branches had got round one of the stones of the monument, and had already, when I saw it, raised the stone some feet above its original position; the tree was growing, and it would continue to lift the stone in this curiously destructive embrace. it is curious to see how our most ordinary mouldings have been manipulated by the native workman, so that they have much the appearance of the mouldings to be seen on some Hindu temples. This feature is very distinct in a monument at Tuticorin (Plate LXI). There is another, and what may be looked upon as a rather remarkable instance, in the burial-ground at Pulicat. It was common in Indian architecture-and good examples may be found in the rock-cut temples of both the Brahmans and the Buddhists-to place a figure on each side of a doorway; these Mr. Rea has been performing the part of "Old Mortality" in the now deserted burial-grounds of the Dutch that are still to be found in the Madras Presidency. The hammer and chisel have not been used to restore the quaint epitaphs and sculptures; the archæologist, in this case, has made drawings of the tombstones and copies of the inscriptions, and given them the more permanent character of a printed form in the present volume. It was in the beginning of the seventeenth century that Europeans, as traders, began what might be termed the invasion of India. The Portuguese had found their way there early in the previous century; that resulted from their discovery of the new route to India by the Cape of Good Hope. The English East India Company was founded in 1599, and in the year following, the Dutch, under Houtman, with a fleet, appeared on the shores of Hindustan. In these early days trade was the sole object, and a bit of ground on which to build a "factory was all that was required. Each of these factories had its burial-ground, which is now, in most cases, almost the only visible remains of Dutch occupation. The number of these places of the dead which Mr. Rea has traced out round the shores of the Peninsula, every one telling of a factory that had existed at the spot, is good evidence of the activity of the Dutch East India Company during the seventeenth century. It may be added that the List of Antiquarian Remains in the Bombay Presidency above noticed mentions the existence of Dutch tombs in the Broach and Ahmadabad districts; these show that the Dutch factories were not limited to Madras. There are seventy-three plates in the volume; most of them are merely representations of single tombstones, with the inscriptions, in Dutch, mixed occasionally with Latin texts from Scripture. Many have coats-of-arms; hour-glasses, skulls, and crossbones are also common; and in most cases there are elaborate ornamental borders. The designs are European, but the cutting has been done by natives. In a few instances, where the monument has some pretensions to an architectural structure, Beale of Fea S LICHGATE AT FULICAT. Reduced from Plate XVI. were known as Dwârpâlas, or door-keepers. The Lichgate at Pulicat still remains; it has a Romanesque arch supported on piers, and on each pier there is a pilaster with Ionic capitals. On both pilasters a skeleton, as a dwârpâla, has been sculptured. Mr. Rea describes these figures -whether humorously or ironically is not indicated as being "almost life-size." In the days when skulls and cross-bones were considered to be the appropriate emblems for tombs, these two door-keepers must have been looked upon as a very happy thought. WILLIAM SIMPSON. W LA CATHÉDRALE.* HEN Didron spoke of Victor Hugo as having in his Notre Dame de Paris built up in a few short weeks the Cathedral of the Middle Ages, he illustrated that ill-regulated but generous fervour which touched and transfigured all men and all things for the Early Gothic Revivalists. Hugo's chapters on the great church are illumined by sudden gleams of genius, and graced by his characteristic literary excellence. They abound in the pregnant hint and acute suggestion which come to an imaginative and poetical writer most readily when he is not hampered by too much knowledge of his subject; but the picture is not made to be looked at closely. It is a piece of scene-painting-broad, dashing, and haphazard. The Cathedral looms before us an imposing, but shadowy, mass; the detail is vague, blurred and uninforming; nor, in spite of the title, is the church really vital to the book; it moulds neither character nor circumstance. As a matter of fact, the romance, when it first appeared, owing to a temporary loss of manuscripts, did not contain the three chapters through which Hugo gallops his architectural hobby-horse; and their connection with the rest is so slender that those who, in the writer's words, have eyes only for the drama may, and do, pass them by with a light heart and pay no penalty. They are for the curious or jaded few, like the Architectural Room at the Royal Academy. The book under notice is of a very different and far less common type. It is indeed. a latter-day miracle that a man brimming over, as M. Huysmans is, with the quintessence of all that is searching, questioning, and luminous in the spirit of contemporary Paris, should have written a book out of all touch with its time, in which iconography, mysticism, the symbolism of sounds, of scents and colours, are discussed, and pressed, and accepted with an air of perfect conviction. Nor is it less surprising that a narrative so dull, prolix, and disconnected-to put it plainly-should have found its thousands of admiring readers in a society both intolerant and incurious in respect of the subject-matter. *La Cathédrale, 7ème Edition, 1898. J. K. Huysmans, Paris. P. V. Stock, Editeur. Third Series. Vol. V. No. 18.-27 August 1898. 3 R But M. Huysmans has already made the intelligent reading world his own. The belief that what he writes is worth reading is not lightly founded, or lightly held, and it is justified, even in so unpromising a production as the present, by sustained and subtle beauties of description, by felicities of thought and phrase which belong only to the elect, and by the truth of the quiet psychological study which forms the backbone of the book. How far M. Huysmans is sincere in the frank mediævalism which he professes, it is impossible to say; but, even if we allow a liberal discount, we must modify seriously the impression of his personality left by his earlier work. The writer of such a book as this is not the man to have dealt with what is revolting in life, except with the idea of bringing it into the light and making it hateful. For the future we must think of him as a pure and candid soul, aghast at the enormities of the world, and recognise in his work the action of a motive never perhaps more truly above reproach than when his means seem most open to exception. The subject of La Cathédrale may be shortly stated. Durtal, for whom the literary atmosphere of Paris has come to mean moral asphyxiation, the gradual sapping of all spiritual impulse, takes the opportunity of the appointment of his friend the Abbé Gévresin to a canonry in Chartres Cathedral, to try the effect of fresh surroundings. There, in the stillness of the small cathedral town, amid the depressing influences of the treeless plains of La Beauce, he wears away the slow-moving months of a life without incident, drifting to and fro almost without volition on a tide of unrest and indecision, now moved by intimate communion with the solemn mysteries of the cathedral towards the monastic life of Solesmes, repelled the next moment by the love of liberty, by the horror of submitting his individuality to the millstones of conventual rigour, most of all, perhaps, by the literary man's dread of having his favourite passages edited by a Superior without a sense of style. This is a true touch; Durtal's temperament is, above all, that of the artist. Fastidious and sensitive, he dwells with satisfaction on the delights of seclusion from the squalor and ugliness of the world; but set him face to face with the reality, and the details frighten and offend him. He might find content at last like a Thoreau in the woods of Walden, one would be inclined to say; but, unless M. Huysmans is misunderstood, we shall find that in L'Oblat, the book which is soon to be looked for, Durtal has taken the momentous, the much-debated step. The title of this book is no misnomer. Either we must catch the infection of the writer's enthusiasm for Notre Dame de Chartres, or we may as well lay his rhapsody aside at once. We must stand with him while he runs his hand lovingly over every fold of drapery in the porches, follow him through disquisitions of a length and minuteness unbearable in any one less gifted, and drink deeply with him of the lore of an age when faith hung like fruit on every tree, with what countenance we may command. For a true enjoyment of the book one must try to enter into the writer's mind, see with him, admire with him, believe with him. But for everyone with an eye or an ear for beauty there are pages of word-painting so vivid and so picturesque that to leave them unread would be a real loss, intellectual and emotional. Unfortunately, it is almost impossible to prove the point by quotation. M. Huysmans is so long-winded that there is nothing for it but paraphrase, and he is at the same time so minute that if one were to try to boil down one of his pages, the simile of the ox in the teacup would be hopelessly inadequate to express the strength of the product. Critical judgments of almost epigrammatical brevity and point are numerous, and none is better than this on the Renaissance: "From the moment the Luxury of the Renaissance made its appearance, the Comforter took to flight; Deadly Sin in stone could spread at will "where, in a few words, the non-religiousness, the return to a classic point of view and classic ideals, which is at the root of every manifestation of the Renaissance, whether it is in literature, architecture, painting, or sculpture, is put with a trenchant and picturesque vigour, which drives the fact home like a sledge-hammer. Architecture for M. Huysmans exists only as the handmaid of religious observance. The history of the art in the Middle Ages is, he says, not only the struggle to resist the thrust and weight of vaults, as laid down by M. Quicherat," but there is something in this art beyond mere material skill and the solving of practical questions." This it is with which M. Huysmans is preoccupied; the history and understanding of Gothic constructionally are not strong points with him, but he has the art of making the dry bones live, when the archæologist would leave them dead as he found them, albeit neatly labelled and described. Here, for instance, is something to counterbalance a little imperfect history: "Romanesque has retained somewhat of a time anterior to the birth of Christ; it is the embodiment of a prayer to the implacable Adonai rather than to the loving Son or the gentle Mother."-" Gothic, in a word, is the unfolding of a soul, while Romanesque architecture pictures it retiring within itself.""Romanesque is typical of the Old Testament, Gothic of the New. The simile, indeed, is exact, when one considers it. Is not the Bible, the unbending book of Jehovah, the awful code of the Father, symbolised in Romanesque with its air of severity and contrition, and the Gospels charged with sweetness and consolation in Gothic, full as it is of outpourings, of persuasiveness, of lowly aspirations?" It is the soul of the great Church which touches him, that indefinable something born partly of the spirit in which its builders worked, partly of its history, partly of its daily use. "Architecture and Archæology have laid bare the organism for us. Who will declare the soul?" For him, Notre Dame at Paris, "in spite of the dithyrambs of Hugo," is soulless. The work which scraping and cleaning, the repiecing of sculpture, the restoration of statuary, began, has been completed by the London tourist, who brandishes his Baedeker during the Elevation of the Host; all that is left is the dull, unillumined corpse of stone. "Then take Amiens, with its white glass and crude glare, its chapels closed with lofty grilles, the long silences undisturbed by prayer, the emptiness. It, too, is void of soul, and, I know not why, breathes for me an old, musty savour of Jansenism." Others-Reims, Rouen, Tours, Le Mans--are still warm, but the last agony is on them; only in Chartres does one feel that the incense of prayer rises to the Holy Mother. The medieval Church, reared by a faith which surmounted every obstacle, remains the embodiment of praise and adoration, but we must look to the tower, better still to the spire, the arrow of masonry, for the true symbol of prayer, "winging its way through the clouds to the very heart of the Father as it were to a target." M. Huysmans's sympathies go out most strongly to the very earliest days of Gothic art. He hangs with the love of a mother over its cradle, but the seductiveness of Jean Texier's work is not lost on him. "The new tower," he says, "pierced like lacework, wrought like a gem, hung about with foliage and the tendrils of the vine, rises with long-drawn grace of coquetry, trying to make up for the gush of soul, the humble entreaty of its elder by laughing orison and happy smile, and to win the Father by merry, childlike prattle." But the writer can be picturesque as well as fanciful. Jean Texier's work is once more his theme. "Under a clear sky the whole mass grows silvery, and, when the sun lights it up, is touched with a glow of gold; from close by its surface is like a biscuit which has been nibbled, the silicious limestone pitted with holes; at other times, when the sun is setting, it is suffused with crimson, and springs aloft rosy and green like a colossal reliquary of delicate workmanship, and at twilight it fades away into blue, and as the blue becomes violet, seems to melt into the air.” On a larger canvas M. Huysmans is no less completely at home. His picture of the celebration of Early Mass in the Crypt is perhaps the best thing of the kind in the book. Packed with small detail, painted with an infinity of little touches, an air of mystery still hangs about it. The gloom parts here and there to show the soft gleam of the lowering vault, the rounded form of a sturdy column; the atmosphere is heavy with the reek of oil lamps and melting wax, mixed with the aroma of incense, and the vague savour of earthiness; the very figures of the kneeling people are dim and indefinable. Only on the officiating priest and his assistant the light falls strong. It is just such a picture as Rembrandt might have painted. The book then is full of dull, featureless tracts of writing, of learning so perverse in its futility that a page or two of proper names comes as a welcome anodyne; the same chord is struck again and again till the very ears ache; the boredom of Durtal's life at Chartres is so immense, his recreations so monotonous, that the reader becomes infected with a malaise |