along the pavement and cried three times in a loud voice: “Le Roi est mort!” Raising it again he cried again: “Vive don Charles, par la grace Dieu, Archiduc d’Autrice, Prince des Espagnes!” and without a pause a herald continued, raising his great banner from the ground, “de Bourbon, de Lostric, et de Brabant”; and a second, “Comte de Flandres, d’Arethorys, de Bourgone, Palatin d’Haynault, de Hollande, de Zelande, de Namur, et de Zutphen!” and a third continued the long list, and a fourth, the last ending: “Marquis du Sainct Empire, Seigneur de Frise, de Salins, et de Malines!”

So the future Lord of the World entered into his inheritance at the age of seven, and as always, without a murmur or a protest, Margaret left her oratory, turned from her slowly rising shrine, and went into Flanders to be guardian for the future Emperor, to train him for his task, and meantime to administer for him one of the most turbulent, if rich and beautiful, dominions of his patrimony.

Bruges and Ghent were too uncertain in their temper as the result of an uncontrolled guild system and its inevitable democracy, inorganic and chaotic. Moreover, Margaret herself had been educated in Malines by her grandmother, Margaret of York, widow of Charles the Bold, so to Malines she came with four of her little nephews and nieces, and was received with great rejoicing, taking up her residence in a very splendid palace, the Hôtel de Savoy, portions of which still remain and are used as a Palais de Justice.

Malines in 1507 was a very different city from that of to-day; as we could have seen it a year ago with its narrow and winding streets, its fragments of old ruins, its little gabled houses, we loved it for its quaintness and its modest picturesqueness which formed a kind of foil to the vast tower of St. Rombaut, lifting like a truncated obelisk above a low plain. At the beginning of the sixteenth century it was, like the other great cities of Flanders and Brabant, a place of palaces and gardens, a courtly and splendid city, rich, busy, magnificent. In the night of the “Spanish Fury” in Antwerp it is of record that amongst other proud buildings, five hundred palaces of marble or chiselled stone were destroyed, and this gives some idea of the nature of the other cities that rivalled and exceeded Antwerp in magnificence. Malines, when the Duchess Margaret took up her abode there, was no village of dark and dirty little streets, but a city of palaces, far finer than London, or even Paris, and a fitting residence for a princely court and for the future Emperor.

The new Regent made it more magnificent than ever; it was a time when five centuries of mediæval culture were blooming in beauty and great learning, and the beneficent qualities of the early, or Christian Renaissance, were uniting with all that had come from an epoch whose term had already arrived. In Italy the Renaissance had rotted into a poison, but the virus had penetrated only a little way into the veins of Europe. The Papacy was rotten to the core, the Medici were cloaking their pestilential tyranny and their glorification of material gain in the fine vesture of learning and æsthetics. Machiavelli was dethroning Christian ethics and substituting efficiency in its place, but the Christian Renaissance was still fighting its losing battle through Cardinal Cusa, Sir Thomas More, and Erasmus. Dürer, Holbein, Hans Sachs were giving a new glory to at least two of the arts in Germany, and as yet Luther was no more than a threat, Wolsey a rising star whose balefulness was not apparent, Calvin unheard of, Henry VIII a splendid prince shortly to be proclaimed “Defender of the Faith” he was so soon to cast down into the mire.

In the domains of Margaret of Malines the afterglow of Catholic culture was still golden and gracious, and while she defended the interests and the welfare of the principality she held in trust with a vigour and a persistency that threw into the shade the lesser abilities of her male predecessors, she made of her city a new centre of learning and righteousness. Here came Louis Vives and Adrian, Archbishop of Utrecht, later the Pope of a year who, had he lived, might have reformed the Church and made the Protestant Reformation innocuous; Erasmus of Rotterdam, that engaging character who could have matched and worsted Luther, and done his work better than he, had he possessed the sincerity and the consecration of a martyr; “Cornelius Agrippa,” Massé, Everard, Molinet, Renacle de Florienne, and other lesser lights. Mabuse, Van Orley, Coxcie came as painters to produce the altar-pieces and portraits desired by the Regent and her court; composers and musicians sought her patronage, for she had a passionate love for music of all sorts and wrote many poems and songs which they set after the fashion of the time. Her interest in architecture was intense, and she made Rombaut Keldermans her court architect, charging him amongst other things with the completion of the vast tower of the church of his name-saint, begun by his direct ancestor Jan in 1452. This was a famous family of master masons, Jan, with his brother André, Mathieu, Antoine, and later Antoine II, Rombaut, and Laurent. The designs for the completion of St. Rombaut’s tower and also for a great Hôtel de Ville are still preserved, and in vision one can see them carried out by and by in a new and regenerated Malines under a new and regenerated civilisation. As a matter of fact, the stone for St. Rombaut’s spire was already cut and on the ground when the fortunes of Flanders changed, and in 1582 it was all seized by the Prince of Orange, and carried away to build a new town at Willemstadt. During Margaret’s regency, the great Cathedral of Ste. Gudule at Brussels was built, the good part of the Ghent Hôtel de Ville, the belfry of Bruges, the spire of Antwerp, as well as innumerable other great works that perished at the hands of the Spaniards, the Calvinists, and the French devils of the Revolution.

As a collector of books, pictures, works of art of all kinds she was indefatigable. In her own house, which was a true palace of art, were Van Eycks, Memlings, Van der Weydens, Dierick Bouts, most of which succumbed long ago to ignorance and vandalism. There were priceless tapestries without end, sequences of six or more: The Life of Queen Esther, the Story of the Three Kings, of the Earthly Paradise, of Arcadia; La Cité des Dames, the History of the Cid, of Alexander, of St. Helena. An inventory of the palace art still exists and reads like a story out of the Arabian Nights; we here find catalogued wonderful carpets and rugs; armour inlaid with gold and silver; caskets, clocks, vases of precious metals, carved and engraved gems, precious marbles, jasper, ivory, alabaster, chalcedony; gold-and-silver plate set with precious stones. As for her private library it was a treasure-house and a student’s sanctuary. There were one hundred and fifty vellum volumes illumined with colours and gold and bound in velvet, gilded leather, metal studded with gems; there were three editions of Aristotle, four of Livy, with the works of Ovid, Seneca, Cæsar. There was a large collection of theological and moral works, decretals and digests in Latin and French, the works of St. Augustine, Lives of Saints, Bibles, missals, breviaries, books of hours, Gospels, Testaments. Froissart was there, with all the old Arthurian romances, as well as the “Golden Legend,” “Le Livre de Tresor,” “le Mirroir du Monde,” “le Mirroir des Dames”; books on hunting, falconry, chess, fashions. All these were illumined manuscripts, but printing was already an industry, and what Margaret had in this line we can only guess, as this particular catalogue is gone.

It was in this wonderful palace, set in the midst of many other palaces in a rich and courtly city, where the streets were always full of the pageantry of the iridescent mingling of an ending mediævalism and an unfolding Renaissance, that Margaret lived for a quarter of a century, training the little princes and princesses, administering the very complicated affairs of her state, defending it against aggression, composing its internal differences, giving aid to the sick, the suffering, and the disquieted in mind and soul, conversing with the philosophers, poets, and theologians she had drawn from many sources, and all the time keeping architects, painters, sculptors, craftsmen busy in adding to the wealth of beauty already superabundant in the Netherlands.

Flanders and Brabant have always been fortunate when women ruled in the place of men and never more so than under Margaret of Malines. She guarded with the most jealous care every just interest of her people, beating at the outset Henry VII of England in a diplomatic contest, but later refusing to marry the thrifty monarch (“They have tried to marry me three times, but my luck is bad.”), bringing Charles of Guelders to rights, aiding in the defeat of France by her father and young Prince Henry of England at the Battle of the Spurs, but on the whole maintaining an unwonted peace.

Not for a thousand years had there been a time more momentous than the years of Margaret’s regency; more complicated in its conflicting currents, more amazing in its possibilities and in the ideas that were brought forth. The Renaissance was in the saddle in Italy, riding the Church and society to their fall; in Germany Protestantism was claiming and fighting for the succession, while France was following Italy in its progressive corruption, England still standing firm behind her Channel cliffs that seemed so well to defend her against spiritual as well as physical invasion. All things were changing, a new era was establishing itself, but Maximilian was not content to see the old depart without a struggle, nor was his son Charles when he succeeded him. In the voluminous correspondence that has been preserved between the Emperor and his Regent of the Netherlands there is an astounding letter which reveals the almost insane lengths to which the imagination could go in these overstimulated times; in it Maximilian confesses that he has a great scheme for the redemption of Europe and it is this: he, himself, is to be made a kind of coadjutor to the Pope (Julius II, then ill), whereupon he will surrender the Empire to his son Charles, and then when Julius shall die, be made Pope in his place, thus uniting all spiritual and temporal power in the persons of the Hapsburg father and son!

He wouldn’t have made a bad Pope, this shrewd, crusading, idealistic Maximilian, certainly he would have been a better than the Alexander VI, Julius II, Leo X type then in vogue, and the vision of Maximilian in the chair of Peter, with Charles V the temporal lord of the world, is stimulating and provocative of speculation as to what might have happened. However, it all came to nothing; Julius recovered, and was succeeded in 1513 by Leo X, who reigned furiously for eight years and then died, to be succeeded, not by Wolsey, who was exerting every diplomatic and pecuniary agency to gain the prize, not by a Cardinal of the Medici or the Colonna, but by an obscure recluse, Adrian, sometime Archbishop of Utrecht, a gentle professor at Louvain whom Maximilian had discovered and sent to Malines to help educate the future Charles V, and who had since been immured in Spain as Cardinal of Tortosa.

It was one of those kaleidoscopic phenomena that gave an exceeding vivacity to the age. Into the midst of a line of Popes distinguished for their highly developed and quite artificial taste, their rapacity and simony, their persistent nepotism and their serene profligacy, came suddenly a shy, ascetic student, pious, austere, and simple. Into the Vatican of an Alexander VI and Leo X he came with his old Flemish housekeeper, to the horror of the curia, and, we may believe, the sympathetic amusement of the angels. For a moment it seemed as though the ideal of Maximilian was to be attained by more orthodox methods. Adrian VI set himself to the task of reforming not alone the curia but the whole Church; to regenerate Catholicism on Catholic lines, defeat Protestantism in its own field, restore peace to the world. Destiny, however, is not to be escaped; the world had busily made its bed and in it it was destined to lie. One by one each young and righteous prince had been taken away by death before he could set his lance in rest against the common enemy, and now the anomalous Pope was denied his self-appointed task. In less than two years he was dead, Clement VII reigned in his stead, and the world, having taken a long breath of relief, went on very much as before, to its inescapable destiny.

When he was fifteen years old Charles formally took over the government of the Netherlands and four years later he was elected to the Empire, becoming Charles V, but Margaret still remained at the head of the Council of Regency of the Netherlands. In the wars between the Emperor and Francis I, the Netherlands escaped as the fighting was elsewhere, and their peace and prosperity remained practically unbroken. In the end Margaret crowned her career by initiating and completing the “Ladies’ Peace,” which resulted in the treaty of Cambrai. Francis I had already been completely beaten by the Emperor, renouncing his claims over Flanders and Artois and promising to keep the peace, but he promptly broke all his engagements and had to be beaten again, very thoroughly this time, with further disastrous results to the remains of Christian culture, for Clement VII had joined with Francis against the Empire, and Rome was stormed and sacked by the lawless troops of the Constable of Bourbon, unfortunately killed in the assault, amidst appalling scenes of murder, arson, and pillage, when untold wealth of ancient art was utterly destroyed. The whole war was a scandal on the name of decency and more than Margaret and the other decent women could bear, so she proposed to the Emperor that she should undertake to make peace, and actually succeeded in doing so, with the aid of Louise of Savoy, mother of King Francis, Marguerite of France, Queen of Navarre, and Marie of Luxembourg, Countess of Vendôme.

Margaret’s work was apparently finished. All her brother’s children had been guarded, educated, and married, Eleanore to the King of Portugal, Isabelle to the King of Denmark, Marie to the King of Hungary, while Ferdinand who had been educated in Spain had married Anne of Hungary and received from his brother, the Emperor, the throne of Austria, to which were added Bohemia and Hungary after the great beating back of the Turks from Vienna in 1529, since King Louis, husband of Marie, had lost his life in the terrible disaster of the battle of Mohacs in 1526, when for the moment the Moslems had been victorious and had threatened all Europe from the field where 20,000 had laid down their lives in a vain attempt to stem the heathen tide.

As for her imperial nephew Charles, he was now the unquestioned head of the Holy Roman Empire and leader of Christendom; on February 24, 1530, he was solemnly crowned by the Pope, in Bologna, with the Iron Crown of Lombardy and the crown of Charlemagne. Peace of sorts, had settled on Europe, and it was a peace of Margaret’s own making. The Lutheran heresy was sullen and threatening, but thus far there was no actual violence. There was a pause in the ominous progress of events, and tired, apprehensive Margaret determined to resign her charge to the Emperor, who was coming from his crowning to visit her in Malines, and retire to one of the convents she herself had founded. She had earned the peace she desired, and a greater peace, which was accorded her by the grace of God, for on November 30, 1530, she died from an overdose of opium given her by her physicians in preparation for an operation that had become necessary, owing to an injury to a foot which had not been properly treated.

She died as she had lived, thoughtful for others, generous, meek in spirit, sincerely and devotedly a Catholic. All the Netherlands mourned for her as a righteous and able governor and, after the imposing funeral services in Bruges, she was carried through the snow, along the road she had followed on her wedding journey, thirty years before, to the church at Brou, where she was placed by the side of the husband, who had been hers for so few years, and for love of whom she had built the most beautiful shrine in Europe.

The church at Brou is the last of Gothic art, and Margaret of Austria, by the love of her people, Margaret of Malines, was the last of the great and righteous and pious women of the age that had made this art its own.

With the passing of Margaret, Malines ceased to be the capital of the Netherlands, but for compensation in some sort it was made an archbishopric; and though its great palaces have passed with its glory, the hoarded art and the

marvellous library of the Regent gone to feed the fires of sacrilege or enrich the galleries of the uttermost parts of the earth, though its wealth is no more and throngs of finely clad burghers and merchants no longer enrich its winding streets with the pageant of a wedded Mediævalism and Renaissance, out of this ecclesiastical aggrandisement has come in these later days a new honour to Malines; for when war and pillage again swept it with the flames of hell, it was the Cardinal of Malines, Archbishop Mercier, who dared to stand forth and defy the spoiler, while shaming his too-cautious ecclesiastical superior, weighing, vacillating, counting costs and profits in the midst of his buzzing curia.

The Heart of Europe, pierced by the sword and shedding the life-blood that had coursed for a thousand years through the arteries of the world, knew that the hour of the eternal question had come, that the clean division between right and wrong had been cut by the sword, that once more the Voice had gone forth: “He that is not with Me is against Me,” and that there was no longer place on earth for the emasculate, the neuter, in the catchword parlance of the time, the neutral. Peter shuddered and hesitated on the throne of the Fisherman; great nations outside the widening ring of fire counted the cost and dreamed day-dreams of arbitration and pacification, but once again Malines spoke, as in the past, with the tongue of the past—and of the future. Mercier of Malines spoke for God and his own people, and for the righteousness that is eternal, as four centuries ago spoke Margaret of Malines.

XI

THE FIFTEENTH-CENTURY PAINTERS

Painting is the use of colour and the composition of lines and forms for sheer joy in this particular kind of beauty; for the honouring of the most honourable things; for the stimulating of high and fine human emotion; for the symbolical (and therefore sacramental) expression of spiritual adventures and experiences that so far transcend the limitations of the material that they are not susceptible of intellectual manifestation. Painting is primarily and in its highest estate an ally and an aid of architecture, as are also sculpture and (in a less intimate degree) music, poetry, and the drama, all working together for the building up, under the inspiration of religion, of a great stimulus and a great expression. As a thing by itself it fails of half its power, but, like all the arts, it can be used in this way, though indifferently and only within certain limitations. To say, therefore, that painting as an art began with Giotto or Cimabue or Duccio, is absurd; there was great painting long before them, and some of it reached heights even they could not attain. Of course most of it is gone, vanishing with the destroyed or remodelled buildings, where it worked intimately with architecture, scraped off by “restorers,” whitewashed by iconoclasts, done over by easel painters, so it is hard to judge it justly, but a few fragments remain in France and Italy that give some idea of its original power and beauty.

Similarly, illumination is not a handicraft or an industrial art; it was frequently great art of a very distinguished quality, and so was the painting of carving and sculpture, an art not disdained by the Van Eycks themselves. From the earliest beginnings of the Middle Ages there was great painting, and the Duccios and Massaccios and Memlings only added to it certain different, and not always admirable, qualities, while devising novel methods that made possible novel modes of expression.

And here enters another misconception that has done much harm: the Van Eycks did not invent oil painting, if by the phrase is meant the oil painting of the nineteenth century. This, the use of mechanically ground pigments already mixed with an oil medium, is a trick hardly more than a century old, and is a time-saving device for the obtaining (which it does not succeed in doing), at the least expenditure of time and thought, of the effects originally produced by the old method that held from the time of Hubert Van Eyck down to that of Sir Joshua Reynolds. This old method consisted in dividing the work of a painter into three stages—drawing, modelling, colouring—each of which had to be done laboriously and to perfection. After the picture had been drawn completely and in every detail it was modelled in a thick underpainting of impasto with its varied reliefs and textures, and then the colour was applied; successive coats of transparent pigment, one imposed on the other, each being allowed to dry before the next was put on. The result was, amongst other things, that depth, resonance, and transparency of colour that mark the great painting of the past and are absolutely unobtainable by the use of the opaque and muddy pigments squeezed out of collapsible tubes. In this earlier method there was no short road to success; a painter could not sweep in his broad masses of paint with a few masterly strokes, masking his lack of proficiency in drawing by daring and theatrical brush work, and making amends for his opaque and unbeautiful colour by a stunning exhibition of a delusive chiaro-oscuro. Everything was built up laboriously and conscientiously; it was consummate craftsmanship, with much in common with stained glass, orfèverie, and even with architecture. No wonder a painter’s training frequently began with a goldsmith; it demanded the most exquisite and conscientious craft and there was no substitute that a public trained in eye and quick in appreciation could be induced to accept. Temperament was no excuse for incapacity; daring brush work made no amends for lack of competence; for once painting was on a par with the other arts, and a painter was as much a master of craft, and as rigidly held to its highest standards, as a musician or a master builder.

Of course there always had been fresco-painting, and here the method was quite different, for the colour had to be applied swiftly and once for all to the wet plaster. Here the technique was direct and instantaneous, quite unlike that of panel painting, and though it was no more adaptable to the vagaries of temperamental expression, it opened up new possibilities of which painters were always trying to take advantage. Giotto himself, being the greatest master of this particular mode, was always working along these lines, and later Velasquez combined them with the possibilities inherent in the development of underpainting as a thing final in itself, without the laborious and studied glazing of successive coats of pure colour.

The art of painting was never a rigid and immobile system; every painter was striving for new methods and new developments, and frequently finding them; in the end, as the old artistic sense died away, virtuosity took its place, and this found its opportunity through the elimination of all the old elements of craftsmanship and a development of the qualities of breadth and swiftness inherent in fresco-painting, together with the dash and bravura that offered themselves through the clever manipulation of the thick and solid and suave material of the old underpainting. In a word, the tendency was toward combining drawing, modelling, and colour in one process, obtaining final effects in one operation; and while this meant a possible slouching of drawing, a substitution of surprise and bravado for consistent modelling, a loss of all depth and resonance of colour, and the putting of a premium on such quite unimportant (and sometimes vicious) matters as dashing brush work, it must be admitted it did permit “temperament” to express itself with a swiftness and mobility impossible before, granting always that this is desirable.

Now in the working of this revolution the Van Eycks had no part whatever. They did not invent “oil painting” or anything like it. They were the greatest painter-craftsmen ever known, and they and the generations that followed them in Flanders and Italy held faithfully to the old threefold mode of operation until Tintoretto, Velasquez, and Rubens began to merge the three in one and to lay the foundations for the present lamentable subterfuges of the Salon and the Royal Academy. What they did do was this: until Hubert’s time every painter had been searching for some medium which would not mitigate the perfect transparency of their hand-ground colours and would dry quickly. All kinds of viscous things had been employed—white of egg, fig juice, and other less seemly media—but none was wholly satisfactory. Oil was the natural thing, but oil was an unconscionable time in drying. Hubert Van Eyck found some oil medium (or varnish) that dried quickly and this at once became the universal medium. It was a great discovery and a great boon, but it had nothing whatever to do with “oil painting,” which did not actually come into existence until the dark days of the late eighteenth or early nineteenth century, therefore the skirts of the Van Eycks are clear and we can absolve them of all responsibility.

There never was a school of such consummate craftsmanship as this of Flanders. The Van Eycks, Memling, Van der Weyden were the most perfectly trained, the most comprehensively competent, and the most conscientiously laborious artists ever known; also they understood drawing, composition, and lighting as no others ever did, while their sense of beauty of colour, either in itself or in subtle and splendid combinations, was unique. They were not portents, sudden meteors shooting across a dark sky, they simply continued and developed a long and glorious tradition. Long before them the monasteries had been producing great art of every kind—frescos, illuminations, stained glass, embroidery, painted sculpture—and it was all art of the greatest. When Hubert painted the “Adoration of the Lamb,” he merely gathered together all these arts and manifested his enormous and astounding synthesis in concentrated form, and better than any one had ever done before. All the intricate delicacy of jewel work, all the vivacity of clean-cut sculpture, all the suavity of silken needlework, all the flaming splendour of stained glass are brought together here in one astonishing combination, and to this era-making synthesis is added the living light

and the human appeal of the poignant beauty of the world, and the transcendent magic of the supernatural, sacramentally and visibly set forth.

This, which very well may be the greatest picture in the world (it does not matter), was ordered from Hubert Van Eyck when he was nearly fifty years old, he having been born about 1366 in the province of Limbourg and coming of a long line of painters. It was ordered by Jodocus Vydts, a worthy burgher of Ghent, as an altar-piece for a chapel he had built and endowed (according to the pious and admirable practice of those good Catholic times) in the Cathedral of St. Bavon. For ten years he worked at his masterpiece, and then death overtook him in the year 1426, when his work was only partly finished, when his brother, Jan, took it up and brought it to a triumphant conclusion in 1432. It is a great triptych of twenty-two painted panels and its preservation has been nothing short of miraculous. Philip II tried to carry it off in 1558, the Protestants to destroy it in 1566, and the Calvinists to give it away to Queen Elizabeth in 1578. It was nearly destroyed by fire in 1641, dismembered and packed away in 1781, carried off (parts of it) to Paris in 1794. In 1816 most of the wings were sold to a shrewd dealer for $20,000 and by him to the Berlin Museum for $80,000; finally the Adam and Eve panels were taken to the Brussels Museum, and a set of copies attached to the mutilated remainder in the Cathedral of St. Bavon.

The work is one vast, comprehensive, and sacramental manifestation of the central Catholic sacrament of the mass, searching and final in its symbolism, consummate in its mastery of all the elements that enter into the make-up of a great work of pictorial and decorative art, unapproached and unapproachable in its splendour of living and radiant colour. In its philosophical grasp, its technical perfection, its unearthly beauty, its communication of the very essence of a fundamental mystery, and in its evocative power it staggers the imagination and takes its place amongst the few great works of man, in any category, which are so far beyond what seems possible of achievement that they rank as definitely superhuman. So far as its spiritual content is concerned, it can no more be estimated than can the mass itself, or paraphrased in words than Chartres Cathedral or a Brahms symphony or the Venus of Melos. If the Van Eycks are responsible for this, they rank with St. Thomas Aquinas and Shakespeare and Leonardo da Vinci as the greatest creative forces amongst men. Of course they were not, nor the others, named. Somehow each was used by something greater than he: the concentrated consciousness of his fellows, the underlying and informing time-spirit of an era—or why not God Himself?—as a channel through which and by which absolute truth was communicated to man who, of his own motion, can do much, but not so much as this.

For the consummate artistry, for the perfect sense of decoration and composition, the keen and exquisite line, the perception and recording of diversified character, the poignant love of all natural beauty and corresponding rejection of all ugliness, for the technique which is that of a master in the fashioning of precious metals and the cutting of priceless gems, for the colour that is now resonant with all the deep splendour of great music, now thin and aerial with all the delicacy of far horizons and misty forests at some pale dawn in a land of dreams—for all these things we may remember Hubert Van Eyck and his brother Jan, for this is their work, but beyond this we go elsewhere, at least as far as the mass itself, for the inspiration that has made this Flemish triptych one of the great, revealing creations of the world.

The infinite variety of conception and rendition simply transcend experience. The three great, dominating figures—God the Father, Our Lady, and St. John Baptist—are of a Byzantine majesty transfused by a passionate humanism that is almost unique in any form. From them you pass to the central panel of the “Worship of the Lamb That Was Slain,” which is as tender and personal and human as the best of Fra Angelico, and, like his clear visions, irradiated by a kind of paradisal glory that sets it in a heaven of its own; from this you go to the panels of singing angels and splendid attendant knights and marching pilgrims that are pages out of the daily record of life in proud and beautiful Bruges, and finally you come to the Adam and Eve who are sheer, unadulterated realism unapproachable in its minute veracity. Surely, these two men were a type of the universal genius. They balked at nothing and found nothing too difficult of accomplishment, simply because they were perfectly trained and broadly accomplished craftsmen who knew that theirs was an exacting and a jealous craft for which “temperament”—artistic or otherwise—was not, and could not be made, a substitute.

It is with a feeling almost of relief that we come down nearer the earth and confront the masterpieces of Jan Van Eyck. With Hubert we are taken into a kind of seventh heaven of mystical revelation; with his brother and those that follow we come back to what is more human, more in scale with experience. Great art still, as great as one can find elsewhere, and with all the mastery of methods, all the confident certainty, all the triumphant colour and the exquisite design and the faultless craftsmanship of the painted “Beatific Vision” itself. There once were many other pictures by Hubert Van Eyck, but all now are gone, destroyed by the savage hands of Calvinists and Revolutionaries, and the “Adoration of the Lamb” remains alone as an isolated miracle.

Jan was of another sort; equally great as a craftsman, he was a fine gentleman, a courtier, the friend of princes, and a diplomat. In those barbarous days before the culmination of the era of enlightenment, art was not a cult, isolated from life, nor were artists a sort of creature apart, made so by the possession of a then undiscovered and quite pathological affliction called the “artistic temperament.” They were good citizens and an integral part of a like-minded community, serving their kind after many fashions, amongst them being the honourable and admirable craft of art. Of this craft Jan was past master; he painted statues and illuminated missals and fashioned stained glass; he created great altar-pieces and produced living portraits of old ecclesiastics and worthy burghers and their wives; for all I know he was an architect as well—at all events he might have been, as is proved by the wonderful drawing of St. Barbara with its background of a great Gothic tower under construction. A thoroughly typical example of his painting is the St. Donatian altar-piece, a votive picture ordered by the excellent old Canon Van der Paele, who is shown in adoration before Our Lady and the Holy Child and attended by St. Donatian himself and St. George. Mr. Berenson could find no finer example than this of that “space composition” on which he rightly lays such stress; Holbein could paint no more exact and characteristic portraits; all the goldsmiths of Byzantium could not rival the jewel work of armour and orphreys, brocades and embroideries, and sculptures and inlays, while the colour, both in its individual parts and its composition, comes nearer the living light of the

windows of Chartres than any other painted colour in the world. One would like to hang this particular picture (for a time only, then replacing it over an altar where alone it belongs) in the midst of a “Rubens Gallery,” or a room in the Luxembourg or the Royal Academy, and call all the world to see.

There is little enough left of Jan’s work, and for the same humiliating reason that holds in the case of his brother. Of Hans Memling, another wonder child, there is fortunately much. When one catalogues the list of this earliest and greatest work in Flanders and recalls the wrecking with axe and torch of cathedrals, abbeys, convents, hospitals, châteaux by Calvinists and sans-culottes; the pyres of smouldering pictures, the ditches filled up with pulverised glass, shattered statues, illuminated missals and graduales and books of hours; the sacred vessels and gorgeous vestments, such as Hubert and Jan, Hans and Gerard showed in their pictures, despoiled of their splendid jewels (transferred for a consideration to Hebrew brokers) and melted down or used for chair covers, as the case may be; and when in this lurid light one weighs the thick hides and the muddled brains and the shrivelled souls of the wreckers against even the mere artistic value of their spoils, one marvels still more at the wonders of scientific evolution and the promises of evolutionary philosophy.

Memling is the third of the great trio of Flemings, and though there were innumerable others whose art was near perfection, these three stand for ever by themselves apart. There is more of human tenderness in his work and a certain spiritualisation informing everything that gives a different quality; the portraiture and differentiation of character are possibly beyond what any other ever attained, but his composition as it gains in complexity and facile ease loses something of that broad and powerful directness, that supreme quality of rhythm and serenity that marked the Van Eycks. The colour also is less invariably sonorous, less pure and splendid and luminous both in its single tones and its harmonies, while now and then the universal Flemish passion for sumptuous stuffs and gorgeous patterns and glittering accessories betrays him into a loss of unity and balance. Still, any criticism is impudent; his St. Ursula series, his St. John Baptist, his St. Bertin and Floreins and Moreel altar-pieces are amongst the greatest pictures that

have been painted, while his portraits are pure life expressed through the terms of pure beauty.

It would be impossible to review all the work of all the great Flemings. Driven by the same impulse, each gave his own personality to all he did, and the sequence is as astonishing as it is priceless. Gerard, David, Roger Van der Weyden, Quentin Metsys, Dierick Bouts, Lucas Cranach, as well as numberless unknown whose work survives their contemporary fame, all reached their several heights of attainment on their own individual lines, and their pictures still remain in Bruges and Ghent, in Brussels and Antwerp (or remain to-day, in August, 1915) to bear witness to the full and vigorous life, the wholesome and happy religious devotion, the astonishing physical beauty of Flemish environment of those last years of the fifteenth century in Europe when the fair day of mediævalism came to its golden close.

Between this whole-souled art of the Middle Ages and that of the Renaissance came an intervening group that served to effect the necessary modulation from one key to quite another. Mabeuse, Van Orley, the younger Porbus, and the Breughels are the chief representatives and through them one sees the old and masculine qualities dying away, the new and alien elements from the south entering in to take possession. When this transition was effected it was in Holland that it found its opportunity, and as the Dutch provinces are outside our consideration we need not consider here the products of a school that ranged in quality from Rubens to Rembrandt, from Frans Hals to Vermeer of Delft. The succession was broken, the torch (with whatever flame that remained) was passed from the Flemings to the Dutch, and only Vandyck appeared in the line of true Flemish descent to demonstrate the possibilities that still remained in spite of Rubens (and at the hands of his own pupil) for the development of a restrained and self-respecting and beautiful art, even though the moving spirit had been dissolved and the great tradition become no more than a memory. The great period of mediæval painting (for it was this in spirit and in truth) had begun and ended in this Cor Cordium, this Flemish concentration of the Heart of Europe. It had begun with the monkish illuminations of the fourteenth century, culminated in the great century from 1395, when Hubert Van Eyck began to paint, to 1494, when Memling died, and

slowly disappeared under the influence of the Renaissance, the Reformation, and the Spanish oppression; by the year 1600 it had ceased to exist, and the Renaissance, which had established itself in all secular and ecclesiastical matters, now took over art also for the purpose of developing its own exact expression. The five centuries of Catholic civilisation had come to an end.

XII

GOTHIC SCULPTURE

LONG before the days of the Pisani in Italy, who were erroneously held to have been the restorers of the lost art of sculpture, France had initiated and developed three great schools, one of which at least reached greater heights even than the later schools of Italy, even than Donatello and Michael Angelo if you test this art by the established principles of the greatest sculpture the world has ever known—that of Greece. These three were: The school of the south with Toulouse as a centre, the school of Burgundy, or Vezelay, and the school of the Île de France. The first is of the late eleventh century, the second of the twelfth, the third of the latter part of this century and the first half of the thirteenth. The earlier work south of the Loire is part Roman, part Byzantine, and it occasionally reaches, as at Moissac, a level of extraordinary decorative value, with, in its bas reliefs, a feeling for rhythmical line and space composition that are quite astounding. In Burgundy, combined with great rudeness and an almost savage directness, there is far greater humanism, with much action and an unusual amount of character differentiation; much of the best work of this school is to be found at Autun and Vezelay. With the middle years of the twelfth century the sculpture of the Île de France seems suddenly to burst forth at St. Denis and Chartres like some miraculous happening. It was not this, but the result of many years of cumulative and progressive effort; but all that went before has perished, while fortunately some examples at St. Denis and a supreme collection at Chartres remain to give the impression of an unwonted and unheralded event. This sculpture of Chartres is more superbly architectural, more intimately a part of the whole artistic scheme than any other on record; all is formal, conventionalised; the figures are erect, rigid, immensely elongated; the multiplied fine lines and delicate zigzags of the drapery, the simple figure-modelling, the immobile, dispassionate faces, all show a most curious self-abnegation on the part of the sculptor and a profound conviction that both he and his art are only part of a greater whole, for they are purely architectural and indeed nothing but the architectural spirit expressing itself through an allied artistic mode. They are startlingly akin to archaic Greek work and, as Professor Moore has said of the sculpture from Delos: “One of these ancient Greek statues might, if wrought in French limestone and slightly modified in outline, stand in the west portal of Chartres without apparent lack of keeping.” Yet there is manifestly no possible point of historical contact between the Hellenic and the French work, and the kinship simply shows the persistence of certain ways of looking at and feeling about things, and the inevitable if unconscious return of one generation to the ways of another, that form a commentary, both cruel and humorous, on the evolutionary philosophy current during the last century, and quite unjustifiably claiming descent from the innocent speculations of Darwin and Herbert Spencer.

Out of this sculpture of Chartres grew the very wonderful art of the thirteenth century, which gives a sorely diminished glory to the Cathedral of Paris and gave, a year ago, a still greater glory to that immortal group of churches now slowly crumbling under gun-fire. Very notable examples of the transition are at Senlis, but they have been shockingly mutilated, and only one of the two wonderful carved lintels still gives much idea of its original beauty. The panel of the “Resurrection of the Virgin,” has all the architectural form and the decorative sense of Chartres, but it has as well an added human quality that makes it enduringly vital and appealing. The same can be said of the surrounding statues and reliefs that are of the same period, and altogether the almost unique work at Senlis strikes a singularly happy balance, as sculptured architecture, between the rigid formalism of Chartres and Vezelay and the exquisite humanism and the almost too-surpassing art of Paris, Amiens, and Reims. But for the Revolution Senlis would not have stood so alone for sculptural art of the transition. Laon once possessed far more, and of an even higher type, but all the column figures of the west doors, and indeed practically all the free-standing statues, were then ruthlessly destroyed and those that have taken their places are merely modern assumptions. The tympana of the doors are original, though mutilated: the Coronation of the Virgin, scenes from her life, the Last Judgment; while in the archivolts and around the windows are remains of singularly beautiful effigies of the wise and foolish virgins, the seven liberal arts, episodes from the lives of the saints. More or less of the original polychromatic decoration remains, and the statues themselves, even in their battered state, are marvels of art. Every trace of archaism and of uncertainty is gone, the sculptor works with a definiteness and a certainty of touch that are amazing, while his sense of the eternally sculpturesque is infallible. Every face—where a face remains—is brilliantly characterised; the poses are graceful, unaffected, constantly varied; the gestures are convincing, the stone quality never lost, while there is nothing outside Hellas—except Amiens and Reims—so faultless in its composition of drapery. From the very first this was one of the strong points in French sculpture; each artist strove for, and attained, not only distinction, but naturalism expressed through and by an almost classic formalism; the line composition, from Vezelay to Reims, is a succession of ever-waxing marvels. At Laon are even now mutilated figures that are as perfect in their composition of lines and masses as anything in Athens, and the same was true of Reims. Personally I have always thought of the figure work at Amiens