“Whoe’er thou art who walkest overhead,Behold thyself in stone: for I yestreen,Was seemly and alert like thee: now dead,Nailed up and earthed, and for the last time green;The first spring greenness and the last decayAre hidden here forever from the day.I, Hubert van Eyck, whom all Bruges’ folks hailedWorthy of lauds, am now with worms engrailed.My soul, with many pangs by God constrained,Fled in September, when the corn is wained,Just fourteen hundred years and twenty-sixSince Lord Christ did invent the crucifix.Lovers of Art, pray for me that I gainGod’s grace, nor find I’ve painted, lived, in vain.”
“Whoe’er thou art who walkest overhead,Behold thyself in stone: for I yestreen,Was seemly and alert like thee: now dead,Nailed up and earthed, and for the last time green;The first spring greenness and the last decayAre hidden here forever from the day.I, Hubert van Eyck, whom all Bruges’ folks hailedWorthy of lauds, am now with worms engrailed.My soul, with many pangs by God constrained,Fled in September, when the corn is wained,Just fourteen hundred years and twenty-sixSince Lord Christ did invent the crucifix.Lovers of Art, pray for me that I gainGod’s grace, nor find I’ve painted, lived, in vain.”
“Whoe’er thou art who walkest overhead,
Behold thyself in stone: for I yestreen,
Was seemly and alert like thee: now dead,
Nailed up and earthed, and for the last time green;
The first spring greenness and the last decay
Are hidden here forever from the day.
I, Hubert van Eyck, whom all Bruges’ folks hailed
Worthy of lauds, am now with worms engrailed.
My soul, with many pangs by God constrained,
Fled in September, when the corn is wained,
Just fourteen hundred years and twenty-six
Since Lord Christ did invent the crucifix.
Lovers of Art, pray for me that I gain
God’s grace, nor find I’ve painted, lived, in vain.”
"L'HOMME À L'ŒUILLET."—VAN EYCK.
"L'HOMME À L'ŒUILLET."—VAN EYCK.
Jan van Eyck was courtier as well as artist. As a young man, he was employed by John of Bavaria, Bishop of Liège, and after the death of his brother we hear of him as gentleman of the chamber to Philip the Good, Duke of Burgundy, by whom he was sent on various missions. One of his journeys was made to Portugal, where he painted the portrait of Princess Isabella, who afterward became the second wife of the Duke, and in whose honour the Order of the Golden Fleece was founded. His famous picture called “L’homme à l’œuillet,” was the portrait of Jean de Roubaix, who accompanied him to Portugal and arranged the marriage of the Princess with the great Duke. Jan seems to have possessed the modesty of true greatness, for on more than one of his pictures is found the motto, “Als Ikh Kan,” As I can. During the latter part of his life he lived at Bruges, where he died in 1440.
In the midst of his court duties, Jan found time to go on with the great altar-piece, which he completed in 1432. A few years later, he produced what is perhaps his finest religious painting next to the Adoration, the Madonna of the Canon van der Paele. This picture represents the Virgin and Child enthroned in a stately basilica, probably the cathedral of St.Donatian at Bruges. In the foreground, on the right stands St. George, on the left St. Donatian. On the Virgin’s left, upon his knees, is George van der Paele, Canon of St. Donatian, the donor of the painting.
This Virgin and St. Donatian by Jan van Eyck would make one think, says Fromentin, “that the art of painting had said its last word, and that from the first hour. And yet, without changing either theme or method, Memling was going to say something more.”
A tradition cherished by the Flemings has it that Hans Memling, in the year 1477, dragged himself, sick and needy, to the gates of St. John’s Hospital in Bruges, where he was tenderly nursed back to health, and that, in gratitude, he painted for the hospital the pictures that have ever since been its pride. This may or may not be true, but a detail in the Marriage of St. Catherine seems designed to confirm the legend. It represents a man dropping exhausted in the street, who is then revived by some cooling drink, and afterward borne to the hospital. We can not but feel that the artist is giving us here an incident from his personal history.
The little we know of Memling’s life may be told in very few words. In 1450, he painted theportrait of Isabella, Duchess of Burgundy, whose likeness Jan van Eyck had journeyed to Portugal to make twenty-two years before. After the death of Philip the Good, no doubt he was court painter to Charles the Rash and in the year of the latter’s defeat and death at Nancy took refuge in Bruges. Here he married and came into possession of some property through his wife, he painted his greatest works, and died in 1495.
In the quaint chapter-room of the old hospital, itself dating from the thirteenth century, Memling’s compositions found an appropriate setting. Here was the great triptych of the Mystic Marriage of St. Catherine, an altar-piece for the high altar of the church connected with the hospital; two smaller triptychs, one of the Three Kings, the other a Pietà; the portrait of Mary Moreel, and a diptych ordered by Martin van Nieuwenhoven, on which is Memling’s finest piece of portraiture, the likeness of the donor. “The man himself is no very superb specimen of humanity; he has a bright and pleasant though rather foolish face; but such as he is Memling has caught the idea of him, and placed him visibly and knowably on the panel.... Its colouring is unusual and most beautiful. The textures of the garments are superb, and notonly are the little landscapes seen through the open windows full of the charm that Memling always threw into his backgrounds, but the charm extends to the interior of the room, with its stained glass windows, paneled walls, looking-glass and other pieces of furniture.”[7]
But the most interesting work by the great Fleming that the hospital contains is the world-famed reliquary of St. Ursula. This chest, in shape like a tiny Gothic chapel, only three feet long and two feet ten inches high, bears on its sides in six arched panels the legend of St. Ursula and her eleven thousand virgins. The saint and her maidens are seen landing at Cologne, arriving at Basle, and received in Rome by the Sovereign Pontiff himself, who joins them for the return voyage down the Rhine. They are awaited at Cologne by the cruel Huns, who shoot them down without mercy, and, last of all, the saintly princess suffers martyrdom.
This story is told in panels only one foot in width. The little pictures are crowded with figures dressed in the sumptuous costumes of the Court of Burgundy. Genuine landscapes are introduced in the backgrounds—the city of Cologne and the scenery along the Rhine are pictured fromsketches which the artist made himself. These tiny paintings have the brilliant colouring of the van Eycks and the finish of detail of the old illuminators. They show the tenderness, the fancy, the patient industry of the master. “Gentle, cordial, affectionate, humble, painstaking as Memling must have been, his best works are those of the St. Ursula series type, where his fancy could play about bright and fairy-like creatures, where no storm nor the memory of a storm need ever come, where no clouds darkened the sky, and not even the brilliant tones of sunset gave forecast of a coming night.”[8]
ST. LUKE PAINTING THE MADONNA.—VAN DER WEYDEN.
ST. LUKE PAINTING THE MADONNA.—VAN DER WEYDEN.
Another of the early Flemish masters was Roger van der Weyden. His St. Luke Painting the Madonna, in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, is considered one of the masterpieces of that gallery.
As an artist, Roger van der Weyden was the equal of neither the van Eycks nor Memling, but he was greater as a master. His art combined the religious symbolism of the Middle Ages with the new naturalism of Jan van Eyck, and its effect was wide-spread. The Germans made his paintings their standard, the Italians acknowledged his greatness, and the artistsof the Low Countries all formed their style under his teaching or strove to imitate his work.
I have never seen a keener and juster analysis of the art of the Flemish primitives than that given by Conway, in his “Early Flemish Artists,” from which I quote: “Jan van Eyck was a man of fact, his work is an attempt to state the uttermost truth about things.... In his pictures, light and shade, texture, colour and outline have about equal stress laid upon them. In this respect he was one of the most complete of artists.“ Roger van der Weyden ”laid chief stress upon outlines, striving to make them graceful so far as in him lay.... Memling was formed of milder stuff.... He was a painter of fairy tales, not of facts.... To lose oneself in a picture of his is to take a pleasant and healthy rest.”
The same critic adds this beautiful characterization of early Flemish art in general: “The paintings of Flanders were not, and were not intended to be, popular. Flemish artists did not, like the Italians, paint for the folk, but for the delight of a small clique of cultured and solid individuals. They painted as their employers worked, with energy, honesty and endurance; they cared not for beauty of the morepalpable and less enduring kind, but they cared infinitely for Truth; for her they laboured in humility, satisfied with the joy of their own obedience, and then, when they slept and knew not of it, she came and clothed the children of their industry with her own unfading garments of loveliness and life.”
Between the glorious past of the van Eycks and Memling and the brilliant future of Rubens and Jordaens, stands Quentin Matsys, the founder of the Antwerp school, who died in 1530. He was the great master of the Gothic-Renaissance transition, showing the influence of the Renaissance, while still clinging to Gothic types. His paintings include religious subjects and incidents drawn from daily life. His “women of a goddess-like delicacy with almond eyes and long slim fingers,” lived a mystical life among transparent, glassy columns and carpets with exotic embroideries. The men have an air of distinction. He often leans as far toward caricature, however, as he does toward sentimentality, and there are great contrasts in his work—grimacing, long-nosed, carousing old men and lovely women. “None understands as well as Matsys how to make strong splendours of colour shine through a thin veil of mist, or how to paint the tremulous surface of life sothat we see the blood running in the veins.”
From “Master Quentin’s” prime until Rubens brought back to Flanders the results of his studies in Italy was nearly one hundred years—years that covered the Spanish oppression of the Low Countries under Charles V and Philip II, years that saw Flanders desolated by the Duke of Alva. But out of the decay of Flemish art rose Peter Paul Rubens, born in 1577.
John Rubens, the father of the painter, was a lawyer in Antwerp. As he favoured the Protestants, he found it the safest course, when the Duke of Alva’s reign of terror began, to take refuge with his family across the border at Cologne. Here he became the legal adviser of Anne of Saxony, wife of William the Silent, who preferred to reside comfortably at Cologne while he was off fighting the Spaniards.
The result of this association was a scandal of the most serious nature, and only the efforts of his forgiving wife and the desire of the house of Orange to hush up the affair, saved Master Rubens from the penalty of death, as prescribed by the German law of that day. His sentence was commuted to imprisonment for life, but after two years of close confinement he was permitted to live with his family in Siegen, on conditionof giving himself up again whenever summoned. It was during this time that Peter Paul, “the most Flemish of all the Flemings,” was born at Siegen, on German soil.
After the death of John Rubens, his widow returned with her family to Antwerp, where the little Peter Paul was sent to a school on the site of the present Milk Market, until he was thirteen years old. Then, as he was a bright, handsome boy, the Countess van Lalaing received him as page into her house, where she held a miniature court. He was in the service of the Countess only one year, but the training he gained in that time gave him the courtesy and ease of manners that made him, in after years, perfectly at home in the presence of princes.
In his boyhood Rubens had shown his love of art by making it his chief amusement to copy the illustrations in his mother’s large family Bible, and after leaving the Countess van Lalaing, he persuaded his mother to let him study painting. For four years he was the pupil of Adam van Noort, and afterward of Otto van Veen, also called Vaenius, after the fashion of the day. At that time van Veen was the most noted painter in Antwerp. Two years more of study, and Rubens was admitted intothe Guild of St. Luke, and the following year he assisted his master in decorating the city for the Joyous Entry of the Archdukes Albert and Isabella.
The young painter’s next step was to seek inspiration in Italy, and in 1600 he went to Venice to study Titian and Veronese. Here he copied old masters, painted portraits, and attracted the attention of the Duke of Mantua, who became his patron. In 1603 he was sent to Spain by the Duke, and took with him many paintings as a present for Philip III. When he went home to Flanders in 1608, Albert and Isabella made him court painter in order that they might keep him in Antwerp.
Rubens was twice married. His first wife, Isabella Brant, made his home happy for seventeen years, and is commemorated in several paintings. Helena Fourment, whom he married four years after Isabella’s death, was a girl of sixteen who was considered remarkably beautiful, and if we may judge by the use he made of her as a model, this opinion of her was fully shared by her husband. Besides the numerous portraits of her—in every possible position, sitting, standing or walking, handsomely dressed or nearly nude, alone or with her husband or children, in her own person or as Bathsheba,Dido or Andromeda—she appears in such large compositions as the Garden of Love and the Judgment of Paris.
The paintings of Rubens have always been the special pride of Antwerp. The Elevation of the Cross and the Descent from the Cross were the treasures of the cathedral. The first was painted in 1610, soon after his return from Italy, and the second but little later. There are six known variants of the Descent from the Cross. The one in the cathedral is a wonderful composition, brilliant in its conception and marvelously drawn. The Elevation is by some critics considered finer than its companion picture. The Christ à la Paille, the “Coup de Lance,” the Adoration of the Kings, and the Last Communion of St. Francis are all in the Antwerp Museum.
Fromentin, writing of Rubens in 1876, thus spoke of Malines and works of the great artist that were treasured there: “There are only two things that have outlived its past splendour, some extremely costly sanctuaries and the pictures by Rubens. These pictures are the celebrated triptych of the Magi, in St. John’s, and the no less celebrated triptych of the Miraculous Draught of Fishes, which belongs to the Church of Notre Dame.”
In this connection it is interesting to read how, when the Germans were shelling Malines for the second time, early last September, a Red Cross worker saved the Adoration of the Magi. The church had not yet suffered from the German shells. “This large work, composed of two side panels and a center piece, being on panel, was too heavy for two men to handle. I was first compelled to break into the church, for everybody had fled from the stricken town, and after many endeavours to find help, commandeered the only police officer available, two fine gendarmes and a locksmith. These men, with the utmost good will, helped us to rig a tackle over the famous picture, and, after two or three hours’ work, we were rejoiced to see our exertions crowned with success, for the three parts of the picture were down, without the slightest scratch. We commandeered from a village close by a dray and two horses, lashed the central piece of the picture between soft pads of hay and blankets, and sent it under the care of one of our men into safety at ——. The two side panels I took away myself in my own car.”
The Miraculous Draught of Fishes, which had been removed from the church of Notre Dame, and was found in a corridor of a public gymnasium, lying bare against the wall and without any protection whatever, was saved in the same way. The shrine of St. Rombaut, “a very costly work of silver and gold, about three feet high and five feet long,” was rescued before the destruction of the cathedral, and sent to a secret place of safety. It is a “valuable specimen of antique goldsmith’s work.” Many altar furnishings in gold and silver, beautiful laces, and a number of paintings, among them two more that are attributed to Rubens, were also included among the articles saved.
PORTRAIT OF A MAN AND HIS WIFE.—RUBENS.
PORTRAIT OF A MAN AND HIS WIFE.—RUBENS.
Rubens was a prolific artist, and his pictures are to be found in all the great galleries of Europe, besides a small number in American private houses and museums. An interesting example of these is the portrait of a man and his wife, in the collection of Mrs. Robert D. Evans of Boston, now in the Museum of Fine Arts.
Rubens had all the industry, honesty, and brilliancy of colour of the great Flemings. He had, besides, greatness of conception and breadth of composition. A distinguished English painter calls him “perhaps the greatest master in the mechanical part of the art, the best workman with his tools, that ever exercised a pencil.” His paintings glow with vitality; they depictnatural life in landscapes, in animals, in human beings. Many of his works are on large canvases and depict gross and sensual subjects. His Madonnas are often unsatisfying; his figures of Christ seldom bear the impress of the Godhead; with one or two notable exceptions the life of the spirit is lacking in his work. One of these exceptions is the Last Communion of St. Francis, which was at last accounts in the Antwerp Museum. The dying saint in the foreground has raised himself on his knees, and is even stretching toward the officiating priest on the left. His weak body is supported by a monk on the right. His face is radiant with spiritual exaltation and an earnestness of purpose that would hold even death in check until the holy wafer has passed his lips. In this picture Rubens has pierced the veil and revealed the things that cannot be known by the senses. Fromentin says of it: “When one has made a prolonged study of this unequalled work in which Rubens is transfigured, one can no longer look at anything, neither any person, nor other paintings, not even Rubens himself; for today one must leave the Museum.”
But Rubens was the head of a school of painting—the later Flemish school. His studio was thronged with young artists, who were assistantsas well as students. With his keenness of observation directed to a line of business, the master quickly discovered what each pupil could do best, and set him at that part of a composition. In this way Rubens was enabled to produce the immense number of pictures that bear his name—thirteen hundred have been catalogued. One student would paint nothing but landscapes, another all the animals, while the teacher put in the most important parts and added the finishing touches to the whole. There was no deceit in this method of working, for the amount of Rubens’ own work a given piece contained depended upon the price his clients were willing to pay. The design was always his, but those who paid the lowest price got nothing but the design from his hand, while his wealthy patrons who could afford the maximum received pieces that were entirely his own handiwork, and between the two extremes there were all grades of collaboration.
Jacob Jordaens was one of the most famous of Rubens’ pupils. It is said that “they are of the same family and the same temperament; and Rubens stands between Jordaens and van Dyck. Rubens is gold, van Dyck silver, and Jordaens blood and fire.” The latter was an indefatigable painter and a rapid worker, oftencompleting a portrait at a single sitting. He covered a wide range of subjects, religious, allegorical, landscapes, portraits and animals, and he succeeded so well that “there are Jordaens attributed to Rubens and Rubens to Jordaens.”
Anthony van Dyck was another pupil of the great master, and the aristocrat of the famous seventeenth century Flemings. He was only a boy among boys, quite undistinguished, until one day chancing to rub against a painting of his teacher’s on which the paint was still wet, he retouched it so skilfully that it turned out better than before. In time he became so formidable a rival, in spite of his youth, that Rubens sent him off to Italy to study. He came back in four years, greater than ever. A few years later, Rubens contrived to have him called to England as court painter. During the time that he remained in Flanders he produced several religious pictures, among them the Raising of the Cross, at Courtrai, and a Crucifixion, which, before the war, was in the Cardinal’s palace at Malines. The same Red Cross worker who rescued the Rubens from destruction at Malines also brought away this composition, of which he says, that it had been cut out of its frame the day before, rolled up, and stowed away inthe cellar. But van Dyck’s best work was done in portraiture, and in this he was “nearly the equal of Titian.”
CHARLES I AND HIS FAMILY.—VAN DYCK.
CHARLES I AND HIS FAMILY.—VAN DYCK.
Van Dyck so quickly became a great favourite of Charles I that he was knighted within three months after going to England. He painted the King and Queen many times. The portrait of Charles I in the Louvre was done at the height of his skill. He loved to paint kings and nobles, in velvet and silken garments trimmed with rare old lace. For ten years he was court painter in England, and so many of his portraits are still in the great houses there that a family portrait by van Dyck is said to be “tantamount in England to a patent of nobility.” After the execution of Charles, he went to Flanders and to Paris seeking commissions, but his popularity had waned, and he returned to England broken in health and spirit, and died there in 1641. His body rests in St. Paul’s Cathedral.
Van Dyck painted cavaliers, and he himself belonged to that type. His work is so individual that it is easily recognized. A charming adventurer, a popular courtier, he was a favourite of kings, was fêted in foreign countries. At the close of his life, he is called “a man in ruins, who until his last hour has the good fortune,and this is the most extraordinary thing about him, to preserve his greatness when he paints.”
The annals of the seventeenth century are filled with the names of a host of artists of more or less renown, followers of Rubens and van Dyck. But “for the Flemish school, the eighteenth century is a long entr’acte, during which the stage, so nobly occupied of old, is sad and deserted.”
The modern Belgian school of art started in Antwerp after the Revolution of 1830. At first it corresponded to the romantic movement in France, of which Delaroche was one of the leaders, but with this difference, that the Belgians chose their subjects for the most part from the age-long battle for freedom waged by their country. The most distinguished of these “romantic” Belgian artists were Louis Galliat and Edouard Biefve.
The “historic” and “archaic” schools of these modern painters included Leys and his followers, whose work is interesting because they sought to reproduce the characteristics of van Eyck and Memling. The frescos in the Antwerp town hall by Leys, illustrating the charters and the privileges of that city in olden times, are called by Max Rooses, “monumentalcreations by a great master of the art of painting.” Henri de Braekeleer had the art of investing the most prosaic subjects with interest. He painted the ordinary things of daily life, a wine-shop, an old man at his printing, in a way that glorified them.
The insane artist, Wiertz, thought himself the second Rubens, and produced a number of huge canvases. The Wiertz Museum had an astonishing collection of the works of this artist—paintings on every imaginable theme, ranging from “wild nightmares of the brain” to such impressive compositions as the Contest for the Body of Patroclus, after the manner of Rubens, and the Triumph of Christ, a sublime work showing great originality and wonderful power of execution.
Much remarkably good restoration of paintings has been done by modern Belgian artists. An amusing story has come to me of an artist who was employed to touch up a large painting in an old church. When he presented his bill the committee in charge refused payment unless the details were specified. Whereupon he presented the items as follows:
To correcting the ten commandments$5.12To embellishing Pontius Pilate and putting new ribbons on his hat3.02To putting new tail on rooster of St. Peter and mending his comb2.20To repluming and gilding left wing of the Guardian Angel5.18To washing the servant of the High Priest and putting carmine on his cheeks5.02To renewing Heaven, adjusting the Stars and cleaning up the moon7.14To touching up Purgatory and restoring Lost Souls3.06To brightening up the flames of Hell and putting new tail on the Devil, mending his left hoof and doing several odd jobs for the damned7.17To rebordering the robes of Herod and adjusting his wig4.00To taking the spots off the son of Tobias1.30To cleaning Balaam’s Ass and putting new shoe on him1.70To putting rings in Sarah’s ears1.71To putting new stone in David’s sling and enlarging the head of Goliath and extending Saul’s legs6.13To decorating Noah’s Ark and putting head on Shem4.31To mending the shirt of the Prodigal Son and cleaning his ear3.39$60.45
Belgium has lost none of her interest in artistic expression. At the Academy in Antwerp, there were about two thousand art students before the war, and about sixteen thousand in all Belgium. Perhaps the most noted living painters at that time were Stevens and Wauters, and Madame Ronner, who was famous for her picturesof cats. The studio of Blanc-Grin, in Brussels, was the center of present-day painters when we were there.
Belgium has never been so famous for its sculptors as for its painters. Among the moderns, Jef Lambeaux took high rank, but Constantin Meunier, of Liège, was perhaps the greatest. “He waspar excellence,” says Max Rooses, “the sculptor of the workman: first of the Hainault coal-miner, then of the worker of all trades and countries.... He finally arrived at investing his models with truly classic beauty. They became the heroes of a grand drama, now commanding the flames of tall furnaces and measuring their strength with the most terrible of the elements, now cutting the corn and tying it in sheaves, defying the almost equally murderous heat of the sun.”
In a notice of the Royal Academy Exhibition in London, in May of the present year, we read, “Almost the only work universally praised in the press reviews of the opening day is by a Belgian sculptor, Egide Rombeaux. It is a statue of more than life size, entitled ’Premier Morning.’” One critic says, that outside the charmed circle where Rodin reigns supreme, no sculpture more remarkable in originality and poetry of conception has been seen of late yearsin a public exhibition. Belgian art has not lost its vitality. Will it not emerge from its baptism of fire with the consecration of a noble purpose to express the honour, the patriotism, the self-sacrifice, that have glorified the land?
ALTHOUGHfor many, perhaps most, of my readers, Belgian literature is summed up in the one word, Maeterlinck, it is nevertheless true that the writers of this little country have been no unworthy spokesmen for so sturdy and independent a race. Even when the nation lay stupefied in the relentless grasp of Spain, among the exiles who sought refuge in Holland was at least one poet, Vondel, who is remembered with pride today.
From the earliest days of Belgian fable the name of the chronicler, Lucius de Tongres, has come down to us. Like many another monk, he wrote in his humble cell the annals of the warring tribes. We think of the Nibelungen Lied as the especial property of Germany, but “The epic of the Franks belongs to our provinces,” says the Belgian writer, Potvin, “and the Siegfried of the Nibelungen is called thehero of the Low Countries.”
Later, when troubadour and trouvère sang oflove and war from Provence to Normandy, there were minstrels also in the castles of Flanders and Brabant. Jean Bodel of Arras, in his “Chansons des Saxons,” sang of resistance to the power of Charlemagne, and it was the trouvères of the Walloon country who first borrowed from the Britons the cycle of theTable Ronde. The greatest poet of the reign of Philip of Alsace, at the end of the twelfth century, was Chrestien de Troyes, a native of Brabant, whose writings were imitated in England and Germany.
The “Chambers of Rhetoric,” formed in the sixteenth century to provide entertainment for the people, exerted so great an influence in promoting a taste for art and literature among Belgians in general that our own Motley could find nothing with which to compare it except the power of the press in the nineteenth century. These chambers were really theatrical guilds, composed almost entirely of artisans, and they not only produced plays and recited original poetry but also arranged pageants and musical festivals. In 1456, the Adoration of the Lamb was reproduced as a tableau vivant by the chamber of rhetoric at Ghent. The “Seven Joys of Mary” was given at Brussels for seven years, beginning in 1444, and was the best actedmystery of that time. Jean Ruysbroeck was called the “Father of Flemish Prose,” while Jean le Bel (a Walloon) started a school of writers which rivaled that of France.
The treatment these rhetoricians received from the Spanish sovereigns is sufficient proof that they were the mouthpiece of the people and voiced their aspirations for freedom in both church and state—Charles V was their persecutor, Philip II their executioner.
When the long struggle with Spain ended in the subjugation of the Spanish Netherlands and art and literature were stifled in the southern provinces of the Low Countries, Vondel, the Fleming, produced in his safe retreat in Holland plays which are worthy of notice today. About the same time the poet who is known as “le père des Flamands, le Vieux Cats,” had many followers, and his works were so popular that they were called “The Household Bible.”
Another exile, Jacques van Zèvecote, a native of Ghent, who also emigrated to Holland during the Spanish oppression, was a great poet. His hatred of Spain found expression in these vigorous lines:—
“The snow will cease to be cold,The summer deprived of the raysOf the sun, the clouds will beImmovable, the huge sand-hills on the shoreLeveled, the fire will cease to burn,Before you will find good faithIn the bosom of a Spaniard.”
“The snow will cease to be cold,The summer deprived of the raysOf the sun, the clouds will beImmovable, the huge sand-hills on the shoreLeveled, the fire will cease to burn,Before you will find good faithIn the bosom of a Spaniard.”
“The snow will cease to be cold,
The summer deprived of the rays
Of the sun, the clouds will be
Immovable, the huge sand-hills on the shore
Leveled, the fire will cease to burn,
Before you will find good faith
In the bosom of a Spaniard.”
Under Napoleon the chambers of rhetoric were revived. In 1809, theconcoursof Ypres celebrated a “hero of the country.” In 1810, Alost called on Belgian poets to sing “The Glory of the Belgians.” A young poet named Lesbroussart won the prize in a fine poem full of the old national spirit of the race. Jenneval, the author of the “Brabançonne,” the national anthem, was killed in a battle between the Dutch and the Belgians outside Antwerp, in the revolution of 1830.
About 1844 Abbe David, and Willems, a free thinker, started literary societies, and later followed Henri Conscience and Ledeganck. Ledeganck was called the Flemish Byron, and another poet, van Beers of Antwerp, was often compared to Shelley. To the early years of free Belgium belonged also Charles de Coster, whom Verhaeren calls “the father of Belgian literature.”
Henri Conscience, the Walter Scott of Flanders, was born in 1812, when Belgium was under the rule of France. His father was a Frenchman, his mother a Fleming. He first wrotein French, but in 1830 he said, “If ever I gain the power to write, I shall throw myself head over ears into Flemish literature.” In 1830 he volunteered as a soldier in the army of Belgian patriots.
His first historical romance, “Het Wonder-Jaar,” written in Flemish, is said to have been “the foundation-stone on which arose the new Flemish school of literature.“ His two finest historical novels, ”The Lion of Flanders“ and ”The Peasants’ War,” describe the revolt of the Flemings against French despotism, for “to raise Flanders was to him a holy aim.” The net profit to the author from the first of these books was six francs!
The most artistic work that Conscience ever did, however, is found in his tales of Flemish peasant life, one of which, “’Rikke-Tikke-Tak,’” says William Sharp, “has not only been rendered into every European tongue, but has been paraphrased to such an extent that variants of it occur, in each instance as an indigenous folk-tale, in every land, from Great Britain in the west to India and even China in the east.” Conscience says of himself, “I write my books to be read by the people.... I have sketched the Flemish peasant as he appeared to me ... when, hungry and sick, I enjoyedhospitality and the tenderest care among them.”
“After a European success ranking only after that of Scott, Balzac, Dumas, Hugo, and Hans Andersen, Henri Conscience is still,” wrote William Sharp in 1896, thirteen years after the great Fleming’s death, “a name of European repute; is still, in his own country, held in the highest honour and affection.”
The Walloon country provided the historians, of whom Vanderkindère was one of the ablest. Charles Potvin, born at Mons in 1818, was a Walloon journalist and prolific writer on a variety of subjects. He held the position of professor of the history of literature at the Royal Museum of Industry in Brussels, was director of theRevue de Belgique, which he founded, and was curator of the Wiertz Museum in Brussels. He was poet, writer on political subjects, historian of art and literature, critic and essayist; “a power in Belgian politics and literature, a leader of democrats and free-thinkers.” In his long life—he died in 1902—he produced a great number of works, among which were “La Belgique,“ a poem, the ”History of Civilization in Belgium,” the “History of Literature in Belgium,” and a work on “Belgian Nationality.”
Camille Lemonnier, of Liège, wrote three or four novels before 1880. He was a brilliant writer, who “touched modern society at almost every point” in his books, but will perhaps be remembered chiefly as thedoyenof the little band of “la jeune Belgique.”
The students at Louvain in 1880, with their rival magazines, really laid “the foundation of a literature which is in many respects the most remarkable of contemporary Europe.” At the head stand Maeterlinck and Verhaeren. Edmond Glesener, a hero of Liège, is well known for his novels.
In 1887, with the publication of the periodical,La Parnasse de la Jeune Belgique, began a renaissance of poetry, which became distinctly modern Belgian in character. Maurice Warlemont (Max Waller) was the generally recognized founder of this paper. Verhaeren and other noted contributors also wrote for thePléiade, which was a famous Parisian periodical at that time.
Maeterlinck is the best known of these modern Belgian writers, for many of his plays have been well translated into English, and some have been produced with great success in this country. He wrote at first in Flemish, but soon changed to French. I admire his symbolic andallegorical language, so mysterious and full of charm. It is said of his earlier poems that “they require a key and are not literature but algebra.“ Maeterlinck ”has the happy faculty of making people think they think.”
Apropos of this mysticism of Maeterlinck’s I may give the bon mot of a witty Frenchman in regard to the Jeune Ecole Belge. He said that their ambition was to write obscurely, and if the first writing seemed easy to understand, they would scratch it out, and try again. At the second attempt, if no one could understand it but the writer—that was still too simple. If the public could not understand the third, nor the writer himself, it was quite perfect.
Maurice Maeterlinck was born on August 29, 1862. As a boy, he lived at Oostacker, in Flanders, and was sent to the College of Sainte Barbe, a Jesuit school, where he studied for seven years. Among his friends in this college was Jean Grégoire le Roi, who later became a well-known poet. Even in those days Maeterlinck contributed to a literary review, and like Verhaeren, he studied for the bar. At the age of twenty-four he went to Paris, where he continued his friendship with le Roi. Maeterlinck had a thin, harsh voice, which was much against him as a lawyer, and he soon gave up that profession and turned his entireattention to literature. He is short, stocky, Flemish in appearance, but is a dreamer, shy, solitary, and moody.
MAURICE MAETERLINCK.
MAURICE MAETERLINCK.
In 1889, his first book of poems, “Serres Chaudes,” was published. After this he returned to Oostacker, and when he was not writing tended his bees, which have always interested him.
In reading his earlier poems, I find they are principally concerned with souls, hothouses, and hospitals. Some of them have a strange prophetic note, and are also good examples of his style.[9]
This is an extract from “The Soul”:
“And lo, it seems I am with my mother,Crossing a field of battle.They are burying a brother-in-arms at noon,While the sentinels are snatching a meal.”
“And lo, it seems I am with my mother,Crossing a field of battle.They are burying a brother-in-arms at noon,While the sentinels are snatching a meal.”
“And lo, it seems I am with my mother,
Crossing a field of battle.
They are burying a brother-in-arms at noon,
While the sentinels are snatching a meal.”
The same strain is found in this bit from “The Hospital”:
“All the lovely green rushes of the banks are in flamesAnd a boat full of wounded men is tossing in the moonlight!All the king’s daughters are out in a boat in the storm!And the princesses are dying in a field of hemlock!”
“All the lovely green rushes of the banks are in flamesAnd a boat full of wounded men is tossing in the moonlight!All the king’s daughters are out in a boat in the storm!And the princesses are dying in a field of hemlock!”
“All the lovely green rushes of the banks are in flames
And a boat full of wounded men is tossing in the moonlight!
All the king’s daughters are out in a boat in the storm!
And the princesses are dying in a field of hemlock!”
Here is another passage. Does it not make one wonder what its meaning can be?
“Do you not hear me calling, white deer with no horns?I have been changed to a hound with one red ear;I have been in the path of stones and the wood of thorns,For somebody hid hatred, and hope, and desire, and fearUnder my feet that they follow you night and day.”
“Do you not hear me calling, white deer with no horns?I have been changed to a hound with one red ear;I have been in the path of stones and the wood of thorns,For somebody hid hatred, and hope, and desire, and fearUnder my feet that they follow you night and day.”
“Do you not hear me calling, white deer with no horns?
I have been changed to a hound with one red ear;
I have been in the path of stones and the wood of thorns,
For somebody hid hatred, and hope, and desire, and fear
Under my feet that they follow you night and day.”
From 1889 to 1896 Maeterlinck wrote many poems and eight plays. His first play, “La Princesse Maleine,” was a masterpiece, and is said to have made an “epoch in the history of the stage.” The author was named the Belgian Shakespeare. Many of his plays, however, have a fairy-like and unreal quality, so they have been termed “bloodless” or unhealthy. A short synopsis of “La Princesse Maleine” will give an idea of the plot.
The scene opens at the betrothal banquet of the young Princess Maleine. The fathers of the two young people quarrel over the arrangements. The betrothal is broken, and war is declared between their countries. In the attack on the castle, in the next act, the mother and father of the Princess are killed, and she disappears with her nurse into the forest. While escaping, she hears that her lover is to wed another. She decides then that she will try to obtain a position as her rival’s attendant and learn the truth.
As she is very beautiful, she succeeds in arrangingit, and is taken to her rival’s castle. The young Prince discovers Maleine’s identity, and realizes that, after all, she is the only one he really loves. The mother of the spurned princess determines to poison Maleine, but the physician does not make the potion deadly, and as she sickens slowly, the wicked queen, tired of waiting for her death, twists a cord of hair around Maleine’s neck and kills her. The scene of the last act is the cemetery near the castle where Maleine’s funeral is going on. The lover stabs the Queen in revenge for the girl’s murder, and then kills himself. The animals in the play all appear. The black hound is there, bats and moles gather about; swans are seen in the castle moat, and peacocks among the cypresses; owls perch on the crosses, and sheep graze near the tombstone.
Among Maeterlinck’s books of essays the best known are “The Bee,” “The Unknown Guest,“ and ”Our Eternity.” In one of his essays he writes that he loves the idea of silence so much that the words of the people in his plays “often seem no more than swallows flying about a deep and still lake, whose surface they ruffle seldom and but for a moment.”
Maeterlinck has continued writing poems and essays as well as plays. The two dramas called“Palleas” and “Melisande” were put on the stage in 1893, and were greatly praised. In 1902 appeared “Le Temple Enseveli.” “Le Trésor des Humbles” was dedicated to Georgette Le Blanc, an actress, who helped him write it. Later they were married and settled in Paris. Here he lived a quiet life, writing constantly, and was seen by only a few of his friends.
“Monna Vanna” was his first play in which the action was assigned to a definite period. It was supposed to take place at the end of the fifteenth century. A few years ago, it was well given in this country, Mary Garden impersonating the heroine. Her rendering of the part was widely discussed. “Sister Beatrice” was also produced in America, and “Mary Magdalene” has been translated into English, as well as “The Bluebird.” The last named was beautifully given in New York, and was superbly staged and very spectacular. It was so artistic, so original and mysterious, and unlike anything that one had ever seen before, you knew at once that it was the work of Maeterlinck. People swarmed to see it, people went to hear it read, and people took it home to read.
Maeterlinck is now over fifty years old, and is at the height of his popularity. He spendsthe winter at Katchema, near Grasse, in the south of France, the summers at the ancient Benedictine Abbey of St. Wandrille. During the war he has been lecturing in behalf of his native country.
I quote from an address made by him in Milan: “It is not for me to recall here the facts which hurled Belgium into the abyss of glorious distress where she now struggles. She has been punished, as no nation ever was punished, for doing her duty as no nation ever did it. She has saved the world, in the full knowledge that she could not be saved.
“She saved the world by throwing herself across the path of the barbarian horde, by allowing herself to be trampled to death in order to give the champions of justice the necessary time, not to succour her—she was aware that she could not be succoured in time—but to assemble troops enough to free Latin civilization from the greatest danger with which it has ever been threatened.
“The spectacle of an entire people, great and humble, rich and poor, savants and unlettered, sacrificing themselves deliberately for something which is invisible—that, I declare, has never been seen before, and I say it without fear that any one can contradict me by searchingthrough the history of mankind. They did what had never been done before, and it is to be hoped, for the good of mankind, that no nation may ever be called upon again to do it.”
Among other well-known Belgian authors Eugène Demolder may be mentioned. In his historical novel, “Le Jardinier de la Pompadour,” he has made the eighteenth century live again in pages “vibrant with prismatic colours.” A charming characteristic of this book is the exquisite pictures of flowers and woods. The critic Gilbert quotes a page, of which he says, “It opens the story like a whiff of perfumes, for it symbolizes the charm and the freshness of rural France in flower.”
The works of Leopold Courouble are greatly enjoyed. He represents the humour of Brabançon fiction. As the old painters of Flanders gave expression to Flemish gaiety in their immortal canvases, so has Courouble concentrated in “Les Fiançailles de Joseph Kaekebroeck” the whole spirit of a race.
Le Vicomte de Spoelberch de Lovenjoul is noted as a critic and essayist, and has had five of his works crowned by the French Academy. Henri Pirenne, author of “Histoire de la Belgique,” is at the head of the list of Belgian historians today. (There have been a number ofpatriotic books written foreshadowing this war. Balzac wrote “France et Belgique,” and it has been said that Balzac was the inspiration of the modern writers of Belgium.)
Grégoire le Roi, Maeterlinck’s friend, is described by Bithell as “the poet of retrospection“—”the hermit bowed down by silver hair, bending at eventide over the embers of the past, visited by weird guests draped with legend.“ It is said ”the weft of his verse is torn by translation, it cannot be grasped, it is wafted through shadows.”
Charles van Lerberghe wrote his play of the new school, “Les Flaireurs,” in 1889, before Maeterlinck had published anything, but his work resembles the latter’s somewhat in style. He was born in 1862, of a Flemish father and a Walloon mother, which resulted in a sort of dual personality. Van Lerberghe was “a man for whom modern life had no more existence than for a mediæval recluse,” and he passed his happiest years in an old-world village in the Ardennes. He died in 1907, having published besides the play already mentioned, only three little books of poetry, “Entrevisions,” “La Chanson d’Eve,” and “Pan”—small but classic. Maeterlinck speaks of his verse as having a sort of “lyric silence, a quality of sound such as wehave not heard in our French poetry.” The early poems of Rossetti are suggested by his work.
“If poetry is music van Lerberghe is a poet. The charm of his verses is unique,“ writes Bithell. Are not these stanzas on ”Rain” exquisite?