It reaches south toward the borderland of the ancient Languedoc region, and in its place names, pronunciations, and patronymics, continues to echo the hard, clicking style of Languedoc speech, as against the more elegant and fluid idiom of the old Langue d’Oïl of Paris and the northern provinces. Great hill systems, with woods, ravines, glens, wide meadows, keep a bucolic aspect, all set off by ranges of distant wooded mountains whose dominant peak is the noble cone of the extinct volcano Puy-de-Dôme, after which the political district is called.
Under so much open sky, settlements remain sparse and far apart. Their distance one from another seems matched in the people by a reserve perhaps imposed by a history of separation. To reach each other, as Caesar wrote, the early Gauls, when they had matters of note to communicate in that landscape, shouted over meadows and through districts, asking neighbors to continue the relay afar, across high green acres where voices could carry on long cries. Early Gallic settlements were rough stockades, in high ground for protection against raid and for periodic market gathering. Life came from the earth and even in spirit returned to it. Caesar saw the Gauls as the most “religious” of men. Rivers, woods, springs, and mountains, in their various mysteries of source and atmosphere, all had their gods. It would not be strange to see the isolated rise of the Puy-de-Dôme itself as a great altar, whether almost lost in summer haze or lighted by clear winter. To live, propitiate, propagate, and die, remote from the sophisticated Roman energies which stirred to the south toward the Mediterranean; to take the earth’s yield and defend the land when necessary—such tasks and impulses governed life in the ancient Averni of pre-Roman Gaul, and seemed eternal.
But in a half century before Christ the Roman drive across Europe under Caesar intruded its superb array into Auvergne. Independence was threatened. The Averni resisted, and found their leader in the son of their king. He was Vercingetorix, who, making a coherent force out of what Caesar dismissed as “rabble,” stalled the conqueror. The tribal prince reached to the spirit of his people, led them to heroic measures, such as burning their own rude stockade towns to deny the invader protection and stores, and defeated Caesar’s attempt to take Gergovia (Clermont) in 52 B.C. The defenders put the torch to more than twenty of their own towns in a single day in one district. Other states did much the same. “In every direction,” wrote Caesar, “fires were to be seen.”
In the end, Rome’s wits and resources were too great to withstand. Overwhelmed by a huge Roman reserve force of men and supplies, Vercingetorix acknowledged defeat. He sent for his chiefs to let them decide whether they should put him to death for his failure, or deliver him alive to Caesar. Since this was a matter for the conqueror to resolve, messengers were sent to him to ask him his will. Caesar received them enthroned before his camp, demanded their weapons and the delivery of Vercingetorix, whose style was equal to the event. Wearing gold-studded armor and riding his finest mount, he presently pulled up before Caesar and in silence threw down his arms and regalia and became a living trophy in captivity. Caesar took him everywhere for five years to display him in defeat, and then had him executed. Rome’s Gallic wars succeeded. To native pastoral paganism was added imperial pagan politics in that remote frontier, and it was not until after the Christian baptism of Rome by Constantine in 312 A.D. that the Gauls began to come under Rome’s new faith.
iii.
Romanesque Heritage
IN THE ENSUING CENTURIES the Christian energies radiating from Rome achieved a far wider and more enduring conquest than any imposed by an armed Caesar. The social and spiritual precepts of Christ struck deep into the individual person, touched veins of spirit through which he found a new sort of identity with fellow beings in the worship of God. The Church evolved, and with it, all its expressions in religious orders, liturgy, theology, and the arts. Christian Rome was the fount, her stream of faith flowed everywhere, and heroes of holiness became even greater objects of veneration than kings and warriors. Long worshipful before the visible, man began to find paths of aspiration linked to what lay before his immediate comprehension. One sure way to satisfy such desire was to make a pilgrimage to a holy place associated with a saint, and obtain the blessing of a human spirit in place of that of a stream, a tree, a mountain. Both pagan and Christian impulses were fervent; the latter one exalted humanity itself in the image of God.
Along with Rome, the great shrine of St James of Compostela in Spain drew pilgrims from all Europe. Their myriad steps confirmed the main roads from France to the Peninsula. Other paths also grew within the confines of France. At intervals along such ways, rest-houses evolved into monasteries, each with its church. A principal road for pilgrims led through Clermont, the old city of Vercingetorix. In many reminders, classic Rome survived there, nowhere more so than in the form of the churches; for, bringing home the ordinary news of travel, pilgrims renewed their recognition of the Roman style long ago established in aqueducts, theaters, walls, council halls (basilicae), during the centuries of the unconverted empire. But the monuments to their faith built at home by the medieval believers referred not only to old massivities of Roman power, but also to the familiar and simple elements of the life all about them. Out of their experience at Compostela and other Spanish shrines, the travellers brought, too, echoes of Iberia, with its own remnants which were Moorish, and memories of these gave various details to the Romanesque style as it was evolved above the Pyrenees and the Alps.
By the twelfth century the Romanesque was widespread in Europe and its character became ever more local, until not only the ancient empire but the identity of cities and fiefdoms in their own regions found expression through representations of living creatures as parts of otherwise inscrutable architecture. Humanism entered visibly into engineering by way of prayer and its fortress. All expression sprang from faith. All safety lay in charity. All strength rose through the combination of these, in the mainstream of the inherited culture. Available through the Church, this was the culture of peasant and lord alike. Anyone growing up in it—while he might not even be aware of secular learning—was yet the possessor of a central body of the historical tradition of post-Roman Europe; and the single most powerful recorded analogy of life was the Holy Scripture.
As it was common to all, so must be its monuments. The churches were self-images of their makers, combining aspiration with recognizable images in stone taken from daily experience—the humble realities of what was loved and what feared, ranging from the human person to grotesques out of the world of demons. The Romanesque style made its daily and lifelong impact less through the refined aesthetic than through expressions of power—durability, seemly strength, and impregnable shelter; and what was sheltered was man’s spirit against all threats the world could offer in every life until that life should end. The patience needed to do the work of the early medieval style seemed to prefigure a promised eternity, even if what made it believable in its mystery were the very motes of daily life represented in carved ornament.
Rome gave its arches to the fabric, and where in classical times they had seemed to hang great weights of masonry high in the air, now in the Middle Ages they brought to mind the earth-bound body of man, braced in stone to endure with blunt shoulders man’s earthly passage. If God made Christ in man, other personifications of Christian attributes and saintly individuals came as a logical step from life to art, and back to life again, by way of the vision of those who gazed at either the smallest or the largest of sacred artifacts—a chief function of iconography. Romanesque sculptured ornament—celebration of man and the common sweetness of his visible world—joined with the craft of the mason to hold constant in the great dark churches the power also of that which was invisible, yet describable. Faith itself seemed anything but abstraction.
In fixed quiet, Romanesque ornament celebrated all living things—animals, fish, men and women of the day at their work; plants of the earth in branch, leaf, fruit, as well as figures of the Passion and the personification of the demonic unseen which thus became as real as the rest. Anywhere, from the capital of a double column, or the base of a font, or the frontal of an altar, or the almost hidden groin of a twining stairway, suddenly one could recognize a common face in stone gazing forth as an angel, a fiend, a saint, one of the Holy
