Part 13

An indescribable ornamentation has been chosen for this threshold; on the enormous posts are a kind of wavy clouds, or ocean-billows, in the centre of which here and there appear the tentacles of medusæ, the ends of paws, the claws of crabs, the ends of long caterpillars, flat and scaly,--all kinds of horrible fragments, imitated in colossal size with a striking fidelity, and making you think that the beasts to which they belong must be hidden there within the walls ready to enfold you and tear your flesh. This splendour has mysteriously hostile undercurrents; we feel that it has many a surprise and menace. Above our heads the lintels are, however, ornamented with large, exquisite flowers in bronze, or gold: roses, peonies, wistaria, and spring branches of full-blown cherry-blossoms; but, still higher, horrible faces with fixed death’s-head grimaces lean toward us; terrible things of all shapes hang by their golden wings from the golden beams of the roof; we perceive in the air rows of mouths split open with atrocious laughter, and rows of eyes half-closed in an unquiet sleep.

An old priest, aroused by the noise of our footsteps on the gravel in the silence of the court, appears before us on the bronze threshold. In order to examine the permit which I present to him, he puts a pair of round spectacles on his nose, which make him look like an owl.

My papers are in order. A bow, and he steps aside to let me enter.

It is gloomy inside this palace, with that mysterious semi-twilight which the Spirits delight in. The impressions felt on entering are grandeur and repose.

The walls are of gold and the ceiling is of gold, supported on columns of gold. A vague, trembling light, illuminating as if from beneath, enters through the very much grated and very low windows; the dark, undetermined depths are full of the gleamings of precious things.

Yellow gold, red gold, green gold; gold that is vital, or tarnished; gold that is brilliant, or lustreless; here and there on the friezes and on the exquisite capitals of the columns, a little vermilion, and a little emerald green; very little, nothing but a thin thread of colour, just enough to relieve the wing of a bird and the petal of a lotus, a peony, or a rose. Despite so much richness nothing is overcharged; such taste has been displayed in the arrangement of the thousands of diverse forms and such harmony in the extremely complicated designs, that the effect of the whole is simple and reposeful.

Neither human figures nor idols have a part in this sanctuary of Shintoism. Nothing stands upon the altars but large vases of gold filled with natural flowers in sheaves, or gigantic flowers of gold.

No idols, but a multitude of beasts, flying or crawling, familiar or chimerical, pursue each other upon the walls, and fly away from the friezes and ceiling in all attitudes of fury and struggle, of terror and flight. Here, a flock of swans hurry away in swift flight the whole length of the golden cornice; in other places are butterflies with tortoises; large and hideous insects among the flowers, or many death-combats between fantastic beasts of the sea, medusæ with big eyes, and imaginary fishes. On the ceiling innumerable dragons bristle and coil. The windows, cut out in multiple trefoils, in a form never before seen and which give little light, seem only a pretext for displaying all kinds of marvellous piercings: trellises of gold entwined with golden leaves, among which golden birds are sporting; all of this seems accumulated at pleasure and permits the least possible light to enter into the deep golden shadows of the temple. The only really simple objects are the columns of a fine golden lacquer ending with capitals of a very sober design, forming a slight calix of the lotus, like those of certain ancient Egyptian palaces.

We could spend days in admiring separately each panel, each pillar, each minute detail; the least little piece of the ceiling, or the walls would be a treasure for a museum. And so many rare and extravagant objects have succeeded in making the whole a composition of large quiet lines; many living forms, many distorted bodies, many ruffled wings, stiff claws, open mouths, and squinting eyes have succeeded in producing a calm, an absolute calm, by force of an inexplicable harmony, twilight, and silence.

I believe, moreover, that here is the quintessence of Japanese Art, of which the specimens brought to our collections of Europe cannot give the true impression. And we are struck by feeling that this Art, so foreign to us, proceeds from an origin so different; nothing here is derived, ever so remotely, from what we call antiquities--Greek, Latin, or Arabian--which always influence, even if we are not aware of it, our native ideas regarding ornamental form. Here the least design, the smallest line,--everything--is as profoundly strange as if it had come from a neighbouring planet which had never held communication with our side of the world.

The entire back of the temple, where it is almost night, is occupied by great doors of black lacquer and gold lacquer, with bolts of carved gold, shutting in a very sacred place which they refuse to show me. They tell me, moreover, that there is nothing in these closets; but that they are the places where the deified souls of the heroes love to dwell; the priests only open them on certain occasions to place in them poems in their honour, or prayers wisely written on rice-paper.

The two lateral wings on each side of the large golden sanctuary are entirely of _marqueterie_, in prodigious mosaics composed of the most precious woods left in their natural colour. The representations are animals and plants: on the walls are light leaves in relief, bamboo, grasses of extreme delicacy, gold convolvulus falling in clusters of flowers, birds of resplendent plumage, peacocks and pheasants with spread tails. There is no painting here, no gold-work; the whole effect is sombre, the general tone that of dead wood; but each leaf of each branch is composed of a different piece; and also each feather of each bird is shaded in such a way as to almost produce the effect of changing colours on the throats and wings.

And at last, at last, behind all this magnificence, the most sacred place which they show me last, the most strange of all strange places, is the little mortuary court which surrounds the tomb. It is hollowed out of a mountain between whose rocky walls water is dripping: the lichens and moss have made a damp carpet here and the tall, surrounding cedars throw their dark shadows over it. There is an enclosure of bronze, shut by a bronze door which is inscribed across its centre with an inscription in gold,--not in the Japanese language, but in Sanscrit to give more mystery; a massive, lugubrious, inexorable door, extraordinary beyond all expression, and which is the ideal door for a sepulchre. In the centre of this enclosure is a kind of round turret also in bronze having the form of a pagoda-bell, of a kneeling beast, of I don’t know what unknown and disturbing thing, and surmounted by a great astonishing heraldic flower: here, under this singular object, rests the body of the little yellow _bonhomme_, once the Emperor Yeyaz, for whom all this pomp has been displayed....

A little breeze agitates the branches of the cedars this morning and there falls a shower of these little dry, brown needles, a little brown rain on the greyish lichens, on the green velvet moss, and upon the sinister bronze objects. The voice of the cascades is heard in the distance like perpetual sacred music. An impression of nothingness and supreme peace reigns in this final court, to which so much splendour leads.

In another quarter of the forest the temple of the deified soul of Yemidzou is of an almost equal magnificence. It is approached by a similar series of steps, little carved and gilded light-towers, doors of bronze and enclosures of lacquer; but the plan of the whole is a little less regular, because the mountain is more broken....

A solemn hour on the Holy Mountain is at night-fall, when they close the temples. It is even more lugubrious at this autumnal season, when the twilight brings sad thoughts. With heavy, rumbling sounds which linger long in the sonorous forest, the great panels of lacquer and bronze are rolled on their grooves to shut in the magnificent buildings which have been open all day, although visited by nobody. A cold and damp shiver passes through the black forest. For fear of fire, which might consume these marvels, not a single light is allowed in this village of Spirits, where certainly darkness falls sooner and remains longer than anywhere else; no lamp has ever shone upon these treasures, which have thus slept in darkness in the very heart of Japan for many centuries; and the cascades increase their music while the silence of night enshrouds the forest so rich in enchantment.

_Japoneries d’automne_ (15th ed., Paris, 1889).

THE PALACE OF HOLYROOD.

DAVID MASSON.

Just after the middle of August, 1561, as we learn from contemporary records, there was a _haar_ of unusual intensity and continuance over Edinburgh and all the vicinity. It began on Sunday the 17th, and it lasted with slight intermissions, till Thursday the 21st. “Besides the surfett weat and corruptioun of the air,” writes Knox, then living in Edinburgh, “the myst was so thick and dark that skairse mycht any man espy ane other the length of two pair of butts.” It was the more unfortunate because it was precisely in those days of miserable fog and drizzle that Mary, Queen of Scots, on her return to Scotland after her thirteen years of residence and education in France, had to form her first real acquaintance with her native shores and the capital of her realm.

[Illustration: THE PALACE OF HOLYROOD.]

She had left Calais for the homeward voyage on Thursday the 14th of August, with a retinue of about one hundred and twenty persons, French and Scottish, embarked in two French state galleys, attended by several transports. They were a goodly company, with rich and splendid baggage. The Queen’s two most important uncles, indeed,--the great Francis de Lorraine, Duke of Guise, and his brother, Charles de Lorraine, the Cardinal,--were not on board. They, with the Duchess of Guise and other senior lords and ladies of the French Court, had bidden Mary farewell at Calais, after having accompanied her thither from Paris, and after the Cardinal had in vain tried to persuade her not to take her costly collection of pearls and other jewels with her, but to leave them in his keeping till it should be seen how she might fare among her Scottish subjects. But on board the Queen’s own galley were three others of her Guise or Lorraine uncles,--the Duc d’Aumale, the Grand Prior, and the Marquis d’Elbeuf,--with M. Damville, son of the Constable of France, and a number of French gentlemen of lower rank, among whom one notes especially young Pierre de Bourdeilles, better known afterwards in literary history as Sieur de Brantôme, and a sprightly and poetic youth from Dauphiné, named Chastelard, one of the attendants of M. Damville. With these were mixed the Scottish contingent of the Queen’s train, her four famous “Marys” included,--Mary Fleming, Mary Livingstone, Mary Seton, and Mary Beaton. They had been her playfellows and little maids of honour long ago in her Scottish childhood; they had accompanied her when she went abroad, and had lived with her ever since in France; and they were now returning with her, Scoto-Frenchwomen like herself, and all of about her own age, to share her new fortunes.

It is to Brantôme that we owe what account we have of the voyage from Calais. He tells us how the Queen could hardly tear herself away from her beloved France, but kept gazing at the French coast hour after hour so long as it was in sight, shedding tears with every look, and exclaiming again and again, “Adieu, ma chère France! Je ne vous verray jamais plus!”...

It was in the afternoon of Wednesday, the 20th of August, that there was a procession on horseback of the Queen, her French retinue, and the gathered Scottish lords and councillors, through the two miles of road which led from Leith to Holyrood. On the way the Queen was met by a deputation of the Edinburgh craftsmen and their apprentices, craving her royal pardon for the ringleaders in a recent riot, in which the Tolbooth had been broken open and the Magistrates insulted and defied. This act of grace accorded as a matter of course, the Queen was that evening in her hall of Holyrood, the most popular of sovereigns for the moment, her uncles and other chiefs of her escort with her, and the rest dispersed throughout the apartments, while outside, in spite of the fog, there were bonfires of joy in the streets and up the slopes of Arthur’s Seat, and a crowd of cheering loiterers moved about in the space between the palace-gate and the foot of the Canongate. Imparting some regulation to the proceedings of this crowd, for a while at least, was a special company of the most “honest” of the townsmen, “with instruments of musick and with musicians,” admitted within the gate, and tendering the Queen their salutations, instrumental and vocal, under her chamber window. “The melody, as she alledged, lyked her weill, and she willed the same to be continewed some nightis after.” This is Knox’s account; but Brantôme tells a different story. After noting the wretchedness of the hackneys provided for the procession from Leith to Holyrood, and the poorness of their harnessings and trappings, the sight of which, he says, made the Queen weep, he goes on to mention the evening serenade under the windows of Holyrood, as the very completion of the day’s disagreeables. The Abbey itself, he admits, was a fine enough building; but, just as the Queen had supped and wanted to go to sleep, “there came under her window five or six hundred rascals of the town to serenade her with vile fiddles and rebecks, such as they do not lack in that country, setting themselves to sing psalms, and singing so ill and in such bad accord that there could be nothing worse. Ah! what music, and what a lullaby for the night!” Whether Knox’s account of the Queen’s impressions of the serenade or Brantôme’s is to be accepted, there can be no doubt that the matter and intention of the performance were religious. Our authentic picture, therefore, of Queen Mary’s first night in Holyrood after her return from France is that of the Palace lit up from within, the dreary fog still persistent outside, the bonfires on Arthur’s Seat and other vantage-grounds flickering through the fog, and the portion of the wet crowd nearest the Palace singing Protestant psalms for the Queen’s delectation to an accompaniment of violins.

Next day, Thursday the 21st, this memorable Edinburgh _haar_ of August 1561 came to an end. Arthur’s Seat and the other heights and ranges of the park round Holyrood wore, we may suppose, their freshest verdure; and Edinburgh, dripping no longer, shone forth, we may hope, in her sunniest beauty. The Queen could then become more particularly acquainted with the Palace in which she had come to reside, and with the nearer aspects of the town to which the Palace was attached, and into which she had yet to make her formal entry.

Then, as now, the buildings that went by the general name of Holyrood were distinguishable into two portions. There was the Abbey, now represented only by the beautiful and spacious fragment of ruin, called the Royal Chapel, but then, despite the spoliations to which it had been subjected by recent English invasions, still tolerably preserved in its integrity as the famous edifice, in Early Norman style, which had been founded in the Twelfth Century by David I., and had been enlarged in the Fifteenth by additions in the later and more florid Gothic. Close by this was Holyrood House, or the Palace proper, built in the earlier part of the Sixteenth Century, and chiefly by James IV., to form a distinct royal dwelling, and so supersede that occasional accommodation in the Abbey itself which had sufficed for Scottish sovereigns before Edinburgh was their habitual or capital residence. One block of this original Holyrood House still remains in the two-turreted projection of the present Holyrood which adjoins the ruined relic of the Abbey, and which contains the rooms now specially shown as “Queen Mary’s Apartments.” But the present Holyrood, as a whole, is a construction of the reign of Charles II., and gives little idea of the Palace in which Mary took up her abode in 1561. The two-turreted projection on the left was not balanced then, as now, by a similar two-turreted projection on the right, with a façade of less height between, but was flanked on the right by a continued château-like frontage, of about the same height as the turreted projection, and at a uniform depth of recess from it, but independently garnished with towers and pinnacles. The main entrance into the Palace from the great outer courtyard was through this château-like flank, just about the spot where there is the entrance through the present middle façade; and this entrance led, like the present, into an inner court or quadrangle, built round on all the four sides. That quadrangle of château, touching the Abbey to the back from its north-eastern corner, and with the two-turreted projection to its front from its north-western corner, constituted, indeed, the main bulk of the Palace. There were, however, extensive appurtenances of other buildings at the back or at the side farthest from the Abbey, forming minor inner courts, while part of that side of the great outer courtyard which faced the entrance was occupied by offices belonging to the Palace, and separating the courtyard from the adjacent purlieus of the town. For the grounds of both Palace and Abbey were encompassed by a wall, having gates at various points of its circuit, the principal and most strongly guarded of which was the Gothic porch admitting from the foot of the Canongate into the front courtyard. The grounds so enclosed were ample enough to contain gardens and spaces of plantation, besides the buildings and their courts. Altogether, what with the buildings themselves, what with the courts and gardens, and what with the natural grandeur of the site,--a level of deep and wooded park, between the Calton heights and crags on the one hand and the towering shoulders of Arthur Seat and precipitous escarpment of Salisbury Crags on the other,--Holyrood in 1561 must have seemed, even to an eye the most satiated with palatial splendours abroad, a sufficiently impressive dwelling-place to be the metropolitan home of Scottish royalty.

_Edinburgh Sketches and Memories_ (London and Edinburgh, 1892).

SAINT-GUDULE.

VICTOR HUGO.

The windows of Saint-Gudule are of a kind almost unknown in France, real paintings, real pictures on glass of a marvellous style, with figures like Titian and architecture like Paul Veronese.

The pulpit of this church is carved in wood by Henry Verbruggen and bears the date of 1699. The whole of creation, the whole of philosophy, the whole of poetry are expressed here by an enormous tree which supports the pulpit in its boughs and shelters a world of birds and animals among its leaves, while at its base Adam and Eve are pursued by a sorrowful angel, followed by Death who seems triumphant, and separated by the tail of the serpent. At its summit, the cross--Truth--and the infant Jesus, whose foot rests upon the head of the bruised serpent. This poem is sculptured and carved out of oak alone, in the strongest, the most tender, and the most _spirituelle_ manner. The effect is prodigiously rococo and prodigiously beautiful. No matter what the fanatics of the severe school would say, it is true. This pulpit is one of those rare instances in art where the beautiful and the rococo meet. Watteau and Coypel have also occasionally discovered such points of intersection....

[Illustration: CHURCH OF SAINT-GUDULE, BRUSSELS]

It was three o’clock when I entered Saint-Gudule. They were celebrating the Office of the Virgin. A Madonna, covered with jewels and clothed in a robe of English lace, glittered on a dais of gold in the centre of the nave through a luminous cloud of incense which was dispersed around her. Many people were praying in the shadow motionless, and a strong ray of sunlight from above dispelled the gloom and shone full upon the large statues of proud mien arranged against the columns. The worshippers seemed of stone, the statues seemed alive.

And then a beautiful chant of mingled deep and ringing voices fell mysteriously with the tones of the organ from the highest rails hidden by the mists of incense. I, during this time, had my eye fixed dreamily upon Verbruggen’s pulpit, teeming with life,--that magic pulpit which is always suggestive.--Frame this with windows, ogives, and Renaissance tombs of white marble and black, and you will understand why a sublime sensation was produced by this scene....

I climbed the towers of Saint-Gudule. It was beautiful. The entire city lay beneath me, the toothed and voluted roofs of Brussels half-hidden by the smoke, the sky (a stormy sky), full of clouds, golden and curled above, solid as marble below; in the distance a large cloud from which rain was falling like fine sand from a bag which has burst; the sun shone above everything; the magnificent open-work, lantern-like belfry stood out sombre against the white mists; then the confused noise of the town reached me, then the verdure of the lovely hills on the horizon: it was truly beautiful. I admired everything like a provincial from Paris, which I am,--everything, even the mason who was hammering on a stone and whistling near me.

_En Voyage: France et Belgique_ (Paris, 1892).

THE ESCURIAL.

EDMONDO DE AMICIS.