“I don't really know what to say to you. I am in a town which, for
aught I know, may be very gay. I don't know a living soul in it.
We have not a single acquaintance in the place, and we glory in the
fact. There is something rather sublime in thus floating on a
single spar in the wide sea of a populous, busy, fuming, fussy world
like this. At any rate it is consonant to both our tastes. You may
suppose, however, that I find it rather difficult to amuse my
friends out of the incidents of so isolated an existence. Our daily
career is very regular and monotonous. Our life is as stagnant as a
Dutch canal. Not that I complain of it,--on the contrary, the canal
may be richly freighted with merchandise and be a short cut to the
ocean of abundant and perpetual knowledge; but, at the same time,
few points rise above the level of so regular a life, to be worthy
of your notice. You must, therefore, allow me to meander along the
meadows of commonplace. Don't expect anything of the impetuous and
boiling style. We go it weak here. I don't know whether you were
ever in Brussels. It is a striking, picturesque town, built up a
steep promontory, the old part at the bottom, very dingy and mouldy,
the new part at the top, very showy and elegant. Nothing can be
more exquisite in its way than the grande place in the very heart of
the city, surrounded with those toppling, zigzag, ten-storied
buildings bedizened all over with ornaments and emblems so peculiar
to the Netherlands, with the brocaded Hotel de Ville on one side,
with its impossible spire rising some three hundred and seventy feet
into the air and embroidered to the top with the delicacy of needle-
work, sugarwork, spider-work, or what you will. I haunt this place
because it is my scene, my theatre. Here were enacted so many deep
tragedies, so many stately dramas, and even so many farces, which
have been familiar to me so long that I have got to imagine myself
invested with a kind of property in the place, and look at it as if
it were merely the theatre with the coulisses, machinery, drapery,
etc., for representing scenes which have long since vanished, and
which no more enter the minds of the men and women who are actually
moving across its pavements than if they had occurred in the moon.
When I say that I knew no soul in Brussels I am perhaps wrong. With
the present generation I am not familiar. 'En revanche,' the dead
men of the place are my intimate friends. I am at home in any
cemetery. With the fellows of the sixteenth century I am on the
most familiar terms. Any ghost that ever flits by night across the
moonlight square is at once hailed by me as a man and a brother. I
call him by his Christian name at once. When you come out of this
place, however, which, as I said, is in the heart of the town,--the
antique gem in the modern setting,--you may go either up or down.
If you go down, you will find yourself in the very nastiest
complications of lanes and culs-de-sac possible, a dark entanglement
of gin-shops, beer-houses, and hovels, through which charming valley
dribbles the Senne (whence, I suppose, is derived Senna), the most
nauseous little river in the world, which receives all the
outpourings of all the drains and houses, and is then converted into
beer for the inhabitants, all the many breweries being directly upon
its edge. If you go up the hill instead of down, you come to an
arrangement of squares, palaces, and gardens as trim and fashionable
as you will find in Europe. Thus you see that our Cybele sits with
her head crowned with very stately towers and her feet in a tub of
very dirty water.
“My habits here for the present year are very regular. I came here,
having, as I thought, finished my work, or rather the first Part
(something like three or four volumes, 8vo), but I find so much
original matter here, and so many emendations to make, that I am
ready to despair. However, there is nothing for it but to
penelopize, pull to pieces, and stitch away again. Whatever may be
the result of my labor, nobody can say that I have not worked like
a brute beast,--but I don't care for the result. The labor is in
itself its own reward and all I want. I go day after day to the
archives here (as I went all summer at the Hague), studying the old
letters and documents of the fifteenth century. Here I remain among
my fellow-worms, feeding on these musty mulberry-leaves, out of
which we are afterwards to spin our silk. How can you expect
anything interesting from such a human cocoon? It is, however, not
without its amusement in a mouldy sort of way, this reading of dead
letters. It is something to read the real, bona fide signs-manual
of such fellows as William of Orange, Count Egmont, Alexander
Farnese, Philip II., Cardinal Granvelle, and the rest of them. It
gives a 'realizing sense,' as the Americans have it. . . . There
are not many public resources of amusement in this place,--if we
wanted them,--which we don't. I miss the Dresden Gallery very much,
and it makes me sad to think that I shall never look at the face of
the Sistine Madonna again,--that picture beyond all pictures in the
world, in which the artist certainly did get to heaven and painted a
face which was never seen on earth--so pathetic, so gentle, so
passionless, so prophetic. . . . There are a few good Rubenses
here,--but the great wealth of that master is in Antwerp. The great
picture of the Descent from the Cross is free again, after having
been ten years in the repairing room. It has come out in very good
condition. What a picture? It seems to me as if I had really stood
at the cross and seen Mary weeping on John's shoulder, and Magdalen
receiving the dead body of the Saviour in her arms. Never was the
grand tragedy represented in so profound and dramatic a manner. For
it is not only in his color in which this man so easily surpasses
all the world, but in his life-like, flesh-and-blood action,--the
tragic power of his composition. And is it not appalling to think
of the 'large constitution of this man,' when you reflect on the
acres of canvas which he has covered? How inspiriting to see with
what muscular, masculine vigor this splendid Fleming rushed in and
plucked up drowning Art by the locks when it was sinking in the
trashy sea of such creatures as the Luca Giordanos and Pietro
Cortonas and the like. Well might Guido exclaim, 'The fellow mixes
blood with his colors! . . . How providentially did the man come
in and invoke living, breathing, moving men and women out of his
canvas! Sometimes he is ranting and exaggerated, as are all men of
great genius who wrestle with Nature so boldly. No doubt his
heroines are more expansively endowed than would be thought genteel
in our country, where cryptogams are so much in fashion,
nevertheless there is always something very tremendous about him,
and very often much that is sublime, pathetic, and moving. I defy
any one of the average amount of imagination and sentiment to stand
long before the Descent from the Cross without being moved more
nearly to tears than he would care to acknowledge. As for color,
his effects are as sure as those of the sun rising in a tropical
landscape. There is something quite genial in the cheerful sense of
his own omnipotence which always inspired him. There are a few fine
pictures of his here, and I go in sometimes of a raw, foggy morning
merely to warm myself in the blaze of their beauty.”
I have been more willing to give room to this description of Rubens's
pictures and the effect they produced upon Motley, because there is a
certain affinity between those sumptuous and glowing works of art and the
prose pictures of the historian who so admired them. He was himself a
colorist in language, and called up the image of a great personage or a
splendid pageant of the past with the same affluence, the same rich
vitality, that floods and warms the vast areas of canvas over which the
full-fed genius of Rubens disported itself in the luxury of imaginative
creation.