et espoentable, car feu partoit d’une mote d’en plus de mille lieux, avecques grosse fumière, dont nul ne pensast à celle heure fors que ce fust ou purgatoire d’aucune âme ou autre illusion de l’ennemy….”[1] Upon this he stops, but suddenly remembers that charcoal-burners are in the habit of lighting such kilns in the depths of woods. However he does not find a house anywhere near, and begins roaming about once more. At last the barking of a dog directs him to the hovel of a poor man, where he finds rest and food.
Other episodes furnished Chastellain with themes for striking descriptions, such as the judicial duel between the two burghers of Valenciennes, mentioned above; the nocturnal quarrel at the Hague, between the envoys of Friesland and some Burgundian noblemen whose sleep they disturb by playing at “touch and go” in the room above on their pattens; the riot at Ghent in 1467, at the entry of the new Duke Charles, which coincided with the fair of Houthem, whither the people were in the habit of taking the shrine of Saint Liévin in a procession. In all these pages we admire the author’s faculty of observation. A number of spontaneous details betray his strongly visual perception. The duke facing the rebels sees before him “a multitude of faces in rusty helmets, framing the grinning beards of villains, biting their lips.” The lout who forces his way to the window, by the duke’s side, wears a gauntlet of blackened iron with which he strikes the window-sill to command silence.
The gift of finding the right and simple word accurately to describe things seen is, at bottom, the same visual power which enables Van Eyck to give his portraits their perfect expression. Only, in literature, this realism remains enslaved by conventional forms and suffocated under a heap of arid rhetoric.
In this respect painting was greatly in advance of literature. It was already expert in the technique of rendering the effects of light. Miniature-painters especially were occupied with the problem of fixing the light-effect of a moment. In painting,
- ↑ But the more he approached it, the more it seemed a hideous and frightful thing, for fire came out of a mound in more than a thousand places with thick smoke, and, at that hour, anybody would think that it was the purgatory of game soul or some other illusion of the devil.
