The Cathedral

Front matter

1 D K I'C I OF THE

U N I VLR5 ITY Of ILLINOIS

Tom Turner Collection

Prefatory Note

There are those to whom the characters in good fiction are far more real than the men and women whom we encounter in life : nor is this illusion confined to readers alone; it is shared by authors, who see in the children of their brain many of their own features, as their physical peculiarities are reproduced and at times exaggerated in their succeeding generations. To those who were fascinated by “ En Route,’’ Durtal, the hero, became living and true : we rejoice to meet him again, and recognize that his creator takes the same pride in his mental and spiritual development as a parent takes in those of his children, both when they repeat and differ from his own traits.

In leaving Durtal at the close of En Route,” he stood at the parting of the ways, and it was uncertain whether he would drift back to his wallowing in the mire, or pursue the steep path of penance and virtue to the end. It is with a relief from tension and of satisfied hope that in “ The Cathedral ” are no signs of wavering, his change of life continues; he is occasionally wearied with the monotony of a provincial town, but he feels the hand of God is on him, turning his steps towards righteousness, his eyes and thoughts to mediaeval mysticism, to the rapt meditation of the cloister rather than to the more modern Catholicism which is ready to make a pact with the world.

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The dramatis personce are exclusively, besides himself, two priests, and the housekeeper of one of them, and the scene is the Cathedral of Chartres, in which is built and carved and blazoned the whole of mediaeval theology in its completest form, with the smallest possible admixture of extraneous teaching. Here Durtal has settled in order that the great cathedral may reveal its secret to him and to us.

In the study of the manuscript, of stone and glass alone has been needed any “ editing,” any prefatory note.” When ill-health convinced me that it was impossible I should continue the work begun by me in the translation of “ En Route,” I rejoiced that it was to be entrusted to the hands of so able a scholar and so painstaking a student as Mrs. Bell; and I should shrink from criticizing her work. But every branch of learning has its own technical terms, and in the description of Catholic rites knowledge of such technical terms is required. It is therefore solely from the knowledge of these, necessarily possessed by a Catholic, that I have presumed to edit, and sometimes to correct the translator.

Probably few French cathedrals are so well known to the tourist as that of Chartres ; yet in these days it is seldom approached as it is best seen. As it gradually grows upon the traveller from the Dreux high-road, it dominates the plain like a great couchant lion, in whose presence all that is smaller is completely extinguished. And just as the edifice dominates the plain, so does the dedication of the cathedral to Our Lady dominate all the accessory doctrines of the Catholic theology embodied in the building. There are two especial objects of devotion^ Our Lady of the Crypt, and Our Lady of the Pillar; and these are constantly visited by throngs of worshippers. It will be remembered that whereas on almost all Catholic altars some relic of the

IX saints there commemorated is associated with them for the veneration of the Faithful, in the case of all the altars dedicated to Our Lady such relics are impossible. Two saints under the old dispensation, Enoch and Elijah, and only one under the new, St. Mary, were taken to Heaven in their natural bodies. The tradition of the Church alone explains the words spoken of Enoch, “ God took him,” in this sense. The Church alone tells us this of St. Mary, and it is by later gifts and miracles, not by relics, that she has stamped her especial presence in so many spots on earth. Thus the worship is that which is enshrined in the whole Cathedral of Chartres more especially than in any other building in France.

There is a peculiar appropriateness in selecting this greatest of all French cathedrals as the exponent of mediaeval theology. In Italy the Gothic style has never so completely taken the ascendant, but still shows in its buildings the forms of pre-Christian temples, or of Renascence art, when mediaevalism was giving way. In Spain the great cathedrals are less known ; in England, and to a less extent in Germany, the outward signs of mediaevalism have been swept away by the adaptation of the buildings to a later worship. But, beginning with La Beauce and through the whole of Burgundy, the stained glass of the cathedrals, the sculptured portals, the cruciform construction of the churches, set forth the whole Catholic interpretation of Christian doctrine in much the same way. In entering one of these churches, and especially in entering the Cathedral of Chartres, the windows catch the earliest attention. Beginning with these, we are directed first to the mystical meaning of colours, thence to the mystical meaning of sculpture and of architecture.

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Therefore the book resolves itself into a series of dissertations on the Bestiary of Holy Scripture, on church painting, on early pictures, on the more mystical and suffering saints of the Middle Ages, and on such parts of the flora and fauna as have shown themselves most adapted to church decoration.

And although an increasing study of mysticism is to be traced among ourselves, in art, in poetry, in music, in the reaction against what has been called the higher criticism, it may be admitted that the whole tone of “ The Cathedral ” is still less English than that of “ En Route” : none of those questions which are burning among ourselves are even touched in the book. Speaking broadly, the strife between Durtal and the Catholic religion is the struggle between vice and virtue, not between two different modes of serving God. There are, indeed, French Protestants, but their theology is, in fact, Unitarian ; and has no more to do with the life of the French nation than that small community of Protestant Dissenters has to do with our own religious life. The general view of the matter may be summed up in the words of an hotel-keeper in a Burgundian town — Ah, sir, I hope you are not Protestant : there are only three Protestants in this town, and they are all persons of indifferent lives.” If the Church in England is to make converts, it will not be by schemes of ‘‘ corporate reunion,” nor even by the adhesion of many units who are in doubt as to the validity of Anglican Orders, but by the discovery made by men that they can best “ live the life ” through Catholicism, and under the teaching of a living voice. Such see in themselves or in those they are placed to guide, that the only real claimant for authority is the Roman Church, and then most firm and complete in her teaching in the xi

Middle Ages. The sole argument in this country against her demands which affects some of the higher minds among us is the late Dean Church’s “ Spartam nactuses^ hanc exorna,^^ I venture to paraphrase this, “ Would that I had been born an Athenian ; but since I was not, but in a poor, mean and despised city, severed from the great Commonweal of Greece, cut off from her glories, I must make the best of it, and do the best with and for that wherein I am.”

Happy they who, turning like Durtal from the husks which the swine did eat, find no cold German Protestantism sprung from Luther, no Edwardian or Elizabethan compromise, but an unsullied series of grand cathedrals, the greatest of them under Our Lady’s patronage, leading the prodigal in the way of peace.

I believe that the teaching of The Cathedral” will be

found to fall in with the moods of many in these days, who

see, in its mystic side, that aspect of Catholicism which

appeals most to them, and sympathize with its criticism of

the primitive painters and early writers. The saints who

helped Durtal at his new start meet us again here. Saint

Theresa, Saint Lidwine, Saint Maria d’Agreda, and we are

led through their courts to their Queen, the

Pattern of Seraphs, only worthy Ark To bear Her God athwart the floods of time.”

We part from him as he leaves Chartres to become an oblate at the Benedictine Abbey of Solesmes, with the prayer, which concludes the book, as if, indeed, he were a personal friend of our own :

Pray for him ; Our Lady of the Pillar ; Virgin of the Crypt.”

C. Kegan Paul.

February 14M, 1898.

Chapter I

At Chartres, as you turn out of the little market-place, which is swept in all weathers by the surly wind from the flats, a mild air as of a cellar, made heavy by a soft, almost smothered scent of oil, puff’s in your face on entering the solemn gloom of the sheltering forest.

Durtal knew it well, and the delightful moment when he could take breath, still half-stunned by the sudden change from a stinging north wind to a velvety airy caress. At five every morning he left his rooms, and to reach the covert of that strange forest he had to cross the square ; the same figures were always to be seen at the turnings from the same streets ; nuns with bowed heads, leaning forward, the borders of their caps blown back and flapping like wings, the wind whirling in their skirts, which they could hardly hold down ; and shrunken women, in garments they hugged round them, struggling forward with bent shoulders lashed by the gusts.

Never at that hour had he seen anybody walking boldly upright, without straining her neck and bowing her head ; and these scattered women gathered by degrees into two long lines, one of them turning to the left, to vanish under a lighted porch opening to a lower level than the square ; the other going straight on, to be swallowed up in the darkness by an invisible wall.

Closing the procession came a few belated priests, hurrying on, with one hand gathering up the gown that ballooned behind them, and with the other clutching their hats, or snatching at the breviary that was slipping from under one arm, their faces hidden on their breast, to plough through the wind with the back of their neck ; with red ears, eyes blinded with tears, clinging desperately, when it rained, to umbrellas that swayed above them, threatening to lift them from the ground and dragging them in every direction.

The passage had been more than usually stormy this morning ; the squalls that tear across the district of La Beauce, where nothing can check them, had been bellowing for hours ; there had been rain, and the puddles splashed under foot. It was difficult to see, and Durtal had begun to think that he should never succeed in getting past the dim mass of the wall that shut in the square, by pushing open the door behind which lay that weird forest, redolent of the night-lamp and the tomb, and protected from the gale.

He sighed with satisfaction, and followed the wide path that led through the gloom. Though he knew his way, he walked cautiously in this alley, bordered by enormous trunks, their crowns lost in shadow. He could have fancied himself in a hothouse roofed with black glass, for there were flagstones under foot, and no sky could be seen, no breeze could stir overhead. The few stars whose glimmer twinkled from afar belonged to our firmament ; they quivered almost on the ground, and were, in fact, earth-born.

In this obscurity nothing was to be heard but the fall of quiet feet, nothing to be seen but silent shades visible against the twilight like shapes of deeper darkness.

Durtal presently turned into another wide walk crossing that he had left. There he found a bench backed by the trunk of a tree, and on this he leaned, waiting till the Mother should awake, and the sweet interview interrupted yesterday by the close of the day should begin again.

He thought of the Virgin, whose watchful care had so often preserved him from unexpected risk, easy slips, or greater falls. Was not She the bottomless Well of goodness, the Bestower of the gifts of good Patience, the Opener of dry and obdurate hearts ? Was She not, above all, the living and thrice Blessed Mother ?

Bending for ever over the squalid bed of the soul, she washed the sores, dressed the wounds, strengthened the fainting weakness of converts. Through all the ages She was the eternal supplicant, eternally entreated ; at once merciful and thankful ; merciful to the woes She alleviated, and thankful to them too. She was indeed our debtor for our sins, since, but for the wickedness of man, Jesus would never have been born under the corrupt semblance of our image, and She would not have been the immaculate Mother of God. Thus our woe was the first cause of Her joy ; and this supremest good resulting from the very excess of Evil, this touching though superfluous bond, linking us to Her, was indeed the most bewildering of mysteries ; for Her gratitude would seem unneeded, since Her inexhaustible mercy was enough to attach Her to us for ever.

Thenceforth, in Her immense humility. She had at various times condescended to the masses ; She had appeared in the most remote spots, sometimes seeming to rise from the earth, sometimes floating over the abyss, descending on solitary mountain peaks, bringing multitudes to Her feet, and working cures ; then, as if weary of wandering to be adored, She wished — so it had seemed — to fix the worship in one place, and had deserted Her ancient haunts in favour of Lourdes.

That town was the second stage of Her progress through France in the nineteenth century. Her first visit was to La Salette.

This was years ago. On the 19th of September, 1846, the Virgin had appeared to two children on a hill ; it was a Saturday, the day dedicated to Her, which, that year, was a fast day by reason of the Ember week. By another coincidence, this Saturday was the eve of the Festival of Our Lady of . Seven Dolours, and the first vespers were being chanted when Mary appeared as from a shell of glory just above the ground.

And she appeared as Our Lady of Tears in that desert landscape of stubborn rocks and dismal hills. Weeping bitterly. She had uttered reproofs and threats ; and a spring, which never in the memory of man had flowed excepting at the melting of the snows, had never since been dried up.

The fame of this event spread far and wide ; frantic thousands scrambled up fearful paths to a spot so high that trees could not grow there. Caravans of the sick and dying were conveyed, God knows how, across ravines to drink the water ; and maimed limbs recovered, and tumours melted away to the chanting of canticles.

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Then, by degrees, after the sordid debates of a contemptible lawsuit, the reputation of La Salette dwindled to nothing ; pilgrims were few, miracles were less often proclaimed. The Virgin, it would seem, was gone ; She had ceased to care for this spring of piety and these mountains.

At the present day few persons climb to La Salette but the natives of Dauphin^, tourists wandering through the Alps, or invalids following the cure at the neighbouring mineral springs of La Mothe. Conversions and spiritual graces still abound there, but bodily healing there is next to none.

In fact,^^ saidDurtal to himself, the vision at La Salette became famous without its ever being known exactly why. It may be supposed to have grown up as follows : the report, confined at first to the village of Corps at the foot of the mountain, spread first throughout the department, was taken up by the adjacent provinces, filtered over all France, overflowed the frontier, trickled through Europe, and at last crossed the seas to land in the New World which, in its turn, felt the throb, and also came to this wilderness to hail the Virgin.

“ And the circumstances attending these pilgrimages were such as might have daunted the determination of the most persevering. To reach the little inn, perched on high near the church, the lazy rumbling of slow trains must be endured for hours, and constant changes at stations ; days must be spent in the diligence, and nights in breeding-places of fleas at country inns ; and after flaying your back on the cardingcombs of impossible beds, you must rise at daybreak to start on a giddy climb, on foot or riding a mule, up zig-zag bridlepaths above precipices ; and at last, when you are there, there are no fir trees, no beeches, no pastures, no torrents ; nothing — nothing but total solitude, and silence unbroken even by the cry of a bird, for at that height no bird is to be found.

What a scene ! thought Durtal, calling up the memories of a journey he had made with the Abbe Gevresin and his housekeeper, since leaving La Trappe. He remembered the horrors of a spot he had passed between Saint Georges de Commiers and La Mure, and his alarm in the carriage as the train slowly travelled across the abyss. Beneath was darkness increasing in spirals down to the

THE CATHEDRAL S

vasty deeps ; above, as far as the eye could reach, piles of mountains invaded the sky.

The train toiled up, snorting and turning round and round like a top ; then, going into a tunnel, was swallowed by the earth ; it seemed to be pushing the light of day away in front, till it suddenly came out into a clearing full of sunshine ; presently, as if it were retracing its road, it rushed into another burrow, and emerged with the strident yell of a steam whistle and deafening clatter of wheels, to fly up the winding ribbon of road cut in the living rock.

Suddenly the peaks parted, a wide opening brought the train out into broad daylight ; the scene lay clear before them, terrible on all sides.

‘‘ Le Drac ! exclaimed the Abbe Gevresin, pointing to a sort of liquid serpent at the bottom of the precipice, writhing and tossing between rocks in the very jaws of the pit.

For now and again the reptile flung itself up on points of stone that rent it as it passed ; the waters changed as though poisoned by these fangs ; they lost their steely hue, and whitened with foam like a bran bath ; then the Drac hurried on faster, faster, flinging itself into the shadowy gorge ; lingered again on gravelly reaches, wallowing in the sun ; presently it gathered up its scattered rivulets and went on its way, scaly with scum like the iridescent dross on boiling lead, till, far away, the rippling rings spread and vanished, skinned and leaving behind them on the banks a white granulated cuticle of pebbles, a hide of dry sand,

Durtal, as he leaned out of the carriage window, looked straight down into the gulf ; on this narrow way with only one line of rails, the train on one side was close to the towering hewn rock, and on the other was the void. Great God ! if it should run off* the rails ! “ What a hash ! ” thought he.

And what was not less overwhelming than the appalling depth of the abyss was, as he looked up, the sight of the furious, frenzied assault of the peaks. Thus, in that carriage, he was literally between the earth and sky, and the ground over which it was moving was invisible, being covered for its whole width by the body of the train.

On they went, suspended in mid-air at a giddy height, along interminable balconies without parapets ; and below, the cliffs dropped avalanche-like, fell straight, bare, without a patch of vegetation or a tree. In places they looked as if they had been split down by the blows of an axe — huge growths of petrified wood ; in others they seemed sawn through shaley layers of slate.

And all round lay a wide amphitheatre of endless mountains, hiding the heavens, piled one above another, barring the way to the travelling clouds, stopping the onward march of the sky.

Some made a good show with their jagged grey crests, huge masses of oyster shells ; others, with scorched summits, like burnt pyramids of coke, were green half-way up. These bristled with pine woods to the very edge of the precipices, and they were scarred too with white crosses — the high roads, dotted in places with Nuremberg dogs, redroofed hamlets, sheepfolds that seemed on the verge of tumbling headlong, clinging on — how, it was impossible to guess, and flung here and there on patches of green carpet glued on to the steep hill-sides ; while other peaks towered higher still, like vast calcined hay-cocks, with doubtfully dead craters still brooding internal fires, and trailing smoky clouds which, as they blew off, really seemed to be coming out of their summits.

The landscape was ominous ; the sight of it was strangely discomfiting ; perhaps because it impugned the sense of the infinite that lurks within us. The firmament was no more than a detail, cast aside like needless rubbish on the desert peaks of the hills. The abyss was the all-important fact ; it made the sky look small and trivial, substituting the magnificence of its depths for the grandeur of eternal space.

The eye, in fact, turned away with disappointment from the sky, which had lost its infinitude of depth, its immeasurable breadth, for the mountains seemed to touch it, pierce it, and uphold it ; they cut it up, sawing it with the jagged teeth of their pinnacles, showing mere tattered skirts of blue and rags of cloud.

The eye was involuntarily attracted to the ravines, and the head swam at the sight of those >ast pits of blackness. This immensity in the wrong place, stolen from above and cast into the depths, was horrible.

The Abbe had said that the Drac was one of the most formidable torrents in France; at the moment it was dormant, almost dry ; but when the season of snows and storms comes it wakes up and flashes like a tide of silver, hisses and tosses, foams and leaps, and can in an instant swallow up villages and dams.

“ It is hideous,” thought Durtal. That bilious flood must carry fevers with it ; it is accursed and rotten with its soapy foam-flakes, its metallic hues, its scrap of rainbowcolour stranded in the mud.”

Durtal now thought over all these details ; as he closed his eyes he could see the Drac and La Salette.

Ah ! ” thought he, “ they may well be proud of the pilgrims who venture to those desolate regions to pray where the vision actually appeared, for when once they are there they are packed on a little plot of ground no bigger than the Place Saint Sulpice, hemmed in on one side by a church of rough stone daubed with cement of the colour of Valbonnais mustard, and on the other by a graveyard. The horizon is a circle of cones, of dry scoriae, like pumice, or covered with short grass ; above them, the glassy slope of perpetual ice and snow ; to walk on, a scanty growth of grass moth-eaten by sand. In two words, to sum up the scene, it was nature’s scab, the leprosy of the earth.

^‘From the artistic point of view, on this microscopic grand parade, close to the spring whose waters are caught in pipes with taps, three bronze statues stand in different spots. One, a Virgin, in the most preposterous garments, her headgear a sort of pastry-mould, a Mohican’s bonnet, is on her knees weeping, with her face hidden in her hands. Then the same Woman, standing up, her hands ecclesiastically shrouded in her sleeves, looks at the two children to whom she is speaking ; Maximin, with hair curled like a poodle, twirling a cap like a raised pie, in his hand ; Melanie buried in a cap with deep frills and accompanied by a dog like a paper-weight — all in bronze. Finally the same Person, once more alone, standing on tip-toe, her eyes raised to heaven with a melodramatic expression.

‘‘Never has the frightful appetite for the hideous that disgraces the Church in our day been so resolutely displayed as on this spot ; and if the soul suffered in the presence of the obtrusive outrage of this degrading work — perpetrated by one Barreme of Angers and cast in the steam foundries of Le Creusot — tlie body too had something to endure on this plateau under the crushing mass of hills that shut in the view.

And yet it was hither that thousands of sick creatures had had themselves hauled up to face the cruel climate, where in summer the sun burns you to a cinder while, two yards away, in the shade of the church, you are frozen.

The first and greatest miracle accomplished at La Salette was that of bringing such an invasion to this precipitous spot in the. Alps, for everything combines to forbid it.

“ But crowds came there year after year, till Lourdes took possession of them ; for it is since the apparition of the Virgin there that La Salette has fallen into disrepute.

Twelve years after the vision at La Salette, the Virgin showed herself again, not in Dauphine this time, but in the depths of Gascony. After the Mother of Tears, Our Lady of Seven Dolours, it was Our Lady of Smiles, of the Immaculate Conception, the Sovereign Lady of Joy in Glory, who appeared ; and here again it was to a shepherdess that she revealed the existence of a spring that healed diseases.

“ And here it is that consternation begins. Lourdes may be described as the exact opposite to La Salette ; the scenery is magnificent, the hills in the foreground are covered with verdure, the tamed mountains permit access to their heights ; on all sides there are shady avenues, fine trees, living waters, gentle slopes, broad roads devoid of danger and accessible to all ; instead of a wilderness, a town, where every requirement of the sick is provided for. Lourdes may be reached without adventures in warrens of vermin, without enduring nights in country inns, or days of jolting in wretched vehicles, without creeping along the face of a precipice ; and the traveller is at his destination when he gets out of the train.

This town then was so admirably chosen for the resort of crowds, that it did not seem necessary that Providence should intervene with such strong measures to attract them.

“ But God, who forced La Salette on the world without availing Himself of the means of fashionable notoriety, now changed His tactics ; with Lourdes, advertisement appeared on the scene.

“ This it is that confounds the mind : Jesus condescending to make use of the wretched arts of human commerce ; adopting the repulsive tricks which we employ to float a manufacture or a business.

And we wonder whether this may not be the sternest lesson in humility ever given to man, as well as the most vehement reproof hurled at the American abominations of our day — God reduced to lowering Himself once more to our level, to speaking our language, to using our own devices that He may make Himself heard and obeyed ; God no longer even trying to make us understand His purpose through Himself, or to uplift us to that height.

In point of fact, the way in which the Lord set to work to promulgate the mercies peculiar to Lourdes is astounding. To make them known He is no longer content to spread the report of its miracles by word of mouth ; no, and it might be supposed that in His eyes Lourdes is harder to magnify than La Salette — He adopted strong measures from the first. He raised up a man whose book, translated into every language, carried the news of the vision to the most distant lands, and certified the truth of the cures effected at Lourdes.

‘‘To the end that this work should stir up the masses, it was necessary that the writer destined to the task should be a clever organizer, and at the same time a man devoid of individuality of style and of any novel ideas. In a word, what was needed was a man devoid of talent ; and that is quite intelligible, since from the point of view of appreciating art the Catholic public is still a hundred feet beneath the profane public. And our Lord did the thing well ; he selected Henri Lasserre.

“ Consequently the mine exploded as required, rending souls and bringing crowds out on to the road to Lourdes.

“Years went by. The fame of the sanctuary is an established fact. Indisputable cures are effected by supernatural means and certified by clinical authorities, whose good faith and scientific skill are above suspicion. Lourdes has its fill ; and yet, little by little, in the long run, though pilgrims do not cease to flow thither, the commotion about the Grotto is diminishing. It is dying out, if not in the religious world, at any rate in the wider world of the careless or the doubting, who must be convinced. And our