But it is not the mere naughtiness of some satirical mason giving expression to the humour of the people which accounts for all the mediæval grotesques--for the Imp of Lincoln, the Noah of Bourges, the Devils of Notre-Dame-de-Paris, the Ass of Chartres. Vices were portrayed in order to illustrate their punishment. ‘Let faithful souls but see the Passion of Our Lord represented,’ says an old writer, ‘and rarely will they fail to be filled with compunction and to raise their eyes to heaven.’ To the impressionable, childlike, illiterate men of the Middle Ages, accordingly, the clergy taught the lessons of dogma and belief through the personages of drama or the medium of art. The sculpted bays of a porch or the storied windows of a nave were a lesson for the ignorant, a sermon for the believer, appealing through the eyes to the heart. The representation of the mysteries and miracle plays showed to him in action and helped him to realise the persons whose figures were already familiar to him as painted on glass, sculptured on capitals, incrusted on the vaulting of the doors. Graphic and dramatic art constituted the books of those who did not know how to read. With the aid of these material objects, as the Abbot Suger, the great artist of S. Denis, declared,[60] the feeble spirit can mount to the truth and the soul which was plunged in darkness rise to the light which bursts upon its terrestrial eyes. We need not wonder then if the paintings of the Middle Ages have not always the severity of modern ecclesiastical art, for vices were portrayed with a view to condemning them the more thoroughly. The mediæval masons were strangers, it would seem, to the legend of Spinello. Evil for them was always ugly, and the Devil a monster, not Lucifer.
But at Chartres this side of life is not dealt with overmuch. The bases of the pillars of the bays in the south and the western porches give some examples of
men and women in the thralls of vice. Apart from these instances, the most famous and striking examples of the masons’ satiric warning are the _Âne qui vielle_ and the _Truie qui file_. These curious imposts of the closed doorway on the south side of the _clocher Vieux_ represent a donkey playing a harp and a sow spinning.[61] They are epigrams in stone, intended to remind us of the maxims, Asinus ad lyram, and Ne sus Minervam doceat; warnings against the pretentious ambitions of the awkward and incompetent, equivalent to the French dictum _Que Gros-Jean n’en remontre pas à son curé_; a proverb of which we have some obvious but homely versions. But of infernal beasts and Vices there is at Chartres, so much is this the Church of Our Lady, a decided scarcity. Of the Virtues there are many: most celebrated is the proud statue of Liberty in the left bay of the north porch, in which some writers have seen a reference to the Communal freedom granted to the people by the Kings, but which is in reality only one of the series of fourteen Heavenly Beatitudes as described by the mediæval theologians, which fill some of the rows of the vaulting of this bay.