BEAUVAIS
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.