Holy Land. The original motives of the apses of this style are to be found in almost identical form in the sixth-century churches of Syria, while the great triple doorway or porches which began with Saint-Gilles and, through the transept porches of Chartres, grew into the cavernous doorways of the typical French cathedral, may be found in their original form in the ruined church of St. Simon Stylites in central Syria.

Greek and Oriental, intellect and emotion, form and colour, had come together in the land of Nazareth and Bethlehem and Jerusalem, and under the creative influence of Christian religion, Christian philosophy, and Christian life, brought into being the first Christian art, the power of which was to persist for a thousand years, however much the form might change under the impulse of varied racial types.

III. EUROPEAN BEGINNINGS

So far as western Europe is concerned, that is to say, all that had been the Empire of Augustus from the Atlantic to Macedonia, the fall of Rome in the sixth century, with the total disappearance of her power and authority, and the dominance of the barbarian elements in her polity, meant the end for a time of all civilization and of all advancement in art. Much of culture and of art was preserved in Byzantium, but for nearly three centuries Europe lay fallow after the great catastrophe. The whole civil system crumbled and disappeared under barbarian control and the Church was the only thing that approximated to a force of law and order, the popes combining, in some sense, the old Imperial functions. with those of their ecclesiastical estate. Very swiftly the barbarian tribes were influenced towards civilization by the religion which now counted no rivals, and the feudal system came into being as the basis for a new political and civil organism. In this process of recovery the greatest force was that of the monks under the rule of St. Benedict, a great multitude of men scattered in highly organized groups

throughout all Europe west of the Rhine and south of the Danube. Their great work was the building up, not only for themselves but for the communities around them, of a life as nearly Christian as they could make it, and from the middle of the seventh century to the end of the thirteenth they formed, under varied systems of organization, the great constructive force in society.

In time this society achieved a new coherency and for about a century, in the very middle of the Dark Ages, there was a period of real civilization. It began with the beating back of the Mohammedan invasion by Charles Martel, an irruption through Africa and Spain that threatened for a time to crush Christianity altogether and turn Europe into a series of Mahometan caliphates, and was continued by the campaigns of Charles the Great against the even worse hordes from the east that were coming through Germany and Austria. Europe was saved, and Charles was acclaimed Emperor of the new Rome and crowned by the Pope in St. Peter's on Christmas Day in the year 800.

If there had been any building worthy of the name of architecture in Europe for two centuries, neither vestige nor record remains. The ruined temples and villas of Roman civilization had been dismembered and the fragments put together again after some rough fashion to serve the simple purposes of the monks, the feudal lords and the various peoples struggling out of barbarism, but so far as we know there was no art here of any kind. Under Charlemagne there came a sudden recovery, once the Moors and the Eastern savages were turned back, for he was a great king and he surrounded himself with all the men of ability he could gather from every part of Europe. He built much, but practically nothing remains except the royal chapel at Aix-la-Chapelle and the fragments of a small church at Steinbach. St. Jean, Poitiers, is probably of the same date and the gateway at Lorsch and Germigny-desPrés a little later. The Chapel at Aix is the most important but it is little more than a rude copy of San Vitale. Some

say the master builder was imported from Byzantium, others that Einhard was the architect, and there is a tradition that all the Carolingian work was carried out by the "Comacini" who are held to have been the descendants of members of the old Roman building guilds who fled to an island in Lake Como at the fall of Rome. In any case there was no originality and little craft; old materials were generally used over again and put together after a rough-and-ready fashion. Better work may have perished than has been preserved to us, but this is hardly probable.

Something might have come of it all if the Carolingian standard of civilization had been maintained, but it was all no more than a "false dawn." After the death of Charlemagne's son, Louis the Pious, everything went to pieces again with the partition of the Empire, and the Dark Ages returned, only with an intensification of their gloom. Not only did social chaos supervene, but the Church fell again into bad hands, and for nearly two hundred years Europe was again sunk in barbarism. During this whole period of five centuries from the fall of Rome important things were happening however, for all the time the Northern races that had been filtering in through the dissolving Roman frontiers were being Christianized and in a measure civilized, chiefly through the influence of the Benedictine monks and the institutions that grew out of feudalism. By the end of the tenth century this process had apparently been completed, at least sufficiently to enable a beginning to be made, and with the opening of the new millenium the curtain rose, so to speak, on the great drama of Mediaevalism.

The prologue to this vast Christian epic covers the last three-quarters of the tenth century, and its events synchronize with the greatest degradation. In 927 a new life came into monasticism through the reformed order of Cluny; in 936 Otto the Great became Emperor; in 987 the new Capetian dynasty was established in France, and in 999 Pope Sylvester II began the redemption of the Church. Mean

while the Hungarians and Slavs had been beaten back from the eastern frontiers of Europe, while the Northmen under Rollo had established themselves in Normandy. This last event, beginning as a catastrophe, was destined to prove a blessing, for the monks of Cluny promptly converted these fierce barbarians from the Baltic, and in less than a century they had become the greatest power for good in all Europe. As they were the dominating force in civilization during the eleventh century, so the Franks, in their turn under the influence of the Cistercians who had followed the Cluniacs as the centre of spiritual energy, took charge of the twelfth century, and between them they built up Mediaevalism. Into the almost universal corruption sprang great leaders and captains of men, raised up apparently without warning, and not only in France, Normandy and Burgundy, but in Spain, Poland, Italy, Sweden, the Rhineland, and conspicuously in England. The vitality was prodigious, the revolution and reform comprehensive. "Never was such an upheaval, such a rattling of the dry bones of wide decrepitude by militant monks, mad with the zeal of reform, and by Norman, Frankish and Flemish adventurers whose headlong careers were embellished by an equally headstrong religious ardour." In the end Europe proved too small for the exuberant vitality of a North that suddenly had found itself, and the riot of action culminated, just as the century closed, in the First Crusade.

"Of course art answered to the existing stimulus, as it always does when the driving impulse is based on fundamental things. Music, from about 1030, developed on new and brilliant lines; at the very beginning of the century, nuns in their Rhenish cloisters were writing Latin comedies; in Hildesheim and Liège the arts of metal achieved a sudden and amazing splendour; sculpture began its recovery in the south of France, while architecture opened like an expanding flower, not only in Normandy, but in France, Burgundy, the Rhineland, and in every quarter of Italy from Lombardy to Calabria and Sicily."

The architectural beginning is in Italy, and just as soon as the year 1000 is passed it shows itself in two places, Tuscany and Lombardy. The first of these two schools is curious and hardly to be explained; the chief existing works are San Miniato and the Baptistry in Florence, together with Pisa Cathedral to a certain extent. They are perhaps the work of a Greek architect imported from Syria, and probably of Syrian craftsmen as well, for the work is exquisite in its fineness. There is nothing Lombard about the Florentine work, though Pisa shows this to a certain degree. If the South had taken charge of the development of civilization the whole history of Christian art would have been different and San Miniatomight have been its prototype. This was not to be; the North gained the control and Gothic was the result.

All the same, Byzantium and Syria played their part, the first through the Court of the Empire where the Princess Theophano, daughter of the Eastern Emperor, became the wife of Otto II and mother of Otto III. When she came to (what must have been to her) the barbarian West she brought enormous treasure of works of art and craftsmanship of all kinds, and artists and artisans as well, and this influence went far. As for Syria it worked most powerfully in the south of France which was the gateway to Europe for all the merchants of the East. In a way the Romanesque of Provence and Languedoc is a continuation and amplification of the sixth-century architecture of Syria. I shall return to this later.

The school of Lombardy is vital and significant; it is also in the direct line of succession, for from thence came the first models, and perhaps the first workmen, that were to form the foundation for the great style of Normandy which, in its turn, was to become the basis for the Gothic style. The Lombards were a most interesting people; originating in Scandinavia they crossed the Baltic at some time and settled in the valley of the Elbe whence, later, some portion of the tribe migrated south to the Danube. By the year 586 they