your Lohengrin, Siegfried, and Parsifal.  If you care to make a study of the whole literature of the subject, read M. Male’s “Art Religieux du XIIIe Siecle en France,” and use it for a guide-book.  Here you need only note how symbolic and how simple the sculpture is, on the portals and porches.  Even what seems a grotesque or an abstract idea is no more than the simplest child’s personification.  On the walls you may have noticed the Ane qui vielle,—­the ass playing the lyre; and on all the old churches you can see “bestiaries,” as they were called, of fabulous animals, symbolic or not; but the symbolism is as simple as the realism of the oxen at Laon.  It gave play to the artist in his effort for variety of decoration, and it amused the people,—­probably the Virgin also was not above being amused;—­now and then it seems about to suggest what you would call an esoteric meaning, that is to say, a meaning which each one of us can consider private property reserved for our own amusement, and from which the public is excluded; yet, in truth, in the Virgin’s churches the public is never excluded, but invited.  The Virgin even had the additional charm to the public that she was popularly supposed to have no very marked fancy for priests as such; she was a queen, a woman, and a mother, functions, all, which priests could not perform.  Accordingly, she seems to have had little taste for mysteries of any sort, and even the symbols that seem most mysterious were clear to every old peasant-woman in her church.  The most pleasing and promising of them all is the woman’s figure you saw on the front of the cathedral in Paris; her eyes bandaged; her head bent down; her crown falling; without cloak or royal robe; holding in her hand a guidon or banner with its staff broken in more than one place.  On the opposite pier stands another woman, with royal mantle, erect and commanding.  The symbol is so graceful that one is quite eager to know its meaning; but every child in the Middle Ages would have instantly told you that the woman with the falling crown meant only the Jewish Synagogue, as the one with the royal robe meant the Church of Christ.

Another matter for which the female taste seemed not much to care was theology in the metaphysical sense.  Mary troubled herself little about theology except when she retired into the south transept with Pierre de Dreux.  Even there one finds little said about the Trinity, always the most metaphysical subtlety of the Church.  Indeed, you might find much amusement here in searching the cathedral for any distinct expression at all of the Trinity as a dogma recognized by Mary.