believe will be, then the horror of human loss, the bitterness of Ypres
and Louvain and Reims will receive its compensation, for out of death
will come life and no man will have died in vain, no work of art will
have perished without a return in kind. To lose Reims and regain after
long years the impulse and the power to build after the same fashion
would be more than ample compensation. We have tried for many centuries
and have failed; no man has built anything approaching it for seven
hundred years, nor has any one matched the statue of Our Lady at Paris,
or the “Worship of the Lamb” at Ghent, or the glass of Chartres, or the
tapestries of Arras, or the metal work of Dinant and Tournai. There was
something lacking, some once indwelling spirit had been taken away, and
though we tried to reassure ourselves by our boasting in far-away lines
of accomplishment--parliamentary government, manhood suffrage, clever
mechanical devices, deductive science, mastery of earth forces hitherto
unknown, industrialism, high finance, favourable balance of trade,
evolutionary philosophy, public-school systems, vocational training, or
what-not; though we even made the effort to exalt the Pantheon and Fifth
Avenue to rivalry with Amiens, the Sieges Allee into an emulation of the
statues of Reims, the Salon and Luxembourg and Royal Academy above the
primitives of Flanders--it was all unconvincing to ourselves and in the
end we came to say that, after all, it did not matter anyway, art was,
“in the ultimate analysis,” only a dispensable amenity of life, which
could go on very well without it. Then came the revelation of 1914 and
we saw our foolishness, realising at last that, “amenity” or no, art did
indicate the existence in a society of something without which it was
bound to decay to the point of extinction; and as the monuments we had
despised because they exceeded our own powers of achievement were one by
one taken from us, we saw architecture and painting and sculpture and
all the other arts in a new light and offered our reverence, too late,
to what we had lost for ever.
Whatever the issue of the war, the world can never be the same, but a
very different place; and amongst the differences will be a new
realisation of the nature and function of art. All the follies of the
last fifty years--didacticism, Bavarian illustration, realism, “new
art,” impressionism, “cubism,” boulevardesque and neo-Gothic and revived
Roman architecture--all the petty and insincere and premeditated
fashions must go, and in their place come a new sincerity, a new sense
of self-consecration.
The real things of life are coming into view through the revealing fires
of the battle-field, and the new experiences of men confronted at last
by everlasting truths. With the destruction of each work of old art
comes a new duty that demands all that is best and strongest and most
sincere in every man--the duty of making good the loss, in kind; the
duty of building a new civilisation and a new culture on the old
foundations now revealed through the burning away of the useless
cumbrances of futile superstructures; the duty of making a Cathedral of
Reims possible again, not through self-conscious and competent
premeditation but because at last men have come to their senses,
regained their old standard of comparative values, and so can no more
fail to build in the spirit of Reims and in reverence for the eternal
truths it enshrined and set forth than could those who built it seven
centuries ago in the sweat of their brows, the joy of their hearts, and
the high devotion of their souls.