During his annual winter lecture tours of America, it has become almost commonplace for Malcolm Miller to be stopped on the street by people who recognize him as the Englishman who gave them that marvelous tour of the Gothic cathedral of Chartres, France. The attention is pleasing and amusing, but he also remembers an incident after a lecture in Cleveland two years ago. A woman came up to him and said that he was the last person to speak to her son.
”Took me back for a moment,” said Miller, 52, a tall, lanky man with unruly salt-and-pepper hair. ”Her son was killed leaving Chartres, I suppose in a car crash. She had never been to Europe but she wanted to come and hear about Chartres. She said, `I`m happy because I know he died with something very beautiful in his mind.` It moved me greatly. People do come up and say extraordinary things to me on these trips.”
Malcolm Miller, the Englishman of Chartres, has built a following in this country and in his homeland not by appearing on all the right talk shows or having his name bruited about in the gossip sheets. He has done it by giving two talks a day at the cathedral, seven days a week, year in and year out. In the 28 years he has been giving tours of one of the most famous cathedrals in France, he has made thousands of fans, who have passed the word along that the only way to see Chartres is in his company.
For the last 15 years, he also has gone on a two-month winter lecture tour when the tourist trade is at its lowest in France. His lectures this year include one at a community college for Eskimos in northern Alaska and a private talk to a Florida woman and her friends. The talk is a 90th birthday present from her son.
”It`s a hobby that`s become my profession,” he said of his love of–his obsession with–the Cathedral of Our Lady in Chartres. ”And now the profession has splintered and become a series of professions.”
Miller did not become well-known among tourists just because he gives an English-language tour of one of the great monuments of Western civilization. He has become famous because he gives a sophisticated, informative, witty tour of that monument. He averages 150 to 200 people in each of his tours tailoring his talks to the interests of his group and to the amount of knowledge his listeners already have of the cathedral. He can give a general talk about the five churches that have stood on the site since Roman times. Or, he can talk for an hour about one of the famous stained-glass windows of the west facade and, during his afternoon lecture, speak for another hour on the sculpture of the south porch.
One of his favorite demonstrations illustrates the principle of the flying buttress, the medieval structural innovation that made possible vast expanses of stained glass by reducing the massive walls. He has members of his tour group join hands above their heads to form pointed arches. Others simulate flying buttresses by pushing against the backs of the human arches. To show how sturdy the arches and their supports are, he dangles from a set of uplifted arms.
On his lecture tours, he puts together a talk in the hour before he speaks, arranging slides from his large collection and organizing his thoughts. As he demonstrated recently at Wheaton College, he talks seriously about serious things, but he knows Chartres` greatness is not diminished by a bit of fun, too. In explaining the organization of windows at the cathedral, he told the Wheaton audience that many windows on the north wall depict the lives of saints, ”some of them rather boring.”
”I like communicating what I know to other people,” he said over afternoon tea. ”A concert pianist doesn`t just want to play for himself. The repertoire is vast, but there is a certain amount of repetition. Yet every time it`s a different audience, and the way in which you interpret the cathedral for them is different. The great satisfaction is knowing that you`ve given to people something that they might never forget.”
Miller first went to Chartres in 1956 as a university student. Part of the requirement for a degree in French from the University of Durham was a final paper in French, written after a year`s residence in the country. He chose Chartres cathedral as his subject. He moved to the village, taught English in the local high school, and researched the crypts of the cathedral. ”I was always interested in languages,” he said, modulating his voice from lecture-volume to whisper with unpredictable suddenness. ”Before I could speak English, I was playing with the radio and listening to French stations. Another early interest was an interest in ancient things. As a boy, I got my parents to take me to cathedrals around England. An interest in religion, yes, but more of an intellectual nature than church-going.”
For one interested in French and old cathedrals, the choice of Chartres was a natural. The Gothic masterpiece, begun in 1194, is not only one of the finest examples of medieval architecture extant, its countless sculptures and 3,000 square yards of stained glass have come down through the centuries in remarkably good shape. Miller tells tour groups and lecture audiences that the cathedral is a library whose text is written in symbols. He explains how the sculpture and stained glass make up an encyclopedic tale of man`s fall from grace and redemption through the sacrifice of Jesus Christ. He could not have expressed these points so well 30 years ago.
”I had known something about the cathedral before I went,” said Miller, who pronounces Chartres (CHAR-trruh) with Gallic drama. ”But I was completely overwhelmed the first time I saw it. I began to realize I had bitten off more than I could eat. Anybody who goes to Chartres, unless they are completely insensitive–and, unfortunately, there are a few people like that who`ve taken my tour–cannot go there and not be overwhelmed. It`s a sense of mystery that`s almost undefinable. For a religious person, it might be the presence of something close to godhood. I`ve seen Buddhists hushed in the cathedral because they recognize a holy place.”
With his paper almost finished, Miller returned to Chartres at Easter, 1958, and was granted permission by the cathedral to give tours in English. It was not so much an act of devotion as a way to make some money. The bulk of his living for many years still came by teaching English in French schools. At Easter breaks and during the summers, he would return to Chartres to give tours.
”It wasn`t something I could make a living on at all,” he said. ”There weren`t enough tourists in the early `60s. The season lasted at the most for five weeks in the summer and a couple weeks at Easter.”
His intellectual appreciation of the way in which symbol and art combine to tell a complete story at Chartres deepened into an emotional attachment during a long illness in the mid-`60s that forced him to give up teaching and, almost, guiding. He spent six months in an English hospital in 1966-67 and underwent a series of operations. All the while, Chartres was on his mind.
”It pulled me through, really,” he recalled. ”In the hospital, I was furious. I knew I had to get back to Chartres. The doctor was saying, `No, no question, you`ve got to go to a convalescent home and no more running around the world,` but I went back. I think already I had a sort of guilt complex, which I get when I`m not at Chartres. I ought to be there, I think, and I`m disappointing people if I`m not there.”
His thoughts about the cathedral were religious, but he talks about them now without becoming too specific.
”I think these things are very difficult to explain,” he said. ”Like every other human being, I get irritable and tired sometimes on these lecture tours. But I think the cathedral gives me a great calmness. I can face problems. I don`t know to what degree this is in the world of religion or just my own experience going through life, but, you see, I hear people grumbling and complaining and it all seems so trivial.”
By the late `60s, when his health was restored and his guiding routine at Chartres was re-established, he noticed something. ”More and more people were coming,” he said. ”Somebody in Seattle, I suppose it was, designed 747s and mass tourism began.”
He started to make a living just from guiding and bought a 15th-Century house close to the cathedral. He showed a slide of the narrow, half-timbered building during his lecture for, he admitted, ”no particular reason. I just like to see it.”
He receives no salary from the cathedral or the town (although the town has awarded him its medal of honor). Instead, at the end of his tours, which last up to 90 minutes, he explains that medals are nice but not edible and invites his auditors to leave a few of their francs with him. He also gets income from lecturing and from the sales of three books. A role as host on a recent six-part series on medieval glass for British television may open up yet another career.
His renown is such that by now most travel books mention Miller`s lectures in their accounts of Chartres. One of Miller`s favorites mentions Miller`s tart manner of dealing with interruptions.
”It said, `Beware of Malcolm Miller`s raised eyebrow,”` he said, laughing. ”`If he`s irritated by a hiccup or a scream from a child, up will go the eyebrow and the offender will receive a heart-stopping glare.` Sounds quite frightening. I am sarcastic. I`ve taught myself to hold my tongue and just stop the lecture for a moment.”
Still, his tongue will not be held all the time. He has been quoted as referring to the 18th-Century high altar at Chartres as more appropriate to
”a fishpond at Versailles.” And once, when a woman asked him before one of his lectures in America if he was going to spend 90 minutes on just one church, he replied, ”No, madam, I intend to talk for 90 minutes on two windows and one door of one church.”
His specialties are the cathedral`s windows and sculpture, which employ a complex systems of symbols to identify and comment on biblical characters. A simple example: the Apostle Peter holds keys to symbolize his authority as the first Pope and he stands upon a rock because Jesus described him as the rock upon which the church would be founded. Miller could expound and expand on the topic for hours, but he rears back in his chair when he is asked if he has mastered his subject.
”The more I stay there, the more I realize how much there is yet to learn,” he said. ”The knowledge in the building is so vast. I don`t think any one person knows that building, and I certainly wouldn`t trust anyone who said he did.”
After 28 years, what could possibly remain for Miller to learn about the cathedral? He reels off a list of subjects, each of which would fill a scholarly career: Neoplatonism, Latin and Greek, Scholasticism, biblical commentary, architecture, the symbolism of numbers, sacred geometry, and, just for good measure, he adds, ”I don`t know enough about it, but someone could do a tremendous study on medieval botany.”
When Miller is not giving tours of the cathedral or indulging the other passion of his life–music–he probably is wandering around the edifice, looking for the spot that matches his mood. In happy moments, he looks at the Mary Magdalene window. When he has a problem, he spends a few moments with the sculpture of John the Baptist.
”In the winter,” he said, looking off in the distance and conjuring up a building thousands of miles away, ”the sun will set in the southwest and the shadow will climb up through the west windows and there`ll be a blaze of yellows and warm reds, which will grow softer as the shadow climbs up. All the reds and yellows will disappear and the blues come out, the blues and the purples and the pinks and the mauves, and all of a sudden you realize the sun has gone down and it`s dark. That`s the poetry of Chartres, but to know that poetry you have to live there.”
