Brussels is full of these, and Antwerp; Louvain had them, and Ypres, Termonde, Arras, and Charleville, only a few months ago; in Bruges and Ghent they fill whole streets and stand in silent accusation of what we of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries have offered as our contribution to the housing of civilisation.
Of the civic halls the list is endless: Brussels, Malines, Bruges, Ypres, Ghent, Antwerp, Mons, Audenaarde, Termonde and Liége; Compiègne, St. Quentin, Arras, Valenciennes; ranging from the grave solemnity of the enormous and wide-spread Ypres to the lacy fantasticism of Louvain and Audenaarde. Architecture has gone far from the Salle Synodale of Sens and the Merveille of Mont-St.-Michel, and it has not gone altogether well, but how significant these stone fancies are of the abounding life and the splendid pride and the open-handed beneficence of the fifteenth-century burghers, who loved their towns and bent the rebellious masonry to their will, working it into a kind of stony lace and embroidery to the glory of trade and civic spirit! If we should lose them now, as we almost lost Louvain, standing in the midst of the roaring flame and drifting smoke, while tall churches and rich universities and fair old houses crumbled and died around it, what should we not lose?
And the churches, those matchless monuments, four, five, and six centuries old, where generations have brought all their best to glorify God, where glass and sculpture, tapestries and fretted woodwork, pictures, and gold and silver wrought cunningly into immortal art—how are we to speak of these, or think of them, with St. Pierre of Louvain and St. Rombaut of Malines still smoking with their dying fires, while piece by piece the calcined stone falls in the embers, and while Reims, one of the wonders of the world, stands gaunt and shattered, wrecked by bombs, swept by fire, its windows that rivalled Chartres split into irremediable ruin, its statues devastated that once stood on a level with the sculptures of Greece?
The catastrophe itself is so unthinkable that the world does not now half realise it. And yet, what of all that remains in the pathway—backward or forward—of Attila and his Huns? St. Gudule of Brussels, St. Bavon of Ghent, and the cathedrals of Antwerp, Tongres, and Tournai; and in France that matchless sequence of which Reims was once the central jewel, Soissons, Senlis and Noyon, St. Remi, Amiens, and Laon; here, with Reims, are seven churches such as man never surpassed, and equalled only at Paris, Chartres, Coutances, and Bourges; each is of a different timbre, each a different expression of the greatest century of Christian civilisation, and, given the opportunity, there is no reason why each should not suffer the fate of Reims.
There is a thin and sinister philosophy, akin to that of Treitschke and Nietzsche (which is for to-day what Machiavelli was for the sixteenth century), that avows no building, no consummate work of art of any kind, “worth the bones of a Pomeranian grenadier,” justifying its statement on the basis of a superficial humanism. Never was a more malignant ethic. A man is valuable in proportion to what he is and does for righteous society, and for what he makes of himself as a free and immortal soul responsible to God. Go through the roaring mills of Crefeld and Essen, the futile pleasure-haunts of Homburg and Wiesbaden, the bureaux and barracks and palaces of Berlin; you will find—as similarly in every country—hundreds of thousands of peasants, workmen, and aristocrats whose contribution to Christian civilisation is nothing, and will be nothing however long they may live; who forget their souls and deny their God, and of these we can say, it is not the bones of a Pomeranian grenadier or even the bones of a Prussian Junker that weigh more in the scale than Reims or Louvain, it is not a million of these that mean so much for service and the glory of God, as one such potent influence as Amiens or Reims, or the library and schools of Louvain, or the pictures of Memling and the Van Eycks in Bruges and Antwerp and Ghent.
Those that cry loudest for the sanctity of human life and its priority before art and letters, most insistently hurl a hundred thousand lives against inevitable death, and spread black starvation over myriads of women and children, in order that their privilege of selling inferior and unnecessary products to far-away savages may be preserved intact. Against this set the cathedrals and universities and the exquisite art of France and Belgium and the Rhine; consider what it meant once, what it means even now, what for the future it is destined to mean as never before.
For the old passes: the old that began with Machiavelli and is ending with von Bernhardi. It is not alone Prussia that will be purged by the fire of an inevitable conflict, nor Germany, nor all the Teuton lands; it is the whole world, that sold its birthright for a mess of pottage and now, in terror of the price at last to be paid, denounces the infamous contract and fights to the death against the armies of the Moloch it helped to fashion. And when the field is won, what happens but the coming into its own again of the very power that made Reims and Louvain, the recovery of the old and righteous and Christian standard of values, the building on the ruins of five centuries of a new civilisation where whatever art that remains will play its due part as the revealer of that Absolute Truth that brought it into being, forgotten now for very long? Then the pictures of Flanders and Umbria and Tuscany, the sculpture of France, the music of Teuton and Slav, the “minor arts” of all mediævalism, the architecture of Bourges and Amiens and Chartres will both reveal and inspire with doubled power.
And in all and through all, Reims in its ruin will be a more potent agency of regeneration than the perfection of Chartres or the finality of Bourges.
I should like to consider, though briefly and in the light of a very real unity that negatived the political disunity that has always prevailed, the art of these lands where for a twelvemonth millions of men have fought after a fashion never known before, while around them each day saw the irreparable destruction of the best that man could do for the love of God, and better than he can do now. In spite of constantly changing