Heart of Europe

by Ralph Adams Cram

FIFTEENTH-CENTURY FLEMISH TAPESTRY

period of the Middle Ages. So far as monumental tombs are concerned, every church in France has been swept clear, chiefly by the Revolutionists, not one of the marvellous collections at St. Denis and Reims remaining, but in Bruges we still have the fine tomb of Mary of Burgundy, of black marble encased in a foliated tracery of gilded copper and coloured enamels.

In the bourdons of France and the carillons of the Low Countries the art of the metal-worker combines with that of music. Both the carillon and the English peal are late developments, the first of the sixteenth, the second of the seventeenth century, but from the beginning of the thirteenth century great bells, used singly or in small combinations, were in constant use. Most of the latter are gone, melted down in the Hundred Years’ War and the Revolution in France, and the wars of religion in the Rhineland and the Low Countries, though a few remain at Amiens, Sens, Metz, and Beauvais, with one weighing over a ton which hung at Reims until last year. The carillons of Belgium and Holland were intact until that time, though many have now fallen with the splendid towers that held them. Arras is gone and probably Dunkerque; Louvain and Ypres are gone and possibly Mons; Malines, most beautiful of all, has been battered to pieces and its forty-five bells have been cracked, melted, hurled in ruin down through the many stories of the great tower. Time after time during the last generation from twenty thousand to forty thousand people have assembled to hear these bells rung by M. Denyn, the greatest master of the art, but they will hear them no more until, perhaps, when the world is made new the bells of Malines may ring out again to welcome the dawn of a better day.

Whether the English peal of an octave, with the bells attuned to the intervals of the diatonic scale, and swung by hand, a man to each rope, in accordance with the most intricate mathematical formulas and without recognised melodies, is better or worse art than the carillon of thirty-five to fifty-two bells, covering sometimes four octaves and a half, in accord with the chromatic scale, fixed in their head-stocks and struck by hammers manipulated by one man sitting before a keyboard, and reproducing the most elaborate musical compositions, is no part of the argument. Each has its place, each is a mode of musical art, and just because one may like the strange and subtle variations of an English peal thundering out its vibrant tones from great bells swinging and clashing in a grey old tower, it does not follow that he must reject the floating and ethereal harmonies of the Belgian carillon pouring into the still evening air strange melodies that are eternally haunting in their poignant appeal. They are silent now, even those that still hang in their tall towers, and the roar of giant artillery, splitting and harshly reverberating, has taken their place. In the good beginnings iron was anathema and might not be used in the service of the Church; bronze alone was tolerable. Now iron is king and holds dominion over the world, transmuted into steel through the offices of its ally, coal. Bronze is rejected, shattered, dethroned, but some of the great bells yet remain, hanging silent and patient while hell rages around them and iron asserts its universal dominion. Perhaps by and by they will give tongue again, proclaiming the end of the iron age, calling in once more a better and more righteous sovereignty.

Some day the world will awaken to the fact that there are other great arts besides architecture, painting, and sculpture; already there is a suspicion abroad that music, poetry, and the drama are arts also and not merely vehicles for the expression of temperament, and there is even a preliminary waking of the subconsciousness which threatens to confess that ritual and ceremonial have been, and may be again, a great fine art in the same sense. Little by little the pharisaic phrase, “industrial art,” is yielding some of its component parts and offering them to the very superior haute noblesse of fine art, and amongst these are stained glass and tapestry. The recent discovery of the existence of Chartres Cathedral and its glass has settled one point, and much against their will the artist and the amateur and the commentator have had to admit that the art of these windows, and of those at Bourges and Le Mans and Angers, is of the highest, and quite in the class of the painters of Italy and Flanders, the sculptors of France and England (in the Middle Ages), and the master builders from Laon to Amiens.

Of this particularly glorious art, which has become more completely a lost art than any other ever revealed to man, there is little in the region under consideration. It did not issue from the Heart of Europe, but had its beginnings elsewhere and its culmination as well. It was an art of the twelfth and thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, degenerating rapidly after the year 1300, and, while the churches and abbeys and cathedrals between the Seine and the Somme were once splendid with glass that almost rivalled that of Chartres, the Reformation and the Revolution had seen to it that the major part of this glory had been made to depart. Amiens retains a little in its chevet chapels, and Reims only a year ago was blazing with an apocalyptic splendour that is now transformed into gaping and fire-swept openings, laced by distorted metal bars, and heaps of pulverised refuse ground into the blood and ashes on shattered pavements. Whatever the Low Countries may have had is long since gone the way of all the other beautiful things the Calvinists did not like and only fragments, imitations, and Renaissance absurdities remain.

With the other great art, that of tapestry, the case is fortunately different. This was almost the intimate art of the Heart of Europe, finding its beginnings in Aix when the Greek princess brought with her from the East the first examples of Byzantine needlework and weaving that had been seen in the West in her day, and going on to new glories in Arras, Brussels, Tournai, Audenaarde, Lille, Enghien. The perfection of tapestry weaving came in the last half of the fifteenth century, but the advance was regular for a century before, and if we can judge from the few examples left the work of the fourteenth century had many fine and powerful qualities that were all its own. The collapse came suddenly, early in the sixteenth century, being marked by Raphael’s intrusion into a field where he had no place, and after this there was no more hope for tapestry than for the other arts, and it rapidly sank to the point where the products of the Gobelins, Beauvais, and Aubussons looms were much admired.

If Gothic tapestry had possessed a pecuniary value easily translated into cash, or if it had been closely associated with the most sacred religious things, we should have preserved less than is actually the case. As it is, it was seldom the victim of cupidity or fanaticism, but by its very nature it was perishable, and therefore nearly all the work antedating the fifteenth century has vanished. Its greatest enemy, however, was the ignorant and vulgar culture of the nineteenth century, and during the first fifty years of this destructive epoch it melted rapidly away. Just before the outbreak of the French Revolution it is no exaggeration to say that there were in France alone enough tapestries to carpet a road from Paris to Arras; of course, many were of the Gobelins type and comparatively valueless as art, but every château, every cathedral and monastery, almost every church had its sets of “arras,” and these were of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries; the curious products of the Renaissance were confined to kings, princes, great nobles, and to their respective palaces. With 1793 the massacre began; everything feudal, even by implication, was burned, sometimes just out of pure deviltry, as when tapestries were consumed in heaps at the foot of the “Tree of Liberty”; sometimes through thrift, as when in 1797 the Directory burned at one time nearly two hundred ancient works of art to recover the gold and silver bullion—which they did at this one holocaust to the value of $13,000. Mr. G. L. Hunter has reckoned the value of these destroyed tapestries at about $2,500,000 in the market of to-day. At this rate, the current value of all the tapestries in France at the Revolution would have been about $250,000,000.