It Is Necessary, However, To Conclude This
Section, To Say A Few Words About Louvain, Which, Lying As It Does
On The Main Route From Brussels To Liege, May Naturally Be
Considered On Our Way To The Northern Ardennes.
Louvain, on the whole, has been much more modernized than other
Belgian cities of corresponding bulk, such as Bruges or Malines.
The road from the railway-station to the centre of the town is
commonplace indeed in its lack of picturesque Flemish house-fronts
or stepped, "corbie," Flemish gables.
Louvain, in fact, unlike the
two "dead" cities of West Flanders and Brabant, wears a briskly
business-like aspect, and pulses with modern life. I suppose that
I ought properly to have written all this in the past tense, for
Louvain is now a heap of smoking cinders. The famous Town Hall
has, indeed, so far been spared by ruffians who would better have
spared the magnificent Cloth Hall at Ypres; between these two
great buildings, the products respectively of the Belgian genius
of the fifteenth and thirteenth centuries, "culture" could hardly
hesitate. The Hotel-de-Ville at Louvain is, indeed, an astonishing
structure, just as the cathedral at Antwerp is astonishing; but
one has to be very indulgent, or very forgetful of better models,
not to deprecate this absolutely wanton riot of overladened
panelling and bulging, top-heavy pinnacles. The expiring throes of
Belgian Gothic were a thousand degrees less chaste than the
classicism of the early Renaissance: few, perhaps, will prefer the
lacelike over-richness of this midfifteenth century town hall at
Louvain to the restraint of the charming sixteenth-century facade
of the Hotel de Ville at Leiden. Opposite the town hall is the
huge fifteenth-century church of St. Pierre, the interior of
which, still smothered in whitewash in 1910, was remarkable for
its florid Gothic rood-screen and soaring Tabernacle, or Ciborium.
The stumpy fragment of tower at the west end is said once to have
been five hundred and thirty feet high! It is not surprising to
read that this last, and crowning, manifestation of a familiar
Belgian weakness was largely wrecked by a hurricane in 1604.
IV.
One has left oneself all too little space to say what ought to be
said of the Belgian Ardennes. Personally I find them a trifle
disappointing; they come, no doubt, as a welcome relief after the
rest of Belgian landscape, which I have heard described, not
altogether unjustly, as the ugliest in the world; but the true
glory and value of Belgium will always be discovered in its
marvellously picturesque old towns, and in its unrivalled wealth
of painting, brass-work, and wood-carving. Compared with these
last splendours the low, wooded wolds of the Ardennes, with their
narrow limestone valleys, seem a little thing indeed. Dinant, no
doubt, and Rochefort would be pleasant places enough if one were
not always harking back in memory to Malines and Ypres, or longing
to be once more in Ghent or Bruges.
The traveller by railway between Brussels and Liege passes, soon
after leaving the station of Ans, a point of great significance in
the study of Belgian landscape. Hitherto from Brussels, or for
that matter from Bruges and Ostend, the country, though studded at
frequent intervals with cities and big towns, has been curiously
and intensely rural in the tracts that lie between; but now, as we
descend the steep incline into the valley of the Meuse, we enter
on a scene of industrial activity which, if never quite as bad as
our own Black Country at home, is sufficiently spoilt and
irritating to all who love rustic grace. The redeeming point, as
always, is that infinitely superior good taste which presents us,
in the midst of coal-mines and desolation, not with our own
unspeakably squalid Sheffields or Rotherhams, but with a queenly
city, with broad and handsome streets, with a wealth of public
gardens, and with many stately remnants of the Renaissance and
Middle Time. It is possible in Liege to forget - or rather
impossible to recall - the soiled and grimy country that stretches
from its gates in the direction of Seraing. Even under the sway of
the Spanish tyranny this was an independent state under the rule
of a Bishop Prince, who was also an Elector of the Holy Roman
Empire. Its original cathedral, indeed, has vanished, like those
at Cambrai and Bruges, in the insensate throes of the French
Revolution; and the existing church of St. Paul, though dating in
part from the thirteenth century, and a fine enough building in
its way, is hardly the kind of structure that one would wish to
associate with the seat of a bishopric that is still so historic,
and was formerly so important and even quasi-regal. Here, however,
you should notice, just as in the great neighbour church of St.
Jacques, the remarkable arabesque-pattern painting of the
severies of the vault, and the splendour of the sixteenth-century
glass. St. Jacques, I think, on the whole is the finer church of
the two, and remarkable for the florid ornament of its spandrels,
and for the elaborate, pendent cusping of the soffits of its
arches - features that lend it an almost barbaric magnificence that
reminds one of Rosslyn Chapel. Liege, built as it is exactly on
the edge of the Ardennes, is far the most finely situated of any
great city in Belgium. To appreciate this properly you should not
fail to climb the long flight of steps - in effect they seem
interminable, but they are really about six hundred - that mounts
endlessly from near the Cellular Prison to a point by the side of
the Citadelle Pierreuse. Looking down hence on the city,
especially under certain atmospheric conditions - I am thinking of
a showery day at Easter - one is reminded of the lines by poor John
Davidson:
"The adventurous sun took Heaven by storm;
Clouds scattered largesses of rain;
The sounding cities, rich and warm,
Smouldered and glittered in the plain."
It is not often that one is privileged to look down so directly,
and from so commanding a natural height, on to so vast and busy a
city - those who like this kind of comparison have styled it the
Belgian Birmingham - lying unrolled so immediately, like a map,
beneath our feet.
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