THE

FOREIGN

QUARTERLY REVIEW.

ART. I.-1. Les Arts au Moyen Age. By M. Du Sommerard, Conseiller à la Cour des Comptes, &c. 4 vols. 8vo. Paris, 1838.

2. Notices sur l'Hotel de Cluny et sur le Palais des Thermes. By M. Du Sommerard. 1 vol. 8vo. Paris, 1834. 3. Rapport de la Commission des Monuments Historiques. 1839. 4. Rapport du Comité Historique des Arts et Monuments. 1838. 5. Cours d'Archéologie Chrétienne. By Messrs. Didron and Albert Lenoir. 1838.

6. Voyages Pittoresques dans l'Ancienne France. By Baron Taylor and M. Charles Nodier.

SIXTY years ago the study of the arts, the architecture, and the manners of the middle ages was almost unknown or unthought of on the Continent, and it was only in Britain that Medi-æval antiquarians attempted to carry their knowledge into practice, or to draw forth from the stores of their discoveries any thing that might be practically useful to their fellow countrymen or that might be in any way reproduced by the artists and architects of their own times. The legal and historical antiquities of the middle ages had indeed had some illustrious labourers, numbered among the continental literati, and such as we cannot boast of in our own island: the names of Muratori, Ducange, the learned and indefatigable Benedictines, and especially of Montfaucon, will at once recur to the mind of the antiquarian. The last named, indeed, may be looked upon as the first person of any weight among the learned of his own nation, who turned his attention to the architectural and artistical part of the subject, and the first who attempted to bring the works of a few centuries back into that repute from which they had been unjustly driven. But in general this latter task was left, entire and undivided, to the science of British antiquarians, and the taste of English dilettanti. Horace Walpole, with his "Strawberry Hill Gothic," absurd as it now appears, did immense service to public taste in giving the ton;-Browne, Willis, Stukely, Grose, and all the names that, during the latter half of the last century, shed lustre on the Society of Antiquaries,-a list far too long to be repeated

here, and one of which Great Britain has just cause to be proud, -settled the question on our side of the water; and turned the tide of public attention into a channel from which it has never since deviated, and from which the monumental treasures of this country have derived such valuable augmentations and such fostering care. England, from the time of the great Camden, has never been wanting in acute and laborious antiquarians, so far as her own national relics and records are concerned; and few nations, if any, can compete with her in this respect up to the times of the Commonwealth, when Selden, Usher, and Prideaux, influenced in a great degree by the religious and political circumstances of the period, put an end for a certain interval to the school of British antiquarians, and turned national inquiry towards the Hebraic ages and the records of the East. It was but for a short period that this cessation endured :—the Augustan age of Anne witnessed the revival of British enthusiasm, and during the first half of the eighteenth century things were fast verging to the condition in which they were found by Horace Walpole and the men of his school. But in the mean time on the Continent, and more particularly in France, after the first brilliancy of the age of Louis XIV. had somewhat subsided, the great antiquarians of the Benedictine school began to explore all the accumulated stores of knowledge, of all times and nations; and the documental history of Europe, we may add of Asia also, was made out to a much greater extent than could have been anticipated à priori; even now, indeed, we look upon the great monuments of their labours with respect and wonder. At this period England was doing comparatively nothing in the exploration of general antiquities: the corrupt and sordid character of the early Georgian reigns threw a damp upon every thing like literary enthusiasm, and was most fatal to national art; and hence retrospective inquiry flourished in those days in France, but certainly not in England.

The pursuits and the taste of any epoch are influenced, doubtless, to a very great degree, by the political circumstances of the time but it is a subject of just surprise that the aristocracy of western Europe should have been so late to awaken to a sense of their interest in the preservation of national antiquities, and of its closely concerning their own honour to see that the works of their ancestors suffered no damage from the hands of sacrilegious posterity. For, if we mistake not, it is only from their having been more or less affected by the revolutionary violence of popular tumults, that they have at last arrived at a true perception of what we may be allowed to call the sublime and beautiful of the middle ages. The aristocracy of England can never be pardoned for the avidity with which they shared in the spoliation of the monasteries in the time of Henry VIII., the dissolution of which, what

ever may be the religious part of the question, was in one sense at least a most serious national calamity, and greatly retarded the march of civilization in our islands. As far as art and architecture are concerned, leaving out Inigo Jones and Wren, we have never had a national school of architecture, sculpture, or painting since then, until comparatively quite recent times: while a fierce iconoclastic spirit was let loose on the country, that showed itself most fearfully in the time of Cromwell, and by destroying all respect for works of former ages induced a cold feeling of neglect that is only lately extinguished. But neglect in matters of art is near akin to death; and hence the gradual decline of monumental taste in England, and which may be traced from the days of Queen Elizabeth, till it reached the lowest point of its bathos in those of George II. and the early part of the reign of George III. Still the aristocracy of England had been advancing in wealth, in intelligence, and in numbers. In France on the other hand, the civil wars that preceded the period of Louis XIV., while they hindered much progress in the fine arts,-for the ambition of the nobles was turned to far different matters,-kept things to a certain extent from taking any other direction: their chateaux remained intact,--those, that is to say, which the great cardinal did not pull down about their owners' ears; and it was not until peace, internal national peace,-had brought luxury and the arts of civilized life again into vogue, that a new school of architecture and of domestic ornamentation began to appear. The history of the fine arts in France and England had also in their early periods this difference, which ought to be taken into account. While Henry VIII. was only following the bent of his passions and thinking of himself alone, Francis I. had Titian, and Benvenuto Cellini at his court: and France then gained a decided start in the fine arts, which she never lost till the period of the great revolution. During the troubled times of Henry III. and IV. the religious wars of France no doubt did much serious damage to some of her most precious monuments: but these were principally secular; and the rage of the combatants affected cities and bastioned walls rather than churches, monasteries, and isolated mansions. While, however, the spirit of religious architecture was dead in Britain, and all attempts at religious decoration or ecclesiastical ornamentation had vanished with the forcible change of the national religion, there remained in France the great body of the regular orders of clergy, who were daily increasing in power and affluence. These, though they did not carry out the architectural traditions of their predecessors to the extent to which we should now expect, performed at all events the noble and useful part of national conservators: the religious

mobs never entered the monasteries: the holy limits of their cloisters served as a refuge to the spirit of the arts of the middle ages long after the Palladian taste of Italy had set the fashion at court, and maintained the great monuments of France inviolate until the barbarous epoch of 1790-2. The taste of the Italian school, to which we have just alluded, prevailed in France at an earlier period than in England: witness the western front of the square of the Louvre, built by Henry II.: witness Chambord, Chenonceaux, Amboise, Blois, and a host of other royal and noble residences; all which preceded in date as they surpassed in grandeur and elegance Burleigh, Hatfield, and other similar edifices in England. But, at the same time, the Gothic spirit (we must be allowed this term for the present, and shall revert to it) flourished in France at a later period than in England, where no building of the same size and beauty can be found of so recent a date as the splendid church of St. Eustache at Paris (15321642); of this, though the details are Italian, the idea and the disposition of the parts are essentially those of the best days of the pointed style. The dispersion of the monastic orders and the change in the national religion were fatal to Christian art in England; and on the other hand the maintenance of the faith of Rome and the existence of the religious orders in France, were two powerfully conservative causes that kept together the traditional taste and the monuments of the middle ages so firm and extensively, that all the malice, all the besotted ignorance of the revolutionists have not been able to destroy them except in part.

The ecclesiastics of France, like all other orders, felt the influence of the age of Louis XIV. and were forced to give way to the classic flood that, filling every corner of the land, drove the spirit of the romantic out of literature and art at the end of the 17th and all of the 18th century. Whatever conventional buildings were erected during that interval were of the prevailing style of the day, a law that men observed without knowing it: but this circumstance very seldom prompted the destruction or mutilation of existing buildings; so that the taste for pointed architecture declined and became extinct gradually, unaccompanied by that frightful destruction of monuments witnessed in England in the 16th century. As a remarkable instance of the conservative spirit in France, we may mention the city of Avignon, where while the Genre Classique at Nismes and Marseilles was in full vogue from the middle of the 17th century, all its best monuments and its admirable walls have remained less injured than those of any other city in France, even to the present day. It is no small praise for a community, if devoid of the genius or inclination to invent, to have at least the taste and sense to preserve

what it possesses of the good and the beautiful; and whoever has visited Avignon will allow that the remark applies there with considerable justice. Similar observations may be applied to other localities in Provence, the Pays romantique, par excellence; where the architect and the painter may pick up more original ideas in a week than in all the rest of France in a year, and where the old feudal chateaux that still cover it would have remained until now in all their primitive excellence but for the moral and political cataclysm of the 18th century. Another and earlier instance of the conservative spirit of the French ecclesiastical orders is at Orleans, where the first stone of the last re-erection of the Cathedral was laid by Henry IV. in 1601, and where, with a few anachronisms and inconsistencies, one of the finest pointed cathedrals of that country has been in course of construction almost ever since. Curiously enough, the principal exceptions to this rule are in Paris; although a notable instance may be quoted at Rouen, in the abominable Ionic screen of the cathedral at the entrance of the choir, which after all was an addition rather than a demolition; but at Paris the Ecole Classique broke out into two or three overt acts of barbarism. Thus the fronts of St. Eustache and St. Gervais were erected at different epochs in a pseudo-Roman style; the choir of Notre Dame was beautified by Louis XIV.; a villainous classic screen was put up in the sanctum sanctorum-the bijou of the middle ages-the Sainte Chapelle; and at length, not very long before the Revolution, the old hall of the great Palace of St. Louis, of the Palais de Justice,-was replaced by the present Salle des pas perdus. The sum total however of all this mischief to the monuments of the country is dust in the balance compared to the alterations and improvements carried on by ecclesiastical and other corporations in our own. We have scarcely a cathedral, college, or parish church that does not bear impress of the barbaric hand of classic innovators, either in screens and choir work, or in that most christian and fraternal invention of pews in places of worship. What few castles survived the Cromwellian wars were nearly all mutilated and dismantled; the sackings of Conway and Ludlow by the natural protectors of such splendid national monuments are only two out of numberless instances; and no inquirer of discrimination and taste can avoid tracing the progressive degradation exemplified in ecclesiastical edifices, from the gorgeous structure of King's College Chapel, Cambridge, one of the latest buildings finished before the Reformation, down to the barn-like appearance of St. James's Church in London, the exterior of which is a most serious discredit to the great name of Sir Christopher Wren.

Before the sun of Louis XIV. had set, the national taste of