Ch. 7 - Roses and Apses

Like all great churches, that are not mere storehouses of theology,
Chartres expressed, besides whatever else it meant, an emotion, the
deepest man ever felt,--the struggle of his own littleness to grasp
the infinite. You may, if you like, figure in it a mathematic
formula of infinity,--the broken arch, our finite idea of space; the
spire, pointing, with its converging lines, to unity beyond space;
the sleepless, restless thrust of the vaults, telling the
unsatisfied, incomplete, overstrained effort of man to rival the
energy, intelligence, and purpose of God. Thomas Aquinas and the
schoolmen tried to put it in words, but their Church is another
chapter. In act, all man's work ends there;--mathematics, physics,
chemistry, dynamics, optics, every sort of machinery science may
invent,--to this favour come at last, as religion and philosophy did
before science was born. All that the centuries can do is to express
the idea differently:--a miracle or a dynamo; a dome or a coal-pit;
a cathedral or a world's fair; and sometimes to confuse the two
expressions together. The world's fair tends more and more
vigorously to express the thought of infinite energy; the great
cathedrals of the Middle Ages always reflected the industries and
interests of a world's fair. Chartres showed it less than Laon or
Paris, for Chartres was never a manufacturing town, but a shrine,
such as Lourdes, where the Virgin was known to have done miracles,
and had been seen in person; but still the shrine turned itself into
a market and created valuable industries. Indeed, this was the chief
objection which Saint Paul made to Ephesus and Saint Bernard to the
cathedrals. They were in some ways more industrial than religious.
The mere masonry and structure made a vast market for labour; the
fixed metalwork and woodwork were another; but the decoration was by
far the greatest. The wood-carving, the glass windows, the
sculpture, inside and out, were done mostly in workshops on the
spot, but besides these fixed objects, precious works of the highest
perfection filled the church treasuries. Their money value was great
then; it is greater now. No world's fair is likely to do better to-
day. After five hundred years of spoliation, these objects fill
museums still, and are bought with avidity at every auction, at
prices continually rising and quality steadily falling, until a bit
of twelfth-century glass would be a trouvaille like an emerald; a
tapestry earlier than 1600 is not for mere tourists to hope; an
enamel, a missal, a crystal, a cup, an embroidery of the Middle Ages
belongs only to our betters, and almost invariably, if not to the
State, to the rich Jews, whose instinctive taste has seized the
whole field of art which rested on their