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
THE DESTROYED CLOTH HALL OF YPRES
“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,