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THE RHONE TO THE SEINE, try to open them to a vision of what it may have been before it was turned into a show.

Alas! even this last effort—this bon mouvement of the imagination—fails to restore an atmosphere of poetry to the church of Brou, to put it in any other light than that of a kind of superlative "Albert Memorial," in which regardlessness of cost has frankly predominated over aesthetic considerations. Yet it is manifestly unfair to charge the Duchess Margaret with the indiscrimination of the parvenu. One should rather ascribe to special conditions of time and place that stifling confusion of ornament, that air of being, as Bacon puts it, so terribly "daubed with cost," which is both the first effect and the final outcome of an inspection of Brou. If Arnold gave the rein to fancy in his mise-en-scène, he was quite exact in picturing the conditions in which the monument was produced, and his enumeration of the "Flemish carvers, Lombard gilders, German masons, smiths from Spain" who collaborated in its making, reminds one that artistic unity could hardly result from so random an association of talents. It was characteristic of the time, of the last boiling-over of the heterogeneous [ 151 ]