44            MONT-SAINT-MICHEL AND CHARTRES
France," he said; although in France there are many beautiful and
curious cloisters. For another reason it has value. The architect
meant it to reassert, with all the art and grace he could command, the
mastery of love, of thought and poetry, in religion, over the masculine,
military energy of the great hall below. The thirteenth century rarely
let slip a chance to insist on this moral that love is law. Saint Francis
was preaching to the birds in 1215 at Assisi, and the architect built
this cloister in 1226 at Mont-Saint-Michel. Both sermons were satu-
rated with the feeling of the time, and both are about equally worth
noting, if one aspires to feel the art.
A conscientious student has yet to climb down the many steps, on
the outside, and look up at the Merveille from below. Few buildings
in France are better worth the trouble. The horizontal line at the roof
measures two hundred and thirty-five feet. The vertical line of the
buttresses measures in round numbers one hundred feet. To make
walls of that height and length stand up at all was no easy matter, as
Robert de Torigny had shown; and so the architect buttressed them
from bottom to top with twelve long buttresses against the thrust of
the interior arches, and three more, bearing against the interior walls.
This gives, on the north front, fifteen strong vertical lines in a space of
two hundred and thirty-five feet. Between these lines the windows
tell their story; the seven long windows of the refectory on one side;
the seven rounded windows of the hall on the other. Even the corner
tower with the charter-house becomes as simple as the rest. The sum
of this impossible wall, and its exaggerated vertical lines, is strength
and intelligence at rest.
The whole Mount still kept the grand style ; it expressed the unity
of Church and State, God and Man, Peace and War, Life and Death,
Good and Bad; it solved the whole problem of the universe. The priest
and the soldier were both at home here, in 1215 as in 1115 or in 1058;
the politician was not outside of it; the sinner was welcome; the poet
was made happy in his own spirit, with a sympathy, almost an affec-