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                            HEART OF EUROPE

               [Illustration: _The Cathedral of Reims_]




                            HEART OF EUROPE

                                  BY

                   RALPH ADAMS CRAM, LITT.D., LL.D.

                      F.A.I.A., A.N.A., F.R.G.S.

                              ILLUSTRATED

                               NEW YORK

                        CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS

                                 1916


                          COPYRIGHT, 1915, BY
                        CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS

                        Published October, 1915

                            [Illustration]




                                  TO

                               E. S. C.

                       WHO SOME DAY MAY KNOW THE
                            HEART OF EUROPE
             AND TO WHOM THIS BOOK MAY BE A DIM RECALLING
                   “OF OLD, UNHAPPY, FAR-OFF THINGS
                         AND BATTLES LONG AGO”

                               WHITEHALL
                            29 AUGUST, 1915


The author wishes to express his great sense of personal obligation to
Miss Gertrude Schirmer and Mr. Emil P. Albrecht for their kindness in
furnishing illustrations that otherwise could not have been obtained.




CONTENTS


CHAPTER                                                             PAGE

I. A SANCTUARY LAID WASTE                                              1

II. THE FORGING OF MEDIÆVALISM                                        15

III. FLANDERS AND BRABANT                                             37

IV. THE SPANISH NETHERLANDS                                           63

V. THE GLORY OF A GREAT ART                                           84

VI. AMIENS AND REIMS                                                 109

VII. THE BURGHERS AND THEIR BUILDING                                 128

VIII. COAL AND IRON                                                  149

IX. A TALE OF THREE CITIES                                           172

X. MARGARET OF MALINES                                               191

XI. THE FIFTEENTH-CENTURY PAINTERS                                   219

XII. GOTHIC SCULPTURE                                                238

XIII. THE ALLIED ARTS                                                256

XIV. ART IN THE RHINELAND                                            278

XV. THE FOREST OF ARDEN                                              296

XVI. EX TENEBRIS LUX                                                 310




ILLUSTRATIONS


_Reims_                                                    _Frontispiece_

                                                             Facing page

_The hall of the University of Louvain_                               12

_The chapel at Aix_                                                   30

_St. Bavon’s Tower, Ghent_                                            44

_The Quai aux Herbes, Ghent_                                          50

_Bruges, from the Quai du Rosaire_                                    54

_The Duke of Alva, Moro van Dashorst_                                 68

_Jumièges_                                                            86

_Laon_                                                                98

_Beauvais_                                                           106

_Amiens_                                                             112

_Reims_                                                              116

_The destroyed Hôtel de Ville of Arras_                              130

_The destroyed Cloth Hall of Ypres_                                  132

_Bruges, Hôtel de Ville_                                             134

_The Hôtel de Ville of Louvain_                                      138

_A chimney-piece from Courtrai_                                      164

_A canal in Malines_                                                 174

_The belfry of Bruges_                                               184

_The tower of St. Rombaut, Malines_                                  202

_A detail from the church at Brou_                                   216

_Our Lady, from the Tryptich at Ghent, Hubert van Eyck_              226

_A drawing of St. Barbara, Jan van Eyck_                             232

_A Memling altar-piece_                                              234

_Madonna and Child with St. Luke, Van der Weyden_                    236

_A head, now destroyed, from Reims_                                  242

_Three destroyed figures from Reims_                                 250

_Fifteenth-century Flemish tapestry_                                 262

_Worms_                                                              282

_Cologne_                                                            286

_Strasbourg_                                                         288

_Bacharach on the Rhine_                                             292

_Schloss Eltz_                                                       300




HEART OF EUROPE




I

A SANCTUARY LAID WASTE


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. Cæsar,
Charlemagne, St. Louis, Napoleon, with proconsuls, paladins, crusaders,
and marshals unnumbered; kings, prince-bishops, monks, knights, and
aureoled saints take 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.

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 intellectualism 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 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 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 hôtel de ville and cathedral; it shows itself sometimes
in more appealing guise in the river villages and proud