Ralph Adams Cram

“ ART IN THE RHINELAND FROM Charlemagne’s ambitious centre at Aix-la-Chapelle the influence of a new culture went west rather than east, and it is not until the eleventh century that we can look for art of any sort along the valley of the Rhine and in the lands of old Lorraine. There was little enough elsewhere, but when, at the finger-touch of a new monasticism calling a new northern blood to action, civilisation began again in Normandy and then in the Île de France, its echo in the Rhineland was far and long delayed, and never more than an echo at most. ”

“ Ypres, Malines, Dinant, Termonde, and Huy, all of which are gone, were treasures that belonged to all the world; Namur and Plombières we could not spare, and as for Bruges and Ghent, even apart from their exquisite architecture and their treasures of painting, the soul shudders at what might happen there were they involved in the retreat of a disorganised army, when one considers what happened to Liége and Louvain in its victorious advance. All Belgium and Luxembourg, all Picardy and Champagne are, or were, rich with lovely little towns and villages, each a work of art in itself ”

“ It is as impossible to describe a tapestry in words as it is to do the same by a Chartres window. In point of composition the tapestries of the fifteenth century are matched only by the greatest pictures; even when they are crowded with figures there is the most masterly spacing of masses, the most consummate balance of form. When one realises that in every case the design is the work of the members of the guild and not of the more famous painters of the time, the wonder grows over the apparently universal feeling for the highest type of artistic expression. ”

“ When a whole town passes, as Ypres and Louvain and Arras, then as it fell so let it lie. A kindly nature will slowly turn these bleak piles of fallen masonry into beautiful memorials, clothing them with grass and vines and flowers and trees. Let them stand so for ever, a memorial to the dead and a warning to man in his pride of life and insolence of will; and for the new cities, let them rise as beautifully as may be alongside, but not over, the graves of a dead era. ”

“ Of course, then art was as living a thing as religion and the realities of liberty, whereas now they all fall in the category of those fictions that please while they do not persuade—which makes all the difference in the world. All Flanders is a lesson in the use of brick, and as it is used here in St. Nicholas, and in the houses of the Quai aux Herbes, as it was used in lost Louvain, in desolated Ypres, in battered Malines, it was a study in good art, a lesson in the history of human culture, a demonstration of the perfect adaptation of modest means to a very noble end. ”

“ Architecture has gone far from the Salle Synodale of Sens and the Merveille of Mont-St.-Michel, and it has not gone altogether well, but how significant these stone fancies are of the abounding life and the splendid pride and the open-handed beneficence of the fifteenth-century burghers, who loved their towns and bent the rebellious masonry to their will, working it into a kind of stony lace and embroidery to the glory of trade and civic spirit! ”

“ Less than fifty years after Brussels came Louvain, and so far as good art is concerned the three-quarters of a century since Bruges has not been altogether well spent. As in the case of religious architecture, an ungoverned passion for beauty and craftsmanship has resulted in the destruction of the sane and noble balance in such churches as Reims, such civic halls as Bruges and Ypres, while nothing is left but an almost impossible luxuriance, as of a northern flower forced in the hot, moist air of a greenhouse. ”

“ Life was worth living to them and they made the most of it, and with much laughter. These carved figures at Reims and Amiens and Paris show in every line the good human joy of doing a thing well, just as so much of the output of so much of modern industrialism shows the dull indifference or the weary disgust for doing a thing ill. No sculptor then would have contented himself with making a clay model and a plaster cast and then turning the execution over to a gang of ignorant day-labourers working like banderlogs, only with the intelligent assistance of mechanical devices. ”

“ Gothic “ornament” is quite as beautiful as are Gothic saints and angels, and here at Reims the stone carving was of the finest. Every space of ornament—capital, crocket, boss, frieze, and string-course—was a combination of these great elements: architectural self-restraint and identity with the work as a whole, passionate love for all the beautiful things in nature, joy in doing everything, even the cutting of unseen surfaces, just as well as man could do the work. It is not better than the ornament of Amiens or Chartres ”

“ Later, when the nineteenth century came to crown with perfect achievement the arduous but incomplete efforts of its predecessor, ugly and barbarous houses took the place of only too many of the beautiful works of the Middle Ages, and finally the wonderful old walls were ruthlessly razed to give place to silly boulevards. And in spite of it all Bruges survives, and more completely than any other city of the North, for it is farthest away from the kingdom of coal and iron, and if war passes it by, it may still remain an oasis, a sanctuary in the desert. ”

“ A city that has shrunken a little within its walls is always more beautiful than one that has burst them and is steadily intruding into the fleeing countryside. That is the difference between the advance of man and that of nature. Ghent, Rome, Nuremberg are kernels of sweetness surrounded by a monstrously expanding rind that is exceeding bitter, but Carcassonne, Rothenburg, Siena, Bruges are so wholly different there is no possibility of comparison. ”

“ And yet, out of these little dukedoms and counties and free cities came the men who made France and Germany, who determined the genius of mediævalism, imparted to it the high soul and the swift hand of its peculiar personality, and gave to the world the memory and tradition of faith and heroism, together with so much of that inimitable art that was its perfect showing forth, and, until yesterday, a visible monument of its accomplishment. ”

“ A land of coal and iron, and of what coal and iron can produce. Not happiness, not character, not culture; neither philosophy, nor religion, nor art. Machines—appalling and ingenious complications of wheels and cogs and valves and pistons, that made more of their kind, together with unheard-of engines of death and mutilation. And factories—emplacements for machines that roared and vibrated endlessly, spinning, weaving, fabricating night and day, turning out what the world needs, but craftily fashioning it so it would not last, or what the world does not need, but that lasted only too long. ”

“ One of the great things in art is its revelation of the possibility of spiritual achievement by and through the narrowest physical limitations. When, on the other hand, architecture tries to assimilate the peculiar methods of bridge building; when painting intrudes into the province of sculpture, literature, photography, or even music; when music becomes mathematical or takes to itself the habits of the circus performer; when sculpture deliquesces into a sloppy kind of black-and-white illustration ”

“ Wars, great and small, have swept it from river to river, but much has been free for a century and all of it free for forty years. Under every oppression and every adversity it has thriven and grown rich, not in material things alone, but in those commodities that have actual intrinsic value; and a short year ago it was the most prosperous, peaceful, and industrious quarter of Europe. ”

“ 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 in all and through all, Reims in its ruin will be a more potent agency of regeneration than the perfection of Chartres or the finality of Bourges.
I should like to consider, though briefly and in the light of a very real unity that negatived the political disunity that has always prevailed, the art of these lands where for a twelvemonth millions of men have fought after a fashion never known before, while around them each day saw the irreparable destruction of the best that man could do for the love of God, and better than he can do now. ”

“ Then there was the Hôtel de Ville, late Gothic of the kind that lingered so long in Flanders after it had perished elsewhere, with sumptuous chimneypieces of fantastic carvings and crowded statues, and finally the matchless old bridge with its three round arches and its enormous towers at either end with their high extinguisher roofs; altogether a good old town, so self-respecting and sane that it could achieve a new prosperity without sacrificing its old ideals. ”

“ Each has its place, each is a mode of musical art, and just because one may like the strange and{265} 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. ”

“ It is not that in the doors of this façade were to be found great statues in conspicuous places with lesser work all around; every piece of sculpture or of carving was a masterpiece of its kind. High up in the gables, hidden in the shadows of the archivolts, forgotten in odd corners where only persistent search would reveal them, were little figures or isolated heads as carefully thought out and as finely felt as the august hierarchies of the front itself. ”

“ Amiens in ruins, its exquisite façade with its perfect sculptures seared and shattered by bursting shells and consuming fire, would have been a catastrophe that could only put to the test the most stoical fortitude, but—it is neither Chartres nor Bourges nor Reims, and simply because the perfect balance between all possible elements in great architecture is here trembling toward its overthrow. Gothic art had three controlling forces working toward an unattainable perfection ”

“ Its Hôtel de Ville, one of the perfect things in architecture, I have spoken of elsewhere; its churches, at least six of them, are each engaging in a different way, and each contains treasures of endless pictures, wood carving, metal work, vestments, gathered from ruined monasteries and churches to take the place of the greater treasures pillaged and destroyed by the Calvinists. Our Lady’s Church, with its curiously beautiful tower and its gem-like porch; the cathedral with its ugly modern tower and its fine interior with all its pictures and treasures of “dinanderie” ”

“ 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. ”

“ Thor, the impersonation of conscienceless and unmitigated force, shatters in pieces the Gothic cathedrals because he and they are antitheses and they cannot exist in the same world. Like Barbarossa sitting stonily in his dim cave under ground, century after century, while his beard grows through the rocky table before him, waiting for the call that will send him forth into the world again, primitive force and primitive craft have sullenly awaited the day when the Christian dispensation passes and they issue again into the light. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Then later, after this first (and different) industrial civilisation had passed, came a new manifestation, and from Lille to Essen appeared the materialisation of a new madness, while Bruges and Courtrai and Aix were forgotten, with all they stood for, and other centres grew up—black, roaring, uncouth, but for men admirable and desired far beyond the restored churches and desecrated abbeys, the schools and universities, the dim and discredited philosophies, the decaying art and the vanished ideals of Fécamp and Reims, of Bruges and Louvain, of Aix and Trèves and Cologne. ”

“ Great art still, as great as one can find elsewhere, and with all the mastery of methods, all the confident certainty, all the triumphant colour and the exquisite design and the faultless craftsmanship of the painted “Beatific Vision” itself. There once were many other pictures by Hubert Van Eyck, but all now are gone, destroyed by the savage hands of Calvinists and Revolutionaries, and the “Adoration of the Lamb” remains alone as an isolated miracle.
Jan was of another sort; equally great as a craftsman, he was a fine gentleman, a courtier, the friend of princes, and a diplomat. ”

“ Every face—where a face remains—is brilliantly characterised; the poses are graceful, unaffected, constantly varied; the gestures are convincing, the stone quality never lost, while there is nothing outside Hellas—except Amiens and Reims—so faultless in its composition of drapery. From the very first this was one of the strong points in French sculpture; each artist strove for, and attained, not only distinction, but naturalism expressed through and by an almost classic formalism; the line composition, from Vezelay to Reims, is a succession of ever-waxing marvels. ”

“ The Renaissance and the Reformation together had extinguished both civilisation and culture over the greater part of Europe; war was everywhere and incessant, all principle had been abandoned and the ethical standards of society had disappeared. Slaughter, civil war, assassination, treason, and sacrilege howled through an ever-widening desolation and the end of the world seemed at hand. Fortunately, in a way, the outrageous career of the Protestants served as an impulse to union ”