Chapter VI: Part 6

And here enters another misconception that has done much harm: the Van Eycks did not invent oil painting, if by the phrase is meant the oil painting of the nineteenth century. This, the use of mechanically ground pigments already mixed with an oil medium, is a trick hardly more than a century old, and is a time-saving device for the obtaining (which it does not succeed in doing), at the least expenditure of time and thought, of the effects originally produced by the old method that held from the time of Hubert Van Eyck down to that of Sir Joshua Reynolds. This old method consisted in dividing the work of a painter into three stages--drawing, modelling, colouring--each of which had to be done laboriously and to perfection. After the picture had been drawn completely and in every detail it was modelled in a thick underpainting of impasto with its varied reliefs and textures, and then the colour was applied; successive coats of _transparent_ pigment, one imposed on the other, each being allowed to dry before the next was put on. The result was, amongst other things, that depth, resonance, and transparency of colour that mark the great painting of the past and are absolutely unobtainable by the use of the opaque and muddy pigments squeezed out of collapsible tubes. In this earlier method there was no short road to success; a painter could not sweep in his broad masses of paint with a few masterly strokes, masking his lack of proficiency in drawing by daring and theatrical brush work, and making amends for his opaque and unbeautiful colour by a stunning exhibition of a delusive chiaro-oscuro. Everything was built up laboriously and conscientiously; it was consummate craftsmanship, with much in common with stained glass, orfèverie, and even with architecture. No wonder a painter’s training frequently began with a goldsmith; it demanded the most exquisite and conscientious craft and there was no substitute that a public trained in eye and quick in appreciation could be induced to accept. Temperament was no excuse for incapacity; daring brush work made no amends for lack of competence; for once painting was on a par with the other arts, and a painter was as much a master of craft, and as rigidly held to its highest standards, as a musician or a master builder.

Of course there always had been fresco-painting, and here the method was quite different, for the colour had to be applied swiftly and once for all to the wet plaster. Here the technique was direct and instantaneous, quite unlike that of panel painting, and though it was no more adaptable to the vagaries of temperamental expression, it opened up new possibilities of which painters were always trying to take advantage. Giotto himself, being the greatest master of this particular mode, was always working along these lines, and later Velasquez combined them with the possibilities inherent in the development of underpainting as a thing final in itself, without the laborious and studied glazing of successive coats of pure colour.

The art of painting was never a rigid and immobile system; every painter was striving for new methods and new developments, and frequently finding them; in the end, as the old artistic sense died away, virtuosity took its place, and this found its opportunity through the elimination of all the old elements of craftsmanship and a development of the qualities of breadth and swiftness inherent in fresco-painting, together with the dash and bravura that offered themselves through the clever manipulation of the thick and solid and suave material of the old underpainting. In a word, the tendency was toward combining drawing, modelling, and colour in one process, obtaining final effects in one operation; and while this meant a possible slouching of drawing, a substitution of surprise and bravado for consistent modelling, a loss of all depth and resonance of colour, and the putting of a premium on such quite unimportant (and sometimes vicious) matters as dashing brush work, it must be admitted it did permit “temperament” to express itself with a swiftness and mobility impossible before, granting always that this is desirable.

Now in the working of this revolution the Van Eycks had no part whatever. They did not invent “oil painting” or anything like it. They were the greatest painter-craftsmen ever known, and they and the generations that followed them in Flanders and Italy held faithfully to the old threefold mode of operation until Tintoretto, Velasquez, and Rubens began to merge the three in one and to lay the foundations for the present lamentable subterfuges of the Salon and the Royal Academy. What they did do was this: until Hubert’s time every painter had been searching for some medium which would not mitigate the perfect transparency of their hand-ground colours and would dry quickly. All kinds of viscous things had been employed--white of egg, fig juice, and other less seemly media--but none was wholly satisfactory. Oil was the natural thing, but oil was an unconscionable time in drying. Hubert Van Eyck found some oil medium (or varnish) that dried quickly and this at once became the universal medium. It was a great discovery and a great boon, but it had nothing whatever to do with “oil painting,” which did not actually come into existence until the dark days of the late eighteenth or early nineteenth century, therefore the skirts of the Van Eycks are clear and we can absolve them of all responsibility.

There never was a school of such consummate craftsmanship as this of Flanders. The Van Eycks, Memling, Van der Weyden were the most perfectly trained, the most comprehensively competent, and the most conscientiously laborious artists ever known; also they understood drawing, composition, and lighting as no others ever did, while their sense of beauty of colour, either in itself or in subtle and splendid combinations, was unique. They were not portents, sudden meteors shooting across a dark sky, they simply continued and developed a long and glorious tradition. Long before them the monasteries had been producing great art of every kind--frescos, illuminations, stained glass, embroidery, painted sculpture--and it was all art of the greatest. When Hubert painted the “Adoration of the Lamb,” he merely gathered together all these arts and manifested his enormous and astounding synthesis in concentrated form, and better than any one had ever done before. All the intricate delicacy of jewel work, all the vivacity of clean-cut sculpture, all the suavity of silken needlework, all the flaming splendour of stained glass are brought together here in one astonishing combination, and to this era-making synthesis is added the living light

OUR LADY, FROM THE TRYPTICH AT GHENT HUBERT VAN EYCK ]

and the human appeal of the poignant beauty of the world, and the transcendent magic of the supernatural, sacramentally and visibly set forth.

This, which very well may be the greatest picture in the world (it does not matter), was ordered from Hubert Van Eyck when he was nearly fifty years old, he having been born about 1366 in the province of Limbourg and coming of a long line of painters. It was ordered by Jodocus Vydts, a worthy burgher of Ghent, as an altar-piece for a chapel he had built and endowed (according to the pious and admirable practice of those good Catholic times) in the Cathedral of St. Bavon. For ten years he worked at his masterpiece, and then death overtook him in the year 1426, when his work was only partly finished, when his brother, Jan, took it up and brought it to a triumphant conclusion in 1432. It is a great triptych of twenty-two painted panels and its preservation has been nothing short of miraculous. Philip II tried to carry it off in 1558, the Protestants to destroy it in 1566, and the Calvinists to give it away to Queen Elizabeth in 1578. It was nearly destroyed by fire in 1641, dismembered and packed away in 1781, carried off (parts of it) to Paris in 1794. In 1816 most of the wings were sold to a shrewd dealer for $20,000 and by him to the Berlin Museum for $80,000; finally the Adam and Eve panels were taken to the Brussels Museum, and a set of copies attached to the mutilated remainder in the Cathedral of St. Bavon.

The work is one vast, comprehensive, and sacramental manifestation of the central Catholic sacrament of the mass, searching and final in its symbolism, consummate in its mastery of all the elements that enter into the make-up of a great work of pictorial and decorative art, unapproached and unapproachable in its splendour of living and radiant colour. In its philosophical grasp, its technical perfection, its unearthly beauty, its communication of the very essence of a fundamental mystery, and in its evocative power it staggers the imagination and takes its place amongst the few great works of man, in any category, which are so far beyond what seems possible of achievement that they rank as definitely superhuman. So far as its spiritual content is concerned, it can no more be estimated than can the mass itself, or paraphrased in words than Chartres Cathedral or a Brahms symphony or the Venus of Melos. If the Van Eycks are responsible for this, they rank with St. Thomas Aquinas and Shakespeare and Leonardo da Vinci as the greatest creative forces amongst men. Of course they were not, nor the others, named. Somehow each was used by something greater than he: the concentrated consciousness of his fellows, the underlying and informing time-spirit of an era--or why not God Himself?--as a channel through which and by which absolute truth was communicated to man who, of his own motion, can do much, but not so much as this.

For the consummate artistry, for the perfect sense of decoration and composition, the keen and exquisite line, the perception and recording of diversified character, the poignant love of all natural beauty and corresponding rejection of all ugliness, for the technique which is that of a master in the fashioning of precious metals and the cutting of priceless gems, for the colour that is now resonant with all the deep splendour of great music, now thin and aerial with all the delicacy of far horizons and misty forests at some pale dawn in a land of dreams--for all these things we may remember Hubert Van Eyck and his brother Jan, for this is their work, but beyond this we go elsewhere, at least as far as the mass itself, for the inspiration that has made this Flemish triptych one of the great, revealing creations of the world.

The infinite variety of conception and rendition simply transcend experience. The three great, dominating figures--God the Father, Our Lady, and St. John Baptist--are of a Byzantine majesty transfused by a passionate humanism that is almost unique in any form. From them you pass to the central panel of the “Worship of the Lamb That Was Slain,” which is as tender and personal and human as the best of Fra Angelico, and, like his clear visions, irradiated by a kind of paradisal glory that sets it in a heaven of its own; from this you go to the panels of singing angels and splendid attendant knights and marching pilgrims that are pages out of the daily record of life in proud and beautiful Bruges, and finally you come to the Adam and Eve who are sheer, unadulterated realism unapproachable in its minute veracity. Surely, these two men were a type of the universal genius. They balked at nothing and found nothing too difficult of accomplishment, simply because they were perfectly trained and broadly accomplished craftsmen who knew that theirs was an exacting and a jealous craft for which “temperament”--artistic or otherwise--was not, and could not be made, a substitute.

It is with a feeling almost of relief that we come down nearer the earth and confront the masterpieces of Jan Van Eyck. With Hubert we are taken into a kind of seventh heaven of mystical revelation; with his brother and those that follow we come back to what is more human, more in scale with experience. Great art still, as great as one can find elsewhere, and with all the mastery of methods, all the confident certainty, all the triumphant colour and the exquisite design and the faultless craftsmanship of the painted “Beatific Vision” itself. There once were many other pictures by Hubert Van Eyck, but all now are gone, destroyed by the savage hands of Calvinists and Revolutionaries, and the “Adoration of the Lamb” remains alone as an isolated miracle.

Jan was of another sort; equally great as a craftsman, he was a fine gentleman, a courtier, the friend of princes, and a diplomat. In those barbarous days before the culmination of the era of enlightenment, art was not a cult, isolated from life, nor were artists a sort of creature apart, made so by the possession of a then undiscovered and quite pathological affliction called the “artistic temperament.” They were good citizens and an integral part of a like-minded community, serving their kind after many fashions, amongst them being the honourable and admirable craft of art. Of this craft Jan was past master; he painted statues and illuminated missals and fashioned stained glass; he created great altar-pieces and produced living portraits of old ecclesiastics and worthy burghers and their wives; for all I know he was an architect as well--at all events he might have been, as is proved by the wonderful drawing of St. Barbara with its background of a great Gothic tower under construction. A thoroughly typical example of his painting is the St. Donatian altar-piece, a votive picture ordered by the excellent old Canon Van der Paele, who is shown in adoration before Our Lady and the Holy Child and attended by St. Donatian himself and St. George. Mr. Berenson could find no finer example than this of that “space composition” on which he rightly lays such stress; Holbein could paint no more exact and characteristic portraits; all the goldsmiths of Byzantium could not rival the jewel work of armour and orphreys, brocades and embroideries, and sculptures and inlays, while the colour, both in its individual parts and its composition, comes nearer the living light of the

windows of Chartres than any other painted colour in the world. One would like to hang this particular picture (for a time only, then replacing it over an altar where alone it belongs) in the midst of a “Rubens Gallery,” or a room in the Luxembourg or the Royal Academy, and call all the world to see.

There is little enough left of Jan’s work, and for the same humiliating reason that holds in the case of his brother. Of Hans Memling, another wonder child, there is fortunately much. When one catalogues the list of this earliest and greatest work in Flanders and recalls the wrecking with axe and torch of cathedrals, abbeys, convents, hospitals, châteaux by Calvinists and sans-culottes; the pyres of smouldering pictures, the ditches filled up with pulverised glass, shattered statues, illuminated missals and graduales and books of hours; the sacred vessels and gorgeous vestments, such as Hubert and Jan, Hans and Gerard showed in their pictures, despoiled of their splendid jewels (transferred for a consideration to Hebrew brokers) and melted down or used for chair covers, as the case may be; and when in this lurid light one weighs the thick hides and the muddled brains and the shrivelled souls of the wreckers against even the mere artistic value of their spoils, one marvels still more at the wonders of scientific evolution and the promises of evolutionary philosophy.

Memling is the third of the great trio of Flemings, and though there were innumerable others whose art was near perfection, these three stand for ever by themselves apart. There is more of human tenderness in his work and a certain spiritualisation informing everything that gives a different quality; the portraiture and differentiation of character are possibly beyond what any other ever attained, but his composition as it gains in complexity and facile ease loses something of that broad and powerful directness, that supreme quality of rhythm and serenity that marked the Van Eycks. The colour also is less invariably sonorous, less pure and splendid and luminous both in its single tones and its harmonies, while now and then the universal Flemish passion for sumptuous stuffs and gorgeous patterns and glittering accessories betrays him into a loss of unity and balance. Still, any criticism is impudent; his St. Ursula series, his St. John Baptist, his St. Bertin and Floreins and Moreel altar-pieces are amongst the greatest pictures that

_From a photograph by Hanfstaengl_]

have been painted, while his portraits are pure life expressed through the terms of pure beauty.

It would be impossible to review all the work of all the great Flemings. Driven by the same impulse, each gave his own personality to all he did, and the sequence is as astonishing as it is priceless. Gerard, David, Roger Van der Weyden, Quentin Metsys, Dierick Bouts, Lucas Cranach, as well as numberless unknown whose work survives their contemporary fame, all reached their several heights of attainment on their own individual lines, and their pictures still remain in Bruges and Ghent, in Brussels and Antwerp (or remain to-day, in August, 1915) to bear witness to the full and vigorous life, the wholesome and happy religious devotion, the astonishing physical beauty of Flemish environment of those last years of the fifteenth century in Europe when the fair day of mediævalism came to its golden close.

Between this whole-souled art of the Middle Ages and that of the Renaissance came an intervening group that served to effect the necessary modulation from one key to quite another. Mabeuse, Van Orley, the younger Porbus, and the Breughels are the chief representatives and through them one sees the old and masculine qualities dying away, the new and alien elements from the south entering in to take possession. When this transition was effected it was in Holland that it found its opportunity, and as the Dutch provinces are outside our consideration we need not consider here the products of a school that ranged in quality from Rubens to Rembrandt, from Frans Hals to Vermeer of Delft. The succession was broken, the torch (with whatever flame that remained) was passed from the Flemings to the Dutch, and only Vandyck appeared in the line of true Flemish descent to demonstrate the possibilities that still remained in spite of Rubens (and at the hands of his own pupil) for the development of a restrained and self-respecting and beautiful art, even though the moving spirit had been dissolved and the great tradition become no more than a memory. The great period of mediæval painting (for it was this in spirit and in truth) had begun and ended in this Cor Cordium, this Flemish concentration of the Heart of Europe. It had begun with the monkish illuminations of the fourteenth century, culminated in the great century from 1395, when Hubert Van Eyck began to paint, to 1494, when Memling died, and

_From a photograph by Hanfstaengl_]

slowly disappeared under the influence of the Renaissance, the Reformation, and the Spanish oppression; by the year 1600 it had ceased to exist, and the Renaissance, which had established itself in all secular and ecclesiastical matters, now took over art also for the purpose of developing its own exact expression. The five centuries of Catholic civilisation had come to an end.

XII

GOTHIC SCULPTURE

Long before the days of the Pisani in Italy, who were erroneously held to have been the restorers of the lost art of sculpture, France had initiated and developed three great schools, one of which at least reached greater heights even than the later schools of Italy, even than Donatello and Michael Angelo if you test this art by the established principles of the greatest sculpture the world has ever known--that of Greece. These three were: The school of the south with Toulouse as a centre, the school of Burgundy, or Vezelay, and the school of the Île de France. The first is of the late eleventh century, the second of the twelfth, the third of the latter part of this century and the first half of the thirteenth. The earlier work south of the Loire is part Roman, part Byzantine, and it occasionally reaches, as at Moissac, a level of extraordinary decorative value, with, in its bas reliefs, a feeling for rhythmical line and space composition that are quite astounding. In Burgundy, combined with great rudeness and an almost savage directness, there is far greater humanism, with much action and an unusual amount of character differentiation; much of the best work of this school is to be found at Autun and Vezelay. With the middle years of the twelfth century the sculpture of the Île de France seems suddenly to burst forth at St. Denis and Chartres like some miraculous happening. It was not this, but the result of many years of cumulative and progressive effort; but all that went before has perished, while fortunately some examples at St. Denis and a supreme collection at Chartres remain to give the impression of an unwonted and unheralded event. This sculpture of Chartres is more superbly architectural, more intimately a part of the whole artistic scheme than any other on record; all is formal, conventionalised; the figures are erect, rigid, immensely elongated; the multiplied fine lines and delicate zigzags of the drapery, the simple figure-modelling, the immobile, dispassionate faces, all show a most curious self-abnegation on the part of the sculptor and a profound conviction that both he and his art are only part of a greater whole, for they are purely architectural and indeed nothing but the architectural spirit expressing itself through an allied artistic mode. They are startlingly akin to archaic Greek work and, as Professor Moore has said of the sculpture from Delos: “One of these ancient Greek statues might, if wrought in French limestone and slightly modified in outline, stand in the west portal of Chartres without apparent lack of keeping.” Yet there is manifestly no possible point of historical contact between the Hellenic and the French work, and the kinship simply shows the persistence of certain ways of looking at and feeling about things, and the inevitable if unconscious return of one generation to the ways of another, that form a commentary, both cruel and humorous, on the evolutionary philosophy current during the last century, and quite unjustifiably claiming descent from the innocent speculations of Darwin and Herbert Spencer.

Out of this sculpture of Chartres grew the very wonderful art of the thirteenth century, which gives a sorely diminished glory to the Cathedral of Paris and gave, a year ago, a still greater glory to that immortal group of churches now slowly crumbling under gun-fire. Very notable examples of the transition are at Senlis, but they have been shockingly mutilated, and only one of the two wonderful carved lintels still gives much idea of its original beauty. The panel of the “Resurrection of the Virgin,” has all the architectural form and the decorative sense of Chartres, but it has as well an added human quality that makes it enduringly vital and appealing. The same can be said of the surrounding statues and reliefs that are of the same period, and altogether the almost unique work at Senlis strikes a singularly happy balance, as sculptured architecture, between the rigid formalism of Chartres and Vezelay and the exquisite humanism and the almost too-surpassing art of Paris, Amiens, and Reims. But for the Revolution Senlis would not have stood so alone for sculptural art of the transition. Laon once possessed far more, and of an even higher type, but all the column figures of the west doors, and indeed practically all the free-standing statues, were then ruthlessly destroyed and those that have taken their places are merely modern assumptions. The tympana of the doors are original, though mutilated: the Coronation of the Virgin, scenes from her life, the Last Judgment; while in the archivolts and around the windows are remains of singularly beautiful effigies of the wise and foolish virgins, the seven liberal arts, episodes from the lives of the saints. More or less of the original polychromatic decoration remains, and the statues themselves, even in their battered state, are marvels of art. Every trace of archaism and of uncertainty is gone, the sculptor works with a definiteness and a certainty of touch that are amazing, while his sense of the eternally sculpturesque is infallible. Every face--where a face remains--is brilliantly characterised; the poses are graceful, unaffected, constantly varied; the gestures are convincing, the stone quality never lost, while there is nothing outside Hellas--except Amiens and Reims--so faultless in its composition of drapery. From the very first this was one of the strong points in French sculpture; each artist strove for, and attained, not only distinction, but naturalism expressed through and by an almost classic formalism; the line composition, from Vezelay to Reims, is a succession of ever-waxing marvels. At Laon are even now mutilated figures that are as perfect in their composition of lines and masses as anything in Athens, and the same was true of Reims. Personally I have always thought of the figure work at Amiens

(apart from the bas reliefs) as less perfect in this respect, in spite of expert opinion, than that of Paris, Laon, and Reims; less brilliantly composed, more heavy and realistic, while the figures themselves are certainly not as slender and graceful, or so varied in pose. Moissac and Vezelay are hieratic abstractions, Chartres pure architecture, Soissons a breathing of divine life into ancient forms, but Laon and Paris and Reims are pure and perfect sculpture against which no criticism of any kind can be brought. Never has actual life been better expressed through the necessarily transforming modes of art than here; in these exquisite and rhythmical compositions the barbarous folly of the naturalistic and realistic schools of modern times is made cruelly apparent, and the base products of the average nineteenth-century practitioners (barring a few exceptions such as St. Gaudens at his best, as in the Rock Creek figure) become in comparison as absurd as do the shameless vulgarities of Bernini and his unhappy ilk.

There still remain at Laon many broken and headless fragments, and I do not know where anything can be found more complete in every sculptural quality. This is a great art at its highest, and it shows, as Reims once showed, that in the early thirteenth century France possessed an art of sculpture that could take its place unashamed beside the best of the Parthenon. Usually one thinks of Gothic sculpture in the terms of that late fourteenth-century work so easily obtainable from venders of the remains of mediæval art, but this is of a time when a cold convention had killed the art itself; when the subtle curves of such matchless things as the statue of the Virgin from the north door of her church in Paris had been distorted into grotesque exaggeration; when the thin, close lines of drapery had coarsened into triangular spaces of meaningless upholstery, and the sensitive, spiritual faces of Reims had given place to fat attempts at a stolid pulchritude. This is not art but a trade, and it bears no earthly resemblance to the consummate work of a century earlier, when the art itself and the religion and the joy and the personal liberty behind it were very real things.

Chronologically, the next great sculpture of France is that of the Cathedral of Paris, but as I have arbitrarily excluded this city from the survey, since one must stop somewhere, while Paris requires a volume to itself, it is only necessary to say that in spite of the devastations of man during six centuries, ending with the dull barbarity of the architect Sufflot, who hacked away the trumeau of the great central west door, together with a large section of the tympanum of the Last Judgment, in order to provide a more magnificent means of entrance for processions, enough still exists to show the singular mastery of the art. As for the statue of Our Lady on the north transept, it is one of the finest works of sculpture of any time or place, the perfection of the drapery finding rivals only in Greece. It is interesting to realise that this marvellous work antedates Niccolo Pisano by more than a century, so that if there still are those who search for the origins of sculpture after the great blank of the Dark Ages, they must forsake the Renaissance and Italy and find what they sought in France during the culmination of the Middle Ages.

At Amiens there is also, over the south portal, a figure of the Blessed Virgin, and while it is wholly different in spirit from that of Paris, it is almost as lovely and even more delicate and full of charm. Paris has the majesty and nobility of Michael Angelo, with nothing of his high but inopportune paganism, but this is like Mino da Fiesole, with all his daintiness and sweetness of feeling, and added to this an almost playful humanism that is wonderfully appealing. “Le Beau Dieu” of Amiens, on the trumeau of the central west door is almost in the class of the Paris Virgin and the sculpture of Reims, and is perhaps more nearly a satisfactory showing forth of Christ in human form than any other work of art in the world. The whole vast church is a pageant of carven figures--prophets, saints, apostles, kings, virtues and vices, symbolical characters, scenes from the Old and New Testaments, the lives of the saints, philosophy, romance--every tympanum is carved in bas relief, and the wall below the columns of the west portals is set with innumerable medallions of the signs of the zodiac and the labours of man. Never was there such an apotheosis of imagination, and only at Reims is there anything a degree finer as art. Even there the difference is mostly one of personal taste; if you like the lost marvels of Reims better than the miraculously preserved wonders of Amiens, well and good; it is for you to say, for both are matchless, each after its own kind. How the amazing array of carvings and statues at Amiens has survived passes the understanding; one would have supposed that its spiritual emphasis, its priceless nature, and its singular beauty would have subjected it to the sequent attentions of Huguenots, Revolutionaries, and the nineteenth century, but all have passed it by; and even the Prussians in their brief occupation on their way to defeat at the Marne had no time to leave their mark. Now that Reims is gone, Amiens must remain (if it does remain) the great and crowning exemplar of Christian sculpture at its highest and most triumphant cresting of achievement.

It is hard to write of the sculptures of Reims, or of anything dead and foully mutilated. For generations the thousands of carved figures stood in their niches growing grey and weather-worn through the passing of years--neglected, unnoticed, despised--while silly effigies were turned out by incompetent bunglers to receive the laudation of the haunters of international expositions and the galleries of the Salon. Then suddenly a dim light showed itself and grew steadily brighter until at last, a year or two ago, the consciousness became sure that here was one of the very great things in the world, one of the few supreme products of man in his highest and most unfamiliar estate, priceless and unreplaceable, as the Parthenon or the philosophy of St. Thomas Aquinas, or the plays of Shakespeare, or the music of Johann Sebastian Bach. And the long-delayed knowledge came to us only to be turned into a memory, the new possession was ours only to be taken away, and now nevermore for ever can it be granted to us to live in and with this perished art, for it is gone as utterly as the lost dramas of Sophocles, the burned library of Alexandria, the “Last Supper” of Leonardo da Vinci.

“The fool hath said in his heart, ‘there is no God,’” and the fool hath said in his heart: “I am greater and more precious than silly works of art.” What is the result of this insolence, the “Pomeranian grenadier” type of insolence that exalts an ignorant, degraded, useless hulk of dull flesh and blood over the supreme works of divinely inspired men? Under the lash of industrialism he can transform coal and iron into money values; he can fight for markets overseas where his masters can sell articles no man needs, to people who do not want them; he can beget children after his own kind, in their turn to do likewise, and finally--though this is not the appealing argument to the partisans of his essential superiority--he has an immortal soul he is doing his best to lose, and frequently succeeding to admiration. Are the vile types that revealed themselves in rape and murder and mutilation in the undefended villages of Belgium, or those under whose orders they acted, more worth saving for further industry of the same nature than the “Worship of the Lamb” in Ghent or the sculptures of the northwest door of Reims? It is an easy argument to offer, the sanctity of human life, but it is not the motive behind the batteries on the hills to the east of the devastated capital of Champagne, month after month pouring shell on the greatest cathedral that the Christianity of the West has reared to the glory of God. The motive behind the batteries is an instinctive realisation that Reims is a record of human greatness to which the gunners and their masters cannot attain, a lasting reproach to inferiority, a sermon and a prayer, a menace to bloated self-sufficiency and to a baseless pride. Nobility engenders hate as well as reverence, the choice depends only on the nature of the man who confronts it, and there never has been a time in all history when decadence did not bring into existence a hatred of all fine and noble things that for very rage and resentment willed the destruction of the dumb accuser. Reims, and what Reims stood for, cannot exist in the world together with their potent and efficient negation; therefore Reims perishes, as has perished at similar times in the past so much of the record in sublimity and beauty of that human superiority which is the silent accuser of all spiritual and ethical degeneration.

For the making of the west front of Reims all the great masters and craftsmen of France gathered together, and the sculpture showed not only greater excellence than may be found elsewhere, but a greater variety in genius and personality. It is not that in the doors of this façade were to be found great statues in conspicuous places with lesser work all around; every piece of sculpture or of carving was a masterpiece of its kind. High up in the gables, hidden in the shadows of the archivolts, forgotten in odd corners where only persistent search would reveal them, were little figures or isolated heads as carefully thought out and as finely felt as the august hierarchies of the front itself. Personality, varied, vital, distinguished, marked the sculpture of Reims, together with an unerring sense of beauty of formalised line, and an erudition, a familiarity with the Scriptures, with scholastic philosophy, with the

lives of the saints, and with the arts and sciences that would appear to do away with the quaint superstition that the Middle Ages were a time of intellectual ignorance. The men who carved these statues were not of the æsthetically elect; they were not a few highly trained, well-dressed, and supercilious specialists, working in the confidence born of years in Paris and Rome; they were stone-masons, members of their own self-respecting union, who had worked their way up a little higher than their fellows and so could carve each his group of statues to the satisfaction of bishop or abbot or master mason and--which was even more to the point--to his own satisfaction and in accordance with the jealous standards of excellence of his guild. He had to know what he was doing and what he had to express; there was no ubiquitous architect to instruct him, no “committee on symbolism” to show him the way, and so if he could not read well enough to enjoy a modern “yellow journal,” or write well enough to forge a name or draft a speculative prospectus, he did know far more about religion, theology, philosophy, history, and the contemporary sciences and arts and romances than the modern workman with his years of public school behind him, or many an architect or sculptor with his high school, preparatory school, and university training behind him as well.

They knew and felt and enjoyed, these sculptors of Reims, whose work endured for six centuries and might have lasted six more. Perhaps the quality of enjoyment was more clearly expressed than anything else. Life was worth living to them and they made the most of it, and with much laughter. These carved figures at Reims and Amiens and Paris show in every line the good human joy of doing a thing well, just as so much of the output of so much of modern industrialism shows the dull indifference or the weary disgust for doing a thing ill. No sculptor then would have contented himself with making a clay model and a plaster cast and then turning the execution over to a gang of ignorant day-labourers working like banderlogs, only with the intelligent assistance of mechanical devices. The artist was the craftsman and the art was a craft, just as the craft was an art, and the work shows it all to those who still can see. Great work, the greatest work, if you like; but so far as Reims is concerned it is now fire-scorched débris, and for its loss we are consoled by the offer of--another Sieges Allee, perhaps. The world may be forgiven for thinking that the game is not worth the candle.

During the Hundred Years’ War sculpture in France froze into a sometimes pleasing but never very profitable convention; now and then it had great loveliness, as in the statues of the church at Brou, but generally it had those qualities of exaggeration, affectation, and insincerity to which I already have referred. Technically, it was always very perfect and sometimes the decorative design and the manipulation of the marble were almost Japanese in their curious delicacy. Toward the end of the century there is an improvement owing to the influence of Flanders, then prosperous and cultured while so much of the rest of Europe was spiritually and physically devastated by wars, but this later work seemed the particular detestation of the reformers, and mostly it is gone, particularly in the land of its origin, where reform followed by revolution left nothing intact that could be mutilated. Little of the work of the two great schools of Tournai and Burgundy remains, but there is enough to show that if the torch of sculptural art had passed in blood and flame from the hands of France, it had been seized by the men of the Netherlands and carried on for two centuries at least with little diminution in its radiance. With the seventeenth century the flame was suddenly extinguished and afterward was nothing but that type of baroque absurdity that still disgraces the undevastated churches with preposterous marble screens and loud-mouthed, theatrical pulpits, and prancing images of heroic size stuck on the columns of nave and choir.

What the seventeenth century failed to accomplish in the line of these atrocities is scarcely worth doing; the grotesque insanity of the confessionals and pulpits and other woodwork of the time passes imagination, and is matched only by the misdirected ingenuity and facility of it all. The cathedral in Brussels; St. André at Antwerp; St. Martin, Ypres; St. Pierre, Louvain, were particularly hard hit, but there were few churches that did not boast at least a pulpit in a style of design that would have looked like a king’s coach of state had it not more closely resembled a bandwagon. St. Gudule in Brussels suffered most of all, for it not only possesses a peculiarly irritating pulpit of most ridiculous design but its columns are disfigured by the impossible statues on grotesque brackets, while it is disgraced by some of the very worst stained glass produced before the last quarter of the nineteenth century, when all past records were revised.

When one compares the tawdry horrors that in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries blotted almost every church in Flanders and Brabant, and compares it, not with the consummate sculpture and decoration of the great era but even with such work of the undoubted decadence as the screens of Louvain and Lierre, the impossible gulf between the two civilisations becomes peculiarly conspicuous. When one realises further that the black-and-white-marble mortuary horrors in the way of screens in Bruges, Antwerp, and Ghent exist at the expense of such works of real, if unguarded, art as the screen at Lierre, destroyed to give place to their perfumed artifice, the annihilation of art that has followed its production with implacable steps takes on a new poignancy, and the continued destruction, now violently in process, becomes even less endurable than before.

XIII

THE ALLIED ARTS

The debt of Europe to the region we are considering is as great in the case of the so-called “minor arts” as it is elsewhere. Even the language preserves the record: Arras has given its name to the tapestries for which it was famous, linen woven in regular patterns is called diaper, or “linge d’Ypres,” cambric is simply the product of Cambrai, gauntlet preserves the fame of Ghent for its gloves, while the lost city of Dinant was once so famous for its work in copper, brass, bronze, and gilded metal that during the Middle Ages all products of this kind were called dinanderie. Tapestry weaving is, or was, an art essentially Flemish; illumination, if shared with Italy and in a measure every land where there were monks and monasteries, reached peculiarly notable heights in Flanders, Brabant, and Champagne; the casting of bells and the forming of them into carillons is peculiarly the province of this region, while metal work, whether of gold and silver, or of bronze and copper and brass, was an art of distinction even from the time of Charlemagne.

It was he that was primarily responsible for the beginnings of many of these admirable arts. From his capital at Aix, where he had gathered all the art and learning he could glean from western Europe, went out the influences that persisted long beyond his day and that of his ill-fortuned dynasty. The Scandinavian tribes and the Celts of Gaul had always been craftsmen in metals, particularly bronze, and Charlemagne used them under the direction of his Roman and Byzantine artificers, developing an art that was neither one nor the other, but a new Christian mode of expression. When toward the close of the tenth century the young Princess Theophano came from the Bosporus as the bride of Otho II, she brought with her other artists, with a treasure of Byzantine craftsmanship in weaving, metals, enamels, and ivory carving; and a new impulse was given, so that, under the direction of a crescent Christianity, a local and racial art developed along many lines and extended itself through the whole region and into France, Normandy, England, and Germany as well. From Aix, Archbishop Willigis and Bishop Bernward carried into Germany the art of metal working as they had learned it, one to Mainz, the other to Hildesheim, where their works still remain. To Dinant, Huy, and Liége the same impulse was given that later extended through Brabant and Flanders. In France the beginnings seem to have been at the hands of St. Eloi at Limoges and Abbot Suger of St. Denis, but it was all within the area to which our attention is confined.

From the time of Charlemagne the production of works of art in precious and common metals was an ever-increasing industry, lapsing during the second Dark Ages, beginning with new and unexampled vigour with the great religious revival of the first years of the eleventh century. It is impossible to form an adequate estimate either of the magnitude of the product or the degree of concrete beauty that came in these many lines of art out of the Middle Ages. For five hundred years craftsmen were busy over all that is now Rhenish Prussia, Holland, Belgium, France, and England, with the Scandinavian countries, Italy, and Spain in only a less degree, in producing an infinite number of exquisite things for an infinite number of churches; metal work of every kind and for every conceivable purpose--sacred vessels, crosses, crosiers, reliquaries, shrines, tombs, and screens; woven tapestries to hang the walls of châteaux and cathedrals; embroidered and jewelled vestments for an unending series of bishops, priests, altars; illuminated volumes whose every vellum page was a work of art and whose bindings were studded with jewels; carved wood and ivory in endless designs and for endless purposes; stained glass, enamels, tiles. Every church, abbey, and cathedral was by the beginning of the Hundred Years’ War as full of works of consummate art as the private museum of a modern millionaire, and were you to gather together the treasures of ecclesiastical crafts in the Cluny, the Victoria and Albert Museum, and the Metropolitan in New York you might have about as much as at that time might have been found in a provincial cathedral of the second class or a minor monastery. In France the sculpture has been largely, and the glass partially, saved; in Flanders many of the pictures; in England a good proportion of the churches themselves, but the rest is gone, utterly and irrevocably, and we can hardly more than dimly imagine from a Gloucester candlestick, an Ascoli cope, a Shrine of St. Sebald the nature of what has been taken from us.

Even from the first these things had three qualities that argued against their preservation, the world being what it is. They were intrinsically valuable because of their bronze and silver and gold and precious gems; therefore in the wars that followed the cresting of mediævalism they were stolen wholesale by one army after another and their jewels plucked out, and then they were broken up, melted down, and returned to their original estate of lumps of bullion, or dead metal, all of which had its price. They were the most sacred material things possessed by the Church that had created them; part and parcel of the Catholic sacraments, memorials of the honoured dead, caskets for the reverent treasuring of the relics of the saints; therefore they were the particular object of the blind and furious hatred of Protestants, whether Huguenots, Calvinists, Presbyterians, or, in a less degree, Lutherans. They were Gothic in their inimitable art, hence anathema to the bewigged bishops, the worldly priests, and, most dangerous of all, the conceited canons of the eighteenth century. What the thief overlooked the fanatic destroyed, and what he forgot the ignorant and vulgar amateur purged away to make place for imitation marble and secular frippery. After four centuries of this it is a wonder that anything remains, and, to tell the truth, there is little enough.

Nevertheless, it is surprising how much of this was still in our chosen territory in 1914, and how much that is in museums elsewhere came originally from the same place. Liége had its extraordinary bronze font, Hal a font, a lectern, and many other treasures of late Gothic and early Renaissance art; Louvain, Tirlemont, Xanten, Aix, and Trèves each had a few pieces of metal work of immense artistic value, while in Bruges, Ghent, Brussels, and Antwerp, in Laon, Noyon, Sens, and Reims were a few miraculously preserved shrines, tapestries, vestments, and sacred vessels. As for the treasures of the European and American museums, the greater part came from Flanders, Brabant, the Rhineland, or eastern France, for this was the great centre of industry, the fountainhead of artistic inspiration. Of the “dinanderie” that owed its existence to the influence of the four great leaders, St. Eloi, St. Willigis, Abbot Suger, and Bishop Bernward, absolutely nothing remains except the fine group of bronze masterpieces by the last at Hildesheim. Liége had, however, the extremely important bronze font made by Regnier of Huy about 1112, and Lille possessed a censer of his workmanship, while in Maastricht was a great shrine of gilded and enamelled copper set with precious stones; the Convent of Notre Dame at Namur and the church of Walcourt had no less than eighteen specimens of the handicraft of Brother Hugh of the great but long ago destroyed Abbey at Oignies between the Meuse and the Sambre, representing the art of a century later, while later still we had the “Chasse de Notre Dame” and the reliquary of St. Eleutherus at Tournai, and the shrine of St. Gertrude of Nivelles made in 1272. Of the vast product of the fourteenth century there are a few fragments only, an eagle lectern and a great paschal candlestick at Tongres, some crosses, reliquaries, monstrances, and candlesticks at Aix, Tongres, Furnes, Mainz, Xanten, Bruges, and Ghent, but, fortunately it would now seem, the greater part of what remains is preserved in the museums of Paris and London and therefore safe for another period. Outside the museums the great treasures were to be found at Sens and Laon, the latter being particularly rich, as is proved by the fact that the cathedral is said to contain no less than eighty reliquaries covering the whole

period of the Middle Ages. So far as monumental tombs are concerned, every church in France has been swept clear, chiefly by the Revolutionists, not one of the marvellous collections at St. Denis and Reims remaining, but in Bruges we still have the fine tomb of Mary of Burgundy, of black marble encased in a foliated tracery of gilded copper and coloured enamels.

In the bourdons of France and the carillons of the Low Countries the art of the metal-worker combines with that of music. Both the carillon and the English peal are late developments, the first of the sixteenth, the second of the seventeenth century, but from the beginning of the thirteenth century great bells, used singly or in small combinations, were in constant use. Most of the latter are gone, melted down in the Hundred Years’ War and the Revolution in France, and the wars of religion in the Rhineland and the Low Countries, though a few remain at Amiens, Sens, Metz, and Beauvais, with one weighing over a ton which hung at Reims until last year. The carillons of Belgium and Holland were intact until that time, though many have now fallen with the splendid towers that held them. Arras is gone and probably Dunkerque; Louvain and Ypres are gone and possibly Mons; Malines, most beautiful of all, has been battered to pieces and its forty-five bells have been cracked, melted, hurled in ruin down through the many stories of the great tower. Time after time during the last generation from twenty thousand to forty thousand people have assembled to hear these bells rung by M. Denyn, the greatest master of the art, but they will hear them no more until, perhaps, when the world is made new the bells of Malines may ring out again to welcome the dawn of a better day.

Whether the English peal of an octave, with the bells attuned to the intervals of the diatonic scale, and swung by hand, a man to each rope, in accordance with the most intricate mathematical formulas and without recognised melodies, is better or worse art than the carillon of thirty-five to fifty-two bells, covering sometimes four octaves and a half, in accord with the chromatic scale, fixed in their head-stocks and struck by hammers manipulated by one man sitting before a keyboard, and reproducing the most elaborate musical compositions, is no part of the argument. Each has its place, each is a mode of musical art, and just because one may like the strange and subtle variations of an English peal thundering out its vibrant tones from great bells swinging and clashing in a grey old tower, it does not follow that he must reject the floating and ethereal harmonies of the Belgian carillon pouring into the still evening air strange melodies that are eternally haunting in their poignant appeal. They are silent now, even those that still hang in their tall towers, and the roar of giant artillery, splitting and harshly reverberating, has taken their place. In the good beginnings iron was anathema and might not be used in the service of the Church; bronze alone was tolerable. Now iron is king and holds dominion over the world, transmuted into steel through the offices of its ally, coal. Bronze is rejected, shattered, dethroned, but some of the great bells yet remain, hanging silent and patient while hell rages around them and iron asserts its universal dominion. Perhaps by and by they will give tongue again, proclaiming the end of the iron age, calling in once more a better and more righteous sovereignty.