The Difference, Perhaps, Is That The Lincolnshire Churches
Present Finer Architectural Feature, And Are Built Of Stone,
Floated Down In
Barges, by dyke or fen, from the famous inland
quarries of Barnack, in Northamptonshire; whilst most of those in
Flanders
Are built of local brick, though the drums of the piers
and the arches are often of blue limestone. It is remarkable,
certainly, that these soaring spires should thus chiefly rise to
eminence in a setting of dead, flat plain. It may well be, indeed,
as some have suggested, that the character of architecture is
unconsciously determined by the type of surrounding scenery; that
men do not build spires in the midst of mountains to compete with
natural sublimity that they cannot hope to emulate, but are
emboldened to express in stone and mortar their own heavenward
aspirations in countries where Nature seems to express herself in
less spiritual, or at any rate in less ambitious, mood.
As we cross the level prairie between these two little towns of
West Flanders (we hope to visit them presently), a group of lofty
roofs and towers is seen grandly towards the west, dominating the
fenland with hardly less insistency than Boston "Stump," in
Lincolnshire, as seen across Wash and fen. This is the little town
of Furnes, than which one can hardly imagine a quainter place in
Belgium, or one more entirely fitted as a doorway by which to
enter a new land. Coming straight from England by way of Calais
and Dunkirk, the first sight of this ancient Flemish market-place,
with its unbroken lines of old white-brick houses, many of which
have crow-stepped gables; with the two great churches of St.
Nicholas, with its huge square tower, and of St. Walburge, with
its long ridge of lofty roof; and with its Hotel de Ville and
Palais de Justice of about the dawn of the seventeenth century, is
a revelation, in its atmosphere of sleepy evening quiet, to those
who rub their eyes with wonder, and find it hard to credit that
London, "with its unutterable, external hideousness," was actually
left behind them only that very morning, and is actually at
present not two hundred miles distant. Furnes, in short, is an
epitome, and I think a very charming one, of all that is most
characteristic in Flanders; and not the less charming because here
the strong currents of modern life that throb through Ghent and
Antwerp extend only to its threshold in the faintest of dying
ripples, and because you do not need to be told that in its town
hall may still be seen hangings of old Spanish leather, and that
the members of the Inquisition used to meet in the ante-chamber of
the first floor of its Palais de Justice, in order to throw
yourself back in memory to those old days of Lowland greatness
from whose struggles Holland emerged victorious, but into which
Belgium, for the time, sank back oppressed.
Furnes - in Flemish Veurne - is an excellent centre from which to
explore the extreme west point of Belgian Flanders, which is also
the extreme west point of Belgium as a whole.
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