During the Hundred Years’ War sculpture in France froze into a sometimes pleasing but never very profitable convention; now and then it had great loveliness, as in the statues of the church at Brou, but generally it had those qualities of exaggeration, affectation, and insincerity to which I already have referred. Technically, it was always very perfect and sometimes the decorative design and the manipulation of the marble were almost Japanese in their curious delicacy. Toward the end of the century there is an improvement owing to the influence of Flanders, then prosperous and cultured while so much of the rest of Europe was spiritually and physically devastated by wars, but this later work seemed the particular detestation of the reformers, and mostly it is gone, particularly in the land of its origin, where reform followed by revolution left nothing intact that could be mutilated. Little of the work of the two great schools of Tournai and Burgundy remains, but there is enough to show that if the torch of sculptural art had passed in blood and flame from the hands of France, it had been seized by the men of the Netherlands and carried on for two centuries at least with little diminution in its radiance. With the seventeenth century the flame was suddenly extinguished and afterward was nothing but that type of baroque absurdity that still disgraces the undevastated churches with preposterous marble screens and loud-mouthed, theatrical pulpits, and prancing images of heroic size stuck on the columns of nave and choir.
What the seventeenth century failed to accomplish in the line of these atrocities is scarcely worth doing; the grotesque insanity of the confessionals and pulpits and other woodwork of the time passes imagination, and is matched only by the misdirected ingenuity and facility of it all. The cathedral in Brussels; St. André at Antwerp; St. Martin, Ypres; St. Pierre, Louvain, were particularly hard hit, but there were few churches that did not boast at least a pulpit in a style of design that would have looked like a king’s coach of state had it not more closely resembled a bandwagon. St. Gudule in Brussels suffered most of all, for it not only possesses a peculiarly irritating pulpit of most ridiculous design but its columns are disfigured by the impossible statues on grotesque brackets, while it is disgraced by some of the very worst stained glass produced before the last quarter of the nineteenth century, when all past records were revised.
When one compares the tawdry horrors that in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries blotted almost every church in Flanders and Brabant, and compares it, not with the consummate sculpture and decoration of the great era but even with such work of the undoubted decadence as the screens of Louvain and Lierre, the impossible gulf between the two civilisations becomes peculiarly conspicuous. When one realises further that the black-and-white-marble mortuary horrors in the way of screens in Bruges, Antwerp, and Ghent exist at the expense of such works of real, if unguarded, art as the screen at Lierre, destroyed to give place to their perfumed artifice, the annihilation of art that has followed its production with implacable steps takes on a new poignancy, and the continued destruction, now violently in process, becomes even less endurable than before.
XIII
THE ALLIED ARTS
THE debt of Europe to the region we are considering is as great in the case of the so-called “minor arts” as it is elsewhere. Even the language preserves the record: Arras has given its name to the tapestries for which it was famous, linen woven in regular patterns is called diaper, or “linge d’Ypres,” cambric is simply the product of Cambrai, gauntlet preserves the fame of Ghent for its gloves, while the lost city of Dinant was once so famous for its work in copper, brass, bronze, and gilded metal that during the Middle Ages all products of this kind were called dinanderie. Tapestry weaving is, or was, an art essentially Flemish; illumination, if shared with Italy and in a measure every land where there were monks and monasteries, reached peculiarly notable heights in Flanders, Brabant, and Champagne; the casting of bells and the forming of them into carillons is peculiarly the province of this region, while metal work, whether of gold and silver, or of bronze and copper and brass, was an art of distinction even from the time of Charlemagne.
It was he that was primarily responsible for the beginnings of many of these admirable arts. From his capital at Aix, where he had gathered all the art and learning he could glean from western Europe, went out the influences that persisted long beyond his day and that of his ill-fortuned dynasty. The Scandinavian tribes and the Celts of Gaul had always been craftsmen in metals, particularly bronze, and Charlemagne used them under the direction of his Roman and Byzantine artificers, developing an art that was neither one nor the other, but a new Christian mode of expression. When toward the close of the tenth century the young Princess Theophano came from the Bosporus as the bride of Otho II, she brought with her other artists, with a treasure of Byzantine craftsmanship in weaving, metals, enamels, and ivory carving; and a new impulse was given, so that, under the direction of a crescent Christianity, a local and racial art developed along many lines and extended itself through the whole region and into France, Normandy, England, and Germany as well. From Aix, Archbishop Willigis and Bishop Bernward carried into Germany the art of metal working as they had learned it, one to Mainz, the other to Hildesheim, where their works still remain. To Dinant, Huy, and Liége the same impulse was given that later extended through Brabant and Flanders. In France the beginnings seem to have been at the hands of St. Eloi at Limoges and Abbot Suger of St. Denis, but it was all within the area to which our attention is confined.
From the time of Charlemagne the production of works of art in precious and common metals was an ever-increasing industry, lapsing during the second Dark Ages, beginning with new and unexampled vigour with the great religious revival of the first years of the eleventh century. It is impossible to form an adequate estimate either of the magnitude of the product or the degree of concrete beauty that came in these many lines of art out of the Middle Ages. For five hundred years craftsmen were busy over all that is now Rhenish Prussia, Holland, Belgium, France, and England, with the Scandinavian countries, Italy, and Spain in only a less degree, in producing an infinite number of exquisite things for an infinite number of churches; metal work of every kind and for every conceivable purpose—sacred vessels, crosses, crosiers, reliquaries, shrines, tombs, and screens; woven tapestries to hang the walls of châteaux and cathedrals; embroidered and jewelled vestments for an unending series of bishops, priests, altars; illuminated volumes whose every vellum page was a work of art and whose bindings were studded with jewels; carved wood and ivory in endless designs and for endless purposes; stained glass, enamels, tiles. Every church, abbey, and cathedral was by the beginning of the Hundred Years’ War as full of works of consummate art as the private museum of a modern millionaire, and were you to gather together the treasures of ecclesiastical crafts in the Cluny, the Victoria and Albert Museum, and the Metropolitan in New York you might have about as much as at that time might have been found in a provincial cathedral of the second class or a minor monastery. In France the sculpture has been largely, and the glass partially, saved; in Flanders many of the pictures; in England a good proportion of the churches themselves, but the rest is gone, utterly and irrevocably, and we can hardly more than dimly imagine from a Gloucester candlestick, an Ascoli cope, a Shrine of St. Sebald the nature of what has been taken from us.
Even from the first these things had three qualities that argued against their preservation, the world being what it is. They were intrinsically valuable because of their bronze and silver and gold and precious gems; therefore in the wars that followed the cresting of mediævalism they were stolen wholesale by one army after another and their jewels plucked out, and then they were broken up, melted down, and returned to their original estate of lumps of bullion, or dead metal, all of which had its price. They were the most sacred material things possessed by the Church that had created them; part and parcel of the Catholic sacraments, memorials of the honoured dead, caskets for the reverent treasuring of the relics of the saints; therefore they were the particular object of the blind and furious hatred of Protestants, whether Huguenots, Calvinists, Presbyterians, or, in a less degree, Lutherans. They were Gothic in their inimitable art, hence anathema to the bewigged bishops, the worldly priests, and, most dangerous of all, the conceited canons of the eighteenth century. What the thief overlooked the fanatic destroyed, and what he forgot the ignorant and vulgar amateur purged away to make place for imitation marble and secular frippery. After four centuries of this it is a wonder that anything remains, and, to tell the truth, there is little enough.
Nevertheless, it is surprising how much of this was still in our chosen territory in 1914, and how much that is in museums elsewhere came originally from the same place. Liége had its extraordinary bronze font, Hal a font, a lectern, and many other treasures of late Gothic and early Renaissance art; Louvain, Tirlemont, Xanten, Aix, and Trèves each had a few pieces of metal work of immense artistic value, while in Bruges, Ghent, Brussels, and Antwerp, in Laon, Noyon, Sens, and Reims were a few miraculously preserved shrines, tapestries, vestments, and sacred vessels. As for the treasures of the European and American museums, the greater part came from Flanders, Brabant, the Rhineland, or eastern France, for this was the great centre of industry, the fountainhead of artistic inspiration. Of the “dinanderie” that owed its existence to the influence of the four great leaders, St. Eloi, St. Willigis, Abbot Suger, and Bishop Bernward, absolutely nothing remains except the fine group of bronze masterpieces by the last at Hildesheim. Liége had, however, the extremely important bronze font made by Regnier of Huy about 1112, and Lille possessed a censer of his workmanship, while in Maastricht was a great shrine of gilded and enamelled copper set with precious stones; the Convent of Notre Dame at Namur and the church of Walcourt had no less than eighteen specimens of the handicraft of Brother Hugh of the great but long ago destroyed Abbey at Oignies between the Meuse and the Sambre, representing the art of a century later, while later still we had the “Chasse de Notre Dame” and the reliquary of St. Eleutherus at Tournai, and the shrine of St. Gertrude of Nivelles made in 1272. Of the vast product of the fourteenth century there are a few fragments only, an eagle lectern and a great paschal candlestick at Tongres, some crosses, reliquaries, monstrances, and candlesticks at Aix, Tongres, Furnes, Mainz, Xanten, Bruges, and Ghent, but, fortunately it would now seem, the greater part of what remains is preserved in the museums of Paris and London and therefore safe for another period. Outside the museums the great treasures were to be found at Sens and Laon, the latter being particularly rich, as is proved by the fact that the cathedral is said to contain no less than eighty reliquaries covering the whole