Part 5
With the Peace of Utrecht all that is now Belgium passed to the Emperor Charles VI, and Austrian dominion began. In contrast to the preceding horrors it was comparatively uneventful; while Prince Charles of Lorraine was governor the country was quiet and prosperous and a certain advance occurred on cultural lines. This enlightened prince deserves well of history in one respect at least, for, by an imperial decree he caused to be issued, it was solemnly asserted that a gentleman did not lose his status as such if he indulged in the practice of the arts or letters! Joseph II, who followed him, was a pedantic reformer of laudable intentions, who set himself to the perfecting of everything, both religious and secular, to the extreme irritation of his people who simply wanted to govern themselves and apparently cared little whether this were well done or ill. In the end the whole country broke up again in rebellion and disorder, the nobles leagued in one group under the Duke d’Arenberg, the lower classes in a second with a vulgar and noisy demagogue, Van der Noot, as its leader. Somehow or other they managed to get together at Breda, raised an army, defeated the Austrian garrisons, and drove the Emperor Joseph across the Meuse when he forthwith died of sheer discouragement.
Then followed a short-lived “republic” engineered by Van der Noot, who was an adherent of the new French ideas, with an attack on the nobles which was sufficiently successful to bring their party to an end. Next, the powers who looked most askance at the fast-growing revolution--England, Holland, and Prussia--united for the restoration of Austrian authority, on general principles, and the Emperor Leopold II, with their support, asserted, and then established his authority, capturing Namur and within two weeks occupying the whole country (which accepted him contentedly enough), driving the ambitious advocate with the revolutionary tendencies into a well-merited exile. Austria tried honestly enough to conciliate the country, but its temper and inclinations were otherwise, so France was asked to intervene, which she was not loath to do, sending Dumouriez to undertake the task. Badly beaten at first, he succeeded finally at Valmy and Jemappes, and the French Revolution assumed control. The cabal of assassins then in power in Paris decreed that Belgium should be saved, but that first she must be purged, and a choice assortment of thirty ruffians was sent to Brussels to see that this was done. A guillotine was set up at once, and clerics, nobles, and the wealthier merchants became its victims, while the patriot army, supported by the local revolutionists, acted after their kind and sacked the remaining churches, destroyed religious houses, and generally plundered whatever they safely could, _i. e._, whatever was unable to defend itself. Dumouriez countenanced none of this, but he was playing a double game, acting ostensibly for the cabal in Paris though with the idea always before him that if he could control Belgium and conquer Holland he would be in a good position from which to turn on his employers, crush them, and then restore the monarchy on constitutional lines. Unfortunately for his plans, he was defeated by the allies and again Austria won back her insecure provinces. She was received with the facile enthusiasm which now seemed chronic with the shattered Belgian character, but after a few months was driven out for the last time when France was finally victorious over the half-hearted, selfish, and ineffectual allies, only one of whom, England, was waging war against the republic with anything approaching sincerity and determination.
Again the French--or rather the republican faction--entered into possession, and unhappy Belgium felt the full force of its grinning hypocrisy, its satanic savagery, and its unscrupulous greed. “Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity” was painted on the walls, and simultaneously the country was robbed of its last coins, its laws and privileges were overthrown, its citizens deprived of even the most fundamental rights of liberty and property, while the few remaining abbeys and castles were sacked, burned, and their ruins razed to the ground. Alva had been an amateur compared with the new apostles of liberty, and when at last Belgium was declared regenerate and was incorporated in the French “republic,” nothing remained for incorporation except a name, a memory, and a huddle of entirely ruined and perfectly hopeless victims of four centuries of cumulative enlightenment and progress.
Of course they rebelled; of course whole groups of desperate men took to the forests and moors, robbing, killing, existing as best they could, and of course they were crushed again and again; at last, however, Bonaparte began to bring some order out of the republican anarchy, and conditions improved. When at last he proclaimed himself Emperor the Belgians accepted him with the same avidity they always had shown for any man who promised some alleviation of their intolerable sufferings. Holland was occupied and given a king of its own, Napoleon’s brother Louis, who was not only the strongest and finest character in the family, but so righteous in his kingship and so whole-heartedly devoted to his Dutch that he soon alienated the sympathies of his imperial brother while failing to gain those of his somewhat difficult subjects.
The dream empire began to dissolve; Holland revolted, and the Prince of Orange was restored; Belgium was occupied by the Allies, who had got to work again, and the scheme of a new state, to be formed of all the old seventeen provinces united under the Prince of Orange, was brought forward against the wishes of the Belgians, who preferred the restoration of Austrian rule. They had lived too close to their Protestant Dutch neighbours and had too keen a memory of their character and habits to desire amalgamation with them on any terms.
Napoleon went to Elba, came back, called on his “loyal Belgians” to support him, advanced into their territories, and at Waterloo lost everything and melted away into history and legend, leaving Belgium in unnatural union with the Dutch provinces, where it remained for some fifteen years, revolting in 1830, making good its rebellion, and establishing itself as an independent state under the sovereignty of Prince Leopold of Saxe-Cobourg, who had been elected King on the refusal of the Duc de Nemours, first chosen by the victorious provisional government.
The long agony was at an end; it had lasted from August 22, 1567, when the Duke of Alva entered Brussels, until July 21, 1831, when Leopold I was crowned King of Belgium, a period of two hundred and sixty-four years. Other peoples and other states have been brought low, time out of mind; have suffered, disintegrated, and disappeared. It would be hard to find another instance, however, where so fabulously rich a people, and so cultivated withal, so supreme in their achievement of a lofty and well-rounded civilisation, have been called upon to submit to so prolonged, varied, and searching an assault, to descend to such depths of misery, poverty, and degradation--and who yet have preserved through two centuries and a half of agony and spoliation a tradition and a habit of righteousness that, when the great test arrived, blazed upward in sudden fierceness of self-revelation to the confusion of new enemies and the wonder of a world. What lies beyond awaits the proof, but for the moment three centuries have dropped away and the old independence, the old fearlessness, the old honour of Bruges and Ghent, of Liége and Malines shine again on old battle-fields of new carnage and in new hearts of old righteousness. The new era begins, and the world waits, confident of the issue.
V
THE GLORY OF A GREAT ART
BETWEEN Paris and Cologne, Strasbourg and Bruges lies, in little, nearly the whole history of northern architecture from Charlemagne to the last Louis of France, when it ceased to be an art and became a fashion. The greater part of Normandy lies, it is true, across the Seine, and is, for the time, beyond our field of vision, but, barring Caen, architectural significance is well concentrated in the triangle, Rouen, Dieppe, le Havre. The same is true of the old Royaume of France; though Chartres and Bourges lie to the south, the beginning, and in some sense the culmination, of Gothic is to be found between Seine and Somme. In the east, to the Rhine, we have practically all that Germany has contributed, except in the later days of the Renaissance.
If we like, we may go far beyond the dim and mysterious era of the Carolings, finding in Trèves old Roman ruins that take us back four or five centuries earlier, but the real history of this region begins with Charlemagne and takes us to his favourite city of Aix-la-Chapelle for the single, but vastly significant, building left us as evidence of his inspiration and his creative power. With the ending of this day-dream there comes a great silence, while civilisation and culture disappear again, to be restored two centuries later, far to the west, and at the hands of the Normans. Here we find St. Georges de Bocherville, Fécamp, and the inestimable and forgotten ruins of Jumièges. For transition to Gothic we have Senlis, Soissons, Noyon, with Laon and Paris as earliest Gothic of pure and consistent type; Châlons, Amiens, and Reims for culmination, and Abbeville, Rouen, Beauvais, Troyes, and Strasbourg for its sumptuous decline.
From the other hand we go on from Aix to Cologne for the fine eleventh-century work that took up the tale after the second Dark Ages that followed the ending of the empire of the Carolings, with more examples at Laach and in Hildesheim, which also are beyond our survey. A century later we get the consistent Teutonic art of Trèves, Mayence, Spires, and Worms, while the high Gothic of the noon of mediævalism is found at Cologne and Strasbourg, with the last rich fantasy of all, in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, in Brussels and Antwerp and Malines, in Courtrai, Tournai, Namur, Louvain, Ghent, Ypres, and Bruges. For Renaissance we find all we need, and everywhere; churches, palaces, guild-halls, châteaux, dwellings, from the fanciful transition at Dieppe, Rouen, Gisors, to the sophisticated, well-conditioned, and perfectly artificial restored classic of Nancy.
As there is no other country in the north, of equal area, where history has been made so plenteously and of such varied quality, so it is with its art, and its architecture in particular, which marks the beginnings, the culmination, and the close of the three stylistic periods of Christian civilisation in the West--Carolingian, Norman, and Gothic--and through monuments singularly significant and equally notable in their perfection. It would be impossible to quote a tenth of them; there are a hundred at least, each of which demands (and many have received) a volume or more, but at least we can pick the most priceless, either for history or beauty, in a farewell that may be final for all, as already it is for such consummate and vanished masterpieces as the Cloth Hall at Ypres and the Cathedral of Reims.
Let us begin with Aix, just over the Belgian
frontier, the “City of the Great King,” where culture lightened again after the long night, and where, of all the churches and palaces of the Emperor, only one remains as evidence of what he did. The royal chapel has been built onto and over and around, but the original norm remains in the shape of that polygonal form with surrounding arcades that was a step in the development of the perfect Gothic chevet. To a great extent it is a replica of San Vitale in Ravenna, and may very well have been built by the descendants of those Roman craftsmen who, after the fall of the one-time capitol of the world, sought refuge either under Byzantine protection in Ravenna or on Lake Como, where the tradition is they carefully cherished the traditions and the esoteric mysteries of their art, perpetuating the slowly fading memory through secret lodges that, some held, were the progenitors of modern freemasonry.
When the possibilities of a new culture and a restored civilisation revealed themselves to the conqueror, who was also statesman, patriot, and (after his dim and flickering light) Christian, two centuries had left the West a wilderness, and all was to do over again. There were, it seemed, neither scholars nor artists nor righteous leaders of any sort in the world, and the task must have appeared hopeless. Charlemagne, undaunted, sent east and west, from Britain to Spain, searching out those who, by report, rose above the hopeless level of barbarian mediocrity. Alcuin of Britain, Peter of Pisa, Theodulphus, Hincmar, Eriugena, Radbertus Maurus, gathered around him at Aix, forming a cultural centre, reforming the Church, building up schools, creating an art almost out of nothing.
There was little enough, though Rome had its basilicas of the time of Constantine--San Paolo, San Lorenzo, Santa Maria Maggiore; from the East, it is true, travellers brought back wondering stories of the splendour of Justinian’s churches, with Hagia Sophia at the head; in Ravenna were the more modest monuments of the Exarchate--Sant’ Apollinare in Classe, San Vitale--in Istria, at Parenzo and Grado, were churches showing some new elements probably provided by Lombard builders, and San Pietro, Toscanella stood like a miracle, novel, without forebears, a new version of an ancient theme. These are what we have left, and then there was more, for much has since been destroyed, but most of it lay far afield, and in the north there was nothing. The work of co-ordination was well performed, however, and the succession was re-established; after the chapel at Aix, therefore, architectural development was continuous, if moderate, though any estimate must be dubious owing to the almost complete destruction of the monuments. We still have the apses of Sant’ Ambrogio in Milan; San Donato, Zara, N. D. de la Couture of Le Mans, and Montier en Der, none of them particularly inspiring or inspired, and none with any hint of what was suddenly to happen at Jumièges in the eleventh century. That the latter building may not have been as amazing an innovation as it appears is indicated by fragments and foundations of the work that came between it and Charlemagne, as at St. Martin of Tours, where the Revolution has left us nothing but foundations indicative of a former superstructure that may well have been the connecting-link, and might have changed our entire estimate of the quality of the architecture of the second Dark Ages. As it is, this chapel at Aix stands not only first in the great recovery of the eighth century, but almost unique, with no successors for nearly three centuries.
When the true dawn begins to lighten the hills, it is in the west that its coming is foreshown, in that Duchy of Normandy, where in a century the fierce Vikings, who had been driven from the coast of Flanders in their forays from the Baltic, had become the finely tempered material out of which was to be forged, by the monks of Cluny, a Catholic civilisation that was to extend itself over all western Europe and endure for five centuries. Of the three great abbeys that were the centres from which radiated the great transforming force, Bec, Fécamp, and Jumièges, the two latter lie on our side of the Seine, with the third only ten miles on the other side, while St. Georges de Bocherville, intact except for its pestilential restoration, is of the same period, as is Cérisy le Forêt. Caen, with its two abbeys of the Conqueror, inestimable monuments of architectural history, is well to the west, with Evreux, Lisieux, Bayeux, and Mont St. Michel, but we have enough on the right bank to demonstrate the nature and the greatness of the work accomplished by Cluny and the Normans in a union cemented by a vital and crescent Christianity.
Jumièges stands first, in its forgotten loop of the Seine, and is amazing, no less. But for its fine new fourteenth-century chevet, it was, at the time of the French Revolution, almost in its original state, but it was destroyed then, with Cluny, Avranches, St. Martin of Tours, and other priceless monuments, though by no means so completely. To-day its towering walls, rising above thick trees and greenery, are startlingly picturesque, but their great value lies in the revelation they make of what was possible in the earliest days of Christian recovery. The work was begun in 1040 and finished within twenty-five years, being followed immediately by the abbeys of Caen, as these were followed by St. Georges de Bocherville. The original plan was in each case about the same, the standard type, originally Latin, with Syrian, and probably Lombard and Carolingian, developments; cruciform, aisled both in nave and choir, the latter being of two bays only, with an apse, but no apsidal aisle and chapels as at Tours. The transepts are of two bays on either side the central tower, the end bays having galleries or tribunes, with a subordinate apse to the east, so forming, in the lower stage, small, low chapels. It is in the working upward from this plan that the significant developments appear, and both here and at Cérisy le Forêt, we find the order of round-arched arcade, high triforium of two arches under a containing arch, and a single clerestory window, Cérisy having as well an open clerestory arcade of three units. The system is clearly alternating, as in Lombardy and Tuscany, but there is no evidence that vaulting was ever contemplated; instead, I think it certain that great transverse arches on every other pier, supporting a wooden roof, were in mind, after the Syrian fashion, as it was later modified at San Miniato in Florence, a few years before, though these were certainly never built at Jumièges. The west front, with its tall, flanking towers, is of the Como type (query: Is the hand of the Comacine master visible here?), while all the vertical proportions are more lofty and aspiring than had ever been known before. As a matter of fact, given the chevet with its aisle and radiating chapels, which was already being worked out farther south by the simple process of halving the Syrian, Byzantine, Ravennesque, and Carolingian polygonal church and attaching this to the simultaneously developed nave, and you have all the potency of the Gothic system, the high vault (sexpartite or quadripartite) with its flying buttresses now to be worked out at Caen, giving the final structural element, while the expanding Catholic faith and the buoyant northern blood were woven together to have issue in that essentially mediæval character which was to transform the whole, infusing it with that peculiar spiritual quality which gave its distinctive character, through a new vision of beauty, to the art that had been evolved for the full expression of a Christian civilisation at last triumphant and supreme over a dead paganism.
After Cluny and Jumièges, Paris, Bourges, Chartres, and Reims are inevitable, and the working out of a great destiny is headlong and almost incredible. Jumièges was finished in 1066, the year of the Norman conquest of England; Reims was begun in 1212. Within a space of a century and a half the greatest architectural evolution in history had taken place, so echoing and voicing an equally unprecedented development in human character and culture. In 1066, hardly more than fifty years had passed since Christian society emerged from two centuries of barbarism; in 1212 it had mounted to the loftiest levels of human achievement, with a theology, a philosophy, and an art, whatever its form, with which there had been nothing comparable in the past, with which the achievements that were to follow, as they now show themselves in the red light of a revealing war, seem only the insane wanderings of a disorganised horde.
The sequence of development is well worked out east of the Seine, and at the hands of the Franks of the “Royaume,” now under the direction of the Cistercians, as a century before the Normans had been controlled by the Cluniacs. This constant revivification of monasticism during crescent periods of human growth is a very interesting phenomenon. Apparently monasticism, which has accompanied Christianity from its earliest beginning until to-day, is an essential portion of its working structure, and if you accept Christianity in fact, you cannot escape accepting the “religious life” in principle. It seems, however, that it is always in unstable equilibrium, prone to inevitable decadence, and no order lasts out three generations without losing its beneficent energy. When life is on its periodic upward curve, a reformation always occurs at the critical moment, and there is no loss of impetus; so the original Benedictinism which had served Charlemagne so well, but had sunk into worse than inaction, gave place in the eleventh century to the great Cluniac reform, which in its turn was succeeded by the Cistercian reform, as this yielded after another hundred years to the reform of St. Dominic and St. Francis.
Now the Romanesque art of Toulouse, Aquitaine, and Burgundy, the Norman of Normandy and England, the Rhenish of Germany, were largely Benedictine of the Cluniac mode, and the style rapidly became inordinately sumptuous, costly, and magnificent, as at Arles, Toulouse, Poitiers, Glastonbury, Durham. It has been said of monastic movements: “First generation pious, second generation learned, third generation decadent.” Certainly as the Benedictines in France went on to the twelfth century, their original austerity and fervour were relaxed, and their art became a thing of splendour as their wealth and learning and temporal power increased. The Cistercian movement of Robert of Molesme and Stephen Harding and Bernard of Clairvaux was a revolt against luxury and laxity, an attempt (as ever) to get back to the supposititious simplicity of earlier times, and in the success that followed architecture changed completely, though the ending of the new style, and even its consummation, were different indeed from what the Cistercian reforms had desired.
In its beginnings Gothic architecture was an attempt at economy, the trying for something less massive and ornate than the great Benedictine piles of inert masonry. By cleverly developing a system of balanced thrusts, the sheer bulk of masonry was reduced by half, while attention was drawn away from the fast-increasing ornamentation to the shell itself, whereby a great gain was effected, and architecture became once more a study in organism, in composition, and in proportion. Gothic is primarily the perfection of exquisite organism, almost living in its consummate integrity and its sensitive interplay of forces. This perfectly co-ordinated structure is, of course, infused and transfigured by an intense sense of beauty, quite new in its forms, and given a spiritual and symbolical content peculiar to itself, the result being what, for want of a better term, we call Gothic. The two elements cannot be disassociated, as pedants feign, for, like all great art, it is in a sense sacramental, and the “outward and visible sign” may never be separated from the “inward and spiritual grace.”[A]
[A] “Sacramentum est corporale vel materiale elementum foris sensibiliter propositum ex similitudine repræsentans, et ex institutione significans et ex sanctificatione continens, aliquam invisibilem et spiritualem gratiam.”--(Hugo de St. Victoire.)