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
[Illustration: 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
[Illustration: 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,
[Illustration: 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,
[Illustration: 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.