seem to have before us here a Romanesque architecture, studied, not
from Roman basilicas or Roman temples, but from the arenas, the
colossal gateways, the triumphal arches, of the people of empire, such
as remain even now, not in the South of France only. The simple
"flying," or rather leaning and almost couchant, buttresses, quadrants
of a circle, might be parts of a Roman aqueduct. In contrast to the
lightsome Gothic manner of the last quarter of the twelfth century (as
we shall presently find it here too, like an escape for the eye, for
the temper, out of some grim underworld into genial daylight), the
Cluniac church might seem a still active instrument of the iron tyranny
of Rome, of its tyranny over the animal spirits. As the ghost of
ancient Rome still lingers "over the grave thereof," in the papacy, the
hierarchy, so is it with the material structures [132] also, the
Cluniac and other Romanesque churches, which most emphatically express
the hierarchical, the papal system. There is something about this
church of Vezelay, in the long-sustained patience of which it tells,
that brings to mind the labour of slaves, whose occasional Fescennine
licence and fresh memories of a barbaric life also find expression, now
and again, in the strange sculpture of the place. Yet here for once,
around a great French church, there is the kindly repose of English
"precincts," and the country which this monastic acropolis overlooks
southwards is a very pleasant one, as we emerge from the shadows
of--yes! of that peculiarly sad place--a country all the pleasanter by
reason of the toil upon it, performed, or exacted from others, by the
monks, through long centuries; Le Morvan, with its distant blue hills
and broken foreground, the vineyards, the patches of woodland, the
roads winding into their cool shadows; though in truth the
fortress-like outline of the monastic church and the sombre hue of its
material lend themselves most readily to the effects of a stormy sky.

By a door, which in the great days opened from a magnificent cloister,
you enter what might seem itself but the ambulatory of a cloister,
superbly vaulted and long and regular, and built of huge stones of a
metallic colour. It is the southern aisle of the nave, a nave of ten
bays, the grandest Romanesque interior in France, [133] perhaps in the
world. In its mortified light the very soul of monasticism, Roman and
half-military, as the completest outcome of a religion o