of the metal-worker combines with that of music. Both the carillon and
the English peal are late developments, the first of the sixteenth, the
second of the seventeenth century, but from the beginning of the
thirteenth century great bells, used singly or in small combinations,
were in constant use. Most of the latter are gone, melted down in the
Hundred Years’ War and the Revolution in France, and the wars of
religion in the Rhineland and the Low Countries, though a few remain at
Amiens, Sens, Metz, and Beauvais, with one weighing over a ton which
hung at Reims until last year. The carillons of Belgium and Holland were
intact until that time, though many have now fallen with the splendid
towers that held them. Arras is gone and probably Dunkerque; Louvain and
Ypres are gone and possibly Mons; Malines, most beautiful of all, has
been battered to pieces and its forty-five bells have been cracked,
melted, hurled in ruin down through the many stories of the great tower.
Time after time during the last generation from twenty thousand to forty
thousand people have assembled to hear these bells rung by M. Denyn, the
greatest master of the art, but they will hear them no more until,
perhaps, when the world is made new the bells of Malines may ring out
again to welcome the dawn of a better day.
Whether the English peal of an octave, with the bells attuned to the
intervals of the diatonic scale, and swung by hand, a man to each rope,
in accordance with the most intricate mathematical formulas and without
recognised melodies, is better or worse art than the carillon of
thirty-five to fifty-two bells, covering sometimes four octaves and a
half, in accord with the chromatic scale, fixed in their head-stocks and
struck by hammers manipulated by one man sitting before a keyboard, and
reproducing the most elaborate musical compositions, is no part of the
argument. Each has its place, each is a mode of musical art, and just
because one may like the strange and subtle variations of an English
peal thundering out its vibrant tones from great bells swinging and
clashing in a grey old tower, it does not follow that he must reject the
floating and ethereal harmonies of the Belgian carillon pouring into the
still evening air strange melodies that are eternally haunting in their
poignant appeal. They are silent now, even those that still hang in
their tall towers, and the roar of giant artillery, splitting and
harshly reverberating, has taken their place. In the good beginnings
iron was anathema and might not be used in the service of the Church;
bronze alone was tolerable. Now iron is king and holds dominion over the
world, transmuted into steel through the offices of its ally, coal.
Bronze is rejected, shattered, dethroned, but some of the great bells
yet remain, hanging silent and patient while hell rages around them and
iron asserts its universal dominion. Perhaps by and by they will give
tongue again, proclaiming the end of the iron age, calling in once more
a better and more righteous sovereignty.
Some day the world will awaken to the fact that there are other great
arts besides architecture, painting, and sculpture; already there is a
suspicion abroad that music, poetry, and the drama are arts also and
not merely vehicles for the expression of temperament, and there is even
a preliminary waking of the subconsciousness which threatens to confess
that ritual and ceremonial have been, and may be again, a great fine art
in the same sense. Little by little the pharisaic phrase, “industrial
art,” is yielding some of its component parts and offering them to the
very superior _haute noblesse_ of fine art, and amongst these are
stained glass and tapestry. The recent discovery of the existence of
Chartres Cathedral and its glass has settled one point, and much against
their will the artist and the amateur and the commentator have had to
admit that the art of these windows, and of those at Bourges and Le Mans
and Angers, is of the highest, and quite in the class of the painters of
Italy and Flanders, the sculptors of France and England (in the Middle
Ages), and the master builders from Laon to Amiens.
Of this particularly glorious art, which has become more completely a
lost art than any other ever revealed to man, there is little in the
region under consideration. It did not issue from the Heart of Europe,
but had its beginnings elsewhere and its culmination as well. It was an
art of the twelfth and thirteenth and fourteenth centuries,
degenerating rapidly after the year 1300, and, while the churches and
abbeys and cathedrals between the Seine and the Somme were once splendid
with glass that almost rivalled that of Chartres, the Reformation and
the Revolution had seen to it that the major part of this glory had been
made to depart. Amiens retains a little in its chevet chapels, and Reims
only a year ago was blazing with an apocalyptic splendour that is now
transformed into gaping and fire-swept openings, laced by distorted
metal bars, and heaps of pulverised refuse ground into the blood and
ashes on shattered pavements. Whatever the Low Countries may have had is
long since gone the way of all the other beautiful things the Calvinists
did not like and only fragments, imitations, and Renaissance absurdities
remain.
With the other great art, that of tapestry, the case is fortunately
different. This was almost the intimate art of the Heart of Europe,
finding its beginnings in Aix when the Greek princess brought with her
from the East the first examples of Byzantine needlework and weaving
that had been seen in the West in her day, and going on to new glories
in Arras, Brussels, Tournai, Audenaarde, Lille, Enghien. The perfection
of tapestry weaving came in the last half of the fifteenth century, but
the advance was regular for a century before, and if we can judge from
the few examples left the work of the fourteenth century had many fine
and powerful qualities that were all its own. The collapse came
suddenly, early in the sixteenth century, being marked by Raphael’s
intrusion into a field where he had no place, and after this there was
no more hope for tapestry than for the other arts, and it rapidly sank
to the point where the products of the Gobelins, Beauvais, and Aubussons
looms were much admired.
If Gothic tapestry had possessed a pecuniary value easily translated
into cash, or if it had been closely associated with the most sacred
religious things, we should have preserved less than is actually the
case. As it is, it was seldom the victim of cupidity or fanaticism, but
by its very nature it was perishable, and therefore nearly all the work
antedating the fifteenth century has vanished. Its greatest enemy,
however, was the ignorant and vulgar culture of the nineteenth century,
and during the first fifty years of this destructive epoch it melted
rapidly away. Just before the outbreak of the French Revolution it is
no exaggeration to say that there were in France alone enough tapestries
to carpet a road from Paris to Arras; of course, many were of the
Gobelins type and comparatively valueless as art, but every château,
every cathedral and monastery, almost every church had its sets of
“arras,” and these were of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries; the
curious products of the Renaissance were confined to kings, princes,
great nobles, and to their respective palaces. With 1793 the massacre
began; everything feudal, even by implication, was burned, sometimes
just out of pure deviltry, as when tapestries were consumed in heaps at
the foot of the “Tree of Liberty”; sometimes through thrift, as when in
1797 the Directory burned at one time nearly two hundred ancient works
of art to recover the gold and silver bullion--which they did at this
one holocaust to the value of $13,000. Mr. G. L. Hunter has reckoned the
value of these destroyed tapestries at about $2,500,000 in the market of
to-day. At this rate, the current value of all the tapestries in France
at the Revolution would have been about $250,000,000.
No appreciation of this value developed until nearly the end of the
nineteenth century. In 1852 a set of ten, formerly belonging to Louis
Philippe, with a total length of one hundred and twenty feet, sold for
about $1,200, and at the same sale another set of six, running to eighty
feet, was bought for $400. At present the intrinsic value of these
wonderful creations is quite fully appreciated, and any one who can
secure a fifteenth-century work for less than $300 a square yard is
fortunate. And yet during the whole of the eighteenth century tapestries
were ruthlessly cut up to form floor rugs, used for packing bales of
merchandise, or, as at Angers, slashed into strips to protect the roots
of orange-trees from the cold, or nailed on the stalls of the bishop’s
stable so that the episcopal nags might not scar their precious flanks.
This last outrage, by the way, was perpetrated on the unique series of
the Apocalypse, a sequence of panels eighteen feet high with a total
length of four hundred and seventy-two feet, woven in Paris about 1370
from designs by Jean de Bruges, court painter to the Emperor Charles V,
for the use of the Duke of Anjou in his private chapel, and at a cost
(in the money of to-day) of upward of $60,000. They had been given to
the cathedral by King René in 1480, but by the beginning of the
nineteenth century they were quite out of fashion and therefore
useless; so until a rag merchant sufficiently accommodating could be
found they were used as noted above and finally sold (the opportunity at
last offering) in 1843 for $60, the purchaser ultimately returning them
to the cathedral when some glimmerings of intelligence came back to the
ecclesiastical authorities.
When this sort of thing was the rule in France and England and Germany
for more than a century during which civilisation and culture were
progressing with such notable rapidity, it is a miracle that anything
has come down to us, particularly when you remember what the Calvinists
and Sansculottes and Reformers did to monasteries and châteaux and
entire cities in the two preceding centuries; but a good deal did so
come down, including even the poor remains of the very much domesticated
tapestries of Angers. There is only one other fourteenth-century set
woven at Arras that can positively be identified, and that is the series
now (or recently) in the cathedral of Tournai, though we know from wills
and inventories that at the beginning of the fifteenth century they
existed in hundreds. The remains of this early work are fine and strong
in design, powerful as decoration, clear but faded in colour. With the
fifteenth century there came an amazing advance, similar to the sudden
appearance of the Van Eycks in painting at exactly the same moment. The
“Burgundian Sacraments”--or what remains--now in the Metropolitan Museum
as the gift of the late J. P. Morgan, is one of the finest examples in
existence of this earliest of the great periods. Admirable as it is, it
fails in perfection of beauty before the wonderful works of art that
immediately followed. With the beginning of the fifteenth century
tapestry weaving came suddenly to a level of supreme excellence that
places it for a hundred years on a level with the other arts, however
august they may be. Very few of these masterpieces remain in Belgium;
you must search for them in Paris, in London, in Madrid, in New York, in
the museums of all the world, but the search is rewarded by the
discovery of an art that, however brief its day, was one of the great
arts of the world.
Each art has its own medium of expression and to this medium it
absolutely adheres in its periods of greatness, adapting itself to its
limitations, working within them, and even making them tributary to its
excellence. Limitations are, after all, the greatest gift of God to man
instead of being, as the last century feigned, something that deplorably
existed only to be transcended; without them man would revert to the
condition of the jellyfish or the primal ooze of the depths of the sea;
with them he has an opportunity to demonstrate his divine elements
through a development that is both in spite of and because of the firm
lines they draw that cannot be overpassed. One of the great things in
art is its revelation of the possibility of spiritual achievement by and
through the narrowest physical limitations. When, on the other hand,
architecture tries to assimilate the peculiar methods of bridge
building; when painting intrudes into the province of sculpture,
literature, photography, or even music; when music becomes mathematical
or takes to itself the habits of the circus performer; when sculpture
deliquesces into a sloppy kind of black-and-white illustration; when
stained glass and tapestry become pictorial; when, in fact, all the arts
forsake their own provinces and deny their own limitations, as they have
tended to do during the last century, splashing over, the one into the
other, they cease to be arts at all and become unprofitable
aberrations.
Only three great arts have come into existence during the last two
thousand years--music, stained glass, and tapestry--and each developed
its own exact and individual mode of expression. Music was as old as
architecture, painting, sculpture, poetry, and the drama, but under the
influences of Christianity it gradually transformed itself into what was
almost a new art and one that has remained the only vital art through
all the unfriendly influences of modern civilisation. Stained glass was
an absolutely new art, taking its rise in the twelfth century,
culminating in the thirteenth, decaying through the two following
centuries, and entirely disappearing in the eighteenth century. It is an
art of Christianity, of Frank genius, and of the Île de France. Tapestry
is also a new art, beginning about 1350, culminating a century later,
dying almost in a day (as a great art), about 1520. It also is
Christian, but, unlike glass, it is primarily secular, and it is
explicitly and almost exclusively Flemish, the great contribution of a
distinguished race to the imperishable art of the world.
It was the glorification of a national industry--weaving--and is
significant as showing how, under wholesome impulses and in a
stimulating environment, a simple industry may be transfigured and made
into art. Its medium was peculiarly delicate, subtle, and beautiful,
threads of spun wool, silk and gold and silver woven by hand into a
fixed warp of strung threads. These filaments of silk (as in the finest
work) had peculiar qualities of beauty, combining both lustrousness and
depth, while the colours being entirely vegetable dyes, with none of the
harsh horrors of the analine by-products of coal-tar, were infinitely
varied and of unique richness and soft splendour. Fortunately, this new
artistic mode was developed sufficiently prior to the breakdown of art
which was signalised by the career of a man in himself a very great
artist--Raphael--to permit a full century of life, and at the hands of a
people who had a peculiar appreciation of decoration and of decorative
methods. The result was startling, for a new art was born and one of the
most distinguished quality. As colour decoration the tapestries of
Flanders come near being the very finest things in the world, although
we must judge them from a few examples only, the admittedly greatest
having long since fallen victims to greed, fanaticism, and the stolid
ignorance of the eighteenth century. Fortunately for the general
public, the remaining masterpieces are now widely scattered and may be
studied with comparative ease, the Metropolitan Museum in New York being
particularly rich and having, either in its own name or by loan, the
Burgundian Sacraments, the matchless “Mazarin” Christ in Glory, the
almost equally beautiful “Coronation of the Virgin,” as well as scores
of others, many of them of supreme excellence.
It is as impossible to describe a tapestry in words as it is to do the
same by a Chartres window. In point of composition the tapestries of the
fifteenth century are matched only by the greatest pictures; even when
they are crowded with figures there is the most masterly spacing of
masses, the most consummate balance of form. When one realises that in
every case the design is the work of the members of the guild and not of
the more famous painters of the time, the wonder grows over the
apparently universal feeling for the highest type of artistic
expression. Compared with the best of the Flemish tapestries, the
boasted and “much admired” composition of Raphael in the “Disputa” and
the “School of Athens,” of Michael Angelo in the Sistine Chapel, is
mathematical and academic. In line and line composition there is the
same exquisite sensitiveness that is almost Greek or Japanese in its
subtlety and rhythm, while the colour, though in many cases faded, is as
pure and musical in its several tones as it is resonant and splendid in
combination. And through all this consummate mastery and this supreme
artistic sense run a peculiar charm and distinction that are found only
in such unique products as the pictures of Jan van Eyck, Fra Angelico,
the Lorenzetti, Carpaccio, and their kind. Through them you enter into a
dim and golden fairyland full of wistful music and haunting memories,
where fair ladies, courteous knights, delicate-winged angels, aureoled
saints in blazing dalmatics pass like dreams through far countries,
“where it is always afternoon” and where the land is always lovely, the
skies serene, the flowers and birds and little beasts friendly and well
beloved. Chretien de Troyes and the troubadours and the Court of Love,
King Arthur and Roland and King René, Guenivere, and the gracious queens
and gentle ladies of all the Middle Ages live again, or rather prolong
their lives through a passive immortality into which whoever understands
is welcome to enter and sit him down in peace.
XIV
ART IN THE RHINELAND
From Charlemagne’s ambitious centre at Aix-la-Chapelle the influence of
a new culture went west rather than east, and it is not until the
eleventh century that we can look for art of any sort along the valley
of the Rhine and in the lands of old Lorraine. There was little enough
elsewhere, but when, at the finger-touch of a new monasticism calling a
new northern blood to action, civilisation began again in Normandy and
then in the Île de France, its echo in the Rhineland was far and long
delayed, and never more than an echo at most. There were bad kings until
the second Crusade and the coming of the Cistercians in 1174, and little
culture; but from then on there was a distinct spiritual revival, a new
impulse in religion and in life, and as a result the output of art of
all kinds was greatly increased. The three elements entering into the
new architecture were: the revived tradition of the old work of the
Carolings, much of which still existed in ruinous form, the new ideas
brought home from Syria by the crusaders, and the infiltration of
Lombard fashions from north Italy, with the Cistercian monks always
exerting their austere and reforming influence toward simplicity.
Many of the earliest examples of this new work--at least the earliest
now existing--are across the Rhine, in Thuringia and Saxony, and are
outside our survey. Gernrode, Essen, Hildesheim, are all beyond our
territory, but Cologne is this side the river and contains some of the
most organic and best of the late tenth and early eleventh century work.
Sta. Maria in Capitolio and St. Martin are both of that very peculiar
type of plan that has an apse and apsidal transepts of equal size and
semicircular in plan. The central tower is supported on four piers made
up of groups of four, as at San Marco in Venice, and the apse and
transepts are surrounded by ambulatories, the main walls being carried
on columns, set rather close together and carrying round arches. It is
an interesting and ingenious scheme, with great possibilities of
development, though it has almost never been used elsewhere; probably it
is of Syrian origin, the idea being brought home by early crusaders,
though it may be Byzantine, in which case also it was probably derived
from Antioch, where the crusaders found so much of value to them in the
development of the later art of Europe. St. Martin’s has also a very
beautiful tower with a high broach spire and admirably designed corner
turrets. The composition of the church from the east, with its curving
apsidal lines, its delicate little colonnades of Lombard form under the
eaves, and the graceful yet powerful towers, is noble and dignified, and
the whole building is far more organic and logically articulated than
the bigger work of a century later farther up the Rhine.
The Church of the Apostles is nearer this later type and has its
unfortunate agglomeration of ill-placed towers, but St. Gereon is _sui
generis_; it can hardly be said to have any plan at all, for it is made
up of a simple little aisleless church of three bays with a round apse
and two small transept-like towers, joined on to an irregular decagon of
a nave, somewhat elliptical in plan, with large niches in each of the
eight lateral sides and a square porch or narthex at the west end. This
anomalous “nave” is early thirteenth century it is true, while the
eastern church is one hundred and fifty years older, but the Gothic
work is on foundations undoubtedly Roman and takes the place of a
structure of somewhat similar plan built by the Empress Helena. The
sequence is curious; there was first a circular or elliptical Roman
building, on the foundations of which the Empress Helena built her
church, the crypt of which still remains, then the easterly choir was
built by Archbishop Hanno late in the eleventh century, and finally the
original main church was torn down and rebuilt on Gothic lines about
1225.
In nearly all the Romanesque churches of Cologne an attempt has been
made to reproduce the original polychromatic decoration which once
covered all portions of the masonry, but the results are not eminently
satisfactory, for mechanical diaper and stencilling cannot take the
place of the old work which was done freely and without exactness of
line and spacing, while the colours and the medium used were quite
different from what is employed to-day. There is no doubt that once
every Gothic interior, now grey and sombre, or garish in its clean
whitewash and mathematical jointing of painted lines, was entirely
covered with the richest possible surface decoration in colours and
gold, and the result must have been a gorgeousness and a gaiety of
which we know nothing and that would probably shock our sensitive taste
to the point of hysteria. One would like to see some great church with
full colour decoration, but as matters now stand, with oil paint,
stencils, coal-tar colours, and all that, the experiment could hardly be
made with any degree of safety.
In Cologne also are many early, middle, and late Gothic churches; that
of the Minorites, St. Severins, St. Panteleon, St. Andreas, St.
Cunibert; in fact, Cologne is especially rich in churches of many styles
and most of them remarkably good, but they are apt to be overlooked by
the tourist who can see, and cares to see, only the overgrown grandeur
of the cathedral. Farther up the Rhine we find a long succession of
great churches which are characteristically German and well show the
best the Teutonic genius was capable of under the highest impulse; Bonn,
Coblentz, Mayence, Worms, and Spires are all huge structures and quite
in a class by themselves. They are not beautiful by any stretch of
courtesy; big they are and massive, with curious combinations of
multiplied apses and transepts and towers, but they are without organic
quality of any kind, their composition is diffuse and casual, their
[Illustration: WORMS]