Copyright, 1888.]
The church of Notre-Dame at Paris is doubtless still a sublime and
majestic building. But, much beauty as it may retain in its old age, it is
not easy to repress a sigh, to restrain our anger, when we mark the
countless defacements and mutilations to which men and time have subjected
that venerable monument, without respect for Charlemagne, who laid its
first stone, or Philip Augustus, who laid its last....
Upon the face of this aged queen of French cathedrals, beside every
wrinkle we find a scar. "Tempus edax, homo edacior;" which I would fain
translate thus: "Time is blind, but man is stupid." Had we leisure to
study with the reader, one by one, the various marks of destruction graven
upon the ancient church, the work of Time would be the lesser, the worse
that of Men, especially of "men of art," since there are persons who have
styled themselves architects during the last two centuries.
And first of all, to cite but a few glaring instances, there are assuredly
few finer pages in the history of architecture than that facade where the
three receding portals with their pointed arches, the carved and
denticulated plinth with its twenty-eight royal niches, the huge central
rose-window flanked by its two lateral windows as is the priest by his
deacon and subdeacon, the lofty airy gallery of trifoliated arcades
supporting a heavy platform upon its slender columns, and lastly the two
dark and massive towers with their pent-house roofs of slate, harmonious
parts of a magnificent whole, one above the other, five gigantic stages,
unfold themselves to the eye, clearly and as a whole, with their countless
details of sculpture, statuary, and carving, powerfully contributing to
the calm grandeur of the whole; as it were, a vast symphony in stone; the
colossal work of one man and one nation, one and yet complex, like the
Iliad and the old Romance epics, to which it is akin; the tremendous sum
of the joint contributions of all the force of an entire epoch, in which
every stone reveals, in a hundred forms, the fancy of the workman
disciplined by the genius of the artist--a sort of human creation, in
brief, powerful and prolific as the Divine creation, whose double
characteristics, variety and eternity, it seems to have acquired.
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