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.
As the old names come forward again in rumours and reports from the
front, in death lists and hideous narratives of outrage and destruction,
indestructible memories, dormant for thirty years, take form and shape
again, and daily the gentle charm of a forgotten land becomes living,
and the dull fear of an unpredictable and sinister future grows more
ominous and intense. There is no other land quite like it; no place
where the old has been spared by the new to such a degree, and where the
old has remained so altogether lovely.
Of course Bruges is the Holy of Holies in this sanctuary of lost ideals,
but on the way stop to consider the outer ring of a better kind of
fortresses that circle her inner citadel.
Nieuport, Dixmude, and Ypres once held their stations from the sea to
the Lys, but their ramparts and bastions were not proof against the
siege-guns of Essen and they have fallen. Next to the east and farther
down the Lys, is Courtrai, under whose walls in 1302 was fought that
battle of the burghers of Flanders against the French, when 1,200 of the
flower of French knighthood, not to speak of the men-at-arms, were
slain, and 600 golden spurs were gathered from the field and hung in
triumph in the abbey church.
[Illustration: A CHIMNEY-PIECE FROM COURTRAI]
Once a great city, Courtrai had recovered something of its ancient
wealth and activity, but this had injured it less than one might
suppose, and it was still a fair town, with many trees and gardens, and
its air of pride in a fine past. There were many churches, confused in
their sequent styles, but full of charm, with rich screens of Gothic
lace work, old wall paintings, and in one--Notre Dame--Vandyck’s
“Elevation of the Cross,” a great picture in every way. Then there was
the Hôtel de Ville, late Gothic of the kind that lingered so long in
Flanders after it had perished elsewhere, with sumptuous chimneypieces
of fantastic carvings and crowded statues, and finally the matchless old
bridge with its three round arches and its enormous towers at either end
with their high extinguisher roofs; altogether a good old town, so
self-respecting and sane that it could achieve a new prosperity without
sacrificing its old ideals.
South of Courtrai lies Tournai, on either side the Scheldt, the last
outpost of an old culture against a new civilisation, for beyond lies Le
Borinage, the Great Scar, where none would venture unless under
compulsion. Like Courtrai it holds its own bravely against coal and
iron, preserving its fine old buildings, and largely confining itself
to its traditional weaving and embroidery, much of which is still the
product of hand-looms and deft fingers. All day the black coal barges
slide down the river, coming from the inner darkness to disappear in the
outer darkness, leaving the city itself clean and sweet, but prosperous
withal, and manifesting a tendency toward boulevards that prompts both
regret and apprehension.
An ancient capital of the Merovings, a great city in the fifteenth
century, four times the size of such struggling communities as London,
besieged from time to time by pretty much every state or faction of
North Europe, Tournai is full of pregnant records of every age for
fifteen centuries. Toward the end of the seventeenth century the grave
of King Childebert himself was discovered, containing innumerable
remains of royal vestments and regalia--three hundred golden bees from
his dalmatic, medals, coins, portions of a sceptre, sword, axe, javelin,
together with the great seal-ring of the King himself and, as well,
vestiges of the skeleton and trappings of his warhorse, killed and
buried with him. Unfortunately these precious relics were seized and
taken to Paris, where most of them were later stolen and never
recovered. It was from the gold bees, however, that Napoleon derived his
idea of substituting this emblem for the traditional lilies of France.
Now the lilies are faded and the bees are dust, but a resurrection is
possible for either, and out of the war one or the other may come to a
new day--or will both yield to the Rampant Lion from a blood-stained and
forever-glorious flag, blowing now, though in exile, amongst the banners
of Europe, equal in dignity and first in honour?
The Cathedral of Our Lady of Tournai is far less known than its peculiar
importance and its peculiar beauty demand. It is a curious accretion and
plexus of styles, from the middle of the eleventh to the end of the
fourteenth century, with an incongruous but beautiful rood-screen of the
Renaissance. Cruciform, and of great size (425 feet in length), it has
the apsidal transepts of the Rhenish style, each with its columned
ambulatory; a central tower with high pointed roof, also Rhenish (and
English) and, as well, four slim surrounding towers, two to each
transept, as at Laon, where they are not all complete, and at Reims,
where they never rose above the nave cornice. All this is in a fine,
strong, simple, round-arched transition style, far superior to anything
on the Rhine, and at least equal to Noyon and Paris. The four tall
towers are equal in size and general design, but run from a consistent
Romanesque to a straightforward Gothic in detail, the effect being
particularly vital and interesting. The enormous choir of late and very
delicate mediæval design, having been begun in the last quarter of the
thirteenth and finished in the middle of the fourteenth century, is one
of the few Gothic things one regrets, for while it is very beautiful in
itself, it has eliminated what was probably a strikingly effective
Romanesque choir, while its towering mass crushes all the rest of the
church and makes it a rather shapeless composition.
The cathedral has suffered constantly and at the hands of many kinds of
unscrupulous vandals. The “Reformers” in the sixteenth century pillaged
it and wrecked its gilded shrines and its ancient glass; the
Revolutionists continued the dread work in the eighteenth century, and a
hundred years later blundering efforts to reinforce it by crude masses
of masonry were succeeded by equally blundering efforts at restoration.
It has, however, preserved and gathered together many treasures of
Catholic art, including chasubles of St. Thomas à Becket, Flemish
tapestries, ivory carvings, embroidered altar frontals, metal work, and
mediæval missals.
There are many other fine old churches in Tournai--St. Jacques, St.
Quentin, St. Nicholas, St. Brice--all with elements of interest, while
the ancient Cloth Hall contains a most valuable collection of mediæval
art-work of all kinds, and the older streets still preserve fine
dwellings and guild-houses of the Middle Ages and early Renaissance.
Audenaarde is all old, and it lies some five and twenty miles down the
slow-winding Scheldt on its roundabout and unhurried way to Ghent and
Antwerp and the sea. Once also it was a great city, now it is a village
of six or seven thousand souls, for it has fortunately never recovered
its prosperity under the new and unhandsome conditions that marked the
nineteenth century, as happened in the case of Brussels and Antwerp and
Ghent. In earlier days it was famous, like Arras, for its tapestries,
and many of those exquisite fifteenth-century masterpieces that are now
exiled in alien museums where they do not belong, but where at least
their value is appreciated and estimated at almost their weight in
gold, came from its looms. Tapestries are made here no more, nor in any
other place, for their art was of a peculiar subtlety that, even if it
finds appreciation amongst stray connoisseurs and curators, is as far
beyond the powers of the present day and generation as the glass of
Chartres or the sculptures of Reims. Linen and cotton weaving and the
brewing of beer have taken the place of tapestries in Audenaarde, but
the old town itself is little harmed thereby.
From the large and pious and opulent days of the later Middle Ages,
there remain in Audenaarde a very splendid great hall and two equally
great churches of rather unusual value. The hall is early sixteenth
century, very rich and equally graceful, with a slender tower and spire,
ending in a great crown as did the now-shattered tower of Arras. Its
rooms are very splendid, with big carved chimneypieces of the most
elaborate design, and with its small size and scrupulous detail it ranks
with Bruges and Arras and in advance of the more ambitious creations of
Brussels and Ghent.
The two remaining churches of Audenaarde, Ste. Walburga and Notre Dame,
have much distinction and architectural value, particularly Notre Dame,
which was Cistercian and is a surprisingly pure example of the reserved
and ascetic Gothic which always marked the buildings of this
order--which it largely created as a matter of fact. Ste. Walburga is
quite different, with its Romanesque choir of very modest proportions,
its ambitious and overshadowing nave of the fifteenth century, and its
unfinished transepts showing where the great scheme of rebuilding,
undertaken when it was too late and religion was already a waning force,
had been abandoned. There has been too much restoration in the case of
all these works of admirable art, and the ancient atmosphere is pretty
well gone, but they are noble still, in spite of the nervous and
mechanical attentions of archæologists and architects and other
well-meaning but misguided people.
IX
A TALE OF THREE CITIES
Still farther to the north, at the confluence of the Scheldt and the
Lys, is Ghent, the proud and turbulent metropolis of the fifteenth
century, the city-state that was so preposterously democratic it could
never get along with its neighbours, nor even with itself; the city of
De Conninck and Breidel and the Van Artevelds, of sudden and heroic
courage, of irresponsible turnings from one side to the other, and a
characteristic vacillation in public policy that kept it always in hot
water and was in the end its undoing; the place of strange old churches
and wonderful houses; the shrine of marvellous pictures and one of them
perhaps, what it has been called, the greatest picture in the world.
To Ghent, over which lay for centuries the oblivion that came upon all
the cities of Flanders after they lost their independence and fell into
the hands of the unscrupulous princes and states of the Renaissance, one
following another with variety of oppression but no cessation thereof,
has come a new vitality. It is as great a city now as then, counting a
population of well over 200,000, while Bruges has no more than a quarter
of this number. Providentially, it has suffered less than might have
been feared by this accession of prosperity; its wonderful churches and
tall towers, its quays with their serried lines of high gabled houses,
its great castle of the Counts of Flanders, its winding streets and
tortuous canals lined with ancient and lovely dwellings and spanned by
little stone bridges, all tell even now for almost their full value; and
though the city is quite metropolitan in its cleanness and well-being,
with fine new streets and bridges and shops, the spell of a great
antiquity is over it, and the new follows the old with conscientious
effort and delightful delicacy of feeling. If an old city must gain a
new lease of life, let it be after the fashion of Ghent.
Here is an old treasure-house full of wonders, and it can be touched
upon lightly, if at all, for it demands a volume to itself. It has a
dozen churches, all of the deepest interest; the Cathedral of St. Bavon,
St. Nicholas, St. Michael, St. Jacques, standing to the front. All
suffered from the Protestants and the French Revolution, and some from
the mishandling of restorers, but they retain their individuality, which
is very marked, for one and all are very local variants of the styles
one finds elsewhere; they are of Ghent and of no other place. Brick is
used widely, as elsewhere in Flanders, either by itself or mingled with
stone; and it is used with that intelligence, so rare in modern times,
that indicates the possibility of adapting a style to the materials
through which it is expressed. Of course, then art was as living a thing
as religion and the realities of liberty, whereas now they all fall in
the category of those fictions that please while they do not
persuade--which makes all the difference in the world. All Flanders is a
lesson in the use of brick, and as it is used here in St. Nicholas, and
in the houses of the Quai aux Herbes, as it was used in lost Louvain, in
desolated Ypres, in battered Malines, it was a study in good art, a
lesson in the history of human culture, a demonstration of the perfect
adaptation of modest means to a very noble end.
Ghent must have been a city of indescribable beauty about the middle of
the sixteenth century before its dark days began and one scourge after
[Illustration: A CANAL IN MALINES]
another followed the Reformers with their combination of dull brutality,
insane self-sufficiency, and savage fury of destruction. Even now the
group of towers, St. Bavon, St. Nicholas, and the belfry with its “Great
Bell Roland”--though the original spires are gone and the belfry has
further suffered the indignity of an extinguisher cap of iron--gives
some faint idea of what must have been before coal and iron came, first
to destroy and then most hideously to re-create. So also does the
towering old castle give a hint, whether you see it from the Place Ste.
Pharailde or from the canal, with its great buttresses lifting out of
the water; so does the unfinished but sumptuous Hôtel de Ville with its
fretted bays and balconied turrets; so do the beautiful ruins of the
ancient abbey shrouded in vines and trees. Life in a mediæval city such
as this could have left little to be desired so far as beauty of
environment was concerned, and when this contained within itself
unspoliated, unrestored churches that were in use all the time and meant
something besides a seventh-day respectability, and a great bell in a
tall tower, around whose rim were the words, “My name is Roland. When I
toll there is fire; when I ring there is victory in Flanders,” it is
easy to see how men could and did paint such pictures as “The Adoration
of the Lamb That Was Slain.”
This, with the other great pictures in Flanders, will be considered in
another chapter. It is the central art-treasure of the cathedral, the
pride of the Netherlands, and one of the wonders of painting of the
world.
Past tragic Termonde--a name and a deed never to be forgotten so long as
history endures--now only a desert of broken walls and a place of
unquiet ghosts, the Scheldt goes down to Antwerp, the last of the inner
circle of impotent defences of the eternal things that cannot resist,
against the passing things that are omnipotent during their little day.
In the sixteenth century it was the greatest and richest city in Europe;
now, with its 400,000 inhabitants, it is double its former size but
numerically counts for little beside the insane aggregations that call
themselves cities and are the work of the last century of misdirected
and evanescent energy. Its greatness culminated in 1550, and then came
the sequence of catastrophes that reduced it to material insignificance
for three hundred years, the Protestant Reformation, with its savage
destruction in 1566 of churches and monasteries, and of what they stood
for as well; the Spanish occupation, with Alva’s enormities in 1576,
when the more industrious and able citizens were driven into England,
and the city itself burned; the winning away by the Dutch of its old
command of commerce; the closing of the river by the Peace of
Westphalia, and finally the devastating storm of the French Revolution
which destroyed pretty much of anything that had been left. By this time
the population had fallen to 40,000, but under Napoleon a short-lived
recovery began, which was brought to an end by the revolution of 1830,
and it was not until the middle of the century that a more lasting
development was initiated.
Antwerp is a good enough modern town, as these go, but its disasters
have robbed it of all its ancient quality, and even the cathedral has
the air of being out of place. Great as it is, it is not a masterpiece,
or even an exemplar of its many Gothic variants at their best. Its
unusual width and number of aisles, its great height and its forest of
columns give a certain impressiveness and a very beautiful play of light
and shade, while its single tower is quite wonderful in its slender
grace and its intricate and delicate scaffolding. Its one famous
picture is the over-praised “Descent from the Cross” of Rubens, painted
while he was under Italian influence and therefore, if quite
uncharacteristic, nobler and more self-contained than the products of
his maturity when he had become wholly himself.
There are one or two other churches of fragmentary value, the unique
museum made out of the old dwelling and printing-office of Christopher
Plantin, with its stores of mediæval and Renaissance industrial art, and
the Royal Museum where there are more admirable examples of the painting
of Flanders, Brabant, and the Netherlands than are to be found gathered
together in any other one place. For critical, or in a limited way,
artistic study, this hoarding together, cheek by jowl, of innumerable
works of art collected from desecrated churches and ruined monasteries,
has its uses, but no one of the pictures torn from its original and
intended surroundings tells for its full value. One wonders sometimes
whether a daily newspaper, a school of fine arts, or a picture-gallery
is the most biting indictment of contemporary culture and artistic
sense; certainly whatever the answer, the picture-gallery presents
powerful claims that are not lightly to be disregarded.
So, from the dunes of the North Sea around to the wide estuary of the
Scheldt, the ring of defences is complete, and in the midst like a
citadel lies Bruges, the Dream City, preserving, guarding, and
reverencing its dreams.
I knew Bruges first in 1886 when I seem to remember its old walls, when
its new buildings were few and unobjectionable, and when the
tourist--English, German, American--was as much of a novelty as he was
an anachronism. I am told now that the walls have gone, and the
boulevards and architects’ buildings, and the tourists have come in;
have come in hosts, with all their destructive possibilities, but I can
think only of the old Bruges, still, meditative, serene; a town Maxfield
Parish might have designed, but impossible elsewhere except as a
survival, by some providential miracle of beneficence, from the heart of
the Middle Ages.
This is not to say that Bruges has survived intact. Hurled into the
midst of the maelstrom of chaos that characterised the Renaissance in
all its political aspects, she was ruined utterly between Maximilian of
Austria, the Calvinists, and the Duke of Alva. War and pillage,
massacre, bribery, treason, the rack marked the advance in culture and
civilisation beyond the dark days of mediævalism. What the Austrian
spared the Protestant devoured, while the Spaniard gleaned the crumbs
that remained. Bruges, that great city, proud, rich, and beautiful above
all cities of the North, counted now a population of a scant 30,000,
hopeless, abandoned, poverty-stricken.
The greatest ruin was wrought by one Balfour, a creature in the pay of
William of Orange, who in 1578 captured the city and held it for six
years, during which time the Catholic religion was prohibited, the
bishop was imprisoned, all priests were either driven into exile or
tortured and then burned at the stake, while churches were destroyed,
turned into stables, sacked and desecrated, and more great pictures,
statues, shrines, windows, sacred vessels, and vestments were destroyed
than have been miraculously preserved. Every religious house in the
vicinity was completely expunged, including the vast Cistercian
monastery of Coxyde, the most glorious church in Flanders; and its
wide-spread gardens, fields, and orchards regained from the dunes by
centuries of labour, reverted to their original estate, and desolation
took the place of beneficent and hard-won fertility.
Out of this reign of terror came as some compensation the saving of
Bruges--or what was left of it. In 1560 the Pope had made the city an
episcopal see, on the urging of Philip II, and after Balfour had met a
well-merited, but too sudden and merciful, death, the exiled and
plundered orders took refuge within its walls, building new and humbler
quarters for themselves and hospitals and almshouses for the miserable
citizens. The Church took the place of commerce, and under its care some
degree of life came back to the ruined city; and the quality it then
took on, of a community of religious houses, institutions of charity and
mercy, and old churches restored again to their proper uses, it has
never lost.
Toward the end of the seventeenth and all through the eighteenth century
the slow destruction of old beauty went on, though with a different
impulse. Now it was the unescapable vandalism of ignorance and degraded
taste that marked the time; old windows that had escaped the Calvinists
were pulled out so that a better light might fall on a new altar, since
it was “such an admirable imitation of marble,” even as happened in
Chartres, where some of the matchless windows were contemptuously cast
into a ditch to reveal the tawdry splendours of the lamentable high
altar and imitation marble of the choir which represented the
enlightened intelligence of the eighteenth-century canons. The sixteenth
century was bad enough, but one wonders sometimes how any continental
culture survived the eighteenth century.