I HAVE tried to give some idea of the contributions of the lands and the peoples in the western theatre of the war in certain of the fields of art; to note the development of culture, the direction of human happenings, the bearing of great men and women who were leaders in Europe, through an abbreviation of historical records, to justify the giving to the region between the Seine and the Rhine, the Alps and the sea, the name of “Heart of Europe.” Such a survey of such a territory must, of necessity, be superficial and incomplete, for too many and wonderful things happened there to be recorded in a volume of limited extent. Chiefly, I have spoken of what could be, and is being, destroyed, but there is much else that is not subject to annihilation at the hands of furious men, the contributions to music, to letters, to the slow-growing spiritual deposit in society through philosophy, theology, and religion.

In music alone the Heart of Europe has done more, and at different times, than any similar area. While the troubadours of the twelfth century came into existence in the sunny lands of Languedoc, it was in Aquitaine, Champagne, and Flanders that the trouvères developed the norm of the troubadours “into something rich and strange,” and under the Countess Marie of Champagne created that beautiful and potent fiction of “courteous love,” which had issue in so many exquisite phases of human character and made possible a great school of romantic poets. They, under the leadership of Chretien de Troyes, made for the Countess Marie, out of the rude elements that had come from England and Wales through Brittany, the great poems and romances of King Arthur and his knights. The greatest of the trouvères was Adam de la Hale and he was born in Arras in the year 1240. Long before him, however, Gottfried of Strasbourg, a contemporary of Chretien de Troyes, had made of the tale of Lancelot and Guinevere one of the deathless poems of the world, as Wolfram von Essenbach of Bavaria was to create its great counterpart from the story of Parsifal.

Very slowly in the meantime music had been{312} working out its wonderful growth from the classical models of SS. Ambrose and Gregory intermingled with the instinctive folk-music of the south, and in the fourteenth century the leadership fell full into the hands of Flanders, where monks and laymen set themselves to the congenial task of building up a new and richer music on polyphonic lines. Brother Hairouet, who was at work about 1420; Binchois, born near Mons and died in 1460; Dufay, born in Hainault and trained in the cathedral at Cambrai, were all, together with the English Dunstable, potent leaders in the great work, laying well the foundations on which a few centuries later was to be erected the vast and magnificent superstructure of Bach and his successors. In the second period, that of the close of the fifteenth century, Antwerp became the centre, Jean de Okeghem, of Termonde, the leader in the intellectualising of music and the establishing it on methodical lines, while in the third period, of the end of the fifteenth and the beginning of the following century, Josquin des Pres led the course back toward a purer beauty, though through modes that were increasingly clever in their elaborate virtuosity. After this the lead passed across the Rhine, with memorable{313} results a century later, when the great cycle, from Bach to Brahms, rounded itself into a perfect ring.

The era-making movements in religion all began outside our territorial limits at Monte Cassino, Cluny, Clairveaux, but it was through St. Benedict of Aniane that Charlemagne at Aix-la-Chapelle effected his regeneration of the Church and his initiation of a new Christian education and culture; St. Bruno, of Cologne, sometime head of the cathedral school of Reims, was the founder of the Order of Carthusians; St. Chrodegang, Archbishop of Metz, brought into existence the Canons Regular of St. Augustine, who introduced into cathedral chapters the order and discipline of monasticism; St. Norbert, of Xanten, created the Order of Prémontré, one of the most beneficent and beautiful of the religious brotherhoods of the Middle Ages, while the “Imitation of Christ,” the most purely spiritual and devotional work of the time, was the product of Thomas à Kempis, an obscure monk of the Netherlands. In the development of Christian mysticism the Rhine valley stands pre-eminent, though the greatest of all those of this school of combined thought and vision was Hugh of St. Victor, of{314} the monastery of Augustinian Canons in Paris, on the banks of the Seine, where now is the Jardin des Plantes, The ancient tradition is that he was born near Ypres, though recent researches seem to indicate that he may have been a son of the Count of Blankenburg in Saxony. In any case, he was the great expositor of sacramental religion and philosophy as Charlemagne’s Radbertus Paschasus was the great defender of the true doctrine of Transubstantiation. If, indeed, Hugh of St. Victor was a product of Flanders, then the credit goes there of having given birth to one of the noblest and most penetrating minds the world has known, one that ranks with that greatest pure intellect of all time, St. Thomas Aquinas.

Whether one accepts the mysticism of the Rhine or not does not matter; it was a potent element in the flowering of Christian piety and the development of Catholic theology, and Elizabeth of Sch?nau, Hildegarde of Bingen, Mary of Ognies, Liutgard of Tongres, Mechtilde of Magdebourg, are all names that connote a poignancy of spiritual experience that proves both the personal exaltation of the time and the quality of the blood that had issue in character such as theirs. This mystical vision of the holy women of the Rhine{315} is simply an extreme intensification of the same vision that was given in lesser measure and in different ways to all the creative artists, philosophers, and theologians of the Middle Ages, from Othloh of the eleventh to St. Bonaventure of the thirteenth century, and it had a great part in determining and fixing the artistic manifestation of this amazing time. Both as a result and an influence it is vastly important and not to be ignored. Out of it came much of that marvellous symbolism of the mass and the cathedral so explicitly set forth by the monk Durandus and Vincent of Beauvais, and for its good offices here alone the world owes it a deep and lasting gratitude.

One is tempted to go on through other fields where the harvest is plenteous, but an end must be made, and it is here. There remains the question of the issue of it all—whether out of this latest devastation that so adequately follows those of the nineteenth century, of the French Revolution, of Protestantism and the wars of religion, of the Hundred Years’ War with England, any compensation may come for the progressive (and as yet unfinished) destruction of the art records of a great past. If we consider alone the wide{316} ruin in Flanders and Brabant, in Artois and Picardy and Champagne, there seems no possible compensation for what we ourselves knew and now have lost for ever. Nevertheless, the law of the universe is death that life may come; and out of this present death that is so immeasurably more wide-spread and inclusive than any known before, even when the Huns or the Moslems were on their deadly march across Europe, there should come a proportionately fuller life, a “life more abundant,” than that which is now in dissolution. If this is so, if we can look across the plains of death and immeasurable destruction to the dimly seen peaks of the mountain frontiers of a new Land of Promise, then we can see Louvain and Liége, Ypres and Arras, Laon and Soissons and Reims pass in the crash and the dim smoke of obliteration, content with their tragic destiny, even as we can see poured out as a new oblation the ten millions of lives, the tears of an hundred millions of those who follow down into the Valley of the Shadow of Death.

Is it all a vain oblation? There is the crucial question and the answer is left with us. This is no war of economic and industrial rivalry, of jealous dynasties, of opposed political theories;{317} it is not the inevitable result of a malignant diplomacy from Frederick the Great and Metternich to Disraeli and the German Kaiser; it is not even the last act in a drama ushered in by Machiavelli and brought to its denouement at Pottsdam. All these and myriad other strands have gone to the weaving of the poisoned shirt of Nessus, but they all are blind agents, tools of a dominant and supreme destiny by which are brought about the events that are only the way of working of an unescapable fate. The war is a culminating catastrophe, but it is as well the greatest mercy ever extended to men, for it may be made the means of a great purging, the atonement for the later sins of the world, the redemption from a wilful blindness and folly that are not consonant with the will of God.

There is a stern propriety in the centring around the Cathedral of Reims of the first phase of the great conflict, and in its slow and implacable demolition. Long ago Heinrich Heine, the poet of the German people, though not himself a German, saw clearly the coming ruin and wrote as follows:

Christianity—and this is its highest merit—has in some degree softened, but it could not destroy, the brutal German{318} joy of battle. When once the taming talisman, the Cross, bre............