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. St. Gudule, of course, should certainly be
visited, not only for the sake of the general fabric, which,
notwithstanding its possession of TWO west towers, is typically
Belgian in its general character, but also for the sake of its
magnificent sixteenth and seventeenth century glass, and
especially for the sake of the five great windows in the Chapelle
du Saint Sacrement, which illustrate in a blaze of gorgeous colour
the story of how Jonathan the Jew bribed Jeanne de Louvain to
steal the three Consecrated Wafers, from which oozed, when
sacrilegiously stabbed by the sceptical Jew, the Sacred Blood of a
world's redemption. This story is told again - or rather, perhaps,
a similar story - in the splendid painted glass from the church of
St. Eloi that is now preserved at Rouen in the Archaeological
Museum. As for the Grande Place, or original market-place of the
city, which is bounded on one side by the magnificent Hotel de
Ville, on the opposite side by the rather heavy, rebuilt Maison du
Roi, and on the remaining two sides chiefly by the splendid old
seventeenth-century Corporation Houses of the various ancient city
guilds - Le Renard, the house of the silk-mercers and haberdashers;
Maison Cornet, the house of the boatmen, or "batelliers"; La
Louvre, the house of the archers; La Brouette, the house of the
carpenters; Le Sac, the house of the printers and booksellers; the
Cygne, the house of the butchers; and other houses that need not
be specified at any greater length, of the tailors, painters, and
brewers - this is probably the completest and most splendid example
of an ancient city market-square that now remains in Europe, and
absolutely without rival even in Belgium itself, though similar
old guild-houses, in the same delightful Flemish fashion, may
still be found (though in this case with admixture of many modern
buildings) in the Grande Place at Antwerp. It was in this splendid
square at Brussels that the unhappy Counts of Egmont and Horn were
brutally done to death, to glut the sinister tyranny of Spanish
Philip, on June 5, 1568.
Also, in addition to these two superlative antiquities, two modern
buildings in Brussels, though for widely different reasons, can
hardly be passed over under plea of lack of space. Crowning the
highest point of the city, and towering itself towards heaven in a
stupendous pile of masonry, is the enormous new Palais de Justice,
probably the most imposing law courts in the world. English Law
undoubtedly is housed with much greater modesty, though not
without due magnificence, in the altogether humbler levels of the
Strand. Also in the High Town - which is the modern quarter of
Brussels, in contrast with the mediaeval Low Town, which lies in
the flat below - is the Royal Museum of Ancient Paintings, which
probably divides honours with the Picture Gallery at Antwerp as
the finest and most representative collection of pictures of the
Netherlandish school in the world. Here you may revel by the hour
in a candlelight effect by Gerard Dow; in the poultry of Melchior
d'Hondecoeter; in a pigsty of Paul Potter's; in landscapes by
Meindert Hobbema; in a moonlight landscape of Van der Neer's; in a
village scene by Jan Steen; in the gallant world of Teniers; and
in the weird imaginings of Pieter Brueghel the younger. The
greatest pictures in the whole collection, I suppose, are those by
Rubens, though he has nothing here that is comparable for a moment
with those in the Picture Gallery and Cathedral at Antwerp. Very
magnificent, however, is the "Woman taken in Adultery," the
"Adoration of the Magi," the "Interceder Interceded" (the Virgin,
at the prayer of St. Francis d'Assisi, restrains the angry Saviour
from destroying a wicked world), and the "Martyrdom of St.
Livinius." This last, however - like the "Crucifixion" in the
Antwerp Gallery; like Van Dyck's picture in this collection of the
drunken Silenus supported by a fawn; and like Rubens' own
disgusting Silenus in our National Gallery at home - illustrates
unpleasantly the painful Flemish facility to condescend to
details, or even whole conceptions, the realism of which is
unnecessarily deliberate and coarse. Here, in this death of St.
Livinius, the executioner is shown in the act of presenting to a
dog with pincers the bleeding tongue that he has just cut out of
the mouth of the dying priest.
Brussels itself, as already intimated, is an exceedingly pleasant
city for a more or less prolonged stay; and, owing at once to the
admirable system of "Rundreise" tickets that are issued by the
State railways at an uncommonly low price, to the rather dubious
quality of the hotels in some of the smaller towns, and to the
cardinal fact that Brussels is a centre from which most of the
other great cities of Belgium - Malines, Ghent, Antwerp, and Liege,
not to mention smaller towns of absorbing interest, such as Mons,
Namur, Hal, Tirlemont, Leau, and Soignies - may be easily visited,
more or less completely, in the course of a single day - owing to
all these facts many people will be glad to make this pleasant
city their centre, or headquarters, for the leisurely exploration
of most of Belgium, with the exception of the more distant and
out-of-the-way districts of West Flanders and the Ardennes.
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