"Most wonderful of all amongst a horde of smaller statues, a mutilated fragment of a statue of Our Lady and the Holy Child, so consummate in its faultless art that it deserves a place with the masterpieces of sculpture of every age and race. Here in this dim and scanty undercraft is an epitome of the English art of four centuries, precious and beautiful beyond the power of words to describe.
"York Abbey was a national monument, the aesthetic and historic value of which was beyond computation. It is with feelings of horror and unutterable dismay that, as we stand beside the few existing fragments, realizing the irreparable loss they make so clear, we call into mind Henry's sacrilege in the sixteenth century, and his silly palace doomed to instant destruction, and the crass ignorance and stolidity of the eighteenth century with its grants of building material, and the mercenary savagery of the nineteenth century when, from smoking lime kilns rose into the air the vanishing ghosts of the noblest creations that owed their existence to man.
"Nothing is sadder to realize than the failure of appreciation for art of the early nineteenth and the eighteenth century. Men had lost, apparently, all proper realization of the value of artistic effort and achievement. It was an era of travel and commerce and, unfortunately, of industrial development. As a consequence, in many parts of Europe, and especially of England, art remains of inestimable value suffered at the hands of utilitarians who found them of use in their enterprises. We are accustomed to rail against the barbarians and the Turks for their failure to appreciate the remains of Latin and Greek art and for their wanton destruction of them, but what shall we say of modern Englishmen, who quite as ruthlessly destroyed objects of art of equal value at least with Roman and Greek, while the great body of the nation made no complaint, and no protest was heard anywhere in the kingdom."
What is so true of the arts is, as might be reasonably expected, quite as true of other phases of intellectual development. Education, for instance, is at the lowest ebb that it has reached since the foundation of the Universities at the end of the twelfth century. In Germany, there was only one university, that of Göttingen, in which there was a professorship of Greek. When Winckelmann introduced the study of Greek into his school at Seehausen, no school-books for this language were available, and he was obliged to write out texts for his students. What was the case in Germany was also true, to a great [{484}] degree, of the rest of Europe. Leading French critics ridiculed the Greek authors. Homer was considered a ballad singer and compared to the street singers of Paris. Voltaire thought that the AEneid of Virgil was superior to all that the Greek writers had ever done. No edition of Plato had been published in Europe since the end of the sixteenth century. Other Greek authors were almost as much neglected, and of true scholarship there was very little. When Cardinal Newman, in his Idea of a University, wants to find the lowest possible term of comparison for the intellectual life of the university, he takes the English universities of the middle of the eighteenth century.
With this neglect of education, and above all of the influence that Greek has always had in chastening and perfecting taste, it is not surprising that literature was in every country of Europe at a very low ebb. It was not so feeble as art, but the two are interdependent, much more than is usually thought. Only France has anything to show in literature that has had an enduring influence in the subsequent centuries. When we compare the French literature of the eighteenth with that of the seventeenth century, however, it is easy to see how much of a descent there has been from Corneille, Racine, Moliêre, Boileau, La Fontaine, Bossuet, Bourdaloue, and Fénelon to Voltaire, Marivaux, Lesage, Diderot, and Bernardin de St. Pierre. This same decadence of literature can be noted even more strikingly in England, in Spain, and in Italy. The seventeenth, especially the first half of it, saw the origin of some of the greatest works of modern literature. The eighteenth century produced practically nothing that was to live and be a vital force in aftertimes.
What is true in art, letters and education is, above all, true in what men did for liberty and for their fellow-men. Hospital organization and the care of the ailing was at its lowest ebb during the eighteenth century. Jacobson, the German historian of the hospitals, says: [Footnote 36]
[Footnote 36: Beiträge zur Geschichte des Krankencomforts. Deutsche Krankenpflege Zeitung, 1898, in 4 parts.]
"It is a remarkable fact that attention to the well-being of the sick, improvements in hospitals and institutions generally and to details of nursing care, had a period of complete and lasting stagnation after the middle of the seventeenth century, or from the close of the Thirty Years' War. Neither officials nor physicians took any interest in the elevation of nursing or improving the conditions of hospitals. During the first two-thirds of the eighteenth century, nothing was done to bring either construction or nursing to a better state. Solely among the religious orders did nursing remain an interest, and some remnants of technique survive. The result was that, in this period, the general level of nursing fell far below that of earlier periods. The hospitals of cities were like prisons, with bare, undecorated walls and little dark rooms, small windows where no sun could enter, and dismal wards where fifty or one hundred patients were crowded together, deprived of all comforts and even of necessaries. In the municipal and state institutions of this period, the beautiful gardens, roomy halls, and [{485}] springs of water of the old cloister hospital of the Middle Ages were not heard of, still less the comforts of their friendly interiors."
As might be expected, with the hospitals so badly organized, the art of nursing was in a decay that is almost unutterable. Miss Nutting, of Johns Hopkins Hospital, the Superintendent of Nurses, and Miss Dock, the Secretary of the International Council of Nurses, have in their History of Nursing a chapter on the Dark Period of Nursing, in which the decadence of the eighteenth century, in what regards the training of nurses for the intelligent care of the sick, is brought out very clearly. They say: [Footnote 37]
[Footnote 37: A History of Nursing, by M. Adelaide Nutting and Lavinia L. Dock, in two volumes, illustrated. G. P. Putnam's Sons, New York, 1907.]
"It is commonly agreed that the darkest known period in the history of nursing was that from the latter part of the seventeenth up to the middle of the nineteenth century. During the time, the condition of the nursing art, the well-being of the patient, and the status of the nurse, all sank to an indescribable level of degradation."
Taine, in his History of the Old Regimé of France, has told the awful story of the attitude of the so-called better classes toward the poor. While conditions were at their worst in France, every country in Europe saw something of the same thing. In certain parts of Germany conditions were, if possible, worse. It is no wonder that the French Revolution came at the end of the eighteenth century, and that a series of further revolutions during the nineteenth century were required to win back some of the rights which men had gained for themselves in earlier centuries and then lost, sinking into a state of decadence out of which we are only emerging, though in most countries we have not reached quite the level of human liberty and, above all, of Christian democracy that our forefathers had secured seven centuries ago.