Beautiful Europe - Belgium | Page 7

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 actually raised. This tower at Ypres, however, fails to illustrate--perhaps because it is earlier, and therefore in better taste--that astounding disproportion in height that is so frequently exhibited by Belgian towers, as at Malines, or in the case of the famous belfry in the market-place at Bruges, when considered with reference to the church, or town hall, below. In front of the High Altar, in the pavement, is an inconspicuous square of white stone, which marks the burial-place of Cornelius Jansen, who died of the plague, as Bishop of Ypres, in