All The Places Enumerated Are Thoroughly Worth Visiting, But Obviously Only The More Important Can Be Dealt With More Than Just Casually Here.

Mons, on a hill overlooking the great coalfield of the Borinage, with its strange pyramidal spoil-heaps, is itself

Curiously free from the dirt and squalor of an English colliery town; and equally worth visiting for the sake of its splendid cathedral of St. Wandru, the richly polychromatic effect of whose interior, due to the conjunction of deep red-brick vaulting with the dark blue of its limestone capitals and piers, illustrates another pleasant phase of Belgian ecclesiastical architecture, as well as for the sake of a contest, almost of yesterday, that has added new and immortal laurels to the genius of British battle. Tournai, on the upper Scheldt, or Escaut, is remarkable for the heavy Romanesque nave of its cathedral, which is built of the famous local black marble, as well as for its remarkable central cluster of five great towers. Soignies (in Flemish Zirick), roughly half-way between Mons and Brussels, and probably little visited, has a sombre old abbey church, of St. Vincent Maldegaire, that was built in the twelfth century, and that is enriched inside with such a collection of splendidly carved classical woodwork - stalls, misericordes, and pulpit - as you will scarcely find elsewhere even in Belgium. The pulpit in particular is wonderful, with its life-sized girl supporters, with their graceful and lightly poised figures, and pure and lovely faces. Namur, strangely enough, has really nothing of antiquity outside the doors of its Archaeological Museum, but is worth a visit if only for the pleasure of promenading streets which, if almost wholly modern, are unusually clean and bright. Tirlemont, again, has two old churches that will not delay you long, though Notre Dame de Lac has remarkably fine confessionals of the dawn of the seventeenth century, and though the splendid brass-work of the font and baptistery lectern at St. Germains would alone be worth a visit; but Leau, for which Tirlemont is the junction, is so quaint and curious a little town, and comes so much in the guise of a pleasant discovery - since Baedeker barely mentions it - that, even apart from its perfect wealth of wood and brass work in the fine thirteenth-century church of St. Leonhard, it might anyhow be thought to justify a visit to this little visited corner of South Brabant. I do not know that the brass-work could be easily matched elsewhere: the huge standard candelabrum to the north of the altar, with its crowning Crucifixion; the lectern, with its triumphant eagle and prostrate dragon; the font, with its cover, and the holy-water stoup almost as big as a small font (in Brittany I have seen them as big as a bath); and the beautiful brass railings that surround the splendid Tabernacle that was executed in 1552 by Cornelius de Vriendt, the brother of the painter Frans Floris, and that towers high into the vaulting to a height of fifty-two feet. One realizes more completely in a quiet village church like this the breadth and intensity of the wave of artistic impulse that swept through the Lowlands in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries than is possible in half a dozen hurried visits to a picture gallery at Antwerp or Brussels. Finally Hal, to conclude our list of minor places, has a grand fourteenth- century church, with a miracle-working Virgin, and a little red- brick town hall of characteristically picturesque aspect.

The railway journey from Brussels to Antwerp traverses a typical bit of Belgian landscape that is as flat as a pancake; and the monotony is only relieved, first by the little town of Vilvoorde, where William Tyndale was burnt at the stake on October 6, 1536, though not alive, having first been mercifully strangled, and afterwards by the single, huge, square tower of Malines (or Mechlin) Cathedral, which dominates the plain from enormous distances, like the towers of Ely or Lincoln, though not, like these last, by virtue of position on a hill, but solely by its own vast height and overwhelming massiveness. Malines, though certainly containing fewer objects of particular interest than Bruges, and though certainly on the whole a less beautiful city, strikes one as hardly less dead-and-alive, and altogether may fairly claim second place among the larger Belgian cities (it houses more than fifty thousand souls) in point of mediaeval character. The great thirteenth and fourteenth century cathedral of St. Rombaut has been the seat of an archbishopric since the sixteenth century, and is still the metropolitan church of Belgium. Externally the body, like the market-hall at Bruges, is almost entirely crushed into insignificance by the utterly disproportionate height and bulk of the huge west tower, the top of which, even in its present unfinished state (one almost hopes that it may never be finished), is actually three hundred and twenty-four feet high. Boston "Stump" is only two hundred and eighty feet to the top of the weather vane, but infinitely slimmer in proportion; whilst even Salisbury spire is only about four hundred odd feet. Immediately below the parapet is the enormous skeleton clock-face, the proportions of which are reproduced on the pavement of the market-place below. The carillons in this tower are an extravagant example of the Belgian passion for chiming bells. Once safely inside the church, and the monster tower forgotten, and we are able to admire its delicate internal proportions, and the remarkable ornament of the spandrels in the great main arcades of the choir. Unfortunately, much of this interior, like that of St. Pierre at Louvain, is smothered under half an inch of plaster; but where this has been removed in tentative patches, revealing the dark blue "drums" of the single, circular columns of the arcades, the general effect is immensely improved. One would also like to send to the scrap-heap the enormous seventeenth-century figures of the Apostles on their consoles on the piers, which form so bad a disfigurement in the nave.

Enter page number Go  Previous Next
Page 8 of 12
Words from 7365 to 8381 of 12374