elsewhere, which is not difficult, since it is preserved in any
number of churches in every path of tourist travel. Normandy is full
of it; Bayeux and Caen contain little else. At the Mount, the
eleventh-century work was antiquated before it was finished. In the
year 1112, Abbot Roger II was obliged to plan and construct a new
group in such haste that it is said to have been finished in 1122.
It extends from what we have supposed to be the old refectory to the
parvis, and abuts on the three lost spans of the church, covering
about one hundred and twenty feet. As usual there were three levels;
a crypt or gallery beneath, known as the Aquilon; a cloister or
promenoir above; and on the level of the church a dormitory, now
lost. The group is one of the most interesting in France, another
pons seclorum, an antechamber to the west portal of Chartres, which
bears the same date (i 110-25). It is the famous period of
Transition, the glory of the twelfth century, the object of our
pilgrimage.

Art is a fairly large field where no one need jostle his neighbour,
and no one need shut himself up in a corner; but, if one insists on
taking a corner of preference, one might offer some excuse for
choosing the Gothic Transition. The quiet, restrained strength of
the Romanesque married to the graceful curves and vaulting
imagination of the Gothic makes a union nearer the ideal than is
often allowed in marriage. The French, in their best days, loved it
with a constancy that has thrown a sort of aureole over their
fickleness since. They never tired of its possibilities. Sometimes
they put the pointed arch within the round, or above it; sometimes
they put the round within the pointed. Sometimes a Roman arch
covered a cluster of pointed windows, as though protecting and
caressing its children; sometimes a huge pointed arch covered a