When the famous relics of Aachen were exposed in 1447, so great was the concourse of pilgrims that it was impossible for the Estates of Liége to assemble. The patricians of Bruges attributed the victory of Rosebeke to the direct intervention of the Mother of God, and it was Saint Michael, the patron of Brussels, who obtained for the craftsmen of that city the great charter of 1421.

Whatever may be thought of the religious convictions of these people, that their art was profoundly influenced by them is a fact which cannot be denied: the remnant of their work which has come down to us bears ample testimony to it, from the stateliest sanctuary to the meanest wayside shrine and from the grandest municipal palace to the carved lintel of some poor workman's cot. Stories from the Old and the New Testament are sculptured on the façade of the Town Hall of Louvain, the original statues which peopled the niches of the Town Hall of Brussels were all of them the statues of saints, and on the highest pinnacle of that network of stone which forms its spire stands Saint Michael slaying the dragon, symbol of the ultimate triumph of good over ill. Nor are these things unusual, we find them over and over again throughout the Low Country.

This is all the more remarkable because the art of the period was in no sense hieratic: the masons and sculptors and painters of Belgium at the time of which we are writing were ordinary working men, members of one or other of the craft guilds, and the patrons who employed them were not as a rule ecclesiastics but, for the most part, plain tradesmen; and yet their art was nothing less than the solemn profession of faith of the burghers and the craftsmen who created it—their creed made manifest in piled up brick and sculptured stone, in oak, in cedar, in iron cunningly wrought, in the saffron sheen of hammered brass, in the glister of gems, the glow of silk and in the burnished splendour of gold: a harmony magnifical of perfect forms and perfect tints in honour of Him who is above all and in all and through all—the Alpha and Omega of the universe. Herein we have the secret of their success—the faith that was in them, their vivid realisation of things unseen. This was how it was that in an age overflowing with luxury, a nation of merchants and manufacturers, who from the very nature of their pursuits must have been for the most part occupied with sordid things, were able to produce an art wholly untainted by sensualism, an art so glorious and so nearly perfect that it has hardly ever been equalled and never yet surpassed. Thus it has ever been and thus it will ever be. The average man is too commonplace and too practical to be moved by an abstract notion. It needs something which he believes to be a living reality, something which he is convinced is immeasurably above and beyond himself to enkindle in him the enthusiasm necessary to conceive and to carry out any really great idea. Art for art's sake is a formula which has sometimes hypnotised individuals of a sensitive and romantic temperament, but it has never yet converted the herd.

Some of us have been warring against the Philistines beneath an oriflamme emblazoned with this shibboleth for the best part of half a century, and what has been the outcome? A modicum of success in the matter of wall paper and a magnificent collection of pictorial bill posters. Nor can we begin to hope for any more solid results until we are at least as firmly convinced as were the sinners of Brabant in the fourteen hundreds of the truth of those words which Thomas à Kempis uttered, and which in one phrase sum up the philosophy of his great spiritual ancestor, old Jan van Ruysbroek—'Vanitas vanitatum et omnia vanitas præter amare Deum et illi soli servire.'[31]

[CHAPTER XVI]
Buildings and Builders (continued)

In an old collegiate church not far from Brussels there is a very curious mural tablet in memory of a certain canon who in his day was seemingly a man of some distinction. The inscription is undated and it runs thus:—

D. O. M.
ac
memoriæ
R.ad̃m. Dñi, D. Francisci
Vanden Abeele
qui
ex Curato 3æ Portionis hujus
insignis Ecclesiæ dein Primæ
Per 25 annos sedulus et laudabilis
Canonicus-Curator fuit;
Sed fuit:
nunc cinis, ossa, vermis
Putredo nihil
Hæc sors mortalium
Nasci, laborare, mori.
Tu qui vivis, oculos
Deorsum conjice,
Et attende.

We, throughout many pages, have been hymning the glory of Brussels in the days of the Burgundian Dukes. That glory is among the things which have been. It was, but it has long since vanished. In the words of Canon Abeele's epitaph—'Fuit; sed fuit: nunc ... nihil' in very large letters.