have expressed if it had thought in our modes. The only word which
describes the Norman style is the French word naif. Littre says that
naif comes from natif, as vulgar comes from vulgus, as though native
traits must be simple, and commonness must be vulgar. Both these
derivative meanings were strange to the eleventh century. Naivete
was simply natural and vulgarity was merely coarse. Norman naivete
was not different in kind from the naivete 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 an eleventh-century church to judge by. We have
not even a facade, and shall have to stop at some Norman village--at
Thaon or Ouistreham--to find a west front which might suit the Abbey
here, but wherever we find it we shall find something a little more
serious, more military, and more practical than you will meet in
other Romanesque work, farther south. So, too, the central tower or
lantern--the most striking feature of Norman churches--has fallen
here at Mont-Saint-Michel, and we shall have to replace it from
Cerisy-la-Foret, and Lessay, and Falaise. We shall find much to say
about the value of the lantern on a Norman church, and the singular
power it expresses. We shall have still more to say of the towers
which flank the west front of Norman churches, but these are mostly
twelfth-century, and will lead us far beyond Coutances and Bayeux,
from fleche to fleche, till we come to the fleche of all fleches, at
Chartres.

We shall have a whole chapter of study, too, over the eleventh-
century apse, but here at Mont-Saint-Michel, Abbot Hildebert's choir
went the way of his nave and tower. He built out even more boldly to
the east than to the west, and although the choir stood for some
four hundred years, which is a sufficient life for most