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.