Beacon Lights of History, Volume 3 part 1: The Middle AgesLord, John
History
Beacon Lights of History, Volume 3 part 1: The Middle Ages
Lord, John
History
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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