SAINT MICHIEL  DE LA  MER  DEL PERIL           9
Taking architecture as an expression of energy, we can some day
compare Mont-Saint-Michel with Beauvais, and draw from the com-
parison whatever moral suits our frame of mind ; but you should first
note that here, in the eleventh century, the Church, however simple-
minded or unschooled, was not cheap. Its self-respect is worth notic-
ing, because it was short-lived in its art. Mont-Saint-Michel, through-
out, even up to the delicate and intricate stonework of its cloisters, is
built of granite. The crypts and substructures are as well constructed
as the surfaces most exposed to view. When we get to Chartres, which
is largely a twelfth-century work, you will see that the cathedral
there, too, is superbly built, of the hardest and heaviest stone within
reach, which has nowhere settled or given way; while, beneath, you
will find a crypt that rivals the church above. The thirteenth century
did not build so. The great cathedrals after 1200 show economy,
and sometimes worse. The world grew cheap, as worlds must.
You may like it all the better for being less serious, less heroic, less
militant, and more what the French call bourgeois, just as you may like
the style of Louis XV better than that of Louis XIV, — Madame du
Barry better than Madame de Montespan, — for taste is free, and all
styles are good which amuse; but since we are now beginning with the
earliest, in order to step down gracefully to the stage, whatever it is,
where you prefer to stop, we must try to understand a little of the
kind of energy which Norman art expressed, or would have expressed
if it had thought in our modes. The only word which describes the
Norman style is the French word naïf. Littré says that naïf comes
from natif, as vulgar comes from vulgus, as though native traits must be
simple, and commonness must be vulgar. Both these derivative mean-
ings were-etrange to the eleventh century. Naïveté was simply natural
and vulgarity was merely coarse. Norman naïveté was not different
in kind from the naïveté of Burgundy or Gascony or Lombardy, but
it was slightly different in expression, as you will see when you travel
south. Here at Mont-Saint-Michel we have only a mutilated trunk of