along it affords a constantly changing view of stately public and
private buildings, no less attractive to the average man than those
“apple-green wineshops, garlanded in vines” that delighted Théophile
Gautier on the river front. Little corner shrines, so numerous in this
city, shelter saints of tinsel and gilt and receive the reverence of
a population that has four hundred Catholics to every Protestant. One
must necessarily delight in a street whose houses are all of delicately
colored brick, with stone trimmings carved to a nicety and shutters
painted in softest greens. The imposing Royal Palace is graceful and
beautiful, but human interest goes out to the stone-garlanded house
across the way,—old Number 54,—where Rubens was born and where he
lived so many years and took so much pleasure in making beautiful for
his parents. On either hand one sees solid residences of the most
generous proportions, and all in tints of pink and gray, and busy
hotels with red-faced porters hurrying about in long blouses. Picture
stores and bookshops scrupulously stocked with religious volumes
beguile lingering inspection. There are establishments on every hand
for the sale of ecclesiastical paraphernalia, with windows hung with
confirmation wreaths, crucifixes, rosaries, and what-not. Occasionally,
even here, one discovers, crushed in between more consequential
businesses, the celebrated little gingerbread-shops of which so much
amused notice has been taken. Restaurants and cafés abound. One sees
them on every hand, with their characteristic overflow of tables
and chairs on the sidewalk, always thronged, both inside and out,
with jolly, chattering patrons and gleaming in sideboard and shelf
with highly polished vessels of brass and pewter. Here and there one
passes the confectionery shops, called _pâtisseries_, where ices,
mild liqueurs, and mineral waters refresh a thriving trade. Stevenson
found no relish for Flemish food, pronouncing it “of a nondescript,
occasional character.” He complained that the Belgians do not go at
eating with proper thoroughness, but “peck and trifle with viands all
day long in an amateur spirit.” “All day long” is apt enough, for
Antwerp’s restaurants and cafés are always thronged.
These ruddy-faced and placid Belgians are a very serene and contented
people. It is pleasant and even restful to watch them; they go
about the affairs of life with such an absence of fret and fever.
Spanish-appearing ladies float gracefully past in silk mantillas;
priests by the hundreds shuffle along leisurely in picturesque hats and
gowns; the portly merchant, on his way at this hour to the _moresque_,
many-columned Bourse, proceeds in like deliberate and unhurried
fashion. Street venders, in peaked caps and voluminous trousers,
approach you with calm deliberation and retire unruffled at your
dismissal. On every sunny corner military men by the score “loafe and
invite their souls.” Tradesmen in the shops and cabmen in the open go
about their business as though it were a matter of infinite leisure.
Even the day laborers in the streets, whose huge sabots stand in long
rows by the curb, survey life tranquilly; why worry when a good pair
of wooden shoes costs less than a dollar and will last for five or six
years?
The snatches of conversation one catches betray the confusion of
tongues inseparable from a nation of whom one half cannot understand
the other, and whose cousins, once or twice removed, are of foreign
speech to either. The Dutch spoken in the Scheldt country is said to
be as bewildering to a German, as is the French the Walloons employ
in the valley of the Meuse to a Parisian. But although the Flemish
outnumber their fellow countrymen of Wallonia two to one, still French
is the tongue of the court, the sciences, and all the educated and
upper circles. It is like Austria-Hungary all over again. And French
continues steadily to gain ground in spite of the utmost efforts of the
enthusiasts behind the new “Flemish Movement.” One sees both classes on
the Place de Meir,—the stolid, light-haired man of Flanders and the
nervous, swarthy Walloon. The beauty of the blue-eyed, _belle Flamande_
is in happy contrast with that of the slender, dark-eyed _Wallonne_,
and their poets have exhausted themselves in efforts to do justice to
either side of so delicate and distracting a dilemma. Our grandmothers
heard much of the charms of _La Flamande_ when Lortzing’s melodious
“Czaar und Zimmermann” was so popular, seventy-five years ago:—
“Adieu, ma jolie Flamande,
Que je quitte malgré moi!
J’en aurai la de demand,
J’ai de l’amitié pour toi.”
The complexion of the life on the Place de Meir changes with the hours.
Between two and three o’clock we find it disposed to adapt itself as
closely as possible along lines of personal comfort. By five it will be
lively with carriages and automobiles bound for the driving in the prim
little Pépinière, or the bird-thronged Zoölogical gardens, or around
the lake in the central park, with a turn up the fashionable Rue Carnot
to the stately boulevards of the new and exclusive Borgerhout section.
At that hour one may count confidently upon seeing every uniform of the
garrison among the crowds of officers who turn out to have a part in
the beauty show. On the other hand, if it were early morning—_very_
early morning—and the sun were still fighting its way through the
mists and vapors of the Scheldt, the Place de Meir would resound with
rattling little carts by the hundreds, bearing great milk cans of
glittering, polished brass packed in straw, by whose sides patient,
placid-faced women would trudge along in quaint thimble-bonnets, with
plaid shawls crossed and belted above voluminous skirts and their
feet set securely in the clumsy wooden sabots of the Fatherland.
Market gardeners in linen smocks and gray worsted stockings would be
bringing Antwerp its breakfast in carts only a little larger than the
milk-women’s, and butcher boys would be scurrying by with meat trays
on their heads or suspended from yokes across their shoulders. And all
the echoes of the city would be forced into feverish activity to answer
the wild clamor of the barking and fighting dogs, shaggy and strong,
that draw all these picturesque little wagons. Assuredly there are few
sights in Antwerp so impressive to the stranger as this substitution of
dog for horse. It has been celebrated in prose and verse, with Ouida
possibly carrying off the palm with her canine _vie intime_, “A Dog of
Flanders.”
As the loiterer continues his afternoon stroll to the large and
central Place de Commune, crosses into the chain of transverse
boulevards, and returns riverward to that choicest spot of all, the
tree-shaded, memory-haunted Place Verte, he is bound to reflect upon
the vast changes that Antwerp, above all other Continental cities,
has experienced in the last quarter-century. He will marvel, too,
that Robert Bell should have lamented in his charming “Wayside
Pictures” the paucity of gay life here and particularly the lack of
theatrical entertainment. It may have been so when Bell wrote, fifty
years ago, but it is decidedly otherwise to-day. So far as theatres
go, they simply abound; nor could city streets be gayer than these,
thronged with a merry, happy people and bright with the uniforms of
artillery-men and fortress engineers, grenadiers of the line and the
dashing _chasseurs-à-cheval_. Every hotel and café has its orchestra;
and in the early evening practically every square of the city has its
concert by a band from a regiment or guild. There is no suburb, they
say, but has its own band or orchestra, or both. Indeed, Antwerp is
nearly as music-mad as art-mad.
The shady aisles of poplars in the cozy Place Verte, the perfumes and
peaceful sounds, the music of the cathedral bells, the homelike hotels
and cafés and the drowsy, nodding Old-World house-fronts combine to
produce a sense of comfort and satisfaction peculiar to this favored
little square. There is, besides, a special and impressive feeling
of something like the personal presence of the great Rubens; partly,
perhaps, from the fact that the city’s chief statue of him, a lifelike
bronze of heroic size, stands at the centre of the Place. Twice the
normal stature of man it is, and its pedestal is five times as high as
one’s head, and the great palette, book, and scrolls are all of more
generous proportions than such things actually ever are;—but there
seems nothing at all disproportionate in that, considering what he
was and what the average man is. The memory of one who could paint a
masterpiece in a day, who stood head and shoulders above every living
artist of his time, and whose work has inspired and delighted mankind
for three hundred years, becomes, like all great objects, positively
prodigious from actual proximity. Such is the inevitable attitude
towards Rubens when one touches the things he touched, walks the
streets of the city where he was born, lived, and lies buried, where
he wrought his greatest artistic triumphs, and where his finest work
is still preserved and reverenced. The most admired cathedral in the
whole of the Netherlands rises out of the fluttering tree-tops of the
square, and the greatest treasures it contains are the product of this
man’s genius. Every one feels the Rubens influence in the Place Verte;
Eugène Fromentin, fresh from his pictorial triumphs of Algerian life,
observed in “Les Maîtres d’Autrefois”: “Our imagination becomes excited
more than usual when, in the centre of Place Verte, we see the statue
of Rubens and further on, the old basilica where are preserved the
triptychs which, humanly speaking, have consecrated it.” Such are the
privileged emotions of the wise and fortunate visitors who pitch their
passing tent in this fair and favored nook.
Reflections over Rubens naturally arouse thoughts of the many sons
of Flanders who won preëminence in the domain of art. No other
city, inexplicable as it is, has, in modern times, seen so large a
proportion of its citizens achieve the loftiest heights of fame in this
glorious activity; nor has any other honored art so unaffectedly in
memorializing their triumphs. In Antwerp there are scores of streets
and squares, and even quays, named after its artists. There are also
fine statues to Rubens, Van Dyck, David Teniers, Jordaens, Quinten
Matsys, and Hendrik Leys, and other memorials to the brothers Van
Eyck, to Memling, Wappers, Frans Hals, Van der Heyden, De Keyser,
and Verboekhoven. In private and public collections the people
have jealously kept possession of the masterpieces of their fellow
countrymen. The Royal Museum of Fine Arts, on the Place du Musée, is as
much a treasure-house of Flemish art as the Rijks Museum at Amsterdam
is of Dutch art. Again Place Verte plumes itself, for just around the
corner was born the great Teniers, wizard depicter of tavern life and
kermesses, and on one side is that tourists’ delight, the graceful,
feathery well-top that Quinten Matsys wrought out of a single piece of
iron, before the days when love inspired him to win the most coveted
laurels of the painter.
However, art aside, Place Verte has distinctions of its own. Something
of interest is always occurring here. Suburban bands hold weekly
competitions in its artistic pavilion and the most skillful musicians
hold concerts here each evening. The sidewalks then are crowded with
chairs and tables, and at the close the people rise and join in the
national hymn “La Brabançonne,” with its out-of-date lament to the
men of Brabant that “the orange may no longer wave upon the tree of
Liberty.” Of an afternoon a regiment may swing through in full regalia,
the red, yellow, and black flag snapping in the van, and the band
crashing out the ancient war-song “Bergen-op-Zoom.” If to-day were
July 21 there would be tremendous enthusiasm and cheering celebrating
the Fêtes Nationales in honor of the Revolution of 1830; as well there
should, for Belgium is the smallest and one of the most desirable
little kingdoms of all Europe, and the national motto, “L’Union fait la
Force,” has to be closely adhered to if the Lion of Brabant would stand
up under the baiting of his powerful and covetous neighbors.
The passing of a Sister of the Béguinage, in sombre black garb and an
extraordinary creation of immaculate white linen on her head, recalls
the many things one has read of this interesting and noble order which
is peculiarly Belgium’s own. Their neat little settlements are a source
of endless admiration to strangers, and quite as fascinating is their
beautiful vesper service which bears the pretty name of the “salut des
Béguines.” Readers of Laurence Sterne, who should be legion, promptly
recall the curious story of “The Fair Béguine” that Trim told Uncle
Toby in “Tristram Shandy,” and the valiant Captain’s comment: “They
visit and take care of the sick by profession—I had rather, for my own
part, they did it out of good nature.”
It is one of the proud distinctions of Place Verte to be at the very
portals of Antwerp’s glorious cathedral, the largest, richest, and
most beautiful in the Netherlands. From his café chair the visitor
watches its great shadow steal over him as the afternoon wanes, while
at any moment by merely raising his eyes he may revel in the graceful
outlines of its sweep of ambulatory chapels and let the aspiring tips
of delicate pinnacles and arches entice his vision to the loftiest
point of its one finished and matchless tower. Never was Napoleon so
pat in “fitting the scene with the apposite phrase” as when he compared
this tower to Mechlin lace. It is delightful to look up above the
trees of the Place at the enormous bulk of this tremendous structure,
stained and darkened by the vapors of river and canals, study its rich
carvings and stained-glass windows centuries old, and note how the
blue sky, in patterns of delicate foliation and fragile arch, shines
like mosaics through the clustered apertures of the filmy openwork of
the lofty tower. A hundred bells drip mellow music from that exquisite
belfry every few minutes all day long. You listen, perhaps, to detect
the impression they gave Thackeray of a new version of the shadow-dance
from “Dinorah,” conscious that they are going to haunt you as they did
him for days after you have left Antwerp far behind. It is peculiarly
appropriate that the Lohengrin Wedding March should be a favorite
on the bells of the very cathedral where Lohengrin, according to
the story, was married. Indeed, so many and so varied are the clear
bell-voices of this great _carillon_ that their music seems, as the
neighboring bells of Bruges did to Longfellow,—
“Like the psalms from some old cloister,
When the nuns sing in the choir;
And the great bell tolled among them,
Like the chanting of a friar.”
Within this treasure-chest of a cathedral are jewels worthy of
such a casket. One goes out of the glare of the afternoon sun into
the coolness and scented gloom of its vaulted, many-aisled, and
multi-chapeled vastness, and there in the hush of worshipers kneeling
in prayer he finds splendid altars that gleam in a profusion of
ornaments of silver, gold, and precious stones, glorious rose-windows,
carven confessionals and choir stalls, life-like figures in wax clad
in silks and crowned in gold, hundreds of masterful paintings, a high
altar of extraordinary splendor blazing in costly decorations under a
golden canopy supported by silver figures, and, at the centre of the
seven aisles, Verbruggen’s far-famed carved wooden pulpit, realistic
in lifelike foliage and birds, and with plump little cherubim floating
aloft with the apparently fluttering canopy. As if this were not enough
to distinguish any one church, here hang three of the most glorious
creations of the hand of man, the masterpieces of Rubens himself. The
Assumption alone could have sufficed; what is it, then, to have the
tremendous glory of the presence of those greater achievements, The
Elevation of the Cross and The Descent from the Cross! One feels he
could easily do as did the hero of Gautier’s “Golden Fleece” and carry
away forever after a hopeless passion for the beautiful, grief-stricken
Magdalen.
The power and appeal of sheer beauty has perhaps never been exampled as
in the case of this cathedral. Through all the sackings and pillages of
Antwerp the savagery and destructiveness of her foes have stopped here.
The most ruthless soldiery could not bring themselves to lay violent
hands upon it. One exception stands out in this remarkable experience,
and that one was quite sufficient. The fanatical “Iconoclasts,”
frenzied against the Church of Rome, fell to a depth of abasement below
the worst villains of Spain. Those atrocious, misguided “Iconoclasts”!
What a frightful page in Antwerp’s history is the one that recounts
the three days of horrors of these frantic and terrible zealots, three
hundred and fifty years ago! Schiller, Motley, and Prescott have told
the story as few stories have ever been told. In the calm of this
afternoon it is impossible to conceive the uproar and confusion with
which these lofty arches then resounded. Fancy a horde of men and boys,
lighted by wax tapers in the hands of screaming women of the streets,
demolishing the altars and rending and destroying every exquisite
decoration and even tearing open the graves and scattering the bones
of the dead. Says Motley: “Every statue was hurled from its niche,
every picture torn from the wall, every wonderfully painted window
shivered to atoms, every ancient monument shattered, every sculptured
decoration, however inaccessible in appearance, hurled to the ground.
Indefatigably, audaciously,—endowed, as it seemed, with preternatural
strength and nimbleness,—these furious Iconoclasts clambered up the
dizzy heights, shrieking and chattering like malignant apes, as they
tore off in triumph the slowly matured fruit of centuries.”
Not the cathedral alone, but every Catholic temple of Antwerp, and four
hundred others in Flanders, were sacked in this sudden revolt against
the Papacy. It is said that King Philip, when he heard of it, fell
into a paroxysm of frenzy and tore his beard for rage, swearing by the
soul of his father that it should cost them dear. How dear it shortly
did cost them, both the guilty and the innocent, we are shown in the
picture Schiller has drawn of Calvinists’ bodies dangling from the
beams of their roofless churches, of “the places of execution filled
with corpses, the prisons with condemned victims, the highroads with
fugitives.” Such was one of the extraordinary experiences through which
this beautiful cathedral passed—one of the maddest, most senseless,
and most frightfully punished outbreaks in all history.
In the company of the doves that nest among the pinnacles and arches
away up in the cathedral tower, one looks out at this hour on a very
considerable portion of the little kingdom—forty miles, they tell you,
with a good glass, in any direction. It is a prospect well worth the
weary climb. Just below, the tiled and gabled roofs rise and fall all
about like a troubled sea. The crooked streets of the old section and
the straight ones of the new, and the _places_ and parks in verdant
spaces here and there have the appearance of some vast topographical
map. The gray Scheldt lies like a string of Ghent flax to Antwerp’s
bent bow. A wrinkled arc of massive and intricate fortifications
wards the rich city from its foes, and just beyond lie numerous tiny
villages all with the exact primness of mathematical problems. An
unusual country view is spread out on every hand. Canals, numerous as
fences and dotted with boats and slowly-moving barges, sear the green
fields like pale-blue scars; and white, dusty roads criss-cross with
their solemn flanking of tall poplar trees. As if this region were the
natural habitat of some strange and monstrous form of animal life, one
beholds everywhere a semblance of motion and activity in the gaunt,
waving, canvas arms of hundreds of plethoric windmills. Diminutive,
trim farms, like little gardens, give the appearance of a general
carpeting by Turkish rugs of vivid and diversified design; each has
its whitewashed cottage roofed in thatch or tile and set in orchards
hedged with box and hawthorn. Fields of corn, wheat, rye, and oats
expand in well-kept richness, and in all this profusely cultivated
region men, women, boys, and girls toil from the faintest dawn to
sunset, and often all night by moonlight, content and even happy in the
winning of enough to supply clothing and shelter and the unvarying fare
of soup, coffee, and black rye bread. Seaward and northward lie sand
dunes, dikes, and polders stretching away to the old morasses where the
valiant Morini faced and stopped even Cæsar. Literary people will see
in all this country the land of “Quentin Durward,” as that greatest
story of Flanders comes to mind, and they will perhaps reflect upon the
characteristics of the good burghers of those days, whom Sir Walter
thought “fat and irritable,” and will see young Durward defying the
ferocious “Wild Boar of Ardennes” in the perilous service of the fair
Lady Isabelle, herself a Flemish countess.
To the northwest one sees the gleaming reaches of the Scheldt emptying
themselves into the distant sea and, nearer at hand, solemn little
Terneuzen where the ships turn into the canal for Ghent—Ghent, the
“Manchester of Belgium,” where old Roland swings in his belfry and
calls
“o’er lagoon and dike of sand,
‘I am Roland! I am Roland! There is victory in the land.’”
On the east rise the spires of Westmalle, where in their Trappist
convent austere disciples of St. Bruno, garbed in sackcloth and with
shaven heads, pass their voiceless lives and keep watch beside the
open graves in the orchard. To the south is venerable Mechlin on the
many-bridged river Dyle, once famous for such laces as we may still
see in the pictures of its immortal son, Frans Hals. Brussels lifts
its towers forty miles due south, and stretches its broad roads to
Waterloo. And it is there the black forest of Ardennes expands, where
St. Hubert, patron of hunters, intercedes for the health of good dogs,
and which certain Shakespearean editors have fixed upon as the Forest
of Arden of “As You Like It.” Over there lies Namur where the gallant
Uncle Toby of “Tristram Shandy” received the painful wound deplored of
the Widow Wadman, “before the Gate of St. Nicholas,” as the precise
description always ran, “in one of the traverses of the trench,
opposite to the salient angle of the demibastion of St. Roch.”
One lingers long and delightedly over this charming panorama of
fascinating and storied associations, until presently the great clock
beneath us booms the hour of three, and our time is up. We turn
regretfully from this toyland country and the gracious, old-fashioned
town—this placid, music-loving, art-reverencing Antwerp, with its
many gables and its many rare delights. The friendly moon, a little
later, will silver her huddled roofs and serrated fronts, her façades
whose fantastic ends will be steps for White Pierrot to go up to his
chimney-tops, her quiet squares and quaint, twisting alleys, her solid
burgher mansions and vineclad waterman cottages. Serene and chaste, the
delicate spire of the magic cathedral will rear its traceried, guardian
length from out the deep shadows of little Place Verte and look down
all night, with the affection of half a thousand years, on this quaint
and merry Antwerp snuggling up to the languid Scheldt.
[Illustration]
ROME
3 P.M. TO 4 P.M.
Like the lizards in the dusty Forum ruins, emerging from dusky retreats
to warm and blink in the sun and then flash back into some sheltered
refuge, so visitors at Rome issue from dim closing museums at three
o’clock in the afternoon and gaze around in a stupid, dazed fashion on
a sky of cloudless deep blue and on placid streets and squares that
seem fairly to quiver in a golden haze of strong sunshine. After the
cool interiors the sultry heat seems doubly oppressive, and there is
something of the nature of a mild struggle before reality succeeds
in summoning them back from that vague state of disassociation,
that condition of all-mind-and-no-body, produced by an intense and
protracted study of all those wonderful things that great museums
contain. To this confused condition of mind there is generally added a
further disquieting element in the shape of a blank misgiving as to how
the intervening hour can be tolerably passed before joining the four
o’clock promenaders in the Pincian Gardens to see Roman Fashion at its
ante-prandial rites. And yet were strangers merely to remain receptive
and allow their extraordinary surroundings to assert themselves and
supply the diversion with which they are dynamically charged, this is
an hour that might well prove to be one of the most delightful of the
whole twenty-four in Rome.