashes with popular desire
without either one becoming aware of it, and from the unconscious conflict
there spurts up an invisible flame—the dull, mystical, agonizing beauty of a
great idea that contains the secret of a world and cannot formulate itself.
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