Part 8
combining the restraint and the simplicity of early Gothic with the exquisite ornament and the sense of decorative beauty of the latest Gothic, it is not of record. It seems to come at the mid-most point, when everything met together, without loss and without exaggeration, for the production of a living example of what society is capable when it achieves a perfect, if unenduring, equilibrium. It is a masterpiece of architectural composition, of brilliant and supremely intelligent design, while it is vivified by a poetry and an inspiration that exist only at a few crowning moments in history. Even now it is one of the loveliest buildings in Europe; what it must have been once, when its fifty statues, each under its crocketed canopy (they also were pulled down and hammered in pieces during the French Revolution), its tracery, balustrades, and pinnacles were blazing with colour and gilding, passes the imagination. It is only a small building of six bays subdivided by its three turrets into two triple groups with a doorway in each. The composition is very subtle and quite original, while the design is emphasised vertically, there being no horizontal members which run through from end to end, though the levels are very delicately indicated by window mullions, niches, panels, traceried arches, and the crowning parapet. It is one of the least obvious of architectural compositions and, I am disposed to think, one of the best. While it lacks the Doric simplicity of Ypres, it has a sensitive rhythm and a richness of light and shade without studied intricacy or premeditated theatricalism that places it amongst the few very perfect works of art. It is a “poetic” composition in the highest sense, or rather it is akin to music of the mode that followed the Gregorian and opened up new possibilities of a more complex, if no more poignant, spiritual expression. It is perhaps the most perfect single piece of architecture in Belgium, and if it is extinguished in the night of Armageddon we lose a thing of inestimable value, unequalled, irreplaceable, even as we have lost that equally inestimable spiritual force that brought it into existence.
The “Halles” also, with their famous “Belfry of Bruges” are a particularly noble example of the same period of artistic supremacy, though they lack consistency, for only the lower stages of the amazing tower are original, this portion of the work being completed about 1296. All the upper part is of the very end of the fifteenth century, and the octagonal upper stage is of no high order of design. Once this also was crowned by a slender spire having a statue of St. Michael sixteen feet high, which must have brought the stupendous erection almost to a height of five hundred feet, for even now the topmost balustrade is three hundred and fifty-two feet above the street. Ten years after the spire was finished it was destroyed by lightning, rebuilt, destroyed again, and then left in its present condition.
Brussels followed Bruges, and its huge City Hall was begun about 1404. Compared with Arras, Bruges, or Louvain, it is dry and somewhat unimaginative, with a curious modern look that may, in part, be due to very drastic restorations and to the devilish ingenuity in destruction of the French Revolutionists. In the beginning, however, it failed in subtle proportions, and in point of composition as well. Its belfry, graceful as it is, is thin and artificial in effect, while the façade is formal without the grave majesty of Ypres, rich without the sensitive refinement of Bruges or the riotous exuberance of Louvain. This is not to condemn it as bad; except for the supreme qualities of the three monuments last mentioned it would stand high in the architectural scale, but it is impossible to avoid comparisons, and through these it suffers, perhaps unjustly.
Less than fifty years after Brussels came Louvain, and so far as good art is concerned the three-quarters of a century since Bruges has not been altogether well spent. As in the case of religious architecture, an ungoverned passion for beauty and craftsmanship has resulted in the destruction of the sane and noble balance in such churches as Reims, such civic halls as Bruges and Ypres, while nothing is left but an almost impossible luxuriance, as of a northern flower forced in the hot, moist air of a greenhouse. The Hôtel de Ville of Louvain, spared by some inconsequent and unnatural whim of those who wrecked all the city around and gave over the priceless libraries of the university to the flames, is one of the smallest of its kind in Belgium; it is only one hundred and thirteen feet long, forty-one feet wide, and seventy feet to the level of its parapet--about the dimensions, let us say, of an average New York dwelling of the better class. It is less a building than an ornament--a shrine, a tabernacle for the sanctuary of a cathedral. You feel that you want to take it up and polish it, you regard it as you do an ivory carving from Pekin,
and so considered it is well-nigh matchless, but it still remains outside the category of architecture, and if you compare it with the Ste. Chapelle, you see at once that the life is already almost gone from a great art, even if it has passed for the moment into a supreme kind of decoration.
In making that statement one is led unawares into one of those generalisations that contains less than half the truth. The life had indeed gone from the larger, the official architecture, the art of the Church, of the commune. After this there was little more than a sorry tale of rapid degeneration, until the French and the Jesuits came with their new style, either clever and often in good taste at the hands of the secular power, or tawdry and rococo when popularised by the new religious order that was the first incarnation of that “efficiency” that in the end became the obsession of the world and the root of the war. It is true that the new fashion rapidly superseded the dying and disintegrating spirit of mediævalism, and never a Bruges town hall or a Malines cathedral came again; instead we get the dull and blundering seventeenth-century portion of the Ghent Hôtel de Ville and the showy and very vulgar Jesuit churches, such as that in Antwerp (attributed to Rubens) and the Cathedral of Arras. On the other hand, and this is too often forgotten, the degradation of state architecture always precedes by many years, sometimes centuries, the downfall of the people’s art, and after a great era of high character and cultural attainments the burghers and lesser nobility, the farmers and merchants and smaller monastic houses continue instinctively to build beautifully, prolonging the old traditions, unhampered by clever architects and the commands of irresponsible fashion, until at last even they succumb and their art falls to the dead level of the stupid artifice that for long had prevailed amongst the great of earth.
So in France while the barbarities of the Louvre were being perpetrated, the loveliest little châteaux and farms and village churches were rising almost as though nothing had happened; so in Germany, Heidelberg and Dresden could not prevent the Tyrol and Rothenbourg, Hildesheim and the Black Forest and the Rhineland from creating the eternally delightful timber houses that far more exactly expressed a racial quality that was to endure in all its fineness, until the end of the nineteenth century saw its ending as well. So in England, Henry VIII and Edward VI might destroy the then vital art, and Elizabeth might expunge its very memory, building ridiculous semi-German conceits to the grief of the judicious; nevertheless the deep-lying tradition prevailed outside court circles and those of the Erastianised Church, and the sixteenth-century domestic architecture of the Cotswolds, of Surrey, Suffolk, Norfolk, and Essex--indeed of almost every county in England--was, in its way, just as good architecture as that which universally prevailed before the “Great Pillage.”
Precisely the same thing happened in Belgium, and half the visual charm of cities such as Bruges, Tournai, Termonde, Ypres, and of all that countryside that has not been devastated by the insane cult of coal and iron, is due to the colloquial domestic architecture of its crooked old streets, its wide-spread market-places, and its drowsy canals and winding quays. In the language of the schools there is no “architecture,” properly speaking, in the Quai aux Avoines, or the Grand Béguinage, or the old almshouses of the Abbaye de St. Trond in Malines, along the banks of the Dyle in murdered Louvain, on the Quai aux Herbes in Ghent, the market-place in Ypres, the Quai du Rosaire, and the Quai Verte in Bruges. All the same, in the simple and naïve houses and hospitals and convents, with their windows and doors where they are wanted, their big roofs and gables and friendly chimneys, their frank use of native materials, and their almost unfailing sense of pleasant proportions, we have what thus far no school has been able to teach.
In the earlier work--early, that is, for domestic architecture, say of the sixteenth century--while there is great individuality, each burgher expressing himself and his own tastes to the full, there is a very courtly regard for his neighbours, and a curious sense of restraint in the light of what the city itself might expect from its citizens. There is a well-bred uniformity of scale, a reticence in detail, a total lack of jealous emulation that speaks well for the self-respect of the old builders. Most of the great houses of the preceding century are gone, either razed entirely or mutilated and degraded to base uses; Bruges, for example, that once was rich in sumptuous mansions of nobles and great merchants, has now almost none, but the quays of Ghent still retain their fine rows of guild-houses and dwellings, and until a year ago Ypres once had them also, that are models of fine civic architecture (and of civic spirit as well), and might well serve as such to a more chaotic and unbalanced generation. They are usually three stories high, with three more in the stepped gables, and the materials are generally brick with trimmings of cut stone, though wood was frequently used, particularly in Ypres, and always in the most consistent and joiner-like way. If there were no other test, you could always tell the work of a good period from that of a bad by the frankness in use of materials: brick is brick, stone is stone, and wood is wood, and there are no shams, imitations, or subterfuges anywhere. Whatever the land produces, that is used and made the most of, while the style of the time (mark, not the fashion of the hour or the fad of the school or the whim of the artist) is so modified as to adapt itself perfectly to these restrictions.
It is not until the Renaissance that the cult of deception comes in, and mutton masquerades as lamb, while silly columns and pediments are pasted on where there is no need and brick is plastered over to magnify the apparent opulence of the owner. It is at this same time that a mean individualism appears, and each builder tries to outface his neighbor. The Grande Place in Brussels is a good example of this new selfishness, and for chaotic originality compares almost favourably with a city street of the nineteenth century. It is all very amusing, these rows of serrated slices, bedecked with mishandled “orders” and crested with miscellaneous gorgeousness on the lines of the sterns of the proud owner’s still prouder galleons, and the result is engagingly theatrical and fantastic, but it is a grave commentary on a new civilisation that has lost in culture just in proportion as it has increased in efficiency.
It is dangerous to think too much about architecture--or any art for that matter. The thirteenth century was supreme in its achievement because it thought so much about religion and character and getting the really good things out of life that for reward it was actually inspired, and so probably thought as little about its art as it did about eugenics; being quite content to do the things it was impelled to do by an impulse for which it was not consciously responsible and which it made little effort to control. The Renaissance thought so much about art, as well as about its own thoughts (which didn’t matter anyway), that even in its best work there is an opulent self-consciousness that defeats its own ends and has issue at last in a self-conscious opulence that is the nadir of culture. These builders of Flanders and Brabant and Artois and Luxembourg and the Rhineland thought as little about art as their very different followers of the Middle Ages, and they certainly lacked the divine inspiration that made Reims superhuman, as St. Thomas Aquinas and Leonardo da Vinci and Shakespeare were superhuman, but the old instinct for beauty had not been burned and hammered out of them by coal and iron, or reversed into an unintelligible jargon (like the Lord’s Prayer said backward) by an insolent intellectualism and a mordant secularism; and so, even when they used pseudo-Renaissance forms in their cheerful and humorous fashion, they managed to produce work that has a certain quality that the best-educated architect of this century of efficient training cannot contrive to obtain in spite of all his labours.
And in any town that had been left alone during the nineteenth century, particularly in Bruges, as well as in many of those the Prussians have destroyed, everything seems to fall into picturesque and beautiful compositions that are the despair of modern planners and “improvers” of cities. Here again the results were quite unpremeditated. You cannot imagine the builders of the Gruuthüse in Bruges carefully arranging their effects of gables and turrets and mullioned windows with scrupulous regard to the soaring tower of Our Lady’s Church; you cannot imagine the wealthy burghers who from time to time reared the varied structures along the canal and the Quai du Rosaire or in the Rue de l’Ane Aveugle (the names are as joyful as the architecture) or around the Pont du Béguinage, working studiously for their dramatic effects with square and triangle, tentative models, and perhaps the able advice of a “Landscape Architect” or a “Scenic Artist.” If they had done this they might have produced a tolerable stage-setting or even a superior sort of world’s fair, but they would not have built Bruges.
No, the conviction has been growing, and is now forced on us by a revealing war, that even in the seventeenth century there were those who possessed a civilisation and a culture beside which ours is a kind of raw barbarism; that they by force of this, and with the aid of a tradition of still greater days in the past, built by instinct as we cannot build by erudition; and that whatever issued from their hands was admirable and honourable and lastingly fair. It is well for us to remember sometimes when we amuse ourselves by discourse as to “inalienable rights of man,” and that sort of thing, that there is one such over which no argument is possible, and that is the right to beauty in life and thought and environment, and that those who filched this from us during the century and a half just passed (and for the first time in history) were tyrants and robbers of the same stamp and degree as their immediate predecessors, who destroyed the other right of man to free and joyful labour as well as that to the genuine self-government and the sane and wholesome democracy that marked the Middle Ages and vanished with the despots and the dogmas of the Renaissance; not to return, so far as we ourselves can perceive of our own experience.
God grant we may retain what is still left us in Flanders and Brabant. If by the triumph of coal and iron either through war or (perhaps even worse) through the imposition on territories thus far spared of the ideals and methods of an efficient industrialism, we lose Bruges as we have lost Ypres and Arras and Malines and Termonde, as we had already lost, though in a different way, Liége and Lille, Mons and Namur, then by so much (and it is very much) have we lost our hidden leaven that in the fulness of time we rely on for the lightening of the whole dull lump of our misguided and now discredited life.
VIII
COAL AND IRON
Across the face of Europe stretched a great scar, even before the war; a scar that reached from Picardy and Artois across Brabant and the Rhineland far into Westphalia. It was an open wound, creeping gangrenously outward, and yearly involving more and more of what once was healthy and fair in its progressive putrefaction. It was an area of darkness that had taken the place of light; of burrowings far down in the earth where men (and women and children once) grubbed dully and breathlessly for poor wages on which to sustain life, life that was mostly the same dull grubbing above the surface as below. It was a place of warfare between an immemorial verdure of trees and flowers and grass, clear streams and pure air and, on the other hand, ever-growing heaps of slag and ashes and scoriæ, of fat smoke and noxious gases. In place of old churches and quiet monasteries, of farms and flocks and forests, of delicate châteaux and vine-clad old ruined castles, of sleepy towns, of winding streets full of carved and gabled houses, grass-grown market-places, still canals under their arched bridges, ancient trees and forgotten gardens, with now and then a vast and mysterious church built out of many ages and crowded with old memories and the aroma of spent incense and vanished prayers--in place of this impractical, inefficient, and very admirable old land of a hundred years ago, had come a great noise, a greater activity, and a remarkable diminution of enduring results. The churches had been despoiled by the Huguenots, wrecked by the Revolutionists, and either sold for cash or restored out of pure delight in wickedness, coupled with a conceit that only accompanies the profoundest ignorance. Monstrous piles of brick, iron, and cement had blistered the land, while the woods and fields were scored and tangled by railway-lines, tram-lines, telegraph-lines. Machines everywhere, under and on and over the earth; noise, oil, gas, smoke, chemicals mingled in the making of a new civilisation, and the old was both forgotten and denied. It was a place where Efficiency was god and his First Commandment was lawfully obeyed; where old virtues were transmuted through exaggeration and over-emphasis into new sins, where souls shrivelled, brains atrophied, manners ceased, that ten might amass wealth they could not use, at the expense of a thousand who had claimed only a competence.
A land of coal and iron, and of what coal and iron can produce. Not happiness, not character, not culture; neither philosophy, nor religion, nor art. Machines--appalling and ingenious complications of wheels and cogs and valves and pistons, that made more of their kind, together with unheard-of engines of death and mutilation. And factories--emplacements for machines that roared and vibrated endlessly, spinning, weaving, fabricating night and day, turning out what the world needs, but craftily fashioning it so it would not last, or what the world does not need, but that lasted only too long. Turning out wealth, ugliness, hatred, power, ignorance, and revolt. A land of coal and iron, black and potential as the first; hard, inhuman, irresistible as the last.
The Heart of Europe has produced many things in its time, dynasties, empires, crusades; religious energy, new philosophies, industrial revolutions, immortal art. Three eras have owed it much: that of Charlemagne, that of the Middle Ages, that of the Renaissance-Reformation. Perhaps, after all, the latest is its greatest debtor, and for its culmination in that civilisation of irreligion, intellectualism, materialism, and unhampered force that is riding now for its fall, it may be that the self-destructive energy has issued from Lille, Maubeuge, and Charleville, from Liége and Charleroi, from Crefeld and Essen, Eschweiler and Elberfeld.
The Black Country of England, the southern counties of Wales; Pittsburgh, Chicago, Paterson, Lawrence, Manchester; cities innumerable in Great Britain and America, have joined in the great act of creating a new ideal and a new power, but the culmination that is its own antidote did not manifest itself there; instead it seems now to have developed in the raw scar across the face of Europe, and the malignant pustule that has burst at last formed itself at the far eastern end. Here, in the Rhineland and Westphalia, grew monstrously the wealth, the potency, and the material force that, made operative by the cold philosophy and the supreme efficiency of Prussia, have made possible, and even inevitable, the supreme attempt to bring to an end the outworn and discredited ideals and methods of ten centuries of Christian civilisation, and establish in unquestioned supremacy the ideals and the methods that have fought hiddenly for dominion in Charleroi and Essen, in Leeds and Birmingham, in Pittsburgh, Chicago, and New York.
Coal and iron. When the first bituminous lump blazed unexpectedly on the hearth of the amazed cottager, the iron that had been man’s servant for so long, stirred in its first waking to mastership, a mastery achieved at last, incredible in its degree, incredible in its potentiality. Creatures of its own, and allies brought into being before or since, but now taking a new force and applied with new motives, gunpowder, steam, electricity, join with it in plausibly offering their services as beneficent agents toward the annihilating of life; and, as agent and controller of the vast hegemony, wealth, desired above all things, powerful beyond all things, after many days “Lord of the World.”
Nations and men have tried for world-mastery, time out of mind, relying on brute strength of muscle, on craft of brain, on indomitable will, and everlasting fear. Have tried and failed--after a little--and the empires of Alexander, Cæsar, Charlemagne, Louis, Philip, Napoleon have crumbled and become a memory. Failure was inevitable for strength of arm, of brain, of will, was not, and could not be made, exclusive possession of any race or people, nor could terror be confined within territorial limits; in the end revolt; the rising of new tribes, intrusion of fear, weakness, degeneration amongst the victors, their ominous evanishment from amongst the conquered.
But how now, with these new aids, these untried forces and potentialities? Suppose that the unestimated energy of a million years, stored in the bowels of the earth, be applied to the dull iron and to the harnessing of the mysterious electrical force, under the stimulus of Will emancipated from the hampering influence of a discredited religion and a superstitious ethic; suppose a new demiurge be created, given supreme direction over soul and mind and body, and named Efficiency, and suppose for two generations the energy employed blindly and to no consistent end by dull nations, half-hearted in their devotion and still bound by the memory of dying creeds and moribund old morals, be applied by the highest and most self-sacrificing intelligence to the creation of a supreme, perfect, and absolutely co-ordinated engine that, at the well-conceived moment, shall be brought to bear without pity and without pause on the inferior nations of the globe. What then?