Each Of These Vast Levels Is Equally Distinguished
By The Splendour And Conspicuousness Of Its Ancient Churches.
Travelling By Railway
Between Nieuport and Dixmude, you have on
every side of you, if the day be clear, a prospect of innumerable
Towers and spires, just as you have if you travel by railway
between Spalding and Sleaford, or between Spalding and King's
Lynn. The difference, perhaps, is that the Lincolnshire churches
present finer architectural feature, and are built of stone,
floated down in barges, by dyke or fen, from the famous inland
quarries of Barnack, in Northamptonshire; whilst most of those in
Flanders are built of local brick, though the drums of the piers
and the arches are often of blue limestone. It is remarkable,
certainly, that these soaring spires should thus chiefly rise to
eminence in a setting of dead, flat plain. It may well be, indeed,
as some have suggested, that the character of architecture is
unconsciously determined by the type of surrounding scenery; that
men do not build spires in the midst of mountains to compete with
natural sublimity that they cannot hope to emulate, but are
emboldened to express in stone and mortar their own heavenward
aspirations in countries where Nature seems to express herself in
less spiritual, or at any rate in less ambitious, mood.
As we cross the level prairie between these two little towns of
West Flanders (we hope to visit them presently), a group of lofty
roofs and towers is seen grandly towards the west, dominating the
fenland with hardly less insistency than Boston "Stump," in
Lincolnshire, as seen across Wash and fen. This is the little town
of Furnes, than which one can hardly imagine a quainter place in
Belgium, or one more entirely fitted as a doorway by which to
enter a new land. Coming straight from England by way of Calais
and Dunkirk, the first sight of this ancient Flemish market-place,
with its unbroken lines of old white-brick houses, many of which
have crow-stepped gables; with the two great churches of St.
Nicholas, with its huge square tower, and of St. Walburge, with
its long ridge of lofty roof; and with its Hotel de Ville and
Palais de Justice of about the dawn of the seventeenth century, is
a revelation, in its atmosphere of sleepy evening quiet, to those
who rub their eyes with wonder, and find it hard to credit that
London, "with its unutterable, external hideousness," was actually
left behind them only that very morning, and is actually at
present not two hundred miles distant. Furnes, in short, is an
epitome, and I think a very charming one, of all that is most
characteristic in Flanders; and not the less charming because here
the strong currents of modern life that throb through Ghent and
Antwerp extend only to its threshold in the faintest of dying
ripples, and because you do not need to be told that in its town
hall may still be seen hangings of old Spanish leather, and that
the members of the Inquisition used to meet in the ante-chamber of
the first floor of its Palais de Justice, in order to throw
yourself back in memory to those old days of Lowland greatness
from whose struggles Holland emerged victorious, but into which
Belgium, for the time, sank back oppressed.
Furnes - in Flemish Veurne - is an excellent centre from which to
explore the extreme west point of Belgian Flanders, which is also
the extreme west point of Belgium as a whole. Flanders, be it
always remembered, does not terminate with mere, present-day,
political divisions, but spreads with unbroken character to the
very gateways of Calais and Lille. Hazebrouck, for example, is a
thoroughly Flemish town, though nearly ten miles, in a beeline,
inside the French border - Flemish not merely, like Dunkirk, in the
architecture of its great brick church, but also actually Flemish
in language, and in the names that one reads above its shop doors.
In particular, excursions may be pleasantly made from Furnes -
whose principal inn, the Noble Rose, is again a quaint relic of
the sixteenth century - to the two delightful little market-towns
of Dixmude and Nieuport-Ville: I write, as always, of what was
recently, and of what I have seen myself; to-day they are probably
heaps of smoking ruin, and sanguinary altars to German "kultur."
Nieuport-Ville, so called in distinction from its dull little
watering-place understudy, Nieuport-les-Bains, which lies a couple
of miles to the west of it, among the sand-dunes by the mouth of
the Yser, and is hardly worth a visit unless you want to bathe -
Nieuport-Ville, in addition to its old yellow-brick Halles, or
Cloth Hall, and its early Tour des Templiers, is remarkable for
its possession of a fascinating church, the recent restoration of
which has been altogether conservative and admirable. Standing
here, in this rich and picturesque interior, you realize strongly
the gulf in this direction between Belgium and France, in which
latter country, in these days of ecclesiastical poverty, loving
restoration of the kind here seen is rare, and whose often
neglected village churches seldom, or never, exhibit that wealth
of marble rood-screen and sculptured woodwork - of beaten brass
and hammered iron - that distinguishes Belgian church interiors
from perhaps all others on earth. The church has also some highly
important brasses, another detail, common of course in most
counties of England, that is now never, or hardly ever, found in
France. Chief, perhaps, among these is the curious, circular brass
- I hope it has escaped - with figures of husband, wife, and
children, on a magnificently worked background, that is now
suspended on the northwest pier of the central crossing. Very
Belgian, too, in character is the rood-beam, with its three
figures of Our Lord in Crucifixion, of the Virgin, and of St.
John; and the striking Renaissance rood-screen in black and white
marble, though not as fine as some that are found in other
churches.
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