Beautiful Europe - Belgium | Page 7

the Miraculous
Draught of Fishes, at St. Andrew's, at Antwerp, or the Conversion of St.
Norbert, in the cathedral at Malines. Certainly the fallen horseman in
the latter, if not a little ludicrous, is a trifle out of place.
From Furnes to Ypres it is a pleasant journey across country by one of
those strange steam-trams along the road, so common in Belgium and
Holland, and not unknown in France, that wind at frequent intervals
through village streets so narrow, that you have only to put out your
hand in passing to touch the walls of houses. This is a very leisurely
mode of travelling, and the halts are quite interminable in their
frequency and length; but the passenger is allowed to stand on the open
platform at the end of the carriage--though sometimes nearly smothered
with thick, black smoke--and certainly no better method exists of
exploring the short stretches of open country that lie between town and
town. Belgian towns, remember, lie mostly thick on the ground--you
are hardly out of Brussels before you come to Malines, and hardly out
of Malines ere you sight the spire of Antwerp. In no part of Europe,
perhaps, save in parts of Lancashire and Yorkshire, do you find so
many big towns in so limited a space; yet the strips of country that lie
between, though often intolerably dull, are (unlike the strips in

Yorkshire) intensely rural in character. Belgian towns do not sprawl in
endless, untidy suburbs, as Sheffield sprawls out towards Rotherham,
and Bradford towards Leeds. Belgian towns, moreover--again unlike
our own big cities in England--are mostly extremely handsome, and
generally contrive, however big, to retain, at any rate in their heart, as
at Antwerp, or in the Grande Place at Brussels, a striking air of
antiquity; whilst some fairly big towns, such as Malines and Bruges,
are mediaeval from end to end. This, of course, is not true of Belgian
Luxembourg and the region of the Ardennes, where the population is
much more sparse; where we do not stumble, about every fifteen miles
or so, on some big town of historic name; and where the endless
chessboard of little fields that lies, for example, between Ghent and
Oudenarde, or between Malines and Louvain, is replaced by long
contours of sweeping limestone wold, often covered with rolling wood.
Ypres is distinguished above all cities in Belgium by the huge size and
stately magnificence of its lordly Cloth Hall, or Halles des Drapiers. So
vast, indeed, is this huge building, and so flat the surrounding plain,
that it is said that it is possible from the strangely isolated hill of Cassel,
which lies about eighteen miles away to the west, just over the border,
in France, on a really clear day--I have only climbed it myself,
unluckily, in a fog of winter mist--to distinguish in a single view, by
merely turning the head, the clustering spires of Laon, the white chalk
cliffs of Kent, and this vast pile of building, like a ship at sea, that
seems to lie at anchor in the heart of the "sounding plain." Nothing,
perhaps, in Europe is so strangely significant of vanished greatness--not
even Rome, with its shattered Forum, or Venice, with a hundred marble
palaces--as this huge fourteenth- century building, with a facade that is
four hundred and thirty- six feet long, and with its lofty central tower,
that was built for the pride and need of Ypres, and as a market for the
barter of its priceless linens, at a time when Ypres numbered a
population of two hundred thousand souls (almost as big as Leicester at
the present day), and was noisy with four thousand busy looms;
whereas now it has but a beggarly total of less than seventeen thousand
souls (about as big as Guildford), and is only a degree less sleepy than
Malines or Bruges-la-Morte. Ypres, again, like Arras, has lent its name
to commerce, if diaper be really rightly derived from the expression
"linen of Ypres." The Cloth Hall fronts on to the Grande Place, and,

indeed, forms virtually one side of it; and behind, in the Petite Place, is
the former cathedral of St. Martin. This is another fine building, though
utterly eclipsed by its huge secular rival, that was commenced in the
thirteenth century, and is typically Belgian, as opposed to French, in the
character of its architecture, and not least in its possession of a single
great west tower. This last feature is characteristic of every big church
in Belgium--one can add them up by the dozen: Bruges, Ghent,
Louvain (though ruined, or never completed), Oudenarde, Malines,
Mons--save Brussels, where the church of Ste. Gudule, called
persistently, but wrongly, the cathedral, has the full complement of two,
and Antwerp, where two were intended, though only one has been