Part 4
At this afternoon hour the Grand Place betrays little of its early-morning activity, when it is thronged with the overflowing stands of busy marketmen in baggy trousers, and banks of rich colors of the flower-women in immaculate linen headdress proffering the choice output of their scrupulously tilled farms. Scarcely less picturesque are these oddly garbed country-folk than the famous fish-venders over at Ostend, and certainly they are a more fragrant people to shop among. A curious and colorful picture they present with the long lines of gayly painted dog-carts blazing with peonies and geraniums. Huddled around the great statue of Brabo they quite throw into limbo the Daughters of the Scheldt that are disporting in bronze on the pedestal. Brabo himself, Antwerp’s Jack-the-Giant-Killer, pauses on high in the act of hurling away the severed hand of the vanquished Antigonus as though he could see no unoccupied spot to throw it in. Should he let go at random, and hit house Number 4, he could surely expect to be hauled down forthwith, for the great Van Dyck was born there, and Antwerp is nothing if not reverent of the memory of her glorious sons of Art. And Brabo cannot afford to take too many chances with the security of his own position, for he himself has a rival; Napoleon the Great was really a greater champion of Flanders than he, and overthrew a worse enemy of Antwerp’s than the fabled Antigonus when he raised the embargo on the Scheldt, that had existed for a century and a half under the terms of the outrageous Treaty of Westphalia, until scarcely a rowboat would venture over the silt-choked mouth of the river, and only then to find the famous capital a forsaken village of empty streets and abandoned factories. The dredging of the channel, the expenditure of millions in construction of wharves and quays, and the restoration of the city to its high place in the commercial world was a greater and more difficult work than Brabo’s.
The varied and vivid life of Antwerp unfolds itself strikingly in the early afternoon to one who exchanges the sleepy, mediæval Grand Place for the broad, curving, crowded boulevard of the popular Place de Meir. It was just such clean and handsome streets as this that inspired John Evelyn to write so delightedly of Antwerp two hundred and fifty years ago, describing them in his famous “Diary” as “fair and noble, clean, well-paved, and sweet to admiration.” Indeed, everything seemed to have charmed Evelyn here, as witness his inclusive approval, “Nor did I ever observe a more quiet, clean, elegantly built, and civil place than this magnificent and famous city of Antwerp.” Rubens, the name of names in Flanders, was then too recently dead to have come into the fullness of his fame; whereas to-day one thinks of him continually here and likes nothing better than the many opportunities to study him in the completeness of his wonderful career—“the greatest master,” said Sir Joshua Reynolds, “in the mechanical part of the art, that ever exercised a pencil.” Even trivial associations of his activity are cherished; as we find them, for instance, in the little woodcut designs he made for his famous friend, Christopher Plantin, the greatest printer of the era, and which one handles reverently in the old Plantin house in the Marché du Vendredi—that picture-book of a house, where corbel-carved ceiling-beams overhang antique presses, types, and mallets, and great windows of tiny leaded panes let in a flood of light from the rarest and mellowest old courtyard in the whole of the Netherlands.
The Place de Meir is Antwerp’s Broadway; and an afternoon stroll along it affords a constantly changing view of stately public and private buildings, no less attractive to the average man than those “apple-green wineshops, garlanded in vines” that delighted Théophile Gautier on the river front. Little corner shrines, so numerous in this city, shelter saints of tinsel and gilt and receive the reverence of a population that has four hundred Catholics to every Protestant. One must necessarily delight in a street whose houses are all of delicately colored brick, with stone trimmings carved to a nicety and shutters painted in softest greens. The imposing Royal Palace is graceful and beautiful, but human interest goes out to the stone-garlanded house across the way,—old Number 54,—where Rubens was born and where he lived so many years and took so much pleasure in making beautiful for his parents. On either hand one sees solid residences of the most generous proportions, and all in tints of pink and gray, and busy hotels with red-faced porters hurrying about in long blouses. Picture stores and bookshops scrupulously stocked with religious volumes beguile lingering inspection. There are establishments on every hand for the sale of ecclesiastical paraphernalia, with windows hung with confirmation wreaths, crucifixes, rosaries, and what-not. Occasionally, even here, one discovers, crushed in between more consequential businesses, the celebrated little gingerbread-shops of which so much amused notice has been taken. Restaurants and cafés abound. One sees them on every hand, with their characteristic overflow of tables and chairs on the sidewalk, always thronged, both inside and out, with jolly, chattering patrons and gleaming in sideboard and shelf with highly polished vessels of brass and pewter. Here and there one passes the confectionery shops, called _pâtisseries_, where ices, mild liqueurs, and mineral waters refresh a thriving trade. Stevenson found no relish for Flemish food, pronouncing it “of a nondescript, occasional character.” He complained that the Belgians do not go at eating with proper thoroughness, but “peck and trifle with viands all day long in an amateur spirit.” “All day long” is apt enough, for Antwerp’s restaurants and cafés are always thronged.
These ruddy-faced and placid Belgians are a very serene and contented people. It is pleasant and even restful to watch them; they go about the affairs of life with such an absence of fret and fever. Spanish-appearing ladies float gracefully past in silk mantillas; priests by the hundreds shuffle along leisurely in picturesque hats and gowns; the portly merchant, on his way at this hour to the _moresque_, many-columned Bourse, proceeds in like deliberate and unhurried fashion. Street venders, in peaked caps and voluminous trousers, approach you with calm deliberation and retire unruffled at your dismissal. On every sunny corner military men by the score “loafe and invite their souls.” Tradesmen in the shops and cabmen in the open go about their business as though it were a matter of infinite leisure. Even the day laborers in the streets, whose huge sabots stand in long rows by the curb, survey life tranquilly; why worry when a good pair of wooden shoes costs less than a dollar and will last for five or six years?
The snatches of conversation one catches betray the confusion of tongues inseparable from a nation of whom one half cannot understand the other, and whose cousins, once or twice removed, are of foreign speech to either. The Dutch spoken in the Scheldt country is said to be as bewildering to a German, as is the French the Walloons employ in the valley of the Meuse to a Parisian. But although the Flemish outnumber their fellow countrymen of Wallonia two to one, still French is the tongue of the court, the sciences, and all the educated and upper circles. It is like Austria-Hungary all over again. And French continues steadily to gain ground in spite of the utmost efforts of the enthusiasts behind the new “Flemish Movement.” One sees both classes on the Place de Meir,—the stolid, light-haired man of Flanders and the nervous, swarthy Walloon. The beauty of the blue-eyed, _belle Flamande_ is in happy contrast with that of the slender, dark-eyed _Wallonne_, and their poets have exhausted themselves in efforts to do justice to either side of so delicate and distracting a dilemma. Our grandmothers heard much of the charms of _La Flamande_ when Lortzing’s melodious “Czaar und Zimmermann” was so popular, seventy-five years ago:—
“Adieu, ma jolie Flamande, Que je quitte malgré moi! J’en aurai la de demand, J’ai de l’amitié pour toi.”
The complexion of the life on the Place de Meir changes with the hours. Between two and three o’clock we find it disposed to adapt itself as closely as possible along lines of personal comfort. By five it will be lively with carriages and automobiles bound for the driving in the prim little Pépinière, or the bird-thronged Zoölogical gardens, or around the lake in the central park, with a turn up the fashionable Rue Carnot to the stately boulevards of the new and exclusive Borgerhout section. At that hour one may count confidently upon seeing every uniform of the garrison among the crowds of officers who turn out to have a part in the beauty show. On the other hand, if it were early morning—_very_ early morning—and the sun were still fighting its way through the mists and vapors of the Scheldt, the Place de Meir would resound with rattling little carts by the hundreds, bearing great milk cans of glittering, polished brass packed in straw, by whose sides patient, placid-faced women would trudge along in quaint thimble-bonnets, with plaid shawls crossed and belted above voluminous skirts and their feet set securely in the clumsy wooden sabots of the Fatherland. Market gardeners in linen smocks and gray worsted stockings would be bringing Antwerp its breakfast in carts only a little larger than the milk-women’s, and butcher boys would be scurrying by with meat trays on their heads or suspended from yokes across their shoulders. And all the echoes of the city would be forced into feverish activity to answer the wild clamor of the barking and fighting dogs, shaggy and strong, that draw all these picturesque little wagons. Assuredly there are few sights in Antwerp so impressive to the stranger as this substitution of dog for horse. It has been celebrated in prose and verse, with Ouida possibly carrying off the palm with her canine _vie intime_, “A Dog of Flanders.”
As the loiterer continues his afternoon stroll to the large and central Place de Commune, crosses into the chain of transverse boulevards, and returns riverward to that choicest spot of all, the tree-shaded, memory-haunted Place Verte, he is bound to reflect upon the vast changes that Antwerp, above all other Continental cities, has experienced in the last quarter-century. He will marvel, too, that Robert Bell should have lamented in his charming “Wayside Pictures” the paucity of gay life here and particularly the lack of theatrical entertainment. It may have been so when Bell wrote, fifty years ago, but it is decidedly otherwise to-day. So far as theatres go, they simply abound; nor could city streets be gayer than these, thronged with a merry, happy people and bright with the uniforms of artillery-men and fortress engineers, grenadiers of the line and the dashing _chasseurs-à-cheval_. Every hotel and café has its orchestra; and in the early evening practically every square of the city has its concert by a band from a regiment or guild. There is no suburb, they say, but has its own band or orchestra, or both. Indeed, Antwerp is nearly as music-mad as art-mad.
The shady aisles of poplars in the cozy Place Verte, the perfumes and peaceful sounds, the music of the cathedral bells, the homelike hotels and cafés and the drowsy, nodding Old-World house-fronts combine to produce a sense of comfort and satisfaction peculiar to this favored little square. There is, besides, a special and impressive feeling of something like the personal presence of the great Rubens; partly, perhaps, from the fact that the city’s chief statue of him, a lifelike bronze of heroic size, stands at the centre of the Place. Twice the normal stature of man it is, and its pedestal is five times as high as one’s head, and the great palette, book, and scrolls are all of more generous proportions than such things actually ever are;—but there seems nothing at all disproportionate in that, considering what he was and what the average man is. The memory of one who could paint a masterpiece in a day, who stood head and shoulders above every living artist of his time, and whose work has inspired and delighted mankind for three hundred years, becomes, like all great objects, positively prodigious from actual proximity. Such is the inevitable attitude towards Rubens when one touches the things he touched, walks the streets of the city where he was born, lived, and lies buried, where he wrought his greatest artistic triumphs, and where his finest work is still preserved and reverenced. The most admired cathedral in the whole of the Netherlands rises out of the fluttering tree-tops of the square, and the greatest treasures it contains are the product of this man’s genius. Every one feels the Rubens influence in the Place Verte; Eugène Fromentin, fresh from his pictorial triumphs of Algerian life, observed in “Les Maîtres d’Autrefois”: “Our imagination becomes excited more than usual when, in the centre of Place Verte, we see the statue of Rubens and further on, the old basilica where are preserved the triptychs which, humanly speaking, have consecrated it.” Such are the privileged emotions of the wise and fortunate visitors who pitch their passing tent in this fair and favored nook.
Reflections over Rubens naturally arouse thoughts of the many sons of Flanders who won preëminence in the domain of art. No other city, inexplicable as it is, has, in modern times, seen so large a proportion of its citizens achieve the loftiest heights of fame in this glorious activity; nor has any other honored art so unaffectedly in memorializing their triumphs. In Antwerp there are scores of streets and squares, and even quays, named after its artists. There are also fine statues to Rubens, Van Dyck, David Teniers, Jordaens, Quinten Matsys, and Hendrik Leys, and other memorials to the brothers Van Eyck, to Memling, Wappers, Frans Hals, Van der Heyden, De Keyser, and Verboekhoven. In private and public collections the people have jealously kept possession of the masterpieces of their fellow countrymen. The Royal Museum of Fine Arts, on the Place du Musée, is as much a treasure-house of Flemish art as the Rijks Museum at Amsterdam is of Dutch art. Again Place Verte plumes itself, for just around the corner was born the great Teniers, wizard depicter of tavern life and kermesses, and on one side is that tourists’ delight, the graceful, feathery well-top that Quinten Matsys wrought out of a single piece of iron, before the days when love inspired him to win the most coveted laurels of the painter.
However, art aside, Place Verte has distinctions of its own. Something of interest is always occurring here. Suburban bands hold weekly competitions in its artistic pavilion and the most skillful musicians hold concerts here each evening. The sidewalks then are crowded with chairs and tables, and at the close the people rise and join in the national hymn “La Brabançonne,” with its out-of-date lament to the men of Brabant that “the orange may no longer wave upon the tree of Liberty.” Of an afternoon a regiment may swing through in full regalia, the red, yellow, and black flag snapping in the van, and the band crashing out the ancient war-song “Bergen-op-Zoom.” If to-day were July 21 there would be tremendous enthusiasm and cheering celebrating the Fêtes Nationales in honor of the Revolution of 1830; as well there should, for Belgium is the smallest and one of the most desirable little kingdoms of all Europe, and the national motto, “L’Union fait la Force,” has to be closely adhered to if the Lion of Brabant would stand up under the baiting of his powerful and covetous neighbors.
The passing of a Sister of the Béguinage, in sombre black garb and an extraordinary creation of immaculate white linen on her head, recalls the many things one has read of this interesting and noble order which is peculiarly Belgium’s own. Their neat little settlements are a source of endless admiration to strangers, and quite as fascinating is their beautiful vesper service which bears the pretty name of the “salut des Béguines.” Readers of Laurence Sterne, who should be legion, promptly recall the curious story of “The Fair Béguine” that Trim told Uncle Toby in “Tristram Shandy,” and the valiant Captain’s comment: “They visit and take care of the sick by profession—I had rather, for my own part, they did it out of good nature.”
It is one of the proud distinctions of Place Verte to be at the very portals of Antwerp’s glorious cathedral, the largest, richest, and most beautiful in the Netherlands. From his café chair the visitor watches its great shadow steal over him as the afternoon wanes, while at any moment by merely raising his eyes he may revel in the graceful outlines of its sweep of ambulatory chapels and let the aspiring tips of delicate pinnacles and arches entice his vision to the loftiest point of its one finished and matchless tower. Never was Napoleon so pat in “fitting the scene with the apposite phrase” as when he compared this tower to Mechlin lace. It is delightful to look up above the trees of the Place at the enormous bulk of this tremendous structure, stained and darkened by the vapors of river and canals, study its rich carvings and stained-glass windows centuries old, and note how the blue sky, in patterns of delicate foliation and fragile arch, shines like mosaics through the clustered apertures of the filmy openwork of the lofty tower. A hundred bells drip mellow music from that exquisite belfry every few minutes all day long. You listen, perhaps, to detect the impression they gave Thackeray of a new version of the shadow-dance from “Dinorah,” conscious that they are going to haunt you as they did him for days after you have left Antwerp far behind. It is peculiarly appropriate that the Lohengrin Wedding March should be a favorite on the bells of the very cathedral where Lohengrin, according to the story, was married. Indeed, so many and so varied are the clear bell-voices of this great _carillon_ that their music seems, as the neighboring bells of Bruges did to Longfellow,—
“Like the psalms from some old cloister, When the nuns sing in the choir; And the great bell tolled among them, Like the chanting of a friar.”
Within this treasure-chest of a cathedral are jewels worthy of such a casket. One goes out of the glare of the afternoon sun into the coolness and scented gloom of its vaulted, many-aisled, and multi-chapeled vastness, and there in the hush of worshipers kneeling in prayer he finds splendid altars that gleam in a profusion of ornaments of silver, gold, and precious stones, glorious rose-windows, carven confessionals and choir stalls, life-like figures in wax clad in silks and crowned in gold, hundreds of masterful paintings, a high altar of extraordinary splendor blazing in costly decorations under a golden canopy supported by silver figures, and, at the centre of the seven aisles, Verbruggen’s far-famed carved wooden pulpit, realistic in lifelike foliage and birds, and with plump little cherubim floating aloft with the apparently fluttering canopy. As if this were not enough to distinguish any one church, here hang three of the most glorious creations of the hand of man, the masterpieces of Rubens himself. The Assumption alone could have sufficed; what is it, then, to have the tremendous glory of the presence of those greater achievements, The Elevation of the Cross and The Descent from the Cross! One feels he could easily do as did the hero of Gautier’s “Golden Fleece” and carry away forever after a hopeless passion for the beautiful, grief-stricken Magdalen.
The power and appeal of sheer beauty has perhaps never been exampled as in the case of this cathedral. Through all the sackings and pillages of Antwerp the savagery and destructiveness of her foes have stopped here. The most ruthless soldiery could not bring themselves to lay violent hands upon it. One exception stands out in this remarkable experience, and that one was quite sufficient. The fanatical “Iconoclasts,” frenzied against the Church of Rome, fell to a depth of abasement below the worst villains of Spain. Those atrocious, misguided “Iconoclasts”! What a frightful page in Antwerp’s history is the one that recounts the three days of horrors of these frantic and terrible zealots, three hundred and fifty years ago! Schiller, Motley, and Prescott have told the story as few stories have ever been told. In the calm of this afternoon it is impossible to conceive the uproar and confusion with which these lofty arches then resounded. Fancy a horde of men and boys, lighted by wax tapers in the hands of screaming women of the streets, demolishing the altars and rending and destroying every exquisite decoration and even tearing open the graves and scattering the bones of the dead. Says Motley: “Every statue was hurled from its niche, every picture torn from the wall, every wonderfully painted window shivered to atoms, every ancient monument shattered, every sculptured decoration, however inaccessible in appearance, hurled to the ground. Indefatigably, audaciously,—endowed, as it seemed, with preternatural strength and nimbleness,—these furious Iconoclasts clambered up the dizzy heights, shrieking and chattering like malignant apes, as they tore off in triumph the slowly matured fruit of centuries.”
Not the cathedral alone, but every Catholic temple of Antwerp, and four hundred others in Flanders, were sacked in this sudden revolt against the Papacy. It is said that King Philip, when he heard of it, fell into a paroxysm of frenzy and tore his beard for rage, swearing by the soul of his father that it should cost them dear. How dear it shortly did cost them, both the guilty and the innocent, we are shown in the picture Schiller has drawn of Calvinists’ bodies dangling from the beams of their roofless churches, of “the places of execution filled with corpses, the prisons with condemned victims, the highroads with fugitives.” Such was one of the extraordinary experiences through which this beautiful cathedral passed—one of the maddest, most senseless, and most frightfully punished outbreaks in all history.