There Are Scores Of
Other Good Pictures In Ghent, Including (Not Even To Go Outside
St. Bavon's) The "Christ Among The Doctors" By Francis Pourbus,
Into Which Portraits Of Philip II.
Of Spain, the Emperor Charles
V., and the infamous Duke of Alva - names of terrible import in
the sixteenth-
Century history of the Netherlands - are introduced
among the bystanders; whilst to the left of Philip is Pourbus
himself, "with a greyish cap on which is inscribed Franciscus
Pourbus, 1567." But it is always to the "Adoration of the Mystic
Lamb" that our steps are first directed, and to which they always
return.
It is hard, indeed, that necessities of space should
compel us to pass so lightly over other towns in Flanders - over
Courtrai, with its noble example of a fortified bridge, and with
its great picture, by Van Dyck, of the "Raising of the Cross" that
was stolen mysteriously a few years ago from the church of Notre
Dame, but has since, like the Joconde at the Louvre, been
recovered and replaced; over Oudenarde, with its two fine
churches, and its small town hall that is famous for its splendour
even in a country the Hotels de Ville of which are easily the most
elaborate (if not always the most chaste or really beautiful) in
Europe; and over certain very minor places, such as Damme, to the
north-east of Bruges, whose silent, sunny streets, and half-
deserted churches, seem to breathe the very spirit of Flemish
mediaevalism. Of the short strip of Flemish coast, from near
Knocke, past the fashionable modern bathing-places of Heyst,
Blankenberghe, and Ostende, to a point beyond La Panne - from
border to border it measures roughly only some forty miles, and is
almost absolutely straight - I willingly say little, for it seems
to me but a little thing when compared with this glorious inland
wealth of architecture and painting. Recently it has developed in
every direction, and is now almost continuously a thin,
brilliantly scarlet line of small bungalows, villas, and lodging-
houses, linked up along the front by esplanades and casinos, where
only a few years ago the fenland met the sea in a chain of rolling
sand-dunes that were peopled only by rabbits, and carpeted only
with rushes and coarse grass. About tastes there is no disputing;
and there are people, no doubt, who, for some odd reason, find
this kind of aggressive modernity in some way more attractive in
Belgium than in Kent. For myself, I confess, it hardly seems worth
while to incur the penalty of sea-sickness merely to play golf on
the ruined shore of Flanders.
III.
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.
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