castle of the Middle Ages, whose lords haughtily proclaimed, “Roi ne
suys, ne prince, ne duc, ne comte aussi: Je suys le Sire de Coucy,” is
Laon on its sudden hill. How great the loss has been here we do not
know, but the town has been frequently under German bombardment, and the
end is not yet. Laon is unique, a masterly work of curious vitality,
original, daring, and even rebellious against a growing tradition. In
the Middle Ages it was vastly admired, but to us of a day more dull and
timorous in architecture, because we have no art of our own and have
found so little in life from which we could draw an inspiration, it is
less safe and satisfying than such coherent and scholastic work as
Amiens or Reims. Begun about 1165, it was finished in 1225, the growth
being from the crossing in all directions, for not only is the amazing
west front of the central period of Gothic perfection, but the choir as
well, for the unique square termination takes the place of a regular
chevet which was part of the original design. This square-ended choir is
the only one in France, and is thoroughly English in effect; moreover,
the transepts have aisles and are the first in France to be so finished,
while they have tribunes at the ends after the Norman fashion, and there
is a central tower or lantern as well. The towers of Laon are its
distinguishing glory, for there are five in all, out of an original
seven, all incomplete, not one retaining its spire, but striking and
immensely individual. The interior organism is not wholly coherent, for
while the vaulting is sexpartite throughout, the system is regular, and
was as manifestly intended for quadripartite vaulting as Noyon for
sexpartite. The west front is vastly picturesque, if somewhat
incoherent, and is clearly a growth from year to year; it lacks both the
sublime calm and grandeur of Paris and the faultless organism of Reims,
but its detail is as brilliantly conceived as any in France, while its
carvings and sculptures are in the same class as the best of Hellas. In
the tops of the towers are the well-known stone effigies of oxen,
placed there by the builders in recognition of the patient service of
the beasts that year after year helped drag the heavy stones from the
plain to the top of the hill where the cathedral stands.
In and around Laon were once innumerable religious houses, but nearly
all their churches were destroyed during the French Revolution, which
annihilated more noble art in five years than had happened in five
centuries. St. Martin remains, and is of the middle of the twelfth
century, but the church of the Abbey of St. Vincent is wholly destroyed.
South of Laon, and about as far away as Noyon, lies Soissons, an ancient
town, famous in history, and containing, until the war, another
masterpiece of mediæval art, the cathedral, which already has been made
the target of German shells, and has suffered seriously. As a city, it
antedated the Roman occupation, was Christianised toward the end of the
third century, became a capital of the Merovings, and a notable city of
the Carolingian dynasty. The south transept is the oldest part, and
dates from about 1175, the choir was finished in 1212, the north
transept and nave about 1250. Porter says of the south transept: “This
portion of Soissons, one of the most ethereal of all twelfth-century
designs, is the highest expression of that fairy-like, Saracenic phase
of Gothic art that had first come into being at Noyon. Like Noyon,
however, this transept lacks the elements of grandeur which are found in
so striking a degree in the nave and choir of this same church of
Soissons.” The nave and choir are indeed amongst the noblest creations
of Catholic art; for justness and delicacy of proportions, refinement of
line, restraint in the placing and determination of ornament, Soissons
ranks with Chartres and Bourges. The richness of its vertical lines is
unusual, the mouldings clear, powerful, and distinguished in contour,
and altogether it has well served for nearly seven centuries as a
perfect exemplar of the Christian art of France as its highest point.
Already it has been appallingly shattered, one shell having struck the
roof of the north aisle, hurling one of the nave shafts into fragments
and obliterating an entire bay. Thus far it has been spared a
conflagration, and if the Prussian lines are promptly forced back, it
may still be preserved as a wonder for still further generations.
So far as the numberless other great churches of Soissons are
concerned, it has for long been too late; they perished, with uncounted
others in this region, at the time of the Revolution. Of the vast abbey
of St. Jean-des-Vignes nothing remains but the sumptuous west front, cut
clear like an architectural “frontispiece” from all the rest, and even
this has been further shattered by German gunfire. The royal abbey of
Our Lady has become a military barracks, St. Crepin, St. Medard with its
famous seven churches, all have vanished, and the loss is irreparable.
Nearer Paris we find Senlis, a further step in architectural
development. The town itself is charming, and full of old art and old
history. Roman walls, with sixteen towers, still remain, together with
fragments of a royal palace of the French kings, from Clovis to Henri
IV, with ancient houses, picturesque streets, desecrated churches, and
monastic ruins, such as those of the Abbey of Victory, founded by Philip
Augustus after the battle of Bouvines, and wrecked, of course, during
the Revolution.
The cathedral is curious and fascinating. Set out in 1155 on enormous
lines, it was curtailed both in height and length through the failure of
adequate funds. It has been rebuilt, extended, supplemented, century
after century, until it has become almost an epitome of French
architecture from the middle of the twelfth to the middle of the
sixteenth century. The southwest tower (its mate is unfinished) is of
the thirteenth-century culmination, and surpassed by no other spire in
France for subtlety of composition and perfection of detail. One of its
crocketed pinnacles has already been shot away, but apparently further
danger is well removed, and will become progressively less threatening
as the Prussian lines are driven back.
It is, of course, quite impossible even to note all the architectural
monuments between the Seine and the frontiers of Belgium. Paris must be
wholly left out, for St. Denis, St. Germain l’Auxerois, Notre Dame, and
the Ste. Chapelle would justly require a volume to themselves. Rouen,
with its cathedral, St. Ouen, St. Maclou, the Palais de Justice, rich
with all the lace and embroidery of the flamboyant period, lies now well
beyond danger, and so does Beauvais, where the nemesis of worldly pride
overtook the lagging spiritual impulse that had made the Middle Ages the
climax of Christian civilisation. Châlons-sur-Marne, once threatened, is
now reprieved, and its
[Illustration: BEAUVAIS]
cathedral, its churches of St. Jean and St. Loup, and its noble and
distinguished Church of Our Lady are safe for another period.
Apart from the great architectural monuments are numberless others
invaluable in archæology, and forming links in the great Gothic
development: St. Etienne of Beauvais, St. Leu d’Esserent, Morienval,
Bury, St. Germer, and St. Remi of Reims--the last valuable beyond
estimate, with an apse that was unparalleled as a masterpiece of
transitional work when Gothic was in its first and finest estate, now
wrecked and desecrated by shells that have burst its vaults into
crumbled fragments and hurled its perfect windows in showers of
splintered glass to the pavements heaped high with the wreck of masonry
and of dismembered altars.
And as in the case of the great churches, so in that of the small, from
Braisne to Caudebec, they cannot even be catalogued. The whole region
was, and is, one of wonderful little parish churches, of all periods,
and many of them are now only shapeless ruins. The great abbeys and
smaller religious houses are practically gone, scores having fallen prey
to the insane fury of the Revolution or the sordid secularism of the
Restoration. What we have lost may be seen from countless such lovely
and pathetic fragments as St. Wandrille, near Caudebec, given a new fame
through the name of Maeterlinck, and so linked with the greater
martyrdom of Belgium in these last days. This, like its myriad
companions, was architecture of the most singular beauty, the loss of
which leaves the world poor, so poor, indeed, that it had at first
nothing wherewith to meet the last assault of the enemy. The loss is
being made good, the penalty already is paid, and though one could
not--one would not--restore or rebuild these silent fragments of
exquisitely wrought stone, meshed in tall trees and clambering vines,
the vision is possible of new foundations, equal in number to these that
are gone, each an expiation and a spiritual guard, each making late
reparation for the past, guaranteeing a future immunity from perils of
the same nature as those that now shake the world.
VI
AMIENS AND REIMS
Two monuments there are to the east of the Seine that form the
realisation of the dim but dominant ideal toward which Christian society
in France was tending even from the days of St. Germer and Jumièges,
through the intermediate and progressive steps of Noyon, Soissons,
Laon-Amiens, and Reims. Equal in fame, counting no others in their own
category save only Chartres and Bourges, the one remains, the other has
passed for ever.
It is a strange sensation for us to-day to watch from afar the slow and
implacable destruction of one of the greatest works of art in the world,
for we must go back more than a century to find any catastrophe of a
similar nature. What happened then, when half a hundred masterpieces of
divinely directed human intelligence and aspiration were reduced to
scrap-heaps at the hands of revolution, is very far away, and the
irreparable loss is as unknown to-day as it was unappreciated then. We
can no more reconstruct for our understanding Cluny, St. Martin of
Tours, or Avranches than we can restore the catalogue of the Alexandrian
library; mercifully we cannot estimate our loss. Back of this era of
annihilation we must go two centuries before we find in England under
Henry VIII a similar episode of infamy. The case of Reims is wholly
different; there are tens of thousands who knew it for what it was--the
crowning manifestation of a crowning civilisation, and for them the loss
is personal, poignant, and unexampled, a horror that sophistry cannot
palliate nor time destroy.
Of the two great churches, Amiens could more easily have been spared.
The word is ill chosen; Amiens in ruins, its exquisite façade with its
perfect sculptures seared and shattered by bursting shells and consuming
fire, would have been a catastrophe that could only put to the test the
most stoical fortitude, but--it is neither Chartres nor Bourges nor
Reims, and simply because the perfect balance between all possible
elements in great architecture is here trembling toward its overthrow.
Gothic art had three controlling forces working toward an unattainable
perfection; structural integrity irradiated by consummate invention and
an almost divine creative genius; passion for that exalted beauty that
is unchangeable and eternal, expressed through new forms at once
northern and Catholic; the just balance and intimate interplay of these
two impulses. Its virtues, like all virtues, were most easily transmuted
into vices, once the controlling balance was overthrown, and each was,
in its stimulating possibilities, a constant and irresistible temptation
toward excess. In Reims, the beginnings of which antedate Amiens by only
a decade, the balance remains true and firm; in Amiens we see the first
fatal steps in the development of a purely human (and notably French)
logic, toward that intellectual pride, that almost arrogance of
self-confidence, that found its nemesis in the unstable marvel of
Beauvais.
In an admirable but anonymous little book called “Some French
Cathedrals,” the author says: “French Gothic was most rational and most
beautiful while it still remembered its Romanesque origin. At Amiens it
was just beginning to forget that and to lose itself in dreams of an
impossible romance which changed it from architecture into a very
wonderful kind of ornamental engineering.” This subtle and significant
change you feel everywhere except in the inimitable façade. The
interior is too high, the masonry too wire-drawn and tenuous, the chevet
too giddy and insecure. It is true that all but the west front has been
impossibly restored, so that outwardly little remains of the original
work, while the glass is gone from all but the ambulatory windows,
leaving the nave a cold blaze of intolerable light. Nevertheless, the
fundamental fault is there; the architect intrudes himself in place of
the _dévot_, the craft of man supplants the guiding of God; so we have
one of the most technically perfect of cathedrals, and one of the least
inspired; you must go to the Rhine to find, in Cologne, a more
self-conscious and serenely satisfied work, and it is well to make this
comparison, for by so doing you realise the real greatness of Amiens,
and how it fails only in comparison with the three perfect examples of
an art that wholly expresses the great concept of mediæval Catholic
philosophy, that in life, as we know it, material and spiritual are
inseparable, that their just balance is the true end of man in this
phase of existence, and that therefore sacramentalism is of the _esse_
of religion, and as well the law of life.
As a whole, both from within and without, Amiens in a measure fails, but
this does not hold
[Illustration: AMIENS]
of its several parts. The west front is still a masterpiece of
consummate and wholly original design, though the towers have been
incongruously (but engagingly) terminated in later centuries. The three
great doors, the first and second arcades, and the rose-window story
contain more brilliant, spirited, ingenious, and withal beautiful design
than any similar work in the world, while the ornament (there is a
wild-rose border around the archivolts of the great porches that finds
no rival in Greece) and the sculptures reach a level of decorative and
emotional significance that marks the time of their production as the
crowning moment in human culture and in Christian civilisation.
We turn to Reims--we turn now in reverence to the memory of Reims--in a
different spirit. Master Robert of Luzarches was a master, and knew it.
Master Robert of Coucy was the servant of a Lord who was greater than
he, and knew this also, and was proud of his service. He was just as
great an architect as his brother of Amiens, but he worked in a godly
fear, and so he built the noblest church in Christendom. This is not to
say that its nave order is equal to Chartres, its rhythm and composition
equal to Bourges. In every great church from 1175 to 1225 there is some
one element or more that is final and unexcelled, but at Reims there was
a great consistency, a noble and all-embracing competence, that placed
it in a class by itself.
Reims was without a fault; perhaps this made its appeal less poignant
and searching than that of the eager and sometimes less-perfect efforts
of men more human in their inadequacies. Man is the creature that tries,
and it is perhaps only human to feel a reverence that lessens affection
for those who seem to transcend the limits that are set to human
accomplishment.
Every other cathedral in France is a splendid chronicle, a record of
changing times, changing endeavours, changing impulses. Men of varying
personalities have wrought out their ideals, year after year, and the
result is in each case a great sequence, a glorious approximation. Reims
was begun in 1211, on the first anniversary of the burning of its
predecessor, and it was finished, manifestly in accordance with an
original and predetermined design, within fifty years. The three gables
and the upper stories of the western towers are a century later,
otherwise the work is consistent and a single conception. The great
ideal comprised a crowning group of seven towers, each with its slender
spire, none of which was ever completed, and had this majestic scheme
been carried out, the church would have been the most complete, as it
was the most perfect, of the architectural manifestations of
Christianity.
It is impossible to analyse Reims, to describe its vital and exquisite
organism, to laud its impeccable scale, its vivid and stimulating
originality, to explain the almost incredible competence and beauty of
its buttressing, the serene delicacy of its detail, to dwell once more
on the glory of its sculpture that ranked with that of Greece, on the
splendour of its glass that was rivalled only at Chartres. It is
impossible to do this now, for its passing has been too recent and too
grievous. Death brings silence for a time to those that knew the dead.
In another chapter I have tried to say something of the sculpture of
Reims, a crowning glory where all was glorious, but sculpture does not
mean the human figure alone; it covered in the Middle Ages all forms of
beauty chiselled out of stone and marble, and the man who wrought the
wild-rose design on the archivolts of Amiens was just as great an artist
as he who fashioned the Virgin of the south transept, or the “Beau
Dieu”; perhaps he was the same man. Gothic “ornament” is quite as
beautiful as are Gothic saints and angels, and here at Reims the stone
carving was of the finest. Every space of ornament--capital, crocket,
boss, frieze, and string-course--was a combination of these great
elements: architectural self-restraint and identity with the work as a
whole, passionate love for all the beautiful things in nature, joy in
doing everything, even the cutting of unseen surfaces, just as well as
man could do the work. It is not better than the ornament of Amiens or
Chartres; in some passages Amiens seems to have achieved the highest
attainable point, but it is of the same quality, and that is enough
glory for any church.
Most of this inimitable art already has been blasted and calcined away,
and the same fate has overtaken the glass. Here was an achievement of
the highest in an art of the best. In the light (literally) of the
stained glass of our own times, we had found some difficulty in
realising that this was an art at all, but it needed only a visit to
Chartres or Reims for enlightenment to come to us. At Chartres, in the
very earliest years of the thirteenth century, it reached its
[Illustration: REIMS]
culmination; there is no greater glass anywhere than this, almost no
greater art, and Reims, while less complete (the aisle windows were
wholly removed by eighteenth-century canons on the score of an added
“cheerfulness”), was of the same school, though later and just past the
cresting of the wave. If it lacked the unearthly clarity and divine
radiance of the western lancets, and the “Belle Verrière” of Chartres,
it had qualities of its own, particularly its most glorious azures and
rubies, that allowed no rival, and it easily ranked with Chartres and
Bourges and Poitiers as manifesting the possibilities of a noble art,
and a lost art, at its highest point of achievement.
So far as can be learned, all this has perished and it cannot be
restored. It lies in shivered heaps where it has fallen and the chapter
of the glass of Reims is closed.
Four months ago the ruin already was irreparable, and since then
bombardments have been frequent and merciless, nor has the enemy as yet
been driven beyond the range of gun-fire. Whether even the shattered and
crumbling fabric--wherefrom all carving, all detail, all glass, all
sculpture has been burned and blasted away--survives in the end, none
can foretell; but one thing is sure, and that is that no “restoration”
must ever be attempted. If enough remains so that careful hands may
preserve it from disintegration and make it available for the worship of
God, well and good, so long as no imitations, whether in stone or metal
or glass, are intruded to mock its vanished glory and obliterate for
future generations the record of an indelible crime. For seven centuries
its beauty and its perfection have spoken to succeeding generations,
each less willing to listen than the last. In its ruin and its
devastation it will speak more clearly and to more willing ears, than in
any pretentious rehabilitation.
To the sordid wickedness of its destruction has been added the insult of
Prussian promises of complete restoration--a catastrophe that would
crown the first with a greater and more contemptible indignity. Instead,
let Reims remain as it is left, and then, in Paris, let France,
regenerated and redeemed, as already has gloriously happened, make for
ever visible her restoration, through blood and suffering, to her old
ideals, by carrying out her vow to build in honour of Ste. Jeanne d’Arc
a great new church, raise a new Reims, like the old in plan and form and
dimensions. Not a copy, but a revival, with the old ideals, the old
motives, the old self-consecration; different, as the new must differ
from the old, but akin in spirit and in truth.
If one only knew how to interpret it, there is some mysterious
significance in the centring of the war of the world around Reims and in
the persistent and successful efforts of the Prussians to raze it to the
ground. Seven centuries ago the mystics of St. Victor would have read
the riddle, but for too long now we have been out of temper with
symbolism and too averse to the acceptance of signs and portents to be
able to see even dimly the correspondences and the significance of those
human happenings that are actually outside human control. In a way Reims
was the ancient heart of France, as Paris is not, and it always was a
sacred city above all others--and sacred it is now as never before. It
was here that the Christianising of the Franks was sealed by the baptism
of Clovis, A. D. 496, by St. Remi, the canonised bishop who occupied the
see for seventy-five years. The crowning of kings (every sovereign but
four for a period of fifteen hundred years came here for his
coronation), the assembling of great councils of the Church, the
beneficent activities of universities and schools of philosophy were
all commonplaces of the life of the city, while it was here that Ste.
Jeanne d’Arc finally discomfited the English and led her King to his
crowning in the church that is now destroyed.
Time and again the city has been devastated, from the Vandals of 392 to
those of 1914. During the Revolution its churches suffered bitterly; the
cathedral and St. Remi, until then, were rich with unnumbered shrines,
altars, statues, tombs, while cloisters and religious buildings of many
kinds surrounded them on all sides. All this wealth of hoarded art that
expressed the piety and culture of centuries was swept away, even to the
sacred ampulla of holy oil, piously believed to have been brought by a
dove for the consecration of Clovis and ever after miraculously
replenished for each succeeding coronation. To this irreparable
devastation was added the indignity of official “restoration,” though in
the case of the cathedral at the able and scrupulous hands of
Viollet-le-Duc, and in the nineteenth century the picturesque and
beautiful old streets gave place to boulevards and a general
Hausmanising on approved Parisian lines, so that in 1914 the city had
become dull and somewhat pretentious, framing the two priceless jewels,
the Church of Our Lady of Reims and that of the holy St. Remi.
All is now gone, the glorious and the insignificant alike overwhelmed in
indiscriminating ruin. The glass and the statues that had survived war,
revolution, and stupidity are shattered in fragments, the roofs consumed
by fire, the vaults burst asunder, the carved stones calcined and
flaking hourly in a dreary rain on blood-stained pavements where a
hundred kings have trod and into deserted streets that have echoed to
the footsteps of threescore generations. The city has passed; _deleta
est Carthago_, but it has left a memory, a tradition, and an inspiration
that may yet play a greater part in the rebuilding of civilisation than
could have been achieved by its remaining monuments as they stood making
their unheeded appeal on the day the first shell was fired from the
Prussian batteries on the eastern hills.