About Tastes There Is No Disputing;
And There Are People, No Doubt, Who, For Some Odd Reason, Find
This Kind Of Aggressive Modernity In Some Way More Attractive In
Belgium Than In Kent.
For myself, I confess, it hardly seems worth
while to incur the penalty of sea-sickness merely to play golf on
the ruined shore of Flanders.
III.
Of Brussels I do not propose to say very much, because Brussels,
although the brightest and gayest town in Belgium, and although
retaining in its Grande Place, and in the buildings that
immediately surround this last, as well as in its great church of
St. Gudule (which, in spite of popular usage, is not, and never
was, in the proper sense a cathedral), relics of antiquity of the
very highest value and interest, yet Brussels, as a whole, is so
distinctively a modern, and even cosmopolitan city, and has so
much general resemblance to Paris (though its site is far more
picturesque, and though the place, to my mind at least, just
because it is smaller and more easily comprehensible, is a much
more agreeable spot to stay in), that it seems better in a sketch
that is principally devoted to what is old and nationally
characteristic in Belgium to give what limited space one has to a
consideration rather of towns like Louvain or Malines, in which
the special Belgian flavour is not wholly overwhelmed by false and
extraneous influences. St. Gudule, of course, should certainly be
visited, not only for the sake of the general fabric, which,
notwithstanding its possession of TWO west towers, is typically
Belgian in its general character, but also for the sake of its
magnificent sixteenth and seventeenth century glass, and
especially for the sake of the five great windows in the Chapelle
du Saint Sacrement, which illustrate in a blaze of gorgeous colour
the story of how Jonathan the Jew bribed Jeanne de Louvain to
steal the three Consecrated Wafers, from which oozed, when
sacrilegiously stabbed by the sceptical Jew, the Sacred Blood of a
world's redemption.
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