HEART OF EUROPE

The Cathedral of Reims

HEART OF EUROPE

BY
RALPH ADAMS CRAM, Litt.D., LL.D.
F.A.I.A., A.N.A., F.R.G.S.
ILLUSTRATED
NEW YORK
CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS
1916

Copyright, 1915, by
CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS
——
Published October, 1915

TO
E. S. C.
WHO SOME DAY MAY KNOW THE
HEART OF EUROPE
AND TO WHOM THIS BOOK MAY BE A DIM RECALLING
“OF OLD, UNHAPPY, FAR-OFF THINGS
AND BATTLES LONG AGO”
WHITEHALL
29 AUGUST, 1915

The author wishes to express his great sense of personal obligation to Miss Gertrude Schirmer and Mr. Emil P. Albrecht for their kindness in furnishing illustrations that otherwise could not have been obtained.

CONTENTS

ILLUSTRATIONS

HEART OF EUROPE

I
A SANCTUARY LAID WASTE

BETWEEN the Seine and the Rhine lay once a beautiful land wherein more history was made, and recorded in old monuments full of grace and grandeur and fancy, than in almost any other region of the world. The old names were best, for each aroused memory and begot strange dreams: Flanders, Brabant, the Palatinate; Picardy, Valois, Champagne, Franche-Comté; Artois, Burgundy, and Bar. And the town names ring with the same sonorous melody, evoking the ghosts of a great and indelible past: Bruges, Ghent, Louvain, and Liége; Aix-la-Chapelle, Coblentz, and Trèves; Ypres and Lille, Tournai and Fontenay, Arras and Malplaquet; Laon, Nancy, Verdun, and Varennes; Amiens, Soissons, and Reims. Cæsar, Charlemagne, St. Louis, Napoleon, with proconsuls, paladins, crusaders, and marshals unnumbered; kings, prince-bishops, monks, knights, and aureoled saints take form and shape again at the clang of the splendid names.

And in all these places, and by all these men (and elsewhere, endlessly, and by hands unnumbered), two thousand years had wrought their visible manifestation in abbey, church, and cathedral; in manor and palace and castle, in trade hall and civic hall, and in library and seminary and school.

Wars, great and small, have swept it from river to river, but much has been free for a century and all of it free for forty years. Under every oppression and every adversity it has thriven and grown rich, not in material things alone, but in those commodities that have actual intrinsic value; and a short year ago it was the most prosperous, peaceful, and industrious quarter of Europe. Whatever the war, however violent the opposing agencies, its priceless records of architecture and other acts were piously or craftily spared, except when the madness of the French Revolution swept over its convents and cloisters, leaving Coxyde, Villers, St. Bavon, St. Jean des Vignes, the Abbaye des Lys, dead witnesses of the faith that had built them and the spared monuments as well.

And now a thing calling itself the highest civilisation in Europe, with the name of God in its mouth, again sweeps the already well-swept land. In defiance of Peace Palaces and Conferences; in spite of the bankers of the world and their double-knotted purse-strings; in spite of a socialism that said war should not happen again, and an evolutionary philosophy that said it could not happen again (men now being so civilised), the world is at war, and the old arena of Europe flames as at Armageddon, while those things too sacred for pillage and destruction by the armies and the commanders of five centuries are given over to annihilation in order that the peril of the Slav, on the other side of Europe, may not menace the treasured civilisation of the West, whose vestiges even now are blazing pyres, or cinders and ashes!

It is significant that thus far the heavy hand of the pursuer has fallen notably on two things: the school and the church; for these are two of the three things he most fears and hates. Not the school, as with him, where secularism, through economic materialism and a sinister philosophy, breeds a race as unprincipled as it is efficient and fearless, nor the church, as with him, where intellectualism ousts faith, expediency morals, and God is glad “ably to support” the victorious battalions of a crown prince. Quite otherwise; the school that teaches both independence and regard for law, with religion as the only basis for right conduct, and the Church that teaches humility and the reality of sin, and the subservience of all rulers, whether king or parliament, to the religion and the authority of a living Christ speaking to-day as He spoke on the Mount of Olives.

When the University of Louvain passed in the smoke and flame of a murdered city; when the Church of St. Pierre and the Cathedral of Malines and the Shrine of Our Lady of Reims were shattered by bombs and swept by devouring fire, there was something in it all other than the grim necessity of a savage war; there was the symbol of a new thing in the world, built on all Louvain, Malines, and Reims had denied, and destroying the very outward show of what could not exist on earth side by side with its potent and dominant negation.

Reims Cathedral “stood in the line of gunfire,” it was “a landmark and unfortunately could not escape,” it had been “fortified by the enemy and therefore could not be spared.” All true, each statement, and thus: It stood between a brute power founded on Bismarckian force and Nietzschean antichristian philosophy, on the one hand, and on the other nations newly conscious of their Christianity, ashamed of their backsliding, and ready to fight to the death for what had made them. It was a landmark, a vast, visible showing forth of a great Christian spirit and a greater Christian principle, and as such it must go down. It was fortified, as every church is fortified, to fight against the devil and all his works, and therefore, equally with the allied forces behind it, it was fighting against a common enemy. If by its ruin it can make this universally and eternally clear, we can see it go without a tear or a regret, for, like the martyr in the Roman arena, it has accomplished its work.

Thus far, of the great cities, Liége, Louvain, Malines, Ypres, Arras, and Reims are gone, with the greater part of their treasured art, while Laon, Soissons, and Namur have been grievously wrecked. Apparently, Amiens, Noyon, Bruges, and Ghent are now safe, but endless opportunities open for destruction and pillage, and we may well be prepared for irreparable loss before the invader is hurled back across his natural river frontier. Let us consider, not what already has been annihilated, but the kind of art it was, so measuring, in a degree, the quality of our loss—and of what we still may lose.

First of all, there are the towns themselves, for all art is not concentrated in hôtel de ville and cathedral; it shows itself sometimes in more appealing guise in the river villages and proud cities, and its testimony to a great past is here equally potent. Ypres, Malines, Dinant, Termonde, and Huy, all of which are gone, were treasures that belonged to all the world; Namur and Plombières we could not spare, and as for Bruges and Ghent, even apart from their exquisite architecture and their treasures of painting, the soul shudders at what might happen there were they involved in the retreat of a disorganised army, when one considers what happened to Liége and Louvain in its victorious advance. All Belgium and Luxembourg, all Picardy and Champagne are, or were, rich with lovely little towns and villages, each a work of art in itself; they are shrivelling like a garden under the first frost, and, it may be, in a little while none will remain.

The major architecture of this unhappy land falls into three classes and three periods of time. Oldest and most priceless are the churches, and these are of the twelfth, thirteenth, and fourteenth centuries, the ages when religion was one and secure and was building a great civilisation that we would fain see equalled again. Then come the town halls and guildhalls of the fifteenth century, each speaking for the proud freedom of merchant and burgher, when the hold of religion was weakening a little, and the first signs were showing themselves of what, in the end, was to have issue in this war of wars; finally come the town houses of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, in all their quaint individuality and their overriding self-esteem, though fine still, and with hints of the great art that already had passed.

Brussels is full of these, and Antwerp; Louvain had them, and Ypres, Termonde, Arras, and Charleville, only a few months ago; in Bruges and Ghent they fill whole streets and stand in silent accusation of what we of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries have offered as our contribution to the housing of civilisation.

Of the civic halls the list is endless: Brussels, Malines, Bruges, Ypres, Ghent, Antwerp, Mons, Audenaarde, Termonde and Liége; Compiègne, St. Quentin, Arras, Valenciennes; ranging from the grave solemnity of the enormous and wide-spread Ypres to the lacy fantasticism of Louvain and Audenaarde. Architecture has gone far from the Salle Synodale of Sens and the Merveille of Mont-St.-Michel, and it has not gone altogether well, but how significant these stone fancies are of the abounding life and the splendid pride and the open-handed beneficence of the fifteenth-century burghers, who loved their towns and bent the rebellious masonry to their will, working it into a kind of stony lace and embroidery to the glory of trade and civic spirit! If we should lose them now, as we almost lost Louvain, standing in the midst of the roaring flame and drifting smoke, while tall churches and rich universities and fair old houses crumbled and died around it, what should we not lose?

And the churches, those matchless monuments, four, five, and six centuries old, where generations have brought all their best to glorify God, where glass and sculpture, tapestries and fretted woodwork, pictures, and gold and silver wrought cunningly into immortal art—how are we to speak of these, or think of them, with St. Pierre of Louvain and St. Rombaut of Malines still smoking with their dying fires, while piece by piece the calcined stone falls in the embers, and while Reims, one of the wonders of the world, stands gaunt and shattered, wrecked by bombs, swept by fire, its windows that rivalled Chartres split into irremediable ruin, its statues devastated that once stood on a level with the sculptures of Greece?

The catastrophe itself is so unthinkable that the world does not now half realise it. And yet, what of all that remains in the pathway—backward or forward—of Attila and his Huns? St. Gudule of Brussels, St. Bavon of Ghent, and the cathedrals of Antwerp, Tongres, and Tournai; and in France that matchless sequence of which Reims was once the central jewel, Soissons, Senlis and Noyon, St. Remi, Amiens, and Laon; here, with Reims, are seven churches such as man never surpassed, and equalled only at Paris, Chartres, Coutances, and Bourges; each is of a different timbre, each a different expression of the greatest century of Christian civilisation, and, given the opportunity, there is no reason why each should not suffer the fate of Reims.

There is a thin and sinister philosophy, akin to that of Treitschke and Nietzsche (which is for to-day what Machiavelli was for the sixteenth century), that avows no building, no consummate work of art of any kind, “worth the bones of a Pomeranian grenadier,” justifying its statement on the basis of a superficial humanism. Never was a more malignant ethic. A man is valuable in proportion to what he is and does for righteous society, and for what he makes of himself as a free and immortal soul responsible to God. Go through the roaring mills of Crefeld and Essen, the futile pleasure-haunts of Homburg and Wiesbaden, the bureaux and barracks and palaces of Berlin; you will find—as similarly in every country—hundreds of thousands of peasants, workmen, and aristocrats whose contribution to Christian civilisation is nothing, and will be nothing however long they may live; who forget their souls and deny their God, and of these we can say, it is not the bones of a Pomeranian grenadier or even the bones of a Prussian Junker that weigh more in the scale than Reims or Louvain, it is not a million of these that mean so much for service and the glory of God, as one such potent influence as Amiens or Reims, or the library and schools of Louvain, or the pictures of Memling and the Van Eycks in Bruges and Antwerp and Ghent.

Those that cry loudest for the sanctity of human life and its priority before art and letters, most insistently hurl a hundred thousand lives against inevitable death, and spread black starvation over myriads of women and children, in order that their privilege of selling inferior and unnecessary products to far-away savages may be preserved intact. Against this set the cathedrals and universities and the exquisite art of France and Belgium and the Rhine; consider what it meant once, what it means even now, what for the future it is destined to mean as never before.

For the old passes: the old that began with Machiavelli and is ending with von Bernhardi. It is not alone Prussia that will be purged by the fire of an inevitable conflict, nor Germany, nor all the Teuton lands; it is the whole world, that sold its birthright for a mess of pottage and now, in terror of the price at last to be paid, denounces the infamous contract and fights to the death against the armies of the Moloch it helped to fashion. And when the field is won, what happens but the coming into its own again of the very power that made Reims and Louvain, the recovery of the old and righteous and Christian standard of values, the building on the ruins of five centuries of a new civilisation where whatever art that remains will play its due part as the revealer of that Absolute Truth that brought it into being, forgotten now for very long? Then the pictures of Flanders and Umbria and Tuscany, the sculpture of France, the music of Teuton and Slav, the “minor arts” of all mediævalism, the architecture of Bourges and Amiens and Chartres will both reveal and inspire with doubled power.

And in all and through all, Reims in its ruin will be a more potent agency of regeneration than the perfection of Chartres or the finality of Bourges.

I should like to consider, though briefly and in the light of a very real unity that negatived the political disunity that has always prevailed, the art of these lands where for a twelvemonth millions of men have fought after a fashion never known before, while around them each day saw the irreparable destruction of the best that man could do for the love of God, and better than he can do now. In spite of constantly changing

THE HALL OF THE UNIVERSITY OF LOUVAIN

frontiers and dynastic vicissitudes, the great unity of mediævalism blends the Rhineland, Flanders, Brabant, Luxembourg, Artois, Champagne, Eastern Normandy, Eastern France, into a consistent whole, so far as all real things are concerned. In spite of its bickerings and fightings and jealousies and plots and counterplots, Europe was really more united, more a working whole, during the Middle Ages than ever it has been since. One religion and one philosophy did for the fluctuant states what the Reformation, democracy, and “enlightenment” could only undo, and in this vanishing art, which, after all, is the truest history man can record, we find the dynamic force, the creative power, of a culture and a civilisation that took little count of artificial barriers between perfectly artificial nations, but included all in the greatest and most beneficent syntheses Europe has ever known.

The art of this land—or these lands, if you like—should be so considered; not as an interesting and even stimulating by-product of social, industrial, and political evolution, with only an accidental relationship to them, and only an empirical interest for the men of to-day, but as the most perfect material expression of the great reality that existed through and by these agencies that were in themselves nothing; the character that emerged through the turmoil of human activity, as it shows itself in the men and women of the time, and expresses itself in their art.

To do this fully is impossible; every province would require a volume, every art a series of volumes, but at least we can catalogue again the more salient qualities of the greater masterpieces, and try to co-ordinate them into some outward semblance of that essential unity they both promised and expressed.

II
THE FORGING OF MEDIÆVALISM

IT is not a large land, this Heart of Europe; three hundred and fifty miles perhaps from the Alps to the sea, and not more than two hundred and fifty from the Seine at Paris to the Rhine at Cologne; half the size, shall we say, of Texas; but what Europe was for the thousand years following the fall of Rome, this little country—or the men that made it great—was responsible. Add the rest of Normandy, and the spiritual energy of the Holy See, with a varying and sometimes negligible influence from the Teutonic lands beyond the Rhine, and you have the mainsprings of mediævalism, even though for its full manifestation you must take into account the men in the far countries of the Italian peninsula and the Iberian, in France and England, Bavaria, Saxony, Bohemia.

The great empires of to-day, England, France, Germany, Italy, two of which have eaten steadily into its territories until only a tiny Luxembourg remains, together with a small new state with a novel name made greater and more lasting by the events of a year than those of its predecessors, have dulled the memory of an ancient unity, taking to themselves at the same time credit, that is none of theirs, for men and happenings that made ten centuries of enduring history; so the glory, the high achievements of the small old states are forgotten. And yet, out of these little dukedoms and counties and free cities came the men who made France and Germany, who determined the genius of mediævalism, imparted to it the high soul and the swift hand of its peculiar personality, and gave to the world the memory and tradition of faith and heroism, together with so much of that inimitable art that was its perfect showing forth, and, until yesterday, a visible monument of its accomplishment.

National unity this territory and these peoples have never possessed. During the Roman dominion they formed the provinces of Germania and Belgica, in the diocese of Gaul; under the Merovings all was comprised in the Frankish kingdom, the old line between the Roman provinces remaining to divide Austrasia and Neustria, as the northern and southern sections came to be called under the Carolings. With the disruption of the empire of Charlemagne, Austrasia went to the kingdom of the East Franks, Neustria to that of the West Franks, the former becoming (west of the Rhine) the duchies of Upper and Lower Lorraine, the latter (east of the Seine) Flanders and Champagne. When Otto the Great restored the Holy Roman Empire in A. D. 962, the Lorraines of course formed a part. These comprised all that is now (or was, in June, 1915) Germany west of the Rhine, together with all of Belgium except Flanders, Luxembourg, and a strip of territory along the northeast frontier of France. Westward to the Seine the land was divided into many feudal holdings, Flanders, which then comprised not only northern Belgium but the present French departments of Nord and Pas de Calais; Champagne, Amiens, Vermandois, Laon, Reims, Châlons. During the Middle Ages Lower Lorraine became the duchy of Brabant and the county of Hainault. Upper Lorraine, Luxembourg and Bar, southern Flanders, Artois. Picardy and Valois became entities, and the great bishoprics of Cologne, Trèves, Strasbourg, Cambray, Liége acquired more and more land until they were principalities in themselves.

During the fifteenth century the magnificent efforts of the dukes of Burgundy to create for themselves an independent state between France and the Empire, and reaching from the Rhine to the Aisne, from the Alps to the sea, resulted in a partial and temporary unification of the old Belgian lands, but with the death of Mary of Burgundy in 1482, the whole territory became more and more closely knit into the Empire, France losing even her claim to suzerainty over Flanders; all the lands west of the Meuse and over the Rhine as far as the Ems became the Netherlands, comprising roughly what is now Holland and Belgium. The duchies of Luxembourg, Bar, and Lorraine, with the Palatinate, shared all that lay between the Meuse and the Rhine, save what the great bishoprics had assumed to themselves, while Burgundy (except the Franche-Comté) and Lorraine were definitively merged in France.

Then came the Spanish dominion over the whole territory, barring the duchy of Julich along the Rhine; the revolt of Holland and the severing of the United Netherlands north of the Rhine from the Spanish territories; finally, in 1715, after 160 years of ruinous domination, Spain was driven out and Austria succeeded in Flanders, Brabant, and Luxembourg, maintaining herself there until the time of Napoleon a century later, when for a few years everything as far as the Rhine, together with the Netherlands on the other side, was incorporated in France. With the fading of the splendid dream of a Napoleonic empire, Holland and Belgium, as we know them now, came into existence, the lands of the duchy of Julich went to Prussia, the Palatinate to Bavaria. Luxembourg was reduced to its existing area and the French frontier delimited as it is now, except for Alsace and Lorraine, which were lost in 1870.

Between the upper and nether millstones of France and the Empire, the Heart of Europe for fifteen centuries has been ground into fragments of ever-changing form, never able to coalesce into unity, but producing ever in spite of political chaos and dynastic oppression great ideals of piety, righteousness, liberty; great art-manifestations of the vigour and nobility of race, great figures to uphold and enforce the lofty principles that have made so much of the brilliant history of mediæval Europe, and all centring around the lands of the many tribes who from earliest times were known as the Belgæ.

They enter well into history, these Belgæ, in the fifty-seventh year before the birth of Christ, Nervii, Veromandri, Atrobates, from the valleys of the Meuse and the Sambre, as Cæsar found and declared, “that day against the Nervii,” when the battle for the winning of this new land was his by hardly more than a chance. The tribes were hard and free, and they died in the end almost to a man, five hundred remaining out of fifty thousand warriors. But Cæsar was magnanimous, as always, and by no means without appreciation of his adversaries, so Allies of Rome, with full claim on her protection, they became, with the rank and title of a free people, as they have remained at heart ever since. In seven years the last of the tribes had surrendered and Belgium became a flourishing colony as well as the advance-guard of Roman civilisation in its progress against the savage Germans of the Rhine. By the fall of the Empire a great and united people had come into being between Gaul and Germania, divided into four great sections with their several capitols at Trèves, Reims, Mainz, and Cologne.

Meanwhile the Franks had come on the scene, though their name is rather a rallying-cry than a mark of race, meaning only that certain of the tribes of Gaul, with others of the Belgæ, were determined to be free—as they became shortly and as they have generally remained ever since. Now the Salian Franks were the dwellers in Flanders and Brabant and under their Duke Clodion had extended their borders as far as Soissons. Clodion’s successor, Merovæus, was grandfather of Clovis, the first Christian king of the north. The Merovings, then, are neither strictly of Gaul nor of Germany, but of the Heart of Europe itself, and their blood, like that of their followers, a mingling of Germanic and Celtic and Roman strains.

Châlons saw them allied with the Romans and driving back the fierce tide of the earlier Huns that threatened to beat out the last flicker of light in Europe: Tolbiac saw them hurl back the savage Allemanni, in the year 496, again preserving the European tradition from submergence under barbarian hordes, nor was this the last time they were to perform this service. Already Clovis had married Clotilde, niece of the Duke of Burgundy, so bringing another region into close contact with his own, and now, after the successful issue of the battle of Tolbiac, when he had first called on the God of Christians, he presented himself before the Archbishop of Reims, St. Remi, for baptism, where he heard the significant words: “Bow thy proud head, Sicambrian! destroy what thou hast worshipped, worship what thou hast destroyed.”

Whatever the motive, and however inadequate the performance of his new obligations by Clovis, his baptism is one of the crucial events in history, marking the end of paganism as a controlling force, and with the conquest of Italy by Theodoric and the promulgation of the Holy Rule of St. Benedict, the beginning of the great Christian era of culture and civilisation that was to endure, unimpaired, for a thousand years.

The dominion of Clovis comprised all that is now France south to the Loire and Burgundy, with Holland, Belgium, Switzerland, and Bavaria, but his capital was at Tournai, and he was in fact even more a Belgian than a French sovereign. Under him all the Franks were united and his power was such that the Emperor at Constantinople made him patrician, consul, and Augustus. With his death in 511 began a long era of division and reunion, of internecine warfare and the plotting of jealous women, two of whom, Fredegonde personifying the Gallic influence, Brunhilde the Germanic, fostered a conflict that hardly came to an end before the fall of the dynasty.

Little by little the Merovings broke away from their racial Belgic affiliations, Soissons became the capital rather than Tournai, and at last by a dramatic turn of fate another Belgian race brought the decrepit line to its term and founded a new and a nobler house. Pepin of Landen, in the province of Liége, became mayor of the palace and the active influence in royal affairs, somewhere about the year 620, and it was a son of his daughter, Pepin of Herstel (a town also in the province of Liége) who was father of Charles Martel, who in his turn was the grandfather of Charlemagne.

As the Huns and the Allemanni had been rolled back from their savage incursions by the aid of men of Belgic nationality, so now the greater threat of an onrushing Mohammedanism was to be dispelled by another and a greater personality, Charles the Hammer, a soldier of consummate ability, the real ruler of all the Franks, and the victor at the battle of Tours when final decision was reached as to whether Europe was for the future to be Moslem or Christian.

Charles Martel died when only fifty years of age, and his son Pepin succeeded him as mayor of the palace. The fiction of Meroving kingship could no longer be maintained; the stock was hopelessly degenerate; the people demanded an end, the Pope sanctioned it, and so, after a most orderly fashion Childeric III betook himself to a convenient cloister, Pepin was raised on the shields of the Gallic soldiers, then decently crowned in St. Denis, and the dynasty of the Carolings began. For sixteen years he reigned as kings had not been wont to reign for many centuries; Saxony, Brittany, Languedoc were added to the Frankish dominions, Rome twice saved from the Lombard invaders, and the Papacy made the faithful ally and defender of the Frankish kingdom, then the one great power in Europe.

There were more reasons than that of policy for this alliance. Practically abandoned by the Roman Emperors in the east, Italy had been the prey of tribe after tribe of northern savages, and the Papacy was the only centre of order and authority. In spite of this the Popes still shrank from severing themselves wholly from the imperial centre, but the iconoclastic controversy had resulted in what was both heresy and schism on the part of the patriarchate of Constantinople, and communion was no longer possible. Moreover, all the other northern tribes that had accepted Christianity—Goths, Vandals, Lombards—had adopted the Arian heresy and were therefore even more distasteful to Rome than unconverted heathen. This condition of things justified the Papacy in its attitude of intolerance, and when Pepin came to the throne, it was almost at the last gasp, through persecution, spoliation, and outrage at the hands of the Teutonic Arians. The Frankish kingdom alone was Catholic, and enthusiastically Catholic, and it is small wonder that to the Pope the rise of a great and powerful and Catholic nation under the dominating Carolings came as a special mercy from heaven—as, indeed, it was.

With the death of Pepin and the accession of his son Charles—known now for all time as Charlemagne—the curtain rose on one of the most brilliant dramas of history. The Lombards had again revolted; Pope Hadrian called on the Franks in despair; King Charles hurled his armies into Italy like an avalanche, captured and deposed Desiderius, last of the Lombard kings, proclaimed himself King of Lombardy, pressed on to Rome, and was welcomed there by the Supreme Pontiff as the saviour of Christendom.

He would, however, accept no formal honours save that of patrician, and returned to the north to continue the work of his father in consolidating and extending the kingdom. For twenty-four years he was engaged in innumerable wars, in eager efforts to restore education, political order, ecclesiastical righteousness, and even some small measure of genuine culture, with results that seem miraculous in the light of what had been before for so many centuries. Finally, in the year 799, he went again to Rome, where Leo III now sat in the chair of Peter, and at mass on Christmas Day, A. D. 800, the Pope came suddenly behind him as he was kneeling before the altar in St. Peter’s and, placing a crown on his head, cried in a loud voice: “Life and victory to Charles, the great and pacific Emperor of the Romans, crowned by the hand of God!” and after three centuries and more of anarchy, barbarism, and hopeless degeneration, the empire was restored as the Holy Roman Empire, in the person of a Frankish warrior of the lands of the Belgæ, and destined to endure for another thousand years.

Aix-la-Chapelle is the very centre of the land and the people that built up the Christian civilisation of the Middle Ages, and it was here that Charlemagne fixed his chief place of residence. During his lifetime it was the very, and the only, centre of order and of culture in Europe. A great warrior, he was an even greater administrator, while as the restorer of learning and the patron of art and letters he was perhaps greatest of all. When he came to the throne there lay behind him nearly four centuries of absolute anarchy and barbarism, from the Baltic to the Mediterranean and from the Atlantic to the marches of the Teutonic savages. What he built he built from the ground upward, and though his was only the “false dawn” that heralds the day, passing utterly, so far as one could see, within a generation after his death, it was the saving of Europe, the preservation of the succession, that, the second Dark Ages overpassed, guaranteed the coming in of the great era that began with the millennial year of Christianity and lasted for five full centuries.

Under his direction a complete administrative system was established over the unwieldy empire; local governments were set up, with a system of regular visitations from the central authority, and in this way the foundations were laid for the counties of Flanders, Brabant, Hainault, into which, together with Vermandois, Valois, Amiens, and Champagne, this territory of our survey was divided during the Middle Ages.

In religion, education, and art Charlemagne went far beyond his predecessors for five centuries, so far as the form and re-creation are concerned. Separated at last from the church in the East, now definitely schismatic, heretical, and Erastian, the Papacy was in a position to go on unhindered in its development, and Charlemagne became not only a defender but a zealous and enthusiastic reformer. Monasticism was universally strengthened and extended, new bishoprics were founded, the state of the Holy See purified, while schools were established in connection with cathedrals and monasteries throughout the Empire. Charles had a great passion for scholars and artists, gathering them from Italy, Spain, England, wherever, indeed, they were to be found, and for a time his court was the nucleus of culture in the West. Architecture was reborn, all the ravelled threads from Rome, Constantinople, Ravenna, Syria were gathered up and knit together, and though few authentic works from among the myriads of the Emperor’s creation still remain, we know from what we have, and chiefly the royal chapel at Aix, that the result was the restoring once more of a line of continuity after the vast vacancy of the Dark Ages, and the initiation of a new vitality that, after the second Dark Ages, was to serve as the energising power that brought Romanesque art into existence and made possible the great glory of Gothic.

Great as he was, Charlemagne had all the weaknesses of his racial tradition, and by yielding to these his era was his alone, nor could it outlast his personal influence. Divided between his successors, the Empire rapidly and naturally fell to pieces during the lifetime of Louis le Debonnaire, who for a brief period had succeeded in uniting it again, and during the second Dark Ages, from 850 to 1000 A. D., there is no more of note to record in this region than in any other part of Europe. The era had culminated under Charlemagne; it was now to sink to its end, as always had happened before, as always, so far as we can see, must continue to happen. Not until the turn of the tide at the year 1000 could a real recovery begin. In the meantime history is little more than a series of personal contests, but out of these certain beginnings are made that are to have issue in great things, and amongst these are the appearance of the first Baldwin of Flanders and the establishing of the first hereditary title, and therefore the oldest in Europe. Baldwin of the Iron Arm successfully fought the Vikings, driving them west until they were forced to content themselves with the land they ultimately made immortal as Normandy. His son married a daughter of Alfred the Great, so establishing a certain connection between England and Flanders, and by fortifying Bruges, Ypres, Ghent, and Courtrai, he did much toward fixing these cities as centres of municipal life and of that fierce independence that marked them for so many generations.

With the opening of the new era, at the beginning of the eleventh century, a new vitality shows itself in the land. William of Normandy had become the son-in-law of Baldwin V, and from Flanders many knights joined the Conqueror for his invasion of England, one becoming first Earl of Northumberland, another first Earl of Chester. Under Baldwin VI complete peace was restored to the distracted provinces, while the Charter of Grammont is a landmark in that development

THE CHAPEL AT AIX

of personal and civil liberty which is one of the great glories of mediævalism. The Tribunal of Peace, established by the Bishop of Liége, is another shining sign of the times, while the defeat of France in its attacks on Flemish independence assured a long period of splendid development.

This was enhanced by the Crusades, and here, particularly in the first, the Heart of Europe showed the quality of the blood that was its life. Whatever the Crusades may have become after long years, they were in their earliest impulse supreme examples of human faith, unselfishness, devotion, heroism, and piety. The redemption of the Holy Places of Christianity from the infidel became a passion, and the protagonist, the moving and vitalising spirit, was one Peter the Hermit, of the province of Liége, who, crucifix in hand, toiled through eastern France, the Netherlands, the Rhineland, as well as through his own country, exhorting prince and peasant to take up arms for the freeing of the Holy Land from the Saracen.

His success was almost miraculous, for the great adventure appealed to every instinct of the time—piety, reverence, chivalry, romance, the passion for a new and venturesome and knightly quest—and in less than two years the Pope himself set his seal of approbation on the First Crusade. In Clermont, in the year 1095, surrounded by four hundred bishops and mitred abbots, he cried to the waiting multitudes of Europe: “Are we called upon to see in this century the desolation of Christianity and to remain at peace the while our holy religion is given over into the hands of the oppressor? Here is a lawful war; go, defend the House of Israel!” Almost with a single voice Europe made answer with the rallying-cry: “God wills it!” Every scarlet garment was shredded in pieces to furnish crosses which were sewn to the shoulders; some even branded themselves with the sign of the cross by means of red-hot irons.

Within another year an army of 100,000 men had been gathered together, under the leadership of Peter, himself, and it poured across Europe as far as Constantinople, a disorganised and impotent mob. It met its fate as soon as it had crossed the Bosporus into Saracen territory, and only a shattered remnant, including the originator of the mad venture, ever returned to its home. In the meantime, however, a greater captain than Peter the Hermit, and of the same race, was gathering the enormous host that succeeded where he had failed. Godfrey of Bouillon, of the province of Liége, a great scholar and greater soldier, gathered 90,000 knights and men-at-arms in Flanders and Brabant, and set out for Jerusalem on the 10th of August, 1096. A month later the French under command of the King’s brother, and the Flemings under Robert, Count of Flanders, followed in his track. Baldwin of Bourg, the Counts of Hainault, Namur, Grez, Audenaarde, and Ypres, with knights of Dixmude, Alost, Bruges, Ghent, Brussels, and Tournai were amongst the leaders, and a concentration was effected at Constantinople when there were no less than 600,000 in all. Crossing into Asia, the great host swept onward from one victory to another; the battle of Dorylæum, fought on the 4th of July, 1097, proved them invincible. Tarsus and Antioch fell, and nothing lay between them and Jerusalem. The city was besieged and finally carried by assault, the attack beginning on the 14th of July, and after a week of incessant fighting on the walls and through the streets, Jerusalem was wholly in the hands of the Crusaders. But the host that set out from its many sources in Europe had vanished and only a tenth of the original number remained to fight the relieving army from Egypt at Ascalon, and to organise the victory. Five hundred thousand men had perished on the long march, died of disease, or fallen in battle.

Godfrey of Bouillon became the first King of Jerusalem, the choice resting between him and Robert of Flanders. He reigned only a year, and was succeeded by his brother Baldwin, who had made himself Count of Edessa, and whose descendants continued on the throne for several generations.

In all the succeeding Crusades, Flanders and Brabant, Lorraine, Champagne, and Burgundy played leading parts, and in the fifth, when the arms of the knights were turned from the relief of Jerusalem to the conquest of the Byzantine Empire, another Baldwin of Flanders was leader, and, after the fall of Constantinople, became the first Latin Emperor of the East, his dynasty continuing on the throne for fifty years.

Amazing as were the results of the Crusades, with the conquering of the Saracens in the Holy Land, and the overthrow of the Eastern Empire, a Walloon being crowned first King of Jerusalem and a Fleming first Latin Emperor of Byzantium, the local results had no permanency, Jerusalem falling again to the Mussulmans after a century and a half, Constantinople reverting to the Eastern line at about the same time. In Europe, however, the results had been of profound import; directly, the Crusades had had a vast influence in determining the temper and the course of mediævalism, indirectly they had laid the foundations of the industrial supremacy of the Belgian cities and of the emancipation of the people from feudalism. The Saracen of the twelfth century was the antithesis of the Ottoman Turk of to-day, and from him the Crusaders learned much to their advantage, while from the Eastern Empire came new impulses toward the development of a broader culture than the West alone could have achieved. So far as the cities of Flanders, Brabant, and Lorraine were concerned, the absence of their martial and turbulent knights was by no means an unmixed catastrophe. The vast expeditions demanded vast expenditures: money came generally into use in place of barter; the common people who remained at home developed their industries, increased their wealth, and in the end took into their own hands much of the business of the government. The habit and tradition of independence and liberty which so grew up, maintained itself steadily against all assaults, nor has it lapsed or waned, as the last year has gloriously proved, and many of the tall towers that became the recognised symbol of civic independence still stand in testimony, though one by one they are falling before the armed negation of all they rose to proclaim.

III
FLANDERS AND BRABANT

IN a study such as this tries to be, it is, of course, impossible to consider in any degree the history of those portions of the chosen territory that joined themselves to, or were by force incorporated in, the great surrounding states. The Rhineland, in spite of its minor vicissitudes of lordship, is and has always been Germanic, and its annals are part and parcel of those of the Teutonic Holy Roman Empire and of the German Empire that succeeded it. The marshes of the mouth of the Rhine early differentiated themselves both from Germany and from the Gallic provinces farther south; Dutch they were and Dutch they will ever remain; their history and their culture and their art are by themselves. The same is true of Champagne, Picardy, Burgundy, Bar, and of the lands between them and the Seine. This is France, and its history is the history of France even if its art takes enduring colour from a persistent quality in its people that is its own and not simply that of the Franks and Normans and Celts who coalesced around the old Île de France to the building of one of the great peoples and one of the great states in history. Each gave more than it received when it became a part of a state that was slowly building itself out of assembling races and peoples, but each was like the daughter of a house; however much she might bring to some alliance, of fortune or character or power, she became merged in her new family, forsaking her name and accepting that of her chosen spouse, together with his ambitions, his interests, and his fortunes. We may then consider the outlying lands of our central district as so many fair daughters who have allied themselves with suitors from neighbouring territories; remembering them with affection, taking pride in the dowries they have carried with them, but confining ourselves to the fortunes of the men of the line who have preserved the family name and defended its honour in the field. In this sense Flanders, Brabant, and Luxembourg are the three princes to whom was given the defence of the patrimony that has been theirs from the ancient times of the earliest beginnings of the house amongst the Gallic and Germanic tribes of the Rhine valley, the meadows and uplands of the Scheldt and the Meuse and the Sambre, and in the Forest of Ardennes.

As the Heart of Europe gradually became parcelled out between the great adjoining empires, each taking its colour more or less from the central influences, while in every instance contributing something in its turn to the sum that made up the varying greatness of both, the essential qualities of the original Belgæ seemed to concentrate in the little province of Flanders, which, during the whole of the Middle Ages, played a part in Europe strikingly disproportionate to its size, which was less than half that of the State of Connecticut, though it contained over 1,200,000 people and counted cities like Ghent with 250,000 population, Ypres with 200,000, Bruges and Courtrai with 100,000 each. At the same time London could boast only 35,000 citizens. In trade, industry, wealth, culture, and the standard of living Flanders was far in advance of the rest of northern Europe, while it was marked by a perfect passion for liberty not only for the state but for each individual member thereof.

Every portion of the land we are considering made its own contribution, early or late, to the great sum of mediævalism, but it would be impossible to consider, even superficially, the gifts of Champagne, Burgundy, the Rhineland. This book does not assume to be a history, it is only a sequence of notes on the lost or imperilled art of the Heart of Europe, with just so much of history as may serve to suggest what lay behind and gave this art its peculiar and unmatched quality.

The great elements that entered into this art and this civilisation that were pre-eminently the art and civilisation of Christianity were primarily two: northern blood and monastic fervour. To the worn-out vitality of the Mediterranean races came in the fresh vigour of the North, Lombard, Germanic, Norman, Frank, while the monastic impulse imparted by St. Benedict broke the spell of the Dark Ages, made possible the “false dawn” of Carolingian civilisation, and then, through its successors, the monks of Cluny in the eleventh century and the Cistercians in the twelfth, brought to perfection and to complete fulness of expression all the latent possibilities in the clean new blood that had been transfused into the hardening veins of an Europe already dangerously near dissolution.

These elements of new blood were chiefly supplied by the Franks (both of the East and the West), the Burgundians, and the Normans, the latter being descendants of the Vikings from the Baltic. The Belgæ were a subdivision of the Franks, and made up of several tribes, Trevii, Eburones, Nervii, etc. Generally speaking, they were Germanic, with a considerable Celtic admixture. The Cluniac and Cistercian reforms came from Burgundy, which is partially within the limits of our study, though later they received great accessions of strength from natives of Flanders, Brabant, the Rhineland, and Champagne. During the eleventh century Normandy was the spiritual centre, the dynamic force, of Europe, while in the twelfth century the leadership was assumed by the Île de France, as wholly under the inspiration of the Cistercians as Normandy had been under that of the Cluniacs. It was during these two centuries that the great burst of Norman and of Gothic architecture occurred in the Île de France, in Normandy, and in Champagne.

The contributions of the land we now know as Belgium were quite different; they were at the same time a product of mediæval culture and one of its causes, for they grew out of the deep and vital impulses beneath the whole epoch, while they seemed to determine many of its manifestations. The first of these, the Crusades, has already been referred to; the second, the great guild system, with its concomitant, the commune, and its result, a desire for personal, civic, and national liberty that became a passion, needs some consideration, since it is from this that came so much of the later mediæval art of Flanders and Brabant that is so priceless and so appallingly in danger of destruction.

Just how and why the Flemings should have become a nation of weavers, merchants, and traders is hard to say, but even in the tenth century, weaving had become so important an industry a charter was granted the guild of weavers by Count Baldwin. The supply of wool came overseas from England, where an important market for the finished wares was also found, and as a result a close community of interests sprang up between Flanders and East Anglia. Without natural protection of any kind, the land lying open to any invasion, walled cities became imperative, as well as unions for self-defence, and so came the great and rich and defiant cities such as Ghent and Bruges, Ypres and Courtrai. When the nobles and knights flocked off on crusade, the citizens remained at home, and they were not slow to seize the opportunity offered them of acquiring, almost without protest, the civil power that, elsewhere, under a dominant and universal feudalism, remained in the hands of the barons.

By this time the development of the guilds had reached enormous proportions, and the members were so numerous, so highly organised, and so defiant of molestation they were almost irresistible. In Ghent, for example, there were more than 50,000 enrolled craftsmen and artificers in the thirteenth century; in Bruges there were the four great trading guilds of wool merchants, linen merchants, mercers, and brewers, and in addition no less than fifty-two guilds of craftsmen. These guilds were not only for the protection of the interests of their members, they equally aimed at maintaining the highest possible standard in their products (so differentiating themselves sharply from the contemporary trade-union), while they demanded and received civic rights and privileges unheard of before and elsewhere. Finally they were military as well as civil in their nature, all the members being trained to arms and under competent military direction. The actual power they could exert is shown by the fact that at one time the weavers in Ghent put an efficient army of 40,000 men into the field. Every man was bound to answer the alarm-bell of his own guild on the instant, and so came the great bell-towers that stood not only as the source of warning and the rallying-place, but also as visible evidences of the liberty of the men who obeyed the summons from their great bourdons.

Never before or since has skilled labour occupied a more advantageous position than in Flanders in the thirteenth century; wages were high, life liberal and self-respecting, comforts and even luxuries common to all, while the high standard of workmanship made labour dignified and enjoyable, and close union of interests guaranteed the protection of all against the aggressions of the nobles and the feudal system.

Offsetting the gains were corresponding losses. Successful industry, through group action, together with the consequent development of the town unit, resulted in a general loss of any national or racial spirit. The interests of each man were those of his guild or town, and during the entire Middle Ages there was the most kaleidoscopic grouping and regrouping of towns and provinces, now against the Empire, now against

ST. BAVON’S TOWER, GHENT

France, Burgundy, England, now against each other or some count or duke working in his turn for dynastic or political dominance. Another cause of dissension was the complicated absurdity of feudal tenure, whereby the French-speaking people of Brabant and Lorraine were united to the Empire, the Flemings to France, while, as happened in the case of the Count of Flanders, a prince might be one of the Twelve Peers of France, and a vassal of the King, and yet be vassal to the Emperor for portions of his land. The process of progressive unification which was taking place elsewhere was here reversed, and by the end of the twelfth century Brabant had been broken up into five counties, while as far as the Seine were small and involved feudal domains and bishoprics, such as Hainault, Vermandois, Ponthièvre, Amiens, Reims, Coucy, Beauvais.

Flanders retained a certain unstable unity, and against this Philip Augustus of France set himself in his comprehensive policy of unification; after his first invasion Ferrand of Portugal, who had married the heiress of the last Baldwin of Flanders and Hainault, took the lead in forming an alliance with England and the Empire for the crushing of France and the division of the kingdom. Bouvines saw the ending of the ambitious plot, and as well the beginnings of modern France. Later came the League of Grammont and the second attempt to destroy France, which failed also; but at the battle of Courtrai by the Lys, the Flemish army of 25,000 utterly defeated a French force of double the number, with the loss of the proudest blood in France. A thousand knights fell, with 20,000 squires and men-at-arms, and in the Church of Our Lady of Courtrai, 700 gold spurs, from the heels of dead knights, were hung to the glory of the great victory.

So through the thirteenth century incessant fighting went on both in Flanders and Brabant, and in the great bishopric of Liége, the net result being the complete downfall of feudalism in advance of the rest of Europe and the solidifying of the popular passion for personal liberty and self-government.

The fourteenth century was the golden age of the communes and as well of renewed resistance to the continuous encroachments of France, when the brief period of the commercial alliance with England under Edward III came to an end. This English alliance, prompted by both commercial and political considerations, had been the dream of the first Van Artevelde, Jacques by name, the leader of the weavers of Ghent. For nine years he had laboured for the interests of his fellow guildsmen and Ghentois, supporting King Edward III in his claims on the crown of France, plotting and planning to preserve the independence of Flanders. He fell a victim, however, to the spirit of irresponsible faction which already had been the inevitable outcome of the democratic, socialistic, and selfishly greedy elements inherent in an unhampered guild system, and was murdered by his own followers in the streets of Ghent.

In the meantime Louis de Mâle, had become Count of Flanders, in succession to his father, Louis de Nevers, while Wenceslas of Luxembourg, son of the King of Bohemia, who had married one of the daughters of John III, became Duke of Brabant. Here, as in Flanders, the various guilds had gained a control that was periodically contested by the nobles, particularly in Louvain, where the disorders continued for twenty years. In the end the cities were defeated, for they had used their power ill, determining their action by superhuman cruelty and greed, oppressing the weaker communes whenever they threatened their trade, fighting amongst themselves, splitting up into factions, and vacillating between sudden enthusiasms and corresponding treachery. Already the tendency was setting in away from the mediæval looseness, mobility, and even democracy in government, and toward that centralisation coupled with autocracy which was to be the contribution of the Renaissance to the science of government and was to end in the absolutism of Henry VIII, Philip of Spain, and Louis XIV. Even if the guilds had shown a high standard of morals and of statesmanship, if the communes had been truly patriotic and national in their aims and methods, they could hardly have stood against a tendency already clearly defined and marking the new era, now coming to birth, as their high beginnings had marked that already drawing to its close.

Louis made war against Brabant, lost, but regained Malines, which he had sold to his father-in-law of Brabant, and then turned his attention to a final suppression of Ghent, the last stronghold of the declining democracy of Flanders. It was in 1279 that Bruges asked for a canal to the Lys to make amends for the silting up of her only outlet to the sea. Ghent protested, fearing loss of her own trade, and took up arms when Louis granted the canal. The “White Hoods” defeated the forces sent against them, whereupon the fickle burgers of Bruges and Ypres went over to their side and long, hard fighting followed, until Louis found himself besieged in Audenaarde by some 60,000 “White Hoods” and was only saved by the intervention of his son-in-law Charles of Burgundy. Retreating to France, with headquarters at Lille, he reorganised his forces, renewed the attack, captured Ypres, and, one after the other, all the cities of Flanders except Ghent, to which he laid siege. At this last crisis in its fortunes Ghent turned to Philip, son of Jacques van Artevelde, who took command, organised a force of 5,000 men, led them against Count Louis’ army of 40,000, attacked near Bruges, and defeated it utterly, Louis escaping only in the clothes of his servant. Bruges was occupied and its walls destroyed, Ypres and Courtrai joined in with Ghent, and Bruges itself turned against its count.

The issue was now fairly joined between commons and knights; Louis de Mâle made his cause that of order and the nobility against anarchy and the proletariat, the King of France and the Duke of Burgundy joined him, and under Oliver, constable of France, 80,000 men, amongst whom no communal levies were admitted, marched on Ghent and its allies. Against this force Philip van Artevelde mustered 40,000 men who advanced to the attack with a mad confidence born of their recent victory over Louis. In a thick fog they hurled themselves in a solid body on the centre of the enemy, broke it, saw victory before them, and then, the fog lifting, found themselves flanked on both sides by the constable’s horse, and abandoned themselves to a panic that ended in the slaughter of more than half their number, including Van Artevelde himself, whose brief day of success and glory had lasted exactly eleven months.

The French sacked Courtrai and went home, whereupon Ghent again took heart of hope, and, aided by Henry Spencer, Bishop of Norwich, with 3,000 men, defied Louis and laid siege to Ypres, which was relieved by the returning French, and a truce was finally signed at Calais.

It was the end of the democratic communes, not only in Flanders but in Brabant, where Duke Wenceslas at the same time had defeated the communes at Louvain, and as well in France, where the growing spirit of communal

THE QUAI AUX HERBES, GHENT

independence was wiped out by a king who had found in Flanders the proof that this cannot co-exist with a strong and centralised monarchy.

Already industrial decline had set in; the country had been harried by French armies and by civil wars, many had gone overseas to England to establish there a rival industry that slowly sapped the prosperity of Flanders and Brabant. The Black Death had decimated the remaining population, and Bruges, Courtrai, Ypres, indeed nearly all the great towns but Ghent, slowly lost their population until hardly a tenth was left. Still a large degree of prosperity remained, and wealth was as much desired and as successfully attained as before, only within narrower lines and by a far smaller number of people.

When Louis de Mâle died, shortly after the victory of his French allies over the communes, his son-in-law, Philip the Bold, Duke of Burgundy, became Count of Flanders, and the fifteenth century was dominated by Burgundian efforts to build up a strong central kingdom when it became evident that it could not control the destinies of France. Flanders, Brabant, and Namur were all incorporated in Burgundy, and later Holland and Hainault, so that it seemed for a time that a great central state might arise between the Empire and the kingdom of France.

Philip’s first efforts were to wean Flanders from its friendship with England in order that he might use the country for the invasion he had planned to bring about. He died in 1404 before he could carry out his schemes and was succeeded by his son, John the Fearless, whose aim was the French crown, in opposition to the Duke of Orleans who had become supreme in Paris. He marched on the capital, which opened its gates to him, while Orleans took refuge in the south but returned and too confidingly patched up some kind of a peace with Burgundy, who had him assassinated in the streets of Paris in the following year. Out of his murder grew the league of the partisans of Orleans, the “Armagnacs,” who took their name from Count d’Armagnac, father-in-law of one of the daughters of the murdered duke, and the warfare between them and the house of Burgundy.

In the meantime Henry V had laid claim to the French throne, had invaded France, and fought the battle of Agincourt. Thus far John the Fearless had kept out of the fight, but now he allied himself with the Dauphin and went to meet him at Montereau to seal his allegiance. Here he was in turn slain by the Armagnacs in revenge for his own murder of the Duke of Orleans, and his son, Philip the Good, at once threw himself into the arms of England, against France, and it was he who handed over the B. Jeanne d’Arc to the Bishop of Beauvais, after her capture at Compiègne in 1430, as a witch and sorceress.

Philip was more devoted to his new possessions than to his native Burgundy, and under him Bruges and Ghent took precedence of his old capital of Dijon. Philip also was the founder of the Order of the Golden Fleece on the occasion of one of his numerous marriages, this time in Bruges and to the Countess of Nevers. The marriage was a great event in many ways, for to it came the Duke and Duchess of Bedford, he being then Regent of France for the English king and realising that the triumphant career of Jeanne d’Arc was having results that urged him to make the most of the Duke of Burgundy, the only friend left to his royal master. The Golden Fleece, the oldest order on the Continent, was instituted in particular honour of Flanders, and especially the city of Bruges, the world centre of the wool trade. There were to be but twenty-four knights, under the leadership of the duke, and they were granted extraordinary privileges, amongst them immunity from all other states, princes and laws, being subject only to their sovereign master, though they remained citizens of their respective states, whatever those may have been. Philip II of Spain did away with this intolerable anomaly, and in 1725 the order was divided between Spain and Austria, so losing wholly its original and most distinctive quality as a signal honour especially pertaining to Flanders.

By 1435 Philip, whose affection for England had been at the best lukewarm, could bear no longer the appalling misery of France and the excesses of the English armies. All north of the Loire had become a wilderness and even in the later Middle Ages pity was a feeling still easily aroused. By the treaty of Arras Burgundy finally separated itself from the English alliance and joined Charles VII, the immediate result being a letting-up of the war in France and a transferring of hostilities to Flanders. The duke led an enthusiastic force of Flemings against Calais, failed to capture it, and then discovered

BRUGES, FROM THE QUAI DU ROSAIRE

the erratic nature of his Flemish subjects, for they forthwith turned against him as suddenly as they had deserted the English alliance, and Philip proceeded forthwith to break their spirit, or rather the frantic independence of their cities. He succeeded, and yet Flanders prospered in spite of the sporadic internecine warfare. Prosperity somehow came back and wealth increased, while Memling, the Van Eycks and their great line of successors, together with other masters of art in allied fields, gave a glory to the time that will endure for ever. Then followed years of strife and turbulence, of shifting alliances and of sympathies as ready to turn as to be aroused. Philip died, was succeeded by his son, Charles the Bold, and the disorders broke out afresh so successfully that at first he was forced to give back all the communal privileges his father had taken away. In addition to his domestic troubles he found himself the object of the serpentine plots of Louis XI now King of France. Charles was equal to the occasion, however; he married Margaret of York, sister to the English King, so acquiring a new ally; marched against Liége, the centre of the local disaffection, captured it triumphantly, then turned on the crafty and unscrupulous Louis and proceeded to beat him at his own game. In the midst of this enviable adventure, Liége revolted once more, and this time Charles, dragging Louis at his heels, captured the city again, now showing none of the mercy he had before exhibited. The whole city was sacked, only the churches and monasteries being spared, and the ruins were given to the flames. In spite of the exemption accorded religious property, the destruction of the great city was too manifestly a violation of the common decencies of Christian conduct to be neutrally endured by the Pope, who at that time (it was almost five centuries ago) did not fear to take a strong stand for righteousness when occasion offered, and Charles had to make his peace with the head of the Church as best he could.

The policy of “frightfulness” had its advantages to its perpetrator, however, and the other rebellious cities surrendered at discretion, losing their treasured liberties and becoming simply communities in a united and centralised state. In the end Charles lost, for Louis XI was a schemer of such profound duplicity that only the devil himself could have matched him in the long run, and on even terms. The duke met failure at every turn: in his effort to co-ordinate his unruly provinces into a working organism, in his ambition to become King of Burgundy instead of duke, in his last war against the Swiss when he was utterly defeated and slain. He was succeeded by his daughter, the famous Mary of Burgundy, who also became a victim of the royal spider of France, but countered on him by suddenly marrying Maximilian, son of the Emperor, and so beginning that train of events that severed Burgundy from its French associations and brought its several parts into a relationship with Germany that continued for nearly three centuries.

Young, beautiful, clever, and immensely popular, Mary of Burgundy seemed destined to accomplish what her father had failed to bring about, the unification and restoration of a great Burgundian state, but after only five years of rule she was killed by a fall from her horse while hunting, and Philip, her infant son, became duke in name, and the old political troubles rose to a climax that in the end brought in the Spanish dominion and the ruin that followed in its wake.

The cities of Flanders and Brabant turned again to France, in a frantic effort to regain their lost liberties, while Maximilian, who had been crowned King of Rome, and was of course next in succession to the Empire, fought again and again to restore his supremacy, and regain his infant son, the future Philip the Fair, who had been sent to France to be educated and to get him out of the hands of his father. In the end he defeated the ring-leading cities, Ghent, Bruges, and Ypres, and was acknowledged regent. In 1493 Frederick died and Maximilian succeeded him as Emperor, proclaiming Philip as Count of Flanders, marrying him out of hand to Joanna, Infanta of Castile, and betrothing his sister to Don John, heir to the crown of Spain. The sudden rise of a great new power in the Iberian Peninsula had overturned all the old alignments; the driving of the Moors from Spain and the union of Aragon and Castile in Ferdinand and Isabella had revealed a new force that might be used against France, and more dependable than England, and the new Emperor was not slow to recognise his opportunity. His sister never married Don John, who died before the projected wedding, and was followed by his sister, the Queen of Portugal, so suddenly the Count of Flanders and his countess became heirs to the throne of Spain. They gained little advantage from this, although after the death of Queen Isabella in 1505 they went to Spain, and were proclaimed as king and queen, but their glory was short-lived, for in the following year Philip met a sudden and untimely end, his queen went mad through grief, and the Emperor became the dominating influence in Spain as well as in Flanders through the guardianship of his five-year-old grandson, the future Charles V.

During his minority his aunt, Margaret of Austria, had acted as regent, and with a wisdom and a benevolence her male predecessors had never shown, so that when in 1515 Charles became actual ruler of Flanders, he found himself in possession of a calm and contented community. Carefully educated by his admirable aunt, Charles, the heir to seventeen kingdoms, could speak the language of each, and he had, moreover, the enormous advantage of being tutored by the great Erasmus of Rotterdam. Hardly had he become King of Spain through the death of Ferdinand, when his grandfather died, and he became Emperor as well. Practically all Europe, and America also, were his, and after his war with France which ended at Pavia with the capture of Francis I (when all was “lost save honour”), he was the temporal Lord of the World, except England alone, while the spiritual power of the Papacy was his only rival on the Continent, and the Pope himself was his old tutor, Adrian, Archbishop of Toledo.

Charles was as able as he was universal in his sovereignty; he organised his vast empire on practical lines under well-chosen regents, none of whom was more excellent than Margaret of Austria, under whom the country prospered exceedingly. She was as shrewd and far-seeing as she was admirable in character; a poet in her own right, she fostered art, letters, and general culture, and her death in 1530 was a loss to Flanders and also to the Emperor, who immediately appointed his sister Mary regent in her place, a lady of less distinguished abilities, but a good and faithful servant for a quarter of a century.

Charles V estimated Luther, and the Reformation generally, at something of their true value; he saw the menace as well as the merit of the budding revolution and opposed it firmly because of its dangerous elements, which were already revealing themselves. The great era of the Middle Ages had come to an end, carrying with it in its fall many of those elements of righteousness in thought and action for which Charles cared almost passionately. He was of the older age rather than of the new, and in the end the conviction that he had failed to stem the tide, coupled with the progressive ruin of the old religion, the old philosophy, the old order of life, led him to abdicate what was almost the throne of the world and seek refuge in a monastery, where he devoted the brief remainder of his life to prayer, meditation, and the making of watches.

In the meantime, however, he had done Europe inestimable services, amongst them the beating back of the Moslem host, the recovery to Christianity of Hungary, the conquest of Tunis, and the general blocking of the double lines of Mohammedan advance. He was successful in his new crusade against the Eastern infidels, but he could not arrest the progress of heresy and anarchy in the West, and he finally abandoned the fight in despair, turning over to others a royalty too heavy to be borne. To his son Philip were given Spain, the American possessions, and the “Low Countries,” which then comprised all Belgium, Holland, and Luxembourg as well as Artois and Cambrai. So began the Spanish dominion over the very centre of the Heart of Europe. It was the richest state in the world; when Philip II became sovereign there were seventeen provinces with 208 great walled towns, 150 boroughs and more than 6,000 villages. The products were infinitely varied and were famous throughout the world: woollen cloth, linen, silk, velvet, damask, embroideries, gloves, metal-work of every kind. Antwerp was in the lead in commerce, and it is said that the city had a population of 250,000, with 1,000 resident foreign merchants; 500 ships entered the port daily, and 300 wagons from across the frontiers of France and the Empire, while more business was transacted there in a week than in two years in Venice, her great commercial rival in the South. Such were the lands that came to Philip of Spain: the richest prize that Europe could afford.

IV
A SPANISH NETHERLANDS

WHEN Philip II came to the throne there was a new king in France, Henry II, who forthwith broke the peace Charles V had engineered, and proceeded to invade both Italy and Flanders. He was promptly beaten, in the north by Egmont at St. Quentin, and after so disastrous a fashion that hardly any one but Nevers and Condé escaped. It was in gratitude for the brilliant victory of his Belgian troops that Philip built the palace of the Escorial. Trying again the next year, Henry did indeed, through the Duke de Guise (whose luck was better than that which followed him when he met Alva the year before in Italy), regain Calais, during the absence of the English garrison, who were home on a holiday; but again Egmont came into the breech, crushed the French at Gravelines, and so forced the treaty of Câteau-Cambrésis, which obliged France, amongst other penalties, to give up to Philip more than two hundred walled towns, though she was allowed to retain Calais, Mary of England now being dead.

Flemish soldiers, now forming the best trained and most effective army in Europe, had won the war for Philip, but out of the victory came in the end the ruin of their country, for before leaving for Spain, which he loved, he demanded of the Netherlands, which he disliked, three million florins toward the expense of the war. This was granted, but coupled with a request that the Spanish garrison be withdrawn. It happened that this demand was made at the instigation of William, Prince of Orange, who now appears on the scene, for he had discovered that Henry and Philip had secretly agreed to stamp out Protestantism in the Low Countries by introducing the Spanish Inquisition, and that the alien garrison was to be the means of putting this plan into effect. William of Orange was not a Fleming but a German; he had expected to be made regent when the King went back to Spain, and had been disappointed. He was neither a Catholic nor a Protestant, but a cold, silent, far-seeing politician of extremely rationalistic views. He knew that the spirit of independence in the Netherlands was so dominating that Catholics and Protestants alike could be allied against both the Inquisition and a foreign garrison. He cleverly united them on this basis, alienated the last flicker of friendly feeling on the part of Philip, and so precipitated the conflict that raged for almost a century to the ruin and misery of all the seventeen provinces. Philip appeared to yield, went back to Spain, and at once began his scheming for the destruction of the Protestant heresy in his too-independent territories.

So far as the aristocracy, the rich burghers, and the cultivated classes were concerned, Protestantism had made little if any headway in spite of the wide corruption of the Church, but among the peasants and the ignorant, particularly in the great cities, it had taken firm hold. To Philip it was both a damnable heresy and a civil menace; he hated it as his father had hated it, but Charles V was of a different mould and temper. Philip was a Spanish Catholic, and therein (at that time) lay all the difference. To him with his cold mind and pitiless temper there was only one question: how to root out this accursed and poisonous growth. The answer was at hand in the shape of the peculiar type of inquisition which had been invented in Spain for the sole purpose of completing the expulsion of the Moors and Jews from the Peninsula after the final defeat of the Mohammedan invaders. It had proved its efficiency to admiration, and, though it had never been used against Christian heretics, Philip felt (as others have felt after him) that both the righteous State and the Catholic Church were, through the King, fighting for their lives, and that he had no right to balk at any means that offered when it was a question of life or death.

The old “Papal” Inquisition, which came into existence toward the end of the Middle Ages, and was the corollary of the dawning spirit of the Renaissance with which it synchronised, was legitimate enough, if you hold, as every one held then, that spiritual evil is as wicked as material evil, and just as worthy of formal punishment. Trials were conducted according to civil law, they were public, and the secular arm alone inflicted punishment. The “Spanish” Inquisition, which is the form so bitterly condemned to-day, was a creature of the Renaissance in its fulness. It was an engine of the most diabolical efficiency, for its proceedings were secret, its finding irrevocable, its penalties merciless and as cruel as English criminal law in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, though it lacked certain of the refinements of torture that were first developed under “Good King Hal” when he was waging his war against the monks and monasteries of his own England.

Had Philip been dealing with the Popes of the Middle Ages, he could never have imposed the Spanish Inquisition on the Netherlands, but those of the Renaissance were as different as possible, and he had no trouble in gaining their consent. A few burnings took place, and then the loyal and Catholic but intensely patriotic nobles took matters into their own hands and through the regent, Margaret of Parma, warned the King that unless the thing was stopped the provinces would act in defence of their own rights and in accordance with their solemnly guaranteed privileges. The Protestant mob also began to act after its own fashion, without waiting for an answer from Philip, and week after week carried on a course of destruction that wrecked cathedrals, monasteries, churches, and destroyed more old stained glass, wonderful statues, great pictures, jewelled vestments, and sacred vessels than have escaped to this day. The senseless and sacrilegious fury of this mob of the baser sort not only lashed the King into a cold fury but it even halted some of the Catholic nobles, many of whom, including Egmont himself, began to wonder if, after all, the Inquisition was not permissible in the light of the revelations that were being made in the desecrated churches of Antwerp and Ghent and Tournai. No advantage was taken of this changing sentiment, however, and, ready at last, Philip struck, and the Duke of Alva, with an army of 10,000 picked men, marched up from Genoa, occupied Brussels, seized every disaffected leader, including even those like Egmont and Horn, who were both loyal and devout Catholics (but barring Orange, who had cautiously retreated to Germany), and established the “Council of Blood,” which during the first week of its activities executed more than eight hundred men whose only crime was protesting against the denial of their guaranteed liberties and the maintenance of the Inquisition.

The Prince of Orange organised in Germany a small armed force for the deliverance of the cowed and horrified Netherlanders, but his first victory over Alva’s forces was answered by immediate reprisals in Brussels, a score of nobles being sent to the block, including Horn and

THE DUKE OF ALVA, MORO VAN DASHORST

Egmont, the latter being the most honoured of the nobles and as good a Catholic as he was a soldier. The people remained absolutely crushed, making no effort to rise in support of the Prince of Orange, who, defeated by Alva, sought the aid of the French Protestants, attacked from the sea by means of privateers who preyed on Spanish commerce, and finally, by establishing a base in Holland, raised this portion of the Spanish Netherlands against Alva and made himself actual head of a new state. In the meantime a Huguenot army had laid siege to Mons, but just as victory seemed near the Massacre of St. Bartholomew ended the Protestant party in France for ever, destroyed all the hopes that had been raised through the possibility of assistance from Coligny, and sent Orange back again behind the Rhine, leaving Flanders and Brabant to their fate. Alva saw to it that this was sufficiently awful, and then began operations against Holland, but by this time Philip had become thoroughly tired of the costly war and listened willingly to the enemies of the terrible duke, recalled him, and sent in his place the comparatively mild and accommodating Requesens.

The tale is now one of progressive and finally successful efforts at pacifying the country, the undoing so far as possible of the bloody work of Alva, the winning back to the Church and to the Spanish crown of all those who had not gone over definitely to Protestantism and the Prince of Orange. Both the Pope and the King offered full amnesty, and the southern provinces, those, that is, that now form the kingdom of Belgium, accepted at once and completely, for after all they were solidly Catholic and in principle not averse to Spanish dominion. The northern provinces—i. e., Holland—rejected all overtures, binding themselves completely, implacably, and savagely to Protestantism, and from now on the former Spanish Netherlands became two states: Holland, soon to win its independence, and Belgium, now and for a long time to come, a Spanish province.

Order was still far away. It was in the year 1573 that Requesens came to reverse the policy of Alva, and not until the Peace of Utrecht in 1715, when Spanish rule was finally terminated, that there was any rest or relief for the tortured and ruined provinces of Flanders and Brabant. Requesens died; the Spanish troops mutinied, were joined by the German mercenaries, and began a war on their own account, burning and sacking Antwerp, butchering 6,000 of the population, and harrying the country right and left. Then came Don John of Austria, Philip’s new governor-general, the victor of Lepanto, and a figure out of the pages of mediæval romance. He came too late; anarchy was firmly fixed in the saddle, riding rough-shod over the desolated garden of Europe. Abandoning his original policy of pacification, he turned to war and was successful, but only to find about every power in Europe represented in the roaring inferno. Orange was fighting from Antwerp as his headquarters, the provincial representatives, with Brussels as their centre, were howling for help from any source; the Protestant faction called John Casimir, Count Palatine, to their assistance, while the Catholics appealed to the Duke d’Alençon, and both put in an appearance, the latter seizing Maubeuge and working thence into the interior, while the former defeated Don John in a pitched battle and drove him back to Namur, where in a few months he died of chagrin and a broken heart, after making his nephew Alexander Farnese, Prince of Parma, his successor in the field.

Hell is the only name that can be applied to the unhappy land, the condition of which was not unlike that of Mexico in this year of enlightenment, 1915. The Renaissance and the Reformation together had extinguished both civilisation and culture over the greater part of Europe; war was everywhere and incessant, all principle had been abandoned and the ethical standards of society had disappeared. Slaughter, civil war, assassination, treason, and sacrilege howled through an ever-widening desolation and the end of the world seemed at hand. Fortunately, in a way, the outrageous career of the Protestants served as an impulse to union; their savagery in Ghent and Brussels somehow pulled the people of Belgium together and enabled Parma to win some small order out of the insane chaos. He began a new campaign, drove out the French, laid siege to the Calvinists in Ghent, and at last (the Prince of Orange having been assassinated at the instigation of Philip) broke down the last Protestant resistance in Brussels and Antwerp and for the moment restored peace over a deserted, ruined, and blood-stained land. And then Philip II died and dying abandoned the country he had received as the richest in Europe and left as the most miserable and poverty-stricken, handing it over to new rulers in the persons of his daughter Isabella and her husband, the Archduke Albert of Austria.

The great and happy and wealthy state created by the House of Burgundy had been utterly destroyed and irretrievably ruined. A new Protestant state had been formed from one fragment in the north, other portions were shortly to be incorporated in France, and the nine provinces that still remained out of the original seventeen were hardly more than a geographical abstraction. Half the great cities had been sacked and burned, the craftsmen and artisans were slaughtered or in exile, the cold and greedy Hollanders had seized (and were to retain by force or fraud) the vast commerce that once was the possession of Flanders and Brabant, agriculture had ceased, famine was universal, religion and mercy and education were memories, while the old civic spirit and the old freedom and independence were things of so long ago they were not even remembered.

To do them justice, the new sovereigns meant well by the exhausted country, but first of all they had set their hearts on the crushing of the Protestant Netherlands, and nine years of war set in which ended at last with the complete victory of the Dutch republic and its acknowledged independence. Then came the anomaly of twelve years of peace with the astonishing outburst of a genuine and brilliant if evanescent culture. Peace is a good foundation for industry, trade, and commerce, but the fact is unavoidable that the black ploughing and the red fertilising of a land by war frequently bring a luxuriant crop of those cultural products that have issue in character as they follow from it. Here in Flanders the years between the Peace of Antwerp in 1609 and the restoration of Spanish rule on the death of Albert in 1624, were opulent with all manner of civic and personal wealth in those lines that are cultural rather than material. It was a time of the restoration of religion through new monastic foundations, of the establishing of houses of mercy, of the building up of great universities, of the development of printing, of the production of great scientists and scholars, of a new era of painting. The University of Louvain dates from this time, the great printing-house of the Plantins and the Moretus, the art of Rubens and Vandyck.

It was all temporary, however, and ephemeral. Spain took charge once more, the Dutch continued their policy of commercial and religious aggression, the Thirty Years’ War drew the unfortunate provinces into its whirlpool; the war between France and Spain was largely fought on their territory, the war of France against the United Netherlands resulted in the seizure by the unsuccessful party—France—of Belgian territory as a salve to its wounded pride. Year after year Belgium was subject to renewed devastations; what the Protestants and Spaniards had left the French despoiled. Brussels, which had now become the richest and most splendid of the cities, was bombarded with red-hot cannon balls and almost wholly destroyed, sixteen churches and four thousand houses being burned, and the great city deprived of almost its last examples of the great art of the Middle Ages.

And so the wretched tale goes on, generation after generation. God alone knows how or why anything was left in Belgium, either of art or culture or character or religion, or even of the rudiments of civilisation. Still something did remain for destruction, as was proved a little later by the revolutionists of France and recently by the Prussians, both of whom have performed the final work quite perfectly. The Heart of Europe had been torn, lacerated, crushed, for one hundred and sixty years, and yet somehow it continued to beat on. A great Christian culture, a great congeries of Christian peoples, product of the splendid centuries from 1000 to 1500 A. D., had been destroyed and superseded by the very different force engendered by Renaissance and Reformation. If there are those who still, despite the blazing enlightenment of the last twelvemonth, retain any illusions as to the comparative beneficence of the two epochs, it would be well for them to consider in detail the annals and the peoples and the personalities of the Heart of Europe during the five centuries of mediævalism, and the same during the five centuries of the Renaissance and the Reformation. The contrast is striking, the revision of judgments unescapable, the lesson, immediately to be applied in the present crisis, pregnant of possible benefits.

With the Peace of Utrecht all that is now Belgium passed to the Emperor Charles VI, and Austrian dominion began. In contrast to the preceding horrors it was comparatively uneventful; while Prince Charles of Lorraine was governor the country was quiet and prosperous and a certain advance occurred on cultural lines. This enlightened prince deserves well of history in one respect at least, for, by an imperial decree he caused to be issued, it was solemnly asserted that a gentleman did not lose his status as such if he indulged in the practice of the arts or letters! Joseph II, who followed him, was a pedantic reformer of laudable intentions, who set himself to the perfecting of everything, both religious and secular, to the extreme irritation of his people who simply wanted to govern themselves and apparently cared little whether this were well done or ill. In the end the whole country broke up again in rebellion and disorder, the nobles leagued in one group under the Duke d’Arenberg, the lower classes in a second with a vulgar and noisy demagogue, Van der Noot, as its leader. Somehow or other they managed to get together at Breda, raised an army, defeated the Austrian garrisons, and drove the Emperor Joseph across the Meuse when he forthwith died of sheer discouragement.

Then followed a short-lived “republic” engineered by Van der Noot, who was an adherent of the new French ideas, with an attack on the nobles which was sufficiently successful to bring their party to an end. Next, the powers who looked most askance at the fast-growing revolution—England, Holland, and Prussia—united for the restoration of Austrian authority, on general principles, and the Emperor Leopold II, with their support, asserted, and then established his authority, capturing Namur and within two weeks occupying the whole country (which accepted him contentedly enough), driving the ambitious advocate with the revolutionary tendencies into a well-merited exile. Austria tried honestly enough to conciliate the country, but its temper and inclinations were otherwise, so France was asked to intervene, which she was not loath to do, sending Dumouriez to undertake the task. Badly beaten at first, he succeeded finally at Valmy and Jemappes, and the French Revolution assumed control. The cabal of assassins then in power in Paris decreed that Belgium should be saved, but that first she must be purged, and a choice assortment of thirty ruffians was sent to Brussels to see that this was done. A guillotine was set up at once, and clerics, nobles, and the wealthier merchants became its victims, while the patriot army, supported by the local revolutionists, acted after their kind and sacked the remaining churches, destroyed religious houses, and generally plundered whatever they safely could, i. e., whatever was unable to defend itself. Dumouriez countenanced none of this, but he was playing a double game, acting ostensibly for the cabal in Paris though with the idea always before him that if he could control Belgium and conquer Holland he would be in a good position from which to turn on his employers, crush them, and then restore the monarchy on constitutional lines. Unfortunately for his plans, he was defeated by the allies and again Austria won back her insecure provinces. She was received with the facile enthusiasm which now seemed chronic with the shattered Belgian character, but after a few months was driven out for the last time when France was finally victorious over the half-hearted, selfish, and ineffectual allies, only one of whom, England, was waging war against the republic with anything approaching sincerity and determination.

Again the French—or rather the republican faction—entered into possession, and unhappy Belgium felt the full force of its grinning hypocrisy, its satanic savagery, and its unscrupulous greed. “Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity” was painted on the walls, and simultaneously the country was robbed of its last coins, its laws and privileges were overthrown, its citizens deprived of even the most fundamental rights of liberty and property, while the few remaining abbeys and castles were sacked, burned, and their ruins razed to the ground. Alva had been an amateur compared with the new apostles of liberty, and when at last Belgium was declared regenerate and was incorporated in the French “republic,” nothing remained for incorporation except a name, a memory, and a huddle of entirely ruined and perfectly hopeless victims of four centuries of cumulative enlightenment and progress.

Of course they rebelled; of course whole groups of desperate men took to the forests and moors, robbing, killing, existing as best they could, and of course they were crushed again and again; at last, however, Bonaparte began to bring some order out of the republican anarchy, and conditions improved. When at last he proclaimed himself Emperor the Belgians accepted him with the same avidity they always had shown for any man who promised some alleviation of their intolerable sufferings. Holland was occupied and given a king of its own, Napoleon’s brother Louis, who was not only the strongest and finest character in the family, but so righteous in his kingship and so whole-heartedly devoted to his Dutch that he soon alienated the sympathies of his imperial brother while failing to gain those of his somewhat difficult subjects.

The dream empire began to dissolve; Holland revolted, and the Prince of Orange was restored; Belgium was occupied by the Allies, who had got to work again, and the scheme of a new state, to be formed of all the old seventeen provinces united under the Prince of Orange, was brought forward against the wishes of the Belgians, who preferred the restoration of Austrian rule. They had lived too close to their Protestant Dutch neighbours and had too keen a memory of their character and habits to desire amalgamation with them on any terms.

Napoleon went to Elba, came back, called on his “loyal Belgians” to support him, advanced into their territories, and at Waterloo lost everything and melted away into history and legend, leaving Belgium in unnatural union with the Dutch provinces, where it remained for some fifteen years, revolting in 1830, making good its rebellion, and establishing itself as an independent state under the sovereignty of Prince Leopold of Saxe-Cobourg, who had been elected King on the refusal of the Duc de Nemours, first chosen by the victorious provisional government.

The long agony was at an end; it had lasted from August 22, 1567, when the Duke of Alva entered Brussels, until July 21, 1831, when Leopold I was crowned King of Belgium, a period of two hundred and sixty-four years. Other peoples and other states have been brought low, time out of mind; have suffered, disintegrated, and disappeared. It would be hard to find another instance, however, where so fabulously rich a people, and so cultivated withal, so supreme in their achievement of a lofty and well-rounded civilisation, have been called upon to submit to so prolonged, varied, and searching an assault, to descend to such depths of misery, poverty, and degradation—and who yet have preserved through two centuries and a half of agony and spoliation a tradition and a habit of righteousness that, when the great test arrived, blazed upward in sudden fierceness of self-revelation to the confusion of new enemies and the wonder of a world. What lies beyond awaits the proof, but for the moment three centuries have dropped away and the old independence, the old fearlessness, the old honour of Bruges and Ghent, of Liége and Malines shine again on old battle-fields of new carnage and in new hearts of old righteousness. The new era begins, and the world waits, confident of the issue.

V
THE GLORY OF A GREAT ART

BETWEEN Paris and Cologne, Strasbourg and Bruges lies, in little, nearly the whole history of northern architecture from Charlemagne to the last Louis of France, when it ceased to be an art and became a fashion. The greater part of Normandy lies, it is true, across the Seine, and is, for the time, beyond our field of vision, but, barring Caen, architectural significance is well concentrated in the triangle, Rouen, Dieppe, le Havre. The same is true of the old Royaume of France; though Chartres and Bourges lie to the south, the beginning, and in some sense the culmination, of Gothic is to be found between Seine and Somme. In the east, to the Rhine, we have practically all that Germany has contributed, except in the later days of the Renaissance.

If we like, we may go far beyond the dim and mysterious era of the Carolings, finding in Trèves old Roman ruins that take us back four or five centuries earlier, but the real history of this region begins with Charlemagne and takes us to his favourite city of Aix-la-Chapelle for the single, but vastly significant, building left us as evidence of his inspiration and his creative power. With the ending of this day-dream there comes a great silence, while civilisation and culture disappear again, to be restored two centuries later, far to the west, and at the hands of the Normans. Here we find St. Georges de Bocherville, Fécamp, and the inestimable and forgotten ruins of Jumièges. For transition to Gothic we have Senlis, Soissons, Noyon, with Laon and Paris as earliest Gothic of pure and consistent type; Châlons, Amiens, and Reims for culmination, and Abbeville, Rouen, Beauvais, Troyes, and Strasbourg for its sumptuous decline.

From the other hand we go on from Aix to Cologne for the fine eleventh-century work that took up the tale after the second Dark Ages that followed the ending of the empire of the Carolings, with more examples at Laach and in Hildesheim, which also are beyond our survey. A century later we get the consistent Teutonic art of Trèves, Mayence, Spires, and Worms, while the high Gothic of the noon of mediævalism is found at Cologne and Strasbourg, with the last rich fantasy of all, in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, in Brussels and Antwerp and Malines, in Courtrai, Tournai, Namur, Louvain, Ghent, Ypres, and Bruges. For Renaissance we find all we need, and everywhere; churches, palaces, guild-halls, châteaux, dwellings, from the fanciful transition at Dieppe, Rouen, Gisors, to the sophisticated, well-conditioned, and perfectly artificial restored classic of Nancy.

As there is no other country in the north, of equal area, where history has been made so plenteously and of such varied quality, so it is with its art, and its architecture in particular, which marks the beginnings, the culmination, and the close of the three stylistic periods of Christian civilisation in the West—Carolingian, Norman, and Gothic—and through monuments singularly significant and equally notable in their perfection. It would be impossible to quote a tenth of them; there are a hundred at least, each of which demands (and many have received) a volume or more, but at least we can pick the most priceless, either for history or beauty, in a farewell that may be final for all, as already it is for such consummate and vanished masterpieces as the Cloth Hall at Ypres and the Cathedral of Reims.

Let us begin with Aix, just over the Belgian

JUMIÈGES

frontier, the “City of the Great King,” where culture lightened again after the long night, and where, of all the churches and palaces of the Emperor, only one remains as evidence of what he did. The royal chapel has been built onto and over and around, but the original norm remains in the shape of that polygonal form with surrounding arcades that was a step in the development of the perfect Gothic chevet. To a great extent it is a replica of San Vitale in Ravenna, and may very well have been built by the descendants of those Roman craftsmen who, after the fall of the one-time capitol of the world, sought refuge either under Byzantine protection in Ravenna or on Lake Como, where the tradition is they carefully cherished the traditions and the esoteric mysteries of their art, perpetuating the slowly fading memory through secret lodges that, some held, were the progenitors of modern freemasonry.

When the possibilities of a new culture and a restored civilisation revealed themselves to the conqueror, who was also statesman, patriot, and (after his dim and flickering light) Christian, two centuries had left the West a wilderness, and all was to do over again. There were, it seemed, neither scholars nor artists nor righteous leaders of any sort in the world, and the task must have appeared hopeless. Charlemagne, undaunted, sent east and west, from Britain to Spain, searching out those who, by report, rose above the hopeless level of barbarian mediocrity. Alcuin of Britain, Peter of Pisa, Theodulphus, Hincmar, Eriugena, Radbertus Maurus, gathered around him at Aix, forming a cultural centre, reforming the Church, building up schools, creating an art almost out of nothing.

There was little enough, though Rome had its basilicas of the time of Constantine—San Paolo, San Lorenzo, Santa Maria Maggiore; from the East, it is true, travellers brought back wondering stories of the splendour of Justinian’s churches, with Hagia Sophia at the head; in Ravenna were the more modest monuments of the Exarchate—Sant’ Apollinare in Classe, San Vitale—in Istria, at Parenzo and Grado, were churches showing some new elements probably provided by Lombard builders, and San Pietro, Toscanella stood like a miracle, novel, without forebears, a new version of an ancient theme. These are what we have left, and then there was more, for much has since been destroyed, but most of it lay far afield, and in the north there was nothing. The work of co-ordination was well performed, however, and the succession was re-established; after the chapel at Aix, therefore, architectural development was continuous, if moderate, though any estimate must be dubious owing to the almost complete destruction of the monuments. We still have the apses of Sant’ Ambrogio in Milan; San Donato, Zara, N. D. de la Couture of Le Mans, and Montier en Der, none of them particularly inspiring or inspired, and none with any hint of what was suddenly to happen at Jumièges in the eleventh century. That the latter building may not have been as amazing an innovation as it appears is indicated by fragments and foundations of the work that came between it and Charlemagne, as at St. Martin of Tours, where the Revolution has left us nothing but foundations indicative of a former superstructure that may well have been the connecting-link, and might have changed our entire estimate of the quality of the architecture of the second Dark Ages. As it is, this chapel at Aix stands not only first in the great recovery of the eighth century, but almost unique, with no successors for nearly three centuries.

When the true dawn begins to lighten the hills, it is in the west that its coming is foreshown, in that Duchy of Normandy, where in a century the fierce Vikings, who had been driven from the coast of Flanders in their forays from the Baltic, had become the finely tempered material out of which was to be forged, by the monks of Cluny, a Catholic civilisation that was to extend itself over all western Europe and endure for five centuries. Of the three great abbeys that were the centres from which radiated the great transforming force, Bec, Fécamp, and Jumièges, the two latter lie on our side of the Seine, with the third only ten miles on the other side, while St. Georges de Bocherville, intact except for its pestilential restoration, is of the same period, as is Cérisy le Forêt. Caen, with its two abbeys of the Conqueror, inestimable monuments of architectural history, is well to the west, with Evreux, Lisieux, Bayeux, and Mont St. Michel, but we have enough on the right bank to demonstrate the nature and the greatness of the work accomplished by Cluny and the Normans in a union cemented by a vital and crescent Christianity.

Jumièges stands first, in its forgotten loop of the Seine, and is amazing, no less. But for its fine new fourteenth-century chevet, it was, at the time of the French Revolution, almost in its original state, but it was destroyed then, with Cluny, Avranches, St. Martin of Tours, and other priceless monuments, though by no means so completely. To-day its towering walls, rising above thick trees and greenery, are startlingly picturesque, but their great value lies in the revelation they make of what was possible in the earliest days of Christian recovery. The work was begun in 1040 and finished within twenty-five years, being followed immediately by the abbeys of Caen, as these were followed by St. Georges de Bocherville. The original plan was in each case about the same, the standard type, originally Latin, with Syrian, and probably Lombard and Carolingian, developments; cruciform, aisled both in nave and choir, the latter being of two bays only, with an apse, but no apsidal aisle and chapels as at Tours. The transepts are of two bays on either side the central tower, the end bays having galleries or tribunes, with a subordinate apse to the east, so forming, in the lower stage, small, low chapels. It is in the working upward from this plan that the significant developments appear, and both here and at Cérisy le Forêt, we find the order of round-arched arcade, high triforium of two arches under a containing arch, and a single clerestory window, Cérisy having as well an open clerestory arcade of three units. The system is clearly alternating, as in Lombardy and Tuscany, but there is no evidence that vaulting was ever contemplated; instead, I think it certain that great transverse arches on every other pier, supporting a wooden roof, were in mind, after the Syrian fashion, as it was later modified at San Miniato in Florence, a few years before, though these were certainly never built at Jumièges. The west front, with its tall, flanking towers, is of the Como type (query: Is the hand of the Comacine master visible here?), while all the vertical proportions are more lofty and aspiring than had ever been known before. As a matter of fact, given the chevet with its aisle and radiating chapels, which was already being worked out farther south by the simple process of halving the Syrian, Byzantine, Ravennesque, and Carolingian polygonal church and attaching this to the simultaneously developed nave, and you have all the potency of the Gothic system, the high vault (sexpartite or quadripartite) with its flying buttresses now to be worked out at Caen, giving the final structural element, while the expanding Catholic faith and the buoyant northern blood were woven together to have issue in that essentially mediæval character which was to transform the whole, infusing it with that peculiar spiritual quality which gave its distinctive character, through a new vision of beauty, to the art that had been evolved for the full expression of a Christian civilisation at last triumphant and supreme over a dead paganism.

After Cluny and Jumièges, Paris, Bourges, Chartres, and Reims are inevitable, and the working out of a great destiny is headlong and almost incredible. Jumièges was finished in 1066, the year of the Norman conquest of England; Reims was begun in 1212. Within a space of a century and a half the greatest architectural evolution in history had taken place, so echoing and voicing an equally unprecedented development in human character and culture. In 1066, hardly more than fifty years had passed since Christian society emerged from two centuries of barbarism; in 1212 it had mounted to the loftiest levels of human achievement, with a theology, a philosophy, and an art, whatever its form, with which there had been nothing comparable in the past, with which the achievements that were to follow, as they now show themselves in the red light of a revealing war, seem only the insane wanderings of a disorganised horde.

The sequence of development is well worked out east of the Seine, and at the hands of the Franks of the “Royaume,” now under the direction of the Cistercians, as a century before the Normans had been controlled by the Cluniacs. This constant revivification of monasticism during crescent periods of human growth is a very interesting phenomenon. Apparently monasticism, which has accompanied Christianity from its earliest beginning until to-day, is an essential portion of its working structure, and if you accept Christianity in fact, you cannot escape accepting the “religious life” in principle. It seems, however, that it is always in unstable equilibrium, prone to inevitable decadence, and no order lasts out three generations without losing its beneficent energy. When life is on its periodic upward curve, a reformation always occurs at the critical moment, and there is no loss of impetus; so the original Benedictinism which had served Charlemagne so well, but had sunk into worse than inaction, gave place in the eleventh century to the great Cluniac reform, which in its turn was succeeded by the Cistercian reform, as this yielded after another hundred years to the reform of St. Dominic and St. Francis.

Now the Romanesque art of Toulouse, Aquitaine, and Burgundy, the Norman of Normandy and England, the Rhenish of Germany, were largely Benedictine of the Cluniac mode, and the style rapidly became inordinately sumptuous, costly, and magnificent, as at Arles, Toulouse, Poitiers, Glastonbury, Durham. It has been said of monastic movements: “First generation pious, second generation learned, third generation decadent.” Certainly as the Benedictines in France went on to the twelfth century, their original austerity and fervour were relaxed, and their art became a thing of splendour as their wealth and learning and temporal power increased. The Cistercian movement of Robert of Molesme and Stephen Harding and Bernard of Clairvaux was a revolt against luxury and laxity, an attempt (as ever) to get back to the supposititious simplicity of earlier times, and in the success that followed architecture changed completely, though the ending of the new style, and even its consummation, were different indeed from what the Cistercian reforms had desired.

In its beginnings Gothic architecture was an attempt at economy, the trying for something less massive and ornate than the great Benedictine piles of inert masonry. By cleverly developing a system of balanced thrusts, the sheer bulk of masonry was reduced by half, while attention was drawn away from the fast-increasing ornamentation to the shell itself, whereby a great gain was effected, and architecture became once more a study in organism, in composition, and in proportion. Gothic is primarily the perfection of exquisite organism, almost living in its consummate integrity and its sensitive interplay of forces. This perfectly co-ordinated structure is, of course, infused and transfigured by an intense sense of beauty, quite new in its forms, and given a spiritual and symbolical content peculiar to itself, the result being what, for want of a better term, we call Gothic. The two elements cannot be disassociated, as pedants feign, for, like all great art, it is in a sense sacramental, and the “outward and visible sign” may never be separated from the “inward and spiritual grace.”[A]

[A] “Sacramentum est corporale vel materiale elementum foris sensibiliter propositum ex similitudine repræsentans, et ex institutione significans et ex sanctificatione continens, aliquam invisibilem et spiritualem gratiam.”—(Hugo de St. Victoire.)

Both processes may be followed through the great sequence of churches between the Seine, the Marne, and the Somme—or might have been a year ago. To-day it is safe to postulate nothing of a dim and ominous future; we know that much of this galaxy has been destroyed after seven centuries of careful cherishing through innumerable wars and revolutions. That all may go is possible, as the power that brought them into existence has gone, though in this case only for a time. Once, however, the great and triumphal progress from Jumièges through Noyon, Senlis, St. Denis, Laon, Paris, Amiens, to its final achievement at Reims, was a complete and visible record of the greatest and most headlong advance toward the real things in Christian civilisation by means of the real things in Christian civilisation history has ever recorded. Five of these—Senlis, Noyon, Laon, Amiens, and Reims lie either within the battle lines that have maintained themselves so long, or at least within sound of the guns; one has been destroyed—Reims; one thus far preserved—Amiens. The fate of the others is in doubt, together with that of all the lands that lie to the east, and the danger of irreparable loss is greater than ever before since the French Revolution.

There was no better place than this once-lovely region, now hidden from view in the lurid smoke and the poisoned fumes of a new and demoniac sort of war, in which to watch the swift growth to a splendid self-consciousness of Gothic architecture. The elements of Gothic organism had been developed in the twelfth century by the great Cluniac-Norman alliance, but this was only a beginning; Gothic quality was still to be achieved, and this consisted largely in three elements—cohesion, economy, and character. The first means the synthetic knitting of everything together, and the giving it dynamic power to develop from within outward; it means making structure absolutely central and comprehensive, but also beautiful; ornament, decoration, remaining something added to it, something of the bene esse, though not of the esse; deriving from it in every instance, but not necessary to its perfection. The second is the reducing of mass to its logical and structural (and also optical) minimum, bringing into play the forces of accommodation, balance, and active, as opposed to passive, resistance. The third is the hardest to describe or determine, and probably can only be perceived through comparison. It is the differentiation in quality, the

LAON

determination of personality, and it is hardly to be defined, though it is instantly perceived.

In the Abbaye aux Hommes, or Cérisy, or St. Georges de Bocherville, we find great majesty and beauty, many elements that are distinctive of true Gothic work and persist through its entire course, but none of these buildings is actually Gothic. In St. Germer de Fly, however, and in Sens and Noyon, while there seems at first little differentiation from the others, the Gothic spirit has found itself and is already working rapidly toward its consummation.

Of the condition of Noyon at the present time we know little; of what this may be in a few months’ time we know less. The town itself was of the oldest, its foundation being Roman, and within its walls Chilperic was buried in 721, while Charlemagne was crowned King of the Franks about thirty years before he became Emperor, and Hugh, first of the Capetian dynasty, was here chosen king in 987. Incidentally, the town was also the birthplace of John Calvin. The ancient cathedral was burned in 1131 and the present work begun shortly after, though it is hard to believe that much of the existing structure antedates the year 1150. The crossing and transepts date from about 1170, the nave about ten years later, while the west front and towers are of the early part of the next century. The certainty and calm assurance of the work is remarkable. Paris, which is later, is full of tentative experiments, but there is no halting here, rather a serene certainty of touch that is perfectly convincing. The plan is curious in that it has transepts with apsidal ends, after the fashion of Rhenish Romanesque, one of the few instances in France. The alternating system is used throughout, and the vault was originally sexpartite; the interior order consists of a low arcade, high triforium, triforium gallery, and a clerestory comprised wholly within the vault lines; round and pointed arches are used indiscriminately, and the flying buttresses are perhaps the earliest that emerged from the protection of the triforium roofs. In the choir, which is earliest in date, the ornament is rude, even rudimentary, though distinctly Gothic in form, but in the nave twenty years has served to change this into work of the most brilliant and classical beauty. In 1293 the whole town was destroyed by fire, and the cathedral wrecked; it was immediately reconstructed, however, and at this time the sexpartite gave place to quadripartite vaulting, while the west front, with its great towers, very noble in their proportions and their powerful buttressing, was completed. This rebuilding and the loss of all the original glass has left Noyon less perfect than many of the neighbouring churches, but it still remained a grave and strikingly solemn example of the transition.

Not far away, past the huge and formidable ruins of Coucy, the greatest castle of the Middle Ages, whose lords haughtily proclaimed, “Roi ne suys, ne prince, ne duc, ne comte aussi: Je suys le Sire de Coucy,” is Laon on its sudden hill. How great the loss has been here we do not know, but the town has been frequently under German bombardment, and the end is not yet. Laon is unique, a masterly work of curious vitality, original, daring, and even rebellious against a growing tradition. In the Middle Ages it was vastly admired, but to us of a day more dull and timorous in architecture, because we have no art of our own and have found so little in life from which we could draw an inspiration, it is less safe and satisfying than such coherent and scholastic work as Amiens or Reims. Begun about 1165, it was finished in 1225, the growth being from the crossing in all directions, for not only is the amazing west front of the central period of Gothic perfection, but the choir as well, for the unique square termination takes the place of a regular chevet which was part of the original design. This square-ended choir is the only one in France, and is thoroughly English in effect; moreover, the transepts have aisles and are the first in France to be so finished, while they have tribunes at the ends after the Norman fashion, and there is a central tower or lantern as well. The towers of Laon are its distinguishing glory, for there are five in all, out of an original seven, all incomplete, not one retaining its spire, but striking and immensely individual. The interior organism is not wholly coherent, for while the vaulting is sexpartite throughout, the system is regular, and was as manifestly intended for quadripartite vaulting as Noyon for sexpartite. The west front is vastly picturesque, if somewhat incoherent, and is clearly a growth from year to year; it lacks both the sublime calm and grandeur of Paris and the faultless organism of Reims, but its detail is as brilliantly conceived as any in France, while its carvings and sculptures are in the same class as the best of Hellas. In the tops of the towers are the well-known stone effigies of oxen, placed there by the builders in recognition of the patient service of the beasts that year after year helped drag the heavy stones from the plain to the top of the hill where the cathedral stands.

In and around Laon were once innumerable religious houses, but nearly all their churches were destroyed during the French Revolution, which annihilated more noble art in five years than had happened in five centuries. St. Martin remains, and is of the middle of the twelfth century, but the church of the Abbey of St. Vincent is wholly destroyed.

South of Laon, and about as far away as Noyon, lies Soissons, an ancient town, famous in history, and containing, until the war, another masterpiece of mediæval art, the cathedral, which already has been made the target of German shells, and has suffered seriously. As a city, it antedated the Roman occupation, was Christianised toward the end of the third century, became a capital of the Merovings, and a notable city of the Carolingian dynasty. The south transept is the oldest part, and dates from about 1175, the choir was finished in 1212, the north transept and nave about 1250. Porter says of the south transept: “This portion of Soissons, one of the most ethereal of all twelfth-century designs, is the highest expression of that fairy-like, Saracenic phase of Gothic art that had first come into being at Noyon. Like Noyon, however, this transept lacks the elements of grandeur which are found in so striking a degree in the nave and choir of this same church of Soissons.” The nave and choir are indeed amongst the noblest creations of Catholic art; for justness and delicacy of proportions, refinement of line, restraint in the placing and determination of ornament, Soissons ranks with Chartres and Bourges. The richness of its vertical lines is unusual, the mouldings clear, powerful, and distinguished in contour, and altogether it has well served for nearly seven centuries as a perfect exemplar of the Christian art of France as its highest point.

Already it has been appallingly shattered, one shell having struck the roof of the north aisle, hurling one of the nave shafts into fragments and obliterating an entire bay. Thus far it has been spared a conflagration, and if the Prussian lines are promptly forced back, it may still be preserved as a wonder for still further generations.

So far as the numberless other great churches of Soissons are concerned, it has for long been too late; they perished, with uncounted others in this region, at the time of the Revolution. Of the vast abbey of St. Jean-des-Vignes nothing remains but the sumptuous west front, cut clear like an architectural “frontispiece” from all the rest, and even this has been further shattered by German gunfire. The royal abbey of Our Lady has become a military barracks, St. Crepin, St. Medard with its famous seven churches, all have vanished, and the loss is irreparable.

Nearer Paris we find Senlis, a further step in architectural development. The town itself is charming, and full of old art and old history. Roman walls, with sixteen towers, still remain, together with fragments of a royal palace of the French kings, from Clovis to Henri IV, with ancient houses, picturesque streets, desecrated churches, and monastic ruins, such as those of the Abbey of Victory, founded by Philip Augustus after the battle of Bouvines, and wrecked, of course, during the Revolution.

The cathedral is curious and fascinating. Set out in 1155 on enormous lines, it was curtailed both in height and length through the failure of adequate funds. It has been rebuilt, extended, supplemented, century after century, until it has become almost an epitome of French architecture from the middle of the twelfth to the middle of the sixteenth century. The southwest tower (its mate is unfinished) is of the thirteenth-century culmination, and surpassed by no other spire in France for subtlety of composition and perfection of detail. One of its crocketed pinnacles has already been shot away, but apparently further danger is well removed, and will become progressively less threatening as the Prussian lines are driven back.

It is, of course, quite impossible even to note all the architectural monuments between the Seine and the frontiers of Belgium. Paris must be wholly left out, for St. Denis, St. Germain l’Auxerois, Notre Dame, and the Ste. Chapelle would justly require a volume to themselves. Rouen, with its cathedral, St. Ouen, St. Maclou, the Palais de Justice, rich with all the lace and embroidery of the flamboyant period, lies now well beyond danger, and so does Beauvais, where the nemesis of worldly pride overtook the lagging spiritual impulse that had made the Middle Ages the climax of Christian civilisation. Châlons-sur-Marne, once threatened, is now reprieved, and its

BEAUVAIS

cathedral, its churches of St. Jean and St. Loup, and its noble and distinguished Church of Our Lady are safe for another period.

Apart from the great architectural monuments are numberless others invaluable in archæology, and forming links in the great Gothic development: St. Etienne of Beauvais, St. Leu d’Esserent, Morienval, Bury, St. Germer, and St. Remi of Reims—the last valuable beyond estimate, with an apse that was unparalleled as a masterpiece of transitional work when Gothic was in its first and finest estate, now wrecked and desecrated by shells that have burst its vaults into crumbled fragments and hurled its perfect windows in showers of splintered glass to the pavements heaped high with the wreck of masonry and of dismembered altars.

And as in the case of the great churches, so in that of the small, from Braisne to Caudebec, they cannot even be catalogued. The whole region was, and is, one of wonderful little parish churches, of all periods, and many of them are now only shapeless ruins. The great abbeys and smaller religious houses are practically gone, scores having fallen prey to the insane fury of the Revolution or the sordid secularism of the Restoration. What we have lost may be seen from countless such lovely and pathetic fragments as St. Wandrille, near Caudebec, given a new fame through the name of Maeterlinck, and so linked with the greater martyrdom of Belgium in these last days. This, like its myriad companions, was architecture of the most singular beauty, the loss of which leaves the world poor, so poor, indeed, that it had at first nothing wherewith to meet the last assault of the enemy. The loss is being made good, the penalty already is paid, and though one could not—one would not—restore or rebuild these silent fragments of exquisitely wrought stone, meshed in tall trees and clambering vines, the vision is possible of new foundations, equal in number to these that are gone, each an expiation and a spiritual guard, each making late reparation for the past, guaranteeing a future immunity from perils of the same nature as those that now shake the world.

VI
AMIENS AND REIMS

TWO monuments there are to the east of the Seine that form the realisation of the dim but dominant ideal toward which Christian society in France was tending even from the days of St. Germer and Jumièges, through the intermediate and progressive steps of Noyon, Soissons, Laon-Amiens, and Reims. Equal in fame, counting no others in their own category save only Chartres and Bourges, the one remains, the other has passed for ever.

It is a strange sensation for us to-day to watch from afar the slow and implacable destruction of one of the greatest works of art in the world, for we must go back more than a century to find any catastrophe of a similar nature. What happened then, when half a hundred masterpieces of divinely directed human intelligence and aspiration were reduced to scrap-heaps at the hands of revolution, is very far away, and the irreparable loss is as unknown to-day as it was unappreciated then. We can no more reconstruct for our understanding Cluny, St. Martin of Tours, or Avranches than we can restore the catalogue of the Alexandrian library; mercifully we cannot estimate our loss. Back of this era of annihilation we must go two centuries before we find in England under Henry VIII a similar episode of infamy. The case of Reims is wholly different; there are tens of thousands who knew it for what it was—the crowning manifestation of a crowning civilisation, and for them the loss is personal, poignant, and unexampled, a horror that sophistry cannot palliate nor time destroy.

Of the two great churches, Amiens could more easily have been spared. The word is ill chosen; Amiens in ruins, its exquisite façade with its perfect sculptures seared and shattered by bursting shells and consuming fire, would have been a catastrophe that could only put to the test the most stoical fortitude, but—it is neither Chartres nor Bourges nor Reims, and simply because the perfect balance between all possible elements in great architecture is here trembling toward its overthrow. Gothic art had three controlling forces working toward an unattainable perfection; structural integrity irradiated by consummate invention and an almost divine creative genius; passion for that exalted beauty that is unchangeable and eternal, expressed through new forms at once northern and Catholic; the just balance and intimate interplay of these two impulses. Its virtues, like all virtues, were most easily transmuted into vices, once the controlling balance was overthrown, and each was, in its stimulating possibilities, a constant and irresistible temptation toward excess. In Reims, the beginnings of which antedate Amiens by only a decade, the balance remains true and firm; in Amiens we see the first fatal steps in the development of a purely human (and notably French) logic, toward that intellectual pride, that almost arrogance of self-confidence, that found its nemesis in the unstable marvel of Beauvais.

In an admirable but anonymous little book called “Some French Cathedrals,” the author says: “French Gothic was most rational and most beautiful while it still remembered its Romanesque origin. At Amiens it was just beginning to forget that and to lose itself in dreams of an impossible romance which changed it from architecture into a very wonderful kind of ornamental engineering.” This subtle and significant change you feel everywhere except in the inimitable façade. The interior is too high, the masonry too wire-drawn and tenuous, the chevet too giddy and insecure. It is true that all but the west front has been impossibly restored, so that outwardly little remains of the original work, while the glass is gone from all but the ambulatory windows, leaving the nave a cold blaze of intolerable light. Nevertheless, the fundamental fault is there; the architect intrudes himself in place of the dévot, the craft of man supplants the guiding of God; so we have one of the most technically perfect of cathedrals, and one of the least inspired; you must go to the Rhine to find, in Cologne, a more self-conscious and serenely satisfied work, and it is well to make this comparison, for by so doing you realise the real greatness of Amiens, and how it fails only in comparison with the three perfect examples of an art that wholly expresses the great concept of mediæval Catholic philosophy, that in life, as we know it, material and spiritual are inseparable, that their just balance is the true end of man in this phase of existence, and that therefore sacramentalism is of the esse of religion, and as well the law of life.

As a whole, both from within and without, Amiens in a measure fails, but this does not hold

AMIENS

of its several parts. The west front is still a masterpiece of consummate and wholly original design, though the towers have been incongruously (but engagingly) terminated in later centuries. The three great doors, the first and second arcades, and the rose-window story contain more brilliant, spirited, ingenious, and withal beautiful design than any similar work in the world, while the ornament (there is a wild-rose border around the archivolts of the great porches that finds no rival in Greece) and the sculptures reach a level of decorative and emotional significance that marks the time of their production as the crowning moment in human culture and in Christian civilisation.

We turn to Reims—we turn now in reverence to the memory of Reims—in a different spirit. Master Robert of Luzarches was a master, and knew it. Master Robert of Coucy was the servant of a Lord who was greater than he, and knew this also, and was proud of his service. He was just as great an architect as his brother of Amiens, but he worked in a godly fear, and so he built the noblest church in Christendom. This is not to say that its nave order is equal to Chartres, its rhythm and composition equal to Bourges. In every great church from 1175 to 1225 there is some one element or more that is final and unexcelled, but at Reims there was a great consistency, a noble and all-embracing competence, that placed it in a class by itself.

Reims was without a fault; perhaps this made its appeal less poignant and searching than that of the eager and sometimes less-perfect efforts of men more human in their inadequacies. Man is the creature that tries, and it is perhaps only human to feel a reverence that lessens affection for those who seem to transcend the limits that are set to human accomplishment.

Every other cathedral in France is a splendid chronicle, a record of changing times, changing endeavours, changing impulses. Men of varying personalities have wrought out their ideals, year after year, and the result is in each case a great sequence, a glorious approximation. Reims was begun in 1211, on the first anniversary of the burning of its predecessor, and it was finished, manifestly in accordance with an original and predetermined design, within fifty years. The three gables and the upper stories of the western towers are a century later, otherwise the work is consistent and a single conception. The great ideal comprised a crowning group of seven towers, each with its slender spire, none of which was ever completed, and had this majestic scheme been carried out, the church would have been the most complete, as it was the most perfect, of the architectural manifestations of Christianity.

It is impossible to analyse Reims, to describe its vital and exquisite organism, to laud its impeccable scale, its vivid and stimulating originality, to explain the almost incredible competence and beauty of its buttressing, the serene delicacy of its detail, to dwell once more on the glory of its sculpture that ranked with that of Greece, on the splendour of its glass that was rivalled only at Chartres. It is impossible to do this now, for its passing has been too recent and too grievous. Death brings silence for a time to those that knew the dead.

In another chapter I have tried to say something of the sculpture of Reims, a crowning glory where all was glorious, but sculpture does not mean the human figure alone; it covered in the Middle Ages all forms of beauty chiselled out of stone and marble, and the man who wrought the wild-rose design on the archivolts of Amiens was just as great an artist as he who fashioned the Virgin of the south transept, or the “Beau Dieu”; perhaps he was the same man. Gothic “ornament” is quite as beautiful as are Gothic saints and angels, and here at Reims the stone carving was of the finest. Every space of ornament—capital, crocket, boss, frieze, and string-course—was a combination of these great elements: architectural self-restraint and identity with the work as a whole, passionate love for all the beautiful things in nature, joy in doing everything, even the cutting of unseen surfaces, just as well as man could do the work. It is not better than the ornament of Amiens or Chartres; in some passages Amiens seems to have achieved the highest attainable point, but it is of the same quality, and that is enough glory for any church.

Most of this inimitable art already has been blasted and calcined away, and the same fate has overtaken the glass. Here was an achievement of the highest in an art of the best. In the light (literally) of the stained glass of our own times, we had found some difficulty in realising that this was an art at all, but it needed only a visit to Chartres or Reims for enlightenment to come to us. At Chartres, in the very earliest years of the thirteenth century, it reached its

REIMS

culmination; there is no greater glass anywhere than this, almost no greater art, and Reims, while less complete (the aisle windows were wholly removed by eighteenth-century canons on the score of an added “cheerfulness”), was of the same school, though later and just past the cresting of the wave. If it lacked the unearthly clarity and divine radiance of the western lancets, and the “Belle Verrière” of Chartres, it had qualities of its own, particularly its most glorious azures and rubies, that allowed no rival, and it easily ranked with Chartres and Bourges and Poitiers as manifesting the possibilities of a noble art, and a lost art, at its highest point of achievement.

So far as can be learned, all this has perished and it cannot be restored. It lies in shivered heaps where it has fallen and the chapter of the glass of Reims is closed.

Four months ago the ruin already was irreparable, and since then bombardments have been frequent and merciless, nor has the enemy as yet been driven beyond the range of gun-fire. Whether even the shattered and crumbling fabric—wherefrom all carving, all detail, all glass, all sculpture has been burned and blasted away—survives in the end, none can foretell; but one thing is sure, and that is that no “restoration” must ever be attempted. If enough remains so that careful hands may preserve it from disintegration and make it available for the worship of God, well and good, so long as no imitations, whether in stone or metal or glass, are intruded to mock its vanished glory and obliterate for future generations the record of an indelible crime. For seven centuries its beauty and its perfection have spoken to succeeding generations, each less willing to listen than the last. In its ruin and its devastation it will speak more clearly and to more willing ears, than in any pretentious rehabilitation.

To the sordid wickedness of its destruction has been added the insult of Prussian promises of complete restoration—a catastrophe that would crown the first with a greater and more contemptible indignity. Instead, let Reims remain as it is left, and then, in Paris, let France, regenerated and redeemed, as already has gloriously happened, make for ever visible her restoration, through blood and suffering, to her old ideals, by carrying out her vow to build in honour of Ste. Jeanne d’Arc a great new church, raise a new Reims, like the old in plan and form and dimensions. Not a copy, but a revival, with the old ideals, the old motives, the old self-consecration; different, as the new must differ from the old, but akin in spirit and in truth.

If one only knew how to interpret it, there is some mysterious significance in the centring of the war of the world around Reims and in the persistent and successful efforts of the Prussians to raze it to the ground. Seven centuries ago the mystics of St. Victor would have read the riddle, but for too long now we have been out of temper with symbolism and too averse to the acceptance of signs and portents to be able to see even dimly the correspondences and the significance of those human happenings that are actually outside human control. In a way Reims was the ancient heart of France, as Paris is not, and it always was a sacred city above all others—and sacred it is now as never before. It was here that the Christianising of the Franks was sealed by the baptism of Clovis, A. D. 496, by St. Remi, the canonised bishop who occupied the see for seventy-five years. The crowning of kings (every sovereign but four for a period of fifteen hundred years came here for his coronation), the assembling of great councils of the Church, the beneficent activities of universities and schools of philosophy were all commonplaces of the life of the city, while it was here that Ste. Jeanne d’Arc finally discomfited the English and led her King to his crowning in the church that is now destroyed.

Time and again the city has been devastated, from the Vandals of 392 to those of 1914. During the Revolution its churches suffered bitterly; the cathedral and St. Remi, until then, were rich with unnumbered shrines, altars, statues, tombs, while cloisters and religious buildings of many kinds surrounded them on all sides. All this wealth of hoarded art that expressed the piety and culture of centuries was swept away, even to the sacred ampulla of holy oil, piously believed to have been brought by a dove for the consecration of Clovis and ever after miraculously replenished for each succeeding coronation. To this irreparable devastation was added the indignity of official “restoration,” though in the case of the cathedral at the able and scrupulous hands of Viollet-le-Duc, and in the nineteenth century the picturesque and beautiful old streets gave place to boulevards and a general Hausmanising on approved Parisian lines, so that in 1914 the city had become dull and somewhat pretentious, framing the two priceless jewels, the Church of Our Lady of Reims and that of the holy St. Remi.

All is now gone, the glorious and the insignificant alike overwhelmed in indiscriminating ruin. The glass and the statues that had survived war, revolution, and stupidity are shattered in fragments, the roofs consumed by fire, the vaults burst asunder, the carved stones calcined and flaking hourly in a dreary rain on blood-stained pavements where a hundred kings have trod and into deserted streets that have echoed to the footsteps of threescore generations. The city has passed; deleta est Carthago, but it has left a memory, a tradition, and an inspiration that may yet play a greater part in the rebuilding of civilisation than could have been achieved by its remaining monuments as they stood making their unheeded appeal on the day the first shell was fired from the Prussian batteries on the eastern hills.

The tendency I have spoken of which showed itself in Amiens, the breaking up of the mediæval integrity and a consequent inclination toward undue emphasis on structural and intellectual arrogance, never went very far because of the ill days that fell on France. The victory of the French crown over the Papacy, with the resulting transfer of the Holy See to Avignon, was the ruin of Catholic civilisation in France, as well as in Italy and the rest of Christendom. The Church became subservient to the state and progressively corrupt in root and branch. The wars with England resulted in nothing less than ruin, and culture and art came to an end. By 1370 building had become thin, poor, uninspired, and yet, within the next ten years flamboyant architecture appeared, and the fifteenth century opened with a sudden burst of artistic splendour. Heaven knows what it all means; France was at her lowest depth, and yet, without warning, a regeneration took place. The Blessed Jeanne d’Arc appears like a miraculous vision, Orleans is saved, the rightful king is crowned, and though the martyrdom of the saviour of France takes place in 1430, the English are driven out in 1456, and a new day begins.

Was Jeanne d’Arc a single manifestation of a new spirit that had entered society, or was this itself a continuation of what she had initiated under God? The answer does not really matter, the important fact is that a great regeneration took place, and a new type of art followed in its wake. Now the tendency was away from the proud efficiency of a glorified architectural engineering and toward the other element in architecture, beauty of form and splendour of ornament. It was almost as though the French had turned to religion and beauty as their only refuge from the miseries of their estate. In the very first years of the fifteenth century, at the darkest hours of France, Notre Dame de l’Epine, close by Châlons on the Marne, was built in 1419. Caudebec in 1426, St. Maclou, Rouen, in 1432, and after these for more than a century France abandoned herself to the creation of works of architectural art that, whatever they may lack of the splendid consistency and the divine serenity of the thirteenth century, are nevertheless amongst the loveliest works of man. Beauvais is an admirable example of the two tendencies; begun in 1225, its impossible choir was finished in 1272, only to collapse twelve years later, paying the penalty of its structural arrogance. For forty years it was in process of reconstruction, after a more conservative fashion though of its original dimensions, and in 1500 the transepts were begun and finished fifty years later. In beauty and in an almost riotous richness, they are the crowning work of this phase of design, while the choir itself, with its marvellously articulated system of buttresses, is a creation of sheer architectural power almost unrivalled. Ambitious and defiant, the canons now, in 1550, reared a vast spire over the crossing, nearly 450 feet high, and of the same sumptuous design as the transepts. The whole stupendous erection fell twenty-five years later, and has never been rebuilt, while the nave was never even begun; so Beauvais remains a vast fragment, and a living commentary on the excesses and the penalties of that pride of life that succeeded to the spiritual humility of the Middle Ages.

The new style, however, was perfectly adapted to the new life of secular supremacy, and, with few exceptions, both here in eastern France and in Flanders and Brabant and the Netherlands, the great civic monuments and the innumerable châteaux of an expanding and ripening society are couched in its beautiful and elaborate terms. Essentially it is a mode of ornament, containing no new element in organism, but always beautiful and, in France at all events, marked always by delicate and admirable taste. With its flame-like tracery, its complicated pinnacles, its scaffoldings of intricate latticework; with its curved and aspiring lines, glimmering niches, pierced parapets, open-work spires, and its tangled foliage, dainty filigree-work and sculptured lace, it is a marvel of imagination, dramatic sense, and consummate craftsmanship. Sometimes it is strikingly competent in its composition, as in the transepts of Beauvais and the front of Troyes, the latter being in its unfulfilled promise (it is only a beginning) one of the great façades of France, but frequently its greatest weakness is forgetfulness of consistency in a passion for beauty of line and light and shade that became almost insane. With the beginning of the sixteenth century the new art began slowly to decay in ecclesiastical buildings, but it continued for at least another hundred years in châteaux and civic work, and it is this in particular that is now disappearing through a war waged by unprecedented methods and in accordance with principles (if we may call them such) which hitherto have been found associated only with barbarian invasions or the frenzies of a mad anarchy that has called itself Revolution.

For the more distinguished châteaux we must go outside our chosen field, to the Loire, Touraine, or to other parts of France where the devastation of past wars and revolutions is less complete. There is Pierrefonds, of course, if one cares for that sort of thing, but of authentic castles of the sixteenth century there are few of notable quality, though many minor farms and manors still remained in August, 1914. Ecouen and Chantilly are exceptions, and the latter, given to the nation by the Duc d’Aumale when he was exiled by the republic for the crime of belonging to the legitimate line of kings, is a good example of the princely buildings of the Renaissance when the last fires of Gothic spirit were dying away.

It is not so long ago that half the towns in France between the Seine and the Belgian frontier were threaded by wonderful little streets of stone-built and half-timber houses three centuries old, and bright with squares and market-places framed in old architecture of Francis I and Henri II. Their quaint and delicate beauty was too much for the nineteenth century, however, which revolted against an old art as it revolted against an old culture and an older religion, so nearly all are gone, their place being taken by substitutes, the destruction of which could hardly be counted against the Prussians for unrighteousness, if one considered æsthetic questions alone, which is, fortunately, impossible. For these dim old streets and sunny silent squares one could, until a few months ago, go confidently across the border, finding in Flanders, Brabant, Liége, and Luxembourg relief from the appalling sophistication that had taken possession of the old cities of Champagne. Even in France, until last year, were Douai, Pont-à-Mousson, Meaux, and of course Arras, though now of some of these worse than nothing remains. In the latter city was once, also, a particularly splendid example of those great civic halls that showed forth the pride and the independence of the industrial cities of the later Middle Ages, and another stood in Douai. As Flanders and Brabant are, however, the chosen places for this particular manifestation of an industrial civilisation, so different to our own in spirit and in expression, we may include them therewith, where they racially and historically belong; and having followed the development of an essentially religious art in France from Jumièges to Beauvais, note its translation in later years into civic forms, in the little and heroic Kingdom with so great and heroic a history, now and for many months shut off from the world still free, by the veil of smoke and poisoned gases.

VII
THE BURGHERS AND THEIR BUILDING

THE great civic halls were those of Audenaarde, Brussels, Louvain, Malines, Termonde, Bruges, Ghent, Ypres, and Arras, and each of these cities was as well full of wonderful old houses, some private residences, some quarters for the various guilds. It is impossible to discriminate between past and present tense in describing them; some are wholly gone, as Ypres and Arras, others we suppose still remain, but how long this may be true one cannot say. If we lose what we have lost in the onrush of a victorious army, and in its long holding of defensive lines in the most amazing siege in history, what may we not expect at the hands of an army in defeat, fighting its way back to its own frontiers for a last desperate stand? Arras, Ypres, and Louvain were hard enough to lose, but the soul shudders at the thought of Bruges and Ghent, Antwerp and Brussels, fought over day after day and abandoned to pillage and destruction.

The historical significance of these halls is very great; they put into material (and as we had thought enduring) form the oligarchical democracy, the great wealth, the pride, the sumptuous and lavish spirit of successive generations of princely merchants and manufacturers. Religion was still a vital force, but it no longer stood alone, and now the secular organisations of guilds and free cities claimed and received the tribute of wealth through the ministry of art. It was not the old art of the days of cathedral building and the founding of abbeys and universities, it was quite a different art altogether, but it fitted the new motives and ideals as the other could not do. Of severity, self-restraint, reticence, it has nothing; it is all splendour and magnificence, emulation and rivalry, but it is still craftsman’s art, and whatever the taste of these great and even fantastic buildings, there is proof of joyful workmanship and of a jealous maintenance of the highest possible standards.

Ypres was the first in point of time, and first in absolute artistic value. Begun by Count Baldwin in the year 1200, it was remodelled, rebuilt, embellished for a hundred years, and finally the “Nieuwerke,” of the most abandoned Renaissance taste, was added to the east. Of huge dimensions—the main front was four hundred and thirty-three feet in length, while the great tower was two hundred and thirty feet high—the design was as simple, imposing, and direct as one would expect to find during the early thirteenth century. It was a simple parallelogram, three stories high, nobly arcaded, with ranges of fine niches which contained statues of the Counts of Flanders and other worthies, until these were completely destroyed by the French during the Revolution. A vast, high-pitched roof covered all, broken in the middle by the belfry, with its corner turrets, which were echoed at the four corners of the building by similar spires. A simpler composition could hardly be imagined, or one more impressive in its grave restraint. Architecturally it was unique; there was and is no other rival of a similar nature, and its value was inestimable. Bold in conception, straightforward, direct, confident without assurance, it was one great masterpiece of the civic art of the Middle Ages, miraculously preserved for six centuries as the visible manifestation of the supreme quality of a great people and a great art. Both without and within it had that spontaneousness, that fine, frank

THE DESTROYED HÔTEL DE VILLE OF ARRAS

naïveté that one finds in all crescent periods and searches for in vain in the following days that history always selects for particular admiration. Analyse it and see how simple it all was. First there were three chief organic elements: the great wall unbroken by any “features,” without buttresses because it was not vaulted; the enormous, high-pitched roof bare of all gables or diversions of any kind; the square, unbuttressed tower in the middle, with a tall, pointed roof and cupola, surrounded by four high pinnacles of the simplest form. It is as calm and simple as a Greek temple, and like this, also, it is final in the perfection of its proportions and its relation of parts; also its great, quiet elements are left alone, not tortured into nervous complexity of varying planes and excitable vagaries of light and shade. Forty-eight pointed and mullioned windows along the main floor give the horizontal divisions, while vertically there were three stages: the low, lintelled colonnade, a mezzanine with very beautiful traceried windows, one to each bay, and a vast main wall without horizontal subdivisions but with a delicately designed and very broad course of traceried panelling above the splendid sequence of great windows, like a lofty blind parapet. The tower was equally simple, its seven stories exquisitely varied in their heights and windowing, but calm always, and final in their sense of exactly felt relations. The pinnacles also, four on the tower and others at either end of the façade, were as simply and perfectly designed as could be asked, without fantastic exuberance or a straining for effect; just traceried octagons with one series of pointed gables and high, crocketed spires.

The “Nieuwerke,” in its ridiculous Renaissance effrontery snuggled up against the silent, absorbed, unnoticing giant, was like an architectural version of Merlin and Vivien; silly and scented impudence in its vain approximations to grave dignity and a self-respect proof against all blandishments.

The great hall inside was just the same: an astonishing room, four hundred and thirty feet long, broken only by the columns and arches bearing the great tower, and roofed with a mass of oak timbering like an ancient and enormous ship turned bottom up. Huge oaken beams rose against the wall dividing it into panels, and each pair supported equally gigantic tie-beams braced by rough-hewn diagonal struts. It was barn-building, if you like, but a good barn is better art than a Newport

THE DESTROYED CLOTH HALL OF YPRES

“cottage”; and this splendidly direct “barn” at Ypres had a quality the Louvre could never attain.

Each panel of this colossal and almost interminable wall was destined for great historical pictures, most of which had been completed, and the effect was majestical in its combination of colour and carpentry. Of it all nothing now remains, as I have said, except a single turret at one end. The greatest surviving monument of the civic architecture of the Middle Ages has been slowly pounded to powder, and has taken its place with the other lost masterpieces of a world that from time to time can create but can somehow never retain ability to enjoy or even to understand. Month after month it was the special target of Prussian shells; the first breeched the wall to the right of the tower and were followed by others that started fires which swept the building from end to end, consuming the enormous timbered roof, destroying the painted walls, crumbling the tracery of the tall tower. For a time the burned-out walls remained, and German professors spoke gently and with bland reassurance of the simple task of restoration, but this last indignity has ceased to threaten, for recently the batteries have resumed their work; little by little the belfry has been shot away, the fretted arcades have been splintered into road-metal, and now at last the destruction is complete; what once was the glory of Ypres, the pride of Flanders, the delight of the architect, is now only a heap of refuse masonry, with one pinnacle standing alone, accusing, in the midst of ruin from which there is no salvation, for which history will search in vain for shadow of excuse.

In sequence of time, the old “Halles” of Malines come next, as portions of them date from 1311, but they have been reconstructed at various times, enlarged in several styles, and in the end were never completed, for their great belfry never succeeded in getting above the roof. Nevertheless they were a wonderfully picturesque and even theatrical composition of pointed portals, fantastic gables, dormers, and turrets, and a very engaging epitome of five centuries of architectural mutations.

The Hôtel de Ville of Bruges is as consistent and perfect as Malines was casual and irresponsible. It was begun in 1376, the corner-stone being laid by Louis de Mâle, and if there is anywhere a more complete example of civic architecture,

BRUGES, HÔTEL DE VILLE

combining the restraint and the simplicity of early Gothic with the exquisite ornament and the sense of decorative beauty of the latest Gothic, it is not of record. It seems to come at the mid-most point, when everything met together, without loss and without exaggeration, for the production of a living example of what society is capable when it achieves a perfect, if unenduring, equilibrium. It is a masterpiece of architectural composition, of brilliant and supremely intelligent design, while it is vivified by a poetry and an inspiration that exist only at a few crowning moments in history. Even now it is one of the loveliest buildings in Europe; what it must have been once, when its fifty statues, each under its crocketed canopy (they also were pulled down and hammered in pieces during the French Revolution), its tracery, balustrades, and pinnacles were blazing with colour and gilding, passes the imagination. It is only a small building of six bays subdivided by its three turrets into two triple groups with a doorway in each. The composition is very subtle and quite original, while the design is emphasised vertically, there being no horizontal members which run through from end to end, though the levels are very delicately indicated by window mullions, niches, panels, traceried arches, and the crowning parapet. It is one of the least obvious of architectural compositions and, I am disposed to think, one of the best. While it lacks the Doric simplicity of Ypres, it has a sensitive rhythm and a richness of light and shade without studied intricacy or premeditated theatricalism that places it amongst the few very perfect works of art. It is a “poetic” composition in the highest sense, or rather it is akin to music of the mode that followed the Gregorian and opened up new possibilities of a more complex, if no more poignant, spiritual expression. It is perhaps the most perfect single piece of architecture in Belgium, and if it is extinguished in the night of Armageddon we lose a thing of inestimable value, unequalled, irreplaceable, even as we have lost that equally inestimable spiritual force that brought it into existence.

The “Halles” also, with their famous “Belfry of Bruges” are a particularly noble example of the same period of artistic supremacy, though they lack consistency, for only the lower stages of the amazing tower are original, this portion of the work being completed about 1296. All the upper part is of the very end of the fifteenth century, and the octagonal upper stage is of no high order of design. Once this also was crowned by a slender spire having a statue of St. Michael sixteen feet high, which must have brought the stupendous erection almost to a height of five hundred feet, for even now the topmost balustrade is three hundred and fifty-two feet above the street. Ten years after the spire was finished it was destroyed by lightning, rebuilt, destroyed again, and then left in its present condition.

Brussels followed Bruges, and its huge City Hall was begun about 1404. Compared with Arras, Bruges, or Louvain, it is dry and somewhat unimaginative, with a curious modern look that may, in part, be due to very drastic restorations and to the devilish ingenuity in destruction of the French Revolutionists. In the beginning, however, it failed in subtle proportions, and in point of composition as well. Its belfry, graceful as it is, is thin and artificial in effect, while the façade is formal without the grave majesty of Ypres, rich without the sensitive refinement of Bruges or the riotous exuberance of Louvain. This is not to condemn it as bad; except for the supreme qualities of the three monuments last mentioned it would stand high in the architectural scale, but it is impossible to avoid comparisons, and through these it suffers, perhaps unjustly.

Less than fifty years after Brussels came Louvain, and so far as good art is concerned the three-quarters of a century since Bruges has not been altogether well spent. As in the case of religious architecture, an ungoverned passion for beauty and craftsmanship has resulted in the destruction of the sane and noble balance in such churches as Reims, such civic halls as Bruges and Ypres, while nothing is left but an almost impossible luxuriance, as of a northern flower forced in the hot, moist air of a greenhouse. The Hôtel de Ville of Louvain, spared by some inconsequent and unnatural whim of those who wrecked all the city around and gave over the priceless libraries of the university to the flames, is one of the smallest of its kind in Belgium; it is only one hundred and thirteen feet long, forty-one feet wide, and seventy feet to the level of its parapet—about the dimensions, let us say, of an average New York dwelling of the better class. It is less a building than an ornament—a shrine, a tabernacle for the sanctuary of a cathedral. You feel that you want to take it up and polish it, you regard it as you do an ivory carving from Pekin,

THE HÔTEL DE VILLE OF LOUVAIN

and so considered it is well-nigh matchless, but it still remains outside the category of architecture, and if you compare it with the Ste. Chapelle, you see at once that the life is already almost gone from a great art, even if it has passed for the moment into a supreme kind of decoration.

In making that statement one is led unawares into one of those generalisations that contains less than half the truth. The life had indeed gone from the larger, the official architecture, the art of the Church, of the commune. After this there was little more than a sorry tale of rapid degeneration, until the French and the Jesuits came with their new style, either clever and often in good taste at the hands of the secular power, or tawdry and rococo when popularised by the new religious order that was the first incarnation of that “efficiency” that in the end became the obsession of the world and the root of the war. It is true that the new fashion rapidly superseded the dying and disintegrating spirit of mediævalism, and never a Bruges town hall or a Malines cathedral came again; instead we get the dull and blundering seventeenth-century portion of the Ghent Hôtel de Ville and the showy and very vulgar Jesuit churches, such as that in Antwerp (attributed to Rubens) and the Cathedral of Arras. On the other hand, and this is too often forgotten, the degradation of state architecture always precedes by many years, sometimes centuries, the downfall of the people’s art, and after a great era of high character and cultural attainments the burghers and lesser nobility, the farmers and merchants and smaller monastic houses continue instinctively to build beautifully, prolonging the old traditions, unhampered by clever architects and the commands of irresponsible fashion, until at last even they succumb and their art falls to the dead level of the stupid artifice that for long had prevailed amongst the great of earth.

So in France while the barbarities of the Louvre were being perpetrated, the loveliest little châteaux and farms and village churches were rising almost as though nothing had happened; so in Germany, Heidelberg and Dresden could not prevent the Tyrol and Rothenbourg, Hildesheim and the Black Forest and the Rhineland from creating the eternally delightful timber houses that far more exactly expressed a racial quality that was to endure in all its fineness, until the end of the nineteenth century saw its ending as well. So in England, Henry VIII and Edward VI might destroy the then vital art, and Elizabeth might expunge its very memory, building ridiculous semi-German conceits to the grief of the judicious; nevertheless the deep-lying tradition prevailed outside court circles and those of the Erastianised Church, and the sixteenth-century domestic architecture of the Cotswolds, of Surrey, Suffolk, Norfolk, and Essex—indeed of almost every county in England—was, in its way, just as good architecture as that which universally prevailed before the “Great Pillage.”

Precisely the same thing happened in Belgium, and half the visual charm of cities such as Bruges, Tournai, Termonde, Ypres, and of all that countryside that has not been devastated by the insane cult of coal and iron, is due to the colloquial domestic architecture of its crooked old streets, its wide-spread market-places, and its drowsy canals and winding quays. In the language of the schools there is no “architecture,” properly speaking, in the Quai aux Avoines, or the Grand Béguinage, or the old almshouses of the Abbaye de St. Trond in Malines, along the banks of the Dyle in murdered Louvain, on the Quai aux Herbes in Ghent, the market-place in Ypres, the Quai du Rosaire, and the Quai Verte in Bruges. All the same, in the simple and naïve houses and hospitals and convents, with their windows and doors where they are wanted, their big roofs and gables and friendly chimneys, their frank use of native materials, and their almost unfailing sense of pleasant proportions, we have what thus far no school has been able to teach.

In the earlier work—early, that is, for domestic architecture, say of the sixteenth century—while there is great individuality, each burgher expressing himself and his own tastes to the full, there is a very courtly regard for his neighbours, and a curious sense of restraint in the light of what the city itself might expect from its citizens. There is a well-bred uniformity of scale, a reticence in detail, a total lack of jealous emulation that speaks well for the self-respect of the old builders. Most of the great houses of the preceding century are gone, either razed entirely or mutilated and degraded to base uses; Bruges, for example, that once was rich in sumptuous mansions of nobles and great merchants, has now almost none, but the quays of Ghent still retain their fine rows of guild-houses and dwellings, and until a year ago Ypres once had them also, that are models of fine civic architecture (and of civic spirit as well), and might well serve as such to a more chaotic and unbalanced generation. They are usually three stories high, with three more in the stepped gables, and the materials are generally brick with trimmings of cut stone, though wood was frequently used, particularly in Ypres, and always in the most consistent and joiner-like way. If there were no other test, you could always tell the work of a good period from that of a bad by the frankness in use of materials: brick is brick, stone is stone, and wood is wood, and there are no shams, imitations, or subterfuges anywhere. Whatever the land produces, that is used and made the most of, while the style of the time (mark, not the fashion of the hour or the fad of the school or the whim of the artist) is so modified as to adapt itself perfectly to these restrictions.

It is not until the Renaissance that the cult of deception comes in, and mutton masquerades as lamb, while silly columns and pediments are pasted on where there is no need and brick is plastered over to magnify the apparent opulence of the owner. It is at this same time that a mean individualism appears, and each builder tries to outface his neighbor. The Grande Place in Brussels is a good example of this new selfishness, and for chaotic originality compares almost favourably with a city street of the nineteenth century. It is all very amusing, these rows of serrated slices, bedecked with mishandled “orders” and crested with miscellaneous gorgeousness on the lines of the sterns of the proud owner’s still prouder galleons, and the result is engagingly theatrical and fantastic, but it is a grave commentary on a new civilisation that has lost in culture just in proportion as it has increased in efficiency.

It is dangerous to think too much about architecture—or any art for that matter. The thirteenth century was supreme in its achievement because it thought so much about religion and character and getting the really good things out of life that for reward it was actually inspired, and so probably thought as little about its art as it did about eugenics; being quite content to do the things it was impelled to do by an impulse for which it was not consciously responsible and which it made little effort to control. The Renaissance thought so much about art, as well as about its own thoughts (which didn’t matter anyway), that even in its best work there is an opulent self-consciousness that defeats its own ends and has issue at last in a self-conscious opulence that is the nadir of culture. These builders of Flanders and Brabant and Artois and Luxembourg and the Rhineland thought as little about art as their very different followers of the Middle Ages, and they certainly lacked the divine inspiration that made Reims superhuman, as St. Thomas Aquinas and Leonardo da Vinci and Shakespeare were superhuman, but the old instinct for beauty had not been burned and hammered out of them by coal and iron, or reversed into an unintelligible jargon (like the Lord’s Prayer said backward) by an insolent intellectualism and a mordant secularism; and so, even when they used pseudo-Renaissance forms in their cheerful and humorous fashion, they managed to produce work that has a certain quality that the best-educated architect of this century of efficient training cannot contrive to obtain in spite of all his labours.

And in any town that had been left alone during the nineteenth century, particularly in Bruges, as well as in many of those the Prussians have destroyed, everything seems to fall into picturesque and beautiful compositions that are the despair of modern planners and “improvers” of cities. Here again the results were quite unpremeditated. You cannot imagine the builders of the Gruuthüse in Bruges carefully arranging their effects of gables and turrets and mullioned windows with scrupulous regard to the soaring tower of Our Lady’s Church; you cannot imagine the wealthy burghers who from time to time reared the varied structures along the canal and the Quai du Rosaire or in the Rue de l’Ane Aveugle (the names are as joyful as the architecture) or around the Pont du Béguinage, working studiously for their dramatic effects with square and triangle, tentative models, and perhaps the able advice of a “Landscape Architect” or a “Scenic Artist.” If they had done this they might have produced a tolerable stage-setting or even a superior sort of world’s fair, but they would not have built Bruges.

No, the conviction has been growing, and is now forced on us by a revealing war, that even in the seventeenth century there were those who possessed a civilisation and a culture beside which ours is a kind of raw barbarism; that they by force of this, and with the aid of a tradition of still greater days in the past, built by instinct as we cannot build by erudition; and that whatever issued from their hands was admirable and honourable and lastingly fair. It is well for us to remember sometimes when we amuse ourselves by discourse as to “inalienable rights of man,” and that sort of thing, that there is one such over which no argument is possible, and that is the right to beauty in life and thought and environment, and that those who filched this from us during the century and a half just passed (and for the first time in history) were tyrants and robbers of the same stamp and degree as their immediate predecessors, who destroyed the other right of man to free and joyful labour as well as that to the genuine self-government and the sane and wholesome democracy that marked the Middle Ages and vanished with the despots and the dogmas of the Renaissance; not to return, so far as we ourselves can perceive of our own experience.

God grant we may retain what is still left us in Flanders and Brabant. If by the triumph of coal and iron either through war or (perhaps even worse) through the imposition on territories thus far spared of the ideals and methods of an efficient industrialism, we lose Bruges as we have lost Ypres and Arras and Malines and Termonde, as we had already lost, though in a different way, Liége and Lille, Mons and Namur, then by so much (and it is very much) have we lost our hidden leaven that in the fulness of time we rely on for the lightening of the whole dull lump of our misguided and now discredited life.

VIII
COAL AND IRON

ACROSS the face of Europe stretched a great scar, even before the war; a scar that reached from Picardy and Artois across Brabant and the Rhineland far into Westphalia. It was an open wound, creeping gangrenously outward, and yearly involving more and more of what once was healthy and fair in its progressive putrefaction. It was an area of darkness that had taken the place of light; of burrowings far down in the earth where men (and women and children once) grubbed dully and breathlessly for poor wages on which to sustain life, life that was mostly the same dull grubbing above the surface as below. It was a place of warfare between an immemorial verdure of trees and flowers and grass, clear streams and pure air and, on the other hand, ever-growing heaps of slag and ashes and scoriæ, of fat smoke and noxious gases. In place of old churches and quiet monasteries, of farms and flocks and forests, of delicate châteaux and vine-clad old ruined castles, of sleepy towns, of winding streets full of carved and gabled houses, grass-grown market-places, still canals under their arched bridges, ancient trees and forgotten gardens, with now and then a vast and mysterious church built out of many ages and crowded with old memories and the aroma of spent incense and vanished prayers—in place of this impractical, inefficient, and very admirable old land of a hundred years ago, had come a great noise, a greater activity, and a remarkable diminution of enduring results. The churches had been despoiled by the Huguenots, wrecked by the Revolutionists, and either sold for cash or restored out of pure delight in wickedness, coupled with a conceit that only accompanies the profoundest ignorance. Monstrous piles of brick, iron, and cement had blistered the land, while the woods and fields were scored and tangled by railway-lines, tram-lines, telegraph-lines. Machines everywhere, under and on and over the earth; noise, oil, gas, smoke, chemicals mingled in the making of a new civilisation, and the old was both forgotten and denied. It was a place where Efficiency was god and his First Commandment was lawfully obeyed; where old virtues were transmuted through exaggeration and over-emphasis into new sins, where souls shrivelled, brains atrophied, manners ceased, that ten might amass wealth they could not use, at the expense of a thousand who had claimed only a competence.

A land of coal and iron, and of what coal and iron can produce. Not happiness, not character, not culture; neither philosophy, nor religion, nor art. Machines—appalling and ingenious complications of wheels and cogs and valves and pistons, that made more of their kind, together with unheard-of engines of death and mutilation. And factories—emplacements for machines that roared and vibrated endlessly, spinning, weaving, fabricating night and day, turning out what the world needs, but craftily fashioning it so it would not last, or what the world does not need, but that lasted only too long. Turning out wealth, ugliness, hatred, power, ignorance, and revolt. A land of coal and iron, black and potential as the first; hard, inhuman, irresistible as the last.

The Heart of Europe has produced many things in its time, dynasties, empires, crusades; religious energy, new philosophies, industrial revolutions, immortal art. Three eras have owed it much: that of Charlemagne, that of the Middle Ages, that of the Renaissance-Reformation. Perhaps, after all, the latest is its greatest debtor, and for its culmination in that civilisation of irreligion, intellectualism, materialism, and unhampered force that is riding now for its fall, it may be that the self-destructive energy has issued from Lille, Maubeuge, and Charleville, from Liége and Charleroi, from Crefeld and Essen, Eschweiler and Elberfeld.

The Black Country of England, the southern counties of Wales; Pittsburgh, Chicago, Paterson, Lawrence, Manchester; cities innumerable in Great Britain and America, have joined in the great act of creating a new ideal and a new power, but the culmination that is its own antidote did not manifest itself there; instead it seems now to have developed in the raw scar across the face of Europe, and the malignant pustule that has burst at last formed itself at the far eastern end. Here, in the Rhineland and Westphalia, grew monstrously the wealth, the potency, and the material force that, made operative by the cold philosophy and the supreme efficiency of Prussia, have made possible, and even inevitable, the supreme attempt to bring to an end the outworn and discredited ideals and methods of ten centuries of Christian civilisation, and establish in unquestioned supremacy the ideals and the methods that have fought hiddenly for dominion in Charleroi and Essen, in Leeds and Birmingham, in Pittsburgh, Chicago, and New York.

Coal and iron. When the first bituminous lump blazed unexpectedly on the hearth of the amazed cottager, the iron that had been man’s servant for so long, stirred in its first waking to mastership, a mastery achieved at last, incredible in its degree, incredible in its potentiality. Creatures of its own, and allies brought into being before or since, but now taking a new force and applied with new motives, gunpowder, steam, electricity, join with it in plausibly offering their services as beneficent agents toward the annihilating of life; and, as agent and controller of the vast hegemony, wealth, desired above all things, powerful beyond all things, after many days “Lord of the World.”

Nations and men have tried for world-mastery, time out of mind, relying on brute strength of muscle, on craft of brain, on indomitable will, and everlasting fear. Have tried and failed—after a little—and the empires of Alexander, Cæsar, Charlemagne, Louis, Philip, Napoleon have crumbled and become a memory. Failure was inevitable for strength of arm, of brain, of will, was not, and could not be made, exclusive possession of any race or people, nor could terror be confined within territorial limits; in the end revolt; the rising of new tribes, intrusion of fear, weakness, degeneration amongst the victors, their ominous evanishment from amongst the conquered.

But how now, with these new aids, these untried forces and potentialities? Suppose that the unestimated energy of a million years, stored in the bowels of the earth, be applied to the dull iron and to the harnessing of the mysterious electrical force, under the stimulus of Will emancipated from the hampering influence of a discredited religion and a superstitious ethic; suppose a new demiurge be created, given supreme direction over soul and mind and body, and named Efficiency, and suppose for two generations the energy employed blindly and to no consistent end by dull nations, half-hearted in their devotion and still bound by the memory of dying creeds and moribund old morals, be applied by the highest and most self-sacrificing intelligence to the creation of a supreme, perfect, and absolutely co-ordinated engine that, at the well-conceived moment, shall be brought to bear without pity and without pause on the inferior nations of the globe. What then?

The answer is still withheld, for the trial is in process. It was a magnificent conception, and inevitable, for the great sequence of spiritual and material happenings that has followed from the first weakening of Christian civilisation and Catholic culture at the very beginning of the fourteenth century was bound to have issue in its logical and dramatic crest, and in the final test of its efficiency. There is nothing half-way in its effort, nothing indifferently accomplished or insecure at any point. Essen, Wilhelmshaven, Berlin have forgotten nothing, failed in nothing. Every material agency, potential on the earth and under, has been developed, harnessed, and applied; every hampering stumbling-block of an old righteousness, an old religion, an old philosophy is removed; coal, iron, steam, electricity, chemistry are built up into a great and puissant unity, made operative by the wealth they themselves have created and energised by the dynamic force of intensive intellect no longer hampered by fear of God or charity for man, or an ancient sense of honour that came out of feudalism, the Crusades, and a Church that held the state in thrall and should have perished with the things she had made.

The mystery of the “Sin against the Holy Ghost,” the mystery of “Antichrist” are mysteries no longer, but clear writings on an open page; blazing words on the walls of the banquet hall where the feast has broken up in sudden and searching terror.

Coal and iron. These territories are now the centres of greatest conflict: Poland, Galicia, and the Scar of Europe in the west. Each is the land of coal and iron. In the east the contest sweeps back and forth in Poland to rob Russia of her mines and manufactures, and add them to the resources of Germany; in the south to preserve to Austria the coal and iron and oil of Galicia; in the west to gain from France the coal and iron of Champagne, Artois, Picardy, as the coal and iron of Belgium were gained in the beginning at the price of paper treaties and a negligible honour, or to deprive Germany of the coal and iron that are the foundations of her empire (actual and potential) in the Rhineland and Westphalia. Was there any drama of Sophocles, Euripides, Shakespeare, Goethe that matched the sombre theatricalism of life itself? Here in the west, far back in the Middle Ages, was the first great centre of manufacture and trade, Bruges, Ghent, Arras, great cities and world markets when London was a little river town, Paris a village, Berlin a frontier fort on the raw edge of a savage and heathen Prussia. Then later, after this first (and different) industrial civilisation had passed, came a new manifestation, and from Lille to Essen appeared the materialisation of a new madness, while Bruges and Courtrai and Aix were forgotten, with all they stood for, and other centres grew up—black, roaring, uncouth, but for men admirable and desired far beyond the restored churches and desecrated abbeys, the schools and universities, the dim and discredited philosophies, the decaying art and the vanished ideals of Fécamp and Reims, of Bruges and Louvain, of Aix and Trèves and Cologne. And now the Frankenstein monster gets him to his perfect work, and through the coal-fields and over the forges and factories, where he was fashioned, spreads death, devastation, and ruin that, nevertheless (and here the mystery and the wonder increase), may yet bring redemption, release, and restoration.

What has been in the immediate past needs no description: Crefeld and Lille are only Manchester and Pittsburgh, and their familiarity is sufficient to itself. What is now is equally common to all, and Louvain, Arras, and Reims in their blood-stained ruin are a part of the common consciousness. Meanwhile there were, and for the moment are, other cities and other regions, forgotten or endured, that are all Charleroi is not, or Crefeld or Maubeuge, and they are well worth a study, partly for what they are, partly for what they signify, partly for what they may forecast for a future beyond the present cataclysm.

There is hardly a more absorbingly interesting portion of France, historically, artistically, or picturesquely, than that wonderful quadrilateral, Compiègne-Noyon-Laon-Soissons, with its three great cathedrals; its finest castle ruin in France—Coucy, the pride of Enguerrand III—its fine old towns, as Laon and Noyon, with their groves and terraced paths; its great Forest of Compiègne; and only a few miles away on one hand or the other, châteaux such as Coucy and Ham, battle-fields of the significance of Crécy. It is all fought over now and may be again; no one knows how much is left, or may be left by and by, but it was a fair land, with many traces of a more spacious and balanced past, not in its great churches alone but as well in its quiet villages and its fine grey houses in old cities. A frontier, in a way, for already the creeping desolation of industrialism had reached close, working always down from the North of coal and iron, already absorbing St. Quentin and involving its ancient architecture in smoke and traffic, blotting out its streets of gabled houses, and turning it into a typical manufacturing centre—this, that was once the dowry of Mary Stuart.

North we enter into a general darkness, but on our way toward the dim old cities of Flanders and Brabant that hold even now the beauty of an elder day, forgotten by the world and outside the area of “great natural resources,” we may pause in spirit in Arras (it would not be well to be there in body, unless one were a soldier in the army of the Allies, when it would be perilous but touched with glory) for sight of an old, old city that gave a vision, better than almost any other in France, of what cities were in this region at the high-tide of the Renaissance. It is gone now, utterly, irremediably, and the ill work begun in the Revolution and continued under the empire, when the great and splendid Gothic cathedral was sold and utterly destroyed, has been finished by Prussian shells.

Capital of Artois, it had a vivid and eventful history, reaching back to pre-Roman times, continuing under Baldwin of the Iron Arm, who became the first Count of Arras; then being halved between the Count of Flanders and the King of France; given by St. Louis to his brother Robert, passing to the Counts of Burgundy, reverting to Louis de Mâle of Flemish fame, abandoned to the Emperor, won back by France; then acquiring the sinister distinction of having produced Robespierre and, finally, coming now to its end at the hands of the German hosts. What Arras must have been before the Revolution we can only guess, but with its glorious cathedral, its Chapelle des Ardents, and its “Pyramid of the Holy Candle” added to its surviving town hall with its fantastically beautiful spire, and its miraculously preserved streets and squares lined with fancifully gabled and arcaded houses, it must have been a sanctuary of old delights. The cathedral was of all styles from the twelfth to the sixteenth century, while the chapel and the “pyramid,” were models of mediæval art in its richest state. Both were destroyed by one Lebon, a human demon and apostate priest, who organised a “terror” of his own in his city and has gone down to infamy for his pestilential crimes.

Both the destroyed monuments were votive offerings in gratitude to Our Lady for her miraculous intervention in the case of a fearful plague in the twelfth century, the instrument of preservation being a certain holy candle, the melted wax from which was effective in preserving the life of all it touched. The pyramid was a slender Gothic tabernacle and spire, ninety feet high, standing in the Petite Place, a masterpiece of carved and painted and gilded sculptures, unique of its kind. Every vestige has vanished except a few relics preserved, together with that most precious memorial, the blood-stained rochet of St. Thomas à Becket, in the modern cathedral which Berlin has just announced has been completely and intentionally destroyed by gun-fire.

Until its recent destruction, Arras was one of the few territorially French towns in this region that could and did take one back into the atmosphere of the pre-coal-and-iron era of Europe, though with a difference. The fine vigour and riotous life of the Renaissance, the gaiety and spontaneousness of mediævalism were gone, with the colour and gold of the carved and painted shrines and houses, the fanciful costumes, the alert civic life; and instead was a grey shadow, a slowly dissolving memory. Still the pale simulacrum could stimulate the imagination, as the rose jar renews the memory of the rose. Now the jar is shattered and the scented leaves are trodden in the red mire, and we must make our way across the frontier if we are to find and enjoy what once Arras could in a measure give. God grant we may always be able to do so, and that Audenaarde and Tournai, Bruges and Malines, and Courtrai, with the still little villages in between, may remain to us after coal and iron have achieved their perfect work and been replaced in that position in life to which it pleased God to call them, so surrendering the more dominating place to which man had called them in his turn.

Of Ypres and Dixmude it is better to say little. Of the first of these, and its vanished glory, the solemn and single great Cloth Hall, I have said an inadequate something, but there was also St. Martin’s, once a cathedral, with its delicate type of Gothic, its rich Renaissance woodwork, its tombs and screens and treasures of ecclesiastical art; there were its old guild-houses and its quaint dwellings, carved and gabled and with wonderful old brickwork. And in Dixmude there was the Church of St. Nicholas with its jubé, or rood-loft, as gorgeous a piece of flamboyant art as one could find anywhere in Belgium or France. All this is gone, but a little farther on, behind the present battle lines, are more wonderful cities still—or are at this writing, in July, 1915.

This little Flanders, from the Scheldt to the sea, was a veritable garden of dreams. Nieuport, Furnes, Ypres, Dixmude, Courtrai, Tournai, Bruges, Ghent, Audenaarde—all are haunted by infinite old memories, and most of them have preserved their souls through seclusion and commercial oblivion, but around and between lie endless little villages of delicate old houses, grey Gothic churches that have not been secularised or abandoned (for Flanders always was a Catholic country), gardens, slow canals and brooks under their low stone bridges, and an ingratiating quiet that gives the lie to the progressive, practical, efficient, and wealthy strip of inordinate activity that “disquieteth itself in vain” from Lille to Liége through Mons and Courcelles, Charleroi and Namur.