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.