_promenoir_ overhanging the Antwerp docks, is one place in a thousand
for the man who is inclined toward any such unusual combination as a
maximum of twentieth-century business activity in a setting of the
Middle Ages. He is fortunate in locality and happy in surroundings. A
Parisian waiter removes the remains of his light luncheon of a salad
of Belgian greens fresh this morning from a trim truck garden beyond
the ramparts, refills the thin tumbler to the taste of the guest with
foaming local Orge or light Brussels Faro or the bitter product of
Ghent or the flat, insipid stuff they boast about at Louvain, and
supplies a light for an excellent cigar made here in Antwerp of the
best growth of Havana. Supposing it to be two o’clock of the usual
mottled, doubtful afternoon,—for Antwerp’s weather, like Antwerp’s
history, is mingled sunshine and shadows,—the loiterer may look out
at his ease on a notable and fascinating panorama. Beneath him and to
either side extend miles of massive docks of ponderous masonry, upon
and about which swarms an ant-like multitude of nimble and active
longshoremen plying a network of ropes and tackle, and directing the
labors of vast, writhing derricks that toil like a mechanical Israel
in bondage. Snuggling close to the grim granite walls are merchant
mammoths from the ends of the earth, and into these, with the ease of
a man stooping for a pin, gigantic steel arms sweep tons of casks and
bales that they have lightly plucked out of long wharf trains lying
alongside. There is a prodigious bustling of porters in long blue
blouses, shouts and cries from the riverful of shipping, trampling
of thousands of hobnailed shoes, and an incessant clatter of the
wooden sabots of little Antwerp boys in peaked caps and baggy blue
trousers and of little Antwerp girls in bright skirts and curious white
headdress.
This sort of thing is proceeding for miles up and down the river front,
and all through the intricate series of locks and _bassins_ and canals
that quadruple the wharfage of this rejuvenated old Flemish city. They
are receiving whole argosies of raw material in the shape of hides,
tobacco, and textiles, and are sending away fortunes in cut diamonds,
delicate laces, linens, beer, sugar, and innumerable clever products
of human hands from fragile glass to ponderous machinery. And they do
it with more ease and, it seems necessary to add, with less profanity
than any other port of Europe. What, then, could have possessed the
genial Eugene Field to pass along that ancient slander on the excellent
burghers of Flanders?
“At any rate, as I grieve to state,
Since these soldiers vented their danders,
Conjectures obtain that for language profane,
There is no such place as Flanders.
* * * * *
This is the kind of talk you’ll find
If ever you go to Flanders.”
While I should not wish to take such extreme ground as that assumed, in
another connection, by a New York police inspector, when he observed
that “every one of them facts has been verified to be absolutely
untrue,” still I must say that, as far as I could notice, there is
nothing notable about the Flemish oath as employed to-day. Indeed, it
is more than likely that one could pass a long and pleasant evening
loitering among the _tavernes_ and recreation haunts of the Belgian
soldier and civilian and come across nothing more vocally spirited
than robust guffaws, possibly punctuated discreetly, or heavy fists
thundering the time as a couple of comrades scrape over the sanded
floor in the contagious rhythm of that venerable and favorite waltz of
the Netherlands,—
“Rosa, willen wy dansen?
Danst Rosa; danst Rosa.
Rosa, willen wy dansen?
Danst Rosa zoet!”
On the other hand, if, with this much of an excuse, a stranger should
go exploring Antwerp between two and three o’clock in quest of
“verkoop men dranken” signs, he would be quite otherwise repaid in
the discovery of charming huddled and crooked streets and a wealth
of architectural quaintness and beauty. He would have no difficulty
in finding _tavernes_ and drinking-places, particularly along the
river front, where they abound. As he passed them he would encounter
robust whiffs of acrid and penetrating odors with tar and fish in the
ascendancy, and catch glimpses of a wooden-shod peasantry fraternizing
with evil-eyed “water-rats” and devouring vast quantities of salmon and
sauerkraut washed down with ale and white beer. There is no charge now,
as once there was, for noise made by patrons. The silk-fingered gentry
overreached themselves here, for when, a number of years ago, they had
carried the robbing of foreign sailors to the point of international
notoriety, the authorities took a hand and devised a system of payment
for Jack ashore; then the American and English ministers and consuls
established and made popular the Sailors’ Bethel on the quay, with its
clean and attractive reading- and amusement-rooms, and the Sailors’
Home on Canal de l’Ancre, where, for fifty-five cents a day, Jack can
have a neat little room to himself and four excellent meals in the
bargain. For these reasons among others, a visitor, even by night,
finds much less of noise and revelry than he had anticipated, and
beholds the thirsty Antwerpian content himself with a final “nip” at
an _estaminet_ or even make shift of a “nightcap” of mineral water
or black coffee at one or another of the city’s innumerable cafés. In
these he will himself be welcome to read the news of the day in the
columns of “Le Précurseur” or “De Nieuwe Gazet,” or, better still,
in the venerable “Gazet van Gent,” one of the oldest of existing
newspapers, with nearly two hundred and fifty years of publication
behind it. The real drinking will have been in progress where the
out-of-town people have been dining _à prix fixe_, and clinking their
burgundy and claret glasses at the great hotels on the Quai Van Dyck,
the Place de Meir, or the Place Verte. The palm should really go to
the amusement seekers of the latter little square; for nothing this
side the capacity of an archery club at a July kermess can compare with
the thirst of the music lovers who throng the tables on the sidewalks
before the restaurants and cafés of jolly Place Verte when the band
is playing, on balmy summer evenings. Instead of dissipation, the
man who explores Antwerp makes constant discovery of unanticipated
delights. He observes about him in the surprising little streets of
the old section an amazing collection of absurd roofs slanting steeply
up for several stories, pierced with owl-like, staring, round windows;
house fronts by the hundreds with denticulated gables stepping upward
like staircases toward the sky; and pots of flowers and immaculate
muslin curtains in tiny doll-house windows peering out from the most
unexpected and impossible places away up among the eaves and chimneys.
He will catch an occasional glimpse of massive old four-poster beds
with green curtains and yellow lace valances; of shining oak chests,
and high-back chairs, and brown dining-rooms wainscoted in polished oak
and most inviting with ponderous side-boards set with Delft platters
and gleaming copper and pewter pieces. From time to time he will see
large, cool living-rooms in which the father enjoys his paper and
meerschaum pipe, while the placid-faced mother employs herself with
lace or embroidery and the fair-haired daughter at the piano tells how
“Ik zag Cecilia komen
Langs eenen waterkant,
Ik zag Cecilia komen
Mit bloemen in haer hand.”
As I previously observed, there is no better place for a preliminary
impression of Antwerp than along the docks. There one acquires some
adequate idea of the amazing extent of its industrial operations and
enjoys, at the same time, an extraordinary panorama of a river choked
with shipping in the immediate foreground, and, on the opposite bank,
the sombre redoubts of Tête de Flandre and Fort Isabelle keeping watch
and ward over the flat little farms that extend seaward in fields of
pale-green corn and barley. For any one who has done the proper amount
of preparatory reading on Antwerp, it will inspire stirring thoughts
of the musical, artistic, and martial career of this rare old Flemish
town.
If the visitor be a lover of music—of Wagner’s music—the surrounding
uproar and confusion will shortly fade into a charming reverie as he
gazes far down the glittering zigzag of the Scheldt and some distant
glimmer will take the form of the swan-boat of Lohengrin with the Grail
knight leaning on his shining shield. The docks and quays will have
disappeared, and in their place will once more lie the old low meadows,
and, under the Oak of Justice, King Henry the Fowler will take seat
on his throne with the nobles of Brabant ranged about him. Fair Elsa,
charged with fratricide, moves slowly forward, sustained by her dream
of a champion who is to come to her defense; and the heralds pace off
the lists and appeal to the four quarters in the sonorous chant,—
“Wer hier im Gotteskampf zu streiten kam
Für Elsa von Brabant, der trete vor.”
And suddenly the peasants by the water’s edge cry out in amazement
and point down the reaches of the river, and there comes glittering
Lohengrin in the “shining armor” of Elsa’s dream. The champion steps
ashore and gives no heed to the awe-hushed company until he has
sung to his feathered steed what now every child in Germany could
sing with him, “Nun sei bedankt, mein lieber Schwan.” And then the
contest rages and the false Frederick falls, and the royal cortège
retires to the neighboring old fortress of the Steen. All night the
treacherous Ortrud and her defeated Frederick plot by the steps of
yonder cathedral, and there, in the morning, Lohengrin weds Elsa and
the immortal Wedding March welcomes the “faithful and true” back to
their fortress home. The black night of mistrust and carnage follows,
and when day dawns Lohengrin bids farewell to his suspicious bride in
these green Scheldt meadows and sails sadly away in his resplendent
boat drawn by the dove of the Grail.
On the other hand, if the visitor has a mind for history, he may
scorn the pretty Grail story and look with stern eyes on this Scheldt
and the battle-scarred city beside it, mindful of the deeds of blood
and fire that fill the hypnotic pages of Schiller, Prescott, and
Motley. The monk of St. Gall could have appropriately dedicated to the
war-ravaged Antwerp of those days his solemn antiphonal “media vita
in morte sumus.” The grim, turreted Steen, just at hand, recalls the
bloody reign of Alva and how he condemned a whole people to death in an
order of three lines. In its present rôle of museum it houses hundreds
of implements of torture that once were drenched in the blood of the
heroic burghers of Antwerp. Not all the horrors of the “Spanish Fury,”
when eight thousand citizens of this town were butchered in three days,
nor the stirring memory of the “French Fury,” with Antwerp triumphant,
can dim the glory of the heroic resistance the “Sea Beggars” made to
the advance of the Duke of Parma up the Scheldt.
[Illustration: ANTWERP, FROM THE SCHELDT]
From the cathedral tower one may see the little towns of Calloo and
Oordam, on either bank of the river; it was between them that Parma
built his bridge to obstruct navigation, and against it the men of
Antwerp sent their famous fire-ships to open up a passage for the
Zeelander allies. Gianibelli, who devised them, and whom Schiller
styled “the Archimedes of Antwerp,” builded better than he knew, for
with one ship he destroyed a thousand Spaniards and heaped up their
defenses into a labyrinth of ruin. Could Antwerp have risen then above
the clash of factions, there would have been no need later to tear down
the dikes and present the strange spectacle of ships sailing over the
land, and their story might have been as triumphant as Holland’s, and a
united Netherlands have issued from those long wars with Spain.
Here where the visitor takes his afternoon ease many a brave pageant
foregathered in the troubled, olden days. In the magic pages of old Van
Meteren’s chronicles we see them pass again: Cold, gloomy, treacherous
Philip stepping from his golden barge to walk under triumphal arches
on a carpet of strewn roses, surrounded by magistrates and burghers
splendid in ruffs and cramoisy velvet; later on, the Regent, Margaret
of Parma, strident and gouty, whom Prescott has called “a man in
petticoats”; and then the bloodthirsty Alva; then the dashing “Sword
of Lepanto,” the brilliant and romantic Don John of Austria; next,
the atrocious Requesens; and, last of all, the revengeful Alexander
of Parma. Hopeful, stolid, impassive Antwerp, ever the sheep for the
shearers, ever believing that at last the worst was over, rejoices in
her welcome to each as though the millennium had finally dawned on all
her troubles and sets cressets to blazing in the cathedral tower and
roasts whole oxen in the public squares.
The scream of a river siren will arouse the visitor from the Past
to the Present, and, with a sigh, he will saunter forth to see the
places that cannot come to him. He will leave with regret this busy,
fascinating river—“the lazy Scheldt” that Goldsmith loved. Excited
little tugs are bustling busily about, queer-coated dock-hands struggle
mightily with their mammoth burdens, and ships of every shape and
pattern throng the roadstead before him. The sharp and trim Yankee
sloop, the ponderous German tramp, the fastidious British freighter,
the clean-cut ocean liner, and, best of all, the round-sterned,
wallowing Dutch craft, green of hull and yellow of sail,—all are here,
and, he can think, for his especial diversion. A canal barge crawls
laboriously by, and in that floating home which she seldom cares to
leave, a much-be-petticoated mother of Flanders busies herself with her
many children and looks after the care of her tiny house;—and looks
after it well, as you may see by the spotless little curtains that
flutter in the windows and the bright pots of geraniums that stand on
the sills. One recalls the keen delight this singular craft afforded
Robert Louis Stevenson at the time he made his charming “Inland Voyage”
from Antwerp. Quoth he: “Of all the creatures of commercial enterprise,
a canal barge is by far the most delightful to consider. It may spread
its sails, and then you see it sailing high above the tree-tops and
the windmill, sailing on the aqueduct, sailing through the green
corn-lands; the most picturesque of things amphibious.... There should
be many contented spirits on board, for such a life is both to travel
and to stay at home.”
Along the front there is also opportunity to expend a couple of francs
to advantage for a ticket on the comfortable little steamer that is
just impatiently casting off from the _embarcadère_, and to go sailing
with her on an hour’s voyage up the river to Tamise to view the
shipping at greater length, to see the merchants’ villas at Hoboken,
and finally the famous picture of the Holy Family at the journey’s end.
Otherwise the visitor may take a parting look up the Quay van Dyck and
the Quay Jordaens, examine once more the striking Porte de l’Escaut
that Rubens decorated, and so turn a reluctant back on the bright life
of the river to thread a crooked street or two, cobbled and tortuous,
and issue forth on the Grand Place before the immense, fantastic Hôtel
de Ville.
In the drowsy early afternoon this quaint and curious old city hall
wears a most friendly and reposeful air. To one who has never before
seen any of these extraordinary Old-World buildings such a one as
this will move such incredulity as mastered the countryman at the
first sight of a giraffe;—“Shucks!” said he when he had looked
it all over, “there never was such an animal!” Fancy a rambling,
picture-book of a structure a hundred yards long, made up of the
oddest combination of architectural orders—massive pillars for the
first story, Doric arcades for the second, Ionic for the third, and
last of all, an abbreviated colonnade supporting a steep, tent-like,
gable-pierced roof! As though some touch of the whimsical might even
so have been neglected, behold a pompous central tower, decorated to
suffocation, arched of window and graven of column, rearing itself
in three diminishing, denticulated stories above the long, sloping
roof, until the singular, box-like ornaments on the very tiptop appear
tiny Greek tombs of a cloud-hung Acropolis. The statues of Wisdom and
Justice could pass for Æschylus and Sophocles, and the Holy Virgin
on the summit might very well be Athena. The friendly air to which I
have referred extends even to these statues, who have the appearance
of shouting down to you to come in out of the heat and have a look
at the great stairway of colored marbles and rest awhile before the
splendid chimney-piece of delicately carved black-and-white stone in
the elaborate Salle des Mariages. Subtle matchmakers, those statues!
And, indeed, if Antwerp is the first steamer-stop of the visitor, he
may well be pardoned for reveling in this Hôtel de Ville as something
that for picturesque beauty he may not hope to better elsewhere. And
yet that would only be because he had not seen the glorious one at
Brussels, or the grim and huddled caprice at Mechlin, or the incredible
Halle aux Draps at Ypres, or the amazing Rabot Gate or Watermen’s Guild
House of Ghent. And even these will fall back into the commonplace
once he has drifted along the Quai du Rosaire of drowsy old Bruges and
been steeped in picturesqueness and color that is beyond any man’s
describing.
No one who cares for structural quaintness and originality can fail
to find especial delight in the surroundings of this venerable
Grand Place. Along one entire side, like prize competitors in an
architectural fancy ball, shoulder to shoulder, stiff and precise,
range the old Halls of the Guilds. The Archers, the Coopers, the
Tailors, the Carpenters, and all the others of that most unusual
alignment, present themselves in full regalia of characteristic
ornament and design. As though in keeping with their ancient traditions
of stout rivalry, there is a very real air of vying between themselves
for some coveted palm for fantastic bizarreness; and all the while with
a solemn innocence of being at all grotesque or unusual. One could
laugh at their naïve unconsciousness of the prodigious show they make,
with sculptures and adornments of bygone days and a combined violent
sky-line slashed with long eaves and bitten out in serrated gable ends.
But there is little of merriment and very much of reverence in the
thoughts they excite of worthy pride in skill of craftsmanship and the
glory their masters brought to this city in the sixteenth century in
winning from Venice the industrial supremacy of the world. In those
days there were no poor in all Antwerp and every child could read and
write at least two languages, and the Counts of Flanders were more
powerful than half the kings of Europe.
But the Grand Place has more to show than the guild halls. The apogee
of the whimsical and fantastic has been attained in the choppy sea of
red-tiled roof-tops that eddies above this huddled neighborhood. Grim
old dormered veterans, queer and chimerical, palsied and askew, have
here held their own stoutly through the centuries. They have echoed
back the shouts of the crusaders, the triumphal cannon of Spanish
royalty, and the free-hearted welcomes to foreign princes come to curry
favor with the Flemish merchant rulers of the world. They have turned
gray with the groans of their nobles writhing under the Inquisition
and rosy with approval of the adroit and courageous William of Nassau.
From their antique windows have leaned the burgomasters of Rubens and
the cavaliers of Velasquez, brave in ruffs and beards; and out of the
most hidden nests of their eaves the wan and pallid faces of their
hunted sons have been raised to watch the approach of the ruthless
soldiery of Requesens and Parma. These old roofs look down to-day on a
rich and happy people whose skill and tireless industry have reared a
commercial fabric that astonishes the world.
At this afternoon hour the Grand Place betrays little of its
early-morning activity, when it is thronged with the overflowing stands
of busy marketmen in baggy trousers, and banks of rich colors of the
flower-women in immaculate linen headdress proffering the choice output
of their scrupulously tilled farms. Scarcely less picturesque are
these oddly garbed country-folk than the famous fish-venders over at
Ostend, and certainly they are a more fragrant people to shop among. A
curious and colorful picture they present with the long lines of gayly
painted dog-carts blazing with peonies and geraniums. Huddled around
the great statue of Brabo they quite throw into limbo the Daughters
of the Scheldt that are disporting in bronze on the pedestal. Brabo
himself, Antwerp’s Jack-the-Giant-Killer, pauses on high in the act of
hurling away the severed hand of the vanquished Antigonus as though
he could see no unoccupied spot to throw it in. Should he let go at
random, and hit house Number 4, he could surely expect to be hauled
down forthwith, for the great Van Dyck was born there, and Antwerp is
nothing if not reverent of the memory of her glorious sons of Art. And
Brabo cannot afford to take too many chances with the security of his
own position, for he himself has a rival; Napoleon the Great was really
a greater champion of Flanders than he, and overthrew a worse enemy
of Antwerp’s than the fabled Antigonus when he raised the embargo on
the Scheldt, that had existed for a century and a half under the terms
of the outrageous Treaty of Westphalia, until scarcely a rowboat would
venture over the silt-choked mouth of the river, and only then to find
the famous capital a forsaken village of empty streets and abandoned
factories. The dredging of the channel, the expenditure of millions in
construction of wharves and quays, and the restoration of the city to
its high place in the commercial world was a greater and more difficult
work than Brabo’s.
The varied and vivid life of Antwerp unfolds itself strikingly in the
early afternoon to one who exchanges the sleepy, mediæval Grand Place
for the broad, curving, crowded boulevard of the popular Place de Meir.
It was just such clean and handsome streets as this that inspired John
Evelyn to write so delightedly of Antwerp two hundred and fifty years
ago, describing them in his famous “Diary” as “fair and noble, clean,
well-paved, and sweet to admiration.” Indeed, everything seemed to
have charmed Evelyn here, as witness his inclusive approval, “Nor did
I ever observe a more quiet, clean, elegantly built, and civil place
than this magnificent and famous city of Antwerp.” Rubens, the name of
names in Flanders, was then too recently dead to have come into the
fullness of his fame; whereas to-day one thinks of him continually here
and likes nothing better than the many opportunities to study him in
the completeness of his wonderful career—“the greatest master,” said
Sir Joshua Reynolds, “in the mechanical part of the art, that ever
exercised a pencil.” Even trivial associations of his activity are
cherished; as we find them, for instance, in the little woodcut designs
he made for his famous friend, Christopher Plantin, the greatest
printer of the era, and which one handles reverently in the old Plantin
house in the Marché du Vendredi—that picture-book of a house, where
corbel-carved ceiling-beams overhang antique presses, types, and
mallets, and great windows of tiny leaded panes let in a flood of
light from the rarest and mellowest old courtyard in the whole of the
Netherlands.