Heart of Europe

by Ralph Adams Cram

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 It is true that the new fashion rapidly superseded the dying and disintegrating spirit of mediævalism, and never a Bruges town hall or a Malines cathedral came again; instead we get the dull and blundering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.