THE POET'S BRUGES.

Otago Witness, Issue 3333, 30 January 1918, Page 58

THE POET'S BRUGES.

By Edith Seahi,e Gp.ossmann, M.A. There are hundreds, perhaps thousands, of people who have somewhere in their minds an image of Bruges without ever having seen it, and who keep a far-off echo of its wonderful bells conveyed to them by Longfellow's twin poems, "The Belfry of Bruges " and " Carillon." For a clear-cut impression of ancient sites we cannot do better than see through the eyes of such a poet traveller from the New World, well versed in the lore of antiquity and visualising ancient things in relief against his own background of modernity. The average educated Briton or Frencnman of our own time has lost' the freshness of sensation which we find in the descriptions of Shelley and Byron when Europe was still an unread book. In the " Carillon " we catch a voice from the soul 0; "the quaint old Flemish city," though scarcely its deepest notes. The bell is the very tongue of the past, and its notes are solemn and tragic with memories of eld deeds done, old things gone by—wars and massacres, births, and magnificent marriages and deaths of princes and kings, Eassion of religious faith, gloom of igotry and torture and executions, fervour of the new faith in spiritual freedom, the awful struggle of two opposing ideals, all these things no longer clashing and rending the airs of heaven with their discords, but blent into one solemn harmony—the voice of Time, the sound of many ages. For years after hearing the bells of the cathedrals of Belgium, of Antwerp most of all, they echoed in my ears with such distinctiveness that I could scarcely believe the sound was only memory and nob reality. Even yet,' as if far away, that sound comes for a moment in the hour that is of all ages the darkest for Belgium. , Deeper now than ever before they should reverberate with the thought of a nation's enslavement and butchery and undying resistance.

In "The Belfry of Bruges " we are shown in historical procession the grand personages of the city's mediaeval centuries moving across the level landscape_ of fields, villages, farms, and intersecting canals that stretches away to the level sea, visible in the mists of early morning to the watcher in the belfry tower. In a vision he sees fhe Foresters of old Flanders, princely burghers— '

Lombard and Venetian merchants with deep laden argosies, Ministers from twenty nations, more than royal pomp and ease. Next the Emperor Maxmilian kneeling humbly on the ground before his own subjects; then "the gentle Mary " in the wood with her hawk and hound, where in her early youth she met sudden death; next it is the Flemish weavers marching back in triumph from their victory over the nobles, called from the number of golden spurs collected "the Battle of the Golden Spurs"; next the fight with burghers of the rival city of Ghent; then the Inquisition terror under the '' whiskered Spaniard" ; finally, the triumph of liberty rung out on the big bell Roland, used to celebrate victory in the land. The true history of Bruges, the city and its own citizens, is not purely romantic; it is a tale of solid material prosperity, lavish display, the growth of a halfmaterialistic, half-religious art. As a permanent institution its nobles were not of half so much consequence as its guilds and its manufacturers, who kept up the magnificent show of princes, but who, being occupied with business, lacked the princes' romantic occupation of fighting, killing, robbing, and carrying off defenceless heiresses. The eyes of grand or humble citizens alike were feasted 'with splendid pageants, church precessions, grand functions in honour of their titular sovereigns, while richly-decorated guildhouses, mansions, and churches dignified the city. Even commerce had in those daya a romance which greed of gain has now long-.robbed it of, just as the merchant vessels of those days, with their myriad sails, were incomparably more beautiful than ours, and also as the still surviving Gothic houses of the chief burghers and the halls of the various guilds put to shame the biggest piles of masonry and carpentry erected by. the traders of Manchester or Liverpool. Their lavish display, as wc ,-see it pictured on the canvases of their great masters, though it inclined to excess, still conformed to its own type of art and beauty. "Bruges" means simply "Bridges," as it is still called in the German tongue, and the bridges were built over the canals, which were the chief highways for the conveyance of its foreign trade to the sea. Bruges became the centre of trade with the East on the one side and with England on the other. But in the ages of Feudalism and chivalry burghers could not Jive their own life and keep their own freedom without violent interruptions. They were subjects and vassals of some great feudal overlord. This Seigneur oppressed his vassals as much as he convenientlv could, and often with his bands of nobles and''retainer fought them down r yet he acted as a preventive in keeping off foreign lords, who would have been mere invaders and ravagers. The svstem worked on the nrinciple of inoculating the civic community with a milder germ of disease in order to shut out one more fatal. However, it is just amongst these lords and their ladie3 that the truly romantic romance of Bruges is to be found, and most of them had little or no Flemish blood in their veins. From the province of the old Roman Empire, which its neople called Belgica, came these fair-haired Franks who conquered the Gauls, and for centuries the history of the Netherlands was linked with that of the growing Kingdom of France,

which Clovis first began to shape out of Roman Gallia. The Belgic element in the French monarchy was strengthened again when a new line began with Pepin, of Heristal (a suburb now of Liege). But not CJovis, nor Pepin, nor Charlemagne magnified the country they came from, but the more, pleasant land into which they had passed, and the Netherlands were treated as outlying provinces of France. From Aix or from Paris the French sovereigns sent their great Feudal lords to rule the provinces of FlandersBrabant or Hainault,—into which Belgica had been divided. "The Foresters of Flanders," who later on were styled "counts," fortified themselvles in impregnable castles amidst the mud flats or sand dunes or forests of Belgium, before the town of Bruges is visible in history. "So," says Motley, "the Roberts and Guys, thp Johns and Baldwins, -became sovereigns of Hainault, Brabant, and Flanders. Duke, count, seignor and vassal, knight and squire, master and man swarm and struggle amain—a wild, chaotic, sanguinary scene. Here bishop and baron contend centuries long, murdering human creatures by ten thousands for an acre or two of' swampy pasture; there doughty families, hugging old musty quarrels to their heart, buffet each other from generation to generation; thus they go ' on, shrieking insane war-cries—Red Caps and Black, White Hoods and Grey, Hooks and Kabbeljaws,—dealing destruction, building - castles and burning them, tilting at tourneys, stealing bullocks, roasting Jews, robbing the highways, crusading now upon Syrian sands amongst Paynim dogs, now in Frisian sands against heretics, plunging about in muct and fire, repenting at idle times, and paying their passage through purgatory with a slice of their illgotten gains, and so getting themselves civilised or exterminated—it matters little "which." This is the drab-coloured view a philosopher takes of their lives. But all these things are the raw material of romance.