space as possible with the given mate- | limits of the aisles, north and south. rial. Not a part of the original design, these No; the peculiar Gothic buttress, chapels were formed for private uses with its double, triple, fourfold flights, in the fourteenth century, by the dewhile it makes such marvels possible, vice of walling in and vaulting the securing light and space and graceful open spaces between the great but effect, relieving the pillars within of tresses of the nave. Under the broad their massiveness, is not a restful but subdued sunshine which falls architectural feature. Consolidation of through range upon range of windows, matter naturally on the move, security reflected from white wall and roof aud for settlement in a very complex sys- gallery, soothing to the eye, while it tem of construction that is avowedly allows you to see the delicate, carved a part of the Gothic situation, the work in all its refinement of touch, it is Gothic problem. With the genius only as an after-thought, an artificial which contended, though not quite after-thought, that you regret the lost always successfully, with this difficult stained glass, or the vanished mural problem, came also novel aesthetic color, if such to any large extent there effect, a whole volume of delightful ever were. The best stained glass is æsthetic effects. For the mere melody often that stained by weather, by cenof Greek architecture, for the sense as turies of weather, and we may well be it were of music in the opposition of grateful for the amazing cheerfulness successive sounds, you got harmony, of the interior of Amiens, as we actuthe richer music generated by opposi-ally find it. Windows of the richest tion of sounds in one and the same remain, indeed, in the apsidal chapels; moment; and were gainers. And then, and the rose-windows of the transepts in contrast with the classic manner, are known, from the prevailing tones and the Romanesque survivals from it, of their stained glass, as Fire and the vast complexity of the Gothic style Water, the western rose symbolizing in seemed, as if consciously, to corre-like manner Earth and Air, as respecBut there is no spond to the richness, the expressive- tively green and blue. ness, the thousandfold influence of the reason to suppose that the interior was Catholic religion, in the thirteenth cen- ever so darkened as to prevent one's tury still in natural movement in every seeing, really and clearly, the dainty direction. The later Gothic of the fif- ornament, which from the first teenth and sixteenth centuries, tended abounded here; the floriated architecto conceal, as it now took for granted, tural detail; the broad band of flowers the structural use of the buttress, for and foliage, thick and deep and purely example; seemed to turn it into a sculptured, above the arches of nave mere occasion for ornament, not al- and choir and transepts, and wreathing ways pleasantly; while the ornament itself continuously round the embedded was out of place, the structure failed. piers which support the roof; with Such falsity is far enough away from the woodwork, the illuminated metal, what at Amiens is really of the thir- the magnificent tombs, the jewellers' teenth century. In this pre-eminently work in the chapels. One precious, "secular" church, the execution, in all early thirteenth-century window of the defiance of its method, is direct, grisaille remains, exquisite in itself, infrank, clearly apparent, with the re-teresting as evidence of the sort of sult not only of reassuring the intelligence, but of keeping one's curiosity also continually on the alert, as we linger in these restless aisles.

The integrity of the edifice, together with its volume of light, has, indeed, been diminished by the addition of a range of chapels, beyond the proper

decoration which originally filled the larger number of the windows. Grisaille, with its lace-work of transparent grey, set here and there with a ruby, a sapphire, a gemmed medallion, interrupts the clear light on things hardly more than the plain glass, of which, indeed, such windows are mainly com

posed. The finely designed frames of | tect will in due measure always trust iron for the support of the glass, in the to. A false restoration only frustrates windows from which even this decora- the proper ripening of his work. tion is gone, still remain, to the delight of those who are knowing in the

matter.

the way.

If we may credit our modern eyes, then, those old, very secular builders aimed at, they achieved, an immense Very ancient light, this seems, at cheerfulness in their great church, with any rate, as if it had been lying impris- a purpose which still pursued them oned thus for long centuries; were, in into their minuter decoration. The fact, the light over which the great couventional vegetation of the Romanvault originally closed, now become esque, its blendings of human or anialmost substance of thought, one might mal with vegetable form, in cornice or fancy, -a mental object or medium. capital, have given way here, in the We are reminded that after all we first Pointed style, to a pleasanter, bemust of necessity look on the great cause more natural, mode of fancy; to churches of the Middle Ages with veritable forms of vegetable life, flower other eyes than those who built or first or leaf, from meadow and woodside, worshipped in them; that there is though still, indeed, with a certain sursomething verily worth having, and a just equivalent for something else lost, in the mere effect of time, and that the salt of all æsthetic study is in the question: What, precisely what, is this to me? You and I, perhaps, should not care much for the mural coloring of a mediæval church, could we see it as it was; might think it crude, and in What little remains of it at Amiens has parted, indeed, in the course of ages, with its shrillness and its coarse grain. And in this matter certainly, in view of Gothic polychrome, our difference from the people of the thirteenth century is radical. We have, as it was very unlikely they should have, a curiosity, a very pleasurable curiosity, in the mere working of the stone they built with, and in the minute facts of their construction, which their coloring, and the layer of plaster it involved, disguised or hid. We may think that in architecture stone is the most beautiful of all things. Modern hands have replaced the color on some of the tombs here the effigies, the tabernacles above — skilfully as may be, and have but deprived them of their dignity. Medieval coloring, in fact, must have improved steadily, as it decayed, almost till there came Congruous again with the popularity to be no question of color at all. In of the builders of Amiens, of their moarchitecture, close as it is to men's lives tives, is the wealth, the freedom, and and their history, the visible result of abundance of popular, almost secular, time is a large factor in the realized teaching, here afforded, in the carving æsthetic value, and what a true archi- especially, within and without; an

│vival of the grotesque in a confusion of the leaf with the flower, which the subsequent Decorated period will wholly purge away in its perfect garden borders. It was not with monastic artists and artisans that the sheds and workshops around Amiens Cathedral were filled, as it rose from its foundations through fifty years; and those lay schools of art, with their communistic sentiment, to which in the thirteenth century the great episcopal builders must needs resort, in the natural course of things would tend towards naturalism. The subordinate arts also were no longer at the monastic stage, borrowing inspiration exclusively from the experiences of the cloister, but belonged to guilds of laymen-smiths, painters, sculptors. The great confederation of the " city," the commune, subdivided itself into confederations of citizens. In the natural objects of the first Pointed style there is the freshness as of nature itself, seen and felt for the first time; as if, in contrast, those older cloistral workmen had but fed their imagination in an embarrassed, imprisoned, and really decadent manner, on mere reminiscence of, or prescriptions about, things visible.

open Bible, in place of later legend, and cast the tombs of the Bishops as at monastic Vézelay, -the Bible Evrard and Geoffrey, vast plates of treated as a book about men and massive black bronze in half-relief, like women, and other persons equally real, but blent with lessons, with the liveliest observations, on the lives of men as they were then and now, what they do, and how they do it, or did it then, and on the doings of nature which so greatly influence what man does; together with certain impressive metaphysical and moral ideas, a sort of popular scholastic philosophy, or as if it were the virtues and vices Aristotle defines, or the characters of Theophrastus, translated into stone. Above all, it is to be observed that as a result of this spirit, this "free" spirit, in it, art has at last become personal. The artist, as such, appears at Amiens, as elsewhere, in the thirteenth century; and, by making his personal way of conception and execution prevail there, renders his own work vivid and organic, and apt to catch the interest of other people. He is no longer a Byzantine, but a Greek-an unconscious Greek. Proof of this is in the famous Beau-Dieu of Amiens, as they call that benign, almost classically proportioned figure, on the central pillar of the great west doorway; though, in fact, neither that, nor anything else on the west front of Amiens, is quite the best work here. For that we must look rather to the sculpture of the portal of the south transept, called, from a certain image there, Portail de la Vierge dorée, gilded at the expense of some unknown de-screens of forged iron around the sancvout person at the beginning of the tuary, work of the seventeenth century, last century. A presentation of the appear actually to soar, in their way, mystic, the delicately miraculous, story in concert with the airy Gothic strucof Saint Honoré, eighth bishop of ture; to let the daylight pass as it Amiens, and his companious, with its will; to have come, they too, from voices, its intuitions, and celestial inti- smiths, odd as it may seem at just that mations, it has evoked a correspondent time, with some touch of inspiration in method of work at once naive and them. In the beginning of the fifnicely expressive. The rose, or roue, teenth century they had reared against above it, carries on the outer rim a certain bald space of wall, between seventeen personages, ascending and the great portal and the descending another piece of popular philosophy-the wheel of fortune, or

abstract thoughts of those grand old prelatic persons. The tomb of Evrard, who laid the foundations (qui fundamenta hujus basilica locavit), is not quite as it was. Formerly it was sunk in the pavement, while the tomb of Bishop Geoffrey opposite (it was he closed in the mighty vault of the nave: hanc basilicam culmen usque perduxit), itself vaulted over the space of the grave beneath. The supreme excellence of those original workmen, the journeymen of Robert de Luzarches and his successor, would seem, indeed, to have inspired others, who have been at their best here, down to the days of Louis the Fourteenth. It prompted, we may think, a high level of execution, through many revolutions of taste in such matters in the marvellous furniture of the choir, for instance, like a whole wood, say a thicket of old hawthorn, with its curved topmost branches spared, slowly transformed by the labor of a whole family of artists, during fourteen years, into the stalls, in number one hundred and teu, with nearly four thousand figures. Yet they are but on a level with the Flamboyant carved and colored enclosures of the choir, with the histories of John the Baptist, whose face-bones are here preserved, and of Saint Firmin - popular saint, who protects the houses of Amiens from fire. Even the

of human life.

And they were great brass-founders, surely, who at that early day modelled

western

"rose," au organ, a lofty, many-chamhered, veritable house of church music, rich in azure and gold, finished above at a later day, not incongruously, in the quaint, pretty manner of Henri-Deux.

towers are lost in the west front, the grandest, perhaps the earliest, example of its species-three profound, sculptured portals; a double gallery above, the upper gallery carrying colossal images of twenty-two kings of the house

And those who are interested in the sixteenth century, at which time the curiosities of ritual, of the old provin- lead that carefully wraps every part of cial Gallican "uses," will be surprised it was heavily gilt. The great western to find one where they might least have expected it. The reserved Eucharist still hangs suspended in a pyx, formed like a dove, in the midst of that lamentable "glory" of the eighteenth century in the central bay of the sanctuary, all the poor, gaudy, gilt rays converg- of Judah, ancestors of Our Lady; ing towards it. There are days in the year in which the great church is still literally filled with reverent worshippers, and if you come late to service you push the doors in vain against the closely serried shoulders of the good people of Amiens, one and all in black for church holiday attire. Then, one and all, they intone the Tantum ergo (did it ever sound so in the Middle Ages ?) as the Eucharist, after a long procession, rises once more into its resting-place.

If the Greeks, as at least one of them says, really believed there could be no true beauty without bigness, that thought certainly is most specious in regard to architecture; and the thirteenth-century church of Amiens is one of the three or four largest buildings in the world, out of all proportion to any Greek building, both in that and in the multitude of its external sculpture. The chapels of the nave are embellished without by a double range of single figures, or groups, commemorative of the persons, the mysteries, to which they are respectively dedicated the gigantic form of Christopher, the Mystery of the Annunciation.

then, the great rose; above it the ringers' gallery, half masking the gable of the nave, and uniting at their topmost stories the twin, but not exactly equal or similar, towers, oddly oblong in plan, as if never intended to carry pyramids or spires. They overlook an immense distance in those flat, peatdigging, black and green regions, with rather cheerless rivers, and are the centre of an architectural region wider still-of a group to which Soissons, far beyond the woods of Compiègne, belongs, with St. Quentin, and, towards the west, a too ambitious rival, Beauvais, which has stood, however— what we now see of it—for six centuries.

It is a spare, rather sad world at most times that Notre-Dame d'Amiens thus broods over; a country with little else to be proud of; the sort of world, in fact, which makes the range of conceptions embodied in these cliffs of quarried and carved stone all the more welcome as a hopeful complement to the meagreness of most people's present existence, and its apparent ending in a sparsely built coffin under the flinty soil, and grey, driving sea-winds. In Notre-Dame, therefore, and her sisters, there is not only a common method of construction, a single definable type, different from that of other French latitudes, but a correspondent common sentiment also something which speaks, amid an immense achievement just here of what is beautiful and great, of the necessity of an immense effort in the natural course of things, of what you may see quaintly designed in one of those hieroglyphic carvings radix de terra sitienti, "a root out of

The builders of the church seem to have projected no very noticeable towers; though it is conventional to regret their absence, especially with visitors from England, where, indeed, cathedral and other towers are apt to be good, and really make their mark. Robert de Luzarches and his successors aimed rather at the domical outline, with its central point at the centre of the church, in the spire or flèche. The existing spire is a wonderful mass of carpentry of the beginning of the a dry ground."

From The Contemporary Review.
RELIGION AND MORALITY.1

BY COUNT LEO TOLSTOI.

You ask me first, How I understand the word religion; and, second, Whether I admit the existence of morality, independent of religion as understood by me. I will answer these most important questions, well put by you, as best I can.

The first defiuition is similar to one a man might make of music by defining it as his most familiar and favorite

song, with which all the world should be acquainted. The second, in the same connection, would be that applied to music by a man who neither understood nor cared for it, and who called it the production of sound by the throat, mouth, or hands upon certain instruments; a useless and even objectionable occupation, from which it was necessary to wean men as soon as possible. The third is similar to that

which a man would apply to music, who considered it a useful contrivance for teaching men to dance or to march, for which purposes it should be main

There are three separate meanings implied by the word religion. FirstThat religion is a certain true revelation given by God to men, from which proceeds the worship of God by men. Such an interpretation is applied to religion by all believers in one of its existing forms, who regard in conse-tained. quence their particular form as the only true one. Second-That religion is a collection of superstitious statements, from which a worship equally superstitious is derived. Such an interpretation is applied to religion by sceptics in general; by those, that is, who do not believe in the religion they are defining. Third-That religion is a compilation of propositions and rules, invented by clever men, and a necessity for the vulgar herd, as much for their consolation as for their subjugation and the restraint of their passions. Such an interpretation is applied to religion by those indifferent to it personally, but who regard it as a useful instrument in the governance of man

kind.

By the first definition, religion is an indubitable and irrefragable truth, the propagation of which amongst all men and by every possible means is necessary to the welfare of mankind. By the second, religion is a mass of superstition from which it is desirable, and even needful to the welfare of human

The difference and narrowness of these definitions arises from their not taking hold of the essence of music, but merely defining its features from the definer's point of view. So is it also with the three definitions of religion. According to the first, religion is whatever the definer thinks that he is right in believing. According to the second, it is that which, in the definer's opin ion, people are wrong in believing. According to the third, it is, by the standard of the definer, what men are benefited by believing. All which define, not what constitutes the essence of religion, but the definer's idea of what religion constitutes. The first supplants the notion of religion by the faith of him who defines; the second, by the faith by which other people regard it; the third, by the faith of men in whatever may be supplied them as religion.

But what is faith? Why do people believe in what they believe? What is faith? and whence has it arisen ?

Amongst the majority of the eduity, that mankind should be delivered. cated classes it is regarded as a setBy the third, religion is a contrivance tled question that the essence of every useful to humanity, though unneces- religion has its origin in the personsary for those of the highest develop-ification, deification, and worship of ment, but which, as indispensable to the forces of nature-proceeding from the consolation and control of the vul- superstitious fear of nature's incongar, it is needful to maintain.

prehensible phenomena. This view is blindly accepted, without criticism, by the educated crowd of our time, and it