Heart of Europe

by Ralph Adams Cram

So, from the dunes of the North Sea around to the wide estuary of the Scheldt, the ring of defences is complete, and in the midst like a citadel lies Bruges, the Dream City, preserving, guarding, and reverencing its dreams.

I knew Bruges first in 1886 when I seem to remember its old walls, when its new buildings were few and unobjectionable, and when the tourist—English, German, American—was as much of a novelty as he was an anachronism. I am told now that the walls have gone, and the boulevards and architects’ buildings, and the tourists have come in; have come in hosts, with all their destructive possibilities, but I can think only of the old Bruges, still, meditative, serene; a town Maxfield Parish might have designed, but impossible elsewhere except as a survival, by some providential miracle of beneficence, from the heart of the Middle Ages.

This is not to say that Bruges has survived intact. Hurled into the midst of the maelstrom of chaos that characterised the Renaissance in all its political aspects, she was ruined utterly between Maximilian of Austria, the Calvinists, and the Duke of Alva. War and pillage, massacre, bribery, treason, the rack marked the advance in culture and civilisation beyond the dark days of mediævalism. What the Austrian spared the Protestant devoured, while the Spaniard gleaned the crumbs that remained. Bruges, that great city, proud, rich, and beautiful above all cities of the North, counted now a population of a scant 30,000, hopeless, abandoned, poverty-stricken.

The greatest ruin was wrought by one Balfour, a creature in the pay of William of Orange, who in 1578 captured the city and held it for six years, during which time the Catholic religion was prohibited, the bishop was imprisoned, all priests were either driven into exile or tortured and then burned at the stake, while churches were destroyed, turned into stables, sacked and desecrated, and more great pictures, statues, shrines, windows, sacred vessels, and vestments were destroyed than have been miraculously preserved. Every religious house in the vicinity was completely expunged, including the vast Cistercian monastery of Coxyde, the most glorious church in Flanders; and its wide-spread gardens, fields, and orchards regained from the dunes by centuries of labour, reverted to their original estate, and desolation took the place of beneficent and hard-won fertility.

Out of this reign of terror came as some compensation the saving of Bruges—or what was left of it. In 1560 the Pope had made the city an episcopal see, on the urging of Philip II, and after Balfour had met a well-merited, but too sudden and merciful, death, the exiled and plundered orders took refuge within its walls, building new and humbler quarters for themselves and hospitals and almshouses for the miserable citizens. The Church took the place of commerce, and under its care some degree of life came back to the ruined city; and the quality it then took on, of a community of religious houses, institutions of charity and mercy, and old churches restored again to their proper uses, it has never lost.

Toward the end of the seventeenth and all through the eighteenth century the slow destruction of old beauty went on, though with a different impulse. Now it was the unescapable vandalism of ignorance and degraded taste that marked the time; old windows that had escaped the Calvinists were pulled out so that a better light might fall on a new altar, since it was “such an admirable imitation of marble,” even as happened in Chartres, where some of the matchless windows were contemptuously cast into a ditch to reveal the tawdry splendours of the lamentable high altar and imitation marble of the choir which represented the enlightened intelligence of the eighteenth-century canons. The sixteenth century was bad enough, but one wonders sometimes how any continental culture survived the eighteenth century.

Later, when the nineteenth century came to crown with perfect achievement the arduous but incomplete efforts of its predecessor, ugly and barbarous houses took the place of only too many of the beautiful works of the Middle Ages, and finally the wonderful old walls were ruthlessly razed to give place to silly boulevards. And in spite of it all Bruges survives, and more completely than any other city of the North, for it is farthest away from the kingdom of coal and iron, and if war passes it by, it may still remain an oasis, a sanctuary in the desert.

The beauty of Bruges is incomparable and unique. Threaded by winding canals, crossed by innumerable old stone bridges, where pink-and-grey walls, tall gables, spired turrets, leaning fronts of mullioned windows rise from old stonepaved quays and garden walls hung with vines and backed by tree tops; cut by narrow streets of ancient houses, with old churches and convents and chapels on every hand and with slender towers lifting over quaint market-places and little squares and sudden gardens, it is a continuous and ever-varying and never-exhausting delight that, so far as I know, finds its rival only in Venice. A city that has shrunken a little within its walls is always more beautiful than one that has burst them and is steadily intruding into the fleeing countryside. That is the difference between the advance of man and that of nature. Ghent, Rome, Nuremberg are kernels of sweetness surrounded by a monstrously expanding rind that is exceeding bitter, but Carcassonne, Rothenburg, Siena, Bruges are so wholly different there is no possibility of comparison. When the houses of an old town seem to huddle a little more closely together, while superfluous walls fall away and the tide of green comes lapping on already moss-grown walls to cover and obliterate the traces man has left of his less successful efforts, then you have something approaching a perfect environment, particularly if, as here, there are innumerable and endless treasures of the best that man can do, now carefully preserved, and growing better the nearer nature comes to touch them with her wand of magic.

Architecturally, Bruges is fifteenth century with a singular consistency—when it isn’t of a century later or, and less conspicuously, of the fourteenth century; not that it matters much, it all hangs together because it is all of one mood and one impulse and one race. Its Hôtel de Ville, one of the perfect things in architecture, I have spoken of elsewhere; its churches, at least six of them, are each engaging in a different way, and each contains treasures of endless pictures, wood carving, metal work, vestments, gathered from ruined monasteries and churches to take the place of the greater treasures pillaged and destroyed by the Calvinists. Our Lady’s Church, with its curiously beautiful tower and its gem-like porch; the cathedral with its ugly modern tower and its fine interior with all its pictures and treasures of “dinanderie”; the Chapel of the Holy Blood, still fantastic and charming in spite of its sufferings at the hands of the French Revolutionists; St. Jacques, St. Gilles, and the Church of the Holy Sepulchre with its noble tomb of Count Baldwin of Jerusalem and his wife.