Page:The thirty-six dramatic situations (1921).djvu/130

 128 THIRTY-SIX DRAMATIC SITUATIONS It is by methods of logic that Viollet-le-Duc has enabled us to estimate truly the marvels of our "grand siecle," the XIII Century, substituting (to cite only this) for the simple admiration of 1830 before each stone saint so "picturesquely" perched upon the point of an ogive, the builders' explanation: that a stone of the exact weight and dimensions of the saint was there absolutely necessary, to prevent the breaking of the ogive under a double lateral pressure, - - whence the instinctive satisfaction it gives our eyes. It is a great misfortune that the understanding of that magnificent age in which a Saint Louis presided over the multiple communal life, an age whose only equal in the world's history is that in which Pericles directed, from the Athenian metropolis, an identical movement, - - that this understanding, which would be so useful to us, should have been horribly compromised in the Roman- tic carnival. Hugo's "Notre-Dame de Paris," wherein the public believed it beheld a portrait of our "Moyen-age" (a most absurd appellation, by the way), represents it, by a singular choice, as already long dead, after the Hundred Years' War which bled us to the point where we fell, passive and defenseless, under the domination of the Florentine national art called "renaissant," and then of various other influences, ancient and foreign, during four centuries. And, down to the very moment at which I write, the literary pro- ductions upon the subject of this most incomparable period of our past have been but pitiable affairs. But yesterday, a Renan was writing of ogival art as an effort which had been impotent ("Souvenirs d'Enfance et de Jeunesse") or which at most had fathered works of no enduring character ("Priere sur l'Acrople"); the very Catholic Huysmans, in his "En Route," was mak- ing the most astounding salad of Roman vaulting, Primitive painting, Gregorian plain-chant, - - a salad whose recipe is "the Faith" and which is called, natur- ally, the "Moyen-age," that age which embraces ten centuries of humanity, plus one-third of humanity's authentic history, three epochs strongly antagonistic to each other, peoples widely diverse and opposed; a