Chapter VII: Part 7

Some day the world will awaken to the fact that there are other great arts besides architecture, painting, and sculpture; already there is a suspicion abroad that music, poetry, and the drama are arts also and not merely vehicles for the expression of temperament, and there is even a preliminary waking of the subconsciousness which threatens to confess that ritual and ceremonial have been, and may be again, a great fine art in the same sense. Little by little the pharisaic phrase, “industrial art,” is yielding some of its component parts and offering them to the very superior _haute noblesse_ of fine art, and amongst these are stained glass and tapestry. The recent discovery of the existence of Chartres Cathedral and its glass has settled one point, and much against their will the artist and the amateur and the commentator have had to admit that the art of these windows, and of those at Bourges and Le Mans and Angers, is of the highest, and quite in the class of the painters of Italy and Flanders, the sculptors of France and England (in the Middle Ages), and the master builders from Laon to Amiens.

Of this particularly glorious art, which has become more completely a lost art than any other ever revealed to man, there is little in the region under consideration. It did not issue from the Heart of Europe, but had its beginnings elsewhere and its culmination as well. It was an art of the twelfth and thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, degenerating rapidly after the year 1300, and, while the churches and abbeys and cathedrals between the Seine and the Somme were once splendid with glass that almost rivalled that of Chartres, the Reformation and the Revolution had seen to it that the major part of this glory had been made to depart. Amiens retains a little in its chevet chapels, and Reims only a year ago was blazing with an apocalyptic splendour that is now transformed into gaping and fire-swept openings, laced by distorted metal bars, and heaps of pulverised refuse ground into the blood and ashes on shattered pavements. Whatever the Low Countries may have had is long since gone the way of all the other beautiful things the Calvinists did not like and only fragments, imitations, and Renaissance absurdities remain.

With the other great art, that of tapestry, the case is fortunately different. This was almost the intimate art of the Heart of Europe, finding its beginnings in Aix when the Greek princess brought with her from the East the first examples of Byzantine needlework and weaving that had been seen in the West in her day, and going on to new glories in Arras, Brussels, Tournai, Audenaarde, Lille, Enghien. The perfection of tapestry weaving came in the last half of the fifteenth century, but the advance was regular for a century before, and if we can judge from the few examples left the work of the fourteenth century had many fine and powerful qualities that were all its own. The collapse came suddenly, early in the sixteenth century, being marked by Raphael’s intrusion into a field where he had no place, and after this there was no more hope for tapestry than for the other arts, and it rapidly sank to the point where the products of the Gobelins, Beauvais, and Aubussons looms were much admired.

If Gothic tapestry had possessed a pecuniary value easily translated into cash, or if it had been closely associated with the most sacred religious things, we should have preserved less than is actually the case. As it is, it was seldom the victim of cupidity or fanaticism, but by its very nature it was perishable, and therefore nearly all the work antedating the fifteenth century has vanished. Its greatest enemy, however, was the ignorant and vulgar culture of the nineteenth century, and during the first fifty years of this destructive epoch it melted rapidly away. Just before the outbreak of the French Revolution it is no exaggeration to say that there were in France alone enough tapestries to carpet a road from Paris to Arras; of course, many were of the Gobelins type and comparatively valueless as art, but every château, every cathedral and monastery, almost every church had its sets of “arras,” and these were of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries; the curious products of the Renaissance were confined to kings, princes, great nobles, and to their respective palaces. With 1793 the massacre began; everything feudal, even by implication, was burned, sometimes just out of pure deviltry, as when tapestries were consumed in heaps at the foot of the “Tree of Liberty”; sometimes through thrift, as when in 1797 the Directory burned at one time nearly two hundred ancient works of art to recover the gold and silver bullion--which they did at this one holocaust to the value of $13,000. Mr. G. L. Hunter has reckoned the value of these destroyed tapestries at about $2,500,000 in the market of to-day. At this rate, the current value of all the tapestries in France at the Revolution would have been about $250,000,000.

No appreciation of this value developed until nearly the end of the nineteenth century. In 1852 a set of ten, formerly belonging to Louis Philippe, with a total length of one hundred and twenty feet, sold for about $1,200, and at the same sale another set of six, running to eighty feet, was bought for $400. At present the intrinsic value of these wonderful creations is quite fully appreciated, and any one who can secure a fifteenth-century work for less than $300 a square yard is fortunate. And yet during the whole of the eighteenth century tapestries were ruthlessly cut up to form floor rugs, used for packing bales of merchandise, or, as at Angers, slashed into strips to protect the roots of orange-trees from the cold, or nailed on the stalls of the bishop’s stable so that the episcopal nags might not scar their precious flanks. This last outrage, by the way, was perpetrated on the unique series of the Apocalypse, a sequence of panels eighteen feet high with a total length of four hundred and seventy-two feet, woven in Paris about 1370 from designs by Jean de Bruges, court painter to the Emperor Charles V, for the use of the Duke of Anjou in his private chapel, and at a cost (in the money of to-day) of upward of $60,000. They had been given to the cathedral by King René in 1480, but by the beginning of the nineteenth century they were quite out of fashion and therefore useless; so until a rag merchant sufficiently accommodating could be found they were used as noted above and finally sold (the opportunity at last offering) in 1843 for $60, the purchaser ultimately returning them to the cathedral when some glimmerings of intelligence came back to the ecclesiastical authorities.

When this sort of thing was the rule in France and England and Germany for more than a century during which civilisation and culture were progressing with such notable rapidity, it is a miracle that anything has come down to us, particularly when you remember what the Calvinists and Sansculottes and Reformers did to monasteries and châteaux and entire cities in the two preceding centuries; but a good deal did so come down, including even the poor remains of the very much domesticated tapestries of Angers. There is only one other fourteenth-century set woven at Arras that can positively be identified, and that is the series now (or recently) in the cathedral of Tournai, though we know from wills and inventories that at the beginning of the fifteenth century they existed in hundreds. The remains of this early work are fine and strong in design, powerful as decoration, clear but faded in colour. With the fifteenth century there came an amazing advance, similar to the sudden appearance of the Van Eycks in painting at exactly the same moment. The “Burgundian Sacraments”--or what remains--now in the Metropolitan Museum as the gift of the late J. P. Morgan, is one of the finest examples in existence of this earliest of the great periods. Admirable as it is, it fails in perfection of beauty before the wonderful works of art that immediately followed. With the beginning of the fifteenth century tapestry weaving came suddenly to a level of supreme excellence that places it for a hundred years on a level with the other arts, however august they may be. Very few of these masterpieces remain in Belgium; you must search for them in Paris, in London, in Madrid, in New York, in the museums of all the world, but the search is rewarded by the discovery of an art that, however brief its day, was one of the great arts of the world.

Each art has its own medium of expression and to this medium it absolutely adheres in its periods of greatness, adapting itself to its limitations, working within them, and even making them tributary to its excellence. Limitations are, after all, the greatest gift of God to man instead of being, as the last century feigned, something that deplorably existed only to be transcended; without them man would revert to the condition of the jellyfish or the primal ooze of the depths of the sea; with them he has an opportunity to demonstrate his divine elements through a development that is both in spite of and because of the firm lines they draw that cannot be overpassed. One of the great things in art is its revelation of the possibility of spiritual achievement by and through the narrowest physical limitations. When, on the other hand, architecture tries to assimilate the peculiar methods of bridge building; when painting intrudes into the province of sculpture, literature, photography, or even music; when music becomes mathematical or takes to itself the habits of the circus performer; when sculpture deliquesces into a sloppy kind of black-and-white illustration; when stained glass and tapestry become pictorial; when, in fact, all the arts forsake their own provinces and deny their own limitations, as they have tended to do during the last century, splashing over, the one into the other, they cease to be arts at all and become unprofitable aberrations.

Only three great arts have come into existence during the last two thousand years--music, stained glass, and tapestry--and each developed its own exact and individual mode of expression. Music was as old as architecture, painting, sculpture, poetry, and the drama, but under the influences of Christianity it gradually transformed itself into what was almost a new art and one that has remained the only vital art through all the unfriendly influences of modern civilisation. Stained glass was an absolutely new art, taking its rise in the twelfth century, culminating in the thirteenth, decaying through the two following centuries, and entirely disappearing in the eighteenth century. It is an art of Christianity, of Frank genius, and of the Île de France. Tapestry is also a new art, beginning about 1350, culminating a century later, dying almost in a day (as a great art), about 1520. It also is Christian, but, unlike glass, it is primarily secular, and it is explicitly and almost exclusively Flemish, the great contribution of a distinguished race to the imperishable art of the world.

It was the glorification of a national industry--weaving--and is significant as showing how, under wholesome impulses and in a stimulating environment, a simple industry may be transfigured and made into art. Its medium was peculiarly delicate, subtle, and beautiful, threads of spun wool, silk and gold and silver woven by hand into a fixed warp of strung threads. These filaments of silk (as in the finest work) had peculiar qualities of beauty, combining both lustrousness and depth, while the colours being entirely vegetable dyes, with none of the harsh horrors of the analine by-products of coal-tar, were infinitely varied and of unique richness and soft splendour. Fortunately, this new artistic mode was developed sufficiently prior to the breakdown of art which was signalised by the career of a man in himself a very great artist--Raphael--to permit a full century of life, and at the hands of a people who had a peculiar appreciation of decoration and of decorative methods. The result was startling, for a new art was born and one of the most distinguished quality. As colour decoration the tapestries of Flanders come near being the very finest things in the world, although we must judge them from a few examples only, the admittedly greatest having long since fallen victims to greed, fanaticism, and the stolid ignorance of the eighteenth century. Fortunately for the general public, the remaining masterpieces are now widely scattered and may be studied with comparative ease, the Metropolitan Museum in New York being particularly rich and having, either in its own name or by loan, the Burgundian Sacraments, the matchless “Mazarin” Christ in Glory, the almost equally beautiful “Coronation of the Virgin,” as well as scores of others, many of them of supreme excellence.

It is as impossible to describe a tapestry in words as it is to do the same by a Chartres window. In point of composition the tapestries of the fifteenth century are matched only by the greatest pictures; even when they are crowded with figures there is the most masterly spacing of masses, the most consummate balance of form. When one realises that in every case the design is the work of the members of the guild and not of the more famous painters of the time, the wonder grows over the apparently universal feeling for the highest type of artistic expression. Compared with the best of the Flemish tapestries, the boasted and “much admired” composition of Raphael in the “Disputa” and the “School of Athens,” of Michael Angelo in the Sistine Chapel, is mathematical and academic. In line and line composition there is the same exquisite sensitiveness that is almost Greek or Japanese in its subtlety and rhythm, while the colour, though in many cases faded, is as pure and musical in its several tones as it is resonant and splendid in combination. And through all this consummate mastery and this supreme artistic sense run a peculiar charm and distinction that are found only in such unique products as the pictures of Jan van Eyck, Fra Angelico, the Lorenzetti, Carpaccio, and their kind. Through them you enter into a dim and golden fairyland full of wistful music and haunting memories, where fair ladies, courteous knights, delicate-winged angels, aureoled saints in blazing dalmatics pass like dreams through far countries, “where it is always afternoon” and where the land is always lovely, the skies serene, the flowers and birds and little beasts friendly and well beloved. Chretien de Troyes and the troubadours and the Court of Love, King Arthur and Roland and King René, Guenivere, and the gracious queens and gentle ladies of all the Middle Ages live again, or rather prolong their lives through a passive immortality into which whoever understands is welcome to enter and sit him down in peace.

XIV

ART IN THE RHINELAND

From Charlemagne’s ambitious centre at Aix-la-Chapelle the influence of a new culture went west rather than east, and it is not until the eleventh century that we can look for art of any sort along the valley of the Rhine and in the lands of old Lorraine. There was little enough elsewhere, but when, at the finger-touch of a new monasticism calling a new northern blood to action, civilisation began again in Normandy and then in the Île de France, its echo in the Rhineland was far and long delayed, and never more than an echo at most. There were bad kings until the second Crusade and the coming of the Cistercians in 1174, and little culture; but from then on there was a distinct spiritual revival, a new impulse in religion and in life, and as a result the output of art of all kinds was greatly increased. The three elements entering into the new architecture were: the revived tradition of the old work of the Carolings, much of which still existed in ruinous form, the new ideas brought home from Syria by the crusaders, and the infiltration of Lombard fashions from north Italy, with the Cistercian monks always exerting their austere and reforming influence toward simplicity.

Many of the earliest examples of this new work--at least the earliest now existing--are across the Rhine, in Thuringia and Saxony, and are outside our survey. Gernrode, Essen, Hildesheim, are all beyond our territory, but Cologne is this side the river and contains some of the most organic and best of the late tenth and early eleventh century work. Sta. Maria in Capitolio and St. Martin are both of that very peculiar type of plan that has an apse and apsidal transepts of equal size and semicircular in plan. The central tower is supported on four piers made up of groups of four, as at San Marco in Venice, and the apse and transepts are surrounded by ambulatories, the main walls being carried on columns, set rather close together and carrying round arches. It is an interesting and ingenious scheme, with great possibilities of development, though it has almost never been used elsewhere; probably it is of Syrian origin, the idea being brought home by early crusaders, though it may be Byzantine, in which case also it was probably derived from Antioch, where the crusaders found so much of value to them in the development of the later art of Europe. St. Martin’s has also a very beautiful tower with a high broach spire and admirably designed corner turrets. The composition of the church from the east, with its curving apsidal lines, its delicate little colonnades of Lombard form under the eaves, and the graceful yet powerful towers, is noble and dignified, and the whole building is far more organic and logically articulated than the bigger work of a century later farther up the Rhine.

The Church of the Apostles is nearer this later type and has its unfortunate agglomeration of ill-placed towers, but St. Gereon is _sui generis_; it can hardly be said to have any plan at all, for it is made up of a simple little aisleless church of three bays with a round apse and two small transept-like towers, joined on to an irregular decagon of a nave, somewhat elliptical in plan, with large niches in each of the eight lateral sides and a square porch or narthex at the west end. This anomalous “nave” is early thirteenth century it is true, while the eastern church is one hundred and fifty years older, but the Gothic work is on foundations undoubtedly Roman and takes the place of a structure of somewhat similar plan built by the Empress Helena. The sequence is curious; there was first a circular or elliptical Roman building, on the foundations of which the Empress Helena built her church, the crypt of which still remains, then the easterly choir was built by Archbishop Hanno late in the eleventh century, and finally the original main church was torn down and rebuilt on Gothic lines about 1225.

In nearly all the Romanesque churches of Cologne an attempt has been made to reproduce the original polychromatic decoration which once covered all portions of the masonry, but the results are not eminently satisfactory, for mechanical diaper and stencilling cannot take the place of the old work which was done freely and without exactness of line and spacing, while the colours and the medium used were quite different from what is employed to-day. There is no doubt that once every Gothic interior, now grey and sombre, or garish in its clean whitewash and mathematical jointing of painted lines, was entirely covered with the richest possible surface decoration in colours and gold, and the result must have been a gorgeousness and a gaiety of which we know nothing and that would probably shock our sensitive taste to the point of hysteria. One would like to see some great church with full colour decoration, but as matters now stand, with oil paint, stencils, coal-tar colours, and all that, the experiment could hardly be made with any degree of safety.

In Cologne also are many early, middle, and late Gothic churches; that of the Minorites, St. Severins, St. Panteleon, St. Andreas, St. Cunibert; in fact, Cologne is especially rich in churches of many styles and most of them remarkably good, but they are apt to be overlooked by the tourist who can see, and cares to see, only the overgrown grandeur of the cathedral. Farther up the Rhine we find a long succession of great churches which are characteristically German and well show the best the Teutonic genius was capable of under the highest impulse; Bonn, Coblentz, Mayence, Worms, and Spires are all huge structures and quite in a class by themselves. They are not beautiful by any stretch of courtesy; big they are and massive, with curious combinations of multiplied apses and transepts and towers, but they are without organic quality of any kind, their composition is diffuse and casual, their

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:

The record of this people, until the close of the fifth century, is
dim and discursive. Up to that time they were more like a firework
display than a people. They appear and disappear on the historic
horizon confusingly, the only unifying condition being a general
and most sacred sense of mission, the mission being the demolition
of the universe. The first head upon which history steadily
focusses its light is that of the great Clovis. He was lord of the
small Salian tribe in Batavia and sacked and plundered all around
him to such an extent that the other Frankish tribes who lived
along the Belgic rivers were smitten with admiration and flocked to
the standard of so virtuous a prince.... The pious Clovis was a
born diplomatist. He was a sanguinary Teuton, a cultured Roman, and
a Christian saint according to circumstances. He was great.

After clearing Gaul of the Burgundians and other Germans who still
barred his progress, and wiping out the Alemanni--those chronic
foes whom Rome had found invincible--Clovis listened to the prayers
of his Christian wife, Clotilde, and was baptised in Rheims
Cathedral by St. Remigius with three thousand of his devoted
Franks, who would probably have heard of it again had they made any
trouble about the matter. He does not seem, however, to have grown
any nicer or kinder on this account. St. Gregory of Tours, his
biographer and panegyrist, who was somewhat modestly endowed with
the sense of humour, tells us gravely that on one occasion, after
dismissing with prayer a synod of the Gallican Church, he quietly
proceeded to butcher all the Merovingian princes. Having pushed his
arms into France, he fixed on Paris as his royal seat; conquered
the Goths under Alaric, his only remaining rivals; and was
invested with purple tunic in St. Martin’s church at Tours.
Twenty-five years after his death the Emperor Justinian generously
bestowed on his sons the provinces of Gaul, which they already
possessed; and most gracefully absolved its inhabitants from their
allegiance to himself, which had only existed in his own august
imagination. Thus the French kingdom of the Merovingians, to the
generation succeeding Clovis, already included all Gaul from
western France to the Rhine and their suzerainty reached to the
Alps and beyond them.

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