ribs rising directly from the square capitals and intersecting the
central spacings, in a spirit which neither you nor I know how to
distinguish from the pure Gothic of the thirteenth century, unless
it is that the arches are hardly pointed enough; they seem to the
eye almost round. The height appears to be about fourteen feet.

The promenoir of Abbot Roger II has an interest to pilgrims who are
going on to the shrine of the Virgin, because the date of the
promenoir seems to be exactly the same as the date which the Abbe
Bulteau assigns for the western portal of Chartres. Ordinarily a
date is no great matter, but when one has to run forward and back,
with the agility of an electric tram, between two or three fixed
points, it is convenient to fix them once for all. The Transition is
complete here in the promenoir, which was planned as early as 1115.
The subject of vaulting is far too ambitious for summer travel; it
is none too easy for a graduate of the Beaux Arts; and few
architectural fields have been so earnestly discussed and disputed.
We must not touch it. The age of the "Chanson de Roland" itself is
not so dangerous a topic. Our vital needs are met, more or less
sufficiently, by taking the promenoir at the Mount, the crypt at
Saint-Denis, and the western portal at Chartres, as the trinity of
our Transition, and roughly calling their date the years 1115-20, To
overload the memory with dates is the vice of every schoolmaster and
the passion of every second-rate scholar. Tourists want as few dates
as possible; what they want is poetry. Yet a singular coincidence,
with which every classroom is only too familiar, has made of the
years--15 a curiously convenient group, and the year 1115 is as
convenient as any for the beginning of the century of Transition.
That was the year when Saint Bernard laid the foundations of his
Abbey of Clairvaux. Perhaps 1115, or at latest 1117, was the year