Within this treasure-chest of a cathedral are jewels worthy of such a casket. One goes out of the glare of the afternoon sun into the coolness and scented gloom of its vaulted, many-aisled, and multi-chapeled vastness, and there in the hush of worshipers kneeling in prayer he finds splendid altars that gleam in a profusion of ornaments of silver, gold, and precious stones, glorious rose-windows, carven confessionals and choir stalls, life-like figures in wax clad in silks and crowned in gold, hundreds of masterful paintings, a high altar of extraordinary splendor blazing in costly decorations under a golden canopy supported by silver figures, and, at the centre of the seven aisles, Verbruggen’s far-famed carved wooden pulpit, realistic in lifelike foliage and birds, and with plump little cherubim floating aloft with the apparently fluttering canopy. As if this were not enough to distinguish any one church, here hang three of the most glorious creations of the hand of man, the masterpieces of Rubens himself. The Assumption alone could have sufficed; what is it, then, to have the tremendous glory of the presence of those greater achievements, The Elevation of the Cross and The Descent from the Cross! One feels he could easily do as did the hero of Gautier’s “Golden Fleece” and carry away forever after a hopeless passion for the beautiful, grief-stricken Magdalen.
The power and appeal of sheer beauty has perhaps never been exampled as in the case of this cathedral. Through all the sackings and pillages of Antwerp the savagery and destructiveness of her foes have stopped here. The most ruthless soldiery could not bring themselves to lay violent hands upon it. One exception stands out in this remarkable experience, and that one was quite sufficient. The fanatical “Iconoclasts,” frenzied against the Church of Rome, fell to a depth of abasement below the worst villains of Spain. Those atrocious, misguided “Iconoclasts”! What a frightful page in Antwerp’s history is the one that recounts the three days of horrors of these frantic and terrible zealots, three hundred and fifty years ago! Schiller, Motley, and Prescott have told the story as few stories have ever been told. In the calm of this afternoon it is impossible to conceive the uproar and confusion with which these lofty arches then resounded. Fancy a horde of men and boys, lighted by wax tapers in the hands of screaming women of the streets, demolishing the altars and rending and destroying every exquisite decoration and even tearing open the graves and scattering the bones of the dead. Says Motley: “Every statue was hurled from its niche, every picture torn from the wall, every wonderfully painted window shivered to atoms, every ancient monument shattered, every sculptured decoration, however inaccessible in appearance, hurled to the ground. Indefatigably, audaciously,—endowed, as it seemed, with preternatural strength and nimbleness,—these furious Iconoclasts clambered up the dizzy heights, shrieking and chattering like malignant apes, as they tore off in triumph the slowly matured fruit of centuries.”
Not the cathedral alone, but every Catholic temple of Antwerp, and four hundred others in Flanders, were sacked in this sudden revolt against the Papacy. It is said that King Philip, when he heard of it, fell into a paroxysm of frenzy and tore his beard for rage, swearing by the soul of his father that it should cost them dear. How dear it shortly did cost them, both the guilty and the innocent, we are shown in the picture Schiller has drawn of Calvinists’ bodies dangling from the beams of their roofless churches, of “the places of execution filled with corpses, the prisons with condemned victims, the highroads with fugitives.” Such was one of the extraordinary experiences through which this beautiful cathedral passed—one of the maddest, most senseless, and most frightfully punished outbreaks in all history.
In the company of the doves that nest among the pinnacles and arches away up in the cathedral tower, one looks out at this hour on a very considerable portion of the little kingdom—forty miles, they tell you, with a good glass, in any direction. It is a prospect well worth the weary climb. Just below, the tiled and gabled roofs rise and fall all about like a troubled sea. The crooked streets of the old section and the straight ones of the new, and the places and parks in verdant spaces here and there have the appearance of some vast topographical map. The gray Scheldt lies like a string of Ghent flax to Antwerp’s bent bow. A wrinkled arc of massive and intricate fortifications wards the rich city from its foes, and just beyond lie numerous tiny villages all with the exact primness of mathematical problems. An unusual country view is spread out on every hand. Canals, numerous as fences and dotted with boats and slowly-moving barges, sear the green fields like pale-blue scars; and white, dusty roads criss-cross with their solemn flanking of tall poplar trees. As if this region were the natural habitat of some strange and monstrous form of animal life, one beholds everywhere a semblance of motion and activity in the gaunt, waving, canvas arms of hundreds of plethoric windmills. Diminutive, trim farms, like little gardens, give the appearance of a general carpeting by Turkish rugs of vivid and diversified design; each has its whitewashed cottage roofed in thatch or tile and set in orchards hedged with box and hawthorn. Fields of corn, wheat, rye, and oats expand in well-kept richness, and in all this profusely cultivated region men, women, boys, and girls toil from the faintest dawn to sunset, and often all night by moonlight, content and even happy in the winning of enough to supply clothing and shelter and the unvarying fare of soup, coffee, and black rye bread. Seaward and northward lie sand dunes, dikes, and polders stretching away to the old morasses where the valiant Morini faced and stopped even Cæsar. Literary people will see in all this country the land of “Quentin Durward,” as that greatest story of Flanders comes to mind, and they will perhaps reflect upon the characteristics of the good burghers of those days, whom Sir Walter thought “fat and irritable,” and will see young Durward defying the ferocious “Wild Boar of Ardennes” in the perilous service of the fair Lady Isabelle, herself a Flemish countess.
To the northwest one sees the gleaming reaches of the Scheldt emptying themselves into the distant sea and, nearer at hand, solemn little Terneuzen where the ships turn into the canal for Ghent—Ghent, the “Manchester of Belgium,” where old Roland swings in his belfry and calls
“o’er lagoon and dike of sand,
‘I am Roland! I am Roland! There is victory in the land.’”
On the east rise the spires of Westmalle, where in their Trappist convent austere disciples of St. Bruno, garbed in sackcloth and with shaven heads, pass their voiceless lives and keep watch beside the open graves in the orchard. To the south is venerable Mechlin on the many-bridged river Dyle, once famous for such laces as we may still see in the pictures of its immortal son, Frans Hals. Brussels lifts its towers forty miles due south, and stretches its broad roads to Waterloo. And it is there the black forest of Ardennes expands, where St. Hubert, patron of hunters, intercedes for the health of good dogs, and which certain Shakespearean editors have fixed upon as the Forest of Arden of “As You Like It.” Over there lies Namur where the gallant Uncle Toby of “Tristram Shandy” received the painful wound deplored of the Widow Wadman, “before the Gate of St. Nicholas,” as the precise description always ran, “in one of the traverses of the trench, opposite to the salient angle of the demibastion of St. Roch.”
One lingers long and delightedly over this charming panorama of fascinating and storied associations, until presently the great clock beneath us booms the hour of three, and our time is up. We turn regretfully from this toyland country and the gracious, old-fashioned town—this placid, music-loving, art-reverencing Antwerp, with its many gables and its many rare delights. The friendly moon, a little later, will silver her huddled roofs and serrated fronts, her façades whose fantastic ends will be steps for White Pierrot to go up to his chimney-tops, her quiet squares and quaint, twisting alleys, her solid burgher mansions and vineclad waterman cottages. Serene and chaste, the delicate spire of the magic cathedral will rear its traceried, guardian length from out the deep shadows of little Place Verte and look down all night, with the affection of half a thousand years, on this quaint and merry Antwerp snuggling up to the languid Scheldt.
