BETWEEN the Seine and the Rhine lay once a beautiful land wherein more history was made, and recorded in old monuments full of grace and grandeur and fancy, than in almost any other region of the world. The old names were best, for each aroused memory and begot strange dreams: Flanders, Brabant, the Palatinate; Picardy, Valois, Champagne, Franche-Comté; Artois, Burgundy, and Bar. And the town names ring with the same sonorous melody, evoking the ghosts of a great and indelible past: Bruges, Ghent, Louvain, and Liége; Aix-la-Chapelle, Coblentz, and Trèves; Ypres and Lille, Tournai and Fontenay, Arras and Malplaquet; Laon, Nancy, Verdun, and Varennes; Amiens, Soissons, and Reims. C?sar, Charlemagne, St. Louis, Napoleon, with proconsuls, paladins, crusaders, and marshals unnumbered; kings, prince-bishops, monks, knights, and aureoled saints take{2} form and shape again at the clang of the splendid names.

And in all these places, and by all these men (and elsewhere, endlessly, and by hands unnumbered), two thousand years had wrought their visible manifestation in abbey, church, and cathedral; in manor and palace and castle, in trade hall and civic hall, and in library and seminary and school.

Wars, great and small, have swept it from river to river, but much has been free for a century and all of it free for forty years. Under every oppression and every adversity it has thriven and grown rich, not in material things alone, but in those commodities that have actual intrinsic value; and a short year ago it was the most prosperous, peaceful, and industrious quarter of Europe. Whatever the war, however violent the opposing agencies, its priceless records of architecture and other acts were piously or craftily spared, except when the madness of the French Revolution swept over its convents and cloisters, leaving Coxyde, Villers, St. Bavon, St. Jean des Vignes, the Abbaye des Lys, dead witnesses of the faith that had built them and the spared monuments as well.{3}

And now a thing calling itself the highest civilisation in Europe, with the name of God in its mouth, again sweeps the already well-swept land. In defiance of Peace Palaces and Conferences; in spite of the bankers of the world and their double-knotted purse-strings; in spite of a socialism that said war should not happen again, and an evolutionary philosophy that said it could not happen again (men now being so civilised), the world is at war, and the old arena of Europe flames as at Armageddon, while those things too sacred for pillage and destruction by the armies and the commanders of five centuries are given over to annihilation in order that the peril of the Slav, on the other side of Europe, may not menace the treasured civilisation of the West, whose vestiges even now are blazing pyres, or cinders and ashes!

It is significant that thus far the heavy hand of the pursuer has fallen notably on two things: the school and the church; for these are two of the three things he most fears and hates. Not the school, as with him, where secularism, through economic materialism and a sinister philosophy, breeds a race as unprincipled as it is efficient and fearless, nor the church, as with him, where in{4}tellectualism ousts faith, expediency morals, and God is glad “ably to support” the victorious battalions of a crown prince. Quite otherwise; the school that teaches both independence and regard for law, with religion as the only basis for right conduct, and the Church that teaches humility and the reality of sin, and the subservience of all rulers, whether king or parliament, to the religion and the authority of a living Christ speaking to-day as He spoke on the Mount of Olives.

When the University of Louvain passed in the smoke and flame of a murdered city; when the Church of St. Pierre and the Cathedral of Malines and the Shrine of Our Lady of Reims were shattered by bombs and swept by devouring fire, there was something in it all other than the grim necessity of a savage war; there was the symbol of a new thing in the world, built on all Louvain, Malines, and Reims had denied, and destroying the very outward show of what could not exist on earth side by side with its potent and dominant negation.

Reims Cathedral “stood in the line of gunfire,” it was “a landmark and unfortunately could not escape,” it had been “fortified by the{5} enemy and therefore could not be spared.” All true, each statement, and thus: It stood between a brute power founded on Bismarckian force and Nietzschean antichristian philosophy, on the one hand, and on the other nations newly conscious of their Christianity, ashamed of their backsliding, and ready to fight to the death for what had made them. It was a landmark, a vast, visible showing forth of a great Christian spirit and a greater Christian principle, and as such it must go down. It was fortified, as every church is fortified, to fight against the devil and all his works, and therefore, equally with the allied forces behind it, it was fighting against a common enemy. If by its ruin it can make this universally and eternally clear, we can see it go without a tear or a regret, for, like the martyr in the Roman arena, it has accomplished its work.

Thus far, of the great cities, Liége, Louvain, Malines, Ypres, Arras, and Reims are gone, with the greater part of their treasured art, while Laon, Soissons, and Namur have been grievously wrecked. Apparently, Amiens, Noyon, Bruges, and Ghent are now safe, but endless opportunities open for destruction and pillage, and we may well be prepared for irreparable loss before the{6} invader is hurled back across his natural river frontier. Let us consider, not what already has been annihilated, but the kind of art it was, so measuring, in a degree, the quality of our loss—and of what we still may lose.

First of all, there are the towns themselves, for all art is not concentrated in h?tel de ville and cathedral; it shows itself sometimes in more appealing guise in the river villages and proud cities, and its testimony to a great past is here equally potent. Ypres, Malines, Dinant, Termonde, and Huy, all of which are gone, were treasures that belonged to all the world; Namur and Plombières we could not spare, and as for Bruges and Ghent, even apart from their exquisite architecture and their treasures of painting, the soul shudders at what might happen there were they involved in the retreat of a disorganised army, when one considers what happened to Liége and Louvain in its victorious advance. All Belgium and Luxembourg, all Picardy and Champagne are, or were, rich with lovely little towns and villages, each a work of art in itself; they are shrivelling like a garden under the first frost, and, it may be, in a little while none will remain.{7}

The major architecture of this unhappy land falls into three classes and three periods of time. Oldest and most priceless are the churches, and these are of the twelfth, thirteenth, and fourteenth centuries, the ages when religion was one and secure and was building a great civilisation that we would fain see equalled again. Then come the town halls and guildhalls of the fifteenth century, each speaking for the proud freedom of merchant and burgher, when the hold of religion was weakening a little, and the first signs were showing themselves of what, in the end, was to have issue in this war of wars; finally come the town houses of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, in all their quaint individuality and their overriding self-esteem, though fine still, and with hints of the great art that already had passed.

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,{8} 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{9} 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.{10}

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{11} 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{12} 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 medi?valism, 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
 

frontiers and dynastic vicissitudes, the great unity of medi?valism blends the Rhineland, Flanders, Brabant, Luxembourg, Artois, Champagne, Eastern Normandy, Eastern France, into a consistent whole, so far as all real things are concerned. In spite of its bickerings and fightings and jealousies and plots and counterplots, Europe was really more united, more a working whole, during the Middle Ages than ever it has been since. One religion and one philosophy did for the fluctuant states what the Reformation, democracy, and “enlightenment” could only undo, and in this vanishing art, which, after all, is the truest history man can record, we find the dynamic force, the creative power, of a culture and a civilisation that took little count of artificial barriers between perfectly artificial nations, but included all in the greatest and most beneficent syntheses Europe has ever known.

The art of this land—or these lands, if you like—should be so considered; not as an interesting and even stimulating by-product of social, industrial, and political evolution, with only an accidental relationship to them, and only an empirical interest for the men of to-day, but as the most perfect material expression of the great{14} reality that existed through and by these agencies that were in themselves nothing; the character that emerged through the turmoil of human activity, as it shows itself in the men and women of the time, and expresses itself in their art.

To do this fully is impossible; every province would require a volume, every art a series of volumes, but at least we can catalogue again the more salient qualities of the greater masterpieces, and try to co-ordinate them into some outward semblance of that essential unity they both promised and expressed.