Dagonet Abroad

by George R. Sims

Enough of Antwerp. I tear myself away from Rubens and Quentin Matsys, from the silver chimes and the little carts drawn by the poor docile dogs; I blush and pass by the shop-window that exhibits ‘Borgia s’amuse,’ and I put my luggage on a fly and drive to the station. I arrive at Antwerp station half an hour before the train starts, and I consume five-and-twenty minutes of that spare time in a process peculiarly Continental, known as registering the baggage. At last I am allowed to pay a fabulous price for the carriage of my portmanteau. I enter the train and I start.

I had said to myself, said I, ‘I will go to Brussels. It is a hot day. There will be no one in the wide, clean streets. I will potter about the Galerie de la Reine; I will climb the Rue Montagne de la Cour, and I will sit on a ten centimes chair in the park, and watch the clean Brussels nurses and the pretty little Brussels babies. I love to contemplate innocence. It rests the jaded eye and improves the blasé mind. So to Brussels I went, and when I got out at the station I thought ‘Bedlam’ had broken loose. Thousands of men dressed in the usual fête-day costume of the ‘braves Belges'—all black—were promenading the streets with tickets stuck in their hats. In their hands they had flags and dolls and long trumpets and Japanese parasols. Shouting and singing and pouring through the streets in lines of twenty arm-in-arm, they carried all before them, and I had to dart into shops, to climb lamp-posts, and to crawl under the tables outside the cafés, or over and over again I should have been borne along by the mighty procession. Once I snatched at a flag and a Japanese umbrella, and thought it would be better to fall in and shout and sing; but I felt that an Englishman might recognise me, and my character would be gone for ever. So I went up a very narrow street, where there was only room for one person at a time, and hid in a doorway and waited till a policeman came by. Then I asked him what was the matter. He told me that to-day was the fifty-fourth anniversary of the National Independence, and all Belgium had gone mad and come to Brussels. That I should have chosen this of all days in the year! I am indeed the victim of a relentless fate—I mean ‘fête.’

In Brussels I went to the Wiertz Museum. Antoine Wiertz, the mad painter, the ‘eccentric genius’ who refused to sell his pictures and flung back to the ‘patrons of art’ their proffered gold at a time that he was almost starving, crying out that gold was the murderer of art, is slowly but surely earning the fame for which he pined during his lifetime. That Wiertz was mad I have not the slightest doubt, but his madness was that to which ‘great genius is oft allied,’ and the world owes much to its madmen. I would a million times rather be mad with Wiertz than sane with some of the gentlemen who cover the walls of the Academy with pictures of ‘Eliza, Wife of Jeremiah Snooks, Esq.,’ ‘A Soldier Buying a Baked Potato,’ ‘The Dying Cabman’s Farewell to his Badge,’ ‘Wandsworth Parish Pump by Moonlight,’ ‘A Roman Lady Taking an Eighteenpenny Bath,’ or ‘A Greek God Waiting for his Shirt to Come Home from the Wash.’

The story of the life of Wiertz, the mad painter of Brussels, is a romance which belongs to the heroic age. It is a romance which is as startling in these matter-of-fact and money-grubbing days as the Clitheroe case would have been in the days of Eros and Psyche.

Wiertz was born in 1806 in Dinant, on the banks of the Meuse, and he died in 1865 in Brussels. He wanted to be Rubens at fourteen, and he spent his life in trying to be Rubens. He began to paint in a granary, which was so low that as he grew he had to stoop in it to avoid hitting his head against the roof. He starved to paint, and he painted for a long time only to starve. He attracted attention at last, and then he was allowed to paint in empty factories and lofty unused warehouses, because these were the only places where he could put up the huge canvases he sought to cover. His picture of the Greeks and Trojans contending for the body of Patroclus is thirty feet high and twenty feet wide. It is his grandest work, and the one which will live on through the centuries. All through his life he endured the most terrible disappointments, but at last he secured a studio where he could carry out his gigantic ideas. The Government gave it him, and there in a side street in Brussels he lived and painted, and to-day his house and studio form the Wiertz Museum, and there you can see his life-work, for he was true to his convictions to the end, and sold nothing.

In his later years he gave the reins to his fiery, untamed imagination, and it reared up occasionally and eventually bolted with him. Some of the paintings which adorn the museum you would only expect to find in a lunatic asylum where they have had artists for patients. Many of them are madly horrible, and their horror is heightened by a method of arrangement which is only worthy of the murder department of a waxwork exhibition. And yet the genius of the man is sublime. A hundred years hence he will be world-famous. To-day, outside Belgium he is comparatively little known.

Next to his ‘Patroclus’ his finest works are ‘The Triumph of Christ,’ ‘The Revolt of Hell,’ and ‘The Forge of Vulcan.’ But for one person who goes to admire these magnificent creations, a hundred go to the museum to gaze on the horrible, the grotesque, and the fantastic specimens of his art. One of his pictures, ‘The Thoughts and Visions of a Severed Head,’ is enough to make a nervous man have a fit in the building. I have just read a story in a magazine which professes to be a true account of what a decapitated head saw. The author has probably seen Wiertz’s picture, and worked up the details in connection with hypnotism. The picture shows what the head of a guillotined man sees and thinks the first moment, the second moment, and the third moment after decapitation. It might with great propriety be called ‘The Nightmare of Jack the Ripper, after eating a whole cold sucking-pig for supper.’

You look through a peephole to see ‘Hunger, Madness, Crime,’ and you behold a remarkably realistic picture of a young mad mother cutting up her baby in order to have it for dinner. The bleeding body is in the mother’s lap; the foot and leg of the child are sticking out of the saucepan which is on the kitchen fire. I have a photograph of this picture hanging in my study now. Every time I look at it, portions of my hair, beard, and moustache turn white.

You look through another peephole, and see your own face, and, by a clever contrivance, all the rest of the picture is ‘Old Nick.’ Startled, you turn away, and you come upon a mad dog. He is tearing at his chain. You spring back, for you think it is a real dog. It is a madman’s trick, and is painted on the wall, and intended to frighten you. Near it is the picture of a gentleman who has been buried in cholera times. The interment has been ‘a little too previous,’ and you see a living man madly trying to get out of his coffin. But heavy coffins are on one half of his ‘casket,’ and amid the ghastly surroundings of the charnel-house you know he will have to die of slow starvation.

A Belgian lady struggling with a French soldier fires a revolver in his face. The face which you see is pleasantly described in the catalogue as ‘shattered into an indistinguishable mass of agony and horror.’ ‘The Orphans’ is an awful picture of a family of children fighting with the undertaker for their father’s corpse. They don’t want the strange man to take ‘papa’ from them. You turn away with a shudder, and your hair rises on end. A woman opposite you is dragging a shrieking blistered child from a cradle which has caught fire. The flesh seems to peel from the little body as the terrified woman drags it from the flaming bassinette. With your eyeballs starting from their sockets you shriek for somebody to give you an arm to lean on that you may totter out, and then you pause and burst into a roar of laughter. M. Wiertz has had a funny fit, and painted for you the wife who wished for a black-pudding, and the husband who wished that it might stick to the end of her nose.