longer; for centuries it continued to pour out from its inexhaustible
Benedictine store, missionaries, prophets, priests, leaders and
protectors of the people; fostering education, agriculture, the arts;
establishing order, nursing a piety that found its reward in this world
through the consciousness of an ever-widening civilisation, and a
greater reward in heaven. Then the power and wealth grew too great for
the equanimity of princes, and it was robbed by one after another,
oppressed by lay abbots _in commendam_, its Benedictine monks driven out
and secular canons intruded, and finally pillaged by recreant bishops of
the new dispensation of humanism and enlightenment and by that
concentration and apotheosis of the same, Le Roi Soleil, and so handed
over to the emissaries of the deluge that followed him, the attractive
exemplars of revolution, who swept the place clean of books and pictures
and statues and all the hoarded art of a thousand years--yes, even of
the poor ashes of the good saint himself--to make place a half century
later for the ashes and slag of blast-furnaces set up within the
ancient walls, and for the housing of soldiers and their mounts.
Still, the work could not wholly be undone, Luxembourg was a Christian
state and so it remained, through fair days and foul, the fairest being
perhaps those when, united to Flanders and Brabant under the Emperor
Maximilian, it fell into the charge of that great lady and unofficial
saint, Margaret “of Malines,” whose story I have tried to tell
elsewhere.
With the wars of religion this peace and prosperity came to an end and
for two hundred years all the duchy was devastated by all the armies of
Europe, from those of Francis I to the obscene hordes of the French
Republic. It had never revolted against the Catholic religion nor
against its varied rulers, and its reward was a slow and savage
extermination. Cities were burned and their names forgotten; great
abbeys and churches like those of Orval and Clairefontaine were utterly
extinguished; tall castles that crowned every height of land were blown
up with gunpowder; fields and farms became waste land; and through
starvation, massacre, and exile the population was reduced to a tithe of
its former numbers, and at last, by the republic that came to bring
liberty, taxed into an all-engulfing penury.
The era of enlightenment had not been wholly happy in its action on
Luxembourg, but it was free at last, and, in 1867, independent, as it
remained until that memorable day in August, 1914, the day of broken
treaties, when the little Grand Duchess backed her motor-car across the
bridge, closing it with a pathetic barrier in the vain protest of honour
against a force that did not recognise the meaning of the word or the
existence of the thing it signified.
Luxembourg to-day is not a place where one may go to revel in the
artistic memorials of a great past; the great past is there, and its
memory is still green, but even more than Brabant or Champagne has it
borne the grievous harrowing of endless wars and recrudescent
barbarisms, not the least destructive of these visitations being the
nineteenth century in its satisfying completeness, which saw many an
abbey and old haunted castle dismantled, reduced to road-metal, and
carted away for the value inherent in its raw material, or turned to
inconceivably base uses from all of which some pecuniary profit might be
obtained. Once it was as rich in enormous castles as any country in the
world that happily has a mediæval past. Bourscheid on its great hill,
lordly and dominating still and a wilderness of vast crags of masonry,
in spite of all that man could do; Brandenbourg, rigid and riven in its
ring of mountains; Esch, split into towering and sundered fragments on
the raw cliffs overhanging the Sûre; Hollenfel, Clervaux, spared by war
to fall victim to the contemptuous neglect of owners who preferred
pseudo-Gothic villas with all modern conveniences; Beaufort, with its
noble proportions and its beauty of a later and more gracious
mediævalism; Vianden, most fascinating of all with its dizzy gables, and
its chapel still intact in spite of the wide ruin of its surroundings.
And every castle ruin is haunted to heart’s desire, crowded with
attested ghosts whose consistent habits and dependable visitations are a
peculiar joy in a world that until a twelvemonth ago could not believe
in the impossible and promptly discounted the improbable. Any peasant in
Luxembourg knew better, and not only the ruins but the whole duchy is
honeycombed by the midnight prowlings of an entire population of
delectable phantoms, while the stories and legends of their commerce in
the past with lords and ladies and knights and monks and bishops form a
literature in themselves.
In spite of its losses, the land was one of infinite and unfamiliar
charm; a land of wide and high plateaus cut by many winding river
courses, each a possible journey of varying delights. Our and Sûre and
Black Erenz; Alzette and Clerf and White Erenz, with many others of
minor flow, cut the duchy in every direction, all at last finding the
goal of their waters in the magical Moselle, as it flows past old Roman
Trèves on its devious way to the Rhine. And it was a kind of little
earthly paradise as well, for the fifty years of its well-earned peace.
A land of farms and gardens and pastures, of contented little villages
and river-bordered hamlets, and a kindly and devoted people. Coal and
iron have left little mark, though the efficient Baedeker (to whom shall
we go for guidance on our journeys in the long days to come?), in one of
his concise and unpremeditately dramatic paragraphs does say: “18½ M.
_Weilerbach_, for the iron-foundry of Weilerbach and the former
summer-house of the Abbots of Echternach, magnificently situated amidst
wood”--an antithesis of startling illumination. Protestantism passed it
by, except for purposes of plunder, and it has always been unanimously
and enthusiastically Catholic, with a record for public and private
morality that puts any and every other part of Europe to sudden shame.
What is to be its future when the great storm that is cleaning the
soiled world of its dust and ashes of false ideals and burnt-out
superstitions sweeps away into the hollows of a night that is only in
its darkness the promise of a new day? Who shall say? but any one can
weave his vision, and to some it already appears that, with the meting
out of inadequate earthly reward for irreparable bodily suffering, will
come the lands to the east as far as the Kyll, with to the south
Saarbourg, and the far side of the Moselle to the Hochwald, including
ancient Trèves, no longer a forgotten relic of an old imperialism but a
greater and better and more potent Hague, a central city of Europe and
of peace, where, under the united guarantees of all the states, is
permanently sitting a great council of ambassadors for the devising of
measures of common interest, the adjustment of international
differences, the preservation of a righteous peace between nations, and
with authority to suppress any violation of treaties or any wilful
aggression of one state against another, by calling into the field
against the offender all the military and naval forces of all the other
powers signatory to an European Treaty of Permanent Peace and
represented in the council of ambassadors.
Or perhaps Trèves, with surrounding territory within a five-mile radius,
might be erected into an international city of council, surrounded by
Luxembourg, Belgium, which may be extended to the Moselle and eastward
half-way to the Rhine, France, the new frontiers of which would be the
old eastern borders of Alsace and Lorraine, and a restored Palatinate
limited to the north and east by the Rhine and the Moselle. Central in
this circle of guarding states, with all Europe for added defence
against any possible recrudescence of local egoism in any place, Trèves
might again become a great city of refuge and of Christian
righteousness, with noble buildings on its circle of surrounding hills,
a centre of religion and education and mercy, guardian of the peace of
Europe, a living and glorious symbol of the world enlightenment that
came through the clean purging of a war greater than all former wars
because the need was greater.
XVI
EX TENEBRIS LUX
I have tried to give some idea of the contributions of the lands and the
peoples in the western theatre of the war in certain of the fields of
art; to note the development of culture, the direction of human
happenings, the bearing of great men and women who were leaders in
Europe, through an abbreviation of historical records, to justify the
giving to the region between the Seine and the Rhine, the Alps and the
sea, the name of “Heart of Europe.” Such a survey of such a territory
must, of necessity, be superficial and incomplete, for too many and
wonderful things happened there to be recorded in a volume of limited
extent. Chiefly, I have spoken of what could be, and is being,
destroyed, but there is much else that is not subject to annihilation at
the hands of furious men, the contributions to music, to letters, to the
slow-growing spiritual deposit in society through philosophy, theology,
and religion.
In music alone the Heart of Europe has done more, and at different
times, than any similar area. While the troubadours of the twelfth
century came into existence in the sunny lands of Languedoc, it was in
Aquitaine, Champagne, and Flanders that the trouvères developed the norm
of the troubadours “into something rich and strange,” and under the
Countess Marie of Champagne created that beautiful and potent fiction of
“courteous love,” which had issue in so many exquisite phases of human
character and made possible a great school of romantic poets. They,
under the leadership of Chretien de Troyes, made for the Countess Marie,
out of the rude elements that had come from England and Wales through
Brittany, the great poems and romances of King Arthur and his knights.
The greatest of the trouvères was Adam de la Hâle and he was born in
Arras in the year 1240. Long before him, however, Gottfried of
Strasbourg, a contemporary of Chretien de Troyes, had made of the tale
of Lancelot and Guinevere one of the deathless poems of the world, as
Wolfram von Essenbach of Bavaria was to create its great counterpart
from the story of Parsifal.
Very slowly in the meantime music had been working out its wonderful
growth from the classical models of SS. Ambrose and Gregory intermingled
with the instinctive folk-music of the south, and in the fourteenth
century the leadership fell full into the hands of Flanders, where monks
and laymen set themselves to the congenial task of building up a new and
richer music on polyphonic lines. Brother Hairouet, who was at work
about 1420; Binchois, born near Mons and died in 1460; Dufay, born in
Hainault and trained in the cathedral at Cambrai, were all, together
with the English Dunstable, potent leaders in the great work, laying
well the foundations on which a few centuries later was to be erected
the vast and magnificent superstructure of Bach and his successors. In
the second period, that of the close of the fifteenth century, Antwerp
became the centre, Jean de Okeghem, of Termonde, the leader in the
intellectualising of music and the establishing it on methodical lines,
while in the third period, of the end of the fifteenth and the beginning
of the following century, Josquin des Pres led the course back toward a
purer beauty, though through modes that were increasingly clever in
their elaborate virtuosity. After this the lead passed across the Rhine,
with memorable results a century later, when the great cycle, from Bach
to Brahms, rounded itself into a perfect ring.
The era-making movements in religion all began outside our territorial
limits at Monte Cassino, Cluny, Clairveaux, but it was through St.
Benedict of Aniane that Charlemagne at Aix-la-Chapelle effected his
regeneration of the Church and his initiation of a new Christian
education and culture; St. Bruno, of Cologne, sometime head of the
cathedral school of Reims, was the founder of the Order of Carthusians;
St. Chrodegang, Archbishop of Metz, brought into existence the Canons
Regular of St. Augustine, who introduced into cathedral chapters the
order and discipline of monasticism; St. Norbert, of Xanten, created the
Order of Prémontré, one of the most beneficent and beautiful of the
religious brotherhoods of the Middle Ages, while the “Imitation of
Christ,” the most purely spiritual and devotional work of the time, was
the product of Thomas à Kempis, an obscure monk of the Netherlands. In
the development of Christian mysticism the Rhine valley stands
pre-eminent, though the greatest of all those of this school of combined
thought and vision was Hugh of St. Victor, of the monastery of
Augustinian Canons in Paris, on the banks of the Seine, where now is the
Jardin des Plantes, The ancient tradition is that he was born near
Ypres, though recent researches seem to indicate that he may have been a
son of the Count of Blankenburg in Saxony. In any case, he was the great
expositor of sacramental religion and philosophy as Charlemagne’s
Radbertus Paschasus was the great defender of the true doctrine of
Transubstantiation. If, indeed, Hugh of St. Victor was a product of
Flanders, then the credit goes there of having given birth to one of the
noblest and most penetrating minds the world has known, one that ranks
with that greatest pure intellect of all time, St. Thomas Aquinas.
Whether one accepts the mysticism of the Rhine or not does not matter;
it was a potent element in the flowering of Christian piety and the
development of Catholic theology, and Elizabeth of Schönau, Hildegarde
of Bingen, Mary of Ognies, Liutgard of Tongres, Mechtilde of Magdebourg,
are all names that connote a poignancy of spiritual experience that
proves both the personal exaltation of the time and the quality of the
blood that had issue in character such as theirs. This mystical vision
of the holy women of the Rhine is simply an extreme intensification of
the same vision that was given in lesser measure and in different ways
to all the creative artists, philosophers, and theologians of the Middle
Ages, from Othloh of the eleventh to St. Bonaventure of the thirteenth
century, and it had a great part in determining and fixing the artistic
manifestation of this amazing time. Both as a result and an influence it
is vastly important and not to be ignored. Out of it came much of that
marvellous symbolism of the mass and the cathedral so explicitly set
forth by the monk Durandus and Vincent of Beauvais, and for its good
offices here alone the world owes it a deep and lasting gratitude.
One is tempted to go on through other fields where the harvest is
plenteous, but an end must be made, and it is here. There remains the
question of the issue of it all--whether out of this latest devastation
that so adequately follows those of the nineteenth century, of the
French Revolution, of Protestantism and the wars of religion, of the
Hundred Years’ War with England, any compensation may come for the
progressive (and as yet unfinished) destruction of the art records of a
great past. If we consider alone the wide ruin in Flanders and Brabant,
in Artois and Picardy and Champagne, there seems no possible
compensation for what we ourselves knew and now have lost for ever.
Nevertheless, the law of the universe is death that life may come; and
out of this present death that is so immeasurably more wide-spread and
inclusive than any known before, even when the Huns or the Moslems were
on their deadly march across Europe, there should come a proportionately
fuller life, a “life more abundant,” than that which is now in
dissolution. If this is so, if we can look across the plains of death
and immeasurable destruction to the dimly seen peaks of the mountain
frontiers of a new Land of Promise, then we can see Louvain and Liége,
Ypres and Arras, Laon and Soissons and Reims pass in the crash and the
dim smoke of obliteration, content with their tragic destiny, even as we
can see poured out as a new oblation the ten millions of lives, the
tears of an hundred millions of those who follow down into the Valley of
the Shadow of Death.
Is it all a vain oblation? There is the crucial question and the answer
is left with us. This is no war of economic and industrial rivalry, of
jealous dynasties, of opposed political theories; it is not the
inevitable result of a malignant diplomacy from Frederick the Great and
Metternich to Disraeli and the German Kaiser; it is not even the last
act in a drama ushered in by Machiavelli and brought to its denouement
at Pottsdam. All these and myriad other strands have gone to the weaving
of the poisoned shirt of Nessus, but they all are blind agents, tools of
a dominant and supreme destiny by which are brought about the events
that are only the way of working of an unescapable fate. The war is a
culminating catastrophe, but it is as well the greatest mercy ever
extended to men, for it may be made the means of a great purging, the
atonement for the later sins of the world, the redemption from a wilful
blindness and folly that are not consonant with the will of God.
There is a stern propriety in the centring around the Cathedral of Reims
of the first phase of the great conflict, and in its slow and implacable
demolition. Long ago Heinrich Heine, the poet of the German people,
though not himself a German, saw clearly the coming ruin and wrote as
follows:
Christianity--and this is its highest merit--has in some degree
softened, but it could not destroy, the brutal German joy of
battle. When once the taming talisman, the Cross, breaks in two,
the savagery of the old fighters, the senseless Berserker fury of
which the northern poets sing and say so much, will gush up anew.
That talisman is decayed, and the day will come when it will
piteously collapse. Then the old stone gods will rise from the
silent ruins, and rub the dust of a thousand years from their eyes.
Thor, with his giant’s hammer, will at last spring up, and shatter
to bits the Gothic cathedrals.
Better than any other, he has declared the nature of this war that arose
a century after his death. Thor, the impersonation of conscienceless and
unmitigated force, shatters in pieces the Gothic cathedrals because he
and they are antitheses and they cannot exist in the same world. Like
Barbarossa sitting stonily in his dim cave under ground, century after
century, while his beard grows through the rocky table before him,
waiting for the call that will send him forth into the world again,
primitive force and primitive craft have sullenly awaited the day when
the Christian dispensation passes and they issue again into the light.
In the fulness of time their day arrives and their first task is to
destroy the symbol of their ended bondage. With the name of Christ on
their lips and the boast of Christian civilisation in their mouths, the
nations and the peoples forsake Christianity until only the
nomenclature remains and the memorials of its power and glory.
Reims falls, but that which built Reims fell long ago, while the devious
undermining and the blind sapping began even while the last cubits were
being added to its stature, and since then has been only a steady
progression in strength and assurance of its antitheses--of materialism,
intellectualism, secularism, industrialism, opportunism, efficiency;
founded on the coal and iron of the Scar of Europe and on the sinister
and ingratiating philosophy that came out of a re-entrant paganism,
thrived under the fertilisation of an evolutionary empiricism, flowered
in a Nietzsche, a Treitschke, and a Bernhardi. And always it presented
itself in a gracious guise; intellectual emancipation, humanitarianism,
social service, democratic liberty, evolution, parliamentary government,
progress, direct approach of each soul to God. It all sounded fine and
high and noble, and on the 30th day of July, 1914, there could have been
hardly a thousand men in the world, apart from those in the secret, who
would not have said--there were not a thousand in Europe who did not
believe--that man in his regular progress from lower ever to higher
things had achieved a plane where the wars and savagery and lies of the
past were no longer possible.
And in one week from that fateful 30th of July the cloud castle had
dissolved in a rain of blood. Could conviction have come to the world in
any other way? Would the diseased body have reacted to a gentle
prophylactic, could the Surgeon have spared His knife? Since the knife
is used, the answer admits of no dispute, but will it be enough? This is
the question that is asked on every battle-field of a world at war; the
lesson is set for the learning--will the nations learn? In so far as
they have diverged from what Reims stood for; from Leo IX and Gregory
VII and Innocent III; from Edward I and Ferdinand III and Louis IX; from
Eleanor of Guienne and Blanche of Castile and Margaret of Malines; from
St. Bernard, St. Norbert, and St. Anselm; from Albertus Magnus and Hugh
of St. Victor and St. Thomas Aquinas, just so far have they to return,
bringing with them not empty hands but all the great good winnowed from
the harvest of grain and chaff they have reaped in those years of
spiritual and material and national disorder that began when the dizzy
fabric of mediævalism trembled to its base at the exile at Avignon and
“piteously collapsed” between the nailing at Wittenberg and the
sansculotte throning of the “Goddess of Reason” in the desecrated
cathedral of Notre Dame. There is good grain in plenty, but it is sowed
along with the chaff and the tares, and now for the last harvesting the
grain has germinated only to dwindle and die, for the tares have sprung
up and choked it and the red garnering is of tares alone.
Men would think, as they follow the scarlet annals of war, that the
lesson was sufficiently clear even for pacificists to read as they run,
but is it so? France reads and learns, gloriously regenerate, blotting
out the memory of old folly with her blood of sacrifice, turning again
as her first King Clovis was adjured by St. Remi of Reims, destroying
what she worshipped a year ago, worshipping what then, and for two
centuries before, she had destroyed. Again France shows the way,
traversing it with bleeding feet and with many tears; Russia is learning
it, though she had less to unlearn; Belgium must have learned it through
her blind martyrdom; but how of the others? Is England learning, and
Italy; will Germany learn, and Austria; will America learn, standing
aloof from the smoking altar of sacrifice; will the Church learn, there
in trembling isolation while again Peter listens for the crowing of the
cock? If not, if when silence comes down on a decimated, an exhausted, a
bankrupt world, the old ways are sought again and men go on as before,
then the myriad lives and the dreary rain of tears are indeed a vain
oblation, and all will be to do over again. God sets no lesson that need
not be learned, and unless out of it all comes an old heaven and a new
earth, then the lesson is set again, as time after time it was set for
imperial Rome, until a century of war and pestilence and famine broke
down her insolent pride and made from the ruins of her vainglory a
foundation for a new civilisation in the strength of the Christianity
she had denied.