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.