This vista is about three hundred and thirty feet long.  The windows rise above a hundred feet.  How ought this vast space to be filled?  Should the perpendicular upward leap of the architecture be followed and accented by a perpendicular leap of colour?  The decorators of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries seem to have thought so, and made perpendicular architectural drawings in yellow that simulated gold, and lines that ran with the general lines of the building.  Many fifteenth-century windows seem to be made up of florid Gothic details rising in stages to the vault.  No doubt critics complained, and still complain, that the monotony of this scheme, and its cheapness of intelligence, were objections; but at least the effect was light, decorative, and safe.  The artist could not go far wrong and was still at liberty to do beautiful work, as can be seen in any number of churches scattered broadcast over Europe and swarming in Paris and France.  On the other hand, might not the artist disregard the architecture and fill the space with a climax of colour?  Could he not unite the Roses of France and Dreux above the high altar in an overpowering outburst of purples and reds?  The seventeenth century might have preferred to mass clouds and colours, and Michael Angelo, in the sixteenth, might have known how to do it.  What we want is not the feeling of the artist so much as the feeling of Chartres.  What shall it be—­the jewelled brilliancy of the western windows, or the fierce self-assertion of Pierre Mauclerc, or the royal splendour of Queen Blanche, or the feminine grace and decorative refinement of the Charlemagne and Santiago windows in the apse?

Never again in art was so splendid a problem offered, either before or since, for the artist of Chartres solved it, as he did the whole matter of fenestration, and later artists could only offer variations on his work.  You will see them at Bourges and Tours and in scores of thirteenth and fourteenth and fifteenth and sixteenth century churches and windows, and perhaps in some of the twentieth century,—­all of them interesting and some of them beautiful,—­and far be it from us, mean and ignorant pilgrims of art, to condemn any intelligent effort to vary or improve the effect; but we have set out to seek the feeling, and while we think of art in relation to ourselves, the sermon of Chartres, from beginning to end, teaches and preaches and insists and reiterates and hammers into our torpid minds the moral that the art of the Virgin was not that of her artists but her own.  We inevitably think of our tastes; they thought instinctively of hers.