Part 14 (1/2)
”You melancholy fogs of winter roll Your pestilential sorrow o'er my soul, And swathe my heart with your long winding sheet, And drench the livid leaves beneath my feet, While far away upon the heaven's bounds, Under the sleeping plain's wet wadding, sounds A tired, lamenting angelus that dies With faint, frail echoes in the empty skies, So lonely, poor, and timid that a rook, Hid in a hollow archstone's dripping nook, Hearing it sob, awakens and replies, Sickening the woeful hush with ghastly cries, Then suddenly grows silent, in the dread, That in the belfry tower the bell is dead.”
THE OLD MASTERS
”In smoky inns whose loft is reached by ladders, And with a grimy ceiling splashed by shocks Of hanging hams, black puddings, onions, bladders, Rosaries of stuffed game, capons, geese, and c.o.c.ks, Around a groaning table sit the gluttons Before the bleeding viands stuck with forks, Already loosening their waistcoat b.u.t.tons, With wet mouths when from flagons leap the corks-- Teniers, and Brackenburgh, and Brauwer, shaken With listening to Jan Steen's uproarious wit, Holding their bellies dithering with bacon, Wiping their chins, watching the hissing spit.
”Men, women, children, all stuffed full to bursting; Appet.i.tes ravening, and instincts rife, Furies of stomach, and of throats athirsting, Debauchery, explosion of rich life, In which these master gluttons, never sated, Too genuine for insipidities, Pitching their easels l.u.s.tily, created Between two drinking bouts a masterpiece.”
Even amid the ruins of their country, Belgian writers, like the Belgian people, are indomitable. Verhaeren, from his retreat in London, sends out words that are a paean of victory, and the bugle note of ”Chantons, Belges, chantons!” by another author, is a call to great deeds in the future.
CHAPTER XII
MOTORING IN FLANDERS
”O little towns, obscure and quaint, Writ on the map in script so faint, Today in types how large, how red, On battle scroll your t.i.tles spread!”
Brussels is ideally located for the motorist. From it both the Flemish and the Walloon districts could easily be reached. To be sure, the towns were paved with the famous Belgian blocks, but the roads outside the towns were in excellent condition. One of our favourite trips was to Antwerp, where we went often, either to meet people landing from steamers from America or to look up boxes s.h.i.+pped us from home.
A bit aside from the direct route between the two cities, but well worth going out of one's way to see, was Louvain. Baedeker speaks of it as ”a dull place with 42,000 inhabitants,” but we found it delightful. It was a pretty old town, with its richly fretted Hotel de Ville, the finest in Belgium, its university and library, its impressive church in the center of the city, and the innumerable other gray old churches with their long sloping roofs. The streets were narrow, picturesque and rather dirty. They were lined with the high walls and closed windows of convent after convent, and there were huge cl.u.s.ters of monastic buildings on the hills about, many of these newly built and modern. The whole town seethed with black-robed priests, brown-robed, bare-footed monks, and white-coped nuns.
In the Middle Ages Louvain had four times its present population; its once famous university had diminished in the same proportion. There was a time when no man might hold public office in the Austrian Netherlands who did not have a degree from the University of Louvain.
Of the two thousand cloth factories which made the city a hive of industry during the thirteen hundreds but little sign remained when we were there. During the fifteenth century it was the largest city west of the Alps. The walls were built at the period of greatest prosperity, and much of the land which they inclosed had been turned into gardens, showing how the population had decreased. It was said that however much outward change there had been, however, in the Abbey of the White Canons the spirit of ”religious mediaevalism” was still to be found, untouched by modern thought.
Southey describes the town hall at Louvain as an ”architectural bijou ... like a thing of ivory or filigree designed for a lady's dressing table.” This building seems to have pa.s.sed through the war unscathed.
But the famous library of the university, which was one of the most noted in Europe, containing over a hundred thousand rare ma.n.u.scripts, was completely destroyed.
Not far from Brussels, and on the direct road to Antwerp, is Vilvorde, a small town, chiefly noted as the scene of the martyrdom of Tyndale, the famous Englishman who attempted the translation of the Bible, and for this was imprisoned and later burned at the stake by the Church. His last words were, ”Lord, open the King of England's eyes!” It seems as if his prayer must have been heard, because within a year--in 1537--the King ordered the publication of the Bible and its use in all the churches of the land.
Halfway between Brussels and Antwerp is Malines, perhaps better known to us by its Dutch name of Mechlin. Every house had its maker of lace; they could be seen on pleasant days sitting on low stools out of doors among the flowers, singing as they worked.
The tower of the beautiful old cathedral, which was erected in 1312, was intended to be the highest in all Christendom, but was never completed.
Its carillon, however, was second only to that of Bruges. The church was dedicated to St. Rombaut, who was supposed to have built it. The story was that in paying his workmen he never took from his pockets more than ten _cens_ at a time, and the men, thinking he must have a large number of the coins upon his person, murdered him for the booty. To their disappointment they found he had just one coin, for the saint, each time he needed money, had worked a miracle similar to that of Jesus and the fishes! A discrepancy of some three or four hundred years between the time of the good saint's life and the building of the church is a trifle confusing. This cathedral has been destroyed.
We set out for a direct trip to Antwerp one morning at eight, and reached there after a fine run of an hour and a half through the fair green country. All along the way the towns were gaily decorated and beflagged for a holiday. The city itself was alive with traffic, while the river and the ca.n.a.ls were crowded with moving boats.
Just opposite the station was the famous Zoo. A band concert was going on, and crowds sat drinking tea or beer beneath the trees, listening to the music, which was interrupted every once in a while by the raucous cry of some wild creature in its cage. All the animals were killed before the siege of the city in October.
A service was being held in the great cathedral. There was lovely music, and a solemn light fell on Rubens' great masterpiece. The church was two hundred and fifty years in building, and is the largest in the Low Countries. Fortunately we can still use the present tense in speaking of Antwerp Cathedral, for it survived both the bombardment and the conflagration that ensued.
Antwerp came into prominence only after Bruges, Ghent and Ypres entered upon their long decline. The architectural gem of the city was the Plantyn-Moretus Museum, once the printing works of Christopher Plantyn and his son-in-law Moretus, who did such notable work in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The rooms of the old house had been restored quite in the old style, so that you felt the quiet, peaceful atmosphere of other days.
[Ill.u.s.tration: CORNER OF THE COURTYARD, PLANTYN-MORETUS MUSEUM, ANTWERP.]
The history of Antwerp goes back some thirteen hundred years, but it was not until the seventeenth century that it gained the right to be called the richest and most prosperous city in Europe. After that it, too, like so many of its sister cities, fell asleep; but these days were of brief duration, for in the middle of the nineteenth century the Belgian Government bought the right to use the Scheldt, and it awoke to new life. When the war broke out it was the greatest port on the continent, and surpa.s.sed only by London and New York in the world.
Its social life was a striking contrast to that of Brussels, for it was strongly Flemish in thought and feeling, as well as in speech, while the national capital was like a French city.
Antwerp was of great strategic importance, for the mouth of the Scheldt is opposite the mouth of the Thames. Napoleon realized this. ”Antwerp might be made a pistol directed at the heart of England,” he said.