Chapter III: Part 3

When the true dawn begins to lighten the hills, it is in the west that its coming is foreshown, in that Duchy of Normandy, where in a century the fierce Vikings, who had been driven from the coast of Flanders in their forays from the Baltic, had become the finely tempered material out of which was to be forged, by the monks of Cluny, a Catholic civilisation that was to extend itself over all western Europe and endure for five centuries. Of the three great abbeys that were the centres from which radiated the great transforming force, Bec, Fécamp, and Jumièges, the two latter lie on our side of the Seine, with the third only ten miles on the other side, while St. Georges de Bocherville, intact except for its pestilential restoration, is of the same period, as is Cérisy le Forêt. Caen, with its two abbeys of the Conqueror, inestimable monuments of architectural history, is well to the west, with Evreux, Lisieux, Bayeux, and Mont St. Michel, but we have enough on the right bank to demonstrate the nature and the greatness of the work accomplished by Cluny and the Normans in a union cemented by a vital and crescent Christianity.

Jumièges stands first, in its forgotten loop of the Seine, and is amazing, no less. But for its fine new fourteenth-century chevet, it was, at the time of the French Revolution, almost in its original state, but it was destroyed then, with Cluny, Avranches, St. Martin of Tours, and other priceless monuments, though by no means so completely. To-day its towering walls, rising above thick trees and greenery, are startlingly picturesque, but their great value lies in the revelation they make of what was possible in the earliest days of Christian recovery. The work was begun in 1040 and finished within twenty-five years, being followed immediately by the abbeys of Caen, as these were followed by St. Georges de Bocherville. The original plan was in each case about the same, the standard type, originally Latin, with Syrian, and probably Lombard and Carolingian, developments; cruciform, aisled both in nave and choir, the latter being of two bays only, with an apse, but no apsidal aisle and chapels as at Tours. The transepts are of two bays on either side the central tower, the end bays having galleries or tribunes, with a subordinate apse to the east, so forming, in the lower stage, small, low chapels. It is in the working upward from this plan that the significant developments appear, and both here and at Cérisy le Forêt, we find the order of round-arched arcade, high triforium of two arches under a containing arch, and a single clerestory window, Cérisy having as well an open clerestory arcade of three units. The system is clearly alternating, as in Lombardy and Tuscany, but there is no evidence that vaulting was ever contemplated; instead, I think it certain that great transverse arches on every other pier, supporting a wooden roof, were in mind, after the Syrian fashion, as it was later modified at San Miniato in Florence, a few years before, though these were certainly never built at Jumièges. The west front, with its tall, flanking towers, is of the Como type (query: Is the hand of the Comacine master visible here?), while all the vertical proportions are more lofty and aspiring than had ever been known before. As a matter of fact, given the chevet with its aisle and radiating chapels, which was already being worked out farther south by the simple process of halving the Syrian, Byzantine, Ravennesque, and Carolingian polygonal church and attaching this to the simultaneously developed nave, and you have all the potency of the Gothic system, the high vault (sexpartite or quadripartite) with its flying buttresses now to be worked out at Caen, giving the final structural element, while the expanding Catholic faith and the buoyant northern blood were woven together to have issue in that essentially mediæval character which was to transform the whole, infusing it with that peculiar spiritual quality which gave its distinctive character, through a new vision of beauty, to the art that had been evolved for the full expression of a Christian civilisation at last triumphant and supreme over a dead paganism.

After Cluny and Jumièges, Paris, Bourges, Chartres, and Reims are inevitable, and the working out of a great destiny is headlong and almost incredible. Jumièges was finished in 1066, the year of the Norman conquest of England; Reims was begun in 1212. Within a space of a century and a half the greatest architectural evolution in history had taken place, so echoing and voicing an equally unprecedented development in human character and culture. In 1066, hardly more than fifty years had passed since Christian society emerged from two centuries of barbarism; in 1212 it had mounted to the loftiest levels of human achievement, with a theology, a philosophy, and an art, whatever its form, with which there had been nothing comparable in the past, with which the achievements that were to follow, as they now show themselves in the red light of a revealing war, seem only the insane wanderings of a disorganised horde.

The sequence of development is well worked out east of the Seine, and at the hands of the Franks of the “Royaume,” now under the direction of the Cistercians, as a century before the Normans had been controlled by the Cluniacs. This constant revivification of monasticism during crescent periods of human growth is a very interesting phenomenon. Apparently monasticism, which has accompanied Christianity from its earliest beginning until to-day, is an essential portion of its working structure, and if you accept Christianity in fact, you cannot escape accepting the “religious life” in principle. It seems, however, that it is always in unstable equilibrium, prone to inevitable decadence, and no order lasts out three generations without losing its beneficent energy. When life is on its periodic upward curve, a reformation always occurs at the critical moment, and there is no loss of impetus; so the original Benedictinism which had served Charlemagne so well, but had sunk into worse than inaction, gave place in the eleventh century to the great Cluniac reform, which in its turn was succeeded by the Cistercian reform, as this yielded after another hundred years to the reform of St. Dominic and St. Francis.

Now the Romanesque art of Toulouse, Aquitaine, and Burgundy, the Norman of Normandy and England, the Rhenish of Germany, were largely Benedictine of the Cluniac mode, and the style rapidly became inordinately sumptuous, costly, and magnificent, as at Arles, Toulouse, Poitiers, Glastonbury, Durham. It has been said of monastic movements: “First generation pious, second generation learned, third generation decadent.” Certainly as the Benedictines in France went on to the twelfth century, their original austerity and fervour were relaxed, and their art became a thing of splendour as their wealth and learning and temporal power increased. The Cistercian movement of Robert of Molesme and Stephen Harding and Bernard of Clairvaux was a revolt against luxury and laxity, an attempt (as ever) to get back to the supposititious simplicity of earlier times, and in the success that followed architecture changed completely, though the ending of the new style, and even its consummation, were different indeed from what the Cistercian reforms had desired.

In its beginnings Gothic architecture was an attempt at economy, the trying for something less massive and ornate than the great Benedictine piles of inert masonry. By cleverly developing a system of balanced thrusts, the sheer bulk of masonry was reduced by half, while attention was drawn away from the fast-increasing ornamentation to the shell itself, whereby a great gain was effected, and architecture became once more a study in organism, in composition, and in proportion. Gothic is primarily the perfection of exquisite organism, almost living in its consummate integrity and its sensitive interplay of forces. This perfectly co-ordinated structure is, of course, infused and transfigured by an intense sense of beauty, quite new in its forms, and given a spiritual and symbolical content peculiar to itself, the result being what, for want of a better term, we call Gothic. The two elements cannot be disassociated, as pedants feign, for, like all great art, it is in a sense sacramental, and the “outward and visible sign” may never be separated from the “inward and spiritual grace.”[A]

[A] “Sacramentum est corporale vel materiale elementum foris sensibiliter propositum ex similitudine repræsentans, et ex institutione significans et ex sanctificatione continens, aliquam invisibilem et spiritualem gratiam.”--(Hugo de St. Victoire.)

Both processes may be followed through the great sequence of churches between the Seine, the Marne, and the Somme--or might have been a year ago. To-day it is safe to postulate nothing of a dim and ominous future; we know that much of this galaxy has been destroyed after seven centuries of careful cherishing through innumerable wars and revolutions. That all may go is possible, as the power that brought them into existence has gone, though in this case only for a time. Once, however, the great and triumphal progress from Jumièges through Noyon, Senlis, St. Denis, Laon, Paris, Amiens, to its final achievement at Reims, was a complete and visible record of the greatest and most headlong advance toward the real things in Christian civilisation by means of the real things in Christian civilisation history has ever recorded. Five of these--Senlis, Noyon, Laon, Amiens, and Reims lie either within the battle lines that have maintained themselves so long, or at least within sound of the guns; one has been destroyed--Reims; one thus far preserved--Amiens. The fate of the others is in doubt, together with that of all the lands that lie to the east, and the danger of irreparable loss is greater than ever before since the French Revolution.

There was no better place than this once-lovely region, now hidden from view in the lurid smoke and the poisoned fumes of a new and demoniac sort of war, in which to watch the swift growth to a splendid self-consciousness of Gothic architecture. The elements of Gothic organism had been developed in the twelfth century by the great Cluniac-Norman alliance, but this was only a beginning; Gothic quality was still to be achieved, and this consisted largely in three elements--cohesion, economy, and character. The first means the synthetic knitting of everything together, and the giving it dynamic power to develop from within outward; it means making structure absolutely central and comprehensive, but also beautiful; ornament, decoration, remaining something added to it, something of the _bene esse_, though not of the _esse_; deriving from it in every instance, but not necessary to its perfection. The second is the reducing of mass to its logical and structural (and also optical) minimum, bringing into play the forces of accommodation, balance, and active, as opposed to passive, resistance. The third is the hardest to describe or determine, and probably can only be perceived through comparison. It is the differentiation in quality, the

determination of personality, and it is hardly to be defined, though it is instantly perceived.

In the Abbaye aux Hommes, or Cérisy, or St. Georges de Bocherville, we find great majesty and beauty, many elements that are distinctive of true Gothic work and persist through its entire course, but none of these buildings is actually Gothic. In St. Germer de Fly, however, and in Sens and Noyon, while there seems at first little differentiation from the others, the Gothic spirit has found itself and is already working rapidly toward its consummation.

Of the condition of Noyon at the present time we know little; of what this may be in a few months’ time we know less. The town itself was of the oldest, its foundation being Roman, and within its walls Chilperic was buried in 721, while Charlemagne was crowned King of the Franks about thirty years before he became Emperor, and Hugh, first of the Capetian dynasty, was here chosen king in 987. Incidentally, the town was also the birthplace of John Calvin. The ancient cathedral was burned in 1131 and the present work begun shortly after, though it is hard to believe that much of the existing structure antedates the year 1150. The crossing and transepts date from about 1170, the nave about ten years later, while the west front and towers are of the early part of the next century. The certainty and calm assurance of the work is remarkable. Paris, which is later, is full of tentative experiments, but there is no halting here, rather a serene certainty of touch that is perfectly convincing. The plan is curious in that it has transepts with apsidal ends, after the fashion of Rhenish Romanesque, one of the few instances in France. The alternating system is used throughout, and the vault was originally sexpartite; the interior order consists of a low arcade, high triforium, triforium gallery, and a clerestory comprised wholly within the vault lines; round and pointed arches are used indiscriminately, and the flying buttresses are perhaps the earliest that emerged from the protection of the triforium roofs. In the choir, which is earliest in date, the ornament is rude, even rudimentary, though distinctly Gothic in form, but in the nave twenty years has served to change this into work of the most brilliant and classical beauty. In 1293 the whole town was destroyed by fire, and the cathedral wrecked; it was immediately reconstructed, however, and at this time the sexpartite gave place to quadripartite vaulting, while the west front, with its great towers, very noble in their proportions and their powerful buttressing, was completed. This rebuilding and the loss of all the original glass has left Noyon less perfect than many of the neighbouring churches, but it still remained a grave and strikingly solemn example of the transition.

Not far away, past the huge and formidable ruins of Coucy, the greatest castle of the Middle Ages, whose lords haughtily proclaimed, “Roi ne suys, ne prince, ne duc, ne comte aussi: Je suys le Sire de Coucy,” is Laon on its sudden hill. How great the loss has been here we do not know, but the town has been frequently under German bombardment, and the end is not yet. Laon is unique, a masterly work of curious vitality, original, daring, and even rebellious against a growing tradition. In the Middle Ages it was vastly admired, but to us of a day more dull and timorous in architecture, because we have no art of our own and have found so little in life from which we could draw an inspiration, it is less safe and satisfying than such coherent and scholastic work as Amiens or Reims. Begun about 1165, it was finished in 1225, the growth being from the crossing in all directions, for not only is the amazing west front of the central period of Gothic perfection, but the choir as well, for the unique square termination takes the place of a regular chevet which was part of the original design. This square-ended choir is the only one in France, and is thoroughly English in effect; moreover, the transepts have aisles and are the first in France to be so finished, while they have tribunes at the ends after the Norman fashion, and there is a central tower or lantern as well. The towers of Laon are its distinguishing glory, for there are five in all, out of an original seven, all incomplete, not one retaining its spire, but striking and immensely individual. The interior organism is not wholly coherent, for while the vaulting is sexpartite throughout, the system is regular, and was as manifestly intended for quadripartite vaulting as Noyon for sexpartite. The west front is vastly picturesque, if somewhat incoherent, and is clearly a growth from year to year; it lacks both the sublime calm and grandeur of Paris and the faultless organism of Reims, but its detail is as brilliantly conceived as any in France, while its carvings and sculptures are in the same class as the best of Hellas. In the tops of the towers are the well-known stone effigies of oxen, placed there by the builders in recognition of the patient service of the beasts that year after year helped drag the heavy stones from the plain to the top of the hill where the cathedral stands.

In and around Laon were once innumerable religious houses, but nearly all their churches were destroyed during the French Revolution, which annihilated more noble art in five years than had happened in five centuries. St. Martin remains, and is of the middle of the twelfth century, but the church of the Abbey of St. Vincent is wholly destroyed.

South of Laon, and about as far away as Noyon, lies Soissons, an ancient town, famous in history, and containing, until the war, another masterpiece of mediæval art, the cathedral, which already has been made the target of German shells, and has suffered seriously. As a city, it antedated the Roman occupation, was Christianised toward the end of the third century, became a capital of the Merovings, and a notable city of the Carolingian dynasty. The south transept is the oldest part, and dates from about 1175, the choir was finished in 1212, the north transept and nave about 1250. Porter says of the south transept: “This portion of Soissons, one of the most ethereal of all twelfth-century designs, is the highest expression of that fairy-like, Saracenic phase of Gothic art that had first come into being at Noyon. Like Noyon, however, this transept lacks the elements of grandeur which are found in so striking a degree in the nave and choir of this same church of Soissons.” The nave and choir are indeed amongst the noblest creations of Catholic art; for justness and delicacy of proportions, refinement of line, restraint in the placing and determination of ornament, Soissons ranks with Chartres and Bourges. The richness of its vertical lines is unusual, the mouldings clear, powerful, and distinguished in contour, and altogether it has well served for nearly seven centuries as a perfect exemplar of the Christian art of France as its highest point.

Already it has been appallingly shattered, one shell having struck the roof of the north aisle, hurling one of the nave shafts into fragments and obliterating an entire bay. Thus far it has been spared a conflagration, and if the Prussian lines are promptly forced back, it may still be preserved as a wonder for still further generations.

So far as the numberless other great churches of Soissons are concerned, it has for long been too late; they perished, with uncounted others in this region, at the time of the Revolution. Of the vast abbey of St. Jean-des-Vignes nothing remains but the sumptuous west front, cut clear like an architectural “frontispiece” from all the rest, and even this has been further shattered by German gunfire. The royal abbey of Our Lady has become a military barracks, St. Crepin, St. Medard with its famous seven churches, all have vanished, and the loss is irreparable.

Nearer Paris we find Senlis, a further step in architectural development. The town itself is charming, and full of old art and old history. Roman walls, with sixteen towers, still remain, together with fragments of a royal palace of the French kings, from Clovis to Henri IV, with ancient houses, picturesque streets, desecrated churches, and monastic ruins, such as those of the Abbey of Victory, founded by Philip Augustus after the battle of Bouvines, and wrecked, of course, during the Revolution.

The cathedral is curious and fascinating. Set out in 1155 on enormous lines, it was curtailed both in height and length through the failure of adequate funds. It has been rebuilt, extended, supplemented, century after century, until it has become almost an epitome of French architecture from the middle of the twelfth to the middle of the sixteenth century. The southwest tower (its mate is unfinished) is of the thirteenth-century culmination, and surpassed by no other spire in France for subtlety of composition and perfection of detail. One of its crocketed pinnacles has already been shot away, but apparently further danger is well removed, and will become progressively less threatening as the Prussian lines are driven back.

It is, of course, quite impossible even to note all the architectural monuments between the Seine and the frontiers of Belgium. Paris must be wholly left out, for St. Denis, St. Germain l’Auxerois, Notre Dame, and the Ste. Chapelle would justly require a volume to themselves. Rouen, with its cathedral, St. Ouen, St. Maclou, the Palais de Justice, rich with all the lace and embroidery of the flamboyant period, lies now well beyond danger, and so does Beauvais, where the nemesis of worldly pride overtook the lagging spiritual impulse that had made the Middle Ages the climax of Christian civilisation. Châlons-sur-Marne, once threatened, is now reprieved, and its

cathedral, its churches of St. Jean and St. Loup, and its noble and distinguished Church of Our Lady are safe for another period.

Apart from the great architectural monuments are numberless others invaluable in archæology, and forming links in the great Gothic development: St. Etienne of Beauvais, St. Leu d’Esserent, Morienval, Bury, St. Germer, and St. Remi of Reims--the last valuable beyond estimate, with an apse that was unparalleled as a masterpiece of transitional work when Gothic was in its first and finest estate, now wrecked and desecrated by shells that have burst its vaults into crumbled fragments and hurled its perfect windows in showers of splintered glass to the pavements heaped high with the wreck of masonry and of dismembered altars.

And as in the case of the great churches, so in that of the small, from Braisne to Caudebec, they cannot even be catalogued. The whole region was, and is, one of wonderful little parish churches, of all periods, and many of them are now only shapeless ruins. The great abbeys and smaller religious houses are practically gone, scores having fallen prey to the insane fury of the Revolution or the sordid secularism of the Restoration. What we have lost may be seen from countless such lovely and pathetic fragments as St. Wandrille, near Caudebec, given a new fame through the name of Maeterlinck, and so linked with the greater martyrdom of Belgium in these last days. This, like its myriad companions, was architecture of the most singular beauty, the loss of which leaves the world poor, so poor, indeed, that it had at first nothing wherewith to meet the last assault of the enemy. The loss is being made good, the penalty already is paid, and though one could not--one would not--restore or rebuild these silent fragments of exquisitely wrought stone, meshed in tall trees and clambering vines, the vision is possible of new foundations, equal in number to these that are gone, each an expiation and a spiritual guard, each making late reparation for the past, guaranteeing a future immunity from perils of the same nature as those that now shake the world.

VI

AMIENS AND REIMS

Two monuments there are to the east of the Seine that form the realisation of the dim but dominant ideal toward which Christian society in France was tending even from the days of St. Germer and Jumièges, through the intermediate and progressive steps of Noyon, Soissons, Laon-Amiens, and Reims. Equal in fame, counting no others in their own category save only Chartres and Bourges, the one remains, the other has passed for ever.

It is a strange sensation for us to-day to watch from afar the slow and implacable destruction of one of the greatest works of art in the world, for we must go back more than a century to find any catastrophe of a similar nature. What happened then, when half a hundred masterpieces of divinely directed human intelligence and aspiration were reduced to scrap-heaps at the hands of revolution, is very far away, and the irreparable loss is as unknown to-day as it was unappreciated then. We can no more reconstruct for our understanding Cluny, St. Martin of Tours, or Avranches than we can restore the catalogue of the Alexandrian library; mercifully we cannot estimate our loss. Back of this era of annihilation we must go two centuries before we find in England under Henry VIII a similar episode of infamy. The case of Reims is wholly different; there are tens of thousands who knew it for what it was--the crowning manifestation of a crowning civilisation, and for them the loss is personal, poignant, and unexampled, a horror that sophistry cannot palliate nor time destroy.

Of the two great churches, Amiens could more easily have been spared. The word is ill chosen; Amiens in ruins, its exquisite façade with its perfect sculptures seared and shattered by bursting shells and consuming fire, would have been a catastrophe that could only put to the test the most stoical fortitude, but--it is neither Chartres nor Bourges nor Reims, and simply because the perfect balance between all possible elements in great architecture is here trembling toward its overthrow. Gothic art had three controlling forces working toward an unattainable perfection; structural integrity irradiated by consummate invention and an almost divine creative genius; passion for that exalted beauty that is unchangeable and eternal, expressed through new forms at once northern and Catholic; the just balance and intimate interplay of these two impulses. Its virtues, like all virtues, were most easily transmuted into vices, once the controlling balance was overthrown, and each was, in its stimulating possibilities, a constant and irresistible temptation toward excess. In Reims, the beginnings of which antedate Amiens by only a decade, the balance remains true and firm; in Amiens we see the first fatal steps in the development of a purely human (and notably French) logic, toward that intellectual pride, that almost arrogance of self-confidence, that found its nemesis in the unstable marvel of Beauvais.

In an admirable but anonymous little book called “Some French Cathedrals,” the author says: “French Gothic was most rational and most beautiful while it still remembered its Romanesque origin. At Amiens it was just beginning to forget that and to lose itself in dreams of an impossible romance which changed it from architecture into a very wonderful kind of ornamental engineering.” This subtle and significant change you feel everywhere except in the inimitable façade. The interior is too high, the masonry too wire-drawn and tenuous, the chevet too giddy and insecure. It is true that all but the west front has been impossibly restored, so that outwardly little remains of the original work, while the glass is gone from all but the ambulatory windows, leaving the nave a cold blaze of intolerable light. Nevertheless, the fundamental fault is there; the architect intrudes himself in place of the _dévot_, the craft of man supplants the guiding of God; so we have one of the most technically perfect of cathedrals, and one of the least inspired; you must go to the Rhine to find, in Cologne, a more self-conscious and serenely satisfied work, and it is well to make this comparison, for by so doing you realise the real greatness of Amiens, and how it fails only in comparison with the three perfect examples of an art that wholly expresses the great concept of mediæval Catholic philosophy, that in life, as we know it, material and spiritual are inseparable, that their just balance is the true end of man in this phase of existence, and that therefore sacramentalism is of the _esse_ of religion, and as well the law of life.

As a whole, both from within and without, Amiens in a measure fails, but this does not hold

of its several parts. The west front is still a masterpiece of consummate and wholly original design, though the towers have been incongruously (but engagingly) terminated in later centuries. The three great doors, the first and second arcades, and the rose-window story contain more brilliant, spirited, ingenious, and withal beautiful design than any similar work in the world, while the ornament (there is a wild-rose border around the archivolts of the great porches that finds no rival in Greece) and the sculptures reach a level of decorative and emotional significance that marks the time of their production as the crowning moment in human culture and in Christian civilisation.

We turn to Reims--we turn now in reverence to the memory of Reims--in a different spirit. Master Robert of Luzarches was a master, and knew it. Master Robert of Coucy was the servant of a Lord who was greater than he, and knew this also, and was proud of his service. He was just as great an architect as his brother of Amiens, but he worked in a godly fear, and so he built the noblest church in Christendom. This is not to say that its nave order is equal to Chartres, its rhythm and composition equal to Bourges. In every great church from 1175 to 1225 there is some one element or more that is final and unexcelled, but at Reims there was a great consistency, a noble and all-embracing competence, that placed it in a class by itself.

Reims was without a fault; perhaps this made its appeal less poignant and searching than that of the eager and sometimes less-perfect efforts of men more human in their inadequacies. Man is the creature that tries, and it is perhaps only human to feel a reverence that lessens affection for those who seem to transcend the limits that are set to human accomplishment.

Every other cathedral in France is a splendid chronicle, a record of changing times, changing endeavours, changing impulses. Men of varying personalities have wrought out their ideals, year after year, and the result is in each case a great sequence, a glorious approximation. Reims was begun in 1211, on the first anniversary of the burning of its predecessor, and it was finished, manifestly in accordance with an original and predetermined design, within fifty years. The three gables and the upper stories of the western towers are a century later, otherwise the work is consistent and a single conception. The great ideal comprised a crowning group of seven towers, each with its slender spire, none of which was ever completed, and had this majestic scheme been carried out, the church would have been the most complete, as it was the most perfect, of the architectural manifestations of Christianity.

It is impossible to analyse Reims, to describe its vital and exquisite organism, to laud its impeccable scale, its vivid and stimulating originality, to explain the almost incredible competence and beauty of its buttressing, the serene delicacy of its detail, to dwell once more on the glory of its sculpture that ranked with that of Greece, on the splendour of its glass that was rivalled only at Chartres. It is impossible to do this now, for its passing has been too recent and too grievous. Death brings silence for a time to those that knew the dead.

In another chapter I have tried to say something of the sculpture of Reims, a crowning glory where all was glorious, but sculpture does not mean the human figure alone; it covered in the Middle Ages all forms of beauty chiselled out of stone and marble, and the man who wrought the wild-rose design on the archivolts of Amiens was just as great an artist as he who fashioned the Virgin of the south transept, or the “Beau Dieu”; perhaps he was the same man. Gothic “ornament” is quite as beautiful as are Gothic saints and angels, and here at Reims the stone carving was of the finest. Every space of ornament--capital, crocket, boss, frieze, and string-course--was a combination of these great elements: architectural self-restraint and identity with the work as a whole, passionate love for all the beautiful things in nature, joy in doing everything, even the cutting of unseen surfaces, just as well as man could do the work. It is not better than the ornament of Amiens or Chartres; in some passages Amiens seems to have achieved the highest attainable point, but it is of the same quality, and that is enough glory for any church.

Most of this inimitable art already has been blasted and calcined away, and the same fate has overtaken the glass. Here was an achievement of the highest in an art of the best. In the light (literally) of the stained glass of our own times, we had found some difficulty in realising that this was an art at all, but it needed only a visit to Chartres or Reims for enlightenment to come to us. At Chartres, in the very earliest years of the thirteenth century, it reached its

culmination; there is no greater glass anywhere than this, almost no greater art, and Reims, while less complete (the aisle windows were wholly removed by eighteenth-century canons on the score of an added “cheerfulness”), was of the same school, though later and just past the cresting of the wave. If it lacked the unearthly clarity and divine radiance of the western lancets, and the “Belle Verrière” of Chartres, it had qualities of its own, particularly its most glorious azures and rubies, that allowed no rival, and it easily ranked with Chartres and Bourges and Poitiers as manifesting the possibilities of a noble art, and a lost art, at its highest point of achievement.

So far as can be learned, all this has perished and it cannot be restored. It lies in shivered heaps where it has fallen and the chapter of the glass of Reims is closed.

Four months ago the ruin already was irreparable, and since then bombardments have been frequent and merciless, nor has the enemy as yet been driven beyond the range of gun-fire. Whether even the shattered and crumbling fabric--wherefrom all carving, all detail, all glass, all sculpture has been burned and blasted away--survives in the end, none can foretell; but one thing is sure, and that is that no “restoration” must ever be attempted. If enough remains so that careful hands may preserve it from disintegration and make it available for the worship of God, well and good, so long as no imitations, whether in stone or metal or glass, are intruded to mock its vanished glory and obliterate for future generations the record of an indelible crime. For seven centuries its beauty and its perfection have spoken to succeeding generations, each less willing to listen than the last. In its ruin and its devastation it will speak more clearly and to more willing ears, than in any pretentious rehabilitation.

To the sordid wickedness of its destruction has been added the insult of Prussian promises of complete restoration--a catastrophe that would crown the first with a greater and more contemptible indignity. Instead, let Reims remain as it is left, and then, in Paris, let France, regenerated and redeemed, as already has gloriously happened, make for ever visible her restoration, through blood and suffering, to her old ideals, by carrying out her vow to build in honour of Ste. Jeanne d’Arc a great new church, raise a new Reims, like the old in plan and form and dimensions. Not a copy, but a revival, with the old ideals, the old motives, the old self-consecration; different, as the new must differ from the old, but akin in spirit and in truth.

If one only knew how to interpret it, there is some mysterious significance in the centring of the war of the world around Reims and in the persistent and successful efforts of the Prussians to raze it to the ground. Seven centuries ago the mystics of St. Victor would have read the riddle, but for too long now we have been out of temper with symbolism and too averse to the acceptance of signs and portents to be able to see even dimly the correspondences and the significance of those human happenings that are actually outside human control. In a way Reims was the ancient heart of France, as Paris is not, and it always was a sacred city above all others--and sacred it is now as never before. It was here that the Christianising of the Franks was sealed by the baptism of Clovis, A. D. 496, by St. Remi, the canonised bishop who occupied the see for seventy-five years. The crowning of kings (every sovereign but four for a period of fifteen hundred years came here for his coronation), the assembling of great councils of the Church, the beneficent activities of universities and schools of philosophy were all commonplaces of the life of the city, while it was here that Ste. Jeanne d’Arc finally discomfited the English and led her King to his crowning in the church that is now destroyed.

Time and again the city has been devastated, from the Vandals of 392 to those of 1914. During the Revolution its churches suffered bitterly; the cathedral and St. Remi, until then, were rich with unnumbered shrines, altars, statues, tombs, while cloisters and religious buildings of many kinds surrounded them on all sides. All this wealth of hoarded art that expressed the piety and culture of centuries was swept away, even to the sacred ampulla of holy oil, piously believed to have been brought by a dove for the consecration of Clovis and ever after miraculously replenished for each succeeding coronation. To this irreparable devastation was added the indignity of official “restoration,” though in the case of the cathedral at the able and scrupulous hands of Viollet-le-Duc, and in the nineteenth century the picturesque and beautiful old streets gave place to boulevards and a general Hausmanising on approved Parisian lines, so that in 1914 the city had become dull and somewhat pretentious, framing the two priceless jewels, the Church of Our Lady of Reims and that of the holy St. Remi.

All is now gone, the glorious and the insignificant alike overwhelmed in indiscriminating ruin. The glass and the statues that had survived war, revolution, and stupidity are shattered in fragments, the roofs consumed by fire, the vaults burst asunder, the carved stones calcined and flaking hourly in a dreary rain on blood-stained pavements where a hundred kings have trod and into deserted streets that have echoed to the footsteps of threescore generations. The city has passed; _deleta est Carthago_, but it has left a memory, a tradition, and an inspiration that may yet play a greater part in the rebuilding of civilisation than could have been achieved by its remaining monuments as they stood making their unheeded appeal on the day the first shell was fired from the Prussian batteries on the eastern hills.

The tendency I have spoken of which showed itself in Amiens, the breaking up of the mediæval integrity and a consequent inclination toward undue emphasis on structural and intellectual arrogance, never went very far because of the ill days that fell on France. The victory of the French crown over the Papacy, with the resulting transfer of the Holy See to Avignon, was the ruin of Catholic civilisation in France, as well as in Italy and the rest of Christendom. The Church became subservient to the state and progressively corrupt in root and branch. The wars with England resulted in nothing less than ruin, and culture and art came to an end. By 1370 building had become thin, poor, uninspired, and yet, within the next ten years flamboyant architecture appeared, and the fifteenth century opened with a sudden burst of artistic splendour. Heaven knows what it all means; France was at her lowest depth, and yet, without warning, a regeneration took place. The Blessed Jeanne d’Arc appears like a miraculous vision, Orleans is saved, the rightful king is crowned, and though the martyrdom of the saviour of France takes place in 1430, the English are driven out in 1456, and a new day begins.

Was Jeanne d’Arc a single manifestation of a new spirit that had entered society, or was this itself a continuation of what she had initiated under God? The answer does not really matter, the important fact is that a great regeneration took place, and a new type of art followed in its wake. Now the tendency was away from the proud efficiency of a glorified architectural engineering and toward the other element in architecture, beauty of form and splendour of ornament. It was almost as though the French had turned to religion and beauty as their only refuge from the miseries of their estate. In the very first years of the fifteenth century, at the darkest hours of France, Notre Dame de l’Epine, close by Châlons on the Marne, was built in 1419. Caudebec in 1426, St. Maclou, Rouen, in 1432, and after these for more than a century France abandoned herself to the creation of works of architectural art that, whatever they may lack of the splendid consistency and the divine serenity of the thirteenth century, are nevertheless amongst the loveliest works of man. Beauvais is an admirable example of the two tendencies; begun in 1225, its impossible choir was finished in 1272, only to collapse twelve years later, paying the penalty of its structural arrogance. For forty years it was in process of reconstruction, after a more conservative fashion though of its original dimensions, and in 1500 the transepts were begun and finished fifty years later. In beauty and in an almost riotous richness, they are the crowning work of this phase of design, while the choir itself, with its marvellously articulated system of buttresses, is a creation of sheer architectural power almost unrivalled. Ambitious and defiant, the canons now, in 1550, reared a vast spire over the crossing, nearly 450 feet high, and of the same sumptuous design as the transepts. The whole stupendous erection fell twenty-five years later, and has never been rebuilt, while the nave was never even begun; so Beauvais remains a vast fragment, and a living commentary on the excesses and the penalties of that pride of life that succeeded to the spiritual humility of the Middle Ages.

The new style, however, was perfectly adapted to the new life of secular supremacy, and, with few exceptions, both here in eastern France and in Flanders and Brabant and the Netherlands, the great civic monuments and the innumerable châteaux of an expanding and ripening society are couched in its beautiful and elaborate terms. Essentially it is a mode of ornament, containing no new element in organism, but always beautiful and, in France at all events, marked always by delicate and admirable taste. With its flame-like tracery, its complicated pinnacles, its scaffoldings of intricate latticework; with its curved and aspiring lines, glimmering niches, pierced parapets, open-work spires, and its tangled foliage, dainty filigree-work and sculptured lace, it is a marvel of imagination, dramatic sense, and consummate craftsmanship. Sometimes it is strikingly competent in its composition, as in the transepts of Beauvais and the front of Troyes, the latter being in its unfulfilled promise (it is only a beginning) one of the great façades of France, but frequently its greatest weakness is forgetfulness of consistency in a passion for beauty of line and light and shade that became almost insane. With the beginning of the sixteenth century the new art began slowly to decay in ecclesiastical buildings, but it continued for at least another hundred years in châteaux and civic work, and it is this in particular that is now disappearing through a war waged by unprecedented methods and in accordance with principles (if we may call them such) which hitherto have been found associated only with barbarian invasions or the frenzies of a mad anarchy that has called itself Revolution.

For the more distinguished châteaux we must go outside our chosen field, to the Loire, Touraine, or to other parts of France where the devastation of past wars and revolutions is less complete. There is Pierrefonds, of course, if one cares for that sort of thing, but of authentic castles of the sixteenth century there are few of notable quality, though many minor farms and manors still remained in August, 1914. Ecouen and Chantilly are exceptions, and the latter, given to the nation by the Duc d’Aumale when he was exiled by the republic for the crime of belonging to the legitimate line of kings, is a good example of the princely buildings of the Renaissance when the last fires of Gothic spirit were dying away.

It is not so long ago that half the towns in France between the Seine and the Belgian frontier were threaded by wonderful little streets of stone-built and half-timber houses three centuries old, and bright with squares and market-places framed in old architecture of Francis I and Henri II. Their quaint and delicate beauty was too much for the nineteenth century, however, which revolted against an old art as it revolted against an old culture and an older religion, so nearly all are gone, their place being taken by substitutes, the destruction of which could hardly be counted against the Prussians for unrighteousness, if one considered æsthetic questions alone, which is, fortunately, impossible. For these dim old streets and sunny silent squares one could, until a few months ago, go confidently across the border, finding in Flanders, Brabant, Liége, and Luxembourg relief from the appalling sophistication that had taken possession of the old cities of Champagne. Even in France, until last year, were Douai, Pont-à-Mousson, Meaux, and of course Arras, though now of some of these worse than nothing remains. In the latter city was once, also, a particularly splendid example of those great civic halls that showed forth the pride and the independence of the industrial cities of the later Middle Ages, and another stood in Douai. As Flanders and Brabant are, however, the chosen places for this particular manifestation of an industrial civilisation, so different to our own in spirit and in expression, we may include them therewith, where they racially and historically belong; and having followed the development of an essentially religious art in France from Jumièges to Beauvais, note its translation in later years into civic forms, in the little and heroic Kingdom with so great and heroic a history, now and for many months shut off from the world still free, by the veil of smoke and poisoned gases.

VII

THE BURGHERS AND THEIR BUILDING

The great civic halls were those of Audenaarde, Brussels, Louvain, Malines, Termonde, Bruges, Ghent, Ypres, and Arras, and each of these cities was as well full of wonderful old houses, some private residences, some quarters for the various guilds. It is impossible to discriminate between past and present tense in describing them; some are wholly gone, as Ypres and Arras, others we suppose still remain, but how long this may be true one cannot say. If we lose what we have lost in the onrush of a victorious army, and in its long holding of defensive lines in the most amazing siege in history, what may we not expect at the hands of an army in defeat, fighting its way back to its own frontiers for a last desperate stand? Arras, Ypres, and Louvain were hard enough to lose, but the soul shudders at the thought of Bruges and Ghent, Antwerp and Brussels, fought over day after day and abandoned to pillage and destruction.

The historical significance of these halls is very great; they put into material (and as we had thought enduring) form the oligarchical democracy, the great wealth, the pride, the sumptuous and lavish spirit of successive generations of princely merchants and manufacturers. Religion was still a vital force, but it no longer stood alone, and now the secular organisations of guilds and free cities claimed and received the tribute of wealth through the ministry of art. It was not the old art of the days of cathedral building and the founding of abbeys and universities, it was quite a different art altogether, but it fitted the new motives and ideals as the other could not do. Of severity, self-restraint, reticence, it has nothing; it is all splendour and magnificence, emulation and rivalry, but it is still craftsman’s art, and whatever the taste of these great and even fantastic buildings, there is proof of joyful workmanship and of a jealous maintenance of the highest possible standards.

Ypres was the first in point of time, and first in absolute artistic value. Begun by Count Baldwin in the year 1200, it was remodelled, rebuilt, embellished for a hundred years, and finally the “Nieuwerke,” of the most abandoned Renaissance taste, was added to the east. Of huge dimensions--the main front was four hundred and thirty-three feet in length, while the great tower was two hundred and thirty feet high--the design was as simple, imposing, and direct as one would expect to find during the early thirteenth century. It was a simple parallelogram, three stories high, nobly arcaded, with ranges of fine niches which contained statues of the Counts of Flanders and other worthies, until these were completely destroyed by the French during the Revolution. A vast, high-pitched roof covered all, broken in the middle by the belfry, with its corner turrets, which were echoed at the four corners of the building by similar spires. A simpler composition could hardly be imagined, or one more impressive in its grave restraint. Architecturally it was unique; there was and is no other rival of a similar nature, and its value was inestimable. Bold in conception, straightforward, direct, confident without assurance, it was one great masterpiece of the civic art of the Middle Ages, miraculously preserved for six centuries as the visible manifestation of the supreme quality of a great people and a great art. Both without and within it had that spontaneousness, that fine, frank

naïveté that one finds in all crescent periods and searches for in vain in the following days that history always selects for particular admiration. Analyse it and see how simple it all was. First there were three chief organic elements: the great wall unbroken by any “features,” without buttresses because it was not vaulted; the enormous, high-pitched roof bare of all gables or diversions of any kind; the square, unbuttressed tower in the middle, with a tall, pointed roof and cupola, surrounded by four high pinnacles of the simplest form. It is as calm and simple as a Greek temple, and like this, also, it is final in the perfection of its proportions and its relation of parts; also its great, quiet elements are left alone, not tortured into nervous complexity of varying planes and excitable vagaries of light and shade. Forty-eight pointed and mullioned windows along the main floor give the horizontal divisions, while vertically there were three stages: the low, lintelled colonnade, a mezzanine with very beautiful traceried windows, one to each bay, and a vast main wall without horizontal subdivisions but with a delicately designed and very broad course of traceried panelling above the splendid sequence of great windows, like a lofty blind parapet. The tower was equally simple, its seven stories exquisitely varied in their heights and windowing, but calm always, and final in their sense of exactly felt relations. The pinnacles also, four on the tower and others at either end of the façade, were as simply and perfectly designed as could be asked, without fantastic exuberance or a straining for effect; just traceried octagons with one series of pointed gables and high, crocketed spires.

The “Nieuwerke,” in its ridiculous Renaissance effrontery snuggled up against the silent, absorbed, unnoticing giant, was like an architectural version of Merlin and Vivien; silly and scented impudence in its vain approximations to grave dignity and a self-respect proof against all blandishments.

The great hall inside was just the same: an astonishing room, four hundred and thirty feet long, broken only by the columns and arches bearing the great tower, and roofed with a mass of oak timbering like an ancient and enormous ship turned bottom up. Huge oaken beams rose against the wall dividing it into panels, and each pair supported equally gigantic tie-beams braced by rough-hewn diagonal struts. It was barn-building, if you like, but a good barn is better art than a Newport

“cottage”; and this splendidly direct “barn” at Ypres had a quality the Louvre could never attain.