The art of this land--or these lands, if you like--should be so considered; not as an interesting and even stimulating by-product of social, industrial, and political evolution, with only an accidental relationship to them, and only an empirical interest for the men of to-day, but as the most perfect material expression of the great reality that existed through and by these agencies that were in themselves nothing; the character that emerged through the turmoil of human activity, as it shows itself in the men and women of the time, and expresses itself in their art. To do this fully is impossible; every province would require a volume, every art a series of volumes, but at least we can catalogue again the more salient qualities of the greater masterpieces, and try to co-ordinate them into some outward semblance of that essential unity they both promised and expressed. II THE FORGING OF MEDIÆVALISM It is not a large land, this Heart of Europe; three hundred and fifty miles perhaps from the Alps to the sea, and not more than two hundred and fifty from the Seine at Paris to the Rhine at Cologne; half the size, shall we say, of Texas; but what Europe was for the thousand years following the fall of Rome, this little country--or the men that made it great--was responsible. Add the rest of Normandy, and the spiritual energy of the Holy See, with a varying and sometimes negligible influence from the Teutonic lands beyond the Rhine, and you have the mainsprings of mediævalism, even though for its full manifestation you must take into account the men in the far countries of the Italian peninsula and the Iberian, in France and England, Bavaria, Saxony, Bohemia. The great empires of to-day, England, France, Germany, Italy, two of which have eaten steadily into its territories until only a tiny Luxembourg remains, together with a small new state with a novel name made greater and more lasting by the events of a year than those of its predecessors, have dulled the memory of an ancient unity, taking to themselves at the same time credit, that is none of theirs, for men and happenings that made ten centuries of enduring history; so the glory, the high achievements of the small old states are forgotten. 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.