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+Project Gutenberg's Beautiful Europe - Belgium, by Joseph E. Morris
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+Title: Beautiful Europe - Belgium
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+Author: Joseph E. Morris
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+Release Date: July, 2003 [Etext# 4242]
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+
+Beautiful Europe
+
+Belgium
+
+by Joseph E. Morris
+
+
+
+
+
+I.
+
+
+It needs, indeed, an effort of the imagination at the moment of
+writing to think of Belgium as in any sense a component part of
+"Beautiful Europe." The unhappy "cockpit" of the Continent at the
+actual hour is again in process of accomplishing its frightful
+destiny--no treaty, or "scrap of paper," is potent to preserve
+this last, and weakest, of all the nations of Western Europe from
+drinking to the dregs the cup of ruin and desolation. Tragic
+indeed in the profoundest sense--in the sense of Aristotle--more
+tragic than the long ruin of the predestined house of Oedipus--is
+this accumulated tragedy of a small and helpless people, whose
+sole apparent crime is their stern determination to cling at any
+cost to their plighted word of honour. I have been lately glancing
+into a little book published about five years ago, in which a view
+is taken of the Belgian character that no one could term
+indulgent. "It is curious," says the writer in one place, "how few
+Belgians, old or young, rich or poor, consider the feelings or
+convenience of others. They are intensely selfish, and this is
+doubtless caused by the way in which they are brought up." And,
+again, in another chapter, he insinuates a doubt as to whether the
+Belgians, if ever called on, would even prove good soldiers. "But
+whether the people of a neutral State are ever likely to be brave
+and self-sacrificing is another thing." Such a writer certainly
+does not shrink--as Burke, we know, once shrank--from framing an
+indictment against an entire people. Whether Belgium, as a nation,
+is self-sacrificing and brave may safely be left to the judgment
+of posterity. There is a passage in one of Mr. Lecky's books--I
+cannot put my finger on the exact reference--in which he
+pronounces that the sins of France, which are many, are forgiven
+her, because, like the woman in the Gospels, she has loved much.
+It is not our business now, if indeed at any time, to appraise the
+sins of Belgium; but surely her love, in anguish, is manifest and
+supreme. When we contemplate these firstfruits of German "kultur"-
+-this deluge of innocent blood, and this wreckage of ancient
+monuments--who can hesitate for a moment to belaud this little
+people, which has flung itself thus gallantly, in the spirit of
+purest sacrifice, in front of the onward progress of this new and
+frightful Juggernaut? Rather one recalls that old persistent
+creed, exemplified perhaps in the mysteries, now of the Greek
+Adonis, now of Persian Mithras, and now of the Roman priest of the
+Nennian lake, that it is only through the gates of sacrifice and
+death that the world moves on triumphant to rejuvenation and life.
+Is it, in truth, through the blood of a bruised and prostrate
+Belgium that the purple hyacinth of a rescued European
+civilization will spring presently from the soaked and untilled
+soil?
+
+Yet even if German "kultur" in the end sweep wholly into ruin the
+long accumulated treasures of Belgian architecture, sculpture, and
+painting--if Bruges, which to-day stands still intact, shall to-
+morrow be reckoned with Dinant and Louvain--yet it would still be
+worth while to set before a few more people this record of
+vanished splendour, that they may better appreciate what the world
+has lost through lust of brutal ambition, and better be on guard
+in the future to protect what wreckage is left. All these
+treasures were bequeathed to us--not to Belgium alone, but to the
+whole world--by the diligence and zeal of antiquity; and we have
+seen this goodly heritage ground in a moment into dust beneath the
+heel of an insolent and degraded militancy. Belgium, in very
+truth, in guarding the civilization and inheritance of other
+nations, has lavishly wrecked her own. "They made me keeper of the
+vineyards; but my own vineyard have I not kept."
+
+Luckily, however, it is not yet quite clear that the "work of
+waste and ruin" is wholly irreparable. One sees in the illustrated
+English papers pictures of the great thirteenth-century churches
+at Dixmude, Dinant, and Louvain, made evidently from photographs,
+that suggest at least that it is not impossible still to rebuild
+the walls of Jerusalem. Dixmude, indeed--I judge from an interior
+view--is possibly shattered past hope; but Dinant and St. Pierre,
+at Louvain, so far at least as their fabrics are concerned, seem
+to lack little but the woodwork of their roofs. It is only a few
+years ago since the writer stood in the burnt-out shell of Selby
+Abbey; yet the Selby Abbey of to-day, though some ancient fittings
+of inestimable value have irreparably perished, is in some ways
+not less magnificent, and is certainly more complete, than its
+imperfect predecessor. One takes comfort, again, in the thought of
+York Minster in the conflagration caused by the single madman
+Martin in 1829, and of the collapse of the blazing ceilings in
+nave and chancel, whilst the great gallery of painted glass, by
+some odd miracle, escaped. Is it too much to hope that this
+devil's work of a million madmen at Dixmude or Nieuport may prove
+equally incomplete?
+
+In the imperfect sketch that follows I write of the aspect of
+Belgium--of its cities, that were formerly the most picturesque in
+Europe; of its landscapes, that range from the level fens of
+Flanders to the wooded limestone wolds of the Ardennes--as I knew
+these, and loved them, in former years, before hell was let loose
+in Europe. And perhaps, the picture here presented will in time be
+not altogether misrepresentative of the regenerated Belgium that
+will certainly some day arise.
+
+
+
+
+
+II.
+
+
+It is not merely in its quality of unredeemed and absolute
+flatness that the great fen country of Flanders is so strongly
+reminiscent of the great fen country of the Holland parts of
+Lincolnshire. Each of these vast levels is equally distinguished
+by the splendour and conspicuousness of its ancient churches.
+Travelling by railway between Nieuport and Dixmude, you have on
+every side of you, if the day be clear, a prospect of innumerable
+towers and spires, just as you have if you travel by railway
+between Spalding and Sleaford, or between Spalding and King's
+Lynn. The difference, perhaps, is that the Lincolnshire churches
+present finer architectural feature, and are built of stone,
+floated down in barges, by dyke or fen, from the famous inland
+quarries of Barnack, in Northamptonshire; whilst most of those in
+Flanders are built of local brick, though the drums of the piers
+and the arches are often of blue limestone. It is remarkable,
+certainly, that these soaring spires should thus chiefly rise to
+eminence in a setting of dead, flat plain. It may well be, indeed,
+as some have suggested, that the character of architecture is
+unconsciously determined by the type of surrounding scenery; that
+men do not build spires in the midst of mountains to compete with
+natural sublimity that they cannot hope to emulate, but are
+emboldened to express in stone and mortar their own heavenward
+aspirations in countries where Nature seems to express herself in
+less spiritual, or at any rate in less ambitious, mood.
+
+As we cross the level prairie between these two little towns of
+West Flanders (we hope to visit them presently), a group of lofty
+roofs and towers is seen grandly towards the west, dominating the
+fenland with hardly less insistency than Boston "Stump," in
+Lincolnshire, as seen across Wash and fen. This is the little town
+of Furnes, than which one can hardly imagine a quainter place in
+Belgium, or one more entirely fitted as a doorway by which to
+enter a new land. Coming straight from England by way of Calais
+and Dunkirk, the first sight of this ancient Flemish market-place,
+with its unbroken lines of old white-brick houses, many of which
+have crow-stepped gables; with the two great churches of St.
+Nicholas, with its huge square tower, and of St. Walburge, with
+its long ridge of lofty roof; and with its Hotel de Ville and
+Palais de Justice of about the dawn of the seventeenth century, is
+a revelation, in its atmosphere of sleepy evening quiet, to those
+who rub their eyes with wonder, and find it hard to credit that
+London, "with its unutterable, external hideousness," was actually
+left behind them only that very morning, and is actually at
+present not two hundred miles distant. Furnes, in short, is an
+epitome, and I think a very charming one, of all that is most
+characteristic in Flanders; and not the less charming because here
+the strong currents of modern life that throb through Ghent and
+Antwerp extend only to its threshold in the faintest of dying
+ripples, and because you do not need to be told that in its town
+hall may still be seen hangings of old Spanish leather, and that
+the members of the Inquisition used to meet in the ante-chamber of
+the first floor of its Palais de Justice, in order to throw
+yourself back in memory to those old days of Lowland greatness
+from whose struggles Holland emerged victorious, but into which
+Belgium, for the time, sank back oppressed.
+
+Furnes--in Flemish Veurne--is an excellent centre from which to
+explore the extreme west point of Belgian Flanders, which is also
+the extreme west point of Belgium as a whole. Flanders, be it
+always remembered, does not terminate with mere, present-day,
+political divisions, but spreads with unbroken character to the
+very gateways of Calais and Lille. Hazebrouck, for example, is a
+thoroughly Flemish town, though nearly ten miles, in a beeline,
+inside the French border--Flemish not merely, like Dunkirk, in the
+architecture of its great brick church, but also actually Flemish
+in language, and in the names that one reads above its shop doors.
+In particular, excursions may be pleasantly made from Furnes--
+whose principal inn, the Noble Rose, is again a quaint relic of
+the sixteenth century--to the two delightful little market-towns
+of Dixmude and Nieuport-Ville: I write, as always, of what was
+recently, and of what I have seen myself; to-day they are probably
+heaps of smoking ruin, and sanguinary altars to German "kultur."
+Nieuport-Ville, so called in distinction from its dull little
+watering-place understudy, Nieuport-les-Bains, which lies a couple
+of miles to the west of it, among the sand-dunes by the mouth of
+the Yser, and is hardly worth a visit unless you want to bathe--
+Nieuport-Ville, in addition to its old yellow-brick Halles, or
+Cloth Hall, and its early Tour des Templiers, is remarkable for
+its possession of a fascinating church, the recent restoration of
+which has been altogether conservative and admirable. Standing
+here, in this rich and picturesque interior, you realize strongly
+the gulf in this direction between Belgium and France, in which
+latter country, in these days of ecclesiastical poverty, loving
+restoration of the kind here seen is rare, and whose often
+neglected village churches seldom, or never, exhibit that wealth
+of marble rood-screen and sculptured woodwork--of beaten brass
+and hammered iron--that distinguishes Belgian church interiors
+from perhaps all others on earth. The church has also some highly
+important brasses, another detail, common of course in most
+counties of England, that is now never, or hardly ever, found in
+France. Chief, perhaps, among these is the curious, circular brass
+--I hope it has escaped--with figures of husband, wife, and
+children, on a magnificently worked background, that is now
+suspended on the northwest pier of the central crossing. Very
+Belgian, too, in character is the rood-beam, with its three
+figures of Our Lord in Crucifixion, of the Virgin, and of St.
+John; and the striking Renaissance rood-screen in black and white
+marble, though not as fine as some that are found in other
+churches. Rood-screens of this exact sort are almost limited to
+Belgium, though there is one, now misplaced in the west end of the
+nave, and serving as an organ-loft, in the church of St. Gery at
+Cambrai--another curious link between French and Belgian Flanders.
+Dixmude (in Flemish Diksmuide), nine and a half miles south from
+Nieuport, is an altogether bigger and more important place, with a
+larger and more important church, of St. Nicholas, to match. My
+recollection of this last, on a Saturday afternoon of heavy
+showers towards the close of March, is one of a vast interior
+thronged with men and women in the usual dismal, black Flemish
+cloaks, kneeling in confession, or waiting patiently for their
+turn to confess, in preparation for the Easter Mass. Here the best
+feature, till lately, was the glorious Flamboyant rood-screen,
+recalling those at Albi and the church of Brou, in France; and
+remarkable in Belgium as one of the very few examples of its sort
+(there is, or was, another in St. Pierre, at Louvain) of so early
+a period, in a land where rood-screens, as a body, are generally
+much later in date.
+
+It is difficult, in dealing with Flanders, to avoid a certain
+amount of architectural description, for architecture, after all,
+is the chief attraction of the country, save perhaps in Ghent and
+Bruges, where we have also noble pictures. Even those who do not
+care to study this architecture in detail will be gratified to
+stroll at leisure through the dim vastness of the great Flemish
+churches, where the eye is satisfied everywhere with the wealth of
+brass and iron work, and where the Belgian passion for wood-
+carving displays itself in lavish prodigality. Such wealth,
+indeed, of ecclesiastical furniture you will hardly find elsewhere
+in Western Europe--font covers of hammered brass, like those at
+Hal and Tirlemont; stalls and confessionals and pulpits, new and
+old, that are mere masses of sculptured wood-work; tall
+tabernacles for the reception of the Sacred Host, like those at
+Louvain and Leau, that tower towards the roof by the side of the
+High Altars. Most of this work, no doubt, is post-Gothic, except
+the splendid stalls and canopies (I wonder, do they still survive)
+at the church of St. Gertrude at Louvain; for Belgium presents few
+examples of mediaeval wood-work like the gorgeous stalls at
+Amiens, or like those in half a hundred churches in our own land.
+Much, in fact, of these splendid fittings is more or less
+contemporary with the noble masterpieces of Rubens and Vandyck,
+and belongs to the same great wave of artistic enthusiasm that
+swept over the Netherlands in the seventeenth century. Belgian
+pulpits, in particular, are probably unique, and certainly, to my
+knowledge, without parallel in Italy, England, or France.
+Sometimes they are merely adorned, like the confessionals at St.
+Charles, at Antwerp, and at Tirlemont, with isolated figures; but
+often these are grouped into some vivid dramatic scene, such as
+the Miraculous Draught of Fishes, at St. Andrew's, at Antwerp, or
+the Conversion of St. Norbert, in the cathedral at Malines.
+Certainly the fallen horseman in the latter, if not a little
+ludicrous, is a trifle out of place.
+
+From Furnes to Ypres it is a pleasant journey across country by
+one of those strange steam-trams along the road, so common in
+Belgium and Holland, and not unknown in France, that wind at
+frequent intervals through village streets so narrow, that you
+have only to put out your hand in passing to touch the walls of
+houses. This is a very leisurely mode of travelling, and the halts
+are quite interminable in their frequency and length; but the
+passenger is allowed to stand on the open platform at the end of
+the carriage--though sometimes nearly smothered with thick, black
+smoke--and certainly no better method exists of exploring the
+short stretches of open country that lie between town and town.
+Belgian towns, remember, lie mostly thick on the ground--you are
+hardly out of Brussels before you come to Malines, and hardly out
+of Malines ere you sight the spire of Antwerp. In no part of
+Europe, perhaps, save in parts of Lancashire and Yorkshire, do you
+find so many big towns in so limited a space; yet the strips of
+country that lie between, though often intolerably dull, are
+(unlike the strips in Yorkshire) intensely rural in character.
+Belgian towns do not sprawl in endless, untidy suburbs, as
+Sheffield sprawls out towards Rotherham, and Bradford towards
+Leeds. Belgian towns, moreover--again unlike our own big cities in
+England--are mostly extremely handsome, and generally contrive,
+however big, to retain, at any rate in their heart, as at Antwerp,
+or in the Grande Place at Brussels, a striking air of antiquity;
+whilst some fairly big towns, such as Malines and Bruges, are
+mediaeval from end to end. This, of course, is not true of Belgian
+Luxembourg and the region of the Ardennes, where the population is
+much more sparse; where we do not stumble, about every fifteen
+miles or so, on some big town of historic name; and where the
+endless chessboard of little fields that lies, for example,
+between Ghent and Oudenarde, or between Malines and Louvain, is
+replaced by long contours of sweeping limestone wold, often
+covered with rolling wood.
+
+Ypres is distinguished above all cities in Belgium by the huge
+size and stately magnificence of its lordly Cloth Hall, or Halles
+des Drapiers. So vast, indeed, is this huge building, and so flat
+the surrounding plain, that it is said that it is possible from
+the strangely isolated hill of Cassel, which lies about eighteen
+miles away to the west, just over the border, in France, on a
+really clear day--I have only climbed it myself, unluckily, in a
+fog of winter mist--to distinguish in a single view, by merely
+turning the head, the clustering spires of Laon, the white chalk
+cliffs of Kent, and this vast pile of building, like a ship at
+sea, that seems to lie at anchor in the heart of the "sounding
+plain." Nothing, perhaps, in Europe is so strangely significant of
+vanished greatness--not even Rome, with its shattered Forum, or
+Venice, with a hundred marble palaces--as this huge fourteenth-
+century building, with a facade that is four hundred and thirty-
+six feet long, and with its lofty central tower, that was built
+for the pride and need of Ypres, and as a market for the barter of
+its priceless linens, at a time when Ypres numbered a population
+of two hundred thousand souls (almost as big as Leicester at the
+present day), and was noisy with four thousand busy looms; whereas
+now it has but a beggarly total of less than seventeen thousand
+souls (about as big as Guildford), and is only a degree less
+sleepy than Malines or Bruges-la-Morte. Ypres, again, like Arras,
+has lent its name to commerce, if diaper be really rightly derived
+from the expression "linen of Ypres." The Cloth Hall fronts on to
+the Grande Place, and, indeed, forms virtually one side of it; and
+behind, in the Petite Place, is the former cathedral of St.
+Martin. This is another fine building, though utterly eclipsed by
+its huge secular rival, that was commenced in the thirteenth
+century, and is typically Belgian, as opposed to French, in the
+character of its architecture, and not least in its possession of
+a single great west tower. This last feature is characteristic of
+every big church in Belgium--one can add them up by the dozen:
+Bruges, Ghent, Louvain (though ruined, or never completed),
+Oudenarde, Malines, Mons--save Brussels, where the church of Ste.
+Gudule, called persistently, but wrongly, the cathedral, has the
+full complement of two, and Antwerp, where two were intended,
+though only one has been actually raised. This tower at Ypres,
+however, fails to illustrate--perhaps because it is earlier, and
+therefore in better taste--that astounding disproportion in height
+that is so frequently exhibited by Belgian towers, as at Malines,
+or in the case of the famous belfry in the market-place at Bruges,
+when considered with reference to the church, or town hall, below.
+In front of the High Altar, in the pavement, is an inconspicuous
+square of white stone, which marks the burial-place of Cornelius
+Jansen, who died of the plague, as Bishop of Ypres, in 1638. The
+monument, if you can call it monument, is scarcely less
+insignificant than the simple block, in the cemetery of
+Plainpalais at Geneva, that is traditionally said to mark the
+resting-place of Calvin. Yet Jansen, in his way, proved almost a
+second Calvin in his death, and menaced the Church from his grave
+with a second Reformation. He left behind in manuscript a book
+called "Augustinus," the predestinarian tenor of which was
+condemned finally, though nearly a century later, by Pope Clement
+XI., in 1713, in the Bull called Unigenitus. Jansenism, however,
+had struck deep its roots in France, and still survives in Holland
+at the present day, at Utrecht, as a sect that is small, indeed,
+but not altogether obscure. Jansen himself, it may be noted, was a
+Hollander by birth, having been born in 1585 at Akkoi in that
+kingdom.
+
+If Ypres is to be praised appropriately as a still delightful old
+city that has managed to retain to a quite singular degree the
+outward aspect and charm of the Middle Ages, one feels that one
+has left one's self without any proper stock of epithets with
+which to appraise at its proper value the charm and romance of
+Bruges. Of late years, it is true, this world-famed capital of
+West Flanders has lost something of its old somnolence and peace.
+Malines, in certain quarters, is now much more dead-alive, and
+Wordsworth, who seems to have visualized Bruges in his mind as a
+network of deserted streets, "whence busy life hath fled," might
+perhaps be tempted now to apply to it the same prophetic outlook
+that he imagined for Pendragon Castle:
+
+    "Viewing
+    As in a dream her own renewing."
+
+One hopes, indeed, that the renewing of Bruges will not proceed
+too zealously, even if Bruges come safely through its present hour
+of crisis. Perhaps there is no big city in the world--and Bruges,
+though it has shrunk pitiably, like Ypres, from its former great
+estate in the Middle Ages, has still more than forty thousand
+souls--that remains from end to end, in every alley, and square,
+and street, so wholly unspoilt and untouched by what is bad in the
+modern spirit, or that presents so little unloveliness and squalor
+in its more out-of-the-way corners as Bruges. Bruges, of course,
+like Venice, and half a dozen towns in Holland, is a strangely
+amphibious city that is intersected in every direction, though
+certainly less persistently than Venice, by a network of stagnant
+canals. On the other hand, if it never rises to the splendour of
+the better parts of Venice--the Piazza and the Grand Canal--and
+lacks absolutely that charm of infinitely varied, if somewhat
+faded or even shabby, colour that characterizes the "Queen of the
+Adriatic," there is yet certainly nothing monotonous in her
+monotone of mellow red-brick; and certainly nothing so
+dilapidated, and tattered, and altogether poverty-stricken as one
+stumbles against in Venice in penetrating every narrow lane, and
+in sailing up almost every canal. Of Venice we may perhaps say,
+what Byron said of Greece, that
+
+    "Hers is the loveliness in death
+    That parts not quite with parting breath";
+
+whilst in Bruges we recognize gladly, not death or decay at all,
+but the serene and gracious comeliness of a dignified and vital
+old age.
+
+We cannot, of course, attempt, in a mere superficial sketch like
+this, even to summarize briefly the wealth of objects of interest
+in Bruges, or to guide the visitor in detail through its maze of
+winding streets. Two great churches, no doubt, will be visited by
+everyone--the cathedral of St. Sauveur and the church of Notre
+Dame--both of which, in the usual delightful Belgian fashion, are
+also crowded picture-galleries of the works of great Flemish
+masters. The See of Bruges, however, dates only from 1559; and
+even after that date the Bishop had his stool in the church of St.
+Donatian, till this was destroyed by the foolish Revolutionaries
+in 1799. In a side-chapel of Notre Dame, and carefully boarded up
+for no reason in the world save to extort a verger's fee for their
+exhibition, are the splendid black marble monuments, with
+recumbent figures in copper gilt, of Charles the Bold, who fell at
+Nancy in 1477 (but lives for ever, with Louis XI. of France, in
+the pages of "Quentin Durward"), and of his daughter, Mary, the
+wife of the Emperor Maximilian, of Austria, who was killed by
+being thrown from her horse whilst hunting in 1482. These two
+tombs are of capital interest to those who are students of Belgian
+history, for Charles the Bold was the last male of the House of
+Burgundy, and it was by the marriage of his daughter that the
+Netherlands passed to the House of Hapsburg, and thus ultimately
+fell under the flail of religious persecution during the rule of
+her grandson, Spanish Philip. Close to Notre Dame, in the Rue St.
+Catherine, is the famous old Hospital of St. Jean, the red-brick
+walls of which rise sleepily from the dull waters of the canal,
+just as Queens' College, or St. John's, at Cambridge, rise from
+the sluggish Cam. Here is preserved the rich shrine, or chasse,
+"resembling a large Noah's ark," of St. Ursula, the sides of which
+are painted with scenes from the virgin's life by Hans Memling,
+who, though born in the neighbourhood of Mayence, and thus really
+by birth a German, lived for nearly a quarter of a century or more
+of his life in Bruges, and is emphatically connected, like his
+master Roger van der Weyden and the brothers Van Eyck, with the
+charming early Flemish school. There is a story that he was
+wounded under Charles le Temeraire on the stricken field of Nancy,
+and painted these gemlike pictures in return for the care and
+nursing that he received in the Hospital of St. Jean, but "this
+story," says Professor Anton Springer, "may be placed in the same
+category as those of Durer's malevolent spouse, and of the
+licentiousness of the later Dutch painters." These scenes from the
+life of St. Ursula are hardly less delightfully quaint than the
+somewhat similar series that was painted by Carpaccio for the
+scuola of the Saint at Venice, and that are now preserved in the
+Accademia. Early Flemish painting, in fact, in addition to its own
+peculiar charm of microscopic delicacy of finish, is hardly
+inferior, in contrast with the later strong realism and occasional
+coarseness of Rubens or Rembrandt, to the tender poetic dreaminess
+of the primitive Italians. Certainly these pictures, though
+finished to the minutest and most delicate detail, are lacking in
+realism actually to a degree that borders on a delicious
+absurdity. St. Ursula and her maidens--whether really eleven
+thousand or eleven--in the final scene of martyrdom await the
+stroke of death with the stoical placidity of a regiment of dolls.
+"All the faces are essentially Flemish, and some of the virgins
+display to great advantage the pretty national feature of the
+slight curl in one or in both lips." A little farther along the
+same street is the city Picture Gallery, with a small but
+admirable collection, one of the gems of which is a splendid St.
+Christopher, with kneeling donors, with their patron saints on
+either side, that was also painted by Memling in 1484, and ranks
+as one of his best efforts. Notice also the portrait of the Canon
+Van de Paelen, painted by Jan van Eyck in 1436, and representing
+an old churchman with a typically heavy Flemish face; and the
+rather unpleasant picture by Gerard David of the unjust judge
+Sisamnes being flayed alive by order of King Cambyses. By a
+turning to the right out of the Rue St. Catherine, you come to the
+placid Minne Water, or Lac d'Amour, not far from the shores of
+which is one of those curious beguinages that are characteristic
+of Flanders, and consist of a number of separate little houses,
+grouped in community, each of which is inhabited by a beguine, or
+less strict kind of nun. In the house of the Lady Superior is
+preserved the small, but very splendid, memorial brass of a former
+inmate, who died at about the middle of the fifteenth century.
+
+Wander where you will in the ancient streets of Bruges, and you
+will not fail to discover everywhere some delightful relic of
+antiquity, or to stumble at every street corner on some new and
+charming combination of old houses, with their characteristic
+crow-stepped, or corbie, gables. New houses, I suppose, there must
+really be by scores; but these, being built with inherent good
+taste (whether unconscious or conscious I do not know) in the
+traditional style of local building, and with brick that from the
+first is mellow in tint and harmonizes with its setting,
+assimilate at once with their neighbours to right and left, and
+fail to offend the eye by any patchy appearance or crudeness.
+Hardly a single street in Bruges is thus without old-world charm;
+but the architectural heart of the city must be sought in its two
+market-places, called respectively the Grande Place and the Place
+du Bourg. In the former are the brick Halles, with their famous
+belfry towering above the structure below it, with true Belgian
+disregard for proportion in height. It looks, indeed, like tower
+piled on tower, till one is almost afraid lest the final octagon
+should be going to topple over! In the Place du Bourg is a less
+aspiring group, consisting of the Hotel de Ville, the Chapelle du
+Saint Sang, the Maison de l'Ancien Greffe, and the Palais de
+Justice--all very Flemish in character, and all, in combination,
+elaborately picturesque. In the Chapel of the Holy Blood is
+preserved the crystal cylinder that is said to enshrine certain
+drops of the blood of Our Saviour that were brought from the Holy
+Land in 1149 by Theodoric, Count of Flanders, and installed in the
+Romanesque chapel that he built for their reception, and the crypt
+of which remains, though the upper chapel has long since been
+rebuilt, in the fifteenth century. At certain stated times the
+relic is exhibited to a crowd of devotees, who file slowly past to
+kiss it. Some congealed blood of Our Lord is also said to be
+preserved, after remarkable vicissitudes of loss and recovery, in
+the Norman Abbey of Fecamp; and mediaeval Gloucestershire once
+boasted as big a treasure, which brought great concourse and
+popularity to the Cistercian house of Hayles. Pass beneath the
+archway of the Maison de l'Ancien Greffe, cross the sluggish
+canal, and turn sharply to the left, and follow, first the cobbled
+Quai des Marbriers, and afterwards its continuation, the Quai
+Vert. Pacing these silent promenades, which are bordered by humble
+cottages, you have opposite, across the water, as also from the
+adjacent Quai du Rosaire, grand groupings of pinnacle, tower, and
+gable, more delightful even, in perfection of combination and in
+mellow charm of colour, than those "domes and towers" of Oxford
+whose presence Wordsworth confessed, in a very indifferent sonnet,
+to overpower his "soberness of reason." "In Brussels," he says
+elsewhere in his journal, "the modern taste in costume,
+architecture, etc., has got the mastery; in Ghent there is a
+struggle; but in Bruges old images are still paramount, and an air
+of monastic life among the quiet goings-on of a thinly-peopled
+city is inexpressibly soothing. A pensive grace seems to be cast
+over all, even the very children." This estimate, after the lapse
+of considerably more than half a century, still, on the whole,
+stands good.
+
+"In Ghent there is a struggle." Approaching Ghent, indeed, by
+railway from Bruges, and with our heads full of old-world romance
+of Philip van Artevelte, and of continually insurgent burghers
+(for whom Ghent was rather famous), and of how Roland, "my horse
+without peer," "brought good news from Ghent," one is rather
+shocked at first, as we circle round the suburbs, at the rows of
+aggressive new houses, and rather tempted to conclude that the
+struggle has now ended, and that modernity, as at Brussels, has
+won the day at Ghent. Luckily the doubt is dissipated as we quit
+the splendid Sud station--and Belgium, one may add in parenthesis,
+has some of the most palatial railway-stations in the world--and
+find ourselves once again enmeshed in a network of ancient
+thoroughfares, which, if they lack wholly the absolute quiet, and
+in part the architectural charm, of Bruges, yet confront us at
+every corner with abundance of old-world charm. I suppose the six
+great things to be seen in Ghent are the cathedral of St. Bavon
+(and in the cathedral the great picture of the "Adoration of the
+Lamb," by Hubert and Jan van Eyck); the churches of St. Michel,
+with a "Crucifixion" by Van Dyck, and St. Nicholas; the wonderful
+old houses on the Quai des Herbes; the splendidly soaring Belfry;
+and possibly the Grande Beguinage, on the outskirts of the town.
+The cathedral has the usual solitary west tower, as at Ely, that
+we have now come to associate--at Ypres and Bruges--with typical
+Belgian churches. The great Van Eyck is hung in a chapel on the
+south of the choir, and the services of the verger must be sought
+for its exhibition. The paintings on the shutters are merely
+copies by Coxie, six of the originals being in the Picture Gallery
+in Berlin. Their restoration to Ghent, one hopes, will form a
+fractional discharge of the swiftly accumulating debt that Germany
+owes to Belgium. The four main panels, however, are genuine work
+of the early fifteenth century, the reredos as a whole having been
+begun by Hubert, and finished by Jan van Eyck in 1432. The centre-
+piece is in illustration of the text in the Apocalypse (v. 12):
+"Worthy is the Lamb that was slain to receive power, and riches,
+and wisdom, and strength, and honour, and glory, and blessing."
+One may question, indeed, if figurative language of the kind in
+question can ever be successfully transferred to canvas; whether
+this literal lamb, on its red-damasked table, in the midst of
+these carefully marshalled squadrons of Apostles, Popes, and
+Princes, can ever quite escape a hint of something ludicrous. One
+may question all this, yet still admire to the full both the
+spirit of devotion that inspired this marvellous picture and its
+miracle of minute and jewel-like execution. There are scores of
+other good pictures in Ghent, including (not even to go outside
+St. Bavon's) the "Christ among the Doctors" by Francis Pourbus,
+into which portraits of Philip II. of Spain, the Emperor Charles
+V., and the infamous Duke of Alva--names of terrible import in
+the sixteenth-century history of the Netherlands--are introduced
+among the bystanders; whilst to the left of Philip is Pourbus
+himself, "with a greyish cap on which is inscribed Franciscus
+Pourbus, 1567." But it is always to the "Adoration of the Mystic
+Lamb" that our steps are first directed, and to which they always
+return.
+
+It is hard, indeed, that necessities of space should
+compel us to pass so lightly over other towns in Flanders--over
+Courtrai, with its noble example of a fortified bridge, and with
+its great picture, by Van Dyck, of the "Raising of the Cross" that
+was stolen mysteriously a few years ago from the church of Notre
+Dame, but has since, like the Joconde at the Louvre, been
+recovered and replaced; over Oudenarde, with its two fine
+churches, and its small town hall that is famous for its splendour
+even in a country the Hotels de Ville of which are easily the most
+elaborate (if not always the most chaste or really beautiful) in
+Europe; and over certain very minor places, such as Damme, to the
+north-east of Bruges, whose silent, sunny streets, and half-
+deserted churches, seem to breathe the very spirit of Flemish
+mediaevalism. Of the short strip of Flemish coast, from near
+Knocke, past the fashionable modern bathing-places of Heyst,
+Blankenberghe, and Ostende, to a point beyond La Panne--from
+border to border it measures roughly only some forty miles, and is
+almost absolutely straight--I willingly say little, for it seems
+to me but a little thing when compared with this glorious inland
+wealth of architecture and painting. Recently it has developed in
+every direction, and is now almost continuously a thin,
+brilliantly scarlet line of small bungalows, villas, and lodging-
+houses, linked up along the front by esplanades and casinos, where
+only a few years ago the fenland met the sea in a chain of rolling
+sand-dunes that were peopled only by rabbits, and carpeted only
+with rushes and coarse grass. About tastes there is no disputing;
+and there are people, no doubt, who, for some odd reason, find
+this kind of aggressive modernity in some way more attractive in
+Belgium than in Kent. For myself, I confess, it hardly seems worth
+while to incur the penalty of sea-sickness merely to play golf on
+the ruined shore of Flanders.
+
+
+
+
+
+III.
+
+
+Of Brussels I do not propose to say very much, because Brussels,
+although the brightest and gayest town in Belgium, and although
+retaining in its Grande Place, and in the buildings that
+immediately surround this last, as well as in its great church of
+St. Gudule (which, in spite of popular usage, is not, and never
+was, in the proper sense a cathedral), relics of antiquity of the
+very highest value and interest, yet Brussels, as a whole, is so
+distinctively a modern, and even cosmopolitan city, and has so
+much general resemblance to Paris (though its site is far more
+picturesque, and though the place, to my mind at least, just
+because it is smaller and more easily comprehensible, is a much
+more agreeable spot to stay in), that it seems better in a sketch
+that is principally devoted to what is old and nationally
+characteristic in Belgium to give what limited space one has to a
+consideration rather of towns like Louvain or Malines, in which
+the special Belgian flavour is not wholly overwhelmed by false and
+extraneous influences. St. Gudule, of course, should certainly be
+visited, not only for the sake of the general fabric, which,
+notwithstanding its possession of TWO west towers, is typically
+Belgian in its general character, but also for the sake of its
+magnificent sixteenth and seventeenth century glass, and
+especially for the sake of the five great windows in the Chapelle
+du Saint Sacrement, which illustrate in a blaze of gorgeous colour
+the story of how Jonathan the Jew bribed Jeanne de Louvain to
+steal the three Consecrated Wafers, from which oozed, when
+sacrilegiously stabbed by the sceptical Jew, the Sacred Blood of a
+world's redemption. This story is told again--or rather, perhaps,
+a similar story--in the splendid painted glass from the church of
+St. Eloi that is now preserved at Rouen in the Archaeological
+Museum. As for the Grande Place, or original market-place of the
+city, which is bounded on one side by the magnificent Hotel de
+Ville, on the opposite side by the rather heavy, rebuilt Maison du
+Roi, and on the remaining two sides chiefly by the splendid old
+seventeenth-century Corporation Houses of the various ancient city
+guilds--Le Renard, the house of the silk-mercers and haberdashers;
+Maison Cornet, the house of the boatmen, or "batelliers"; La
+Louvre, the house of the archers; La Brouette, the house of the
+carpenters; Le Sac, the house of the printers and booksellers; the
+Cygne, the house of the butchers; and other houses that need not
+be specified at any greater length, of the tailors, painters, and
+brewers--this is probably the completest and most splendid example
+of an ancient city market-square that now remains in Europe, and
+absolutely without rival even in Belgium itself, though similar
+old guild-houses, in the same delightful Flemish fashion, may
+still be found (though in this case with admixture of many modern
+buildings) in the Grande Place at Antwerp. It was in this splendid
+square at Brussels that the unhappy Counts of Egmont and Horn were
+brutally done to death, to glut the sinister tyranny of Spanish
+Philip, on June 5, 1568.
+
+Also, in addition to these two superlative antiquities, two modern
+buildings in Brussels, though for widely different reasons, can
+hardly be passed over under plea of lack of space. Crowning the
+highest point of the city, and towering itself towards heaven in a
+stupendous pile of masonry, is the enormous new Palais de Justice,
+probably the most imposing law courts in the world. English Law
+undoubtedly is housed with much greater modesty, though not
+without due magnificence, in the altogether humbler levels of the
+Strand. Also in the High Town--which is the modern quarter of
+Brussels, in contrast with the mediaeval Low Town, which lies in
+the flat below--is the Royal Museum of Ancient Paintings, which
+probably divides honours with the Picture Gallery at Antwerp as
+the finest and most representative collection of pictures of the
+Netherlandish school in the world. Here you may revel by the hour
+in a candlelight effect by Gerard Dow; in the poultry of Melchior
+d'Hondecoeter; in a pigsty of Paul Potter's; in landscapes by
+Meindert Hobbema; in a moonlight landscape of Van der Neer's; in a
+village scene by Jan Steen; in the gallant world of Teniers; and
+in the weird imaginings of Pieter Brueghel the younger. The
+greatest pictures in the whole collection, I suppose, are those by
+Rubens, though he has nothing here that is comparable for a moment
+with those in the Picture Gallery and Cathedral at Antwerp. Very
+magnificent, however, is the "Woman taken in Adultery," the
+"Adoration of the Magi," the "Interceder Interceded" (the Virgin,
+at the prayer of St. Francis d'Assisi, restrains the angry Saviour
+from destroying a wicked world), and the "Martyrdom of St.
+Livinius." This last, however--like the "Crucifixion" in the
+Antwerp Gallery; like Van Dyck's picture in this collection of the
+drunken Silenus supported by a fawn; and like Rubens' own
+disgusting Silenus in our National Gallery at home--illustrates
+unpleasantly the painful Flemish facility to condescend to
+details, or even whole conceptions, the realism of which is
+unnecessarily deliberate and coarse. Here, in this death of St.
+Livinius, the executioner is shown in the act of presenting to a
+dog with pincers the bleeding tongue that he has just cut out of
+the mouth of the dying priest.
+
+Brussels itself, as already intimated, is an exceedingly pleasant
+city for a more or less prolonged stay; and, owing at once to the
+admirable system of "Rundreise" tickets that are issued by the
+State railways at an uncommonly low price, to the rather dubious
+quality of the hotels in some of the smaller towns, and to the
+cardinal fact that Brussels is a centre from which most of the
+other great cities of Belgium--Malines, Ghent, Antwerp, and Liege,
+not to mention smaller towns of absorbing interest, such as Mons,
+Namur, Hal, Tirlemont, Leau, and Soignies--may be easily visited,
+more or less completely, in the course of a single day--owing to
+all these facts many people will be glad to make this pleasant
+city their centre, or headquarters, for the leisurely exploration
+of most of Belgium, with the exception of the more distant and
+out-of-the-way districts of West Flanders and the Ardennes. All
+the places enumerated are thoroughly worth visiting, but obviously
+only the more important can be dealt with more than just casually
+here. Mons, on a hill overlooking the great coalfield of the
+Borinage, with its strange pyramidal spoil-heaps, is itself
+curiously free from the dirt and squalor of an English colliery
+town; and equally worth visiting for the sake of its splendid
+cathedral of St. Wandru, the richly polychromatic effect of whose
+interior, due to the conjunction of deep red-brick vaulting with
+the dark blue of its limestone capitals and piers, illustrates
+another pleasant phase of Belgian ecclesiastical architecture, as
+well as for the sake of a contest, almost of yesterday, that has
+added new and immortal laurels to the genius of British battle.
+Tournai, on the upper Scheldt, or Escaut, is remarkable for the
+heavy Romanesque nave of its cathedral, which is built of the
+famous local black marble, as well as for its remarkable central
+cluster of five great towers. Soignies (in Flemish Zirick),
+roughly half-way between Mons and Brussels, and probably little
+visited, has a sombre old abbey church, of St. Vincent Maldegaire,
+that was built in the twelfth century, and that is enriched inside
+with such a collection of splendidly carved classical woodwork--
+stalls, misericordes, and pulpit--as you will scarcely find
+elsewhere even in Belgium. The pulpit in particular is wonderful,
+with its life-sized girl supporters, with their graceful and
+lightly poised figures, and pure and lovely faces. Namur,
+strangely enough, has really nothing of antiquity outside the
+doors of its Archaeological Museum, but is worth a visit if only
+for the pleasure of promenading streets which, if almost wholly
+modern, are unusually clean and bright. Tirlemont, again, has two
+old churches that will not delay you long, though Notre Dame de
+Lac has remarkably fine confessionals of the dawn of the
+seventeenth century, and though the splendid brass-work of the
+font and baptistery lectern at St. Germains would alone be worth a
+visit; but Leau, for which Tirlemont is the junction, is so quaint
+and curious a little town, and comes so much in the guise of a
+pleasant discovery--since Baedeker barely mentions it--that, even
+apart from its perfect wealth of wood and brass work in the fine
+thirteenth-century church of St. Leonhard, it might anyhow be
+thought to justify a visit to this little visited corner of South
+Brabant. I do not know that the brass-work could be easily matched
+elsewhere: the huge standard candelabrum to the north of the
+altar, with its crowning Crucifixion; the lectern, with its
+triumphant eagle and prostrate dragon; the font, with its cover,
+and the holy-water stoup almost as big as a small font (in
+Brittany I have seen them as big as a bath); and the beautiful
+brass railings that surround the splendid Tabernacle that was
+executed in 1552 by Cornelius de Vriendt, the brother of the
+painter Frans Floris, and that towers high into the vaulting to a
+height of fifty-two feet. One realizes more completely in a quiet
+village church like this the breadth and intensity of the wave of
+artistic impulse that swept through the Lowlands in the sixteenth
+and seventeenth centuries than is possible in half a dozen hurried
+visits to a picture gallery at Antwerp or Brussels. Finally Hal,
+to conclude our list of minor places, has a grand fourteenth-
+century church, with a miracle-working Virgin, and a little red-
+brick town hall of characteristically picturesque aspect.
+
+The railway journey from Brussels to Antwerp traverses a typical
+bit of Belgian landscape that is as flat as a pancake; and the
+monotony is only relieved, first by the little town of Vilvoorde,
+where William Tyndale was burnt at the stake on October 6, 1536,
+though not alive, having first been mercifully strangled, and
+afterwards by the single, huge, square tower of Malines (or
+Mechlin) Cathedral, which dominates the plain from enormous
+distances, like the towers of Ely or Lincoln, though not, like
+these last, by virtue of position on a hill, but solely by its own
+vast height and overwhelming massiveness. Malines, though
+certainly containing fewer objects of particular interest than
+Bruges, and though certainly on the whole a less beautiful city,
+strikes one as hardly less dead-and-alive, and altogether may
+fairly claim second place among the larger Belgian cities (it
+houses more than fifty thousand souls) in point of mediaeval
+character. The great thirteenth and fourteenth century cathedral
+of St. Rombaut has been the seat of an archbishopric since the
+sixteenth century, and is still the metropolitan church of
+Belgium. Externally the body, like the market-hall at Bruges, is
+almost entirely crushed into insignificance by the utterly
+disproportionate height and bulk of the huge west tower, the top
+of which, even in its present unfinished state (one almost hopes
+that it may never be finished), is actually three hundred and
+twenty-four feet high. Boston "Stump" is only two hundred and
+eighty feet to the top of the weather vane, but infinitely slimmer
+in proportion; whilst even Salisbury spire is only about four
+hundred odd feet. Immediately below the parapet is the enormous
+skeleton clock-face, the proportions of which are reproduced on
+the pavement of the market-place below. The carillons in this
+tower are an extravagant example of the Belgian passion for
+chiming bells. Once safely inside the church, and the monster
+tower forgotten, and we are able to admire its delicate internal
+proportions, and the remarkable ornament of the spandrels in the
+great main arcades of the choir. Unfortunately, much of this
+interior, like that of St. Pierre at Louvain, is smothered under
+half an inch of plaster; but where this has been removed in
+tentative patches, revealing the dark blue "drums" of the single,
+circular columns of the arcades, the general effect is immensely
+improved. One would also like to send to the scrap-heap the
+enormous seventeenth-century figures of the Apostles on their
+consoles on the piers, which form so bad a disfigurement in the
+nave. The treasure of the church is the great "Crucifixion" by Van
+Dyck, which is hung in the south transept, but generally kept
+covered. To see other stately pictures you must go to the church
+of St. Jean, where is a splendid altar triptych by Rubens, the
+centre panel of which is the "Adoration of the Magi"; or to the
+fifteenth-century structure of Notre Dame au dela de la Dyle (the
+clumsy title is used, I suppose, for the sake of distinction from
+the classical Notre Dame d'Hanswyck), where Rubens' "Miraculous
+Draught of Fishes" is sometimes considered the painter's
+masterpiece. It is not yet clear whether this noble picture has
+been destroyed in the recent bombardment. Even to those who care
+little for art, a stroll to these two old churches through the
+sleepy back-streets of Malines, with their white and sunny houses,
+can hardly fail to gratify.
+
+If Malines is a backwater of the Middle Time, as somnolent or as
+dull (so some, I suppose, would call it) as the strange dead towns
+of the Zuyder Zee, or as Coggeshall or Thaxted in our own green
+Essex, Antwerp, at any rate, which lies only some fifteen miles or
+so to the north of it, is very much awake, and of aspect mostly
+modern, though not without some very curious and charming relics
+of antiquity embedded in the heart of much recent stone and
+mortar. Perhaps it will be well to visit one of these at once,
+taking the tram direct from the magnificent Gare de l'Est (no
+lesser epithet is just) to the Place Verte, which may be
+considered the real centre of the city; and making our way thence
+by a network of quieter back-streets to the Musee Plantin-
+Moretus, which is the goal of our immediate ambition. I bring you
+here at once, not merely because the place itself is quite unique
+and of quite exceptional interest, but because it strikes
+precisely that note of real antiquity that underlies the modern
+din and bustle of Antwerp, though apt to be obscured unless we
+listen needfully. Happy, indeed, was the inspiration that moved
+the city to buy this house from its last private possessor, Edward
+Moretus, in 1876. To step across this threshold is to step
+directly into the merchant atmosphere of the sixteenth century.
+The once great printing house of Plantin-Moretus was founded by
+the Frenchman, Christopher Plantin, who was born at St. Aventin,
+near Tours, in 1514, and began his business life as a book-binder
+at Rouen. In 1549 he removed to Antwerp, and was there innocently
+involved one night in a riot in the streets, which resulted in an
+injury that incapacitated him for his former trade, and
+necessitated his turning to some new employment. He now set up as
+printer, with remarkable success, and was a sufficiently important
+citizen at the date of his death, in 1589, to be buried in his own
+vault under a chapel in the Cathedral. The business passed, on his
+decease, to his son-in-law, Jean Moertorf, who had married his
+daughter, Martine, in 1570, and had Latinized his surname to
+Moretus in accordance with the curious custom that prevailed among
+scholars of the sixteenth century. Thus Servetus was really Miguel
+Servete, and Thomas Erastus was Thomas Lieber. The foundation of
+the fortunes of the house was undoubtedly its monopoly--analogous
+to that enjoyed by the English house of Spottiswoode, and by the
+two elder Universities--of printing the liturgical works--Missals,
+Antiphons, Psalters, Breviaries, etc.--that were used throughout
+the Spanish dominions. No attempt, however, seems to have been
+made in the later stages of the history of the house to adopt
+improved machinery, or to reconstruct the original, antiquated
+buildings. The establishment, accordingly, when it was taken over
+by the city in 1876, retained virtually the same aspect as it had
+worn in the seventeenth century, and remains to the present day
+perhaps the best example in the world of an old-fashioned city
+business house of the honest time when merchant-princes were
+content to live above their office, instead of seeking solace in
+smug suburban villas. The place has been preserved exactly as it
+stood, and even the present attendants are correctly clad in the
+sober brown garb of the servants of three hundred years since. It
+is interesting, not only in itself, but as an excellent example of
+how business and high culture were successfully combined under the
+happier economic conditions of the seventeenth and eighteenth
+centuries. The Plantin-Moretus family held a high position in the
+civic life of Antwerp, and mixed in the intellectual and artistic
+society for which Antwerp was famed in the seventeenth century--
+the Antwerp of Rubens (though not a native) and Van Dyck, of
+Jordaens, of the two Teniers, of Grayer, Zegers, and Snyders.
+Printing, indeed, in those days was itself a fine art, and the
+glories of the house of Plantin-Moretus rivalled those of the
+later Chiswick Press, and of the goodly Chaucers edited in our own
+time by Professor Skeat, and printed by William Morris. Proof-
+reading was then an erudite profession, and Francois Ravelingen,
+who entered Plantin's office as proof-reader in 1564, and assisted
+Arias Montanus in revising the sheets of the Polyglot Bible, is
+said to have been a great Greek and Oriental scholar, and crowned
+a career of honourable toil, like Hogarth's Industrious
+Apprentice, by marrying his master's eldest daughter, Marguerite,
+in 1565. The room in which these scholars worked remains much in
+its old condition, with the table at which they sat, and some of
+their portraits on the wall. Everything here, in short, is
+interesting: the press-room, which was used almost continuously
+and practically without change--two of the antiquated presses of
+Plantin's own time remain--for nearly three centuries; the Great
+and Little Libraries, with their splendid collection of books; the
+archive room, with its long series of business accounts and
+ledgers; the private livingrooms of the Moretus family; and last,
+but not least, the modest little shop, where books still repose
+upon the shelves, which looks as though the salesman might return
+at any moment to his place behind the counter. England has
+certainly nothing like it, though London had till recently in
+Crosby Hall a great merchant's house of the fifteenth century,
+though stripped of all internal fittings and propriety. Luckily
+this last has been re-erected at Chelsea, though robbed by the
+change of site of half its authenticity and value.
+
+I have chosen to dwell on this strange museum at length that seems
+disproportionate, not merely because of its unique character, but
+because it seems to me full of lessons and reproach for an age
+that has subordinated honest workmanship to cheap and shoddy
+productiveness, and has sacrificed the workman to machinery.
+Certainly no one who visits Antwerp can afford to overlook it; but
+probably most people will first bend their steps towards the more
+popular shrine of the great cathedral. Here I confess myself utter
+heretic: to call this church, as I have seen it called, "one of
+the grandest in Europe," seems to me pure Philistinism--the cult
+of the merely big and obvious, to the disregard of delicacy and
+beauty. Big it is assuredly, and superficially astonishing; but
+anything more barn-like architecturally, or spiritually
+unexalting, I can hardly call to memory. Outside it lacks entirely
+all shadow of homogeneity; the absence of a central tower, felt
+perhaps even in the great cathedrals of Picardy and the Ile de
+France, just as it is felt in Westminster and in Beverley Minster,
+is here actually accentuated by the hideous little cupola--I
+hardly know how properly to call it--that squats, as though in
+derision, above the crossing; whilst even the natural meeting and
+intersection at this point of high roofs, which in itself would
+rise to dignity, is wantonly neglected to make way for this
+monstrosity. The church, in fact, looks, when viewed externally,
+more like four separate churches than one; and when we step
+inside, with all the best will in the world to make the best of
+it, it is hard to find, much to admire, and anything at all to
+love, in these acres of dismally whitewashed walls, and long,
+feeble lines of arcades without capitals. The inherent vice of
+Belgian architecture--its lack of really beautiful detail, and
+its fussy superfluity of pinnacle and panelling--seems to me here
+to culminate. Belgium has really beautiful churches--not merely of
+the thirteenth century, when building was lovely everywhere, but
+later buildings, like Mons, and St. Pierre at Louvain; but Antwerp
+is not of this category. Architecturally, perhaps, the best
+feature of the whole church is the lofty spire (over four hundred
+feet), which curiously resembles in general outline that of the
+Hotel de Ville at Brussels (three hundred and seventy feet), and
+dates from about the same period (roughly the middle of the
+fifteenth century). As usual in Belgium, it is quite out of scale;
+it is lucky, indeed, that the corresponding south-west tower has
+never been completed, for the combination of the two would be
+almost overwhelming. It is curious and interesting as an example
+of a tower tapering upwards to a point in a succession of
+diminishing stages, in contrast with tower and spire. France has
+something like it, though far more beautiful, in the thirteenth-
+century tower at Senlis; but England affords no parallel. I am not
+sure who invented the quite happy phrase, "Confectioner's Gothic,"
+but this tower at Antwerp is not badly described by it. It is
+altogether too elaborate and florid, like the sugar pinnacle of a
+wedding-cake.
+
+This cathedral of Antwerp, however, though at the time that it was
+built a mere collegiate church of secular canons, and only first
+exalted to cathedral rank in 1559, is one of the largest churches
+in superficial area in the world, a result largely due to its
+possession, uniquely, of not less than six aisles, giving it a
+total breadth of one hundred and seventy feet. Hung in the two
+transepts respectively are the two great pictures by Rubens--the
+"Elevation of the Cross" and the "Descent from the Cross"--that
+are described at such length, and with so much critical
+enthusiasm, by Sir Joshua Reynolds in his "Journey to Flanders and
+Holland." The "Descent from the Cross," painted by Rubens in 1612,
+when he was only thirty-five years old, is perhaps the more
+splendid, and is specially remarkable for the daring with which
+the artist has successfully ventured (what "none but great
+colourists can venture") "to paint pure white linen near flesh."
+His Christ, continues Sir Joshua, "I consider as one of the finest
+figures that ever was invented: it is most correctly drawn, and I
+apprehend in an attitude of the utmost difficulty to execute. The
+hanging of the head on His shoulder, and the falling of the body
+on one side, gives such an appearance of the heaviness of death,
+that nothing can exceed it." Antwerp, of course, is full of
+magnificent paintings by Rubens, though unfortunately the house in
+which he lived in the Place de Meir (which is traversed by the
+tram on its way from the Est Station to the Place Verte), which
+was built by him in 1611, and in which he died in 1640, was almost
+entirely rebuilt in 1703. There is another great Crucifixion by
+the master in the Picture Gallery, or Palais des Beaux Arts, which
+illustrates his exceptional power as well as his occasional
+brutality." The centurion, with his hands on the nape of his
+horse's neck, is gazing with horror at the writhings of the
+impenitent thief, whose legs are being broken with an iron bar,
+which has so tortured the unhappy man that in his agony he has
+torn his left foot from the nail." It is questionable whether any
+splendour of success can ever justify a man in thus condescending
+to draw inspiration from the torture-room or shambles.
+
+One would gladly spend more time in this Antwerp gallery, which
+exceeds, I think, in general magnificence the collections at
+Brussels and Amsterdam; and gladly would one visit the great
+fifteenth and sixteenth century churches of St. Jacques, St.
+Andre, and St. Paul, which not merely form together
+architecturally an important group of a strongly localized
+character, but are also, like the cathedral, veritable museums or
+picture galleries. It is necessary, however, to conclude this
+section, to say a few words about Louvain, which, lying as it does
+on the main route from Brussels to Liege, may naturally be
+considered on our way to the northern Ardennes.
+
+Louvain, on the whole, has been much more modernized than other
+Belgian cities of corresponding bulk, such as Bruges or Malines.
+The road from the railway-station to the centre of the town is
+commonplace indeed in its lack of picturesque Flemish house-fronts
+or stepped, "corbie," Flemish gables. Louvain, in fact, unlike the
+two "dead" cities of West Flanders and Brabant, wears a briskly
+business-like aspect, and pulses with modern life. I suppose that
+I ought properly to have written all this in the past tense, for
+Louvain is now a heap of smoking cinders. The famous Town Hall
+has, indeed, so far been spared by ruffians who would better have
+spared the magnificent Cloth Hall at Ypres; between these two
+great buildings, the products respectively of the Belgian genius
+of the fifteenth and thirteenth centuries, "culture" could hardly
+hesitate. The Hotel-de-Ville at Louvain is, indeed, an astonishing
+structure, just as the cathedral at Antwerp is astonishing; but
+one has to be very indulgent, or very forgetful of better models,
+not to deprecate this absolutely wanton riot of overladened
+panelling and bulging, top-heavy pinnacles. The expiring throes of
+Belgian Gothic were a thousand degrees less chaste than the
+classicism of the early Renaissance: few, perhaps, will prefer the
+lacelike over-richness of this midfifteenth century town hall at
+Louvain to the restraint of the charming sixteenth-century facade
+of the Hotel de Ville at Leiden. Opposite the town hall is the
+huge fifteenth-century church of St. Pierre, the interior of
+which, still smothered in whitewash in 1910, was remarkable for
+its florid Gothic rood-screen and soaring Tabernacle, or Ciborium.
+The stumpy fragment of tower at the west end is said once to have
+been five hundred and thirty feet high! It is not surprising to
+read that this last, and crowning, manifestation of a familiar
+Belgian weakness was largely wrecked by a hurricane in 1604.
+
+
+
+
+
+IV.
+
+
+One has left oneself all too little space to say what ought to be
+said of the Belgian Ardennes. Personally I find them a trifle
+disappointing; they come, no doubt, as a welcome relief after the
+rest of Belgian landscape, which I have heard described, not
+altogether unjustly, as the ugliest in the world; but the true
+glory and value of Belgium will always be discovered in its
+marvellously picturesque old towns, and in its unrivalled wealth
+of painting, brass-work, and wood-carving. Compared with these
+last splendours the low, wooded wolds of the Ardennes, with their
+narrow limestone valleys, seem a little thing indeed. Dinant, no
+doubt, and Rochefort would be pleasant places enough if one were
+not always harking back in memory to Malines and Ypres, or longing
+to be once more in Ghent or Bruges.
+
+The traveller by railway between Brussels and Liege passes, soon
+after leaving the station of Ans, a point of great significance in
+the study of Belgian landscape. Hitherto from Brussels, or for
+that matter from Bruges and Ostend, the country, though studded at
+frequent intervals with cities and big towns, has been curiously
+and intensely rural in the tracts that lie between; but now, as we
+descend the steep incline into the valley of the Meuse, we enter
+on a scene of industrial activity which, if never quite as bad as
+our own Black Country at home, is sufficiently spoilt and
+irritating to all who love rustic grace. The redeeming point, as
+always, is that infinitely superior good taste which presents us,
+in the midst of coal-mines and desolation, not with our own
+unspeakably squalid Sheffields or Rotherhams, but with a queenly
+city, with broad and handsome streets, with a wealth of public
+gardens, and with many stately remnants of the Renaissance and
+Middle Time. It is possible in Liege to forget--or rather
+impossible to recall--the soiled and grimy country that stretches
+from its gates in the direction of Seraing. Even under the sway of
+the Spanish tyranny this was an independent state under the rule
+of a Bishop Prince, who was also an Elector of the Holy Roman
+Empire. Its original cathedral, indeed, has vanished, like those
+at Cambrai and Bruges, in the insensate throes of the French
+Revolution; and the existing church of St. Paul, though dating in
+part from the thirteenth century, and a fine enough building in
+its way, is hardly the kind of structure that one would wish to
+associate with the seat of a bishopric that is still so historic,
+and was formerly so important and even quasi-regal. Here, however,
+you should notice, just as in the great neighbour church of St.
+Jacques, the remarkable arabesque-pattern painting of the
+severies of the vault, and the splendour of the sixteenth-century
+glass. St. Jacques, I think, on the whole is the finer church of
+the two, and remarkable for the florid ornament of its spandrels,
+and for the elaborate, pendent cusping of the soffits of its
+arches--features that lend it an almost barbaric magnificence that
+reminds one of Rosslyn Chapel. Liege, built as it is exactly on
+the edge of the Ardennes, is far the most finely situated of any
+great city in Belgium. To appreciate this properly you should not
+fail to climb the long flight of steps--in effect they seem
+interminable, but they are really about six hundred--that mounts
+endlessly from near the Cellular Prison to a point by the side of
+the Citadelle Pierreuse. Looking down hence on the city,
+especially under certain atmospheric conditions--I am thinking of
+a showery day at Easter--one is reminded of the lines by poor John
+Davidson:
+
+    "The adventurous sun took Heaven by storm;
+    Clouds scattered largesses of rain;
+    The sounding cities, rich and warm,
+    Smouldered and glittered in the plain."
+
+It is not often that one is privileged to look down so directly,
+and from so commanding a natural height, on to so vast and busy a
+city--those who like this kind of comparison have styled it the
+Belgian Birmingham--lying unrolled so immediately, like a map,
+beneath our feet.
+
+From Liege, if you like, you may penetrate the Ardennes--I do not
+know whether Shakespeare was thinking in "As You Like It" of this
+woodland or of his own Warwickshire forest of Arden; perhaps he
+thought of both--immediately by way of Spa and the valley of the
+Vesdre, or by the valleys of the Ourthe and of its tributary the
+Ambleve; or you may still cling for a little while to the fringe
+of the Ardennes, which is also the fringe of the industrial
+country, and explore the valley of the Meuse westward, past Huy
+and Namur, to Dinant. Huy has a noble collegiate church of Notre
+Dame, the chancel towers of which (found again as far away as
+Como) are suggestive of Rhenish influence, but strikes one as
+rather dusty and untidy in itself. Namur, on the contrary, we have
+already noted with praise, though it has nothing of real
+antiquity. The valley of the Meuse is graced everywhere at
+intervals with fantastic piles of limestone cliff, and certainly,
+in a proper light, is pretty; but there is far too much quarrying
+and industrialism between Liege and Namur, and far too many
+residential villas along the banks between Namur and Dinant,
+altogether to satisfy those who have high ideals of scenery.
+Wordsworth, in a prefatory note to a sonnet that was written in
+1820, and at a date when these signs of industrialism were
+doubtless less obtrusive, says: "The scenery on the Meuse pleases
+one more, upon the whole, than that of the Rhine, though the river
+itself is much inferior in grandeur"; but even he complains that
+the scenery is "in several places disfigured by quarries, whence
+stones were taken for the new fortifications." Dinant, in
+particular, has an exceptionally grand cliff; but the summit is
+crowned (or was) by an ugly citadel, and the base is thickly
+clustered round with houses (not all, by any means, mediaeval and
+beautiful) in a way that calls to mind the High Tor at Matlock
+Bath. Dinant, in short, is a kind of Belgian Matlock, and appeals
+as little as Matlock to the "careful student" of Nature. If at
+Dinant, however, you desert the broad valley of the Meuse for the
+narrow and secluded limestone glen of the Lesse, with its clear
+and sparkling stream, you will sample at once a kind of scenery
+that reminds you of what is best in Derbyshire, and is also best
+and most characteristic in the Belgian Ardennes. The walk up the
+stream from Dinant to Houyet, where the valley of the Lesse
+becomes more open and less striking, is mostly made by footpath;
+and the pellucid river is crossed, and recrossed, and crossed
+again, by a constant succession of ferries. Sometimes the white
+cliff rises directly from the water, sheer and majestic, like that
+which is crowned by the romantic Chateau Walzin; sometimes it is
+more broken, and rises amidst trees from a broad plinth of emerald
+meadow that is interposed between its base and the windings of the
+river. Sometimes we thread the exact margin of the stream, or
+traverse in the open a scrap of level pasture; sometimes we
+clamber steeply by a stony path along the sides of an abrupt and
+densely wooded hillside, where the thicket is yellow in spring
+with Anemone Ranunculoides, or starred with green Herb Paris. This
+is the kind of glen scenery that is found along the courses of the
+Semois, Lesse, and Ourthe, recalling, with obvious differences,
+that of Monsal Dale or Dovedale, but always, perhaps, without that
+subtle note of wildness that robes even the mild splendours of
+Derbyshire with a suggestion of mountain dignity. The Ardennes, in
+short--and this is their scenic weakness--never attain to the
+proper mountain spirit. There is a further point, however, in
+which they also recall Derbyshire, but in which they are far
+preeminent. This is the vast agglomeration of caves and vertical
+potholes--like those in Craven, but here called etonnoirs--that
+riddle the rolling wolds in all directions. Chief among these is
+the mammoth cave of Han, the mere perambulation of which is said
+to occupy more than two hours. I have never penetrated myself into
+its sombre and dank recesses, but something may be realized of its
+character and scale merely by visiting its gaping mouth at Eprave.
+This is the exit of the Lesse, which, higher up the vale, at the
+curious Perte de Lesse, swerves suddenly from its obvious course,
+down the bright and cheerful valley, to plunge noisily through a
+narrow slit in the rock--
+
+    "Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
+    Through caverns measureless to man
+    Down to a sunless sea."
+
+Rochefort, which itself has a considerable cave, is a pleasant
+centre for the exploration of these subterranean marvels.
+Altogether this limestone region of the Ardennes, though certainly
+not remarkable for mountain or forest splendour, comes as a
+somewhat welcome relief after the interminable levels and
+chessboard fields of East and West Flanders, or of the provinces
+of Limburgh and Antwerp.
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's Beautiful Europe - Belgium, by Joseph E. Morris
+
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