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
[Illustration: THREE DESTROYED FIGURES FROM REIMS]
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
[Illustration: FIFTEENTH-CENTURY FLEMISH TAPESTRY]
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.