Page:The Waning of the Middle Ages (1924).djvu/300

262 thought. Thought takes the form of visual images. Really to impress the mind a concept has first to take a visible shape. The insipidity of allegory could be borne, because the satisfaction of the mind lay in the vision. This constant need of expressing the visible was far better fulfilled by pictorial than by literary means. And again better by prose than by poetry, because it conforms more easily to the visualizing turn of mind. The prose of the fifteenth century in general is superior to its poetry, because prose, like painting, could attain a high degree of direct and powerful realism, which was denied to poetry by its stage of development and by its proper nature.

There is one author, especially, who, by the eminent clearness of his vision of external things, reminds us of Van Eyck, namely, Georges Chastellain. He was a Fleming from the Alost district. Though he calls himself “a loyal Frenchman,” “a Frenchman by birth,” it is highly probable that Flemish was his mother-tongue. La Marche calls him “a born Fleming, though writing in the French language.” He himself likes to lay stress on his rusticity; he speaks of “his coarse speech,” he calls himself “a Flemish man, a man of the cattle-breeding marshes, rude, ignorant, stammering of tongue, greasy of mouth and of palate and quite bemired with other defects, proper to the nature of the land.” His Flemish birth explains the heaviness of his flowery speech, his pompous and turgid grandiloquence; in short, his truly “Burgundian” style, which makes him almost unbearable to the French reader. It is a formal style, of somewhat elephantine character. But it is also to his Flemish cast of mind that Chastellain owes his lucid and penetrating vision and the richness of his colouring.

There are undeniable affinities between Chastellain and Jan van Eyck. In his best moments Chastellain equals Van Eyck at his worst, and that is saying a good deal. Let us recall the group of singing angels of the altar-piece of the Lamb. Those heavy dresses of red and gold brocade, loaded with precious stones, those too expressive grimaces, the somewhat puerile decoration of the lectern—all this in painting is the equivalent of the showy Burgundian prose. It is a rhetorician’s style transferred to painting. Now, whereas this rhetorical element occupies but a small place in painting, it is the principal thing in Chastellain’s prose, where the clear observation and the