Ralph Adams Cram

LONG before the days of the Pisani in Italy, who were erroneously held to have been the restorers of the lost art of sculpture, France had initiated and developed three great schools, one of which at least reached greater heights even than the later schools of Italy, even than Donatello and Michael Angelo if you test this art by the established principles of the greatest sculpture the world has ever known—that of Greece. These three were: The school of the south with Toulouse as a centre, the school of Burgundy, or Vezelay, and the school of the Île de France. The first is of the late eleventh century, the second of the twelfth, the third of the latter part of this century and the first half of the thirteenth. The earlier work south of the Loire is part Roman, part Byzantine, and it occasionally reaches, as at Moissac, a level of extraordinary decorative value, with, in its bas reliefs, a feeling for rhythmical line and space composition that are quite astounding. In Burgundy, combined with great rudeness and an almost savage directness, there is far greater humanism, with much action and an unusual amount of character differentiation; much of the best work of this school is to be found at Autun and Vezelay. With the middle years of the twelfth century the sculpture of the Île de France seems suddenly to burst forth at St. Denis and Chartres like some miraculous happening. It was not this, but the result of many years of cumulative and progressive effort; but all that went before has perished, while fortunately some examples at St. Denis and a supreme collection at Chartres remain to give the impression of an unwonted and unheralded event. This sculpture of Chartres is more superbly architectural, more intimately a part of the whole artistic scheme than any other on record; all is formal, conventionalised; the figures are erect, rigid, immensely elongated; the multiplied fine lines and delicate zigzags of the drapery, the simple figure-modelling, the immobile, dispassionate faces, all show a most curious self-abnegation on the part of the sculptor and a profound conviction that both he and his art are only part of a greater whole, for they are purely architectural and indeed nothing but the architectural spirit expressing itself through an allied artistic mode. They are startlingly akin to archaic Greek work and, as Professor Moore has said of the sculpture from Delos: “One of these ancient Greek statues might, if wrought in French limestone and slightly modified in outline, stand in the west portal of Chartres without apparent lack of keeping.” Yet there is manifestly no possible point of historical contact between the Hellenic and the French work, and the kinship simply shows the persistence of certain ways of looking at and feeling about things, and the inevitable if unconscious return of one generation to the ways of another, that form a commentary, both cruel and humorous, on the evolutionary philosophy current during the last century, and quite unjustifiably claiming descent from the innocent speculations of Darwin and Herbert Spencer.

Out of this sculpture of Chartres grew the very wonderful art of the thirteenth century, which gives a sorely diminished glory to the Cathedral of Paris and gave, a year ago, a still greater glory to that immortal group of churches now slowly crumbling under gun-fire. Very notable examples of the transition are at Senlis, but they have been shockingly mutilated, and only one of the two wonderful carved lintels still gives much idea of its original beauty. The panel of the “Resurrection of the Virgin,” has all the architectural form and the decorative sense of Chartres, but it has as well an added human quality that makes it enduringly vital and appealing. The same can be said of the surrounding statues and reliefs that are of the same period, and altogether the almost unique work at Senlis strikes a singularly happy balance, as sculptured architecture, between the rigid formalism of Chartres and Vezelay and the exquisite humanism and the almost too-surpassing art of Paris, Amiens, and Reims. But for the Revolution Senlis would not have stood so alone for sculptural art of the transition. Laon once possessed far more, and of an even higher type, but all the column figures of the west doors, and indeed practically all the free-standing statues, were then ruthlessly destroyed and those that have taken their places are merely modern assumptions. The tympana of the doors are original, though mutilated: the Coronation of the Virgin, scenes from her life, the Last Judgment; while in the archivolts and around the windows are remains of singularly beautiful effigies of the wise and foolish virgins, the seven liberal arts, episodes from the lives of the saints. More or less of the original polychromatic decoration remains, and the statues themselves, even in their battered state, are marvels of art. Every trace of archaism and of uncertainty is gone, the sculptor works with a definiteness and a certainty of touch that are amazing, while his sense of the eternally sculpturesque is infallible. 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. At Laon are even now mutilated figures that are as perfect in their composition of lines and masses as anything in Athens, and the same was true of Reims. Personally I have always thought of the figure work at Amiens

A HEAD, NOW DESTROYED, FROM REIMS

(apart from the bas reliefs) as less perfect in this respect, in spite of expert opinion, than that of Paris, Laon, and Reims; less brilliantly composed, more heavy and realistic, while the figures themselves are certainly not as slender and graceful, or so varied in pose. Moissac and Vezelay are hieratic abstractions, Chartres pure architecture, Soissons a breathing of divine life into ancient forms, but Laon and Paris and Reims are pure and perfect sculpture against which no criticism of any kind can be brought. Never has actual life been better expressed through the necessarily transforming modes of art than here; in these exquisite and rhythmical compositions the barbarous folly of the naturalistic and realistic schools of modern times is made cruelly apparent, and the base products of the average nineteenth-century practitioners (barring a few exceptions such as St. Gaudens at his best, as in the Rock Creek figure) become in comparison as absurd as do the shameless vulgarities of Bernini and his unhappy ilk.

There still remain at Laon many broken and headless fragments, and I do not know where anything can be found more complete in every sculptural quality. This is a great art at its highest, and it shows, as Reims once showed, that in the early thirteenth century France possessed an art of sculpture that could take its place unashamed beside the best of the Parthenon. Usually one thinks of Gothic sculpture in the terms of that late fourteenth-century work so easily obtainable from venders of the remains of mediÆval art, but this is of a time when a cold convention had killed the art itself; when the subtle curves of such matchless things as the statue of the Virgin from the north door of her church in Paris had been distorted into grotesque exaggeration; when the thin, close lines of drapery had coarsened into triangular spaces of meaningless upholstery, and the sensitive, spiritual faces of Reims had given place to fat attempts at a stolid pulchritude. This is not art but a trade, and it bears no earthly resemblance to the consummate work of a century earlier, when the art itself and the religion and the joy and the personal liberty behind it were very real things.

Chronologically, the next great sculpture of France is that of the Cathedral of Paris, but as I have arbitrarily excluded this city from the survey, since one must stop somewhere, while Paris requires a volume to itself, it is only necessary to say that in spite of the devastations of man during six centuries, ending with the dull barbarity of the architect Sufflot, who hacked away the trumeau of the great central west door, together with a large section of the tympanum of the Last Judgment, in order to provide a more magnificent means of entrance for processions, enough still exists to show the singular mastery of the art. As for the statue of Our Lady on the north transept, it is one of the finest works of sculpture of any time or place, the perfection of the drapery finding rivals only in Greece. It is interesting to realise that this marvellous work antedates Niccolo Pisano by more than a century, so that if there still are those who search for the origins of sculpture after the great blank of the Dark Ages, they must forsake the Renaissance and Italy and find what they sought in France during the culmination of the Middle Ages.

At Amiens there is also, over the south portal, a figure of the Blessed Virgin, and while it is wholly different in spirit from that of Paris, it is almost as lovely and even more delicate and full of charm. Paris has the majesty and nobility of Michael Angelo, with nothing of his high but inopportune paganism, but this is like Mino da Fiesole, with all his daintiness and sweetness of feeling, and added to this an almost playful humanism that is wonderfully appealing. “Le Beau Dieu” of Amiens, on the trumeau of the central west door is almost in the class of the Paris Virgin and the sculpture of Reims, and is perhaps more nearly a satisfactory showing forth of Christ in human form than any other work of art in the world. The whole vast church is a pageant of carven figures—prophets, saints, apostles, kings, virtues and vices, symbolical characters, scenes from the Old and New Testaments, the lives of the saints, philosophy, romance—every tympanum is carved in bas relief, and the wall below the columns of the west portals is set with innumerable medallions of the signs of the zodiac and the labours of man. Never was there such an apotheosis of imagination, and only at Reims is there anything a degree finer as art. Even there the difference is mostly one of personal taste; if you like the lost marvels of Reims better than the miraculously preserved wonders of Amiens, well and good; it is for you to say, for both are matchless, each after its own kind. How the amazing array of carvings and statues at Amiens has survived passes the understanding; one would have supposed that its spiritual emphasis, its priceless nature, and its singular beauty would have subjected it to the sequent attentions of Huguenots, Revolutionaries, and the nineteenth century, but all have passed it by; and even the Prussians in their brief occupation on their way to defeat at the Marne had no time to leave their mark. Now that Reims is gone, Amiens must remain (if it does remain) the great and crowning exemplar of Christian sculpture at its highest and most triumphant cresting of achievement.

It is hard to write of the sculptures of Reims, or of anything dead and foully mutilated. For generations the thousands of carved figures stood in their niches growing grey and weather-worn through the passing of years—neglected, unnoticed, despised—while silly effigies were turned out by incompetent bunglers to receive the laudation of the haunters of international expositions and the galleries of the Salon. Then suddenly a dim light showed itself and grew steadily brighter until at last, a year or two ago, the consciousness became sure that here was one of the very great things in the world, one of the few supreme products of man in his highest and most unfamiliar estate, priceless and unreplaceable, as the Parthenon or the philosophy of St. Thomas Aquinas, or the plays of Shakespeare, or the music of Johann Sebastian Bach. And the long-delayed knowledge came to us only to be turned into a memory, the new possession was ours only to be taken away, and now nevermore for ever can it be granted to us to live in and with this perished art, for it is gone as utterly as the lost dramas of Sophocles, the burned library of Alexandria, the “Last Supper” of Leonardo da Vinci.

“The fool hath said in his heart, ‘there is no God,’” and the fool hath said in his heart: “I am greater and more precious than silly works of art.” What is the result of this insolence, the “Pomeranian grenadier” type of insolence that exalts an ignorant, degraded, useless hulk of dull flesh and blood over the supreme works of divinely inspired men? Under the lash of industrialism he can transform coal and iron into money values; he can fight for markets overseas where his masters can sell articles no man needs, to people who do not want them; he can beget children after his own kind, in their turn to do likewise, and finally—though this is not the appealing argument to the partisans of his essential superiority—he has an immortal soul he is doing his best to lose, and frequently succeeding to admiration. Are the vile types that revealed themselves in rape and murder and mutilation in the undefended villages of Belgium, or those under whose orders they acted, more worth saving for further industry of the same nature than the “Worship of the Lamb” in Ghent or the sculptures of the northwest door of Reims? It is an easy argument to offer, the sanctity of human life, but it is not the motive behind the batteries on the hills to the east of the devastated capital of Champagne, month after month pouring shell on the greatest cathedral that the Christianity of the West has reared to the glory of God. The motive behind the batteries is an instinctive realisation that Reims is a record of human greatness to which the gunners and their masters cannot attain, a lasting reproach to inferiority, a sermon and a prayer, a menace to bloated self-sufficiency and to a baseless pride. Nobility engenders hate as well as reverence, the choice depends only on the nature of the man who confronts it, and there never has been a time in all history when decadence did not bring into existence a hatred of all fine and noble things that for very rage and resentment willed the destruction of the dumb accuser. Reims, and what Reims stood for, cannot exist in the world together with their potent and efficient negation; therefore Reims perishes, as has perished at similar times in the past so much of the record in sublimity and beauty of that human superiority which is the silent accuser of all spiritual and ethical degeneration.

For the making of the west front of Reims all the great masters and craftsmen of France gathered together, and the sculpture showed not only greater excellence than may be found elsewhere, but a greater variety in genius and personality. 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. Personality, varied, vital, distinguished, marked the sculpture of Reims, together with an unerring sense of beauty of formalised line, and an erudition, a familiarity with the Scriptures, with scholastic philosophy, with the

lives of the saints, and with the arts and sciences that would appear to do away with the quaint superstition that the Middle Ages were a time of intellectual ignorance. The men who carved these statues were not of the Æsthetically elect; they were not a few highly trained, well-dressed, and supercilious specialists, working in the confidence born of years in Paris and Rome; they were stone-masons, members of their own self-respecting union, who had worked their way up a little higher than their fellows and so could carve each his group of statues to the satisfaction of bishop or abbot or master mason and—which was even more to the point—to his own satisfaction and in accordance with the jealous standards of excellence of his guild. He had to know what he was doing and what he had to express; there was no ubiquitous architect to instruct him, no “committee on symbolism” to show him the way, and so if he could not read well enough to enjoy a modern “yellow journal,” or write well enough to forge a name or draft a speculative prospectus, he did know far more about religion, theology, philosophy, history, and the contemporary sciences and arts and romances than the modern workman with his years of public school behind him, or many an architect or sculptor with his high school, preparatory school, and university training behind him as well.

They knew and felt and enjoyed, these sculptors of Reims, whose work endured for six centuries and might have lasted six more. Perhaps the quality of enjoyment was more clearly expressed than anything else. 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. The artist was the craftsman and the art was a craft, just as the craft was an art, and the work shows it all to those who still can see. Great work, the greatest work, if you like; but so far as Reims is concerned it is now fire-scorched dÉbris, and for its loss we are consoled by the offer of—another Sieges Allee, perhaps. The world may be forgiven for thinking that the game is not worth the candle.

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.