ruling, taxing, and administering justice with an order and method that had not been seen in the West since Justinian. In war, that important subdivision of politics, they could combine the fire power of infantry with the shock of mail-clad cavalry.1 In military engineering they could make fast the lands they had won by great square towers of masonry that stand to this day. Besides castles, they built great churches, and in their building they rediscovered height, the power of throwing up great stone vaults, and the effect of majesty. Meanwhile the Italians were building fine churches too. Sant’ Ambrogio, in Milan (to name only one that comes to mind), can stand comparison with any Norman church. In everything this rudely powerful time stood erect and wrought as European men had not wrought for half a thousand years. The Dark Ages had gone; the Middle Ages had begun.
What was the spirit of these men in their new power? We can try to feel it in their buildings and writings, but the answers to such questions are elusive and as baffling as any that the human mind can put to the sphynx of history. It is a paradox that this time, with its furious energy and rage of creation, seems to have left us in its buildings not only an expression of strength, but also of a self-reliant completeness and repose. The plain round arches, the heavy pillars, the decoration at once rude and severe, have a sense of restraint, of balance and solidity about them that the Gothic never has. They seem akin to the “Song of Roland” with its
“Pagans are wrong and Christians are right,”
as unfaltering as the swing of a great sword. No breath of doubt or uncertainty as to the faith has come down to us from this eleventh century. At the same time, it was a brutal age of strong appetites and passions. Energy and not refinement is its note; war and not love. The imagination of the time, when it set itself to carving stone, played often with wild and impossible monsters that throw into strong relief the strict, clear lines of the architecture. There is extravagance in it too, for it is Roland’s pride in refusing to sound his horn in time to summon help that brings him and the peers to their death.
Meanwhile art and scholarship remained monastic. The architects were monks and the cathedrals belonged to monks and priests more than to the layman. Of laymen the almost universal type is the warrior.
In 1099, just before the turn of the century, the Crusaders returned. They had come together from all over Europe, and together had seen the world and done their great deeds. Their homecoming issues in a new time, the twelfth century.
I have spoken of the Crusade as a tidal wave. The expression is just so far as it suggests its enormous effort. It is also just in that it was a breaker down of barriers, not only the barriers between the divisions of Christendom, which it united in a common effort, but also the barrier between Europe and the East. But the expression of a tidal wave is incorrect in suggesting a levelling and destructive force. For what followed was the continuation and enlargement of what the Norman-Hilde-brandine eleventh century had done, with greater riches, complexity and refinement. There appear, also, new forces, but there is no conscious break with the immediate past.
In obedience to the returning Crusaders’ new sense of power came increase of commerce and intercommunication, of population and of wealth. Thus government and administration worthy of the name, which had been the creation of the eleventh century, continue to grow stronger and more centralized. But to them is added a new thing, the knowledge of the Roman law, with its large reasoning and its great sense of the State.
So also building was continued, and the bases of design do not change, but the severity of the older work begins to be lost in encrusted masses of sculptured detail. Most of the carving strikes us as crude; a good deal of it is meant to be grotesque and much of the rest is grotesque—unintentionally. But there is vigour about it; and an effect of richness, through painstaking repetition of simple motifs. This richness of decorative sculpture links up naturally with the new social tendency to refinement in manners.
With refinement in manners we come to our first sharp contrast with that which had been. William the Conqueror, annoyed at having his bastardy continually thrown in his face by his wife, is said to have relieved his feelings by tying her by the hair to his horse’s tail and dragging her out to a neighbouring suburb. Now we find William’s great grandson’s wife, Eleanor of Aquitaine, the foremost figure in a totally new sort of “high society” among the governing class of the time in which it was becoming the fashion to concern oneself with an elaborately courteous worship of idealized woman. Not that the eleventh century woman had been nobody. Countess Matilda of Tuscany had been a tower of strength to Hildebrand in his tireless political struggles. But now we find noblewomen taking the lead in social observance (and in literary appreciation) somewhat as they do in the United States to-day. It is true that the lay part of the movement had its centre, as we shall see in the next chapter, in Southern France. But it was general throughout the society of the time, and along with the lay movement went the new cult of the Virgin.
This new religious feeling came as abruptly as the corresponding change in lay society. Whereas Roland had prayed to God the Father, now everyone, even the knight in battle and the austere religious reformer like Saint Bernard, preferred to pray to the Mother of God. What they saw in her, those brought up in the Protestant tradition can scarcely feel. She stood for the illogical, affectionate side of religion. She loved all sorts of flattery and attention and everyone loved her and paid her the court she loved. She loved beautiful and pretry things too, and, womanlike, all the decorative side of life, so that her cult played a great part in the cathedral building. In poems and tales of her it is possible to feel, at least faintly, the tremendous out-pouring of devotion she inspired. It was the twelfth century that placed her among the gods of our West European stock.
Most men worthy of the name dislike feminism. There is something unnatural and strained about it. In civilized times, made possible only by the highest human energy, it is a perpetual riddle to find the sex which is less vigorous, both in body and mind, coming to the fore. Therefore many men have called the feminism of the Cæsarean-Augustan age in Rome, and also of to-day, a sign of social decay. But this will not fit the case of twelfth-century feminism. If feminism is a sickness of society it would seem sometimes to be a growing sickness. It would seem that, in times of rapid expansion of civilized things, the energy of man is so taken up with taming the wilderness, fighting back the barbarian, and producing the wealth by which the body of society must live, that he is surpassed by woman in knowledge of all the arts and studies that make life rich and beautiful, all those things in short that the business man of to-day despises under the name of “general culture.” The woman, then, seeing that she surpasses him in so much, sets up in her own mind to be his superior, and is half acknowledged by him as such. But the man of to-day may console himself with the thought that about feminism there is something forced and malformed, and that, in the past, its excess has never lasted long.
The time that saw the kings strengthened by the Roman law, the new refinement of the rich dominated by the noble lady, and all classes of men and women worshipping the Virgin, saw also a new spirit of civic liberty. The growing towns began to set up as “communes,” practically self-governing corporations. When they could, they bought their freedom in the form of a charter from the feudal overlord; when they could not come to terms they fought him cheerfully. They were turbulent, always rioting about something or other, and the glimpses we get of their municipal finance suggest that the city grafter of to-day could learn from them. Nevertheless, they concentrated in themselves much of the confused, but happy and conquering, energies of the time. Politically, they half realized, without knowing it, the ideal of the ancient free city. Through them and their independence we touch Athens, which they knew not at all. Economically, they brought art and industry out of the monasteries, and organized the craftsman and the artisan in guilds which largely checked competition between their members. Thus they guaranteed to the workman his independence and security so well that our labour unions grope after them to-day like blind giants. Soon, here and there, they were to feel for a new architecture that (as we shall see) was to be the Gothic. All these things they did, not because of
