detail crude and uninteresting. Nowhere is there a step forward in the development of organism, and as they increase in size they show only a multiplication of rather infelicitous parts. Underneath is an idea that was susceptible of development into something fine and national, but it never had either the time or the spirit to work itself out and so remains a heavy and rather illiterate labouring after something too dimly seen to be really stimulating in the sense in which the ideal in Normandy and France was stimulating. Actually there was more of promise in the work of the eleventh century, as we see it at Hildesheim and Cologne, but this also was left undeveloped and never worked out its inherent possibilities.

The architectural development of Germany began too late; it was always a full century behind France and Italy, and when the Rhenish people were hammering away at their clumsy and uninspired giants of masonry that never seemed to become anything else and never produced any elements of novelty or progress, either structurally or æsthetically, Normandy already had struck out those masterpieces of crescent vitality, Jumièges and the abbeys of Caen, while France was well along the highroad of her consummate Gothic, through St. Denis, Noyon, Laon, and Paris.

This backwardness in the acceptance of civilisation has always worked against the attainment of the highest levels of culture by that portion of the Germanic nation north of the Danube and east of the Rhine, while it has given it a certain advantage in the achievement of material ends, since the ethical and religious considerations, that in a measure held elsewhere, were naturally lacking. No part of this wild land of savage and heathen tribes ever felt the touch of Roman civilisation, such as it was, and it was the last part of central Europe to be Christianised. The Bavarians, Burgundians, and Franks all accepted Christianity at the end of the fifth century, but the tribes between the Rhine and the Weser were heathens for another three hundred years. The Wendish lands (where Berlin now is) did not come into Christian Europe until the early eleventh century, at about the time, let us say, of Duke Richard of Normandy and the founding of the great abbeys and schools of Bec, Fécamp, and Jumièges; Pomerania (where the grenadiers come from) was converted after a fashion a hundred years later still, in the days of the highest civilisation in Europe, but Prussia was the last of all, and when Christianity was preached in its arid plains and amongst its stubbornly heathen peoples Reims cathedral was rising into its sublime majesty, marking the high attainments of almost eight centuries of cumulative Christian culture.

Even in the Rhineland, however, there was something lacking to that culture that always has issue in great architectural art; many things were started but none was ever finished. The school of Cologne gave place to the Rhenish fashion and this was suddenly abandoned for Gothic after it had been raised to its highest point in France and was at the very moment of decline. Neither Cologne nor Strasbourg is of the same quality of perfection as Bourges or Amiens or Reims; indeed, they both fall immeasurably short, and though later, across the Rhine, in Freibourg, Erfurt, even as far afield as Vienna, Teutonic blood was to begin a new coursing through veins already hardening, again there was to be no culmination and the Renaissance was accepted, ready-made, as it came from France and Italy.

Cologne is a magnificent essay in premeditated art, and it has certain qualities of almost over-powering grandeur that are wholly its own; the west front with its vast towers is a masterpiece of consistent design, but it is so knowing and academic that it misses the inspiration accorded to more modest and God-fearing master builders, while the interior is wire-drawn and metallic and quite without the infinite grace and subtlety of the best French or even English work. Of the sense of scale it has little or nothing, its detail is of a cast-iron quality, and altogether it seems like a very successful nineteenth-century essay in academic design.

Of course, much of what we see is modern; the choir is fairly early for Gothic in Germany, having been begun in 1248 and finished just seventy-five years later; the transepts followed at once, and the lower portion of the nave, but interest died out and some time during the fifteenth century work completely stopped. During the Renaissance nothing was done except to mess up the forlorn interior with pseudo-classic ineptitudes, and finally the Revolutionists came over to turn the whole thing into a storage place for hay. In 1823 royalty conceived the scheme of restoring the ruin and completing the entire design in accordance with certain original plans which had been preserved. It is said, possibly with truth,

that the first architect, Master Gerard, sold his soul to the devil as the price for these same plans, and if so he would perhaps have done better had he followed the practice of the master masons of a century earlier in France, who preferred to deal with other spiritual powers and not on the basis of trade. However this may be, the work went on at the expense of all Germany, and was finally completed in 1880, at a cost of some five millions of dollars.

As it stands, then, it is largely the work of restoration and of nineteenth-century talent; hence, if in the fortunes of war it should be subjected to the hail of shell and shrapnel from French and British batteries, so working out the hard old Israelitish law of an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, and suffering even as Reims has suffered, the world would look on with far different sentiments since, apart from its windows (some of them) and pictures and tombs, nothing would be lost that could not be replaced and after a better fashion; for after all when you say the most you can for the nineteenth century it will generally be admitted that, even in Germany, it was not a stimulating era so far as creative or even archæological Gothic art is concerned.

Strasbourg is much more interesting and poetic, with great refinement and originality in design, though its taste is far from impeccable, its structural sense gravely deficient. The tendency is wholly toward lace-like and fantastic design, but it has little resemblance to the late French flamboyant with its curving and interlacing lines; instead, it is more suggestive of the English perpendicular, with its scaffolding of vertical lines applied to, but not a part of, the basic fabric. It has no consistency of plan, for the eastern end, with its semicircular apse and portions of its transepts, is of a singularly noble type of twelfth-century Romanesque, while the nave is mid-thirteenth century and the tower and upper portion of the west front are a hundred years later. Confused as it is, there is an extraordinary charm about it all, for every part is personal and distinguished, full of novel and poetic ideas and all kinds of unaffected touches of genius. The wonderful colour of the exterior and the singularly fine glass of the interior have much to do with its general effect of a delicate mediæval loveliness that makes amends for its architectural shortcomings.

Of the castle architecture of the Rhine there is

little left from the mediæval period from which one can gain an adequate idea of its excellence, which was probably great. As in Luxembourg, everything has been shattered into wildly picturesque ruins which are outside the category of architecture, and such Renaissance work as Heidelberg is quite as far without the same category, though for another reason; here even picturesqueness of site and dilapidation cannot make amends for ignorance, assurance, and excruciating taste. As a matter of fact, the best architecture of the Rhine is the domestic building of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the half timber, many-gabled structures that give the little Rhine towns a charm that is unexcelled and testify to the native sense of beauty in the common people, when they were left alone and not confused by the self-satisfied and ill-bred interference of the connoisseur.

If Christian culture began too late along the Rhine to find a great expression in architecture, the same is not true of painting, which followed after and achieved much that the older art could not accomplish. The Teutonic tribes of the Rhine had always excelled in certain virtues of frugality, temperance, domestic morality, and a righteous revolt showed itself here against the corruption of the Church and society in the fourteenth century that followed the first downward trend of mediævalism. Early in the century men and women began to draw away from a world with which they had little sympathy, striving for personal righteousness, the sense of an inner relation to God, the attainment through mystical means of escape from the devastating wars, the pestilence and famine, the favouritism and cupidity and licentiousness of the Church. The centre of these mystical brotherhoods was Cologne, particularly at the end of the fourteenth and the beginning of the fifteenth century, and it is not a mere coincidence that here at Cologne also, and at the same time, a new school of painting should come into existence, exactly as had happened a few years earlier in Siena and Florence. There had been great wall painting for several centuries, but it had always been an essential part of architecture, hieratic, formal, monumental, impersonal; now the new spiritual impulse was to work out an original and very personal form of expression on the basis of these earlier works, but at smaller scale and with a minute craftsmanship borrowed partly from the goldsmiths’ work and the enamels for which Cologne already was famous; partly from the exquisite illumination of the vellum volumes of the time. It was somewhere about 1350 that Master Wilhelm, who holds the same place in the north that was attained by Cimabue in the south, was born. His pictures are rare but there is one of great value in Cologne cathedral, the “St. Clara Triptych,” and it shows all the elements now at work toward the development of the new art, the fine and masterly line and composition, with a strong rhythmic sense taken over from the fully developed wall painting of the preceding century, the delicate craftsmanship of the goldsmith, the illuminator, or the worker in enamels, and the extraordinary personal quality, the direct human appeal, that was furnished by the mystical seekers after union with God through a direct relationship outside the formalised institutions and practices of the Church. You get the quality best of all perhaps from the “Madonna of the Bean-flower” in the Cologne Museum, another picture by Master Wilhelm, and as lovely and personal as one could ask. There are also the “Paradise pictures,” equally human and even more mystical; visions of delicate and gracious gardens, where youths and ladies and children and angels all mingle in the midst of flowers and singing around the Queen of Heaven herself; efforts, one might think, to create a paradise for the imagination, where one could escape from the too numerous horrors of a none too accommodating world. The more specifically devotional pictures are very numerous and generally anonymous; painters then were craftsmen, members of guilds devoted to the upbuilding of the highest standards of workmanship, and caring little for their own personal fame. Picture exhibitions and competitions for prizes and medals were also unknown, which made a difference. In all these works is the same sweet humanism, the invariable personal appeal, and it is easy to understand that a new art such as this must have been a wonderful boon to a weary and disappointed generation.

The Teuton had at last found a field for the expression of that æsthetic sense that was one of the inalienable possessions of man down to the nineteenth century, and he made the very best of it, as he was to make the best of the still newer art of music a few centuries later. The world wanted this new art, and from Cologne it spread rapidly to the west into Flanders and Brabant, and south to Franconia and Suabia. To the

school of Cologne Hubert van Eyck owed much, he could hardly have been what he was but for Master Wilhelm and his contemporaries, but he added something of his own Flanders, and more of himself, and the art he initiated rose immeasurably above its source.

In sculpture also the Teuton found a facile and congenial form of expression, but this art developed rather to the north and east of the Rhine. Hildesheim was, of course, the centre, for it was here that Bishop Bernward gathered or educated his amazing craftsmen in bronze. Where such an artist came from, as he who made the cathedral doors and the bronze column, heaven alone knows, for it was early in the eleventh century that these came into existence. They began a school, however, that continued in Saxony for many centuries and had its influence over all Germany. The early thirteenth-century bronze font, also in the cathedral, is one of those masterpieces that defy comparison. The great school of sculpture in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries was that which grew up between the Elbe and the Hartz Mountains, not only in Hildesheim but Halberstadt, Bamberg, Freiberg, Magdebourg, Naumbourg, the masters of Magdebourg ranking with those of Amiens and Reims. Undoubtedly there is French influence here, perhaps through the training, under the masters of France, of the craftsmen who later went back to their native lands to practise their art. In Strasbourg the French influence is even more clearly seen but here it is rather in the line of the more southerly schools. It is at Strasbourg that we find that singular and ingenious masterpiece, the “Pillar of the Angels,” slender grouped shafts with intermediate niches, one above the other, each containing an exquisite statue of an apostle, an angel, or, at the top, our Lord at the Day of Judgment. This is one of those sudden and unprecedented happenings in mediæval art that mark the vast vitality, imagination, and personal initiative of the time. It has no progenitors, no successors, it is a sport of personal genius, and the masterpiece of one Ervin de Steinbach, who appears to have been the architect for the later portions of the cathedral.

Apart from Strasbourg, however, sculpture seems never to have been a favoured art in the Rhineland, and the painting of Cologne remains its chief claim to honourable record, though stained glass reached considerable heights, as is seen both at Cologne and Strasbourg, and on definitely local lines. By the fifteenth century the Flemish schools of art of all kinds had succeeded by their sheer achievement in establishing their dominant influence along the Rhine, and with the Renaissance the lingering elements of an instinctive practice of beauty quite died away.

XV

THE FOREST OF ARDEN

WHERE the immemorial Forest of the Ardennes closes in on the Moselle that winds beautifully to the Rhine, there is a little land that can give us small aid in the way of art, for the hand of man and of an implacable fatality has been heavy, and little remains, but it is a place of infinite charm and of significance as well, while in the last year its ancient name has come into the light again, even as it was some centuries ago. It has borne many names, acknowledged many sovereignties; Roman Belgica, part of the kingdom of the Ripuarian Franks, Austrasia, Lorraine, a province of the Germanic Holy Roman Empire, Burgundy, the Netherlands (Spanish and Austrian), France again, both of the republican and imperial mode, then back in an amorphous Germany, and now, crushed into a tiny but concentrated state, an independent but sovereign Grand Duchy of Luxembourg, imprisoned for the moment in dark fastnesses of oppression wherefrom no word issues forth, but destined under God to a triumphant release and to a restoration that may mean a return to earlier and wider frontiers.

Luxembourg means that portion of the Heart of Europe lying between the Meuse and the Moselle, and one line drawn from Limbourg to Trèves, another from Verdun to Metz. It is now a tithe of this, but who can say what may be in the future? All its great northern portion has for long been incorporated in the eternally honourable kingdom of Belgium, and there it will remain, but there is always the old Archbishopric of Trèves with its Moselle valley, and there are the lands along the Saar and the new (and old) frontiers of France. At present, as a result of three treaties in which it played the passive part of victim, it is a fourth the size it once had under its first Duke Wenceslas; the first section was lost in 1659, the second at the Congress of Vienna in 1815, the third and largest at London in 1859, but, as a Japanese guide remarked at the monastery of Horiuji, “The quality is not dependent on the numerality of quantity,” and as nothing was lost but land the indomitable spirit of the people remained intact and merely concentrated itself still more intensely within its shrunken borders.

Luxembourg lies along that line where first the Teuton blended with the primitive Gaul, or Celt, and where a second mingling later took place between the result of the first—the Salian Frank—and the same old Teutonic stock. It is the mating-place of races and therefore the fighting-place as well, and always will remain so, as they and we now realise only too clearly. They were far enough apart, these Celts and Germans, to guarantee good progeny. The Gaul was huge of stature, blonde, long-haired, fond of fine clothes and golden chains. He was pastoral and agricultural, aristocratic in his social and political systems, incontinent, good-natured, quick-tempered, superstitious, Druidical. The Teuton was red-haired, shaven except for a fierce top-knot, grim in his clothing, contemptuous of agriculture and of everything else except fighting; as a youth he wore an iron collar which could not be removed until he had killed his man. Politically he was ultra-democratic; socially, monogamous and chaste; theologically, monotheistic. From the fusion of these two elements came the many tribes of Gallia Belgica, and in good time most of the peoples of the Heart of Europe, of Flanders, Brabant, Luxembourg, Lorraine, the hither Rhineland, Champagne, Burgundy, Picardy, Artois. Trèves, head city of the Treveri, was the natural capital and so it became under the Cæsars when they had made their wilderness and called it peace.

It did not remain a wilderness long; presently came the pacific Cæsars of a later day and the whole land became first the “kitchen-garden of Rome” and then the Newport of the Empire. Fine roads cut the forests in every direction, land was cleared, agriculture intensified, so that shortly the whole region was a garden dotted with private parks and estates. Trèves was made a great city, with palaces, temples, baths, amphitheatres, the summer capital of Europe and second in Gaul only to Lyons. A city of manifold pleasures and as many beauties; rich, sumptuous, sensuous, where from the shores of Tiber and Bosporus enervated and exhausted devotees of the joy of living came to cool themselves and restore their vitality in the fresh air and the green river valleys of this curiously picturesque retreat. All along the Moselle rose gorgeous villas with their rooms of sheeted marble and mosaic and gilded cedar and splendid fabrics, their terraced gardens and cool groves and wide-spreading parks. A golden day-dream focussed along the windings of a little river and destined, the sleepers dreamed, to endure for ever.

And then the greater dream of empire began to turn into nightmare. The Gallic legions revolted against a weakening hand in Rome, and Cæsars of a day and a thousand votes fought back and forth over the land, and burned and murdered and died until peace came again, and restoration, with real emperors refreshing themselves in their imperial city of Trèves and their dim forests on the hilly walls of the winding Moselle. War again, and ruin, this time of a nature to last for generations and to leave the marble villas to the slow but kindly burial of trees and vines and moss. Out of the terrible east the Huns came like a flood with the deadly Attila at their head, blind terror before them, death and silence behind. Just to the west, at Châlons, they were beaten back and fled eastward again (men thought for ever), and what was left became part of the new Frankish kingdom. Of the makers of this nation and the stock from which sprang Merovings, Carolings, and most of

the other royal houses of Europe, the Reverend T. H. Passmore writes engagingly thus:

Luxembourg had long been Christian after a fashion; the first Bishop of Trèves had been appointed by St. Peter himself, while the Emperor Constantine, who had lived much in the city, fostered the new religion in every way. Later, at the time of the era-making Pepin of Heristal, St. Willibrord came from England on his great mission to the heathen of Friesland, and while converting them, and much of Norway and Denmark to boot, established here at Echternach a great monastery that was his spiritual power-house, from which he drew the energy that sent him on his endless journeys and cruises, by land and sea, for the winning of souls to Christ. He did his work well, none better, and wherever he went Christianity went with him, and a new civilisation, a new culture, that remained for many centuries after he had been called to his high reward, buried in his dear abbey at Echternach and enrolled in the Kalendar of Saints.

It was a vast monastery and a magnificent one, but it is a monastery no longer; for centuries it continued to pour out from its inexhaustible Benedictine store, missionaries, prophets, priests, leaders and protectors of the people; fostering education, agriculture, the arts; establishing order, nursing a piety that found its reward in this world through the consciousness of an ever-widening civilisation, and a greater reward in heaven. Then the power and wealth grew too great for the equanimity of princes, and it was robbed by one after another, oppressed by lay abbots in commendam, its Benedictine monks driven out and secular canons intruded, and finally pillaged by recreant bishops of the new dispensation of humanism and enlightenment and by that concentration and apotheosis of the same, Le Roi Soleil, and so handed over to the emissaries of the deluge that followed him, the attractive exemplars of revolution, who swept the place clean of books and pictures and statues and all the hoarded art of a thousand years—yes, even of the poor ashes of the good saint himself—to make place a half century later for the ashes and slag of blast-furnaces set up within the ancient walls, and for the housing of soldiers and their mounts.

Still, the work could not wholly be undone, Luxembourg was a Christian state and so it remained, through fair days and foul, the fairest being perhaps those when, united to Flanders and Brabant under the Emperor Maximilian, it fell into the charge of that great lady and unofficial saint, Margaret “of Malines,” whose story I have tried to tell elsewhere.

With the wars of religion this peace and prosperity came to an end and for two hundred years all the duchy was devastated by all the armies of Europe, from those of Francis I to the obscene hordes of the French Republic. It had never revolted against the Catholic religion nor against its varied rulers, and its reward was a slow and savage extermination. Cities were burned and their names forgotten; great abbeys and churches like those of Orval and Clairefontaine were utterly extinguished; tall castles that crowned every height of land were blown up with gunpowder; fields and farms became waste land; and through starvation, massacre, and exile the population was reduced to a tithe of its former numbers, and at last, by the republic that came to bring liberty, taxed into an all-engulfing penury.

The era of enlightenment had not been wholly happy in its action on Luxembourg, but it was free at last, and, in 1867, independent, as it remained until that memorable day in August, 1914, the day of broken treaties, when the little Grand Duchess backed her motor-car across the bridge, closing it with a pathetic barrier in the vain protest of honour against a force that did not recognise the meaning of the word or the existence of the thing it signified.

Luxembourg to-day is not a place where one may go to revel in the artistic memorials of a great past; the great past is there, and its memory is still green, but even more than Brabant or Champagne has it borne the grievous harrowing of endless wars and recrudescent barbarisms, not the least destructive of these visitations being the nineteenth century in its satisfying completeness, which saw many an abbey and old haunted castle dismantled, reduced to road-metal, and carted away for the value inherent in its raw material, or turned to inconceivably base uses from all of which some pecuniary profit might be obtained. Once it was as rich in enormous castles as any country in the world that happily has a mediæval past. Bourscheid on its great hill, lordly and dominating still and a wilderness of vast crags of masonry, in spite of all that man could do; Brandenbourg, rigid and riven in its ring of mountains; Esch, split into towering and sundered fragments on the raw cliffs overhanging the Sûre; Hollenfel, Clervaux, spared by war to fall victim to the contemptuous neglect of owners who preferred pseudo-Gothic villas with all modern conveniences; Beaufort, with its noble proportions and its beauty of a later and more gracious mediævalism; Vianden, most fascinating of all with its dizzy gables, and its chapel still intact in spite of the wide ruin of its surroundings. And every castle ruin is haunted to heart’s desire, crowded with attested ghosts whose consistent habits and dependable visitations are a peculiar joy in a world that until a twelvemonth ago could not believe in the impossible and promptly discounted the improbable. Any peasant in Luxembourg knew better, and not only the ruins but the whole duchy is honeycombed by the midnight prowlings of an entire population of delectable phantoms, while the stories and legends of their commerce in the past with lords and ladies and knights and monks and bishops form a literature in themselves.

In spite of its losses, the land was one of infinite and unfamiliar charm; a land of wide and high plateaus cut by many winding river courses, each a possible journey of varying delights. Our and Sûre and Black Erenz; Alzette and Clerf and White Erenz, with many others of minor flow, cut the duchy in every direction, all at last finding the goal of their waters in the magical Moselle, as it flows past old Roman Trèves on its devious way to the Rhine. And it was a kind of little earthly paradise as well, for the fifty years of its well-earned peace. A land of farms and gardens and pastures, of contented little villages and river-bordered hamlets, and a kindly and devoted people. Coal and iron have left little mark, though the efficient Baedeker (to whom shall we go for guidance on our journeys in the long days to come?), in one of his concise and unpremeditately dramatic paragraphs does say: “18½ M. Weilerbach, for the iron-foundry of Weilerbach and the former summer-house of the Abbots of Echternach, magnificently situated amidst wood”—an antithesis of startling illumination. Protestantism passed it by, except for purposes of plunder, and it has always been unanimously and enthusiastically Catholic, with a record for public and private morality that puts any and every other part of Europe to sudden shame.

What is to be its future when the great storm that is cleaning the soiled world of its dust and ashes of false ideals and burnt-out superstitions sweeps away into the hollows of a night that is only in its darkness the promise of a new day? Who shall say? but any one can weave his vision, and to some it already appears that, with the meting out of inadequate earthly reward for irreparable bodily suffering, will come the lands to the east as far as the Kyll, with to the south Saarbourg, and the far side of the Moselle to the Hochwald, including ancient Trèves, no longer a forgotten relic of an old imperialism but a greater and better and more potent Hague, a central city of Europe and of peace, where, under the united guarantees of all the states, is permanently sitting a great council of ambassadors for the devising of measures of common interest, the adjustment of international differences, the preservation of a righteous peace between nations, and with authority to suppress any violation of treaties or any wilful aggression of one state against another, by calling into the field against the offender all the military and naval forces of all the other powers signatory to an European Treaty of Permanent Peace and represented in the council of ambassadors.

Or perhaps Trèves, with surrounding territory within a five-mile radius, might be erected into an international city of council, surrounded by Luxembourg, Belgium, which may be extended to the Moselle and eastward half-way to the Rhine, France, the new frontiers of which would be the old eastern borders of Alsace and Lorraine, and a restored Palatinate limited to the north and east by the Rhine and the Moselle. Central in this circle of guarding states, with all Europe for added defence against any possible recrudescence of local egoism in any place, Trèves might again become a great city of refuge and of Christian righteousness, with noble buildings on its circle of surrounding hills, a centre of religion and education and mercy, guardian of the peace of Europe, a living and glorious symbol of the world enlightenment that came through the clean purging of a war greater than all former wars because the need was greater.

XVI

EX TENEBRIS LUX

I HAVE tried to give some idea of the contributions of the lands and the peoples in the western theatre of the war in certain of the fields of art; to note the development of culture, the direction of human happenings, the bearing of great men and women who were leaders in Europe, through an abbreviation of historical records, to justify the giving to the region between the Seine and the Rhine, the Alps and the sea, the name of “Heart of Europe.” Such a survey of such a territory must, of necessity, be superficial and incomplete, for too many and wonderful things happened there to be recorded in a volume of limited extent. Chiefly, I have spoken of what could be, and is being, destroyed, but there is much else that is not subject to annihilation at the hands of furious men, the contributions to music, to letters, to the slow-growing spiritual deposit in society through philosophy, theology, and religion.

In music alone the Heart of Europe has done more, and at different times, than any similar area. While the troubadours of the twelfth century came into existence in the sunny lands of Languedoc, it was in Aquitaine, Champagne, and Flanders that the trouvères developed the norm of the troubadours “into something rich and strange,” and under the Countess Marie of Champagne created that beautiful and potent fiction of “courteous love,” which had issue in so many exquisite phases of human character and made possible a great school of romantic poets. They, under the leadership of Chretien de Troyes, made for the Countess Marie, out of the rude elements that had come from England and Wales through Brittany, the great poems and romances of King Arthur and his knights. The greatest of the trouvères was Adam de la Hâle and he was born in Arras in the year 1240. Long before him, however, Gottfried of Strasbourg, a contemporary of Chretien de Troyes, had made of the tale of Lancelot and Guinevere one of the deathless poems of the world, as Wolfram von Essenbach of Bavaria was to create its great counterpart from the story of Parsifal.

Very slowly in the meantime music had been working out its wonderful growth from the classical models of SS. Ambrose and Gregory intermingled with the instinctive folk-music of the south, and in the fourteenth century the leadership fell full into the hands of Flanders, where monks and laymen set themselves to the congenial task of building up a new and richer music on polyphonic lines. Brother Hairouet, who was at work about 1420; Binchois, born near Mons and died in 1460; Dufay, born in Hainault and trained in the cathedral at Cambrai, were all, together with the English Dunstable, potent leaders in the great work, laying well the foundations on which a few centuries later was to be erected the vast and magnificent superstructure of Bach and his successors. In the second period, that of the close of the fifteenth century, Antwerp became the centre, Jean de Okeghem, of Termonde, the leader in the intellectualising of music and the establishing it on methodical lines, while in the third period, of the end of the fifteenth and the beginning of the following century, Josquin des Pres led the course back toward a purer beauty, though through modes that were increasingly clever in their elaborate virtuosity. After this the lead passed across the Rhine, with memorable results a century later, when the great cycle, from Bach to Brahms, rounded itself into a perfect ring.

The era-making movements in religion all began outside our territorial limits at Monte Cassino, Cluny, Clairveaux, but it was through St. Benedict of Aniane that Charlemagne at Aix-la-Chapelle effected his regeneration of the Church and his initiation of a new Christian education and culture; St. Bruno, of Cologne, sometime head of the cathedral school of Reims, was the founder of the Order of Carthusians; St. Chrodegang, Archbishop of Metz, brought into existence the Canons Regular of St. Augustine, who introduced into cathedral chapters the order and discipline of monasticism; St. Norbert, of Xanten, created the Order of Prémontré, one of the most beneficent and beautiful of the religious brotherhoods of the Middle Ages, while the “Imitation of Christ,” the most purely spiritual and devotional work of the time, was the product of Thomas à Kempis, an obscure monk of the Netherlands. In the development of Christian mysticism the Rhine valley stands pre-eminent, though the greatest of all those of this school of combined thought and vision was Hugh of St. Victor, of the monastery of Augustinian Canons in Paris, on the banks of the Seine, where now is the Jardin des Plantes, The ancient tradition is that he was born near Ypres, though recent researches seem to indicate that he may have been a son of the Count of Blankenburg in Saxony. In any case, he was the great expositor of sacramental religion and philosophy as Charlemagne’s Radbertus Paschasus was the great defender of the true doctrine of Transubstantiation. If, indeed, Hugh of St. Victor was a product of Flanders, then the credit goes there of having given birth to one of the noblest and most penetrating minds the world has known, one that ranks with that greatest pure intellect of all time, St. Thomas Aquinas.

Whether one accepts the mysticism of the Rhine or not does not matter; it was a potent element in the flowering of Christian piety and the development of Catholic theology, and Elizabeth of Schönau, Hildegarde of Bingen, Mary of Ognies, Liutgard of Tongres, Mechtilde of Magdebourg, are all names that connote a poignancy of spiritual experience that proves both the personal exaltation of the time and the quality of the blood that had issue in character such as theirs. This mystical vision of the holy women of the Rhine is simply an extreme intensification of the same vision that was given in lesser measure and in different ways to all the creative artists, philosophers, and theologians of the Middle Ages, from Othloh of the eleventh to St. Bonaventure of the thirteenth century, and it had a great part in determining and fixing the artistic manifestation of this amazing time. Both as a result and an influence it is vastly important and not to be ignored. Out of it came much of that marvellous symbolism of the mass and the cathedral so explicitly set forth by the monk Durandus and Vincent of Beauvais, and for its good offices here alone the world owes it a deep and lasting gratitude.

One is tempted to go on through other fields where the harvest is plenteous, but an end must be made, and it is here. There remains the question of the issue of it all—whether out of this latest devastation that so adequately follows those of the nineteenth century, of the French Revolution, of Protestantism and the wars of religion, of the Hundred Years’ War with England, any compensation may come for the progressive (and as yet unfinished) destruction of the art records of a great past. If we consider alone the wide ruin in Flanders and Brabant, in Artois and Picardy and Champagne, there seems no possible compensation for what we ourselves knew and now have lost for ever. Nevertheless, the law of the universe is death that life may come; and out of this present death that is so immeasurably more wide-spread and inclusive than any known before, even when the Huns or the Moslems were on their deadly march across Europe, there should come a proportionately fuller life, a “life more abundant,” than that which is now in dissolution. If this is so, if we can look across the plains of death and immeasurable destruction to the dimly seen peaks of the mountain frontiers of a new Land of Promise, then we can see Louvain and Liége, Ypres and Arras, Laon and Soissons and Reims pass in the crash and the dim smoke of obliteration, content with their tragic destiny, even as we can see poured out as a new oblation the ten millions of lives, the tears of an hundred millions of those who follow down into the Valley of the Shadow of Death.

Is it all a vain oblation? There is the crucial question and the answer is left with us. This is no war of economic and industrial rivalry, of jealous dynasties, of opposed political theories; it is not the inevitable result of a malignant diplomacy from Frederick the Great and Metternich to Disraeli and the German Kaiser; it is not even the last act in a drama ushered in by Machiavelli and brought to its denouement at Pottsdam. All these and myriad other strands have gone to the weaving of the poisoned shirt of Nessus, but they all are blind agents, tools of a dominant and supreme destiny by which are brought about the events that are only the way of working of an unescapable fate. The war is a culminating catastrophe, but it is as well the greatest mercy ever extended to men, for it may be made the means of a great purging, the atonement for the later sins of the world, the redemption from a wilful blindness and folly that are not consonant with the will of God.

There is a stern propriety in the centring around the Cathedral of Reims of the first phase of the great conflict, and in its slow and implacable demolition. Long ago Heinrich Heine, the poet of the German people, though not himself a German, saw clearly the coming ruin and wrote as follows:

Better than any other, he has declared the nature of this war that arose a century after his death. Thor, the impersonation of conscienceless and unmitigated force, shatters in pieces the Gothic cathedrals because he and they are antitheses and they cannot exist in the same world. Like Barbarossa sitting stonily in his dim cave under ground, century after century, while his beard grows through the rocky table before him, waiting for the call that will send him forth into the world again, primitive force and primitive craft have sullenly awaited the day when the Christian dispensation passes and they issue again into the light. In the fulness of time their day arrives and their first task is to destroy the symbol of their ended bondage. With the name of Christ on their lips and the boast of Christian civilisation in their mouths, the nations and the peoples forsake Christianity until only the nomenclature remains and the memorials of its power and glory.

Reims falls, but that which built Reims fell long ago, while the devious undermining and the blind sapping began even while the last cubits were being added to its stature, and since then has been only a steady progression in strength and assurance of its antitheses—of materialism, intellectualism, secularism, industrialism, opportunism, efficiency; founded on the coal and iron of the Scar of Europe and on the sinister and ingratiating philosophy that came out of a re-entrant paganism, thrived under the fertilisation of an evolutionary empiricism, flowered in a Nietzsche, a Treitschke, and a Bernhardi. And always it presented itself in a gracious guise; intellectual emancipation, humanitarianism, social service, democratic liberty, evolution, parliamentary government, progress, direct approach of each soul to God. It all sounded fine and high and noble, and on the 30th day of July, 1914, there could have been hardly a thousand men in the world, apart from those in the secret, who would not have said—there were not a thousand in Europe who did not believe—that man in his regular progress from lower ever to higher things had achieved a plane where the wars and savagery and lies of the past were no longer possible.

And in one week from that fateful 30th of July the cloud castle had dissolved in a rain of blood. Could conviction have come to the world in any other way? Would the diseased body have reacted to a gentle prophylactic, could the Surgeon have spared His knife? Since the knife is used, the answer admits of no dispute, but will it be enough? This is the question that is asked on every battle-field of a world at war; the lesson is set for the learning—will the nations learn? In so far as they have diverged from what Reims stood for; from Leo IX and Gregory VII and Innocent III; from Edward I and Ferdinand III and Louis IX; from Eleanor of Guienne and Blanche of Castile and Margaret of Malines; from St. Bernard, St. Norbert, and St. Anselm; from Albertus Magnus and Hugh of St. Victor and St. Thomas Aquinas, just so far have they to return, bringing with them not empty hands but all the great good winnowed from the harvest of grain and chaff they have reaped in those years of spiritual and material and national disorder that began when the dizzy fabric of mediævalism trembled to its base at the exile at Avignon and “piteously collapsed” between the nailing at Wittenberg and the sansculotte throning of the “Goddess of Reason” in the desecrated cathedral of Notre Dame. There is good grain in plenty, but it is sowed along with the chaff and the tares, and now for the last harvesting the grain has germinated only to dwindle and die, for the tares have sprung up and choked it and the red garnering is of tares alone.

Men would think, as they follow the scarlet annals of war, that the lesson was sufficiently clear even for pacificists to read as they run, but is it so? France reads and learns, gloriously regenerate, blotting out the memory of old folly with her blood of sacrifice, turning again as her first King Clovis was adjured by St. Remi of Reims, destroying what she worshipped a year ago, worshipping what then, and for two centuries before, she had destroyed. Again France shows the way, traversing it with bleeding feet and with many tears; Russia is learning it, though she had less to unlearn; Belgium must have learned it through her blind martyrdom; but how of the others? Is England learning, and Italy; will Germany learn, and Austria; will America learn, standing aloof from the smoking altar of sacrifice; will the Church learn, there in trembling isolation while again Peter listens for the crowing of the cock? If not, if when silence comes down on a decimated, an exhausted, a bankrupt world, the old ways are sought again and men go on as before, then the myriad lives and the dreary rain of tears are indeed a vain oblation, and all will be to do over again. God sets no lesson that need not be learned, and unless out of it all comes an old heaven and a new earth, then the lesson is set again, as time after time it was set for imperial Rome, until a century of war and pestilence and famine broke down her insolent pride and made from the ruins of her vainglory a foundation for a new civilisation in the strength of the Christianity she had denied.

And if the lesson is learned by all tongues and all peoples, as we must believe will be, then the horror of human loss, the bitterness of Ypres and Louvain and Reims will receive its compensation, for out of death will come life and no man will have died in vain, no work of art will have perished without a return in kind. To lose Reims and regain after long years the impulse and the power to build after the same fashion would be more than ample compensation. We have tried for many centuries and have failed; no man has built anything approaching it for seven hundred years, nor has any one matched the statue of Our Lady at Paris, or the “Worship of the Lamb” at Ghent, or the glass of Chartres, or the tapestries of Arras, or the metal work of Dinant and Tournai. There was something lacking, some once indwelling spirit had been taken away, and though we tried to reassure ourselves by our boasting in far-away lines of accomplishment—parliamentary government, manhood suffrage, clever mechanical devices, deductive science, mastery of earth forces hitherto unknown, industrialism, high finance, favourable balance of trade, evolutionary philosophy, public-school systems, vocational training, or what-not; though we even made the effort to exalt the Pantheon and Fifth Avenue to rivalry with Amiens, the Sieges Allee into an emulation of the statues of Reims, the Salon and Luxembourg and Royal Academy above the primitives of Flanders—it was all unconvincing to ourselves and in the end we came to say that, after all, it did not matter anyway, art was, “in the ultimate analysis,” only a dispensable amenity of life, which could go on very well without it. Then came the revelation of 1914 and we saw our foolishness, realising at last that, “amenity” or no, art did indicate the existence in a society of something without which it was bound to decay to the point of extinction; and as the monuments we had despised because they exceeded our own powers of achievement were one by one taken from us, we saw architecture and painting and sculpture and all the other arts in a new light and offered our reverence, too late, to what we had lost for ever.

Whatever the issue of the war, the world can never be the same, but a very different place; and amongst the differences will be a new realisation of the nature and function of art. All the follies of the last fifty years—didacticism, Bavarian illustration, realism, “new art,” impressionism, “cubism,” boulevardesque and neo-Gothic and revived Roman architecture—all the petty and insincere and premeditated fashions must go, and in their place come a new sincerity, a new sense of self-consecration.

The real things of life are coming into view through the revealing fires of the battle-field, and the new experiences of men confronted at last by everlasting truths. With the destruction of each work of old art comes a new duty that demands all that is best and strongest and most sincere in every man—the duty of making good the loss, in kind; the duty of building a new civilisation and a new culture on the old foundations now revealed through the burning away of the useless cumbrances of futile superstructures; the duty of making a Cathedral of Reims possible again, not through self-conscious and competent premeditation but because at last men have come to their senses, regained their old standard of comparative values, and so can no more fail to build in the spirit of Reims and in reverence for the eternal truths it enshrined and set forth than could those who built it seven centuries ago in the sweat of their brows, the joy of their hearts, and the high devotion of their souls.