cathedral, its churches of St. Jean and St. Loup, and its noble and distinguished Church of Our Lady are safe for another period.

Apart from the great architectural monuments are numberless others invaluable in archæology, and forming links in the great Gothic development: St. Etienne of Beauvais, St. Leu d’Esserent, Morienval, Bury, St. Germer, and St. Remi of Reims—the last valuable beyond estimate, with an apse that was unparalleled as a masterpiece of transitional work when Gothic was in its first and finest estate, now wrecked and desecrated by shells that have burst its vaults into crumbled fragments and hurled its perfect windows in showers of splintered glass to the pavements heaped high with the wreck of masonry and of dismembered altars.

And as in the case of the great churches, so in that of the small, from Braisne to Caudebec, they cannot even be catalogued. The whole region was, and is, one of wonderful little parish churches, of all periods, and many of them are now only shapeless ruins. The great abbeys and smaller religious houses are practically gone, scores having fallen prey to the insane fury of the Revolution or the sordid secularism of the Restoration. What we have lost may be seen from countless such lovely and pathetic fragments as St. Wandrille, near Caudebec, given a new fame through the name of Maeterlinck, and so linked with the greater martyrdom of Belgium in these last days. This, like its myriad companions, was architecture of the most singular beauty, the loss of which leaves the world poor, so poor, indeed, that it had at first nothing wherewith to meet the last assault of the enemy. The loss is being made good, the penalty already is paid, and though one could not—one would not—restore or rebuild these silent fragments of exquisitely wrought stone, meshed in tall trees and clambering vines, the vision is possible of new foundations, equal in number to these that are gone, each an expiation and a spiritual guard, each making late reparation for the past, guaranteeing a future immunity from perils of the same nature as those that now shake the world.

VI

AMIENS AND REIMS

It is a strange sensation for us to-day to watch from afar the slow and implacable destruction of one of the greatest works of art in the world, for we must go back more than a century to find any catastrophe of a similar nature. What happened then, when half a hundred masterpieces of divinely directed human intelligence and aspiration were reduced to scrap-heaps at the hands of revolution, is very far away, and the irreparable loss is as unknown to-day as it was unappreciated then. We can no more reconstruct for our understanding Cluny, St. Martin of Tours, or Avranches than we can restore the catalogue of the Alexandrian library; mercifully we cannot estimate our loss. Back of this era of annihilation we must go two centuries before we find in England under Henry VIII a similar episode of infamy. The case of Reims is wholly different; there are tens of thousands who knew it for what it was—the crowning manifestation of a crowning civilisation, and for them the loss is personal, poignant, and unexampled, a horror that sophistry cannot palliate nor time destroy.

Of the two great churches, Amiens could more easily have been spared. The word is ill chosen; Amiens in ruins, its exquisite façade with its perfect sculptures seared and shattered by bursting shells and consuming fire, would have been a catastrophe that could only put to the test the most stoical fortitude, but—it is neither Chartres nor Bourges nor Reims, and simply because the perfect balance between all possible elements in great architecture is here trembling toward its overthrow. Gothic art had three controlling forces working toward an unattainable perfection; structural integrity irradiated by consummate invention and an almost divine creative genius; passion for that exalted beauty that is unchangeable and eternal, expressed through new forms at once northern and Catholic; the just balance and intimate interplay of these two impulses. Its virtues, like all virtues, were most easily transmuted into vices, once the controlling balance was overthrown, and each was, in its stimulating possibilities, a constant and irresistible temptation toward excess. In Reims, the beginnings of which antedate Amiens by only a decade, the balance remains true and firm; in Amiens we see the first fatal steps in the development of a purely human (and notably French) logic, toward that intellectual pride, that almost arrogance of self-confidence, that found its nemesis in the unstable marvel of Beauvais.

In an admirable but anonymous little book called “Some French Cathedrals,” the author says: “French Gothic was most rational and most beautiful while it still remembered its Romanesque origin. At Amiens it was just beginning to forget that and to lose itself in dreams of an impossible romance which changed it from architecture into a very wonderful kind of ornamental engineering.” This subtle and significant change you feel everywhere except in the inimitable façade. The interior is too high, the masonry too wire-drawn and tenuous, the chevet too giddy and insecure. It is true that all but the west front has been impossibly restored, so that outwardly little remains of the original work, while the glass is gone from all but the ambulatory windows, leaving the nave a cold blaze of intolerable light. Nevertheless, the fundamental fault is there; the architect intrudes himself in place of the dévot, the craft of man supplants the guiding of God; so we have one of the most technically perfect of cathedrals, and one of the least inspired; you must go to the Rhine to find, in Cologne, a more self-conscious and serenely satisfied work, and it is well to make this comparison, for by so doing you realise the real greatness of Amiens, and how it fails only in comparison with the three perfect examples of an art that wholly expresses the great concept of mediæval Catholic philosophy, that in life, as we know it, material and spiritual are inseparable, that their just balance is the true end of man in this phase of existence, and that therefore sacramentalism is of the esse of religion, and as well the law of life.

As a whole, both from within and without, Amiens in a measure fails, but this does not hold

of its several parts. The west front is still a masterpiece of consummate and wholly original design, though the towers have been incongruously (but engagingly) terminated in later centuries. The three great doors, the first and second arcades, and the rose-window story contain more brilliant, spirited, ingenious, and withal beautiful design than any similar work in the world, while the ornament (there is a wild-rose border around the archivolts of the great porches that finds no rival in Greece) and the sculptures reach a level of decorative and emotional significance that marks the time of their production as the crowning moment in human culture and in Christian civilisation.

We turn to Reims—we turn now in reverence to the memory of Reims—in a different spirit. Master Robert of Luzarches was a master, and knew it. Master Robert of Coucy was the servant of a Lord who was greater than he, and knew this also, and was proud of his service. He was just as great an architect as his brother of Amiens, but he worked in a godly fear, and so he built the noblest church in Christendom. This is not to say that its nave order is equal to Chartres, its rhythm and composition equal to Bourges. In every great church from 1175 to 1225 there is some one element or more that is final and unexcelled, but at Reims there was a great consistency, a noble and all-embracing competence, that placed it in a class by itself.

Reims was without a fault; perhaps this made its appeal less poignant and searching than that of the eager and sometimes less-perfect efforts of men more human in their inadequacies. Man is the creature that tries, and it is perhaps only human to feel a reverence that lessens affection for those who seem to transcend the limits that are set to human accomplishment.

Every other cathedral in France is a splendid chronicle, a record of changing times, changing endeavours, changing impulses. Men of varying personalities have wrought out their ideals, year after year, and the result is in each case a great sequence, a glorious approximation. Reims was begun in 1211, on the first anniversary of the burning of its predecessor, and it was finished, manifestly in accordance with an original and predetermined design, within fifty years. The three gables and the upper stories of the western towers are a century later, otherwise the work is consistent and a single conception. The great ideal comprised a crowning group of seven towers, each with its slender spire, none of which was ever completed, and had this majestic scheme been carried out, the church would have been the most complete, as it was the most perfect, of the architectural manifestations of Christianity.

It is impossible to analyse Reims, to describe its vital and exquisite organism, to laud its impeccable scale, its vivid and stimulating originality, to explain the almost incredible competence and beauty of its buttressing, the serene delicacy of its detail, to dwell once more on the glory of its sculpture that ranked with that of Greece, on the splendour of its glass that was rivalled only at Chartres. It is impossible to do this now, for its passing has been too recent and too grievous. Death brings silence for a time to those that knew the dead.

In another chapter I have tried to say something of the sculpture of Reims, a crowning glory where all was glorious, but sculpture does not mean the human figure alone; it covered in the Middle Ages all forms of beauty chiselled out of stone and marble, and the man who wrought the wild-rose design on the archivolts of Amiens was just as great an artist as he who fashioned the Virgin of the south transept, or the “Beau Dieu”; perhaps he was the same man. Gothic “ornament” is quite as beautiful as are Gothic saints and angels, and here at Reims the stone carving was of the finest. Every space of ornament—capital, crocket, boss, frieze, and string-course—was a combination of these great elements: architectural self-restraint and identity with the work as a whole, passionate love for all the beautiful things in nature, joy in doing everything, even the cutting of unseen surfaces, just as well as man could do the work. It is not better than the ornament of Amiens or Chartres; in some passages Amiens seems to have achieved the highest attainable point, but it is of the same quality, and that is enough glory for any church.

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,

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?

The answer is still withheld, for the trial is in process. It was a magnificent conception, and inevitable, for the great sequence of spiritual and material happenings that has followed from the first weakening of Christian civilisation and Catholic culture at the very beginning of the fourteenth century was bound to have issue in its logical and dramatic crest, and in the final test of its efficiency. There is nothing half-way in its effort, nothing indifferently accomplished or insecure at any point. Essen, Wilhelmshaven, Berlin have forgotten nothing, failed in nothing. Every material agency, potential on the earth and under, has been developed, harnessed, and applied; every hampering stumbling-block of an old righteousness, an old religion, an old philosophy is removed; coal, iron, steam, electricity, chemistry are built up into a great and puissant unity, made operative by the wealth they themselves have created and energised by the dynamic force of intensive intellect no longer hampered by fear of God or charity for man, or an ancient sense of honour that came out of feudalism, the Crusades, and a Church that held the state in thrall and should have perished with the things she had made.

The mystery of the “Sin against the Holy Ghost,” the mystery of “Antichrist” are mysteries no longer, but clear writings on an open page; blazing words on the walls of the banquet hall where the feast has broken up in sudden and searching terror.

Coal and iron. These territories are now the centres of greatest conflict: Poland, Galicia, and the Scar of Europe in the west. Each is the land of coal and iron. In the east the contest sweeps back and forth in Poland to rob Russia of her mines and manufactures, and add them to the resources of Germany; in the south to preserve to Austria the coal and iron and oil of Galicia; in the west to gain from France the coal and iron of Champagne, Artois, Picardy, as the coal and iron of Belgium were gained in the beginning at the price of paper treaties and a negligible honour, or to deprive Germany of the coal and iron that are the foundations of her empire (actual and potential) in the Rhineland and Westphalia. Was there any drama of Sophocles, Euripides, Shakespeare, Goethe that matched the sombre theatricalism of life itself? Here in the west, far back in the Middle Ages, was the first great centre of manufacture and trade, Bruges, Ghent, Arras, great cities and world markets when London was a little river town, Paris a village, Berlin a frontier fort on the raw edge of a savage and heathen Prussia. Then later, after this first (and different) industrial civilisation had passed, came a new manifestation, and from Lille to Essen appeared the materialisation of a new madness, while Bruges and Courtrai and Aix were forgotten, with all they stood for, and other centres grew up—black, roaring, uncouth, but for men admirable and desired far beyond the restored churches and desecrated abbeys, the schools and universities, the dim and discredited philosophies, the decaying art and the vanished ideals of Fécamp and Reims, of Bruges and Louvain, of Aix and Trèves and Cologne. And now the Frankenstein monster gets him to his perfect work, and through the coal-fields and over the forges and factories, where he was fashioned, spreads death, devastation, and ruin that, nevertheless (and here the mystery and the wonder increase), may yet bring redemption, release, and restoration.

What has been in the immediate past needs no description: Crefeld and Lille are only Manchester and Pittsburgh, and their familiarity is sufficient to itself. What is now is equally common to all, and Louvain, Arras, and Reims in their blood-stained ruin are a part of the common consciousness. Meanwhile there were, and for the moment are, other cities and other regions, forgotten or endured, that are all Charleroi is not, or Crefeld or Maubeuge, and they are well worth a study, partly for what they are, partly for what they signify, partly for what they may forecast for a future beyond the present cataclysm.

There is hardly a more absorbingly interesting portion of France, historically, artistically, or picturesquely, than that wonderful quadrilateral, Compiègne-Noyon-Laon-Soissons, with its three great cathedrals; its finest castle ruin in France—Coucy, the pride of Enguerrand III—its fine old towns, as Laon and Noyon, with their groves and terraced paths; its great Forest of Compiègne; and only a few miles away on one hand or the other, châteaux such as Coucy and Ham, battle-fields of the significance of Crécy. It is all fought over now and may be again; no one knows how much is left, or may be left by and by, but it was a fair land, with many traces of a more spacious and balanced past, not in its great churches alone but as well in its quiet villages and its fine grey houses in old cities. A frontier, in a way, for already the creeping desolation of industrialism had reached close, working always down from the North of coal and iron, already absorbing St. Quentin and involving its ancient architecture in smoke and traffic, blotting out its streets of gabled houses, and turning it into a typical manufacturing centre—this, that was once the dowry of Mary Stuart.

North we enter into a general darkness, but on our way toward the dim old cities of Flanders and Brabant that hold even now the beauty of an elder day, forgotten by the world and outside the area of “great natural resources,” we may pause in spirit in Arras (it would not be well to be there in body, unless one were a soldier in the army of the Allies, when it would be perilous but touched with glory) for sight of an old, old city that gave a vision, better than almost any other in France, of what cities were in this region at the high-tide of the Renaissance. It is gone now, utterly, irremediably, and the ill work begun in the Revolution and continued under the empire, when the great and splendid Gothic cathedral was sold and utterly destroyed, has been finished by Prussian shells.

Capital of Artois, it had a vivid and eventful history, reaching back to pre-Roman times, continuing under Baldwin of the Iron Arm, who became the first Count of Arras; then being halved between the Count of Flanders and the King of France; given by St. Louis to his brother Robert, passing to the Counts of Burgundy, reverting to Louis de Mâle of Flemish fame, abandoned to the Emperor, won back by France; then acquiring the sinister distinction of having produced Robespierre and, finally, coming now to its end at the hands of the German hosts. What Arras must have been before the Revolution we can only guess, but with its glorious cathedral, its Chapelle des Ardents, and its “Pyramid of the Holy Candle” added to its surviving town hall with its fantastically beautiful spire, and its miraculously preserved streets and squares lined with fancifully gabled and arcaded houses, it must have been a sanctuary of old delights. The cathedral was of all styles from the twelfth to the sixteenth century, while the chapel and the “pyramid,” were models of mediæval art in its richest state. Both were destroyed by one Lebon, a human demon and apostate priest, who organised a “terror” of his own in his city and has gone down to infamy for his pestilential crimes.

Both the destroyed monuments were votive offerings in gratitude to Our Lady for her miraculous intervention in the case of a fearful plague in the twelfth century, the instrument of preservation being a certain holy candle, the melted wax from which was effective in preserving the life of all it touched. The pyramid was a slender Gothic tabernacle and spire, ninety feet high, standing in the Petite Place, a masterpiece of carved and painted and gilded sculptures, unique of its kind. Every vestige has vanished except a few relics preserved, together with that most precious memorial, the blood-stained rochet of St. Thomas à Becket, in the modern cathedral which Berlin has just announced has been completely and intentionally destroyed by gun-fire.

Until its recent destruction, Arras was one of the few territorially French towns in this region that could and did take one back into the atmosphere of the pre-coal-and-iron era of Europe, though with a difference. The fine vigour and riotous life of the Renaissance, the gaiety and spontaneousness of mediævalism were gone, with the colour and gold of the carved and painted shrines and houses, the fanciful costumes, the alert civic life; and instead was a grey shadow, a slowly dissolving memory. Still the pale simulacrum could stimulate the imagination, as the rose jar renews the memory of the rose. Now the jar is shattered and the scented leaves are trodden in the red mire, and we must make our way across the frontier if we are to find and enjoy what once Arras could in a measure give. God grant we may always be able to do so, and that Audenaarde and Tournai, Bruges and Malines, and Courtrai, with the still little villages in between, may remain to us after coal and iron have achieved their perfect work and been replaced in that position in life to which it pleased God to call them, so surrendering the more dominating place to which man had called them in his turn.

Of Ypres and Dixmude it is better to say little. Of the first of these, and its vanished glory, the solemn and single great Cloth Hall, I have said an inadequate something, but there was also St. Martin’s, once a cathedral, with its delicate type of Gothic, its rich Renaissance woodwork, its tombs and screens and treasures of ecclesiastical art; there were its old guild-houses and its quaint dwellings, carved and gabled and with wonderful old brickwork. And in Dixmude there was the Church of St. Nicholas with its jubé, or rood-loft, as gorgeous a piece of flamboyant art as one could find anywhere in Belgium or France. All this is gone, but a little farther on, behind the present battle lines, are more wonderful cities still—or are at this writing, in July, 1915.

This little Flanders, from the Scheldt to the sea, was a veritable garden of dreams. Nieuport, Furnes, Ypres, Dixmude, Courtrai, Tournai, Bruges, Ghent, Audenaarde—all are haunted by infinite old memories, and most of them have preserved their souls through seclusion and commercial oblivion, but around and between lie endless little villages of delicate old houses, grey Gothic churches that have not been secularised or abandoned (for Flanders always was a Catholic country), gardens, slow canals and brooks under their low stone bridges, and an ingratiating quiet that gives the lie to the progressive, practical, efficient, and wealthy strip of inordinate activity that “disquieteth itself in vain” from Lille to Liége through Mons and Courcelles, Charleroi and Namur.

As the old names come forward again in rumours and reports from the front, in death lists and hideous narratives of outrage and destruction, indestructible memories, dormant for thirty years, take form and shape again, and daily the gentle charm of a forgotten land becomes living, and the dull fear of an unpredictable and sinister future grows more ominous and intense. There is no other land quite like it; no place where the old has been spared by the new to such a degree, and where the old has remained so altogether lovely.

Of course Bruges is the Holy of Holies in this sanctuary of lost ideals, but on the way stop to consider the outer ring of a better kind of fortresses that circle her inner citadel.

Nieuport, Dixmude, and Ypres once held their stations from the sea to the Lys, but their ramparts and bastions were not proof against the siege-guns of Essen and they have fallen. Next to the east and farther down the Lys, is Courtrai, under whose walls in 1302 was fought that battle of the burghers of Flanders against the French, when 1,200 of the flower of French knighthood, not to speak of the men-at-arms, were slain, and 600 golden spurs were gathered from the field and hung in triumph in the abbey church.