Beacon Lights of History, Volume 05: The Middle AgesLord, John
History
Beacon Lights of History, Volume 05: The Middle Ages
Lord, John
History
as much a sealed book as Wordsworth is to Taine. The Protestant tourist
from Michigan or Pennsylvania can "do" any cathedral in two hours, and
wonder why they make such a fuss about a church not half so large as
the New York Central Railroad station. The wonders of cathedrals must be
studied, like the glories of a landscape, with an eye to the beautiful
and the grand, cultured and practised by the contemplation of ideal
excellence, when the mind summons the imagination to its aid, with all
the poetry and all the history which have been learned in a life of
leisure and study. How different the emotions of a Ruskin or a Tennyson,
in surveying those costly piles, from those of a man fresh from a
distillery or from a warehouse of cotton fabrics, or even from those of
many fashionable women, whose only aesthetic accomplishment is to play
languidly and mechanically on an instrument, and whose only intellectual
achievement is to have devoured a dozen silly novels in the course of a
summer spent in alternate sleep and dalliance! Nor does familiarity
always give a zest to the pleasure which arises from the creations of
art or the glories of nature. The Roman beggar passes the Coliseum or
St. Peter's without notice or enjoyment, as a peasant sees unmoved the
snow-capped mountains of Switzerland or the beautiful lakes of
Killarney. Said sorrowfully my guide up the Rhigi, "I wish I lived in
Holland, for there are men there." Yet there are those whom the ascent
of Rhigi and the ruined monuments of ancient Rome would haunt for a
lifetime, in whose memory they would be perpetually fresh, never to pass
away, any more than the looks and the vows of early love from the mind
of a sentimental woman.
The glorious old architecture whose peculiarity was the pointed arch,
flourished only about three hundred years in its purity and matchless
beauty. Then another change took place. The ideal became lost in
meaningless ornaments. The human figure peoples the naked walls. "Man
places his own image everywhere.... The tomb rises like a mausoleum in
side chapels. Man is enthroned, not God." The corruption of the art
keeps pace with the corruption of the Papacy and the discords of
society. In the fourteenth century the Mediaeval has lost its charm
and faith.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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