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{173} 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{174} 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 H?tel 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 medi?val 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{176} 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{177} 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 scaf{178}folding. 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 medi?val 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{179} 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{180} Duke of Alva. War and pillage, massacre, bribery, treason, the rack marked the advance in culture and civilisation beyond the dark days of medi?valism. 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{181} 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 c............