WORK OF ART

Evening Post, Volume CVIII, Issue 139, 9 December 1929, Page 19

WORK OF ART

THE BOOK OF KELLS

A PRICELESS VOLUME

ANCIENT PENMANSHIP

Whatever may be said for that excellent instrument the typewriter (and much, indeed, may be said for it)j it has all but ruined the craft of penmanship, says a writer in "John O'London's Weekly." Among modern authors, only 'Dr. 'Robert Bridges and Mr. Arnold Bennett (whose carefullybound MSS. are as beautiful to look upon as they are rare) seem to take delight in the actual craft of handwriting, despising the typewriter so beloved of Mr. George Bernard Shaw. As for the rest, one has the awful suspicion that, whether they dictate to their secretaries (as Henry James used to do), ■ make use of ".the typewriter, pen, or ! pencil,-they are incapable of writing not only a. graceful hand but one that would pass the criticism of the writing-master of, say, fifty years •■ ago. To appreciate the beauty of penmanship in its most exquisite—and most elaborate —form one has to journey to Dublin. In the library of Trinity College there is to be found the most beautiful book in the world—"The Gospel of Columbkille, " or, as it is known nowadays, "The Book of Kells." Here is a book the value of which no collector or no bibliographical expert has ever been able to determine. It is probably the only book in the world of which one might truthfully say that it is priceless. The little town of Kells, from which the book takes its present name, is in County Meath, in the Irish Midlands. History tells ua of a famous monastery there of which there is now no trace, though the town still boasts of three magnificent ancient Irish stone crosses, an old church, and a very famous round tower.

EVENTFUL HISTORY.

The famous Abbey of Kells probably suffered, more vicissitudes "at the hands of Danish pillagers and pirates in the Middle Ages than any other great building of its kind in Western Europe. It was founded in the early sixth century A.D., and between that time and the the year 1000 was sacked and pillaged no fewer than eight times, on one occasion being levelled to the ground. In the year 1006, we learn from the "Annals of the Four Masters," the MS. of the famous book of gospels was stolen from the church and was found "after twenty nights and two months" hidden under a sod, all the jewels and its precious and most exquisitely worked binding rudely torn from it. Experts on medieval penmanship and "illumination" have never been able to agree even as to the approximate date of the book's composition. Some authorities declare emphatically that the penmanship and style of lettering is that of the sixth century; others with equal emphasis and authority that it belongs' to the seventh, the eighth, the ninth, and even the tenth centuries. The most modern view, however, is that it belongs to the middle of the ninth century.

QUEEN VICTOEIA'S AUTOGRAPH. Certain it is, as Sir Edward Sullivan reminds us, "the famous Manuscript of the Gospels . . . seems to have survived in an almost miraculous fashion the marauding incursions and pillage of many-centuries."- In Dublin malicious people will tell you that in spite of the Danes the worst ill-treatment the Book ever received was in 1549, when Queen Victoria and Prince Albert signed their autographs on its precious and lovely pages. This, however, is nothing more than a vicious legend spread by silly people who never seem to have taken the trouble to verify the facts. What Queen. Victoria and Prince Albert did was to autograph an otherwise worthless blank leaf of parchment inserted at tho beginning of the manuscript.

It is impossible to convey in writing the extraordinary craftsmanship of ttie scribe or scribes whose . work it was, much less the beauty of its exquisite capitals interlaced and intertwined with curious Celtic designs, grotesque animals, pictures of saints,-of God, of Jesus Christ, and the Virgin Mary, all done in gold and in tho most exquisite colours; sharp blacks, vivid crimsons, blues, and greens that to-day are as bright as when they were first painted. There are several curious facts about this remarkable transcription of the Gospels. The characters in which it is written have long b6en regarded as Celtic, and have been adopted by hundreds of modern Irish designers as examples of ancient Irish characters. Instead, they are nothing more or less than a slight modification of Bonian characters with nothing Irish about them at all! And these are the characters that are used in the present-day Irish Free State.

We know quite a lot about how these ancient Celtic craftsmen went about their work and what their, materials were. Their pens were not of steel, but the" quills of geese, swans, and crowsj their parchment was made from the skins of goats and calves, beaten to a fine thinness and polished. As for the colours, they were made from natural substances by the scribes themselves—black from lampblack or fishbones; red from realgar; green from malachite; blue from lapis-lazuli; reddish purple from finely-ground glass mixed with gold dust. And so minute was their workmanship that an expert recently counted (with the aid of a lens) no fewer than 158' interlacements, each consisting of a strip of white, bordered on both sides by a black line, in tho space of oiie inch!