Chapter VI: Part 6

In no other place is the transition from one style to another revealed in a way so impressive and naïve; nowhere else does the brilliant butterfly of the Renaissance show itself more deeply imprisoned in the heavy Gothic chrysalis. If Chambord, by its plan which is essentially French and feudal, by its enclosure flanked with towers, and by the breadth of its heavy mass, slavishly recalls the mediæval _manoirs_, by its lavish profusion of ornamentation it suggests the creations of the Sixteenth Century as far as the beginning of the roofs; it is Gothic as far as the platform; and it belongs to the Renaissance when it comes to the roof itself. It may be compared to a rude French knight of the Fourteenth Century, who is wearing on his cuirass some fine Italian embroideries, and on his head the plumed felt of François I.,--assuredly an incongruous costume, but not without character....

The _château_ should be entered by one of the four doors which open in the centre of the donjon. Nothing is more fantastic, and, at the same time, magnificent than the spectacle which greets the eye. It seems more like one of those fairy palaces which we see at the Opera, than a real building. Neglect and nakedness give it an additional value and double its immensity. On entering this vast solitude of stone, we are seized with that respectful silence which involuntarily strikes us under high and solitary vaults. In the centre of the vast Salle des Gardes, which occupies the entire ground-floor, and to which the four towers of the donjon give the form of the Greek cross, rises a monumental stairway which divides this hall into four equal parts, each being fifty feet long and thirty feet broad. This bold conception justifies its celebrity: the stairway at Chambord is in itself a monument. The staircase, completely isolated and open-worked, is composed of posts which follow the winding. Two flights of stairs, one above the other, unfold in helices and pass alternately one over the other without meeting. This will explain how two persons could ascend at the same time without meeting, yet perceiving each other at intervals. Even while looking at this, it is difficult to conceive this arrangement. These two helices, which are placed above each other and which turn over and over each other without ever uniting, have exactly the curve of a double corkscrew. I believe that no other comparison can give a more exact idea of this celebrated work which has exhausted the admiration and the eulogy of all the _connaisseurs_. “What merits the greatest praise,” writes Blondel in his _Leçons d’architecture_, “is the ingenious disposition of that staircase of double flights, crossing each other and both common to the same newel. One cannot admire too greatly the lightness of its arrangement, the boldness of its execution, and the delicacy of its ornaments,--perfection which astonishes and makes it difficult to conceive how any one could imagine a design so picturesque and how it could be put into execution.” The author of _Cinq Mars_ taking up this same idea says: “It is difficult to conceive how the plan was drawn and how the orders were given to the workmen: it seems a fugitive thought, a brilliant idea which must have taken material form suddenly--a realized dream.”...

In going through the high halls and long corridors which lead from one chapel to the other, one likes to restore in imagination the rich furniture, the tapestries, the glazed tiles of faïence, and the ceilings incrusted with tin fleur-de-lis, which formed its decoration. Each gallery was filled with frescoes by Jean Cousin and the principal works of Leonardo da Vinci.... The breath of the Revolution has scattered and destroyed all these rarities. For fifteen days the frippers ran from all points of the province to divide the paintings, the precious enamels, the chests of oak and ebony, the sculptured pulpits, and the high-posted beds covered with armorial hangings. They sold at auction all the souvenirs of the glory of the monarchy. What they could not sell, they burned....

When we descend the noble staircase which François I. ordered, which an unknown artist executed, and which deserves to be credited to Primaticcio, it is impossible not to look back upon the Past. What illustrious feet have trod, what eyes have beheld these marvels! What hands, now cold, charming hands of queens, or courtesans more powerful than those queens, and rude hands of warriors, or statesmen, have traced on these white stones names celebrated in that day, but now effaced from the walls, as they are each day more and more effaced from the memory of men! The wheel of Time, which broke in its revolution, has only left enough in this _château_ for us to observe and reconstruct in imagination personages great enough to harmonize with such grandeur, and to excite in us that pious respect which must always be attached to everything about to end. Another turn of the wheel and ruin will begin. “_Ce château,_” a poet has said, “_est frappé de malédiction._”[12]...

To-day, and during two Revolutions, the chief of the eldest branch of the Bourbons has remained the master of Chambord. Between this exiled master and this deserted castle there is an intimate and sad relation which will touch the most unsympathetic heart. Each stone that falls in the grass-grown court without a human ear to take note of the noise,--is it not the parallel of an obliterated memory, a hope that is ever weakening? In the absence of this master, who, doubtless, will never return, the old _château_ falls into the shadow and silence which belong to fallen majesty. It awaits in this grave and slightly morose sorrow those great vicissitudes, which are imposed on stones, as on men, that the Future has in store.

_Let Résidences royales de la Loire_ (Paris, 1863).

THE TEMPLES OF NIKKO.

PIERRE LOTI.

He who has not beheld Nikko, has no right to make use of the word
_splendour_.

_Japanese Proverb._

In the heart of the large island of Niphon and in a mountainous and wooded region, fifty leagues from Yokohama, is hidden that marvel of marvels--the necropolis of the Japanese Emperors.

There, on the declivity of the Holy Mountain of Nikko, under cover of a dense forest and in the midst of cascades whose roar among the shadows of the cedars never ceases, is a series of enchanting temples, made of bronze and lacquer with roofs of gold, which look as if a magic ring must have called them into existence among the ferns and mosses and the green dampness, over-arched by dark branches and surrounded by the wildness and grandeur of Nature.

Within these temples there is an inconceivable magnificence, a fairy-like splendour. Nobody is about, except a few guardian bonzes who chant hymns, and several white-robed priestesses who perform the sacred dances whilst waving their fans. Every now and then the slow vibrations of an enormous bronze gong, or the dull, heavy blows on a monstrous prayer-drum are heard in the deep and echoing forest. At other times there are certain sounds which really seem to be a part of the silence and solitude, the chirp of the grasshoppers, the cry of the falcons in the air, the chatter of the monkeys in the branches, and the monotonous fall of the cascades.

All this dazzling gold in the mystery of the forest makes these sepulchres unique. This is the Mecca of Japan; this is the heart, as yet inviolate, of this country which is now gradually sinking in the great Occidental current, but which has had a magnificent Past. Those were strange mystics and very rare artists who, three or four hundred years ago, realized all this magnificence in the depths of the woods and for their dead....

We stop before the first temple. It stands a little off to itself in a kind of glade. You approach it by a garden with raised terraces; a garden with grottos, fountains, and dwarf-trees with violet, yellow, or reddish foliage.

The vast temple is entirely red, and blood-red; an enormous black and gold roof, turned up at the corners, seems to crush it with its weight. From it comes a kind of religious music, soft and slow, interrupted from time to time by a heavy and horrible blow.

It is wide open, open so that its entire façade with columns is visible; but the interior is hidden by an immense white _velum_. The _velum_ is of silk, only ornamented in its entire white length by three or four large, black, heraldic roses, which are very simple, but I cannot describe their exquisite distinction, and behind this first and half-lifted hanging, the light bamboo blinds are let down to the ground.

We walk up several granite steps, and, to permit my entrance, my guide pushes aside a corner of the Veil: the sanctuary appears.

Within everything is in black lacquer and gold lacquer, with the gold predominating. Above the complicated cornice and golden frieze there springs a ceiling in compartments, in worked lacquer of black and gold. Behind the colonnade at the back, the remote part, where, doubtless, the gods are kept, is hidden by long curtains of black and gold brocade, hanging in stiff folds from the ceiling to the floor. Upon white mats on the floor large golden vases are standing, filled with great bunches of golden lotuses as tall as trees. And finally from the ceiling, like the bodies of large dead serpents or monstrous boas, hang a quantity of astonishing caterpillars of silk, as large as a human arm, blue, yellow, orange, brownish-red, and black, or strangely variegated like the throats of certain birds of those islands.

Some bonzes are singing in one corner, seated in a circle around a prayer-drum, large enough to hold them all....

We go out by the back door, which leads into the most curious garden in the world: it is a square filled with shadows shut in by the forest cedars and high walls, which are red like the sanctuary; in the centre rises a very large bronze obelisk flanked with four little ones, and crowned with a pyramid of golden leaves and golden bells;--you would say that in this country bronze and gold cost nothing, they are used in such profusion, everywhere, just as we use the mean materials of stone and plaster.--All along this blood-red wall which forms the back of the temple, in order to animate this melancholy garden, at about the height of a man there is a level row of little wooden gods, of all forms and colours, which are gazing at the obelisk; some blue, others yellow, others green; some have the shape of a man, others of an elephant: a company of dwarfs, extraordinarily comical, but which express no merriment.

In order to reach the other temples, we again walk through the damp and shadowy woods along the avenues of cedars, which ascend and descend and intersect in various ways, and really constitute the streets of this city of the dead.

We walk on pathways of fine sand, strewn with these little brown needles which drop from the cedars. Always in terraces, they are bordered with balustrades and pillars of granite covered with the most delicious moss; you would say all the hand-rails have been garnished with a beautiful green velvet, and at each side of the sanded pathway invariably flow little fresh and limpid brooks, which join their crystal notes to those of the distant torrents and cascades.

At a height of one hundred, or two hundred metres, we arrive at the entrance of something which seems to indicate magnificence: above us on the mountain in the medley of branches, walls taper upward, while roofs of lacquer and bronze, with their population of monsters, are perched everywhere, shining with gold.

Before this entrance there is a kind of open square, a narrow glade, where a little sunlight falls. And here in its luminous rays two bonzes in ceremonial costume pass across the dark background: one, in a long robe of violet silk with a surplice of orange silk; the other, in a robe of pearl-grey with a sky-blue surplice; each wears a high and rigid head-dress of black lacquer, which is seldom worn now. (These were the only human beings whom we met on the way, during our pilgrimage.) They are probably going to perform some religious office, and, passing before the sumptuous entrance, they make profound bows.

This temple before which we are now standing is that of the deified soul of the Emperor Yeyaz (Sixteenth Century), and, perhaps, the most marvellous of all the buildings of Nikko.

You ascend by a series of doors and enclosures, which become more and more beautiful as you get higher and nearer the sanctuary, where the soul of this dead Emperor dwells....

At the door of the Palace of the Splendour of the Orient we stop to take off our shoes according to custom. Gold is everywhere, resplendent gold.

An indescribable ornamentation has been chosen for this threshold; on the enormous posts are a kind of wavy clouds, or ocean-billows, in the centre of which here and there appear the tentacles of medusæ, the ends of paws, the claws of crabs, the ends of long caterpillars, flat and scaly,--all kinds of horrible fragments, imitated in colossal size with a striking fidelity, and making you think that the beasts to which they belong must be hidden there within the walls ready to enfold you and tear your flesh. This splendour has mysteriously hostile undercurrents; we feel that it has many a surprise and menace. Above our heads the lintels are, however, ornamented with large, exquisite flowers in bronze, or gold: roses, peonies, wistaria, and spring branches of full-blown cherry-blossoms; but, still higher, horrible faces with fixed death’s-head grimaces lean toward us; terrible things of all shapes hang by their golden wings from the golden beams of the roof; we perceive in the air rows of mouths split open with atrocious laughter, and rows of eyes half-closed in an unquiet sleep.

An old priest, aroused by the noise of our footsteps on the gravel in the silence of the court, appears before us on the bronze threshold. In order to examine the permit which I present to him, he puts a pair of round spectacles on his nose, which make him look like an owl.

My papers are in order. A bow, and he steps aside to let me enter.

It is gloomy inside this palace, with that mysterious semi-twilight which the Spirits delight in. The impressions felt on entering are grandeur and repose.

The walls are of gold and the ceiling is of gold, supported on columns of gold. A vague, trembling light, illuminating as if from beneath, enters through the very much grated and very low windows; the dark, undetermined depths are full of the gleamings of precious things.

Yellow gold, red gold, green gold; gold that is vital, or tarnished; gold that is brilliant, or lustreless; here and there on the friezes and on the exquisite capitals of the columns, a little vermilion, and a little emerald green; very little, nothing but a thin thread of colour, just enough to relieve the wing of a bird and the petal of a lotus, a peony, or a rose. Despite so much richness nothing is overcharged; such taste has been displayed in the arrangement of the thousands of diverse forms and such harmony in the extremely complicated designs, that the effect of the whole is simple and reposeful.

Neither human figures nor idols have a part in this sanctuary of Shintoism. Nothing stands upon the altars but large vases of gold filled with natural flowers in sheaves, or gigantic flowers of gold.

No idols, but a multitude of beasts, flying or crawling, familiar or chimerical, pursue each other upon the walls, and fly away from the friezes and ceiling in all attitudes of fury and struggle, of terror and flight. Here, a flock of swans hurry away in swift flight the whole length of the golden cornice; in other places are butterflies with tortoises; large and hideous insects among the flowers, or many death-combats between fantastic beasts of the sea, medusæ with big eyes, and imaginary fishes. On the ceiling innumerable dragons bristle and coil. The windows, cut out in multiple trefoils, in a form never before seen and which give little light, seem only a pretext for displaying all kinds of marvellous piercings: trellises of gold entwined with golden leaves, among which golden birds are sporting; all of this seems accumulated at pleasure and permits the least possible light to enter into the deep golden shadows of the temple. The only really simple objects are the columns of a fine golden lacquer ending with capitals of a very sober design, forming a slight calix of the lotus, like those of certain ancient Egyptian palaces.

We could spend days in admiring separately each panel, each pillar, each minute detail; the least little piece of the ceiling, or the walls would be a treasure for a museum. And so many rare and extravagant objects have succeeded in making the whole a composition of large quiet lines; many living forms, many distorted bodies, many ruffled wings, stiff claws, open mouths, and squinting eyes have succeeded in producing a calm, an absolute calm, by force of an inexplicable harmony, twilight, and silence.

I believe, moreover, that here is the quintessence of Japanese Art, of which the specimens brought to our collections of Europe cannot give the true impression. And we are struck by feeling that this Art, so foreign to us, proceeds from an origin so different; nothing here is derived, ever so remotely, from what we call antiquities--Greek, Latin, or Arabian--which always influence, even if we are not aware of it, our native ideas regarding ornamental form. Here the least design, the smallest line,--everything--is as profoundly strange as if it had come from a neighbouring planet which had never held communication with our side of the world.

The entire back of the temple, where it is almost night, is occupied by great doors of black lacquer and gold lacquer, with bolts of carved gold, shutting in a very sacred place which they refuse to show me. They tell me, moreover, that there is nothing in these closets; but that they are the places where the deified souls of the heroes love to dwell; the priests only open them on certain occasions to place in them poems in their honour, or prayers wisely written on rice-paper.

The two lateral wings on each side of the large golden sanctuary are entirely of _marqueterie_, in prodigious mosaics composed of the most precious woods left in their natural colour. The representations are animals and plants: on the walls are light leaves in relief, bamboo, grasses of extreme delicacy, gold convolvulus falling in clusters of flowers, birds of resplendent plumage, peacocks and pheasants with spread tails. There is no painting here, no gold-work; the whole effect is sombre, the general tone that of dead wood; but each leaf of each branch is composed of a different piece; and also each feather of each bird is shaded in such a way as to almost produce the effect of changing colours on the throats and wings.

And at last, at last, behind all this magnificence, the most sacred place which they show me last, the most strange of all strange places, is the little mortuary court which surrounds the tomb. It is hollowed out of a mountain between whose rocky walls water is dripping: the lichens and moss have made a damp carpet here and the tall, surrounding cedars throw their dark shadows over it. There is an enclosure of bronze, shut by a bronze door which is inscribed across its centre with an inscription in gold,--not in the Japanese language, but in Sanscrit to give more mystery; a massive, lugubrious, inexorable door, extraordinary beyond all expression, and which is the ideal door for a sepulchre. In the centre of this enclosure is a kind of round turret also in bronze having the form of a pagoda-bell, of a kneeling beast, of I don’t know what unknown and disturbing thing, and surmounted by a great astonishing heraldic flower: here, under this singular object, rests the body of the little yellow _bonhomme_, once the Emperor Yeyaz, for whom all this pomp has been displayed....

A little breeze agitates the branches of the cedars this morning and there falls a shower of these little dry, brown needles, a little brown rain on the greyish lichens, on the green velvet moss, and upon the sinister bronze objects. The voice of the cascades is heard in the distance like perpetual sacred music. An impression of nothingness and supreme peace reigns in this final court, to which so much splendour leads.

In another quarter of the forest the temple of the deified soul of Yemidzou is of an almost equal magnificence. It is approached by a similar series of steps, little carved and gilded light-towers, doors of bronze and enclosures of lacquer; but the plan of the whole is a little less regular, because the mountain is more broken....

A solemn hour on the Holy Mountain is at night-fall, when they close the temples. It is even more lugubrious at this autumnal season, when the twilight brings sad thoughts. With heavy, rumbling sounds which linger long in the sonorous forest, the great panels of lacquer and bronze are rolled on their grooves to shut in the magnificent buildings which have been open all day, although visited by nobody. A cold and damp shiver passes through the black forest. For fear of fire, which might consume these marvels, not a single light is allowed in this village of Spirits, where certainly darkness falls sooner and remains longer than anywhere else; no lamp has ever shone upon these treasures, which have thus slept in darkness in the very heart of Japan for many centuries; and the cascades increase their music while the silence of night enshrouds the forest so rich in enchantment.

_Japoneries d’automne_ (15th ed., Paris, 1889).

THE PALACE OF HOLYROOD.

DAVID MASSON.

Just after the middle of August, 1561, as we learn from contemporary records, there was a _haar_ of unusual intensity and continuance over Edinburgh and all the vicinity. It began on Sunday the 17th, and it lasted with slight intermissions, till Thursday the 21st. “Besides the surfett weat and corruptioun of the air,” writes Knox, then living in Edinburgh, “the myst was so thick and dark that skairse mycht any man espy ane other the length of two pair of butts.” It was the more unfortunate because it was precisely in those days of miserable fog and drizzle that Mary, Queen of Scots, on her return to Scotland after her thirteen years of residence and education in France, had to form her first real acquaintance with her native shores and the capital of her realm.

She had left Calais for the homeward voyage on Thursday the 14th of August, with a retinue of about one hundred and twenty persons, French and Scottish, embarked in two French state galleys, attended by several transports. They were a goodly company, with rich and splendid baggage. The Queen’s two most important uncles, indeed,--the great Francis de Lorraine, Duke of Guise, and his brother, Charles de Lorraine, the Cardinal,--were not on board. They, with the Duchess of Guise and other senior lords and ladies of the French Court, had bidden Mary farewell at Calais, after having accompanied her thither from Paris, and after the Cardinal had in vain tried to persuade her not to take her costly collection of pearls and other jewels with her, but to leave them in his keeping till it should be seen how she might fare among her Scottish subjects. But on board the Queen’s own galley were three others of her Guise or Lorraine uncles,--the Duc d’Aumale, the Grand Prior, and the Marquis d’Elbeuf,--with M. Damville, son of the Constable of France, and a number of French gentlemen of lower rank, among whom one notes especially young Pierre de Bourdeilles, better known afterwards in literary history as Sieur de Brantôme, and a sprightly and poetic youth from Dauphiné, named Chastelard, one of the attendants of M. Damville. With these were mixed the Scottish contingent of the Queen’s train, her four famous “Marys” included,--Mary Fleming, Mary Livingstone, Mary Seton, and Mary Beaton. They had been her playfellows and little maids of honour long ago in her Scottish childhood; they had accompanied her when she went abroad, and had lived with her ever since in France; and they were now returning with her, Scoto-Frenchwomen like herself, and all of about her own age, to share her new fortunes.

It is to Brantôme that we owe what account we have of the voyage from Calais. He tells us how the Queen could hardly tear herself away from her beloved France, but kept gazing at the French coast hour after hour so long as it was in sight, shedding tears with every look, and exclaiming again and again, “Adieu, ma chère France! Je ne vous verray jamais plus!”...

It was in the afternoon of Wednesday, the 20th of August, that there was a procession on horseback of the Queen, her French retinue, and the gathered Scottish lords and councillors, through the two miles of road which led from Leith to Holyrood. On the way the Queen was met by a deputation of the Edinburgh craftsmen and their apprentices, craving her royal pardon for the ringleaders in a recent riot, in which the Tolbooth had been broken open and the Magistrates insulted and defied. This act of grace accorded as a matter of course, the Queen was that evening in her hall of Holyrood, the most popular of sovereigns for the moment, her uncles and other chiefs of her escort with her, and the rest dispersed throughout the apartments, while outside, in spite of the fog, there were bonfires of joy in the streets and up the slopes of Arthur’s Seat, and a crowd of cheering loiterers moved about in the space between the palace-gate and the foot of the Canongate. Imparting some regulation to the proceedings of this crowd, for a while at least, was a special company of the most “honest” of the townsmen, “with instruments of musick and with musicians,” admitted within the gate, and tendering the Queen their salutations, instrumental and vocal, under her chamber window. “The melody, as she alledged, lyked her weill, and she willed the same to be continewed some nightis after.” This is Knox’s account; but Brantôme tells a different story. After noting the wretchedness of the hackneys provided for the procession from Leith to Holyrood, and the poorness of their harnessings and trappings, the sight of which, he says, made the Queen weep, he goes on to mention the evening serenade under the windows of Holyrood, as the very completion of the day’s disagreeables. The Abbey itself, he admits, was a fine enough building; but, just as the Queen had supped and wanted to go to sleep, “there came under her window five or six hundred rascals of the town to serenade her with vile fiddles and rebecks, such as they do not lack in that country, setting themselves to sing psalms, and singing so ill and in such bad accord that there could be nothing worse. Ah! what music, and what a lullaby for the night!” Whether Knox’s account of the Queen’s impressions of the serenade or Brantôme’s is to be accepted, there can be no doubt that the matter and intention of the performance were religious. Our authentic picture, therefore, of Queen Mary’s first night in Holyrood after her return from France is that of the Palace lit up from within, the dreary fog still persistent outside, the bonfires on Arthur’s Seat and other vantage-grounds flickering through the fog, and the portion of the wet crowd nearest the Palace singing Protestant psalms for the Queen’s delectation to an accompaniment of violins.

Next day, Thursday the 21st, this memorable Edinburgh _haar_ of August 1561 came to an end. Arthur’s Seat and the other heights and ranges of the park round Holyrood wore, we may suppose, their freshest verdure; and Edinburgh, dripping no longer, shone forth, we may hope, in her sunniest beauty. The Queen could then become more particularly acquainted with the Palace in which she had come to reside, and with the nearer aspects of the town to which the Palace was attached, and into which she had yet to make her formal entry.

Then, as now, the buildings that went by the general name of Holyrood were distinguishable into two portions. There was the Abbey, now represented only by the beautiful and spacious fragment of ruin, called the Royal Chapel, but then, despite the spoliations to which it had been subjected by recent English invasions, still tolerably preserved in its integrity as the famous edifice, in Early Norman style, which had been founded in the Twelfth Century by David I., and had been enlarged in the Fifteenth by additions in the later and more florid Gothic. Close by this was Holyrood House, or the Palace proper, built in the earlier part of the Sixteenth Century, and chiefly by James IV., to form a distinct royal dwelling, and so supersede that occasional accommodation in the Abbey itself which had sufficed for Scottish sovereigns before Edinburgh was their habitual or capital residence. One block of this original Holyrood House still remains in the two-turreted projection of the present Holyrood which adjoins the ruined relic of the Abbey, and which contains the rooms now specially shown as “Queen Mary’s Apartments.” But the present Holyrood, as a whole, is a construction of the reign of Charles II., and gives little idea of the Palace in which Mary took up her abode in 1561. The two-turreted projection on the left was not balanced then, as now, by a similar two-turreted projection on the right, with a façade of less height between, but was flanked on the right by a continued château-like frontage, of about the same height as the turreted projection, and at a uniform depth of recess from it, but independently garnished with towers and pinnacles. The main entrance into the Palace from the great outer courtyard was through this château-like flank, just about the spot where there is the entrance through the present middle façade; and this entrance led, like the present, into an inner court or quadrangle, built round on all the four sides. That quadrangle of château, touching the Abbey to the back from its north-eastern corner, and with the two-turreted projection to its front from its north-western corner, constituted, indeed, the main bulk of the Palace. There were, however, extensive appurtenances of other buildings at the back or at the side farthest from the Abbey, forming minor inner courts, while part of that side of the great outer courtyard which faced the entrance was occupied by offices belonging to the Palace, and separating the courtyard from the adjacent purlieus of the town. For the grounds of both Palace and Abbey were encompassed by a wall, having gates at various points of its circuit, the principal and most strongly guarded of which was the Gothic porch admitting from the foot of the Canongate into the front courtyard. The grounds so enclosed were ample enough to contain gardens and spaces of plantation, besides the buildings and their courts. Altogether, what with the buildings themselves, what with the courts and gardens, and what with the natural grandeur of the site,--a level of deep and wooded park, between the Calton heights and crags on the one hand and the towering shoulders of Arthur Seat and precipitous escarpment of Salisbury Crags on the other,--Holyrood in 1561 must have seemed, even to an eye the most satiated with palatial splendours abroad, a sufficiently impressive dwelling-place to be the metropolitan home of Scottish royalty.

_Edinburgh Sketches and Memories_ (London and Edinburgh, 1892).

SAINT-GUDULE.

VICTOR HUGO.

The windows of Saint-Gudule are of a kind almost unknown in France, real paintings, real pictures on glass of a marvellous style, with figures like Titian and architecture like Paul Veronese.

The pulpit of this church is carved in wood by Henry Verbruggen and bears the date of 1699. The whole of creation, the whole of philosophy, the whole of poetry are expressed here by an enormous tree which supports the pulpit in its boughs and shelters a world of birds and animals among its leaves, while at its base Adam and Eve are pursued by a sorrowful angel, followed by Death who seems triumphant, and separated by the tail of the serpent. At its summit, the cross--Truth--and the infant Jesus, whose foot rests upon the head of the bruised serpent. This poem is sculptured and carved out of oak alone, in the strongest, the most tender, and the most _spirituelle_ manner. The effect is prodigiously rococo and prodigiously beautiful. No matter what the fanatics of the severe school would say, it is true. This pulpit is one of those rare instances in art where the beautiful and the rococo meet. Watteau and Coypel have also occasionally discovered such points of intersection....

It was three o’clock when I entered Saint-Gudule. They were celebrating the Office of the Virgin. A Madonna, covered with jewels and clothed in a robe of English lace, glittered on a dais of gold in the centre of the nave through a luminous cloud of incense which was dispersed around her. Many people were praying in the shadow motionless, and a strong ray of sunlight from above dispelled the gloom and shone full upon the large statues of proud mien arranged against the columns. The worshippers seemed of stone, the statues seemed alive.

And then a beautiful chant of mingled deep and ringing voices fell mysteriously with the tones of the organ from the highest rails hidden by the mists of incense. I, during this time, had my eye fixed dreamily upon Verbruggen’s pulpit, teeming with life,--that magic pulpit which is always suggestive.--Frame this with windows, ogives, and Renaissance tombs of white marble and black, and you will understand why a sublime sensation was produced by this scene....

I climbed the towers of Saint-Gudule. It was beautiful. The entire city lay beneath me, the toothed and voluted roofs of Brussels half-hidden by the smoke, the sky (a stormy sky), full of clouds, golden and curled above, solid as marble below; in the distance a large cloud from which rain was falling like fine sand from a bag which has burst; the sun shone above everything; the magnificent open-work, lantern-like belfry stood out sombre against the white mists; then the confused noise of the town reached me, then the verdure of the lovely hills on the horizon: it was truly beautiful. I admired everything like a provincial from Paris, which I am,--everything, even the mason who was hammering on a stone and whistling near me.

_En Voyage: France et Belgique_ (Paris, 1892).

THE ESCURIAL.

EDMONDO DE AMICIS.

Before my departure for Andalusia, I went to see the famous Convent of the Escurial, the leviathan of architecture, the eighth wonder of the world, the largest mass of granite upon the earth, and, if you desire other imposing epithets, then you must imagine them, for you will not find one that has not been used to describe it. I left Madrid in the early morning. The village of the Escurial, from which the Convent received its name, is eight leagues from the city, not far from the Guadarrama; you pass through an arid and uninhabited country whose horizon is bounded by snow-covered mountains. A light, fine, and cold rain was falling when I reached the station of the Escurial. From it to the village there is a rise of half a mile. I clambered into an omnibus, and at the end of a few minutes, I was deposited in a solitary street bordered on the left by the Convent and on the right by the houses of the village, and shut in by the mountains. At the first glance you understand nothing; you expect to see a building and you find a city; you do not know if you are already in the Convent, or if you are outside; you are hemmed in by walls. You advance, and find yourself in a square; you look about you and see streets; you have not yet entered, and already the Convent surrounds you: you are at your wit’s end, and no longer know which way to turn. The first feeling is one of depression: the entire edifice is of mud-coloured stone, and all the layers are marked by a white stripe; the roofs are covered with lead. You might call it a building made of earth. The very high walls are naked and pierced by a great number of windows which resemble barbicans. You might call it a prison rather than a convent. You find this gloomy colour everywhere: there is not a living soul here, and the silence is that of a deserted fortress; and beyond the black roofs, the black mountain, which seems to be suspended over the building, gives it mysterious solitude. It seems as if the founder must have chosen the spot, the plan, and the colours, everything, in fact, with the intention of producing a sad and solemn spectacle. You lose your gaiety before entering; you can smile no longer, you are thinking. You pause at the door of the Escurial with a kind of quaking, as if at the entrance of a dead city; it seems to you that if the terrible Inquisition is reigning in any corner of the world, it must be between these walls; for it is here that you can see its last traces and hear its last echo.

Everybody knows that the Basilica and the Convent of the Escurial were founded by Philip II. after the battle of San Quintino to fulfil his vow made during the war to Saint Laurence when he was forced to cannonade a church consecrated to this saint. Don Juan Batista of Toledo commenced the building and Herrera finished it, and the work upon it lasted for twenty-one years. Philip II. wished the building to have the form of a gridiron in memory of Saint Laurence’s martyrdom; and, in reality, this is its form. The plan is a rectangular parallelogram. Four large square towers with pointed roofs rise at the four corners, and represent the four feet of a gridiron; the church and the royal palace, which extend on one side, represent the handle; and the interior buildings, which are placed across the two long sides, represent the parallel bars. Other smaller buildings rise outside of the parallelogram, not far from the Convent, along one of the long sides and one of the courts, forming two large squares; the other two sides are occupied by gardens. Façades, doors, and entrance-halls, are all in harmony with the grandeur and character of the edifice: it is useless to multiply descriptions. The royal Palace is magnificent, and in order to keep a clear impression of each individual building, it is better to see it before you enter the Convent and Church. This palace is in the north-east corner of the building. Several halls are filled with pictures, others are hung from the ceiling to the floor with tapestries, representing bull-fights, dances, games, _fêtes_, and Spanish costumes, after Goya; others are decorated and furnished in princely style; the floor, the doors, and the windows are covered with marvellous mosaics and dazzling gold-work. But among all the rooms, that of Philip II. is especially remarkable. It is a dark and bare cell, whose alcove communicates with the royal oratory of the church in such a way that, when the doors were open, from his bed he could see the priest celebrating Mass. Philip II. slept in this room, had his last illness there, and died there. You can still see some of the chairs he used, two little benches on which he rested his gouty leg, and a writing-desk. The walls are white, the ceiling is unornamented, and the floor is of stone.

When you have seen the royal Palace, you go out of the building, cross the square, and re-enter the great door. A guide joins you and you pass through the large entrance to find yourself in the Kings’ courtyard. Here you gain an idea of the enormous structure of the building. This court is entirely shut in by walls; opposite the door is the façade of the Church. Above a wide stairway stand six enormous Doric columns; each of these supports a large pedestal, and each pedestal upholds a statue. These six colossal statues are by Batista Monegro, representing Jehoshaphat, Ezekiel, David, Solomon, Joshua, and Manasseh. The courtyard is paved and bunches of damp grass grow here and there; the walls look like rocks cut in points; everything is rigid, massive, and heavy, and presents the indescribable aspect of a fantastic edifice hewn by Titans from a mountain and capable of defying earthquakes and lightnings. At this point you really begin to understand the Escurial....

After seeing the Church and the Sacristy, you visit the Picture-Gallery, which contains a large number of paintings by artists of all countries, not the best examples, however, for these have been taken to the Madrid gallery, but of sufficient value to merit a thoughtful visit of half a day. From the Picture-Gallery you go to the Library by means of the large stairway, over which is rounded an enormous vaulted ceiling, painted all over with frescoes by Luca Giordano. The Library is an immense hall adorned with large allegorical paintings, and contains more than fifty thousand rare volumes, four thousand of which were given by Philip II., and beyond this is another hall, which contains a very valuable collection of manuscripts. From the Library you go to the Convent. Here human imagination is completely lost. If my reader knows Espronceda’s _Estudiante de Salamanca_, he will remember that the persistent young man, when following the mysterious lady whom he met at night at the foot of a tabernacle, runs from street to street, from square to square, and from alley to alley, turning and returning, until he arrives at a spot where he can no longer see the houses of Salamanca and where he discovers that he is in an unknown city; and in proportion as he advances the town seems to grow larger, the streets longer and the intertwining alleys more tortuous; but he goes on and on without stopping, not knowing if he is awake or dreaming, if he is intoxicated or mad; terror begins to enter his brave heart and the most peculiar phantoms crowd into his distracted mind: this is what happens to the stranger in the Convent of the Escurial. You pass through a long subterranean corridor, so narrow that you can touch the wall with your elbows, so low that your head almost hits the ceiling, and as damp as a grotto under the sea; on reaching its end, you turn, and you are in another corridor. You go on, pass through doors, and look around: other corridors extend as far as your eye can see. At the end of some of them you notice a feeble light, at the end of others an open door which reveals a suite of rooms. Every now and then you hear a footstep: you stop; all is silent; then you hear it again; you do not know if it is above your head, or to the right, or the left, or before you, or behind you. You are about to enter a door; you recoil in terror: at the end of a long corridor you see a man, motionless as a spectre, who is staring at you. You continue your journey and arrive in a strange court, surrounded by high walls and overgrown with grass, full of echoes, and illuminated by a wan light which seems to come from some strange sun; it reminds you of the haunts of witches described to you in your childhood. You go out of the court, walk up a stairway, arrive in a gallery, and look down: there beneath you is another, and deserted, court. You walk down another corridor, you descend another stairway, and you find yourself in a third court; then again more corridors, stairways, suites of empty rooms, and narrow courts, and everywhere granite, a wan light, and the stillness of death. For a short time you think you could retrace your steps; then your memory forsakes you, and you recall nothing: it seems as if you had walked ten leagues, that you have been in this labyrinth for a month, and that you will never get out of it. You come to a court, and exclaim: “I have seen this before!” No you are mistaken: it is another one. You think you are on one side of the building and you are on the opposite one. You ask your guide for the cloister, and he replies: “It is here,” and you continue walking for half an hour. You fancy you are dreaming: you have glimpses of long walls, frescoed, and adorned with pictures, the crucifix, and with inscriptions; you see and you forget; you ask yourself “Where am I?” You see a light as if from another world: you have never conceived of such a peculiar light. Is it the reflection of the granite? Is it moonlight? No, it is daylight; but a daylight sadder than darkness; it is a false, sinister, fantastic daylight. Let us go on! From corridor to corridor, from court to court, you look before you with mistrust; you expect to see suddenly at the turn of a corner a row of skeleton monks with hoods drawn over their eyes and their arms folded; you think of Philip II.; you fancy you hear his step growing ever fainter down the distant passages; you remember all you have read of him, of his terrors, of the Inquisition; and everything becomes suddenly plain; you understand it all for the first time: the Escurial is Philip II., you see him at every step, and you hear him breathe; for he is here, living and fearful, and the image of his terrible God is with him. Then you want to revolt, to raise your thought to the God of your heart and hope, and to conquer the mysterious terror which this place inspires; but you cannot; the Escurial envelops you, possesses you, crushes you; the cold of its stones penetrates into your very bones, the sadness of its sepulchral labyrinths takes possession of your soul. If you were with a friend, you would say: “Let us go!”; if you were with your loved one, you would tremblingly clasp her to your heart; if you were alone, you would take flight. Finally you ascend the stairway, and, entering a room, go to the window to salute rapturously the mountains, the sunshine, liberty, and the great and generous God who loves and pardons.

How one breathes again at this window!

From it you see the gardens, which occupy a restricted space and which are very simple, but elegant and beautiful, and in perfect harmony with the building. You see in them twelve charming fountains, each surrounded by four squares of box-wood, representing the royal escutcheons, designed with such skill and trimmed with such precision that in looking at them from the windows they seem to be made of plush and velvet, and they stand out from the white sand of the walks in a very striking manner. There are no trees, nor flowers, nor pavilions here; in all the gardens nothing is to be seen but fountains and squares of box-wood and these two colours--white and green--and such is the beauty of this noble simplicity that the eye is enchanted with it, and when it has passed out of sight, the thought returns and rests there with pleasure mingled with a gentle melancholy....

An illustrious traveller has said that after having spent a day in the Convent of the Escurial, one should feel happy for the remainder of his life in thinking that he might be still between those walls, but that he has escaped. That is very nearly true. Even now, after so long a time, on rainy days when I am sad I think about the Escurial, then I look around the walls of my room and I become gay; during nights of insomnia, I see the courts of the Escurial; when I am ill and drop into a feverish and heavy sleep, I dream that all night I am wandering in these corridors, alone and followed by the phantom of a monk, screaming and knocking at all the doors without finding a way out, until I decide to go to the Pantheon, where the door bangs behind me and shuts me in among the tombs.

With what delight I saw the myriad lights of the _Puerta del Sol_, the crowded _cafés_ and the great and noisy street of the Alcala! When I went into the house I made such a noise, that the servant, who was a good and simple Gallician, ran excitedly to her mistress and said: “_Me parece el italiano se ha vuelto loco._” (I think the Italian has lost his senses).

_La Spagna_ (Florence, 1873).

THE TEMPLE OF MADURA.

JAMES FERGUSSON.

There does not seem to be any essential difference either in plan or form between the Saiva and Vaishnava temples in the south of India. It is only by observing the images or emblems worshipped, or by reading the stories represented in the numerous sculptures with which a temple is adorned, that we find out the god to whom it is dedicated. Whoever he may be, the temples consist almost invariably of the four following parts, arranged in various manners, as afterwards to be explained, but differing in themselves only according to the age in which they were executed:--

1. The principal part, the actual temple itself, is called the _Vimana_. It is always square in plan, and surmounted by a pyramidal roof of one or more storeys; it contains the cell in which the image of the god or his emblem is placed.

2. The porches or _Mantapas_, which always cover and precede the door leading to the cell.

3. Gate pyramids, _Gopuras_, which are the principal features in the quadrangular enclosures which always surround the _Vimanas_.

4. Pillared halls or _Choultries_, used for various purposes, and which are the invariable accompaniments of these temples.

Besides these, a temple always contains tanks or wells for water--to be used either for sacred purposes or the convenience of the priests,--dwellings for all the various grades of the priesthood attached to it, and numerous other buildings designed for state or convenience....