the mouth of hell – here depicted as a kind of toothy fish – which emerges from another, grimmer, door. The angel and devil closest to the centre glare at each other across the gulf that separates good and evil. The devil, with sumo-wrestler proportions, punk-spiked hair, and an enormous bludgeon, is the only character on the tympanum blatantly to overwhelm his allotted niche. The others, encased in their cartoon-strip boxes, tell their stories; this devil, however, poses an active threat, as if at any moment he may free himself from the stone and add your story to his.
The angel at whom he stares grabs a little soul by the hand and pulls him out of no-man’s-land – the grey area between good and evil, from which we only see him partially emerging – it’s that close a save – before the devil can get his claws on him. The angel’s eyes hold a dare: just try it, he says to the bludgeon-wielding devil. And yet he hurries the little soul onward toward heaven, just to be safe.
This is it, Romanesque art at its most anxiously appealing. This moment is acted on what Hannah Green calls ‘the rim of time’. The everlasting is about to begin; mortality is about to end. Yet it is a quintessentially human moment, full of fear of the awful arbitrariness of fate. Far from ceasing to be, time plays a role – the angel snatched that soul from the void just in the nick of it – and so does luck.
Most art makes a statement. Romanesque sculpture poses a question: will we be saved? The only answer it musters is a shrug. Maybe. Probably not. There is uncertainty and death, hard work and hunger in this life, and judgement in the next. No wonder its quiet, secular moments, the corbels of clasping couples, fiddlers, dancers, and domestic beasts, all found their places on religious buildings. Each is a touching bid to secure a chip of immortality – the cheap kind found in stone – for the otherwise brief pleasures of life. Despite its fixation with the everlasting, the Romanesque point of view ultimately hails from the conundrum of the human condition. This is one of the reasons I love it so much: it dares to reveal not the nobility, but the vulnerability of life in the face of death.
Lights came on without warning, like a shock of lightning. I had slipped into an over-fed daze sitting in the stony darkness of the nave. Before entering the abbey I’d found a very pink garret room in the Auberge St Jacques, just steps away, and had eaten dinner there too in the over-lit dining room. The young waiter had inquired if I wanted a salade aux gésiers. I’d asked what it was.
‘Une salade avec pommes et poulet, Madame,’ is what I heard.
A salad avec pommes de poulets is what came. Not a salad with apples and chicken at all, but a salad with apples of the chicken – fried gizzards, in other words. Ah, I’d thought, undone by a crafty French preposition. Not the first time, nor the last. What I’d actually ordered was a Salade Caussenarde, a speciality of the region, made up of mixed greens, local walnuts, and either crumbled feta or Roquefort cheese. Mine came with Roquefort – an appropriate choice, considering the caves where the cheese is aged used to belong to the monks of Conques. I willed myself to forget what I was eating. After the duck, crusty crème brulée, and half-bottle of Gaillac that followed, and then the soft abbey darkness, I had almost fallen asleep. But the abrupt lights in the upper gallery banished any easygoing rapprochement between wakefulness and sleep, night and day, light and dark. My grey-black heaven was gone, replaced by definitive black shadows cutting at odd angles across brilliantly revivified white stone: a sight unbeheld for more than nine hundred of Conques’ thousand years, until the twentieth century wired the abbey for electricity.
An organist had come to practise for tomorrow’s mass. Far above me he struck the keys and vibrations filled every cavity, the barrel vault and my chest alike, making heavy, solemn music inside my body and out. I was thankful the nave itself was still fairly dark, and the side aisles, too. They beckoned me away from the electric intrusion like conduits to an alternate state of mind, much as the road outside my window had at night, when I was a child. A nearby streetlight had thrown leaf patterns into a small puddle of illumination, casting the road beyond into even greater darkness. I knew where it led – down to Grove Avenue, my school, the football field – but I would pretend it could take me anywhere.
Surely the drive to go, to be surprised, to leave the unrelenting known for whatever lay beyond, has always lurked somewhere beneath the pilgrim’s piety. In his book on pilgrimage, Peter Sumption suggests that upon taking to the road the pilgrim left behind the chief quality of medieval life – ‘monotonous regularity and the rule of overpowering conventions’. He cites a fifteenth-century writer who bluntly identified the wanderlust factor: a pilgrim’s principal motivation, he wrote, was ‘curiosity to see new places and experience new things, an impatience of the servant with his master, of children with their parents, or wives with their husbands’.
Not surprisingly, Kingsley put his finger on the same chord. ‘Into the psychology of the pilgrimage there must have entered love of wandering for its own sweet sake,’ he wrote in Romanesque Sculpture of the Pilgrimage Roads. ‘The same restlessness that creates the modern tourist spurred on the men of the Middle Ages to roam.’
‘For its own sweet sake’. Again and again, Lucy notes in her journal their arrival at a hotel and her keen desire to bathe and nap, while Kingsley goes ‘out to investigate the village’, or ‘takes a walk’, or ‘visits the church’. The man was perpetually restless. During the early stages of their courtship it nearly killed him to spend the summer of 1911 at home reading Rabelais (counting the pages was ‘an indication, doubtless, that I am not properly enjoying it’), while Lucy travelled on the West Coast. He made a show of being enthusiastic about her adventures, but envy got the better of him. ‘One day I was dragged out yachting, which fairly made my hair curl with excitement.’ In another letter he was ‘stale from lack of travel’. When Lucy wrote of her climb up Mount Hood, in Oregon, he replied: ‘I thoroughly envy you the experience. I hate hard climbs while I am doing them – always get as scared as a kitten and never fail to vow to myself that if I get down safely I shall never no never try a mountain again – and yet one always does.’ By the time he finished writing, his blood was ‘on fire’ to climb anything.
Janice Mann, who wrote comparatively of Kingsley and Émile Mâle, believed Kingsley’s wanderlust to be typical of his nationality and generation. ‘For Porter,’ she wrote, ‘the process of art history was one of travel – physical and figurative – to the frontier. His sense of art historical accomplishment was satisfied by moving from familiar areas of the discipline into the unknown, just as progress in the European settlement of America involved moving repeatedly from civilisation into the wilderness. He was drawn to the open road both literally and metaphorically.’
It was true: as more scholars moved into the study of Romanesque art in the late 1920s, Kingsley shifted his focus to Ireland, where he and Lucy acquired a castle in Donegal as a base for his pioneering work on early Christian crosses. But even more intriguing than his need to roam was the nature of the unknown that Kingsley sought. For him, as well as for other American writers from Henry Adams to Henry James, the ‘wilderness’ of which Mann speaks was nothing other than the European past: a wilderness in time rather than place. In Kingsley’s case, he was not travelling to discover a new, empirical reality – a continent that could be sampled, measured, drawn, and detailed – but rather overlooked evidence that would substantiate a dream of the Middle Ages that he already held in his head. Like Conques Abbey in darkness, invisible but present, Kingsley imagined a world that could be sensed but no longer be seen, built upon remnants and old stone foundations that he and Lucy sought by day, of a society he valued far more than his own. Like me, he was a romantic, rebuilding the ruined eternity of the Romanesque in his mind, spellbound by his own reinventions.
His friends, notably the Irish poet George Russell, known by his epithet ‘Æ’, teased him about his disregard for modern life. Imagining Kingsley’s horror of air travel, Russell wrote with delight, ‘I suppose that would be an adhesion to the mechanical age which would seem to you almost as bad as Bolshevism. I fancy you sigh for travels with
