Part 7

Most of this inimitable art already has been blasted and calcined away, and the same fate has overtaken the glass. Here was an achievement of the highest in an art of the best. In the light (literally) of the stained glass of our own times, we had found some difficulty in realising that this was an art at all, but it needed only a visit to Chartres or Reims for enlightenment to come to us. At Chartres, in the very earliest years of the thirteenth century, it reached its

culmination; there is no greater glass anywhere than this, almost no greater art, and Reims, while less complete (the aisle windows were wholly removed by eighteenth-century canons on the score of an added “cheerfulness”), was of the same school, though later and just past the cresting of the wave. If it lacked the unearthly clarity and divine radiance of the western lancets, and the “Belle Verrière” of Chartres, it had qualities of its own, particularly its most glorious azures and rubies, that allowed no rival, and it easily ranked with Chartres and Bourges and Poitiers as manifesting the possibilities of a noble art, and a lost art, at its highest point of achievement.

So far as can be learned, all this has perished and it cannot be restored. It lies in shivered heaps where it has fallen and the chapter of the glass of Reims is closed.

Four months ago the ruin already was irreparable, and since then bombardments have been frequent and merciless, nor has the enemy as yet been driven beyond the range of gun-fire. Whether even the shattered and crumbling fabric--wherefrom all carving, all detail, all glass, all sculpture has been burned and blasted away--survives in the end, none can foretell; but one thing is sure, and that is that no “restoration” must ever be attempted. If enough remains so that careful hands may preserve it from disintegration and make it available for the worship of God, well and good, so long as no imitations, whether in stone or metal or glass, are intruded to mock its vanished glory and obliterate for future generations the record of an indelible crime. For seven centuries its beauty and its perfection have spoken to succeeding generations, each less willing to listen than the last. In its ruin and its devastation it will speak more clearly and to more willing ears, than in any pretentious rehabilitation.

To the sordid wickedness of its destruction has been added the insult of Prussian promises of complete restoration--a catastrophe that would crown the first with a greater and more contemptible indignity. Instead, let Reims remain as it is left, and then, in Paris, let France, regenerated and redeemed, as already has gloriously happened, make for ever visible her restoration, through blood and suffering, to her old ideals, by carrying out her vow to build in honour of Ste. Jeanne d’Arc a great new church, raise a new Reims, like the old in plan and form and dimensions. Not a copy, but a revival, with the old ideals, the old motives, the old self-consecration; different, as the new must differ from the old, but akin in spirit and in truth.

If one only knew how to interpret it, there is some mysterious significance in the centring of the war of the world around Reims and in the persistent and successful efforts of the Prussians to raze it to the ground. Seven centuries ago the mystics of St. Victor would have read the riddle, but for too long now we have been out of temper with symbolism and too averse to the acceptance of signs and portents to be able to see even dimly the correspondences and the significance of those human happenings that are actually outside human control. In a way Reims was the ancient heart of France, as Paris is not, and it always was a sacred city above all others--and sacred it is now as never before. It was here that the Christianising of the Franks was sealed by the baptism of Clovis, A. D. 496, by St. Remi, the canonised bishop who occupied the see for seventy-five years. The crowning of kings (every sovereign but four for a period of fifteen hundred years came here for his coronation), the assembling of great councils of the Church, the beneficent activities of universities and schools of philosophy were all commonplaces of the life of the city, while it was here that Ste. Jeanne d’Arc finally discomfited the English and led her King to his crowning in the church that is now destroyed.

Time and again the city has been devastated, from the Vandals of 392 to those of 1914. During the Revolution its churches suffered bitterly; the cathedral and St. Remi, until then, were rich with unnumbered shrines, altars, statues, tombs, while cloisters and religious buildings of many kinds surrounded them on all sides. All this wealth of hoarded art that expressed the piety and culture of centuries was swept away, even to the sacred ampulla of holy oil, piously believed to have been brought by a dove for the consecration of Clovis and ever after miraculously replenished for each succeeding coronation. To this irreparable devastation was added the indignity of official “restoration,” though in the case of the cathedral at the able and scrupulous hands of Viollet-le-Duc, and in the nineteenth century the picturesque and beautiful old streets gave place to boulevards and a general Hausmanising on approved Parisian lines, so that in 1914 the city had become dull and somewhat pretentious, framing the two priceless jewels, the Church of Our Lady of Reims and that of the holy St. Remi.

All is now gone, the glorious and the insignificant alike overwhelmed in indiscriminating ruin. The glass and the statues that had survived war, revolution, and stupidity are shattered in fragments, the roofs consumed by fire, the vaults burst asunder, the carved stones calcined and flaking hourly in a dreary rain on blood-stained pavements where a hundred kings have trod and into deserted streets that have echoed to the footsteps of threescore generations. The city has passed; _deleta est Carthago_, but it has left a memory, a tradition, and an inspiration that may yet play a greater part in the rebuilding of civilisation than could have been achieved by its remaining monuments as they stood making their unheeded appeal on the day the first shell was fired from the Prussian batteries on the eastern hills.

The tendency I have spoken of which showed itself in Amiens, the breaking up of the mediæval integrity and a consequent inclination toward undue emphasis on structural and intellectual arrogance, never went very far because of the ill days that fell on France. The victory of the French crown over the Papacy, with the resulting transfer of the Holy See to Avignon, was the ruin of Catholic civilisation in France, as well as in Italy and the rest of Christendom. The Church became subservient to the state and progressively corrupt in root and branch. The wars with England resulted in nothing less than ruin, and culture and art came to an end. By 1370 building had become thin, poor, uninspired, and yet, within the next ten years flamboyant architecture appeared, and the fifteenth century opened with a sudden burst of artistic splendour. Heaven knows what it all means; France was at her lowest depth, and yet, without warning, a regeneration took place. The Blessed Jeanne d’Arc appears like a miraculous vision, Orleans is saved, the rightful king is crowned, and though the martyrdom of the saviour of France takes place in 1430, the English are driven out in 1456, and a new day begins.

Was Jeanne d’Arc a single manifestation of a new spirit that had entered society, or was this itself a continuation of what she had initiated under God? The answer does not really matter, the important fact is that a great regeneration took place, and a new type of art followed in its wake. Now the tendency was away from the proud efficiency of a glorified architectural engineering and toward the other element in architecture, beauty of form and splendour of ornament. It was almost as though the French had turned to religion and beauty as their only refuge from the miseries of their estate. In the very first years of the fifteenth century, at the darkest hours of France, Notre Dame de l’Epine, close by Châlons on the Marne, was built in 1419. Caudebec in 1426, St. Maclou, Rouen, in 1432, and after these for more than a century France abandoned herself to the creation of works of architectural art that, whatever they may lack of the splendid consistency and the divine serenity of the thirteenth century, are nevertheless amongst the loveliest works of man. Beauvais is an admirable example of the two tendencies; begun in 1225, its impossible choir was finished in 1272, only to collapse twelve years later, paying the penalty of its structural arrogance. For forty years it was in process of reconstruction, after a more conservative fashion though of its original dimensions, and in 1500 the transepts were begun and finished fifty years later. In beauty and in an almost riotous richness, they are the crowning work of this phase of design, while the choir itself, with its marvellously articulated system of buttresses, is a creation of sheer architectural power almost unrivalled. Ambitious and defiant, the canons now, in 1550, reared a vast spire over the crossing, nearly 450 feet high, and of the same sumptuous design as the transepts. The whole stupendous erection fell twenty-five years later, and has never been rebuilt, while the nave was never even begun; so Beauvais remains a vast fragment, and a living commentary on the excesses and the penalties of that pride of life that succeeded to the spiritual humility of the Middle Ages.

The new style, however, was perfectly adapted to the new life of secular supremacy, and, with few exceptions, both here in eastern France and in Flanders and Brabant and the Netherlands, the great civic monuments and the innumerable châteaux of an expanding and ripening society are couched in its beautiful and elaborate terms. Essentially it is a mode of ornament, containing no new element in organism, but always beautiful and, in France at all events, marked always by delicate and admirable taste. With its flame-like tracery, its complicated pinnacles, its scaffoldings of intricate latticework; with its curved and aspiring lines, glimmering niches, pierced parapets, open-work spires, and its tangled foliage, dainty filigree-work and sculptured lace, it is a marvel of imagination, dramatic sense, and consummate craftsmanship. Sometimes it is strikingly competent in its composition, as in the transepts of Beauvais and the front of Troyes, the latter being in its unfulfilled promise (it is only a beginning) one of the great façades of France, but frequently its greatest weakness is forgetfulness of consistency in a passion for beauty of line and light and shade that became almost insane. With the beginning of the sixteenth century the new art began slowly to decay in ecclesiastical buildings, but it continued for at least another hundred years in châteaux and civic work, and it is this in particular that is now disappearing through a war waged by unprecedented methods and in accordance with principles (if we may call them such) which hitherto have been found associated only with barbarian invasions or the frenzies of a mad anarchy that has called itself Revolution.

For the more distinguished châteaux we must go outside our chosen field, to the Loire, Touraine, or to other parts of France where the devastation of past wars and revolutions is less complete. There is Pierrefonds, of course, if one cares for that sort of thing, but of authentic castles of the sixteenth century there are few of notable quality, though many minor farms and manors still remained in August, 1914. Ecouen and Chantilly are exceptions, and the latter, given to the nation by the Duc d’Aumale when he was exiled by the republic for the crime of belonging to the legitimate line of kings, is a good example of the princely buildings of the Renaissance when the last fires of Gothic spirit were dying away.

It is not so long ago that half the towns in France between the Seine and the Belgian frontier were threaded by wonderful little streets of stone-built and half-timber houses three centuries old, and bright with squares and market-places framed in old architecture of Francis I and Henri II. Their quaint and delicate beauty was too much for the nineteenth century, however, which revolted against an old art as it revolted against an old culture and an older religion, so nearly all are gone, their place being taken by substitutes, the destruction of which could hardly be counted against the Prussians for unrighteousness, if one considered æsthetic questions alone, which is, fortunately, impossible. For these dim old streets and sunny silent squares one could, until a few months ago, go confidently across the border, finding in Flanders, Brabant, Liége, and Luxembourg relief from the appalling sophistication that had taken possession of the old cities of Champagne. Even in France, until last year, were Douai, Pont-à-Mousson, Meaux, and of course Arras, though now of some of these worse than nothing remains. In the latter city was once, also, a particularly splendid example of those great civic halls that showed forth the pride and the independence of the industrial cities of the later Middle Ages, and another stood in Douai. As Flanders and Brabant are, however, the chosen places for this particular manifestation of an industrial civilisation, so different to our own in spirit and in expression, we may include them therewith, where they racially and historically belong; and having followed the development of an essentially religious art in France from Jumièges to Beauvais, note its translation in later years into civic forms, in the little and heroic Kingdom with so great and heroic a history, now and for many months shut off from the world still free, by the veil of smoke and poisoned gases.

VII

THE BURGHERS AND THEIR BUILDING

The great civic halls were those of Audenaarde, Brussels, Louvain, Malines, Termonde, Bruges, Ghent, Ypres, and Arras, and each of these cities was as well full of wonderful old houses, some private residences, some quarters for the various guilds. It is impossible to discriminate between past and present tense in describing them; some are wholly gone, as Ypres and Arras, others we suppose still remain, but how long this may be true one cannot say. If we lose what we have lost in the onrush of a victorious army, and in its long holding of defensive lines in the most amazing siege in history, what may we not expect at the hands of an army in defeat, fighting its way back to its own frontiers for a last desperate stand? Arras, Ypres, and Louvain were hard enough to lose, but the soul shudders at the thought of Bruges and Ghent, Antwerp and Brussels, fought over day after day and abandoned to pillage and destruction.

The historical significance of these halls is very great; they put into material (and as we had thought enduring) form the oligarchical democracy, the great wealth, the pride, the sumptuous and lavish spirit of successive generations of princely merchants and manufacturers. Religion was still a vital force, but it no longer stood alone, and now the secular organisations of guilds and free cities claimed and received the tribute of wealth through the ministry of art. It was not the old art of the days of cathedral building and the founding of abbeys and universities, it was quite a different art altogether, but it fitted the new motives and ideals as the other could not do. Of severity, self-restraint, reticence, it has nothing; it is all splendour and magnificence, emulation and rivalry, but it is still craftsman’s art, and whatever the taste of these great and even fantastic buildings, there is proof of joyful workmanship and of a jealous maintenance of the highest possible standards.

Ypres was the first in point of time, and first in absolute artistic value. Begun by Count Baldwin in the year 1200, it was remodelled, rebuilt, embellished for a hundred years, and finally the “Nieuwerke,” of the most abandoned Renaissance taste, was added to the east. Of huge dimensions--the main front was four hundred and thirty-three feet in length, while the great tower was two hundred and thirty feet high--the design was as simple, imposing, and direct as one would expect to find during the early thirteenth century. It was a simple parallelogram, three stories high, nobly arcaded, with ranges of fine niches which contained statues of the Counts of Flanders and other worthies, until these were completely destroyed by the French during the Revolution. A vast, high-pitched roof covered all, broken in the middle by the belfry, with its corner turrets, which were echoed at the four corners of the building by similar spires. A simpler composition could hardly be imagined, or one more impressive in its grave restraint. Architecturally it was unique; there was and is no other rival of a similar nature, and its value was inestimable. Bold in conception, straightforward, direct, confident without assurance, it was one great masterpiece of the civic art of the Middle Ages, miraculously preserved for six centuries as the visible manifestation of the supreme quality of a great people and a great art. Both without and within it had that spontaneousness, that fine, frank

naïveté that one finds in all crescent periods and searches for in vain in the following days that history always selects for particular admiration. Analyse it and see how simple it all was. First there were three chief organic elements: the great wall unbroken by any “features,” without buttresses because it was not vaulted; the enormous, high-pitched roof bare of all gables or diversions of any kind; the square, unbuttressed tower in the middle, with a tall, pointed roof and cupola, surrounded by four high pinnacles of the simplest form. It is as calm and simple as a Greek temple, and like this, also, it is final in the perfection of its proportions and its relation of parts; also its great, quiet elements are left alone, not tortured into nervous complexity of varying planes and excitable vagaries of light and shade. Forty-eight pointed and mullioned windows along the main floor give the horizontal divisions, while vertically there were three stages: the low, lintelled colonnade, a mezzanine with very beautiful traceried windows, one to each bay, and a vast main wall without horizontal subdivisions but with a delicately designed and very broad course of traceried panelling above the splendid sequence of great windows, like a lofty blind parapet. The tower was equally simple, its seven stories exquisitely varied in their heights and windowing, but calm always, and final in their sense of exactly felt relations. The pinnacles also, four on the tower and others at either end of the façade, were as simply and perfectly designed as could be asked, without fantastic exuberance or a straining for effect; just traceried octagons with one series of pointed gables and high, crocketed spires.

The “Nieuwerke,” in its ridiculous Renaissance effrontery snuggled up against the silent, absorbed, unnoticing giant, was like an architectural version of Merlin and Vivien; silly and scented impudence in its vain approximations to grave dignity and a self-respect proof against all blandishments.

The great hall inside was just the same: an astonishing room, four hundred and thirty feet long, broken only by the columns and arches bearing the great tower, and roofed with a mass of oak timbering like an ancient and enormous ship turned bottom up. Huge oaken beams rose against the wall dividing it into panels, and each pair supported equally gigantic tie-beams braced by rough-hewn diagonal struts. It was barn-building, if you like, but a good barn is better art than a Newport

“cottage”; and this splendidly direct “barn” at Ypres had a quality the Louvre could never attain.

Each panel of this colossal and almost interminable wall was destined for great historical pictures, most of which had been completed, and the effect was majestical in its combination of colour and carpentry. Of it all nothing now remains, as I have said, except a single turret at one end. The greatest surviving monument of the civic architecture of the Middle Ages has been slowly pounded to powder, and has taken its place with the other lost masterpieces of a world that from time to time can create but can somehow never retain ability to enjoy or even to understand. Month after month it was the special target of Prussian shells; the first breeched the wall to the right of the tower and were followed by others that started fires which swept the building from end to end, consuming the enormous timbered roof, destroying the painted walls, crumbling the tracery of the tall tower. For a time the burned-out walls remained, and German professors spoke gently and with bland reassurance of the simple task of restoration, but this last indignity has ceased to threaten, for recently the batteries have resumed their work; little by little the belfry has been shot away, the fretted arcades have been splintered into road-metal, and now at last the destruction is complete; what once was the glory of Ypres, the pride of Flanders, the delight of the architect, is now only a heap of refuse masonry, with one pinnacle standing alone, accusing, in the midst of ruin from which there is no salvation, for which history will search in vain for shadow of excuse.

In sequence of time, the old “Halles” of Malines come next, as portions of them date from 1311, but they have been reconstructed at various times, enlarged in several styles, and in the end were never completed, for their great belfry never succeeded in getting above the roof. Nevertheless they were a wonderfully picturesque and even theatrical composition of pointed portals, fantastic gables, dormers, and turrets, and a very engaging epitome of five centuries of architectural mutations.

The Hôtel de Ville of Bruges is as consistent and perfect as Malines was casual and irresponsible. It was begun in 1376, the corner-stone being laid by Louis de Mâle, and if there is anywhere a more complete example of civic architecture,