Page:The Normans in European History.djvu/202

188 later, the one simple and austere, the other richer and less grand. Freeman may seem fanciful when he suggests that these sister churches express the spirit of their respective founders, "the imperial will of the conquering duke" and the milder temper of his "loving and faithful duchess," but in any event they are Norman and typical of their age and country. There are elements in the ornamentation of Norman churches in this period which have been explained by reference to the distant influence of the Scandinavian north or the Farther East, there are perhaps traces of Lombard architecture in their plan, but their structure as a whole is as Norman as the stone of which they are built, distinguished by local traits from the other varieties of French Romanesque to which this period gave rise. Not the least Norman feature of these buildings is the persistent common sense of design and execution; the Norman architects did not attempt the architecturally impossible or undertake tasks, like the cathedral of Beauvais, which they were unable to finish in their own time and style. "What they began, they completed," writes the Nestor of American historians in his sympathetic interpretation of the art and the spirit of Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres. In Norman art, as in other phases of Norman achievement, the last word cannot be said till we have followed it far beyond the borders of the duchy, northward to Durham, "half house of God,