"The evidence is abundant and positive, and is increasing upon us year by year, that the work done upon the fabrics of our churches, and the other work done in the beautifying of the interior of our churches, such as the woodcarving of our screens, the painting of the lovely [{470}] figures in the panels of those screens, the embroidery of the banners and vestments, the frescoes on the walls, the engraving of the monumental brasses, the stained glass in the windows, and all that vast aggregate of artistic achievements which existed in immense profusion in our village churches till the sixteenth century stripped them bare—all this was executed by local craftsmen. The evidence for this is accumulating upon us every year, as one antiquary after another succeeds in unearthing fragments of pre-Reformation church-wardens' accounts.
"We have actual contracts for church building and church repairing undertaken by village contractors. We have the cost of a rood screen paid to a village carpenter, of painting executed by local artists. We find the name of an artificer, described as aurifaber, or worker in gold and silver, living in a parish which could never have had five hundred inhabitants; we find the people in another place casting a new bell and making the mould for it themselves; we find the blacksmith of another place forging the iron work for the church door, or we get a payment entered for the carving of the bench ends in a little church five hundred years ago, which bench ends are to be seen in that church at the present moment. And we get fairly bewildered by the astonishing wealth of skill and artistic taste and aesthetic feeling which there must have been in this England of ours, in times which till lately we had assumed to be barbaric times. Bewildered, I say, because we cannot understand how it all came to a dead-stop in a single generation, not knowing that the frightful spoliation of our churches and other parish buildings, and the outrageous plunder of the parish gilds in the reign of Edward the Sixth by the horrible band of robbers that carried on their detestable work, effected such a hideous obliteration, such a clean sweep of the precious treasures that were dispersed in rich profusion over the whole land, that a dull despair of ever replacing what had been ruthlessly pillaged crushed the spirit of the whole nation, and art died out in rural England, and King Whitewash and Queen Ugliness ruled supreme for centuries."
My argument is that a century which produced such artist-artisans everywhere, had technical schools in great profusion, though they may not have been called by any such ambitious name.
HOW IT ALL STOPPED.
To most people it seems impossible to understand how it is that, if artistic evolution proceeded to the perfection which it now seems clear that it actually attained in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, we are only just getting back to a proper state of public taste and a right degree of artistic skill in many of these same accomplishments at the present time. That thought has come to many others who, knowing and appreciating medieval progress in art and literature, have tried to work out the reasons for the gap that exists between medieval art and modern artistic endeavor. Some of these explanations, because they serve to make clear why art evolution stopped so abruptly and we are retracing our steps and taking models from the past rather than doing original work that is an advance, must be quoted here. Many people will find in them, I think, the reasons for their misunderstanding of the old times.
Gerhardt Hauptmann, who is very well known, even among English-speaking people, as one of the great living German dramatists, and whose "Sunken Bell" attracted considerable attention in both its German and English versions here in New York, in a recent criticism of a new German book, declared that the reason for the gap between modern and medieval art was the movement now coming to be known as the religious revolt in Germany in the sixteenth century. He said:
"I, as a Protestant, have often had to regret that we purchased our freedom of conscience, our individual liberty, at entirely too high a price. In order to make room for a small, mean little plant of personal life, we destroyed a whole garden of fancy and hewed down a virgin forest of aesthetic ideas. We went even so far in the insanity of our weakness as to throw out of the garden of our souls the fruitful soil that had been accumulating for thousands of years, or else we plowed it under sterile clay.
"We have to-day, then, an intellectual culture that is well protected by a hedge of our personality, but within this hedge we have only delicate dwarf trees and unworthy plants, the poorer progeny of great predecessors. We have telegraph lines, bridges and railroads, but there grow no churches and cathedrals, only sentry boxes and barracks. We need gardeners who will cause the present sterilizing process of the soil to stop, and will enrich the surface by working up into it the rich layers beneath. In my work-room there is ever before me the photograph of Sebaldus' Tomb (model Metropolitan Museum, New York). This rich German symbol rose from the invisible in the most luxuriant developmental period of German art. As a formal product of that art, it is very difficult to appreciate it as it deserves. It seems to me as one of the most wonderful bits of work in the whole field of artistic accomplishment. The soul of all the great medieval period encircles this silver coffin, wrapping it up into a noble unity, and enthrones on the very summit of death. Life as a growing child. Such a work could only have come to its perfection in the protected spaces of the old Mother Church."
Rev. Dr. Jessopp, in his book, already cited, "The Great Pillage," does not hesitate to state in unmistakable terms the reason why all the beauty and happiness went out of English country life some two centuries after the Thirteenth Century, and how it came about that the modern generations have had to begin over again from the beginning, and not where our Catholic forefathers of the medieval period left us, in what used to be the despised Middle Ages. He says:
"When I talk of the great pillage, I mean that horrible and outrageous looting of our churches other than conventual, and the robbing of the people of this country of property in land and movables, which property had actually been inherited by them as members of those organized religious communities known as parishes. It is necessary to emphasize the fact that in the general scramble of the Terror under Henry the Eighth, and of the Anarchy in the days of Edward the Sixth, there was only one class that was permitted to retain any large portion of its endowments. The monasteries were plundered even to their very pots and pans. Almshouses in which old men and women were fed and clothed were robbed to the last pound, the poor alms-folk being turned out into the cold at an hour's warning to beg their bread. [{472}] Hospitals for the sick and needy, sometimes magnificently provided with nurses and chaplains, whose very raison d'etre was that they were to look after and care for those who were past caring for themselves—these were stripped of all their belongings, the inmates sent out to hobble into some convenient dry ditch to lie down and die in, or to crawl into some barn or hovel, there to be tended, not without fear of consequences, by some kindly man or woman who could not bear to see a suffering fellow creature drop down and die at their own doorposts.
"We talk with a great deal of indignation of the Tweed ring. The day will come when someone will write the story of two other rings—the ring of the miscreants who robbed the monasteries in the reign of Henry the Eighth was the first; but the ring of the robbers who robbed the poor and helpless in the reign of Edward the Sixth was ten times worse than the first.
"The Universities only just escaped the general confiscation; the friendly societies and benefit clubs and the gilds did not escape. The accumulated wealth of centuries, their houses and lands, their money, their vessels of silver and their vessels of gold, their ancient cups and goblets and salvers, even to their very chairs and tables, were all set down in inventories and catalogues, and all swept into the great robbers' hoard. Last, but not least, the immense treasures in the churches, the joy and boast of every man and woman and child in England, who day by day and week by week assembled to worship in the old houses of God which they and their fathers had built, and whose every vestment and chalice and candlestick and banner, organs and bells, and picture and image and altar and shrine they looked upon as their own and part of their birthright—all these were torn away by the rudest spoilers, carted off, they knew not whither, with jeers and scoffs and ribald shoutings, while none dared raise a hand or let his voice be heard above the whisper of a prayer of bitter grief and agony.
"One class was spared. The clergy of this Church of England of ours managed to retain some of their endowments; but if the boy king had lived another three years, there is good reason for believing that these too would have gone."
Graft prevailed, and the old order disappeared in a slough of selfishness.