After seeing the castles planned for his 1908 tour Lawrence intended to go to Brittany. On the way he visited Chartres Cathedral. The letter he wrote home is one of the most revealing to have survived from his youth. 'I expected that Chartres would have like most French Cathedrals spoilt by restoration, so I slipped out before breakfast to "do" it. What I found I cannot describe - it is absolutely untouched and unspoilt, in superb preservation, and the noblest building (for Beauvais is only half a one) that I have ever seen, or expect to see. If only you could get an idea of its beauty, of its perfection, without going to look at it! Its date is late xiith and early xiii cent. It is not enormous; but the carvings on its 3 portals are as fine as the best of all Greek work. Till yesterday I would put no sculptors near the Greeks of the Vth cent. Today the French of the early middle ages may be inferior, but I do not think so: nothing in imagination could be grander than that arrangement of three huge cavernous portals, (30 odd feet deep), of gigantic height, with statues everywhere for pillars, bas-reliefs for plain surfaces, statuettes and canopies for mouldings. The whole wall of the cathedral is chased and wrought like a Florentine plaque, and by master hands! You may think the individual figures stiff - the details coarse - everything is hard and narrow I admit, but when you see the whole - you can conceive at once the frame and the picture, then you must admit that nothing could be greater, except it were the Parthenon as it left the hands of Pheidias: it must be one of the noblest works of man, as it is the finest of the middle ages. One cannot describe it in anything but superlatives, and these seem so wretchedly formal that I am half tempted to scratch out everything that I have written: Chartres is Chartres:- that is, a gallery built by the sculptors to enclose a finer collection than the Elgin Marbles. I went in, as I said, before breakfast, and I left when dark:- all the day I was running form one door to another, finding in each something I thought finer than the one I had just left, and then returning to find that the finest was that in front of me - for it is a place absolutely impossible to imagine, or to recollect, at any rate for me: it is overwhelming, and when night came I was absolutely exhausted, drenched to the skin (it had poured all day) and yet with a feeling I had never had before in the same degree - as though I had found a path ( a hard one) as far as the gates of Heaven, and had caught a glimpse of the inside, the gate being ajar. You will understand how I felt though I cannot express myself. Certainly Chartres is the sight of a lifetime, a place truly in which to worship God. The middle ages were truer that way than ourselves, in spite of their narrowness and hardness and ignorance of the truth as we complacently put it: the truth doesn’t matter a straw, if men only believe what they say or are willing to show that they do believe something. Chartres besides has the finest late xvi and early xvii bas-reliefs in the world, and is beautiful in its design and its proportions. I have bought all the picture post-cards, but they are of course hardly a ghost of the reality, nothing ever could be, though photography is best for such works. I took a photo myself of Philosophus, a most delightful little statuette, about 18 inches high: if not fogged, (I forgot to lock my camera, and somebody has fiddled with it), it may give one an idea of how the smallest parts of the building are finished with as much care as the centre-posts of the main doorways, and if Philosophus were of Greek marble there would be photographs of him in every album, between Hermes of Praxiteles and the Sophocles of the Lateran. He is great work. I also tried to take a photo of the masterpiece, the Christ of the south portal, but that cannot be worth looking at. I expect I will burn my photos of Chartres as soon as they are visible. Yet perhaps with care and time, one would get something worthy from a photograph. We must return there (I would want assistants) and spend a fortnight in pure happiness.'

Bodleian Library, Oxford (MS.Res.c.13)

Literature: HL pp. 79-81.

Christ of the South Portal
Photograph by T. E. Lawrence, 1908
(not exhibited)