You may like it all the better for being less serious, less heroic, less militant, and more what the French call bourgeois, just as you may like the style of Louis xv better than that of Louis XIV,—­ Madame du Barry better than Madame de Montespan,—­for taste is free, and all styles are good which amuse; but since we are now beginning with the earliest, in order to step down gracefully to the stage, whatever it is, where you prefer to stop, we must try to understand a little of the kind of energy which Norman art expressed, or would have expressed if it had thought in our modes.  The only word which describes the Norman style is the French word naif.  Littre says that naif comes from natif, as vulgar comes from vulgus, as though native traits must be simple, and commonness must be vulgar.  Both these derivative meanings were strange to the eleventh century.  Naivete was simply natural and vulgarity was merely coarse.  Norman naivete was not different in kind from the naivete of Burgundy or Gascony or Lombardy, but it was slightly different in expression, as you will see when you travel south.  Here at Mont-Saint-Michel we have only a mutilated trunk of an eleventh-century church to judge by.  We have not even a facade, and shall have to stop at some Norman village—­at Thaon or Ouistreham—­to find a west front which might suit the Abbey here, but wherever we find it we shall find something a little more serious, more military, and more practical than you will meet in other Romanesque work, farther south.  So, too, the central tower or lantern—­the most striking feature of Norman churches—­has fallen here at Mont-Saint-Michel, and we shall have to replace it from Cerisy-la-Foret, and Lessay, and Falaise.  We shall find much to say about the value of the lantern on a Norman church, and the singular power it expresses.  We shall have still more to say of the towers which flank the west front of Norman churches, but these are mostly twelfth-century, and will lead us far beyond Coutances and Bayeux, from fleche to fleche, till we come to the fleche of all fleches, at Chartres.

We shall have a whole chapter of study, too, over the eleventh-century apse, but here at Mont-Saint-Michel, Abbot Hildebert’s choir went the way of his nave and tower.  He built out even more boldly to the east than to the west, and although the choir stood for some four hundred years, which is a sufficient life for most architecture, the foundations gave way at last, and it fell in 1421, in the midst of the English wars, and remained a ruin until 1450.  Then it was rebuilt, a monument of the last days of the Gothic, so that now, standing at the western door, you can look down the church, and see the two limits of mediaeval architecture married together,—­the earliest Norman and the latest French.  Through the Romanesque arches of 1058, you look into the exuberant choir of latest Gothic, finished in 1521.  Although the two structures are some five hundred years apart,