ssia.
But, though any stick may be good enough, some are too good. Besides,
however much we love France and the French, let us have the justice to
remember that if, as seems possible, French soldiers were using the
cathedral as a post of observation, the Germans, according to what are
called the rules of war, were in the right. In that case it was the
French themselves who first transgressed that law which, they now tell
us, makes neutral and inviolate works of art. For my own part, I utterly
deny that it can ever, in any circumstances, be right to destroy or put
in jeopardy beautiful things. But for any of those governments which
took a hand in the deliberate ruin of the summer palace at Pekin to
prate of vandalism and pose as defenders of art is not only disingenuous
but silly. The spectacle of European soldiers and statesmen who, to
admonish such evil Chinamen as might persist in defending their liberty
and their religion, destroyed without demur the masterpieces of Oriental
art, the spectacle, I say, of these people whimpering over the late
Gothic of Louvain or the early Gothic of Reims, strikes me as being what
the French, if their sense of humour had not suffered more than their
monuments, would call _un peu trop fort_.

Reims is, or was--I am not sure whether we are more conscious of what
existed before the bombardment or of what we imagine remains--Reims is
or was a typical thirteenth-century building; and, like most
thirteenth-century buildings, is or was, to my feeling, of no great
artistic significance. That it is a venerable focus of sentiment no one
denies; so, I suppose, is the monstrosity of Cologne and the Albert
Memorial. I am not concerned with sentiment, but with art. Therefore, I
must note that of such artistic value as the cathedral ever possessed
the greater part was not destroyed by the German bombardment: it was
destroyed when, some years ago, the upper part of the church was made as
good as new by the Ministry of Fine Arts. Only the glass, and the
sculpture over the little door in the north transept, and a few
twelfth-or very early thirteenth-century figures which had escaped
restoration will be a great loss to the world; and, for our comfort, we
may remember that the glass was not comparable with the glass at
Chartres or Bourges, while finer sculpture is to be seen in scores of
Romanesque churches. I can listen with admirable patience to tales of
damage done to Reims cathedral; but should the a