Four months ago the ruin already was irreparable, and since then bombardments have been frequent and merciless, nor has the enemy as yet been driven beyond the range of gun-fire. Whether even the shattered and crumbling fabric—wherefrom all carving, all detail, all glass, all sculpture has been burned and blasted away—survives in the end, none can foretell; but one thing is sure, and that is that no “restoration” must ever be attempted. If enough remains so that careful hands may preserve it from disintegration and make it available for the worship of God, well and good, so long as no imitations, whether in stone or metal or glass, are intruded to mock its vanished glory and obliterate for future generations the record of an indelible crime. For seven centuries its beauty and its perfection have spoken to succeeding generations, each less willing to listen than the last. In its ruin and its devastation it will speak more clearly and to more willing ears, than in any pretentious rehabilitation.
To the sordid wickedness of its destruction has been added the insult of Prussian promises of complete restoration—a catastrophe that would crown the first with a greater and more contemptible indignity. Instead, let Reims remain as it is left, and then, in Paris, let France, regenerated and redeemed, as already has gloriously happened, make for ever visible her restoration, through blood and suffering, to her old ideals, by carrying out her vow to build in honour of Ste. Jeanne d’Arc a great new church, raise a new Reims, like the old in plan and form and dimensions. Not a copy, but a revival, with the old ideals, the old motives, the old self-consecration; different, as the new must differ from the old, but akin in spirit and in truth.
If one only knew how to interpret it, there is some mysterious significance in the centring of the war of the world around Reims and in the persistent and successful efforts of the Prussians to raze it to the ground. Seven centuries ago the mystics of St. Victor would have read the riddle, but for too long now we have been out of temper with symbolism and too averse to the acceptance of signs and portents to be able to see even dimly the correspondences and the significance of those human happenings that are actually outside human control. In a way Reims was the ancient heart of France, as Paris is not, and it always was a sacred city above all others—and sacred it is now as never before. It was here that the Christianising of the Franks was sealed by the baptism of Clovis, A. D. 496, by St. Remi, the canonised bishop who occupied the see for seventy-five years. The crowning of kings (every sovereign but four for a period of fifteen hundred years came here for his coronation), the assembling of great councils of the Church, the beneficent activities of universities and schools of philosophy were all commonplaces of the life of the city, while it was here that Ste. Jeanne d’Arc finally discomfited the English and led her King to his crowning in the church that is now destroyed.
Time and again the city has been devastated, from the Vandals of 392 to those of 1914. During the Revolution its churches suffered bitterly; the cathedral and St. Remi, until then, were rich with unnumbered shrines, altars, statues, tombs, while cloisters and religious buildings of many kinds surrounded them on all sides. All this wealth of hoarded art that expressed the piety and culture of centuries was swept away, even to the sacred ampulla of holy oil, piously believed to have been brought by a dove for the consecration of Clovis and ever after miraculously replenished for each succeeding coronation. To this irreparable devastation was added the indignity of official “restoration,” though in the case of the cathedral at the able and scrupulous hands of Viollet-le-Duc, and in the nineteenth century the picturesque and beautiful old streets gave place to boulevards and a general Hausmanising on approved Parisian lines, so that in 1914 the city had become dull and somewhat pretentious, framing the two priceless jewels, the Church of Our Lady of Reims and that of the holy St. Remi.
All is now gone, the glorious and the insignificant alike overwhelmed in indiscriminating ruin. The glass and the statues that had survived war, revolution, and stupidity are shattered in fragments, the roofs consumed by fire, the vaults burst asunder, the carved stones calcined and flaking hourly in a dreary rain on blood-stained pavements where a hundred kings have trod and into deserted streets that have echoed to the footsteps of threescore generations. The city has passed; deleta est Carthago, but it has left a memory, a tradition, and an inspiration that may yet play a greater part in the rebuilding of civilisation than could have been achieved by its remaining monuments as they stood making their unheeded appeal on the day the first shell was fired from the Prussian batteries on the eastern hills.
The tendency I have spoken of which showed itself in Amiens, the breaking up of the mediæval integrity and a consequent inclination toward undue emphasis on structural and intellectual arrogance, never went very far because of the ill days that fell on France. The victory of the French crown over the Papacy, with the resulting transfer of the Holy See to Avignon, was the ruin of Catholic civilisation in France, as well as in Italy and the rest of Christendom. The Church became subservient to the state and progressively corrupt in root and branch. The wars with England resulted in nothing less than ruin, and culture and art came to an end. By 1370 building had become thin, poor, uninspired, and yet, within the next ten years flamboyant architecture appeared, and the fifteenth century opened with a sudden burst of artistic splendour. Heaven knows what it all means; France was at her lowest depth, and yet, without warning, a regeneration took place. The Blessed Jeanne d’Arc appears like a miraculous vision, Orleans is saved, the rightful king is crowned, and though the martyrdom of the saviour of France takes place in 1430, the English are driven out in 1456, and a new day begins.
Was Jeanne d’Arc a single manifestation of a new spirit that had entered society, or was this itself a continuation of what she had initiated under God? The answer does not really matter, the important fact is that a great regeneration took place, and a new type of art followed in its wake. Now the tendency was away from the proud efficiency of a glorified architectural engineering and toward the other element in architecture, beauty of form and splendour of ornament. It was almost as though the French had turned to religion and beauty as their only refuge from the miseries of their estate. In the very first years of the fifteenth century, at the darkest hours of France, Notre Dame de l’Epine, close by Châlons on the Marne, was built in 1419. Caudebec in 1426, St. Maclou, Rouen, in 1432, and after these for more than a century France abandoned herself to the creation of works of architectural art that, whatever they may lack of the splendid consistency and the divine serenity of the thirteenth century, are nevertheless amongst the loveliest works of man. Beauvais is an admirable example of the two tendencies; begun in 1225, its impossible choir was finished in 1272, only to collapse twelve years later, paying the penalty of its structural arrogance. For forty years it was in process of reconstruction, after a more conservative fashion though of its original dimensions, and in 1500 the transepts were begun and finished fifty years later. In beauty and in an almost riotous richness, they are the crowning work of this phase of design, while the choir itself, with its marvellously articulated system of buttresses, is a creation of sheer architectural power almost unrivalled. Ambitious and defiant, the canons now, in 1550, reared a vast spire over the crossing, nearly 450 feet high, and of the same sumptuous design as the transepts. The whole stupendous erection fell twenty-five years later, and has never been rebuilt, while the nave was never even begun; so Beauvais remains a vast fragment, and a living commentary on the excesses and the penalties of that pride of life that succeeded to the spiritual humility of the Middle Ages.
The new style, however, was perfectly adapted to the new life of secular supremacy, and, with few exceptions, both here in eastern France and in Flanders and Brabant and the Netherlands, the great civic monuments and the innumerable châteaux of an expanding and ripening society are couched in its beautiful and elaborate terms. Essentially it is a mode of ornament, containing no new element in organism, but always beautiful and, in France at all events, marked always by delicate and admirable taste. With its flame-like tracery, its complicated pinnacles, its scaffoldings of intricate latticework; with its curved and aspiring lines, glimmering niches, pierced parapets, open-work spires, and its tangled foliage, dainty filigree-work and sculptured lace, it is a marvel of imagination, dramatic sense, and consummate craftsmanship. Sometimes it is strikingly competent in its composition, as in the transepts of Beauvais and the front of Troyes, the latter being in its unfulfilled promise (it is only a beginning) one of the great façades of France, but frequently its greatest weakness is forgetfulness of consistency in a passion for beauty of line and light and shade that became almost insane. With the beginning of the sixteenth century the new art began slowly to decay in ecclesiastical buildings, but it continued for at least another hundred years in châteaux and civic work, and it is this in particular that is now disappearing through a war waged by unprecedented methods and in accordance with principles (if we may call them such) which hitherto have been found associated only with barbarian invasions or the frenzies of a mad anarchy that has called itself Revolution.
For the more distinguished châteaux we must go outside our chosen field, to the Loire, Touraine, or to other parts of France where the devastation of past wars and revolutions is less complete. There is Pierrefonds, of course, if one cares for that sort of thing, but of authentic castles of the sixteenth century there are few of notable quality, though many minor farms and manors still remained in August, 1914. Ecouen and Chantilly are exceptions, and the latter, given to the nation by the Duc d’Aumale when he was exiled by the republic for the crime of belonging to the legitimate line of kings, is a good example of the princely buildings of the Renaissance when the last fires of Gothic spirit were dying away.
It is not so long ago that half the towns in France between the Seine and the Belgian frontier were threaded by wonderful little streets of stone-built and half-timber houses three centuries old, and bright with squares and market-places framed in old architecture of Francis I and Henri II. Their quaint and delicate beauty was too much for the nineteenth century, however, which revolted against an old art as it revolted against an old culture and an older religion, so nearly all are gone, their place being taken by substitutes, the destruction of which could hardly be counted against the Prussians for unrighteousness, if one considered æsthetic questions alone, which is, fortunately, impossible. For these dim old streets and sunny silent squares one could, until a few months ago, go confidently across the border, finding in Flanders, Brabant, Liége, and Luxembourg relief from the appalling sophistication that had taken possession of the old cities of Champagne. Even in France, until last year, were Douai, Pont-à-Mousson, Meaux, and of course Arras, though now of some of these worse than nothing remains. In the latter city was once, also, a particularly splendid example of those great civic halls that showed forth the pride and the independence of the industrial cities of the later Middle Ages, and another stood in Douai. As Flanders and Brabant are, however, the chosen places for this particular manifestation of an industrial civilisation, so different to our own in spirit and in expression, we may include them therewith, where they racially and historically belong; and having followed the development of an essentially religious art in France from Jumièges to Beauvais, note its translation in later years into civic forms, in the little and heroic Kingdom with so great and heroic a history, now and for many months shut off from the world still free, by the veil of smoke and poisoned gases.