Ch. 7 - Roses and Apses - Page 2

degradation. Royalty and
feudality spent their money rather on arms and clothes. The Church
alone was universal patron, and the Virgin was the dictator of
taste.

With the Virgin's taste, during her regency, critics never find
fault. One cannot know its whole magnificence, but one can accept it
as a matter of faith and trust, as one accepts all her other
miracles without cavilling over small details of fact. The period of
eighteenth-century scepticism about such matters and the bourgeois
taste of Voltaire and Diderot have long since passed, with the
advent of a scientific taste still more miraculous; the whole world
of the Virgin's art, catalogued in the "Dictionnaire du Mobilier
Francais" in six volumes by Viollet-le-Duc; narrated as history by
M. Labarte, M. Molinier, M. Paul Lacroix; catalogued in museums by
M. du Sommerard and a score of others, in works almost as costly as
the subjects,--all the vast variety of bric-a-brac, useful or
ornamental, belonging to the Church, increased enormously by the
insatiable, universal, private demands for imagery, in ivory, wood,
metal, stone, for every room in every house, or hung about every
neck, or stuck on every hat, made a market such as artists never
knew before or since, and such as instantly explains to the
practical American not only the reason for the Church's tenacity of
life, but also the inducements for its plunder. The Virgin
especially required all the resources of art, and the highest. Notre
Dame of Chartres would have laughed at Notre Dame of Paris if she
had detected an economy in her robes; Notre Dame of Rheims or Rouen
would have derided Notre Dame of Amiens if she had shown a feminine,
domestic, maternal turn toward cheapness. The Virgin was never
cheap. Her great ceremonies were as splendid as her rank of Queen in
Heaven and on Earth required; and as her procession wound its way
along the aisles, through the crowd of her subjects, up to the high
altar, it was impossible then, and not altogether easy now, to
resist the rapture of her radiant presence. Many a young person, and
now and then one who is not in first youth, witnessing the sight in
the religious atmosphere of such a church as this, without a
suspicion of susceptibility, has suddenly seen what Paul saw on the
road to Damascus, and has fallen on his face with the crowd,
grovelling at the foot of the Cross, which, for the first time in
his life, he feels.

If you want to know what churches were made for, come down here on
some great festival of the Virgin, and give yourself up to it; but
come alone! That kind of knowledge cannot be taught and can seldom
be shared. We are not now seeking religion; indeed, true religion
generally comes unsought. We are trying only