The one, fashioned by the Byzantine chisel, sprang into complete being in the heroic ages of faith, in the days of war, and beheld at its feet Thomas, exiled from Canterbury, and Bernard, when preaching the second Crusade, hailed there by bishops and barons as generalissimo of that great enterprise. The other rose, after a long peace, under the hands of the still Christian architects of the Renaissance, when all dangers and difficulties had been surmounted. She arose in her smiling elegance, rose till it seemed that she would touch the stars, and her mantle shone with a thousand lights and sparkled with a thousand
ornaments. Statues and buttresses, gargoyles, arabesques and crochets pile themselves in successive stages, until the eye loses the sense of everything but a sort of architectural lacework.
The Cathedral is truly a Bible in stone. And just as in the sculptured porches the mediæval masons carved in a symbolic type, which the illiterate could read, the story of the Pentateuch and the Gospels; just as in their jewelled windows the monkish glaziers told again the same Bible story for all to see and understand, so it would seem that here in Chartres, the architects also, but by fortune rather than design, have symbolised in stone the Old Testament and the New. In that amazing window of the south transept the prophets of the former dispensation are portrayed carrying on their shoulders the naïve evangelists. Similarly the builders have made the Romanesque crypt to carry the Gothic upper church, and the old tower, eloquent of Byzantine art, massive and superb, confronts the joyous, soaring sister who has sprung up, from like foundations, at his side, the last effort, or rather the last amusement, of that Gothic art which is typical of aspirations that are justified, of a faith that is fulfilled.
The Clocher Vieux combines to the highest degree grandeur with harmonious unity of proportion. From the bottommost stone to the highest there is never a break in the perfect line; and the plain massive base of enormous quarried stones, some of which, they say, measure ten feet by three, passes into the light octagonal spire, covered with its curious coat of mail or fishes’ scales, by imperceptible and inevitable gradations. It is a triumph of sheer beauty of proportion unaided by the art of ornament. The transition from the square tower to the tapering _flèche_ is, in spite of this simplicity, so exquisitely treated that it cannot be distinguished. It is a perfect masterpiece of masonic skill. Two terrible fires and more than 700 winters have left it with not one stone displaced.[57]