in heaven, while she looked—­her own lost baby playing with the Christ-Child at the Virgin’s knee, as much at home as the saints, and much more at home than the kings.  Before rising from her knees, every one of these women will have bent down and kissed the stone pavement in gratitude for Mary’s mercy.  The earth, she says, is a sorry place, and the best of it is bad enough, no doubt, even for Queen Blanche and the Duchess Alix who has had to leave her children here alone; but there above is Mary in heaven who sees and hears me as I see her, and who keeps my little boy till I come; so I can wait with patience, more or less!  Saints and prophets and martyrs are all very well, and Christ is very sublime and just, but Mary knows!

It was very childlike, very foolish, very beautiful, and very true,- -as art, at least:—­so true that everything else shades off into vulgarity, as you see the Persephone of a Syracusan coin shade off into the vulgarity of a Roman emperor; as though the heaven that lies about us in our infancy too quickly takes colours that are not so much sober as sordid, and would be welcome if no worse than that.  Vulgarity, too, has feeling, and its expression in art has truth and even pathos, but we shall have time enough in our lives for that, and all the more because, when we rise from our knees now, we have finished our pilgrimage.  We have done with Chartres.  For seven hundred years Chartres has seen pilgrims, coming and going more or less like us, and will perhaps see them for another seven hundred years; but we shall see it no more, and can safely leave the Virgin in her majesty, with her three great prophets on either hand, as calm and confident in their own strength and in God’s providence as they were when Saint Louis was born, but looking down from a deserted heaven, into an empty church, on a dead faith.

CHAPTER XI

THE THREE QUEENS

After worshipping at the shrines of Saint Michael on his Mount and of the Virgin at Chartres, one may wander far and wide over France, and seldom feel lost; all later Gothic art comes naturally, and no new thought disturbs the perfected form.  Yet tourists of English blood and American training are seldom or never quite at home there.  Commonly they feel it only as a stage-decoration.  The twelfth and thirteenth centuries, studied in the pure light of political economy, are insane.  The scientific mind is atrophied, and suffers under inherited cerebral weakness, when it comes in contact with the eternal woman—­Astarte, Isis, Demeter, Aphrodite, and the last and greatest deity of all, the Virgin.  Very rarely one lingers, with a mild sympathy, such as suits the patient student of human error, willing to be interested in what he cannot understand.  Still more rarely, owing to some revival of archaic instincts, he rediscovers the woman.  This is perhaps the mark of the artist alone, and his solitary privilege.  The rest of us cannot feel; we can only study.  The proper study of mankind is woman and, by common agreement since the time of Adam, it is the most complex and arduous.  The study of Our Lady, as shown by the art of Chartres, leads directly back to Eve, and lays bare the whole subject of sex.