The dream empire began to dissolve; Holland revolted, and the Prince of Orange was restored; Belgium was occupied by the Allies, who had got to work again, and the scheme of a new state, to be formed of all the old seventeen provinces united under the Prince of Orange, was brought forward against the wishes of the Belgians, who preferred the restoration of Austrian rule. They had lived too close to their Protestant Dutch neighbours and had too keen a memory of their character and habits to desire amalgamation with them on any terms.
Napoleon went to Elba, came back, called on his “loyal Belgians” to support him, advanced into their territories, and at Waterloo lost everything and melted away into history and legend, leaving Belgium in unnatural union with the Dutch provinces, where it remained for some fifteen years, revolting in 1830, making good its rebellion, and establishing itself as an independent state under the sovereignty of Prince Leopold of Saxe-Cobourg, who had been elected King on the refusal of the Duc de Nemours, first chosen by the victorious provisional government.
The long agony was at an end; it had lasted from August 22, 1567, when the Duke of Alva entered Brussels, until July 21, 1831, when Leopold I was crowned King of Belgium, a period of two hundred and sixty-four years. Other peoples and other states have been brought low, time out of mind; have suffered, disintegrated, and disappeared. It would be hard to find another instance, however, where so fabulously rich a people, and so cultivated withal, so supreme in their achievement of a lofty and well-rounded civilisation, have been called upon to submit to so prolonged, varied, and searching an assault, to descend to such depths of misery, poverty, and degradation—and who yet have preserved through two centuries and a half of agony and spoliation a tradition and a habit of righteousness that, when the great test arrived, blazed upward in sudden fierceness of self-revelation to the confusion of new enemies and the wonder of a world. What lies beyond awaits the proof, but for the moment three centuries have dropped away and the old independence, the old fearlessness, the old honour of Bruges and Ghent, of Liége and Malines shine again on old battle-fields of new carnage and in new hearts of old righteousness. The new era begins, and the world waits, confident of the issue.
V
THE GLORY OF A GREAT ART
BETWEEN Paris and Cologne, Strasbourg and Bruges lies, in little, nearly the whole history of northern architecture from Charlemagne to the last Louis of France, when it ceased to be an art and became a fashion. The greater part of Normandy lies, it is true, across the Seine, and is, for the time, beyond our field of vision, but, barring Caen, architectural significance is well concentrated in the triangle, Rouen, Dieppe, le Havre. The same is true of the old Royaume of France; though Chartres and Bourges lie to the south, the beginning, and in some sense the culmination, of Gothic is to be found between Seine and Somme. In the east, to the Rhine, we have practically all that Germany has contributed, except in the later days of the Renaissance.
If we like, we may go far beyond the dim and mysterious era of the Carolings, finding in Trèves old Roman ruins that take us back four or five centuries earlier, but the real history of this region begins with Charlemagne and takes us to his favourite city of Aix-la-Chapelle for the single, but vastly significant, building left us as evidence of his inspiration and his creative power. With the ending of this day-dream there comes a great silence, while civilisation and culture disappear again, to be restored two centuries later, far to the west, and at the hands of the Normans. Here we find St. Georges de Bocherville, Fécamp, and the inestimable and forgotten ruins of Jumièges. For transition to Gothic we have Senlis, Soissons, Noyon, with Laon and Paris as earliest Gothic of pure and consistent type; Châlons, Amiens, and Reims for culmination, and Abbeville, Rouen, Beauvais, Troyes, and Strasbourg for its sumptuous decline.
From the other hand we go on from Aix to Cologne for the fine eleventh-century work that took up the tale after the second Dark Ages that followed the ending of the empire of the Carolings, with more examples at Laach and in Hildesheim, which also are beyond our survey. A century later we get the consistent Teutonic art of Trèves, Mayence, Spires, and Worms, while the high Gothic of the noon of mediævalism is found at Cologne and Strasbourg, with the last rich fantasy of all, in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, in Brussels and Antwerp and Malines, in Courtrai, Tournai, Namur, Louvain, Ghent, Ypres, and Bruges. For Renaissance we find all we need, and everywhere; churches, palaces, guild-halls, châteaux, dwellings, from the fanciful transition at Dieppe, Rouen, Gisors, to the sophisticated, well-conditioned, and perfectly artificial restored classic of Nancy.
As there is no other country in the north, of equal area, where history has been made so plenteously and of such varied quality, so it is with its art, and its architecture in particular, which marks the beginnings, the culmination, and the close of the three stylistic periods of Christian civilisation in the West—Carolingian, Norman, and Gothic—and through monuments singularly significant and equally notable in their perfection. It would be impossible to quote a tenth of them; there are a hundred at least, each of which demands (and many have received) a volume or more, but at least we can pick the most priceless, either for history or beauty, in a farewell that may be final for all, as already it is for such consummate and vanished masterpieces as the Cloth Hall at Ypres and the Cathedral of Reims.
Let us begin with Aix, just over the Belgian