achievement the arduous but incomplete efforts of its predecessor, ugly
and barbarous houses took the place of only too many of the beautiful
works of the Middle Ages, and finally the wonderful old walls were
ruthlessly razed to give place to silly boulevards. And in spite of it
all Bruges survives, and more completely than any other city of the
North, for it is farthest away from the kingdom of coal and iron, and if
war passes it by, it may still remain an oasis, a sanctuary in the
desert.
The beauty of Bruges is incomparable and unique. Threaded by winding
canals, crossed by innumerable old stone bridges, where pink-and-grey
walls, tall gables, spired turrets, leaning fronts of mullioned windows
rise from old stonepaved quays and garden walls hung with vines and
backed by tree tops; cut by narrow streets of ancient houses, with old
churches and convents and chapels on every hand and with slender towers
lifting over quaint market-places and little squares and sudden gardens,
it is a continuous and ever-varying and never-exhausting delight that,
so far as I know, finds its rival only in Venice. A city that has
shrunken a little within its walls is always more beautiful than one
that has burst them and is steadily intruding into the fleeing
countryside. That is the difference between the advance of man and that
of nature. Ghent, Rome, Nuremberg are kernels of sweetness surrounded by
a monstrously expanding rind that is exceeding bitter, but Carcassonne,
Rothenburg, Siena, Bruges are so wholly different there is no
possibility of comparison. When the houses of an old town seem to huddle
a little more closely together, while superfluous walls fall away and
the tide of green comes lapping on already moss-grown walls to cover and
obliterate the traces man has left of his less successful efforts, then
you have something approaching a perfect environment, particularly if,
as here, there are innumerable and endless treasures of the best that
man can do, now carefully preserved, and growing better the nearer
nature comes to touch them with her wand of magic.
Architecturally, Bruges is fifteenth century with a singular
consistency--when it isn’t of a century later or, and less
conspicuously, of the fourteenth century; not that it matters much, it
all hangs together because it is all of one mood and one impulse and one
race. Its Hôtel de Ville, one of the perfect things in architecture, I
have spoken of elsewhere; its churches, at least six of them, are each
engaging in a different way, and each contains treasures of endless
pictures, wood carving, metal work, vestments, gathered from ruined
monasteries and churches to take the place of the greater treasures
pillaged and destroyed by the Calvinists. Our Lady’s Church, with its
curiously beautiful tower and its gem-like porch; the cathedral with its
ugly modern tower and its fine interior with all its pictures and
treasures of “dinanderie”; the Chapel of the Holy Blood, still fantastic
and charming in spite of its sufferings at the hands of the French
Revolutionists; St. Jacques, St. Gilles, and the Church of the Holy
Sepulchre with its noble tomb of Count Baldwin of Jerusalem and his
wife.
[Illustration: THE BELFRY OF BRUGES]
Then there are all the old guild-houses, hospitals, convents,
monasteries, and the rows and rows of fine old dwellings, each a model
of personal and curiously contented architectural art, but, after all,
Bruges is not Bruges because of its single buildings, or all of them
together, or because of its pictures and its metal work and wood
carving. It is Bruges because of its unearthly beauty of canals and
gardens, of endless sudden compositions of lovely forms and lines and
silhouettes; because of its still atmosphere of old days and better
ways, and because it is a place where religion no longer appears as an
accessory but takes its place even in these modern times as a constant,
daily, poignant, and personal influence.
Already this living charm had begun to exert itself over a wider and
wider field, and when the war came there were more than 4,000 English
and Americans who had taken up their residence there, drawn by its
subtle charm and by what this stood for once, and stands for now. When
the King is back in Brussels again, and real life begins once more, who
knows but that the spirit of Bruges may find itself dominant over the
spirit (has it a spirit?) of Charleroi, not only in Flanders and
Belgium and Europe, but throughout the world, for “the old order
changeth, giving place to new,” and the “new” is also, and unmistakably,
the old, preserved as here in Bruges for better days, when through
suffering and ruin man comes into his own again, and sees once more what
is, what is not, worth while.
In Brabant were once other centres of old memories: Maastricht, Liége,
Huy, and Namur; Dinant, Louvain, and Malines. None of them remains, for
across Brabant runs the black scar that has transformed the cities of
the Sambre and the Meuse into smoking anvils, where iron is hammered out
into efficiency and coal is torn from the earth and burned in consuming
fires to the same end; for across Brabant runs the red scar that
efficiency has blazed like a trail of enduring flame, never to be
forgotten or forgiven so long as man remains on earth; a portent and a
horror to all generations _in sæcula sæculorum_. Dinant, Louvain,
Malines; yes, and Tirlemont, Aerschot, Wavre and the innumerable other
names that are uttered below the breath as signifying things that cannot
be spoken but never will be forgotten, things that give one at last to
understand the stern necessity of the once discredited, but now
grateful, doctrines of hell and of eternal damnation in the Christian
scheme of the universe.
Dinant, whose fame in the fifteenth century for the making of wonderful
works of art in metal, gave the name “dinanderie” to this admirable
art--Dinant, crouched under the castle-crowned cliffs of the Meuse, with
its quaint church, has gone now, and gone also is Louvain, all but its
Hôtel de Ville which is more like a pyx or a reliquary, or some other
work of “dinanderie,” than a real building. The destruction of Louvain
needs no description, for its fires have burned its story indelibly into
human consciousness. We know only too well how its university was
destroyed, with its priceless library and its ancient and unique
manuscripts; how the great and beautiful Church of St. Pierre was swept
by flames and left a hopeless ruin; how its streets were absorbed, one
after another, in the roaring conflagration, covering with their débris
the stains of massacre and pillage. Of Malines we know less, nor shall
until the great cloud rolls back, but there was much there to lose, and
some of this we know has been lost while more may follow. In spite of
the altars to coal and iron outside the old cincture of the town,
Malines itself was a gentle and lovely old place, gathered around its
great Church of St. Rombaut with its incredible tower. A town of old
houses and still canals in strangely poetic combination, a little Bruges
with a finer church than any the perfect Flemish city could boast. The
church itself is of a vigorous type of the earliest fourteenth-century
architecture, but the great tower, which was planned as the highest and
most splendid spire in the world, though it completed only three hundred
and twenty of its projected five hundred and fifty feet, is fifteenth
century, and as perfect an example of late Gothic at its best as may be
found anywhere in the world. It is really indescribable in its
combination of majesty, brilliancy of design, and inconceivable
intricacy of detail. The exuberance that marks the flamboyant art of
France is here controlled and directed into the most excellent channels,
and if ever it had been completed it must have taken its place as the
most beautiful tower in the world. As it is, it ranks in its own way
with the southern flèche of Chartres and Giotto’s Tower in Florence, and
more one cannot say.
Information is not forthcoming as to how far it already has been
wrecked; it is said that the glimmering pinnacles and niches of its
amazing buttresses have suffered severely from shell-fire, and that its
carillon, the finest in Belgium, has been destroyed; if nothing worse
follows, the world may yet see its visionary spire take actual form at
last, in the gratitude of a people for the passing from themselves, and
from the world, of the shadow of death.
Inevitably, when one thinks of Malines, Louvain, Ypres, Arras, Soissons,
Reims, there comes the suggestion of possible restorations, concretely
expressed already by German savants and archæologists incapable of
comprehending the difference between art and imitation, and as some
palliation for the evils that have been done. It is a thought that must
resolutely be put aside. As I said in speaking of Reims, if enough
remains to be made habitable by simple patching and protection, let this
be done by all means, but without a foot of false carving or glass or
sculpture. Build other churches if you like, and as you must, and
perhaps on the old general lines, though elsewhere, but let us have no
more a Pierrefond or a Mt. St. Michael. What is gone is gone
irrevocably, and its shells and shards are too valuable in their eternal
teaching to be obliterated by well-meant schemes of rehabilitation.
When a whole town passes, as Ypres and Louvain and Arras, then as it
fell so let it lie. A kindly nature will slowly turn these bleak piles
of fallen masonry into beautiful memorials, clothing them with grass and
vines and flowers and trees. Let them stand so for ever, a memorial to
the dead and a warning to man in his pride of life and insolence of
will; and for the new cities, let them rise as beautifully as may be
alongside, but not over, the graves of a dead era. Glastonbury and
Jumièges, in their solemn and noble ruin, tell their story to ears that
at last are disposed to listen, and the story of Reims and Louvain, with
the same moral at its end, must be told eternally after the same
fashion.
X
MARGARET OF MALINES
The historians always call her Marguerite of Austria, but this is hardly
fair, for even if she were a daughter of the Hapsburg Emperor Maximilian
she did not come into her own until she took up her residence in a
beautiful castle in Malines and made that own the fortune and the
destinies and the happiness of the Flemish people who had been given
her. On both her father’s side and her mother’s she was English, if you
go back far enough, her great, great, great-grandfather having been that
“John of Gaunt (Ghent), time-honoured Lancaster” of whom we have heard
before. Her mother, Mary of Burgundy, who died when she was a baby,
traced her line back through Charles the Bold and Isabella of Bourbon to
John of Gaunt’s daughter, Philippa, who married John I of Portugal; and
it is through Philippa’s son Eduard and his daughter Eleanor who married
Maximilian’s father, the Emperor Frederick III, that the strain comes on
the father’s side. So “Margaret of Malines” let her be; and as well the
well-beloved Regent of Flanders, for never, even in the great days of
great kings and governors, was there ever a better sovereign or a more
engaging lady.
The Middle Ages are as full of lovable and admirable women as the
Renaissance is of sinister and regrettable representatives of the same
sex. They had no votes and they claimed no rights; they were less
welcome at birth than princes, and they were incontinently (and often
prodigally) married off without a “by your leave” by their scheming
fathers. Wholly subservient both in principle and in law, they were
anything but this in fact, and a study of the Middle Ages reveals a
certain feminine dominance that is startling to the male of to-day. It
is well to remember that the clinging type, with the ringlets and facile
emotions and tears, is a product of modern civilisation; mediævalism
knew nothing of it, and little of that even less attractive aspect that
always becomes conspicuous when society is breaking down at the end of
an era; a Catherine of Russia, while not without prototypes in the
Middle Ages, would have been as anomalous then as a Blanche of Castile
in the eighteenth century. Apparently, the only conspicuous differences
between the men and women of mediævalism were that the men did the
fighting and most of the active or violent work, while the women
directed their courses, corrected their mistakes, and built up their
character and that of their children; and that the men confined
themselves to the tactics while the women controlled the major strategy
of the battle of life.
The glitter and the show remained with the men, the substance of power
remained with the women, and as their vision is apt to be wider and more
penetrating it is fortunate that this was so. Of course it was all a
part of the very real supremacy of Christianity over all domains of
activity, all phases of life and thought. As soon as its power began to
lapse and old pagan theories came in with the Renaissance, while Our
Lady and the saints were dethroned by the Reformation, the wholesome
balance was overthrown and women slowly fell back to that earlier
position where the only defence against male oppression was the power of
sex, the result being those artificial barriers and differences, and the
unwholesome bartering of bribes and promises and threats, that always
have resulted, and always will, in a complete downfall of personal and
social righteousness. The problem to-day is not how women are to get the
ballot but how they are to regain their old mediæval equality (or
supremacy if you like) without it. During mediævalism men were more
masculine and women more feminine than ever before or since, and in all
probability a good part of the ethical, cultural, and social success of
the time was due to this fact and to the absence of artificial barriers
that denied to demonstrated character and to proved capacity the
opportunity of effective service.
Whenever you find a great man in mediæval history (or any other for that
matter) _cherchez la femme_; ten to one you will find behind a St. Louis
a mother like Blanche of Castile, or a guardian like Margaret of Austria
behind a Charles V. Men try in vain to change the course of history by
their own efforts; women always have the power to do this through the
new generation they are nursing and educating, while the men are
exhausting their energies in the fighting and the politics and the
everlasting strenuousness that bring so many great things to pass that
hardly last overnight. After all, so far anyway as the Middle Ages are
concerned, it was the monks and nuns at their endless prayers in chapel
and cell and cloister, and the mothers in their tall towers and their
walled gardens, with their children about them, that made the great and
enduring things possible.
Margaret of Malines was as perfect a type of this consecrated womanhood
as one could find in a year’s delving in ancient history; in addition
she was a particularly charming lady and a very great statesman.
Moreover her twenty-three years of rule in the Netherlands cover a
particularly significant and interesting period in the history of this
country and the end of mediæval civilisation here when it had outlasted
its career elsewhere in Europe, so we may try in a chapter to give some
idea of society in the Heart of Europe, at exactly the moment when it
was about to surrender to the anarchy that already was progressively
dominant elsewhere.
Margaret was born on January 10, 1480, in Brussels. Her father, the
Archduke Maximilian of Hapsburg, was apparently a kind of imperial
Admirable Crichton--handsome, fearless, a gallant knight, a poet,
painter, scholar, patron of all arts and letters, and as serenely
conscious of his personal merits as they deserved. Her mother was the
beautiful Mary of Burgundy, daughter of the headlong and magnificent
Charles the Bold and Isabel of Bourbon who, like Margaret’s own mother,
and her father’s mother, Eleanor of Portugal, was one of those fine and
beautiful characters with which mediæval history is so full. When the
little Margaret was only two years old her radiant mother, who was
adored by every one, was killed while hunting and Maximilian, who was
heartbroken and quite frantic with grief, found his two children,
Margaret and her brother Philip, seized by the somewhat aggressive
burghers of Ghent on the ground that it was for the state, and not the
father, to determine their education and their future. Louis XI of
France was undoubtedly behind them, for he believed he saw his chance to
devour Burgundy, and in the end he cleverly engineered the treaty of
Arras whereby the small Margaret was affianced to his son Charles and
taken to the French court to be properly educated, while Philip remained
in Flanders to be reared as the burghers saw fit.
Fortunately, the old French spider, Louis XI, died almost as soon as
Margaret reached Paris, and her education was undertaken by his daughter
the Princess Anne, who became regent for the Dauphin Charles and was
another of those strong and righteous personalities of a time that
already had almost exhausted itself by overproduction. Under her able
direction the château of Amboise became a kind of “finishing school” for
princesses, and here the small Margaret was subjected to a system of
training that would stagger the present day. “On a foundation of strong
religious principles hewn from the early fathers of the Church and the
_Enseignements de Saint Louis_, she built up a moral and philosophic
education with the help of the ancient philosophers, especially Plato as
studied with the commentary of Boethius,” maintaining a cloisteral
simplicity of life and fighting affectation and pretence with an austere
ardour that contrasts quaintly with the court life of the time. And all
this just before the discovery of America and on the eve of the election
of the Borgia, Alexander VI, to the Papacy!
In spite of her gorgeous betrothal to the poor little awkward and
misshapen prince, the marriage was destined not to come off; political
considerations intervened, and Charles married Anne, the heiress of
Brittany, out of hand, and the Princess Margaret was unceremoniously
returned to Flanders where she was received with enthusiasm by her
loyal if turbulent and irresponsible Flemings.
The situation was characteristically fifteenth century, which is to say
impetuous and fantastic. Maximilian had just been made King of the
Romans and heir to the Holy Roman Empire; he had ventured into the nest
of unruly Flemings, been captured, and imprisoned for eleven weeks, to
the scandal of Europe and of the Pope who put both Bruges and Ghent
under the interdict. Maximilian won in the end by promising much and
performing little, and then backed Brittany against France, intending to
marry the little Princess Anne, but he lost both the battle and his
coveted bride with her desirable territories, both being won by his
prospective son-in-law Charles who at one blow threw over Margaret, and
won the very lady her father had been striving to attain. Maximilian’s
irritation was perhaps excusable under the circumstances, but when he
found no one who really cared to help him in a war against France he
turned to schemes of a new crusade for driving the Turks out of Europe,
consoled himself with a Sforza princess from Milan, and worked out a
beautiful new scheme of a Spanish alliance by marrying his son Philip
to the Princess Juana and Margaret to the royal Infante, Don Juan.
Margaret was now seventeen, and after Dona Juana had made her way to
Flanders by sea, always in imminent danger of shipwreck, and married
Prince Philip, she took the poor storm-tossed ladies-in-waiting back
with her by the same uncomfortable route, producing for their
edification, in the midst of the worst of the incessant tempests, her
proposed epitaph which ran:
“Ci-gist Margot, la gentile demoiselle
Qu’eut deux maris, et ci mourut pucelle.”
The epitaph was not needed, and Margaret reached Spain at last, where
she was received with wild joy, at once becoming the idol of all who met
her, from Queen Isabella down. The prince was of the same temper as
herself, handsome, noble in character, learned, proficient in all the
arts, and they were married the moment Lent was over, in the midst of a
kind of frenzy of general joy and magnificence. This was on Easter
Sunday, April 10, 1497; on October 4 the fairy prince was dead of the
plague, dying as he had lived his brief life of nineteen years, a gentle
and perfect knight, destroying the golden dreams of his people, breaking
the heart of the Queen, and leaving Margaret, heartbroken also, to
await the birth of her child, who was born only to die after a single
breath. The life of the girl-widow was despaired of, but she finally
recovered, and in spite of the prayers of the sorrowing Queen and court,
who had acquired a passionate affection for her, returned to Flanders,
where her brother Philip, through a sequence of deaths in the royal
family of Spain, had suddenly found his wife the heir to the vast and
powerful kingdom. Margaret arrived in 1499 and two years later, again
for political reasons (her spirited father now being interested in the
conquest of Italy), was married to Duke Philibert of Savoy, Philibert le
Beau, a figure of splendour, courage, learning, and beneficence; devoted
to his people, to governmental and industrial reform, to the founding of
schools, hospitals, monasteries. One looks aghast on the mortality of
young and promising leaders at this particular time. They arise like
splendid stars, they embody all the beneficent quality of the five
centuries of mediævalism that already had come to an end; they have no
kinship with the new type of the Renaissance then first showing
itself--with a Henry VIII, a Francis I, a Philip II, an Alexander
VI--and one by one they are blotted out of the darkening heavens. Born
out of due time, after the ending of an epoch of righteousness and
beauty, they seem to be taken away from a world they could not save and
that could only have been for them a misery and a disappointment, as it
was for Margaret’s baby nephew, Charles, who was destined to inherit the
world in its chaotic desolation only to surrender it at last and seek
refuge in the cloister.
So it was with this model of chivalry, Philibert the Beautiful; three
years of ecstatic happiness were granted him and his duchess, Margaret,
and then he also died, in the room in which he had been born, at Pont
d’Ain, only twenty-four years before. Margaret withdrew at once from the
world, cut off her great wealth of golden hair, and devoted herself to
prayers and devotions, and to the building at Brou, in memory of the
dead duke, of that matchless piece of architectural jewel work, the
shrine that occupied the energies of the greatest artist-craftsmen in
Europe for a period of twenty-five years, From every part of France,
Flanders, Burgundy, Italy architects, painters, sculptors, glassmakers,
wood-workers, craftsmen in metals were gathered together, and thus they
laboured year after year, at first supervised by the Duchess Margaret
from an oratory she had built where she might divide her time between
intercessions for the repose of the soul of her knight and
superintendence of the building that was to immortalise his memory and
form the place of sepulture for him, and for her when God willed. In the
money of our time the cost of this shrine, small as it is, was over
$4,000,000, and it represented the ending of art as it marked the ending
of a great epoch.