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.

Ghent must have been a city of indescribable beauty about the middle of the sixteenth century before its dark days began and one scourge after

another followed the Reformers with their combination of dull brutality, insane self-sufficiency, and savage fury of destruction. Even now the group of towers, St. Bavon, St. Nicholas, and the belfry with its “Great Bell Roland”—though the original spires are gone and the belfry has further suffered the indignity of an extinguisher cap of iron—gives some faint idea of what must have been before coal and iron came, first to destroy and then most hideously to re-create. So also does the towering old castle give a hint, whether you see it from the Place Ste. Pharailde or from the canal, with its great buttresses lifting out of the water; so does the unfinished but sumptuous HÔtel de Ville with its fretted bays and balconied turrets; so do the beautiful ruins of the ancient abbey shrouded in vines and trees. Life in a mediÆval city such as this could have left little to be desired so far as beauty of environment was concerned, and when this contained within itself unspoliated, unrestored churches that were in use all the time and meant something besides a seventh-day respectability, and a great bell in a tall tower, around whose rim were the words, “My name is Roland. When I toll there is fire; when I ring there is victory in Flanders,” it is easy to see how men could and did paint such pictures as “The Adoration of the Lamb That Was Slain.”

This, with the other great pictures in Flanders, will be considered in another chapter. It is the central art-treasure of the cathedral, the pride of the Netherlands, and one of the wonders of painting of the world.

Past tragic Termonde—a name and a deed never to be forgotten so long as history endures—now only a desert of broken walls and a place of unquiet ghosts, the Scheldt goes down to Antwerp, the last of the inner circle of impotent defences of the eternal things that cannot resist, against the passing things that are omnipotent during their little day. In the sixteenth century it was the greatest and richest city in Europe; now, with its 400,000 inhabitants, it is double its former size but numerically counts for little beside the insane aggregations that call themselves cities and are the work of the last century of misdirected and evanescent energy. Its greatness culminated in 1550, and then came the sequence of catastrophes that reduced it to material insignificance for three hundred years, the Protestant Reformation, with its savage destruction in 1566 of churches and monasteries, and of what they stood for as well; the Spanish occupation, with Alva’s enormities in 1576, when the more industrious and able citizens were driven into England, and the city itself burned; the winning away by the Dutch of its old command of commerce; the closing of the river by the Peace of Westphalia, and finally the devastating storm of the French Revolution which destroyed pretty much of anything that had been left. By this time the population had fallen to 40,000, but under Napoleon a short-lived recovery began, which was brought to an end by the revolution of 1830, and it was not until the middle of the century that a more lasting development was initiated.

Antwerp is a good enough modern town, as these go, but its disasters have robbed it of all its ancient quality, and even the cathedral has the air of being out of place. Great as it is, it is not a masterpiece, or even an exemplar of its many Gothic variants at their best. Its unusual width and number of aisles, its great height and its forest of columns give a certain impressiveness and a very beautiful play of light and shade, while its single tower is quite wonderful in its slender grace and its intricate and delicate scaffolding. Its one famous picture is the over-praised “Descent from the Cross” of Rubens, painted while he was under Italian influence and therefore, if quite uncharacteristic, nobler and more self-contained than the products of his maturity when he had become wholly himself.

There are one or two other churches of fragmentary value, the unique museum made out of the old dwelling and printing-office of Christopher Plantin, with its stores of mediÆval and Renaissance industrial art, and the Royal Museum where there are more admirable examples of the painting of Flanders, Brabant, and the Netherlands than are to be found gathered together in any other one place. For critical, or in a limited way, artistic study, this hoarding together, cheek by jowl, of innumerable works of art collected from desecrated churches and ruined monasteries, has its uses, but no one of the pictures torn from its original and intended surroundings tells for its full value. One wonders sometimes whether a daily newspaper, a school of fine arts, or a picture-gallery is the most biting indictment of contemporary culture and artistic sense; certainly whatever the answer, the picture-gallery presents powerful claims that are not lightly to be disregarded.

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.

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.