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iss1 iefefc kssp 555SSSSSSSB5SS555BSHSSI THE WASHmGTONSTO gS mw 1Z 1ST0RIC CHIMES OF FLANDERS HUSHED BY Bronze Voices That Have Rung the Appeal of Peace on Earth From the Celebrated Shrines of Belgium Throughout the Ages Now Stilled as Germans Turn the Peal of Carillons Into Thunderous Roar of the Implements of ar tz jwnAtf mm ICM A rj otf I TssrarS iSa i St vf js Ttgl i if a By ORRIS ACROSS the pointed roofs and wayward streets of Antwerp th fell one day 400 years ago the mellow din of bells In a gay and golden peal that tumbled forth a cluster of notes at a time the carillon of Notre Dame sang to the town until every eye turned toward the belfry and every foot hastened to the cathedral door Over the threshold paced a procession rich with the color and stiff with the pomp of the Middle Ages As the company went up the nave where velvets and jewels caught added radiance from the crimson and amber of stained windows the bells beat upon the ir again with a louder triumph before they at last fell silent There was good cause for the lusty strokes with which the carillon ringers tugged at their ropes on that pleasant day in 1507 For the new bell the Big Bell had come safe from th a asting furnace the bishop in a robes was there to consecrate it and the king himself was standing as its sponsor When the final reverent word had been spoken that dedicated the bell to the service of God and Antwerp Charles struck from the bronze sides one loud tone The noise rose clear and deep through the hush of the cathedral It floated among the dim rafters as a voice that promised blessings and it hummed into oblivion with a slow portentous melancholy that might well have been a presage of its doom Sacking Art Centers I or doom idaj has dawned upon the Big Bell of Notre Dame and upon the belli of all the other steeples in Flanders the Ger man nfd met il Tht hae taken the doorplates and piano ornaments tiom the homes of Brussels and the splendid bronze hordes tiom the Apnue Louise Thev have taken the chimes from Isegnem and Roulers from Bruges and a dozen Milages Alread thev hive begun the backing of Brussels ind Antwerp art gal lenes the itubens and Van Eyck masterpiei os are gone and the sacking of the churches in those fitie is soon to follow The bells aie being made into guns When next the speak it will be in a roir that means ruin to the vpi helds oer whose harvests thev so long hae rung the curfew and the angelus Her bells hao alwas meant mufh to Flanders A wealth lowlind beset bv greedv neigh bor the little kingdom has countless times been warned of marching enemies bv the clamor from a steeple In dis of peace the Flemish developed their chimes into the hvelv lilt of the carillons which made their guilds of ringers noted throughout Europe To hold the oirillons thev built some of the noblest towers the world has seen and when the towers were built the cities vied with each other in filling them with noble bells Ihee were 4 0 bronze voices in the tower of Bruges Cathedral ind the same number at Louvain There are 4 4 at Malines and almost a hundred in Antwerp Notre Dame tverv one of these had its baptismal name as well as a popular nickname Thats Douce ment the villagers would say as a high tone trembled on the air at evensong Or in the dawn La Pucelle is calling to matins Or as an alarum crashed forth some anxious night The Thunderer Here come the en emv I sually the alarum bell which was a matter of course the largest in the church belonged not to the cathedral but to the town It was owned by the municipality because the tocsin proved vital in primitive times to the towns existence No fewer than three bells in Notre Dame were the property of Antwerp itself The burghers cocked their ears when any of these spoke and bade one another hearken to Carolus or Curfew or St Marys Under the name engraved on the metal there was also cut a rhymed prayer for the people half believed that the consecrated music could frighten away evil spirits Long before most Christian communities had a church bell Flanders heard its first chime ring at Oudenarde Like the twelfth century edifice in which it was installed the chime had crudity but it also had inspiration The clang that drifted over the fields marked the birth of an art destined to culminate in such marvelous notes as that of Antwerps Carolus an art destined to make Belgian carillons the envy of the world and an art destined to disappear only under the sledgehammers of present day kultur The original chime at Oudenarde long since vanished But never since those far off days has bell music been lacking to the village It swelled in ever increasingincreasing beauty as the thirteenth century churches rose and grew into a symphony with the chorus lodged 200 years later in the five story tower of the great town hall With its first harsh but ambitious chime Oudenarde set an ecclesiastic fashion that was quicklv followed Bells soon caroled from the tower which Antwerp raised to the honor of Notre Dame au Pilier Before the vear 1000 five centuries earlier than the day on which Charles the Fifth stood sponsor a shrine had been erected on the edge of the canal where an image ot the Virgin looked toward the gray waters of the German ocean Over the shrine the monks built a temple giving to it more than a century of toil For 500 years the temple summoned pilgrims with its brazen voices from all corners of the continent Tradition says that some of the antique chimes were preserved through times of destruction and reconstruction to be placed in the completed edifice hich rose at the end of the sixteenth centurv Here the carillon big bell and all had splendid housing isapoleon called the tower a bit of Mechlin lace in stone Boche Treasure Trove Manv architects put their brains into the building of the temple and manv artists made then faith immortal on its walls Rubens created his Assumption for the high altar He executed the masterpiece sixteen days at 100 florins a day To the north transept went his Elevation and to the west transept his Descent From the Cross the finest of his works and one of those which the Germans took within the last month to Dussel dorf Long before the cathedral had been finished by architect artist and sculptor the burghers of Ant werp began to make it melodious Thev called on the foundries of medieval Louvain on the makers Van den Gheyn Hemony Aer schodt and Wagheven for the best of their skill Bell metal in those days contained two parts of copper to one of tin The churches of Flanders are therefore a veritable metal mine for the Hun Nor is it only the belfries that vield material for howitzers From the cross on the spire to to sconce in the crypt there are vessels symbols lecterns and balusters grilles statues and a thousand other objects big and little of brass and iron and copper which represent to the Belgian a treasure heap accumulated through ages and to the boche a treasure trove Belgium has already suffered twice from tidal waves of icono clasm In Calvinist days her churches were plundered In the days of the French revolution she was robbed again But the third surge of vandalism bids fair to spell utter and Irreparable loss For the boche is not moved by any religious frenzy He has set about his job with deliberation He has tabulated the matchless objects of art into which went the genius of ages and he has found them to be so much hundredweight of ore for the furnaces of Essen He has brought his German efficiency to the problem of mining the Belgian cathedrals for their last ounce of metal Only those who have seen a smiling French village turned into desolation absolute can understand how thoroughly the Hun will perform his newest task The bells of Bruges are gone For 700 years the town has been vibrant with the peal of carillons from a dozen celebrated shrines It is silent now A stately boom from every steeple used to mark the comings and goings of the dukes of Burgundy who held their court in this metropolis of the Renaissance The silvery chimes of St Basil welcomed many a ducal heir into the world and the muffled knell of St Walburga tolled the old seigneurs to their rest St Sauveur poured forth a lordly clangor that rippled far across the level Flemish meadows on a spring day in 14 78 The wide reverberations told the world that within its walls the cathedral had gathered a glittering retinue of knights to hold the thirteenth chapter of the Golden Fleece Sacred Memories On the banks of the stalls where the knights sat and listened to the bells that April noon there are still discernible the 28 painted coats of arms which commemorate the meeting of the order to do honor to the Duke of Burgundy who founded It The brass lecterns and candelabra of the choir the wrought brass grilles and gates the great alabaster arch with its veins of copper were a suitable frame for the magnificence of that proud occasion To the Germans who stole St Sauveurs bells the other day those objects of romance and history were merely so much gun metal in the lode It was a summons to matins from Notre Dame that stole softly into the ears of Mary of Burgundy when she rode out of Bruges one fatal morning The Emperor Maximilian cantered by the side of his young wife as the hunting party hawk at wrist went its way to the woods at the edge of the town Before angelus the ladies and lords came slowly back the duchess white faced but gallant striving to make light of a bad fall from her horse She was about to become a mother and the injuries were mortal but for love of her husband Mary long kept that knowledge secret When she died at the age of 25 the hopeless tolling from the belfries threw all Flanders into mourning They buried her in the south chapel of Notre Dame in a tomb next to that of her father Charles the Bojd The last of the house of Burgundy the two were also the last native rulers of the Netherlands Their resting place Is very dear to the Flemish It la not likely to be spared For the gilded effigies of father and daughter are made of the copper that Germany covets for shells The ancient decorator bethought him to place round the tombs a genealogical tree It bears on its branches 36 angels with shields on which are listed the duchies counties and lordships that were Marys Thus by a curious twist of fate the Germans who lay hands on the copper effigies are face to face with a reminder of the dowry brought by the Flemish princess to the house of Austria and handed down to her grandson that same Charles the Fifth who sponsored Antwerps bell There is brass in plenty as well as copper among the churches of Bruges The brass chandeliers of St Annes are famous There are brass lecterns in the chapel of St Basil which Theodoric of Alsace erected in 114 9 and a coped renaissance lectern of brass is in St Walburgas Within St Sepulchre are brass sconces as heavy as any in Belgium They were put there by Pierre and Jacques Adornes and their wives who built the shrine The devotees made two trips to Palestine in order to be sure that their little church should be a replica of the Holy Sepulchre Yet the odd building with Its eight sided tur reted tower is like nothing else on the earth or under It The crypt beneath the choir contains a copy of the sepulchre with an effigy of Christ It is before the tomb that the great brass sconces shine The Bells of Bruges With the bells of Bruges there went almost on the same day those of Iseghem a textile town to the southward and those of Roulers By another kink of fate Roulers one of the first villages to be robbed of its carillon was the spot where in 1794 the French beat the troops of Austria It is an ancient settlement a few miles north of Courtrai and one of the earliest of the Belgian communes As far back as the eleventh century the weavers of Roulers linens were famous The chimes now put to silence hung for generations in the unusually tall belfry of St Michaels From this height their clear music rained a shower of sounds on the distant flax farms Before now the tumbled ruins of Ypres and Liege must have been searched for their metal hoard In St Bartholomews at Liege there stood a splendid metal font cast in the year 1112 by Lambert Pantras of Dinant St Martins of Ypres had a marble and copper screen on its south aisle and the balustrades on the north aisle screen were copper It had too a Gothic brass font and countless candlesticks of brass and wrought iron St Martins today is the ghost of that tremendous edifice for which in the year 1221 the Countess Margaret of Constantinople placed the first stone of the nave Throughout two centuries the work of building went on and indeed the superb tower was still unfinished when German shells made it a target Is it not a strange echo that whispers among the shattered arches A Flemish Countess of Constantinople laid the cornerstone of the temple which 700 years later an ally of Constantinople destroyed Three things and all of them metal do Tirlemont and Ter monde and Tournai mean to the Prussian conquerors Once before inn ii mi i i I mm sbbbbBm kBHP 1 fMliit 1 iV i BraBHRHS i i rt f5S KEiai PwHK555iSK5s3r this war there was a wonderful brass pelican that held the sacred books in St Germains of Tirlemont There were copper balusters In Notre Dame of Termonde And at Tournai In the cathedral of the five steeples there was a store of copper brass and iron vessels that had been accumulating since the end of the third century Built rebuilt enlarged this finest cathedral in the land still held traces of the former structures absorbed by it from age to age It even preserved some of the primitive gifts bestowed by almost its first worshipers Jewels of Malines Reared so long ago the church was not unaccustomed to pillage in A 822 the Normans burned as much of the shrine as would Ignite and stole whatever valuables the monks were unable to hide In 1566 the iconoclasts swooped down with special savagery In 1794 the soldiery of the French revolution made the altar desolate From all these calamities Tournai Cathedral rose phoenix like to greater glories This time it will be a miracle if more than a rubbish heap remains For doomsday has dawned upon the Big Bell of Notre Dame the Germans need metal The bishop in his robes was there to consecrate the bell and the King himself was standing as its sponsor The Ambleve still flows by Stavelot In that fact lies a gleam of hope How to save part of its treasure was a lesson which this village on the road to Luxembourg taught the rest of Belgium when the French revolution raged As the vandals drew near the townspeople rallied to protect St Remacles relics St Remacle had been bishop of Liege from 652 until 662 His bones were inclosed in a case six feet long fashioned of enameled copper plates The coffer sparkled with a hundred gems beryl opal amethyst Into a cask the townspeople slipped their priceless reliquary and they sank the cask in the waters of the Ambleve to wait the arrival of gentler times It will be Stavelots one stroke of modern good luck if today the coffer is again at the bottom of the stream Both metal coffers and masterpieces of painting as well as chimes were the jewels with which Malines and Ghent were studded The carillons of Malines had the honor of gracing the greatest church tower ever plan ned by medieval architects For centuries the work of construction went on until in 1583 it became desultory and the tower stopped half finished 340 feet in air RubenB painted three large pictures for Malines among them his Adoration of the Magi He painted for it eight small panels also completing them in the incredibly brief space of eighteen days and receiving the incredibly small sum of 900 for the group A receipt in the sacristy done in the painters own handwriting proves it The Treasures of Ghent Ghent too has much to lure the despoiler who seeks the masterpieces of either artist or artisan Before the high altar in St Bavons there stand four copper candlesticks each nine feet tall They were made at Cardinal Wol seys command by Da Rovezzano and were intended as columns for the prelates tomb Disgrace overtook Wolsey denying him the mausoleum he had built at Windsor castle Henry the Eighth al ways eager to raise pocket money sold the four columns to St Pauls in London the candlesticks still bear on big shields the arms of the English cathedral and of the English king When the civil wars broke out in England parliament ordered souvenirs of prelacy and royalty to be sold a second time Antoine Triest Bishop of Ghent was the purchaser The copper pillars are worth their weight in gold to Germany today In such extraordinary fashion do Cardinal Wolsey and Henry the Eighth give aid and comfort to their countrys enemy It was for Ghent cathedral that Jan and Hubert van Eyck painted the triptych of Adam and Eve which with other spoil from Belgian art galleries the boches carried to Berlin some weeks ago The work has had remarkable The High Cost of Passes THE new war tax on theater tickets has occasioned a great deal of discussion among those who are interested in the drama and also has developed a wide variety of odd situations that have proved amusing annoying or distressing to those directly concerned according to the individual disposition In this city Mr Moore owner of the Strand Theater recently received a vitriolic letter from a patron who had been charged a war tax of 6 cents on two 25 cent tickets when he knew perfectly well that 10 per cent of 50 cents was 5 cents Of course the tax is per ticket but the irate gentleman apparently didn know that Mr Robb manager of the Knickerbocker has had installed a special ticket vending machine because on Saturdays seven kinds of tickets are sold at his house each kind carrying its own war tax And that the way it goes A curious and somewhat amusing instance of the effect upon theatrical conditions of the war tax on passes is to be found in recent box office statements of some of the leading New York theaters according to Rennold Wolf At one Broadway theater Is housed a high class company presenting an excellent comedy The gross weekly expense of maintaining both house and company approximates 5 000 And yet last week the total of tax collected on passes alone equaled one third of the gross box office receipts Furthermore managers are beginning to learn that In the ease of attractions that do not please the general public it is almost impossible to induce even deadheads or skulls to attend on account of the burden of the war tax Nowadays it is only the most persuasive manager who can prevail upon deadheads to accept passes for his waning attraction at a cost of 20 cents each to themselves One of the most prominent managers in New York is said to have paid out of his own pocket 66 in war taxes in order to assemble a sufficiently imposing number of free patrons at one of his attractions recently playing in Brooklyn This is a discouraging condition which probably will not confront Mr Fowler at the National this week Viva Ranaud the comely mother of Snookums In The Newlyweds Grown up Baby at Poll this week will close her theatrical season at the Christmas holidays and enter Uncle Sams service as a member of a hospital unit Arthur Hopkins has in readiness a modern romantic comedy The Gypsy Trail by Robert Housum which will have its premiere at the Playhouse In Wilmington Del tomorrow night The cast includes Ernest Glendennlng who has been plav ing Youth In Experience for several seasons and Miss Phoebe Foster whose most recent appearances were In The Cinderella Man and The Lassoo Other members of the company are Roland Young Katherine Emmet Effle Elsler and Robert Cum mlngs Henry Millers next production will be John Galsworthy A Bit of Love which he will produce In association with Heggie At Eblings Casino in New York a few nights ago George Cohan participated in a program given for St Luke Church In the Bronx His bit was to be a spirited rendition of his own war song Over There The nrt verse went very well but Its author forgot the words of the second verse and so good naturedly guessed out loud that he would have to dance himself out of the predicament George haan danced in public for several years but he cut loose some of the old steps nevertheless and it required a matter of minutes to quiet the applause sufficiently to permit other performers to present their turns George Cohan feet are the only two made in that particular mold ji Julian Eltinge recently refused a vaudeville booking at J2 500 per week but expressed willingness to take a brief whirl in the varieties if the TJ could find it convenient to make the weekly wage J3500 Wee Sing light my pipe1 Greater patriotism than this hath no man During the liberty loan campaign In Chicago Joseph Santley who was appearing at the LaSalle Theater requested the management of the house to change the electrio sln in front of the theater to Oh Boy Buy a Liberty Bond Instead of Oh Boy With Joseph Santley This is probably the only instance in the memory of man when a player who had reached a point where his name was in lights himself prompted its erasure journeyings since the two brothers in 1420 began to spend upon It the twelve patient years that brought It to perfection French revolutionists stole the painting The French government returned it 20 years later but through some mismanagement four of the wing panels were disposed of to a Parisian art dealer He in turn disposed of them here fate smiled awry once more to the old museum in Berlin Carillons of Brussels Doomaf Yet another dismemoerment be fell the triptych A celebrity IiU ing Ghent a century ago experienced a shock at the nudity of Adam and Eve These two figures were accordingly banished to a gallery at Brussels where the Germans lately found them Almost equally with her Rubens Belgium mourns the triptych The bells of Brussels are not condemned to exile like the pictures but to annihilation Since even the doorplate and piano ornaments and bronze horses of that city have been confiscated there is little hop of saving the chimes With the removal of the carillon from the Church of St Michael and St Gtt dule fate once more puts a touch of the incredible in Belgian annals During the sixteenth century tbere was added to the beauties of the church a group of stained windows and the carillon rocked the tower in a paen at the dedication Picked out in softest tints there are on iho windows four portraits One pair is that of Isabella wife to Charles the fifth with her patroness Elisabeth of Hungary The other chair is the figure of Marie sister to Charles with her husband King Louis ef Hungary Fate itself must grow a trt lie bewildered as the antique chimes ot Belgium are wrenched clanking from their towers Hungary is no longer the friend of Belgian prinoes The carillons that for centuries hare translated the events of Flemish history into music are at this moment melting into guns for the ally of Hungary and the ravage of Flanders It is not improbable that its own bells will bring many a stately cathedral crashing to the ground ft to 3ti I 55SrS5f vsSS ft irjs a Bssrt3 peJSi rl.