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
THE DESTROYED HÔTEL DE VILLE OF ARRAS
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.