ou once more where we stood for a while, on entering
by the doorway [140] in the midst of the long southern aisle. Cross
the aisle, and gather now in one view the perspective of the whole.
Away on the left hand the eye is drawn upward to the tranquil light of
the vaults of the fore-church, seeming doubtless the more spacious
because partly concealed from us by the wall of partition below. But
on the right hand, towards the east, as if with the set purpose of a
striking architectural contrast, an instruction as to the place of this
or that manner in the architectural series, the long, tunnel-like,
military work of the Romanesque nave opens wide into the exhilarating
daylight of choir and transepts, in the sort of Gothic Bernard would
have welcomed, with a vault rising now high above the roof-line of the
body of the church, sicut lilium excelsum. The simple flowers, the
flora, of the early Pointed style, which could never have looked at
home as an element in the half-savage decoration of the nave, seem to
be growing here upon the sheaves of slender, reedy pillars, as if
naturally in the carved stone. Even here indeed, Roman, or Romanesque,
taste still lingers proudly in the monolith columns of the chevet.
Externally, we may note with what dexterity the Gothic choir has been
inserted into its place, below and within the great buttresses of the
earlier Romanesque one.

Visitors to the great church of Assisi have sometimes found a kind of
parable in the threefold [141] ascent from the dark crypt where the
body of Saint Francis lies, through the gloomy "lower" church, into the
height and breadth, the physical and symbolic "illumination," of the
church above. At Vezelay that kind of contrast suggests itself in one
view; the hopeful, but transitory, glory upon which one enters; the
long, darksome, central avenue; the "open vision" into which it
conducts us. As a symbol of resurrection, its choir is a fitting
diadem to the church of the Magdalen, whose remains the monks meant it
to cover.

And yet, after all, notwithstanding this assertion of the superiority
(are we so to call it?) of the new Gothic way, perhaps by the very
force of contrast, the Madeleine of Vezelay is still pre-eminently a
Romanesque, and thereby the typically monastic, church. In spite of
restoration even, as we linger here, the impression of the monastic
Middle Age, of a very exclusive monasticism, that has verily turned its
back upon common life, j