Part 5

In the sixteenth century Flanders was the scene of tragic resistance to Spain and the Inquisition. Liberty was lost and recovered and lost again; but prosperity still bloomed from the ashes of destroyed commerce, the language and institutions of the land were redeemed with a fearful price, civilization was preserved with blood and sorrow, art flourished in the midst of horrors; and how all this came to pass is explained only by the stubbornness with which the people kept up their local patriotism. The visible signs of this municipal pride and glory were, until four years ago, and in part still are, the great churches, town-halls, and guild-houses of Flanders. Among the most impressive of these monuments were the Cloth Hall at Ypres, the Belfry of Bruges, the Town-halls of Audenarde, Alost, Termonde, Louvain, Brussels, and Ghent, the Cathedrals of Antwerp and Malines, the quaint Béguinages or cities of retirement for religious women, and many another less renowned but hardly less beautiful expression of ancient faith and community of enterprise.

The Austrian yoke was shaken off at the time of the French Revolution, and after a short period of republican government Belgium, together with France, came under the domination of Napoleon. At the Congress of Vienna, in 1815, Belgium and Holland were united under the name of the Kingdom of the Netherlands, in an ill-assorted combination which lasted only till 1830, when the present Kingdom of Belgium was established. From that year to 1914 the Flemish people of Belgium, though more than satisfied to live in political union with the Walloons, and indeed being the more prosperous and rapidly growing part of the population, were solicitous to preserve their local customs and particularly their own language. Societies were formed for the cultivation of Flemish literature. Endowments for the same purpose were established. One of the parliamentary aims of political parties in the provinces of East and West Flanders and Antwerp and the northern sections of Brabant and Limbourg was the safe-guarding of Flemish as one of the official languages and a medium of instruction. There was not the slightest flavor of disloyalty in this desire. It was entirely constitutional. It expressed itself openly, and had no need for secrecy. The tendency thus created was called the Flamingant movement. No one connected with it, so far as I can discover, entertained the slightest notion of appealing to Germany for countenance or support. The Flemings in general and the Flamingants in particular would have been the last people in the world to admit that their language was a dialect of _German_ or that their manifest destiny was absorption in the German Empire. The unity of Belgium was as precious to them as to the Walloons, and was placed above every consideration of race and speech. But there is no country under the sun in which local self-government and community interests are so highly developed as in Belgium. Under the Belgian constitution the communes enjoy the maximum of freedom. Civic pride nowhere else burns so bright. It is the habit of local self-government, the strong personalities developed under this system, and the spirit of the communes that have saved Belgium from starvation during the war. As every one of Mr. Hoover's American delegates in Belgium will testify, the spectacle was and is magnificent. As early as October, 1914, when the wave of invasion had passed over Belgium, the communes stood firm, and in all of them committees with almost absolute power, and enjoying the perfect confidence of the people, were formed and got to work commandeering the visible supply of food and distributing it prudently.

Within a very short time after the invasion the Germans showed that they intended to take advantage of the difference between Flemings and Walloons, a difference which, as we have seen, was purely domestic, and concerned with no really vital political issue. Among the offices of his hated administration, Governor-General von Bissing established a bureau for dealing with "the Flemish question," a bureau consisting of German specialists in philology and discord. For about seven months, this commission, which was working in secret, attracted hardly any attention. Then it began to operate visibly. In the summer of 1915, I was stationed, as delegate of the Hoover commission, in Ghent, the capital of East Flanders, and witnessed the beginning of German coquetry. As may be imagined, it was very clumsy and ineffectual. One day an attempt would be made to flatter the local pride of the peasants by printing official notices and war bulletins in Flemish and German only, instead of Flemish, German, and French, as had previously been the practice; the next day they would be informed, in these same posters, that they must surrender their hay-crop to the German military authorities. The Germans appeared to be as much detested in Flanders as anywhere else in Belgium. I saw the wife of a distinguished citizen of Ghent burst into tears of vexation and anxiety because a German officer of high rank spoke to her in a restaurant. She said she feared she would be distrusted for the rest of her life by her fellow-citizens for having listened to a German officer. Yet he was evidently a gentleman, behaved with propriety, and had the excuse for addressing her that he was quartered in her house. I have known persons in Ghent to go willingly to prison rather than comply with German rules or pay fines into the German treasury. "Do you see that man?" said to me an acquaintance in Ghent one day, pointing to a German in uniform who was speaking Flemish to some peasants. "He lived here before the war; he will not be able to live here after the war; his life will not be safe."

Before the war there were four universities in Belgium: the Catholic university of Louvain, the liberal or non-sectarian university of Brussels, and the two state universities of Liége and Ghent. The instruction was given entirely in French, except that there were certain courses at Louvain and Ghent which were paralleled, rather expensively, one would think, by courses in Flemish. In 1911 a bill was introduced in the Belgian Parliament looking to the gradual transformation of the University of Ghent into an institution completely Flemish. In 1912 this proposal was again discussed, and was reported favorably in the Chamber of Representatives. The war of course put an end to the project.

Now the Germans have taken it up with enthusiasm, trying to harvest for their own purposes the sympathies that were formerly cultivated in its favor. Whether they annex all or part or none of Belgium, they desire to pose as the liberators of Flanders, and to foment a permanent jealousy between the Flemish-speaking people and the rest of the Belgian population. This is precisely like their conduct in the south of Ireland, in the Province of Quebec, and in Russia. They have their eye on Antwerp, which they intend to keep, whatever happens, and they realize that Flanders would be a good basis for the eventual absorption of Holland.

On December 2, 1915, it became known in Belgium that the German authorities purposed to reopen the University of Ghent, which of course had been closed, and to make Flemish the language of instruction. Their design was instantly understood by everybody, including the leaders of the old Flamingant movement, who, instead of falling in with it, met it with a vigorous protest. This was disregarded, and on the 31st of December the decree was promulgated. A commission of German professors was empowered to draw up regulations for carrying out the plan of transformation. Meanwhile, in order to encourage as many Belgian young men as possible to escape from the country and find their way into the Belgian army, the real authorities of the four universities were keeping these institutions closed. Their passive resistance enraged the Germans, who, on March 18, 1916, arrested the two most celebrated professors of Ghent, Henri Pirenne, and Paul Frédéricq, eminent historians, and sent them to prison-camps in Germany, where they have been treated with disgusting brutality. The colleagues of these two brave men were not less courageous themselves, and signed a second protest. Thereupon the Germans made up a ridiculous little faculty of their own, and imposed it upon the university, which, we must remember had no students. There were at first seven of these professors, of whom one was a German, another a native of the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg, and five were Belgians without distinction in the learned world or respectability as citizens. To these were later added a number of equally insignificant Dutch and German teachers of minor rank, and a very few Belgians. Opinion in Holland rose in disgust, and an unpleasant life awaits the Dutch instructors if they ever dare return to the land of their birth. They have been canny enough to make sure of pensions from the German government, in view of the probability that they will in the near future be men without a country.

On April 5, 1916, the German Chancellor, making a curious mixture of cynicism and hypocrisy, in a speech before the Reichstag, promised that the Imperial Government would help the Flemish population to free itself from "the preponderance of French culture." The Germans no doubt expected some backing from the Flamingant societies, the trustees of the Flemish endowment funds, and the former political supporters of the Flemish movement. In this they have been disappointed, for their conduct has aroused protest upon protest from all these quarters. It is difficult to determine, from the boasts in the German newspapers and the denials of exiled Belgians, just how many teachers and students had been scraped together by the beginning of 1917, but the faculty was a motley collection of German, Dutch and Belgian nonentities, and there were less than three students for every teacher. To-day there is only one student in agriculture, the subject that would naturally be most sought in a Flemish university. Of all the war-babies, this University of Ghent is surely the most anæmic. Yet if we are to believe General von Bissing in the speech in which he declared it alive and viable, "The God of War held it at the baptismal font with naked sword in hand!" This is _echt Deutsch_ in taste and feeling. And while these proceedings were solemnly going on, the deportation of workmen from Ghent was beginning; on the very day of inauguration, husbands and fathers were being torn from their families to suffocate in German salt-mines, to sweat and faint in German collieries, to dig and die in German trenches. Has the world ever seen a more revolting instance of hypocrisy? I happened to be in Courtrai one morning when a number of Flemish wives and mothers were herded into the jail there, from the village of Sweveghem, because their men had refused to make barbed wire for the Germans. International law forbids a conqueror to compel the vanquished to produce munitions of war, but what of that!

Parallel with the ludicrous pretence of enriching Belgium with a Germano-Flemish university, close observers of Belgian affairs, by reading the Dutch and German newspapers, have watched the development of another German scheme for producing discord. On February 14, 1917, thirty Belgian tools of the German military authorities set themselves up, or rather were set up by German backers, as a "Council of Flanders," with the avowed purpose of creating an autonomous state out of the Flemish-speaking portion of Belgium. The plot began to culminate in Baron von Bissing's decree of March 21, 1917, establishing two administrative regions, one Flemish, the other Walloon. Brussels was to be the capital of the former, Namur of the latter. This decree sent consternation into the hearts of all true Belgians, and has led finally to an ominous result, the resignation of nearly all the Belgian judiciary. Up to this time, protected by international law and by the national constitution, which even the Germans professed to respect, the magistrates of Belgium had continued to perform some of their functions, thereby shielding the people to a certain extent from direct contact with German judges and police officers, and no doubt saving the country from bloody and useless insurrections: for if the minute and daily administration of local affairs, such as the collection of private debts and the enforcement of town ordinances, had been all this time in German hands, the irritation would have been unbearable.

With a few delightful exceptions, newspapers in Belgium, even though appearing under their old names and in French, are controlled by the Germans. I used to amuse myself, in 1915, by translating passages from _Le Bruxellois_, ostensibly a real Belgian journal, back into the German in which they were originally written or thought. The style betrayed a Teutonic source. The delightful exceptions are the brave little clandestine _Libre Belgique_ and other papers of a similar character, which keep up the spirits of the Belgian people and drive the Germans to impotent fury.

In this case, as in that of the University of Ghent, the Germans professed to be responding to Belgian desires. They point to the so-called Council of Flanders, in reality a collection of renegade Belgians who were brought together by German influence, and protected by German arms from the violence of Flemish mobs, who dared to hiss them and insult them. A delegation of these worthies was conducted to Berlin, where they presented a humble request for the strangulation of Belgian liberty and the partition of their native land. Against this plot all Belgium has risen. How can Belgium have risen? The answer will give some idea of the bravery of those people, even in the isolation and darkness and hunger of their present life. Last June between four and five hundred Belgian magistrates and members of the bar signed a fruitless petition to the German Chancellor against the decree. Judges and local administrative officials gave up their functions and their livelihood. For this, many of them were arrested and deported to Germany. Against the decree of separation, and in favor of "the Belgian Fatherland, Free and Indivisible," petitions have been signed by nearly all the former senators and deputies remaining in Belgium, by the Flamingant leaders, by municipal councils, and by the heroic Cardinal Mercier. The Cardinal especially drew attention to the fact that international law demands that the domestic administration of an invaded country shall be allowed to proceed unmolested, if military necessity permits. To this point Baron von Falkenhausen, the German Governor-General, made the following insolent rejoinder: "Your Eminence addressed to me on the 6th of June a letter in which, taking your stand on the principles of international law, you criticize certain of my official acts. I must respectfully reply to your Eminence that I refuse to enter with you upon a discussion of this subject."

Decree has followed decree with steady insistence. The courts, even in Brussels, which is mainly a French-speaking city, must hold their sessions in Flemish; official correspondence north of the imaginary line must be in Flemish; the Official Bulletin of German Laws and Decrees in Occupied Belgium is printed in German and Flemish for one part of the country and in German and French for the other. On August 9, 1917, von Falkenhausen issued an edict declaring that in the Flemish administrative region "Flemish must be the exclusive official language of all the authorities and all the functionaries of the state, the provinces, and the communes, as well as their establishments, including educational institutions and the teachers therein." On October 6 the communes in the Province of Brabant were ordered immediately to organize courses in Flemish for the instruction of their employees who did not know that language.

The invaders have tried to create a Belgian faction in support of their policy, and have here and there, at different times, organized meetings and processions of so-called "Activists," or pro-German Belgians. But these assemblages have never been other than contemptible in size and composition. They have been hissed and mobbed by vast crowds of patriotic Belgians, and in Belgium it takes courage to attack a movement which is protected by German bayonets. On February 9, 1918, the Chief Justice and two Associate Judges of the Belgian Court of Appeals at Brussels were arrested for instituting proceedings against the "Activists," and were ordered to be deported to Germany.

With all their cunning the Germans in Belgium have shown themselves densely stupid. Their near-sighted pedantry inclines them to put their trust in formulas, when the thing they are dealing with is life. They think they can _decree_ an indomitable people into submission. Having begun with butchery, they declined into robbery, and now they imagine that because bribery is less rude, it will be regarded as a sort of mercy. Jealous and quarrelsome at home, fussy and petty in their own local and domestic affairs, they cannot understand magnanimity in others. German writers have often admitted and lamented the tendency of the German people to be parochial (_kleinstädtisch_) in their outlook, and stencilled (_schablonenhaft_) in their personality. So they are; and these bad qualities render them incapable of understanding the spirit of Belgium, which is independent, individual, far-sighted, and bold. Since July, 1914, the German heel has stamped its imprint on regions several times as extensive as the German Empire itself. But a nation of pedants will never rule the world, and the echo of those iron-bound, blood-spattered boots will cease to ring when the American people realize that what the Germans have done in Belgium they will try to do wherever they find room to tramp.

IMMORTALITY IN LITERATURE

"_Come l'uom s'eterna_"

Now that the immortals in literature have been caught and measured; now that we know that they fill not more than five feet of shelf room, we may be pardoned for asking a question or two as to how they "arrived," what their chances are for "staying put," and whether the place for classics is inevitably "upon the shelf." These are of course awkward questions, but there are other regions beside heaven which one must be as a little child to enter--the Garden of Understanding among them.

It is in a certain sense a positive relief to find that the really persistent literature of the past is so compressible, and it is reassuring as one looks forward to the long future, to think that the people towards the end of time will not be so unimaginably burdened with the deathless monuments of their past; although when one multiplies five feet, the sediment of five millennia, by x, the classic library of the end of things seems to us of this unheroic age, a trifle depressing. Of course, the men of the Ultima Thule of time may take their classics less seriously, and it may be that they will find less of a gap than we between the thoughts and speech of the immortals and those of daily intercourse. But since the immortals die not, there is no escaping their accumulation.

Yet after all, come to think of it, there is a good deal of an assumption in the assertion that our five feet of immortals are all going to perch upon that last library shelf. There have been immortals of the past who failed to reach even our days; had they all fulfilled their promise and the prophecies of their friends, the publishers would not be willing to let us buy our modest set of unquestionable classics on monthly payments without the guarantee of our great grandchildren. Paradoxical as it may seem, many immortals have proved mortal, and the deathless have died. We must lay this troublesome fact to the loose speech of our forefathers. They were hyperbolic now and then, and they dubbed a volume immortal without stopping to think whether the twentieth century A. D. would also find it interesting, and so, of course, really immortal. Humanity has been fallible in the past, and the result is that we are forced most unscientifically to accept contradictory ideas with gravity--in short, to speak of "relative immortality." The work that outlives its contemporaries is, we may admit, relatively deathless. Such a statement makes no prophecy, however, as to the remote future. Relative immortality merely means that a work goes on interesting for a few years, a generation or two, a century or more. It is only the simon pure immortal who will not have to get up at the sound of Gabriel's trump. Blessed relief--the final shelf of unforgettable classics may be only five feet long after all, and may be even shorter!

Naturally, your enduring work must have a strong constitution; it must have all the characteristics of a live creature except the power of growth within itself, and, alas, of propagating its kind. Perhaps one might liken it to the Leyden jar which we of the older generation used to read of in our physics--I do not know whether it is remembered now-a-days. It has a charge of electricity of more or less strength, and it has a retaining capacity of more or less endurance, so that to touch it as the ages pass, is to receive a spark of life.

Many a work has started out with a tremendous appeal to its first audience, but has not been able to hold its second or third. The first night is not always a sure test of the length of a "run." Such a work had a momentary word to speak which was appropriate, which came as pat as Vice in the old comedy; but like a jest called out by a passing event, it raised its crackle of laughter and died. One need not go far to find examples. Mrs. Radcliffe's _Mysteries of Udolpho_ is pigeonholed here; and _Uncle Tom's Cabin_ and _The Jungle_ are tied by the same tape, in spite of a certain uncanny habit of reappearance of Mrs. Stowe's painful tale. Much literature of this sort is, of course, temporarily valuable; but Time promptly and wisely puts it into the wallet at his back. Without endurance, fame is as the fire of thorns under the pot; without vitality, naught can endure.

As a matter of fact a work need not be brutally vital to have a fair chance at long life. It must interest somebody very much indeed. Of course, the great immortals start out in life popular in the best sense; but there are lesser immortals too. One does not have to be Dante or Shakespeare to win out. So long as the second class passengers persist in interesting a few hearers on the various stages of the road, they will not be forgotten. They may be, as they usually are, caviare to the general, but they find from age to age fit audience. Poets like Horace and Spenser and Blake, the authors of _Emma_ or _Cranford_ may cross the final line side by side with their great competitors. And some of us who venture diffident prophecy, expect greater endurance for Mr. Robert Frost and his shy _North of Boston_ than for the dramatic anachronisms of the late Stephen Phillips, or the epic _longueurs_ of Mr. Alfred Noyes. Long life in literature concerns itself with the length of Clotho's thread, and not at all with the question as to whether it be labelled "No. 60" or "No. 90."