At this afternoon hour the Grand Place betrays little of its early-morning activity, when it is thronged with the overflowing stands of busy marketmen in baggy trousers, and banks of rich colors of the flower-women in immaculate linen headdress proffering the choice output of their scrupulously tilled farms. Scarcely less picturesque are these oddly garbed country-folk than the famous fish-venders over at Ostend, and certainly they are a more fragrant people to shop among. A curious and colorful picture they present with the long lines of gayly painted dog-carts blazing with peonies and geraniums. Huddled around the great statue of Brabo they quite throw into limbo the Daughters of the Scheldt that are disporting in bronze on the pedestal. Brabo himself, Antwerp’s Jack-the-Giant-Killer, pauses on high in the act of hurling away the severed hand of the vanquished Antigonus as though he could see no unoccupied spot to throw it in. Should he let go at random, and hit house Number 4, he could surely expect to be hauled down forthwith, for the great Van Dyck was born there, and Antwerp is nothing if not reverent of the memory of her glorious sons of Art. And Brabo cannot afford to take too many chances with the security of his own position, for he himself has a rival; Napoleon the Great was really a greater champion of Flanders than he, and overthrew a worse enemy of Antwerp’s than the fabled Antigonus when he raised the embargo on the Scheldt, that had existed for a century and a half under the terms of the outrageous Treaty of Westphalia, until scarcely a rowboat would venture over the silt-choked mouth of the river, and only then to find the famous capital a forsaken village of empty streets and abandoned factories. The dredging of the channel, the expenditure of millions in construction of wharves and quays, and the restoration of the city to its high place in the commercial world was a greater and more difficult work than Brabo’s.
The varied and vivid life of Antwerp unfolds itself strikingly in the early afternoon to one who exchanges the sleepy, mediæval Grand Place for the broad, curving, crowded boulevard of the popular Place de Meir. It was just such clean and handsome streets as this that inspired John Evelyn to write so delightedly of Antwerp two hundred and fifty years ago, describing them in his famous “Diary” as “fair and noble, clean, well-paved, and sweet to admiration.” Indeed, everything seemed to have charmed Evelyn here, as witness his inclusive approval, “Nor did I ever observe a more quiet, clean, elegantly built, and civil place than this magnificent and famous city of Antwerp.” Rubens, the name of names in Flanders, was then too recently dead to have come into the fullness of his fame; whereas to-day one thinks of him continually here and likes nothing better than the many opportunities to study him in the completeness of his wonderful career—“the greatest master,” said Sir Joshua Reynolds, “in the mechanical part of the art, that ever exercised a pencil.” Even trivial associations of his activity are cherished; as we find them, for instance, in the little woodcut designs he made for his famous friend, Christopher Plantin, the greatest printer of the era, and which one handles reverently in the old Plantin house in the Marché du Vendredi—that picture-book of a house, where corbel-carved ceiling-beams overhang antique presses, types, and mallets, and great windows of tiny leaded panes let in a flood of light from the rarest and mellowest old courtyard in the whole of the Netherlands.
The Place de Meir is Antwerp’s Broadway; and an afternoon stroll along it affords a constantly changing view of stately public and private buildings, no less attractive to the average man than those “apple-green wineshops, garlanded in vines” that delighted Théophile Gautier on the river front. Little corner shrines, so numerous in this city, shelter saints of tinsel and gilt and receive the reverence of a population that has four hundred Catholics to every Protestant. One must necessarily delight in a street whose houses are all of delicately colored brick, with stone trimmings carved to a nicety and shutters painted in softest greens. The imposing Royal Palace is graceful and beautiful, but human interest goes out to the stone-garlanded house across the way,—old Number 54,—where Rubens was born and where he lived so many years and took so much pleasure in making beautiful for his parents. On either hand one sees solid residences of the most generous proportions, and all in tints of pink and gray, and busy hotels with red-faced porters hurrying about in long blouses. Picture stores and bookshops scrupulously stocked with religious volumes beguile lingering inspection. There are establishments on every hand for the sale of ecclesiastical paraphernalia, with windows hung with confirmation wreaths, crucifixes, rosaries, and what-not. Occasionally, even here, one discovers, crushed in between more consequential businesses, the celebrated little gingerbread-shops of which so much amused notice has been taken. Restaurants and cafés abound. One sees them on every hand, with their characteristic overflow of tables and chairs on the sidewalk, always thronged, both inside and out, with jolly, chattering patrons and gleaming in sideboard and shelf with highly polished vessels of brass and pewter. Here and there one passes the confectionery shops, called pâtisseries, where ices, mild liqueurs, and mineral waters refresh a thriving trade. Stevenson found no relish for Flemish food, pronouncing it “of a nondescript, occasional character.” He complained that the Belgians do not go at eating with proper thoroughness, but “peck and trifle with viands all day long in an amateur spirit.” “All day long” is apt enough, for Antwerp’s restaurants and cafés are always thronged.
These ruddy-faced and placid Belgians are a very serene and contented people. It is pleasant and even restful to watch them; they go about the affairs of life with such an absence of fret and fever. Spanish-appearing ladies float gracefully past in silk mantillas; priests by the hundreds shuffle along leisurely in picturesque hats and gowns; the portly merchant, on his way at this hour to the moresque, many-columned Bourse, proceeds in like deliberate and unhurried fashion. Street venders, in peaked caps and voluminous trousers, approach you with calm deliberation and retire unruffled at your dismissal. On every sunny corner military men by the score “loafe and invite their souls.” Tradesmen in the shops and cabmen in the open go about their business as though it were a matter of infinite leisure. Even the day laborers in the streets, whose huge sabots stand in long rows by the curb, survey life tranquilly; why worry when a good pair of wooden shoes costs less than a dollar and will last for five or six years?
The snatches of conversation one catches betray the confusion of tongues inseparable from a nation of whom one half cannot understand the other, and whose cousins, once or twice removed, are of foreign speech to either. The Dutch spoken in the Scheldt country is said to be as bewildering to a German, as is the French the Walloons employ in the valley of the Meuse to a Parisian. But although the Flemish outnumber their fellow countrymen of Wallonia two to one, still French is the tongue of the court, the sciences, and all the educated and upper circles. It is like Austria-Hungary all over again. And French continues steadily to gain ground in spite of the utmost efforts of the enthusiasts behind the new “Flemish Movement.” One sees both classes on the Place de Meir,—the stolid, light-haired man of Flanders and the nervous, swarthy Walloon. The beauty of the blue-eyed, belle Flamande is in happy contrast with that of the slender, dark-eyed Wallonne, and their poets have exhausted themselves in efforts to do justice to either side of so delicate and distracting a dilemma. Our grandmothers heard much of the charms of La Flamande when Lortzing’s melodious “Czaar und Zimmermann” was so popular, seventy-five years ago:—
“Adieu, ma jolie Flamande,
Que je quitte malgré moi!
J’en aurai la de demand,
J’ai de l’amitié pour toi.”
The complexion of the life on the Place de Meir changes with the hours. Between two and three o’clock we find it disposed to adapt itself as closely as possible along lines of personal comfort. By five it will be lively with carriages and automobiles bound for the driving in the prim little Pépinière, or the bird-thronged Zoölogical gardens, or around the lake in the central park, with a turn up the fashionable Rue Carnot to the stately boulevards of the new and exclusive Borgerhout section. At that hour one may count confidently upon seeing every uniform of the garrison among the crowds of officers who turn out to have a part in the beauty show. On the other hand, if it were early morning—very early morning—and the sun were still fighting its way through the mists and vapors of the Scheldt, the Place de Meir would resound with rattling little carts by the hundreds, bearing great milk cans of glittering, polished brass packed in straw, by whose sides patient, placid-faced women would trudge along in quaint thimble-bonnets, with plaid shawls crossed and belted above voluminous skirts and their feet set securely in the clumsy wooden sabots of the Fatherland. Market gardeners in linen smocks and gray worsted stockings would be bringing Antwerp its breakfast in carts only a little larger than the milk-women’s, and butcher boys would be scurrying by with meat trays on their heads or suspended from yokes across their shoulders. And all the echoes of the city would be forced into feverish activity to answer the wild clamor of the barking and fighting dogs, shaggy and strong, that draw all these picturesque little wagons. Assuredly there are few sights in Antwerp so impressive to the stranger as this substitution of dog for horse. It has been celebrated in prose and verse, with Ouida possibly carrying off the palm with her canine vie intime, “A Dog of Flanders.”