[Illustration with caption:  Le Mans]

One who is painfully conscious of ignorance, and who never would dream of suggesting a correction to anybody, may not venture to suggest an idea of any sort to an architect; but if it were allowed to paraphrase Viollet-le-Duc’s words into a more or less emotional or twelfth-century form, one might say, after him, that, compared with Paris or Laon, the Chartres apse shows the same genius that is shown in the Chartres rose; the same large mind that overrules,—­the same strong will that defies difficulties.  The Chartres apse is as entertaining as all the other Gothic apses together, because it overrides the architect.  You may, if you really have no imagination whatever, reject the idea that the Virgin herself made the plan; the feebleness of our fancy is now congenital, organic, beyond stimulant or strychnine, and we shrink like sensitive-plants from the touch of a vision or spirit; but at least one can still sometimes feel a woman’s taste, and in the apse of Chartres one feels nothing else.

[Illustration with caption:  Chartres]

CHAPTER VIII

THE TWELFTH-CENTURY GLASS

At last we are face to face with the crowning glory of Chartres.  Other churches have glass,—­quantities of it, and very fine,—­but we have been trying to catch a glimpse of the glory which stands behind the glass of Chartres, and gives it quality and feeling of its own.  For once the architect is useless and his explanations are pitiable; the painter helps still less; and the decorator, unless he works in glass, is the poorest guide of all, while, if he works in glass, he is sure to lead wrong; and all of them may toil until Pierre Mauclerc’s stone Christ comes to life, and condemns them among the unpardonable sinners on the southern portal, but neither they nor any other artist will ever create another Chartres.  You had better stop here, once for all, unless you are willing to feel that Chartres was made what it is, not by artist, but by the Virgin.

If this imperial presence is stamped on the architecture and the sculpture with an energy not to be mistaken, it radiates through the glass with a light and colour that actually blind the true servant of Mary.  One becomes, sometimes, a little incoherent in talking about it; one is ashamed to be as extravagant as one wants to be; one has no business to labour painfully to explain and prove to one’s self what is as clear as the sun in the sky; one loses temper in reasoning about what can only be felt, and what ought to be felt instantly, as it was in the twelfth century, even by the truie qui file and the ane qui vielle.  Any one should feel it that wishes; any one who does not wish to feel it can let it alone.  Still, it may be that not one tourist in a hundred—­perhaps not one in a thousand of the English-speaking race—­does feel it, or can feel it even when explained to him, for we have lost many senses.