On Something | Page 7

inspired men differing in their traditions and upbringing
from all the commonalty of mankind had done such things. When you
go to the names all you find is that Coulombe out of Touraine began
the job, that there was some sort of quarrel between his head-man and
the paymasters, that he was replaced in the most everyday manner
conceivable by a Fleming, Van Boghem, and that this Fleming had to
help him a better-known Swiss, one Meyt. It is the same story with
nearly all this kind of work and its wonderful period. The wealth of
detail at Louviers or Gisors is almost anonymous; that of the first
named perhaps quite anonymous.
Who carved the wood in St. James's Church at Antwerp? I think the
name is known for part of it, but no one did the whole or anything like
the whole, and yet it is all one thing. Who carved the wood in St.
Bertrand de Coraminges? We know who paid for it, and that is all we
know. And as for the wood of Rouen, we must content ourselves with
the vague phrase, "Probably Flemish artists."
Of the Gothic statues where they were conventional, however grand the
work, one can understand that they should be anonymous, but it is
curious to note the same silence where the work is strikingly and
particularly individual. Among the kings at Rheims are two heads, one
of St. Louis, one of his grandson. Had some one famous sculptor done
these things and others, were his work known and sought after, these
two heads would be as renowned as anything in Europe. As it is they
are two among hundreds that the latter thirteenth and early fourteenth
centuries scattered broadcast; each probably was the work of a different
workman, and the author or authors of each remain equally unknown.
I know not whether there is more pathos or more humour or more
consolation in considering this ignorance of ours with regard to the
makers of good things.
It is full of parable. There is something of it in Nature. There are men
who will walk all day through a June wood and come out atheists at the
end of it, finding no signature thereupon; and there are others who,
sailing over the sea, come back home after seeing so many things still

puzzled as to their authorship. That is one parable.
Then there is this: the corrective of ambition. Since so much remains,
the very names of whose authors have perished, what does it matter to
you or to the world whether your name, so long as your work, survives?
Who was it that carefully and cunningly fixed the sights on Gumber
Corner so as to get upon a clear day his exact alignment with
Pulborough and then the shoulder of Leith Hill, just to miss the two
rivers and just to obtain the best going for a military road? He was
some engineer or other among the thousands in the Imperial Service.
He was at Chichester for some weeks and drew his pay, and then
perhaps went on to London, and he was born in Africa or in Lombardy,
or he was a Breton, or he was from Lusitania or from the Euphrates. He
did that bit of work most certainly without any consideration of fame,
for engineers (especially when they are soldiers) are singular among
artists in this matter. But he did a very wonderful thing, and the Roman
Road has run there for fifteen hundred years--his creation. Some one
must have hit upon that precise line and the reason for it. It is exactly
right, and the thing done was as great and is to-day as satisfying as that
sculpture of Brou or the two boys Murillo painted, whom you may see
in the Gallery at Dulwich. But he never thought of any one knowing his
name, and no one knows it.
Then there is this last thing about anonymous work, which is also a
parable and a sad one. It shows how there is no bridge between two
human minds.
How often have I not come upon a corbel of stone carved into the shape
of a face, and that face had upon it either horror or laughter or great
sweetness or vision, and I have looked at it as I might have looked
upon a living face, save that it was more wonderful than most living
faces. It carried in it the soul and the mind of the man who made it. But
he has been dead these hundreds of years. That corbel cannot be in
communion with me, for it is of stone; it is dumb and will not speak to
me, though it compels me continually to ask it questions. Its author also
is dumb, for