school of Cologne Hubert van Eyck owed much, he could hardly have been what he was but for Master Wilhelm and his contemporaries, but he added something of his own Flanders, and more of himself, and the art he initiated rose immeasurably above its source.
In sculpture also the Teuton found a facile and congenial form of expression, but this art developed rather to the north and east of the Rhine. Hildesheim was, of course, the centre, for it was here that Bishop Bernward gathered or educated his amazing craftsmen in bronze. Where such an artist came from, as he who made the cathedral doors and the bronze column, heaven alone knows, for it was early in the eleventh century that these came into existence. They began a school, however, that continued in Saxony for many centuries and had its influence over all Germany. The early thirteenth-century bronze font, also in the cathedral, is one of those masterpieces that defy comparison. The great school of sculpture in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries was that which grew up between the Elbe and the Hartz Mountains, not only in Hildesheim but Halberstadt, Bamberg, Freiberg, Magdebourg, Naumbourg, the masters of Magdebourg ranking with those of Amiens and Reims. Undoubtedly there is French influence here, perhaps through the training, under the masters of France, of the craftsmen who later went back to their native lands to practise their art. In Strasbourg the French influence is even more clearly seen but here it is rather in the line of the more southerly schools. It is at Strasbourg that we find that singular and ingenious masterpiece, the “Pillar of the Angels,” slender grouped shafts with intermediate niches, one above the other, each containing an exquisite statue of an apostle, an angel, or, at the top, our Lord at the Day of Judgment. This is one of those sudden and unprecedented happenings in mediæval art that mark the vast vitality, imagination, and personal initiative of the time. It has no progenitors, no successors, it is a sport of personal genius, and the masterpiece of one Ervin de Steinbach, who appears to have been the architect for the later portions of the cathedral.
Apart from Strasbourg, however, sculpture seems never to have been a favoured art in the Rhineland, and the painting of Cologne remains its chief claim to honourable record, though stained glass reached considerable heights, as is seen both at Cologne and Strasbourg, and on definitely local lines. By the fifteenth century the Flemish schools of art of all kinds had succeeded by their sheer achievement in establishing their dominant influence along the Rhine, and with the Renaissance the lingering elements of an instinctive practice of beauty quite died away.
XV
THE FOREST OF ARDEN
WHERE the immemorial Forest of the Ardennes closes in on the Moselle that winds beautifully to the Rhine, there is a little land that can give us small aid in the way of art, for the hand of man and of an implacable fatality has been heavy, and little remains, but it is a place of infinite charm and of significance as well, while in the last year its ancient name has come into the light again, even as it was some centuries ago. It has borne many names, acknowledged many sovereignties; Roman Belgica, part of the kingdom of the Ripuarian Franks, Austrasia, Lorraine, a province of the Germanic Holy Roman Empire, Burgundy, the Netherlands (Spanish and Austrian), France again, both of the republican and imperial mode, then back in an amorphous Germany, and now, crushed into a tiny but concentrated state, an independent but sovereign Grand Duchy of Luxembourg, imprisoned for the moment in dark fastnesses of oppression wherefrom no word issues forth, but destined under God to a triumphant release and to a restoration that may mean a return to earlier and wider frontiers.
Luxembourg means that portion of the Heart of Europe lying between the Meuse and the Moselle, and one line drawn from Limbourg to Trèves, another from Verdun to Metz. It is now a tithe of this, but who can say what may be in the future? All its great northern portion has for long been incorporated in the eternally honourable kingdom of Belgium, and there it will remain, but there is always the old Archbishopric of Trèves with its Moselle valley, and there are the lands along the Saar and the new (and old) frontiers of France. At present, as a result of three treaties in which it played the passive part of victim, it is a fourth the size it once had under its first Duke Wenceslas; the first section was lost in 1659, the second at the Congress of Vienna in 1815, the third and largest at London in 1859, but, as a Japanese guide remarked at the monastery of Horiuji, “The quality is not dependent on the numerality of quantity,” and as nothing was lost but land the indomitable spirit of the people remained intact and merely concentrated itself still more intensely within its shrunken borders.
Luxembourg lies along that line where first the Teuton blended with the primitive Gaul, or Celt, and where a second mingling later took place between the result of the first—the Salian Frank—and the same old Teutonic stock. It is the mating-place of races and therefore the fighting-place as well, and always will remain so, as they and we now realise only too clearly. They were far enough apart, these Celts and Germans, to guarantee good progeny. The Gaul was huge of stature, blonde, long-haired, fond of fine clothes and golden chains. He was pastoral and agricultural, aristocratic in his social and political systems, incontinent, good-natured, quick-tempered, superstitious, Druidical. The Teuton was red-haired, shaven except for a fierce top-knot, grim in his clothing, contemptuous of agriculture and of everything else except fighting; as a youth he wore an iron collar which could not be removed until he had killed his man. Politically he was ultra-democratic; socially, monogamous and chaste; theologically, monotheistic. From the fusion of these two elements came the many tribes of Gallia Belgica, and in good time most of the peoples of the Heart of Europe, of Flanders, Brabant, Luxembourg, Lorraine, the hither Rhineland, Champagne, Burgundy, Picardy, Artois. Trèves, head city of the Treveri, was the natural capital and so it became under the Cæsars when they had made their wilderness and called it peace.
It did not remain a wilderness long; presently came the pacific Cæsars of a later day and the whole land became first the “kitchen-garden of Rome” and then the Newport of the Empire. Fine roads cut the forests in every direction, land was cleared, agriculture intensified, so that shortly the whole region was a garden dotted with private parks and estates. Trèves was made a great city, with palaces, temples, baths, amphitheatres, the summer capital of Europe and second in Gaul only to Lyons. A city of manifold pleasures and as many beauties; rich, sumptuous, sensuous, where from the shores of Tiber and Bosporus enervated and exhausted devotees of the joy of living came to cool themselves and restore their vitality in the fresh air and the green river valleys of this curiously picturesque retreat. All along the Moselle rose gorgeous villas with their rooms of sheeted marble and mosaic and gilded cedar and splendid fabrics, their terraced gardens and cool groves and wide-spreading parks. A golden day-dream focussed along the windings of a little river and destined, the sleepers dreamed, to endure for ever.
And then the greater dream of empire began to turn into nightmare. The Gallic legions revolted against a weakening hand in Rome, and Cæsars of a day and a thousand votes fought back and forth over the land, and burned and murdered and died until peace came again, and restoration, with real emperors refreshing themselves in their imperial city of Trèves and their dim forests on the hilly walls of the winding Moselle. War again, and ruin, this time of a nature to last for generations and to leave the marble villas to the slow but kindly burial of trees and vines and moss. Out of the terrible east the Huns came like a flood with the deadly Attila at their head, blind terror before them, death and silence behind. Just to the west, at Châlons, they were beaten back and fled eastward again (men thought for ever), and what was left became part of the new Frankish kingdom. Of the makers of this nation and the stock from which sprang Merovings, Carolings, and most of