THE BELFRY OF BRUGES
Then there are all the old guild-houses, hospitals, convents, monasteries, and the rows and rows of fine old dwellings, each a model of personal and curiously contented architectural art, but, after all, Bruges is not Bruges because of its single buildings, or all of them together, or because of its pictures and its metal work and wood carving. It is Bruges because of its unearthly beauty of canals and gardens, of endless sudden compositions of lovely forms and lines and silhouettes; because of its still atmosphere of old days and better ways, and because it is a place where religion no longer appears as an accessory but takes its place even in these modern times as a constant, daily, poignant, and personal influence.
Already this living charm had begun to exert itself over a wider and wider field, and when the war came there were more than 4,000 English and Americans who had taken up their residence there, drawn by its subtle charm and by what this stood for once, and stands for now. When the King is back in Brussels again, and real life begins once more, who knows but that the spirit of Bruges may find itself dominant over the spirit (has it a spirit?) of Charleroi, not only in Flanders and Belgium and Europe, but throughout the world, for “the old order changeth, giving place to new,” and the “new” is also, and unmistakably, the old, preserved as here in Bruges for better days, when through suffering and ruin man comes into his own again, and sees once more what is, what is not, worth while.
In Brabant were once other centres of old memories: Maastricht, Liége, Huy, and Namur; Dinant, Louvain, and Malines. None of them remains, for across Brabant runs the black scar that has transformed the cities of the Sambre and the Meuse into smoking anvils, where iron is hammered out into efficiency and coal is torn from the earth and burned in consuming fires to the same end; for across Brabant runs the red scar that efficiency has blazed like a trail of enduring flame, never to be forgotten or forgiven so long as man remains on earth; a portent and a horror to all generations in sæcula sæculorum. Dinant, Louvain, Malines; yes, and Tirlemont, Aerschot, Wavre and the innumerable other names that are uttered below the breath as signifying things that cannot be spoken but never will be forgotten, things that give one at last to understand the stern necessity of the once discredited, but now grateful, doctrines of hell and of eternal damnation in the Christian scheme of the universe.
Dinant, whose fame in the fifteenth century for the making of wonderful works of art in metal, gave the name “dinanderie” to this admirable art—Dinant, crouched under the castle-crowned cliffs of the Meuse, with its quaint church, has gone now, and gone also is Louvain, all but its Hôtel de Ville which is more like a pyx or a reliquary, or some other work of “dinanderie,” than a real building. The destruction of Louvain needs no description, for its fires have burned its story indelibly into human consciousness. We know only too well how its university was destroyed, with its priceless library and its ancient and unique manuscripts; how the great and beautiful Church of St. Pierre was swept by flames and left a hopeless ruin; how its streets were absorbed, one after another, in the roaring conflagration, covering with their débris the stains of massacre and pillage. Of Malines we know less, nor shall until the great cloud rolls back, but there was much there to lose, and some of this we know has been lost while more may follow. In spite of the altars to coal and iron outside the old cincture of the town, Malines itself was a gentle and lovely old place, gathered around its great Church of St. Rombaut with its incredible tower. A town of old houses and still canals in strangely poetic combination, a little Bruges with a finer church than any the perfect Flemish city could boast. The church itself is of a vigorous type of the earliest fourteenth-century architecture, but the great tower, which was planned as the highest and most splendid spire in the world, though it completed only three hundred and twenty of its projected five hundred and fifty feet, is fifteenth century, and as perfect an example of late Gothic at its best as may be found anywhere in the world. It is really indescribable in its combination of majesty, brilliancy of design, and inconceivable intricacy of detail. The exuberance that marks the flamboyant art of France is here controlled and directed into the most excellent channels, and if ever it had been completed it must have taken its place as the most beautiful tower in the world. As it is, it ranks in its own way with the southern flèche of Chartres and Giotto’s Tower in Florence, and more one cannot say.
Information is not forthcoming as to how far it already has been wrecked; it is said that the glimmering pinnacles and niches of its amazing buttresses have suffered severely from shell-fire, and that its carillon, the finest in Belgium, has been destroyed; if nothing worse follows, the world may yet see its visionary spire take actual form at last, in the gratitude of a people for the passing from themselves, and from the world, of the shadow of death.
Inevitably, when one thinks of Malines, Louvain, Ypres, Arras, Soissons, Reims, there comes the suggestion of possible restorations, concretely expressed already by German savants and archæologists incapable of comprehending the difference between art and imitation, and as some palliation for the evils that have been done. It is a thought that must resolutely be put aside. As I said in speaking of Reims, if enough remains to be made habitable by simple patching and protection, let this be done by all means, but without a foot of false carving or glass or sculpture. Build other churches if you like, and as you must, and perhaps on the old general lines, though elsewhere, but let us have no more a Pierrefond or a Mt. St. Michael. What is gone is gone irrevocably, and its shells and shards are too valuable in their eternal teaching to be obliterated by well-meant schemes of rehabilitation. When a whole town passes, as Ypres and Louvain and Arras, then as it fell so let it lie. A kindly nature will slowly turn these bleak piles of fallen masonry into beautiful memorials, clothing them with grass and vines and flowers and trees. Let them stand so for ever, a memorial to the dead and a warning to man in his pride of life and insolence of will; and for the new cities, let them rise as beautifully as may be alongside, but not over, the graves of a dead era. Glastonbury and Jumièges, in their solemn and noble ruin, tell their story to ears that at last are disposed to listen, and the story of Reims and Louvain, with the same moral at its end, must be told eternally after the same fashion.