striving for effect; our conquest of England, with which the Duke is
infatuated, is more ambitious still; but all this is a trifle to the
outburst which is coming in the next generation; and Saint Michael
on his Mount expresses it all.

Taking architecture as an expression of energy, we can some day
compare Mont-Saint-Michel with Beauvais, and draw from the
comparison 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 noticing, because it was short-lived in its art. Mont-Saint-
Michel, throughout, 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