Certainly the hapless Catholics have no luck when once they try to meddle with what they do not understand; their incurable lack of artistic sense is once more displayed in this attempt over which the whole world of art and letters is laughing in their sleeve.
"Then is there nothing, absolutely nothing, to the credit side for the Church?" exclaimed Durtal. "And yet some attempts at ascetic art have been made in this century. A few years since, the Benedictine House at Beuron, in Bavaria, tried to revive ecclesiastical art"; and Durtal remembered having looked through some reproductions of mural frescoes painted by these monks in a tower at Monte Cassino.
These frescoes had gone back to the types of Assyria and Egypt, with their crowned gods, their sphynx-headed angels having fan-shaped wings behind their heads, their
old men with plaited beards playing on stringed instruments; and then the Friars of Beuron had given up this hieratic style, in which, it must be owned, they succeeded but ill, and in certain later works—especially in a volume of the Way of the Cross, published at Freiburg in Breisgau—they had adopted a strange medley of other styles.
The Roman soldiers who figured in those pages were huge firemen, a bequest from the schools of Guérin and David; and then, unexpectedly, in certain plates where the Magdalen and the Holy women appeared, a younger spirit seemed to prevail among the commonplace groups—Greek female types derived from the Renaissance, pretty and elegant, evidently imported from the works of the pre-Raphaelites, and strongly recalling Walter Crane's illustrations.
Thus the ideal at Beuron had developed into an alloy of the French art of the First Empire and contemporary English work.
Some of these compositions were all but laughable, that of the Ninth Station, to mention one: Christ lying at full length on His face, and being pulled up by a rope tied to His bound hands; it looked as if He were learning to swim. Still, but for feeble and vulgar incidents, clumsy and obvious details, what strange scenes suddenly rose before his mind, distinct from the mass: Veronica on her knees before Jesus, was really distracted with grief, really fine; the borrowed or copied figures of the other persons represented disappeared; even in the least original of these compositions the coarse, unsatisfactory utterances of these monks spoke an almost eloquent language; and this because intense faith and fervour lurked in the work. A breath had passed over those faces, and they were alive; the emotion, the voice of prayer, was felt in the silence of this conventional crowd. This Way of the Cross was matchless from this point of view: Monastic piety had introduced an unexpected element, giving evidence of the mysterious power it has at its command, infusing a personal emotion, a peculiar aroma, into a work which, without it, would never indeed have existed. These Benedictines had suggested the sensation of kneeling worship and the very fragrance of the Gospel, as artists of wider scope had failed in doing.
Their attempt, however, had begotten no following, and
at this day the school is almost dead, producing nothing but feeble prints for old women designed by the lay-brothers.
How, indeed, could it have been anything but still-born? The idea of doing for the West what Manuel Pauselinos did for the East, of eliminating study from nature, imposing an uniform ritual of colour and line, of compelling every artistic temperament to squeeze itself into the same mould, shows an absolute misapprehension of art in the mind of the man who attempted it. The system was bound to end in ankylosis, in the paralysis of painting, and this, in fact, was the result.