On the other hand, if the visitor has a mind for history, he may scorn the pretty Grail story and look with stern eyes on this Scheldt and the battle-scarred city beside it, mindful of the deeds of blood and fire that fill the hypnotic pages of Schiller, Prescott, and Motley. The monk of St. Gall could have appropriately dedicated to the war-ravaged Antwerp of those days his solemn antiphonal “media vita in morte sumus.” The grim, turreted Steen, just at hand, recalls the bloody reign of Alva and how he condemned a whole people to death in an order of three lines. In its present rôle of museum it houses hundreds of implements of torture that once were drenched in the blood of the heroic burghers of Antwerp. Not all the horrors of the “Spanish Fury,” when eight thousand citizens of this town were butchered in three days, nor the stirring memory of the “French Fury,” with Antwerp triumphant, can dim the glory of the heroic resistance the “Sea Beggars” made to the advance of the Duke of Parma up the Scheldt.
ANTWERP, FROM THE SCHELDT
From the cathedral tower one may see the little towns of Calloo and Oordam, on either bank of the river; it was between them that Parma built his bridge to obstruct navigation, and against it the men of Antwerp sent their famous fire-ships to open up a passage for the Zeelander allies. Gianibelli, who devised them, and whom Schiller styled “the Archimedes of Antwerp,” builded better than he knew, for with one ship he destroyed a thousand Spaniards and heaped up their defenses into a labyrinth of ruin. Could Antwerp have risen then above the clash of factions, there would have been no need later to tear down the dikes and present the strange spectacle of ships sailing over the land, and their story might have been as triumphant as Holland’s, and a united Netherlands have issued from those long wars with Spain.
Here where the visitor takes his afternoon ease many a brave pageant foregathered in the troubled, olden days. In the magic pages of old Van Meteren’s chronicles we see them pass again: Cold, gloomy, treacherous Philip stepping from his golden barge to walk under triumphal arches on a carpet of strewn roses, surrounded by magistrates and burghers splendid in ruffs and cramoisy velvet; later on, the Regent, Margaret of Parma, strident and gouty, whom Prescott has called “a man in petticoats”; and then the bloodthirsty Alva; then the dashing “Sword of Lepanto,” the brilliant and romantic Don John of Austria; next, the atrocious Requesens; and, last of all, the revengeful Alexander of Parma. Hopeful, stolid, impassive Antwerp, ever the sheep for the shearers, ever believing that at last the worst was over, rejoices in her welcome to each as though the millennium had finally dawned on all her troubles and sets cressets to blazing in the cathedral tower and roasts whole oxen in the public squares.
The scream of a river siren will arouse the visitor from the Past to the Present, and, with a sigh, he will saunter forth to see the places that cannot come to him. He will leave with regret this busy, fascinating river—“the lazy Scheldt” that Goldsmith loved. Excited little tugs are bustling busily about, queer-coated dock-hands struggle mightily with their mammoth burdens, and ships of every shape and pattern throng the roadstead before him. The sharp and trim Yankee sloop, the ponderous German tramp, the fastidious British freighter, the clean-cut ocean liner, and, best of all, the round-sterned, wallowing Dutch craft, green of hull and yellow of sail,—all are here, and, he can think, for his especial diversion. A canal barge crawls laboriously by, and in that floating home which she seldom cares to leave, a much-be-petticoated mother of Flanders busies herself with her many children and looks after the care of her tiny house;—and looks after it well, as you may see by the spotless little curtains that flutter in the windows and the bright pots of geraniums that stand on the sills. One recalls the keen delight this singular craft afforded Robert Louis Stevenson at the time he made his charming “Inland Voyage” from Antwerp. Quoth he: “Of all the creatures of commercial enterprise, a canal barge is by far the most delightful to consider. It may spread its sails, and then you see it sailing high above the tree-tops and the windmill, sailing on the aqueduct, sailing through the green corn-lands; the most picturesque of things amphibious.... There should be many contented spirits on board, for such a life is both to travel and to stay at home.”
Along the front there is also opportunity to expend a couple of francs to advantage for a ticket on the comfortable little steamer that is just impatiently casting off from the embarcadère, and to go sailing with her on an hour’s voyage up the river to Tamise to view the shipping at greater length, to see the merchants’ villas at Hoboken, and finally the famous picture of the Holy Family at the journey’s end. Otherwise the visitor may take a parting look up the Quay van Dyck and the Quay Jordaens, examine once more the striking Porte de l’Escaut that Rubens decorated, and so turn a reluctant back on the bright life of the river to thread a crooked street or two, cobbled and tortuous, and issue forth on the Grand Place before the immense, fantastic Hôtel de Ville.
In the drowsy early afternoon this quaint and curious old city hall wears a most friendly and reposeful air. To one who has never before seen any of these extraordinary Old-World buildings such a one as this will move such incredulity as mastered the countryman at the first sight of a giraffe;—“Shucks!” said he when he had looked it all over, “there never was such an animal!” Fancy a rambling, picture-book of a structure a hundred yards long, made up of the oddest combination of architectural orders—massive pillars for the first story, Doric arcades for the second, Ionic for the third, and last of all, an abbreviated colonnade supporting a steep, tent-like, gable-pierced roof! As though some touch of the whimsical might even so have been neglected, behold a pompous central tower, decorated to suffocation, arched of window and graven of column, rearing itself in three diminishing, denticulated stories above the long, sloping roof, until the singular, box-like ornaments on the very tiptop appear tiny Greek tombs of a cloud-hung Acropolis. The statues of Wisdom and Justice could pass for Æschylus and Sophocles, and the Holy Virgin on the summit might very well be Athena. The friendly air to which I have referred extends even to these statues, who have the appearance of shouting down to you to come in out of the heat and have a look at the great stairway of colored marbles and rest awhile before the splendid chimney-piece of delicately carved black-and-white stone in the elaborate Salle des Mariages. Subtle matchmakers, those statues! And, indeed, if Antwerp is the first steamer-stop of the visitor, he may well be pardoned for reveling in this Hôtel de Ville as something that for picturesque beauty he may not hope to better elsewhere. And yet that would only be because he had not seen the glorious one at Brussels, or the grim and huddled caprice at Mechlin, or the incredible Halle aux Draps at Ypres, or the amazing Rabot Gate or Watermen’s Guild House of Ghent. And even these will fall back into the commonplace once he has drifted along the Quai du Rosaire of drowsy old Bruges and been steeped in picturesqueness and color that is beyond any man’s describing.
No one who cares for structural quaintness and originality can fail to find especial delight in the surroundings of this venerable Grand Place. Along one entire side, like prize competitors in an architectural fancy ball, shoulder to shoulder, stiff and precise, range the old Halls of the Guilds. The Archers, the Coopers, the Tailors, the Carpenters, and all the others of that most unusual alignment, present themselves in full regalia of characteristic ornament and design. As though in keeping with their ancient traditions of stout rivalry, there is a very real air of vying between themselves for some coveted palm for fantastic bizarreness; and all the while with a solemn innocence of being at all grotesque or unusual. One could laugh at their naïve unconsciousness of the prodigious show they make, with sculptures and adornments of bygone days and a combined violent sky-line slashed with long eaves and bitten out in serrated gable ends. But there is little of merriment and very much of reverence in the thoughts they excite of worthy pride in skill of craftsmanship and the glory their masters brought to this city in the sixteenth century in winning from Venice the industrial supremacy of the world. In those days there were no poor in all Antwerp and every child could read and write at least two languages, and the Counts of Flanders were more powerful than half the kings of Europe.
But the Grand Place has more to show than the guild halls. The apogee of the whimsical and fantastic has been attained in the choppy sea of red-tiled roof-tops that eddies above this huddled neighborhood. Grim old dormered veterans, queer and chimerical, palsied and askew, have here held their own stoutly through the centuries. They have echoed back the shouts of the crusaders, the triumphal cannon of Spanish royalty, and the free-hearted welcomes to foreign princes come to curry favor with the Flemish merchant rulers of the world. They have turned gray with the groans of their nobles writhing under the Inquisition and rosy with approval of the adroit and courageous William of Nassau. From their antique windows have leaned the burgomasters of Rubens and the cavaliers of Velasquez, brave in ruffs and beards; and out of the most hidden nests of their eaves the wan and pallid faces of their hunted sons have been raised to watch the approach of the ruthless soldiery of Requesens and Parma. These old roofs look down to-day on a rich and happy people whose skill and tireless industry have reared a commercial fabric that astonishes the world.