The Church of Saint Nicholas

Of the buildings in Brussels and its immediate neighbourhood, which date from this period (950-1200), but few remain. Indeed, in the city itself there are only fragments. Foremost among the monuments which contain them note the Parish Church of Saint Nicholas in the Rue au Beurre, one of the oldest and perhaps the most interesting of the time-honoured sanctuaries of Brussels. The date of its foundation is not known, but it cannot be later, and may be considerably earlier, than the close of the ten hundreds. It is one of those old buildings which, by reason of their great age and thrilling memories, have attained individuality and almost become living things—a stalwart veteran who in the course of a long and honourable career has manfully endured an unwonted share of the trials and vicissitudes of life. It has gained many scars in wrestling with time and the elements, more in its conflict with man. It has been cast down and renewed, enlarged and curtailed, defaced and embellished, polluted and blessed over and over again; and though for the last fifty years it has been constantly threatened by municipal blockheads with total destruction, it still towers amid the nest of habitations which cluster round its walls and cling on to its buttresses, a picturesque and venerable pile in spite of its mutilations—not the least pleasing of the rare landmarks of old-world Brussels.

THE OLD CHURCH OF SAINT NICHOLAS, RUE AU BEURRE.

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It is not, however, its intrinsic beauty which renders this church so fascinating. It possesses in common with many ancient things, not only buildings, but often trees, pictures, furniture, and notably jewellery, another attribute: there is about it a certain subtle influence which at once lays hold of the spectator and convinces him that it has a story. It has, and a thrilling one which, if it were written, would fill volumes and keep the reader spellbound from the opening words of the first sentence to the end of the last page.

This church, dedicated to Saint Nicholas, patron saint of burghers and merchants, and situated on the fringe of the Great Market, hard by their Town Hall and Guild-houses, has been, from time immemorial, the distinctive church of the bourgeoisie, in the same way that Saint Jacques sur Coudenberg has always been the distinctive church of the Court. Its life is bound up with the life of the city. It is the cradle of its liberties. Its hopes, its struggles, its victories, its defeats are intimately associated with it. In this church the city fathers were wont to assemble in the early days when they had no town hall. Its steeple was the town belfry—we say advisedly was, for it exists no more—home of the 'work-clock,' which every morning called the craftsman to his toil and in the evening sounded his release; and of the shrill tocsin, which in days of terror summoned him to arms, and when he had triumphed shouted victory. Here, too, in a lower storey, was the archive chamber where were laid up the records and the title-deeds—the charters which the town had bought at such great cost of blood and gold. Thrice burnt down and thrice rebuilt, until the close of the seventeen hundreds, this ancient tower was the pride and the glory of the men of Brussels, who regarded it as the outward and visible sign of their privileges as citizens and their rights as men. Nor is this all, the Church of Saint Nicholas is possessed of a mysterousmysterious power of attraction. Why men should single out this particular church in preference to all others is a question hard to answer. There is no ostensible reason for it: it is not the shrine of some great and popular saint, no famous relics are treasured here, nor miraculous image or picture. They are drawn to it in spite of themselves. Wherefore, who shall say? Enter when you will, it is never without worshippers, and what a motley throng they are! Of course that sex which the breviary so quaintly and aptly styles devout is the most in evidence. Women in shoals are there—women of every age and every complexion, all sorts and conditions of women: from the grande dame of ancient date, demure, aloof, dowdy, who, to her very rosary beads, is invested with an air of distinction, to the market-woman with her milk cans or her basket of fresh vegetables; from the fashion plate of the demi monde, perfumed and painted, to the snuffy crone in foul rags, who in the same breath asks an alms and tells her chaplet. And the men, if there be fewer of them, are no less heterogeneous—that sleek, smug-faced tradesman is trying a deal with Saint Anthony, he has made him an offering and promised more if only he will promote his undertakings; the youth in glorious apparel is commending, perhaps, to Saint Joseph an affair of the heart, or—who can tell?—perhaps he has a thorn in the flesh of which he would fain be rid; the shabby, middle-aged, sallow-faced wreck who stands before 'Onze Lieve Vrouw,' works, when he is not too drunk, as a journeyman tailor, in politics he is a social democrat, and if you were to ask him his religion, he would tell you that he was a libre penseur, but the woman who loves him is sick and believes, and he has slunk in here to put up a taper for her in honour of the 'Salus infirmorum,' the old man with trembling limbs and palsied head, who is painfully making the way of the Cross, was in his day a dashing spark who could make women's hearts throb and sometimes broke them. He has drunk to the dregs of the joys of life and experienced the after-taste, but all this is ancient history; he has long ago made his peace with God, and is quietly waiting now for the great metamorphosis. And there are children too, not many—for the neighbourhood is one of theatres, cafés, public buildings—ragged urchins some of them, with bare feet and pinched faces. The streets outside are cold and wet, or they are hot and dusty, and where else should these waifs seek shelter but in their Father's house?

Such are the devotees who frequent this mysterious shrine; and the visible objects of their devotion—the likenesses of the ghosts who haunt it, are no less varied than are they. Some of them are Neo-Gothic conceptions of the school of Saint Luke—tall, emaciated figures with gilded locks and pale, meek faces; others are of the time of the Renaissance, and are full-blooded, fleshy, human; others again are as old perhaps as the church itself, and these are the most interesting.

For how many centuries, for example, has the 'Man of Sorrows' sat by the western doorway silently asking of those who enter, 'Is it nothing to you, all ye that pass by?' A strangely pathetic figure this. The sculptor who modelled it must have had this text in his mind, 'There is no beauty in Him,' and this, 'The Lord has placed upon His shoulders the iniquity of us all.' The statue is of carved wood painted after life, but time and maybe the flare of tapers have rendered it almost black. It is quite nude save for a loin cloth, but someone, perhaps scandalised at this, has thrown a mantle of purple velvet now faded and moth eaten, over the shoulders. A relic is let into the instep of the left foot, which is defaced and partly worn away by the lips of innumerable troubled souls who have found consolation in their own sorrows by pitying the sorrows of Christ. For the rest, the church is not without charm from an æsthetic point of view—the axis of the choir is probably more decidedly inclined to the north-east than that of any other church that the visitor will call to mind: this and the divers styles of architecture in which it is built renders it at least picturesque. Moreover, though the stained glass which once glowed in its windows has long since disappeared, and though whitewash and plaster have effaced the frescoes and carving with which its walls were formerly adorned, the interior is still bathed in glowing tints: it is rich in old oak furniture, in objects of marble and copper and brass, in easel paintings and in devotional statues resplendent with colour and gold, and there are flowers too and red lamps, and withal and always a host of flaring tapers. But let not the reader be disappointed. There is much in this church which is tawdry, trivial, vulgar, which transgresses in a flagrant degree the canons of good taste; its splendour, it cannot be denied, is not always the splendour of truth. We have here the lustre of colour which, like charity, covers a multitude of sins, the fascination of old-world memories and the glamour of the picturesque. Added to this there are a few genuine works of art, notably some good pictures, which even the most fastidious need not be ashamed to admire; but since they are all of more recent date than the Middle Age, they do not come within the scope of these pages. And what, perhaps, it will be asked, has this farrago of modern idolatry for which space has been found to do with the Middle Age? This much—call it idolatry if you will, we have here mediævalism undiluted. The credulous folk who flock to the Church of Saint Nicholas are silly enough to believe, like their fathers in the thirteen hundreds, that the Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath.

It is difficult, perhaps impossible, to say anything definite as to dates in the case of a building like the Church of Saint Nicholas, which has endured so many vicissitudes and suffered so much at the hands of restorers, but there can be little doubt that the great oblong columns which support the vaulting of the nave, and perhaps too the walls of the aisles, or at all events some portions of them, formed part of the original structure. But whether these things be old or new is a matter of little moment. The burghers' church is doomed. The decree has gone forth, and as soon as the leases of the old houses which cluster round it fall in, it is to be sacrificed to the demon progress. A street has to be enlarged or straightened, or the site is needed for a cab-stand or a public-house, or for some purpose equally objectionable. Death indeed sits close to our old friend, hence this disquisition. Albeit, he has so often escaped by the skin of his teeth that it is hard not to believe that means will even yet be found for still further prolonging his days. One thing is quite certain. If this piece of vandalism be carried out, it will be for the indelible shame of the whole city. A disgrace alike to the authors of the crime, and to those who by their indifference or their lack of energy, have connived at it. In Belgium there is a permanent Government commission for the preservation of ancient monuments, and a private society likewise exists, of which the raison d'être is similar, yet it seems that neither of these bodies have as much as thought it worth their while to lodge a formal protest.

More important from an architectural point of view than the Church of Saint Nicholas is the Church of Notre-Dame de la Chapelle. The foundation stone was laid by Duke Godfrey Longbeard in 1134, and though the greater portion of the existing structure is of more recent date, some interesting fragments still remain of the original building, notably the little Chapel of the Holy Cross and the beautiful façade of the south transept, which is pure Romanesque and richly adorned with sculpture. The plans were modified as the work progressed, and the rest of the south transept, the north transept and the chancel are in the style of the Transition. A nave and aisles were also added at this period, but they were destroyed by fire early in the fourteen hundreds, and rebuilt in the course of the century in the style then in vogue.

The collegiate Church of Saint Michael and Saint Gudule was commenced by Duke Henry I. in 1170, and the eastern wall of the ambulatory, with its Romanesque windows, date from this period. It took the men of Brussels five hundred years to complete this beautiful building, and hence it contains specimens of every style of architecture, and is on that account none the less interesting. We shall have something more to say of each of these churches in another chapter.

The civil architecture of this period is represented only by some fragments of the fortifications with which Lambert Balderick surrounded the city in 1040. They are scattered about here and there in various parts of the old town. There is a picturesque bit of wall for example in the garden of Saint Gudule's Presbytery, another piece has been incorporated into a house in the Rue des douze Apôtres, there is more in the Steenporte, and, most important of all, a tower some sixty feet high between the Halles Centrales and the Church of Saint Catherine.

This picturesque relic, which is called 'la Tour Noire,' was discovered when some old houses were demolished in 1887. At first the Corporation was for pulling it down, but fortunately Brussels at this time had a burgomaster who was not only an artist and an archæologist of repute, but also an enthusiastic amateur of mediæval architecture. After a long fight, M. Buls, who is still living though he has now withdrawn from public life, succeeded in saving the old tower, and thanks to his indefatigable efforts, it was later on restored by the town.