Ghent must have been a city of indescribable beauty about the middle of the sixteenth century before its dark days began and one scourge after
A CANAL IN MALINES
another followed the Reformers with their combination of dull brutality, insane self-sufficiency, and savage fury of destruction. Even now the group of towers, St. Bavon, St. Nicholas, and the belfry with its “Great Bell Roland”—though the original spires are gone and the belfry has further suffered the indignity of an extinguisher cap of iron—gives some faint idea of what must have been before coal and iron came, first to destroy and then most hideously to re-create. So also does the towering old castle give a hint, whether you see it from the Place Ste. Pharailde or from the canal, with its great buttresses lifting out of the water; so does the unfinished but sumptuous Hôtel de Ville with its fretted bays and balconied turrets; so do the beautiful ruins of the ancient abbey shrouded in vines and trees. Life in a mediæval city such as this could have left little to be desired so far as beauty of environment was concerned, and when this contained within itself unspoliated, unrestored churches that were in use all the time and meant something besides a seventh-day respectability, and a great bell in a tall tower, around whose rim were the words, “My name is Roland. When I toll there is fire; when I ring there is victory in Flanders,” it is easy to see how men could and did paint such pictures as “The Adoration of the Lamb That Was Slain.”
This, with the other great pictures in Flanders, will be considered in another chapter. It is the central art-treasure of the cathedral, the pride of the Netherlands, and one of the wonders of painting of the world.
Past tragic Termonde—a name and a deed never to be forgotten so long as history endures—now only a desert of broken walls and a place of unquiet ghosts, the Scheldt goes down to Antwerp, the last of the inner circle of impotent defences of the eternal things that cannot resist, against the passing things that are omnipotent during their little day. In the sixteenth century it was the greatest and richest city in Europe; now, with its 400,000 inhabitants, it is double its former size but numerically counts for little beside the insane aggregations that call themselves cities and are the work of the last century of misdirected and evanescent energy. Its greatness culminated in 1550, and then came the sequence of catastrophes that reduced it to material insignificance for three hundred years, the Protestant Reformation, with its savage destruction in 1566 of churches and monasteries, and of what they stood for as well; the Spanish occupation, with Alva’s enormities in 1576, when the more industrious and able citizens were driven into England, and the city itself burned; the winning away by the Dutch of its old command of commerce; the closing of the river by the Peace of Westphalia, and finally the devastating storm of the French Revolution which destroyed pretty much of anything that had been left. By this time the population had fallen to 40,000, but under Napoleon a short-lived recovery began, which was brought to an end by the revolution of 1830, and it was not until the middle of the century that a more lasting development was initiated.
Antwerp is a good enough modern town, as these go, but its disasters have robbed it of all its ancient quality, and even the cathedral has the air of being out of place. Great as it is, it is not a masterpiece, or even an exemplar of its many Gothic variants at their best. Its unusual width and number of aisles, its great height and its forest of columns give a certain impressiveness and a very beautiful play of light and shade, while its single tower is quite wonderful in its slender grace and its intricate and delicate scaffolding. Its one famous picture is the over-praised “Descent from the Cross” of Rubens, painted while he was under Italian influence and therefore, if quite uncharacteristic, nobler and more self-contained than the products of his maturity when he had become wholly himself.
There are one or two other churches of fragmentary value, the unique museum made out of the old dwelling and printing-office of Christopher Plantin, with its stores of mediæval and Renaissance industrial art, and the Royal Museum where there are more admirable examples of the painting of Flanders, Brabant, and the Netherlands than are to be found gathered together in any other one place. For critical, or in a limited way, artistic study, this hoarding together, cheek by jowl, of innumerable works of art collected from desecrated churches and ruined monasteries, has its uses, but no one of the pictures torn from its original and intended surroundings tells for its full value. One wonders sometimes whether a daily newspaper, a school of fine arts, or a picture-gallery is the most biting indictment of contemporary culture and artistic sense; certainly whatever the answer, the picture-gallery presents powerful claims that are not lightly to be disregarded.