(apart from the bas reliefs) as less perfect in this respect, in spite of expert opinion, than that of Paris, Laon, and Reims; less brilliantly composed, more heavy and realistic, while the figures themselves are certainly not as slender and graceful, or so varied in pose. Moissac and Vezelay are hieratic abstractions, Chartres pure architecture, Soissons a breathing of divine life into ancient forms, but Laon and Paris and Reims are pure and perfect sculpture against which no criticism of any kind can be brought. Never has actual life been better expressed through the necessarily transforming modes of art than here; in these exquisite and rhythmical compositions the barbarous folly of the naturalistic and realistic schools of modern times is made cruelly apparent, and the base products of the average nineteenth-century practitioners (barring a few exceptions such as St. Gaudens at his best, as in the Rock Creek figure) become in comparison as absurd as do the shameless vulgarities of Bernini and his unhappy ilk.
There still remain at Laon many broken and headless fragments, and I do 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
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.
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
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.
In the bourdons of France and the carillons of the Low Countries the art 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.
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