the walls of the New Jerusalem; the blue waves
he [128] might have fancied its pavement of sapphire. In the churches,
the worship, of his new order he required simplicity, and even
severity, being fortunate in finding so winsome an exponent of that
principle as the early Gothic of Pontigny, or of the first Cistercian
church, now destroyed, at Citeaux itself. Strangely enough, while
Bernard's own temper of mind was a survival from the past (we see this
in his contest with Abelard), hierarchic, reactionary, suspicious of
novelty, the architectural style of his preference was largely of
secular origin. It had a large share in that inventive and innovating
genius, that expansion of the natural human soul, to which the art, the
literature, the religious movements of the thirteenth century in
France, as in Italy, where it ends with Dante, bear witness.

In particular, Bernard had protested against the sculpture, rich and
fantastic, but gloomy, it might be indecent, developed more abundantly
than anywhere else in the churches of Burgundy, and especially in those
of the Cluniac order. "What is the use," he asks, "of those grotesque
monsters in painting and sculpture?" and almost certainly he had in
mind the marvellous carved work at Vezelay, whither doubtless he came
often--for example on Good Friday, 1146, to preach, as we know, the
second crusade in the presence of Louis the Seventh. He too might have
wept at the sight of the doomed multitude (one in ten, it is said,
returned from the Holy [129] Land), as its enthusiasm, under the charm
of his fiery eloquence, rose to the height of his purpose. Even the
aisles of Vezelay were not sufficient for the multitude of his hearers,
and he preached to them in the open air, from a rock still pointed out
on the hillside. Armies indeed have been encamped many times on the
slopes and meadows of the valley of the Cure, now to all seeming so
impregnably tranquil. The Cluniac order even then had already declined
from its first intention; and that decline became especially visible in
the Abbey of Vezelay itself not long after Bernard's day. Its majestic
immoveable church was complete by the middle of the twelfth century.
And there it still stands in spite of many a threat, while the
conventual buildings around it have disappeared; and the institution it
represented--secularised at its own request at the Reformation--had
dwindled almost to nothing at all, till in the last century the las