Beautiful Europe - Belgium | Page 5

a million madmen at Dixmude or
Nieuport may prove equally incomplete?
In the imperfect sketch that follows I write of the aspect of Belgium--of
its cities, that were formerly the most picturesque in Europe; of its
landscapes, that range from the level fens of Flanders to the wooded
limestone wolds of the Ardennes--as I knew these, and loved them, in
former years, before hell was let loose in Europe. And perhaps, the
picture here presented will in time be not altogether misrepresentative
of the regenerated Belgium that will certainly some day arise.

II.
It is not merely in its quality of unredeemed and absolute flatness that
the great fen country of Flanders is so strongly reminiscent of the great

fen country of the Holland parts of Lincolnshire. Each of these vast
levels is equally distinguished by the splendour and conspicuousness of
its ancient churches. Travelling by railway between Nieuport and
Dixmude, you have on every side of you, if the day be clear, a prospect
of innumerable towers and spires, just as you have if you travel by
railway between Spalding and Sleaford, or between Spalding and
King's Lynn. 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. Flanders, be it always
remembered, does not terminate with mere, present-day, political
divisions, but spreads with unbroken character to the very gateways of
Calais and Lille. Hazebrouck, for example, is a thoroughly Flemish
town, though nearly ten miles, in a beeline, inside the French
border--Flemish not merely, like Dunkirk, in the architecture of its
great brick church, but also actually Flemish in language, and in the
names that one reads above its shop doors. In particular, excursions
may be pleasantly made from Furnes-- whose principal inn, the Noble
Rose, is again