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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.
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
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
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
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
“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.
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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.
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
“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)
“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.