The Cathedral of Our Lady of Tournai is far less known than its peculiar importance and its peculiar beauty demand. It is a curious accretion and plexus of styles, from the middle of the eleventh to the end of the fourteenth century, with an incongruous but beautiful rood-screen of the Renaissance. Cruciform, and of great size (425 feet in length), it has the apsidal transepts of the Rhenish style, each with its columned ambulatory; a central tower with high pointed roof, also Rhenish (and English) and, as well, four slim surrounding towers, two to each transept, as at Laon, where they are not all complete, and at Reims, where they never rose above the nave cornice. All this is in a fine, strong, simple, round-arched transition style, far superior to anything on the Rhine, and at least equal to Noyon and Paris. The four tall towers are equal in size and general design, but run from a consistent Romanesque to a straightforward Gothic in detail, the effect being particularly vital and interesting. The enormous choir of late and very delicate mediæval design, having been begun in the last quarter of the thirteenth and finished in the middle of the fourteenth century, is one of the few Gothic things one regrets, for while it is very beautiful in itself, it has eliminated what was probably a strikingly effective Romanesque choir, while its towering mass crushes all the rest of the church and makes it a rather shapeless composition.
The cathedral has suffered constantly and at the hands of many kinds of unscrupulous vandals. The “Reformers” in the sixteenth century pillaged it and wrecked its gilded shrines and its ancient glass; the Revolutionists continued the dread work in the eighteenth century, and a hundred years later blundering efforts to reinforce it by crude masses of masonry were succeeded by equally blundering efforts at restoration. It has, however, preserved and gathered together many treasures of Catholic art, including chasubles of St. Thomas à Becket, Flemish tapestries, ivory carvings, embroidered altar frontals, metal work, and mediæval missals.
There are many other fine old churches in Tournai—St. Jacques, St. Quentin, St. Nicholas, St. Brice—all with elements of interest, while the ancient Cloth Hall contains a most valuable collection of mediæval art-work of all kinds, and the older streets still preserve fine dwellings and guild-houses of the Middle Ages and early Renaissance.
Audenaarde is all old, and it lies some five and twenty miles down the slow-winding Scheldt on its roundabout and unhurried way to Ghent and Antwerp and the sea. Once also it was a great city, now it is a village of six or seven thousand souls, for it has fortunately never recovered its prosperity under the new and unhandsome conditions that marked the nineteenth century, as happened in the case of Brussels and Antwerp and Ghent. In earlier days it was famous, like Arras, for its tapestries, and many of those exquisite fifteenth-century masterpieces that are now exiled in alien museums where they do not belong, but where at least their value is appreciated and estimated at almost their weight in gold, came from its looms. Tapestries are made here no more, nor in any other place, for their art was of a peculiar subtlety that, even if it finds appreciation amongst stray connoisseurs and curators, is as far beyond the powers of the present day and generation as the glass of Chartres or the sculptures of Reims. Linen and cotton weaving and the brewing of beer have taken the place of tapestries in Audenaarde, but the old town itself is little harmed thereby.
From the large and pious and opulent days of the later Middle Ages, there remain in Audenaarde a very splendid great hall and two equally great churches of rather unusual value. The hall is early sixteenth century, very rich and equally graceful, with a slender tower and spire, ending in a great crown as did the now-shattered tower of Arras. Its rooms are very splendid, with big carved chimneypieces of the most elaborate design, and with its small size and scrupulous detail it ranks with Bruges and Arras and in advance of the more ambitious creations of Brussels and Ghent.
The two remaining churches of Audenaarde, Ste. Walburga and Notre Dame, have much distinction and architectural value, particularly Notre Dame, which was Cistercian and is a surprisingly pure example of the reserved and ascetic Gothic which always marked the buildings of this order—which it largely created as a matter of fact. Ste. Walburga is quite different, with its Romanesque choir of very modest proportions, its ambitious and overshadowing nave of the fifteenth century, and its unfinished transepts showing where the great scheme of rebuilding, undertaken when it was too late and religion was already a waning force, had been abandoned. There has been too much restoration in the case of all these works of admirable art, and the ancient atmosphere is pretty well gone, but they are noble still, in spite of the nervous and mechanical attentions of archæologists and architects and other well-meaning but misguided people.
IX
A TALE OF THREE CITIES
STILL farther to the north, at the confluence of the Scheldt and the Lys, is Ghent, the proud and turbulent metropolis of the fifteenth century, the city-state that was so preposterously democratic it could never get along with its neighbours, nor even with itself; the city of De Conninck and Breidel and the Van Artevelds, of sudden and heroic courage, of irresponsible turnings from one side to the other, and a characteristic vacillation in public policy that kept it always in hot water and was in the end its undoing; the place of strange old churches and wonderful houses; the shrine of marvellous pictures and one of them perhaps, what it has been called, the greatest picture in the world.
To Ghent, over which lay for centuries the oblivion that came upon all the cities of Flanders after they lost their independence and fell into the hands of the unscrupulous princes and states of the Renaissance, one following another with variety of oppression but no cessation thereof, has come a new vitality. It is as great a city now as then, counting a population of well over 200,000, while Bruges has no more than a quarter of this number. Providentially, it has suffered less than might have been feared by this accession of prosperity; its wonderful churches and tall towers, its quays with their serried lines of high gabled houses, its great castle of the Counts of Flanders, its winding streets and tortuous canals lined with ancient and lovely dwellings and spanned by little stone bridges, all tell even now for almost their full value; and though the city is quite metropolitan in its cleanness and well-being, with fine new streets and bridges and shops, the spell of a great antiquity is over it, and the new follows the old with conscientious effort and delightful delicacy of feeling. If an old city must gain a new lease of life, let it be after the fashion of Ghent.
Here is an old treasure-house full of wonders, and it can be touched upon lightly, if at all, for it demands a volume to itself. It has a dozen churches, all of the deepest interest; the Cathedral of St. Bavon, St. Nicholas, St. Michael, St. Jacques, standing to the front. All suffered from the Protestants and the French Revolution, and some from the mishandling of restorers, but they retain their individuality, which is very marked, for one and all are very local variants of the styles one finds elsewhere; they are of Ghent and of no other place. Brick is used widely, as elsewhere in Flanders, either by itself or mingled with stone; and it is used with that intelligence, so rare in modern times, that indicates the possibility of adapting a style to the materials through which it is expressed. Of course, then art was as living a thing as religion and the realities of liberty, whereas now they all fall in the category of those fictions that please while they do not persuade—which makes all the difference in the world. All Flanders is a lesson in the use of brick, and as it is used here in St. Nicholas, and in the houses of the Quai aux Herbes, as it was used in lost Louvain, in desolated Ypres, in battered Malines, it was a study in good art, a lesson in the history of human culture, a demonstration of the perfect adaptation of modest means to a very noble end.