In the transepts, Queen Blanche and Duke Perron, in legal possession of their territory, showed that they were thinking of each other as well as of the Virgin, and claimed loudly that they ought each to be first in the Virgin’s favour; and they stand there in place, as the thirteenth century felt them.  Subject to their fealty to Mary, the transepts belonged to them, and if Blanche did not, like Pierre, assert Herself and her son on the Virgin’s window, perhaps she thought the Virgin would resent Pierre’s boldness the more by contrast with her own good taste.  So far as is known, nowhere does Blanche appear in person at Chartres; she felt herself too near the Virgin to obtrude a useless image, or she was too deeply religious to ask anything for herself.  A queen who was to have two children sainted, to intercede for her at Mary’s throne, stood in a solitude almost as unique as that of Mary, and might ignore the raw brutalities of a man-at-arms; but neither she nor Pierre has carried the quarrel into Mary’s presence, nor has the Virgin condescended even to seem conscious of their temper.  This is the theme of the artist—­the purity, the beauty, the grace, and the infinite loftiness of Mary’s nature, among the things of earth, and above the clamour of kings.

Therefore, when we, and the crushed crowd of kneeling worshippers around us, lift our eyes at last after the miracle of the mass, we see, far above the high altar, high over all the agitation of prayer, the passion of politics, the anguish of suffering, the terrors of sin, only the figure of the Virgin in majesty, looking down on her people, crowned, throned, glorified, with the infant Christ on her knees.  She does not assert herself; probably she intends to be felt rather than feared.  Compared with the Greek Virgin, as you see her, for example, at Torcello, the Chartres Virgin is retiring and hardly important enough for the place.  She is not exaggerated either in scale, drawing, or colour.  She shows not a sign of self-consciousness, not an effort for brilliancy, not a trace of stage effect—­hardly even a thought of herself, except that she is at home, among her own people, where she is loved and known as well as she knows them.  The seven great windows are one composition; and it is plain that the artist, had he been ordered to make an exhibition of power, could have overwhelmed us with a storm of purple, red, yellows, or given us a Virgin of Passion who would have torn the vault asunder; his ability is never in doubt, and if he has kept true to the spirit of the western portal and the twelfth-century, it is because the Virgin of Chartres was the Virgin of Grace, and ordered him to paint her so.  One shudders to think how a single false note—­a suggestion of meanness, in this climax of line and colour—­would bring the whole fabric down in ruins on the eighteenth-century meanness of the choir below; and one notes, almost bashfully, the expedients of the artists to quiet their effects.  So the lines of the seven windows are built up, to avoid the horizontal, and yet not exaggerate the vertical.