It was assuredly a good time when men's lives and actions were handed down, so to speak, from father to son, and the poor man had his '_locum tenens_' as well as the rich; and how he loved his own dwelling, how he decked it with ornament according to his taste or his means, how he watched over it and preserved it from decay; how, in short, his pride was in his own hearth and home--these old buildings tell us.
The conservative influence of all this on his character (which, although we are in France, we must call 'home-feeling'), its tendency to contentment and self-respect, are subjects suggestive enough, but on which we must not dwell. It flourished during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, and it declined when men commenced crowding into cities, and were no longer 'content to do without what they could not produce.'[14]
Let us stay quietly at Lisieux, if we have time, and _see_ the place, for we shall find nothing in all Normandy to exceed it in interest; and the way to see it best, and to remember it, is, undoubtedly, to _sketch_. Let us make out all these curious 'bits,' these signs, and emblems in wood and stone--twigs and moss, and birds with delicate wings, a spray of leaves, the serene head of a Madonna, the rampant heraldic griffin,--let us copy, if we can, their colour and the marks of age. We may sketch them, and we may dwell upon them, here, with the enthusiasm of an artist who returns to his favourite picture again and again; for we have seen the sun scorching these panels and burning upon their gilded shields; and we have seen the snow-flakes fall upon these sculptured eaves, silently, softly, thickly--like the dust upon the bronze figures of Ghiberti's gates at Florence--so thickly fall, so soon disperse, leaving the dark outlines sharp and clear against the sky; the wood almost as unharmed as the bronze.
But more interesting, perhaps, to the traveller who sees these things for the first time, more charming than the most exquisite Gothic lines, more fascinating than their quaint aspect, more attractive even than their colour or their age, are the associations connected with them; and the knowledge that they bear upon them the direct impress of the hands that built them centuries ago, and that every house is stamped, as it were, with the hall mark of individuality. The historian is nowhere so eloquent as when he can point to such examples as these. We may learn from them (as we did at Pont Audemer) much of the method of working in the 14th century, and, indeed, of the habits of the people, and the secret of their great success.