ANTWERP

2 P.M. TO 3 P.M.

A tablein the lively little Café de la Terrasse, up on the broad stonepromenoiroverhanging the Antwerp docks, is one place in a thousand for the man who is inclined toward any such unusual combination as a maximum of twentieth-century business activity in a setting of the Middle Ages. He is fortunate in locality and happy in surroundings. A Parisian waiter removes the remains of his light luncheon of a salad of Belgian greens fresh this morning from a trim truck garden beyond the ramparts, refills the thin tumbler to the taste of the guest with foaming local Orge or light Brussels Faro or the bitter product of Ghent or the flat, insipid stuff they boast about at Louvain, and supplies a light for an excellent cigar made here in Antwerp of the best growth of Havana. Supposing it to be two o’clock of the usual mottled, doubtful afternoon,—for Antwerp’s weather, like Antwerp’s history, is mingled sunshine and shadows,—the loiterer may look out at his ease on a notable and fascinating panorama. Beneath him and to either side extend miles of massive docks of ponderous masonry, upon and about which swarms an ant-like multitude of nimble and active longshoremen plyinga network of ropes and tackle, and directing the labors of vast, writhing derricks that toil like a mechanical Israel in bondage. Snuggling close to the grim granite walls are merchant mammoths from the ends of the earth, and into these, with the ease of a man stooping for a pin, gigantic steel arms sweep tons of casks and bales that they have lightly plucked out of long wharf trains lying alongside. There is a prodigious bustling of porters in long blue blouses, shouts and cries from the riverful of shipping, trampling of thousands of hobnailed shoes, and an incessant clatter of the wooden sabots of little Antwerp boys in peaked caps and baggy blue trousers and of little Antwerp girls in bright skirts and curious white headdress.

This sort of thing is proceeding for miles up and down the river front, and all through the intricate series of locks andbassinsand canals that quadruple the wharfage of this rejuvenated old Flemish city. They are receiving whole argosies of raw material in the shape of hides, tobacco, and textiles, and are sending away fortunes in cut diamonds, delicate laces, linens, beer, sugar, and innumerable clever products of human hands from fragile glass to ponderous machinery. And they do it with more ease and, it seems necessary to add, with less profanity than any other port of Europe. What, then, could have possessed the genial Eugene Field to pass along that ancient slander on the excellent burghers of Flanders?

“At any rate, as I grieve to state,Since these soldiers vented their danders,Conjectures obtain that for language profane,There is no such place as Flanders.This is the kind of talk you’ll findIf ever you go to Flanders.”

“At any rate, as I grieve to state,Since these soldiers vented their danders,Conjectures obtain that for language profane,There is no such place as Flanders.

“At any rate, as I grieve to state,

Since these soldiers vented their danders,

Conjectures obtain that for language profane,

There is no such place as Flanders.

This is the kind of talk you’ll findIf ever you go to Flanders.”

This is the kind of talk you’ll find

If ever you go to Flanders.”

While I should not wish to take such extreme ground as that assumed, in another connection, by a New York police inspector, when he observed that “every one of them facts has been verified to be absolutely untrue,” still I must say that, as far as I could notice, there is nothing notable about the Flemish oath as employed to-day. Indeed, it is more than likely that one could pass a long and pleasant evening loitering among thetavernesand recreation haunts of the Belgian soldier and civilian and come across nothing more vocally spirited than robust guffaws, possibly punctuated discreetly, or heavy fists thundering the time as a couple of comrades scrape over the sanded floor in the contagious rhythm of that venerable and favorite waltz of the Netherlands,—

“Rosa, willen wy dansen?Danst Rosa; danst Rosa.Rosa, willen wy dansen?Danst Rosa zoet!”

“Rosa, willen wy dansen?

Danst Rosa; danst Rosa.

Rosa, willen wy dansen?

Danst Rosa zoet!”

On the other hand, if, with this much of an excuse, a stranger should go exploring Antwerp between two andthree o’clock in quest of “verkoop men dranken” signs, he would be quite otherwise repaid in the discovery of charming huddled and crooked streets and a wealth of architectural quaintness and beauty. He would have no difficulty in findingtavernesand drinking-places, particularly along the river front, where they abound. As he passed them he would encounter robust whiffs of acrid and penetrating odors with tar and fish in the ascendancy, and catch glimpses of a wooden-shod peasantry fraternizing with evil-eyed “water-rats” and devouring vast quantities of salmon and sauerkraut washed down with ale and white beer. There is no charge now, as once there was, for noise made by patrons. The silk-fingered gentry overreached themselves here, for when, a number of years ago, they had carried the robbing of foreign sailors to the point of international notoriety, the authorities took a hand and devised a system of payment for Jack ashore; then the American and English ministers and consuls established and made popular the Sailors’ Bethel on the quay, with its clean and attractive reading- and amusement-rooms, and the Sailors’ Home on Canal de l’Ancre, where, for fifty-five cents a day, Jack can have a neat little room to himself and four excellent meals in the bargain. For these reasons among others, a visitor, even by night, finds much less of noise and revelry than he had anticipated, and beholds the thirsty Antwerpian content himself with a final “nip” at anestaminetor even make shift of a “nightcap”of mineral water or black coffee at one or another of the city’s innumerable cafés. In these he will himself be welcome to read the news of the day in the columns of “Le Précurseur” or “De Nieuwe Gazet,” or, better still, in the venerable “Gazet van Gent,” one of the oldest of existing newspapers, with nearly two hundred and fifty years of publication behind it. The real drinking will have been in progress where the out-of-town people have been diningà prix fixe, and clinking their burgundy and claret glasses at the great hotels on the Quai Van Dyck, the Place de Meir, or the Place Verte. The palm should really go to the amusement seekers of the latter little square; for nothing this side the capacity of an archery club at a July kermess can compare with the thirst of the music lovers who throng the tables on the sidewalks before the restaurants and cafés of jolly Place Verte when the band is playing, on balmy summer evenings. Instead of dissipation, the man who explores Antwerp makes constant discovery of unanticipated delights. He observes about him in the surprising little streets of the old section an amazing collection of absurd roofs slanting steeply up for several stories, pierced with owl-like, staring, round windows; house fronts by the hundreds with denticulated gables stepping upward like staircases toward the sky; and pots of flowers and immaculate muslin curtains in tiny doll-house windows peering out from the most unexpected and impossible places away up among the eavesand chimneys. He will catch an occasional glimpse of massive old four-poster beds with green curtains and yellow lace valances; of shining oak chests, and high-back chairs, and brown dining-rooms wainscoted in polished oak and most inviting with ponderous side-boards set with Delft platters and gleaming copper and pewter pieces. From time to time he will see large, cool living-rooms in which the father enjoys his paper and meerschaum pipe, while the placid-faced mother employs herself with lace or embroidery and the fair-haired daughter at the piano tells how

“Ik zag Cecilia komenLangs eenen waterkant,Ik zag Cecilia komenMit bloemen in haer hand.”

“Ik zag Cecilia komen

Langs eenen waterkant,

Ik zag Cecilia komen

Mit bloemen in haer hand.”

As I previously observed, there is no better place for a preliminary impression of Antwerp than along the docks. There one acquires some adequate idea of the amazing extent of its industrial operations and enjoys, at the same time, an extraordinary panorama of a river choked with shipping in the immediate foreground, and, on the opposite bank, the sombre redoubts of Tête de Flandre and Fort Isabelle keeping watch and ward over the flat little farms that extend seaward in fields of pale-green corn and barley. For any one who has done the proper amount of preparatory reading on Antwerp, it will inspire stirring thoughts of the musical, artistic, and martial career of this rare old Flemish town.

If the visitor be a lover of music—of Wagner’s music—the surrounding uproar and confusion will shortly fade into a charming reverie as he gazes far down the glittering zigzag of the Scheldt and some distant glimmer will take the form of the swan-boat of Lohengrin with the Grail knight leaning on his shining shield. The docks and quays will have disappeared, and in their place will once more lie the old low meadows, and, under the Oak of Justice, King Henry the Fowler will take seat on his throne with the nobles of Brabant ranged about him. Fair Elsa, charged with fratricide, moves slowly forward, sustained by her dream of a champion who is to come to her defense; and the heralds pace off the lists and appeal to the four quarters in the sonorous chant,—

“Wer hier im Gotteskampf zu streiten kamFür Elsa von Brabant, der trete vor.”

“Wer hier im Gotteskampf zu streiten kam

Für Elsa von Brabant, der trete vor.”

And suddenly the peasants by the water’s edge cry out in amazement and point down the reaches of the river, and there comes glittering Lohengrin in the “shining armor” of Elsa’s dream. The champion steps ashore and gives no heed to the awe-hushed company until he has sung to his feathered steed what now every child in Germany could sing with him, “Nun sei bedankt, mein lieber Schwan.” And then the contest rages and the false Frederick falls, and the royal cortège retires to the neighboring old fortress of the Steen. Allnight the treacherous Ortrud and her defeated Frederick plot by the steps of yonder cathedral, and there, in the morning, Lohengrin weds Elsa and the immortal Wedding March welcomes the “faithful and true” back to their fortress home. The black night of mistrust and carnage follows, and when day dawns Lohengrin bids farewell to his suspicious bride in these green Scheldt meadows and sails sadly away in his resplendent boat drawn by the dove of the Grail.

On the other hand, if the visitor has a mind for history, he may scorn the pretty Grail story and look with stern eyes on this Scheldt and the battle-scarred city beside it, mindful of the deeds of blood and fire that fill the hypnotic pages of Schiller, Prescott, and Motley. The monk of St. Gall could have appropriately dedicated to the war-ravaged Antwerp of those days his solemn antiphonal “media vita in morte sumus.” The grim, turreted Steen, just at hand, recalls the bloody reign of Alva and how he condemned a whole people to death in an order of three lines. In its present rôle of museum it houses hundreds of implements of torture that once were drenched in the blood of the heroic burghers of Antwerp. Not all the horrors of the “Spanish Fury,” when eight thousand citizens of this town were butchered in three days, nor the stirring memory of the “French Fury,” with Antwerp triumphant, can dim the glory of the heroic resistance the “Sea Beggars” made to the advance of the Duke of Parma up the Scheldt.

ANTWERP, FROM THE SCHELDT

From the cathedral tower one may see the little towns of Calloo and Oordam, on either bank of the river; it was between them that Parma built his bridge to obstruct navigation, and against it the men of Antwerp sent their famous fire-ships to open up a passage for the Zeelander allies. Gianibelli, who devised them, and whom Schiller styled “the Archimedes of Antwerp,” builded better than he knew, for with one ship he destroyed a thousand Spaniards and heaped up their defenses into a labyrinth of ruin. Could Antwerp have risen then above the clash of factions, there would have been no need later to tear down the dikes and present the strange spectacle of ships sailing over the land, and their story might have been as triumphant as Holland’s, and a united Netherlands have issued from those long wars with Spain.

Here where the visitor takes his afternoon ease many a brave pageant foregathered in the troubled, olden days. In the magic pages of old Van Meteren’s chronicles we see them pass again: Cold, gloomy, treacherous Philip stepping from his golden barge to walk under triumphal arches on a carpet of strewn roses, surrounded by magistrates and burghers splendid in ruffs and cramoisy velvet; later on, the Regent, Margaret of Parma, strident and gouty, whom Prescott has called “a man in petticoats”; and then the bloodthirsty Alva; then the dashing “Sword of Lepanto,” the brilliant and romantic Don John of Austria; next, the atrociousRequesens; and, last of all, the revengeful Alexander of Parma. Hopeful, stolid, impassive Antwerp, ever the sheep for the shearers, ever believing that at last the worst was over, rejoices in her welcome to each as though the millennium had finally dawned on all her troubles and sets cressets to blazing in the cathedral tower and roasts whole oxen in the public squares.

The scream of a river siren will arouse the visitor from the Past to the Present, and, with a sigh, he will saunter forth to see the places that cannot come to him. He will leave with regret this busy, fascinating river—“the lazy Scheldt” that Goldsmith loved. Excited little tugs are bustling busily about, queer-coated dock-hands struggle mightily with their mammoth burdens, and ships of every shape and pattern throng the roadstead before him. The sharp and trim Yankee sloop, the ponderous German tramp, the fastidious British freighter, the clean-cut ocean liner, and, best of all, the round-sterned, wallowing Dutch craft, green of hull and yellow of sail,—all are here, and, he can think, for his especial diversion. A canal barge crawls laboriously by, and in that floating home which she seldom cares to leave, a much-be-petticoated mother of Flanders busies herself with her many children and looks after the care of her tiny house;—and looks after it well, as you may see by the spotless little curtains that flutter in the windows and the bright pots of geraniums that stand on the sills. One recalls the keen delight thissingular craft afforded Robert Louis Stevenson at the time he made his charming “Inland Voyage” from Antwerp. Quoth he: “Of all the creatures of commercial enterprise, a canal barge is by far the most delightful to consider. It may spread its sails, and then you see it sailing high above the tree-tops and the windmill, sailing on the aqueduct, sailing through the green corn-lands; the most picturesque of things amphibious.... There should be many contented spirits on board, for such a life is both to travel and to stay at home.”

Along the front there is also opportunity to expend a couple of francs to advantage for a ticket on the comfortable little steamer that is just impatiently casting off from theembarcadère, and to go sailing with her on an hour’s voyage up the river to Tamise to view the shipping at greater length, to see the merchants’ villas at Hoboken, and finally the famous picture of the Holy Family at the journey’s end. Otherwise the visitor may take a parting look up the Quay van Dyck and the Quay Jordaens, examine once more the striking Porte de l’Escaut that Rubens decorated, and so turn a reluctant back on the bright life of the river to thread a crooked street or two, cobbled and tortuous, and issue forth on the Grand Place before the immense, fantastic Hôtel de Ville.

In the drowsy early afternoon this quaint and curious old city hall wears a most friendly and reposeful air. To one who has never before seen any of these extraordinaryOld-World buildings such a one as this will move such incredulity as mastered the countryman at the first sight of a giraffe;—“Shucks!” said he when he had looked it all over, “there never was such an animal!” Fancy a rambling, picture-book of a structure a hundred yards long, made up of the oddest combination of architectural orders—massive pillars for the first story, Doric arcades for the second, Ionic for the third, and last of all, an abbreviated colonnade supporting a steep, tent-like, gable-pierced roof! As though some touch of the whimsical might even so have been neglected, behold a pompous central tower, decorated to suffocation, arched of window and graven of column, rearing itself in three diminishing, denticulated stories above the long, sloping roof, until the singular, box-like ornaments on the very tiptop appear tiny Greek tombs of a cloud-hung Acropolis. The statues of Wisdom and Justice could pass for Æschylus and Sophocles, and the Holy Virgin on the summit might very well be Athena. The friendly air to which I have referred extends even to these statues, who have the appearance of shouting down to you to come in out of the heat and have a look at the great stairway of colored marbles and rest awhile before the splendid chimney-piece of delicately carved black-and-white stone in the elaborate Salle des Mariages. Subtle matchmakers, those statues! And, indeed, if Antwerp is the first steamer-stop of the visitor, he may well be pardoned for reveling in thisHôtel de Ville as something that for picturesque beauty he may not hope to better elsewhere. And yet that would only be because he had not seen the glorious one at Brussels, or the grim and huddled caprice at Mechlin, or the incredible Halle aux Draps at Ypres, or the amazing Rabot Gate or Watermen’s Guild House of Ghent. And even these will fall back into the commonplace once he has drifted along the Quai du Rosaire of drowsy old Bruges and been steeped in picturesqueness and color that is beyond any man’s describing.

No one who cares for structural quaintness and originality can fail to find especial delight in the surroundings of this venerable Grand Place. Along one entire side, like prize competitors in an architectural fancy ball, shoulder to shoulder, stiff and precise, range the old Halls of the Guilds. The Archers, the Coopers, the Tailors, the Carpenters, and all the others of that most unusual alignment, present themselves in full regalia of characteristic ornament and design. As though in keeping with their ancient traditions of stout rivalry, there is a very real air of vying between themselves for some coveted palm for fantastic bizarreness; and all the while with a solemn innocence of being at all grotesque or unusual. One could laugh at their naïve unconsciousness of the prodigious show they make, with sculptures and adornments of bygone days and a combined violent sky-line slashed with long eaves and bitten out in serrated gable ends. But there is little of merrimentand very much of reverence in the thoughts they excite of worthy pride in skill of craftsmanship and the glory their masters brought to this city in the sixteenth century in winning from Venice the industrial supremacy of the world. In those days there were no poor in all Antwerp and every child could read and write at least two languages, and the Counts of Flanders were more powerful than half the kings of Europe.

But the Grand Place has more to show than the guild halls. The apogee of the whimsical and fantastic has been attained in the choppy sea of red-tiled roof-tops that eddies above this huddled neighborhood. Grim old dormered veterans, queer and chimerical, palsied and askew, have here held their own stoutly through the centuries. They have echoed back the shouts of the crusaders, the triumphal cannon of Spanish royalty, and the free-hearted welcomes to foreign princes come to curry favor with the Flemish merchant rulers of the world. They have turned gray with the groans of their nobles writhing under the Inquisition and rosy with approval of the adroit and courageous William of Nassau. From their antique windows have leaned the burgomasters of Rubens and the cavaliers of Velasquez, brave in ruffs and beards; and out of the most hidden nests of their eaves the wan and pallid faces of their hunted sons have been raised to watch the approach of the ruthless soldiery of Requesens and Parma. These old roofs look down to-day on a rich and happy peoplewhose skill and tireless industry have reared a commercial fabric that astonishes the world.

At this afternoon hour the Grand Place betrays little of its early-morning activity, when it is thronged with the overflowing stands of busy marketmen in baggy trousers, and banks of rich colors of the flower-women in immaculate linen headdress proffering the choice output of their scrupulously tilled farms. Scarcely less picturesque are these oddly garbed country-folk than the famous fish-venders over at Ostend, and certainly they are a more fragrant people to shop among. A curious and colorful picture they present with the long lines of gayly painted dog-carts blazing with peonies and geraniums. Huddled around the great statue of Brabo they quite throw into limbo the Daughters of the Scheldt that are disporting in bronze on the pedestal. Brabo himself, Antwerp’s Jack-the-Giant-Killer, pauses on high in the act of hurling away the severed hand of the vanquished Antigonus as though he could see no unoccupied spot to throw it in. Should he let go at random, and hit house Number 4, he could surely expect to be hauled down forthwith, for the great Van Dyck was born there, and Antwerp is nothing if not reverent of the memory of her glorious sons of Art. And Brabo cannot afford to take too many chances with the security of his own position, for he himself has a rival; Napoleon the Great was really a greater champion of Flanders than he, and overthrew a worse enemy ofAntwerp’s than the fabled Antigonus when he raised the embargo on the Scheldt, that had existed for a century and a half under the terms of the outrageous Treaty of Westphalia, until scarcely a rowboat would venture over the silt-choked mouth of the river, and only then to find the famous capital a forsaken village of empty streets and abandoned factories. The dredging of the channel, the expenditure of millions in construction of wharves and quays, and the restoration of the city to its high place in the commercial world was a greater and more difficult work than Brabo’s.

The varied and vivid life of Antwerp unfolds itself strikingly in the early afternoon to one who exchanges the sleepy, mediæval Grand Place for the broad, curving, crowded boulevard of the popular Place de Meir. It was just such clean and handsome streets as this that inspired John Evelyn to write so delightedly of Antwerp two hundred and fifty years ago, describing them in his famous “Diary” as “fair and noble, clean, well-paved, and sweet to admiration.” Indeed, everything seemed to have charmed Evelyn here, as witness his inclusive approval, “Nor did I ever observe a more quiet, clean, elegantly built, and civil place than this magnificent and famous city of Antwerp.” Rubens, the name of names in Flanders, was then too recently dead to have come into the fullness of his fame; whereas to-day one thinks of him continually here and likes nothing better than the many opportunities to study him in the completenessof his wonderful career—“the greatest master,” said Sir Joshua Reynolds, “in the mechanical part of the art, that ever exercised a pencil.” Even trivial associations of his activity are cherished; as we find them, for instance, in the little woodcut designs he made for his famous friend, Christopher Plantin, the greatest printer of the era, and which one handles reverently in the old Plantin house in the Marché du Vendredi—that picture-book of a house, where corbel-carved ceiling-beams overhang antique presses, types, and mallets, and great windows of tiny leaded panes let in a flood of light from the rarest and mellowest old courtyard in the whole of the Netherlands.

The Place de Meir is Antwerp’s Broadway; and an afternoon stroll along it affords a constantly changing view of stately public and private buildings, no less attractive to the average man than those “apple-green wineshops, garlanded in vines” that delighted Théophile Gautier on the river front. Little corner shrines, so numerous in this city, shelter saints of tinsel and gilt and receive the reverence of a population that has four hundred Catholics to every Protestant. One must necessarily delight in a street whose houses are all of delicately colored brick, with stone trimmings carved to a nicety and shutters painted in softest greens. The imposing Royal Palace is graceful and beautiful, but human interest goes out to the stone-garlanded house across the way,—old Number 54,—whereRubens was born and where he lived so many years and took so much pleasure in making beautiful for his parents. On either hand one sees solid residences of the most generous proportions, and all in tints of pink and gray, and busy hotels with red-faced porters hurrying about in long blouses. Picture stores and bookshops scrupulously stocked with religious volumes beguile lingering inspection. There are establishments on every hand for the sale of ecclesiastical paraphernalia, with windows hung with confirmation wreaths, crucifixes, rosaries, and what-not. Occasionally, even here, one discovers, crushed in between more consequential businesses, the celebrated little gingerbread-shops of which so much amused notice has been taken. Restaurants and cafés abound. One sees them on every hand, with their characteristic overflow of tables and chairs on the sidewalk, always thronged, both inside and out, with jolly, chattering patrons and gleaming in sideboard and shelf with highly polished vessels of brass and pewter. Here and there one passes the confectionery shops, calledpâtisseries, where ices, mild liqueurs, and mineral waters refresh a thriving trade. Stevenson found no relish for Flemish food, pronouncing it “of a nondescript, occasional character.” He complained that the Belgians do not go at eating with proper thoroughness, but “peck and trifle with viands all day long in an amateur spirit.” “All day long” is apt enough, for Antwerp’s restaurants and cafés are always thronged.

These ruddy-faced and placid Belgians are a very serene and contented people. It is pleasant and even restful to watch them; they go about the affairs of life with such an absence of fret and fever. Spanish-appearing ladies float gracefully past in silk mantillas; priests by the hundreds shuffle along leisurely in picturesque hats and gowns; the portly merchant, on his way at this hour to themoresque, many-columned Bourse, proceeds in like deliberate and unhurried fashion. Street venders, in peaked caps and voluminous trousers, approach you with calm deliberation and retire unruffled at your dismissal. On every sunny corner military men by the score “loafe and invite their souls.” Tradesmen in the shops and cabmen in the open go about their business as though it were a matter of infinite leisure. Even the day laborers in the streets, whose huge sabots stand in long rows by the curb, survey life tranquilly; why worry when a good pair of wooden shoes costs less than a dollar and will last for five or six years?

The snatches of conversation one catches betray the confusion of tongues inseparable from a nation of whom one half cannot understand the other, and whose cousins, once or twice removed, are of foreign speech to either. The Dutch spoken in the Scheldt country is said to be as bewildering to a German, as is the French the Walloons employ in the valley of the Meuse to a Parisian. But although the Flemish outnumber theirfellow countrymen of Wallonia two to one, still French is the tongue of the court, the sciences, and all the educated and upper circles. It is like Austria-Hungary all over again. And French continues steadily to gain ground in spite of the utmost efforts of the enthusiasts behind the new “Flemish Movement.” One sees both classes on the Place de Meir,—the stolid, light-haired man of Flanders and the nervous, swarthy Walloon. The beauty of the blue-eyed,belle Flamandeis in happy contrast with that of the slender, dark-eyedWallonne, and their poets have exhausted themselves in efforts to do justice to either side of so delicate and distracting a dilemma. Our grandmothers heard much of the charms ofLa Flamandewhen Lortzing’s melodious “Czaar und Zimmermann” was so popular, seventy-five years ago:—

“Adieu, ma jolie Flamande,Que je quitte malgré moi!J’en aurai la de demand,J’ai de l’amitié pour toi.”

“Adieu, ma jolie Flamande,

Que je quitte malgré moi!

J’en aurai la de demand,

J’ai de l’amitié pour toi.”

The complexion of the life on the Place de Meir changes with the hours. Between two and three o’clock we find it disposed to adapt itself as closely as possible along lines of personal comfort. By five it will be lively with carriages and automobiles bound for the driving in the prim little Pépinière, or the bird-thronged Zoölogical gardens, or around the lake in the central park, with a turn up the fashionable Rue Carnot to the stately boulevards of the new and exclusive Borgerhout section.At that hour one may count confidently upon seeing every uniform of the garrison among the crowds of officers who turn out to have a part in the beauty show. On the other hand, if it were early morning—veryearly morning—and the sun were still fighting its way through the mists and vapors of the Scheldt, the Place de Meir would resound with rattling little carts by the hundreds, bearing great milk cans of glittering, polished brass packed in straw, by whose sides patient, placid-faced women would trudge along in quaint thimble-bonnets, with plaid shawls crossed and belted above voluminous skirts and their feet set securely in the clumsy wooden sabots of the Fatherland. Market gardeners in linen smocks and gray worsted stockings would be bringing Antwerp its breakfast in carts only a little larger than the milk-women’s, and butcher boys would be scurrying by with meat trays on their heads or suspended from yokes across their shoulders. And all the echoes of the city would be forced into feverish activity to answer the wild clamor of the barking and fighting dogs, shaggy and strong, that draw all these picturesque little wagons. Assuredly there are few sights in Antwerp so impressive to the stranger as this substitution of dog for horse. It has been celebrated in prose and verse, with Ouida possibly carrying off the palm with her caninevie intime, “A Dog of Flanders.”

As the loiterer continues his afternoon stroll to the large and central Place de Commune, crosses into thechain of transverse boulevards, and returns riverward to that choicest spot of all, the tree-shaded, memory-haunted Place Verte, he is bound to reflect upon the vast changes that Antwerp, above all other Continental cities, has experienced in the last quarter-century. He will marvel, too, that Robert Bell should have lamented in his charming “Wayside Pictures” the paucity of gay life here and particularly the lack of theatrical entertainment. It may have been so when Bell wrote, fifty years ago, but it is decidedly otherwise to-day. So far as theatres go, they simply abound; nor could city streets be gayer than these, thronged with a merry, happy people and bright with the uniforms of artillery-men and fortress engineers, grenadiers of the line and the dashingchasseurs-à-cheval. Every hotel and café has its orchestra; and in the early evening practically every square of the city has its concert by a band from a regiment or guild. There is no suburb, they say, but has its own band or orchestra, or both. Indeed, Antwerp is nearly as music-mad as art-mad.

The shady aisles of poplars in the cozy Place Verte, the perfumes and peaceful sounds, the music of the cathedral bells, the homelike hotels and cafés and the drowsy, nodding Old-World house-fronts combine to produce a sense of comfort and satisfaction peculiar to this favored little square. There is, besides, a special and impressive feeling of something like the personal presence of the great Rubens; partly, perhaps, fromthe fact that the city’s chief statue of him, a lifelike bronze of heroic size, stands at the centre of the Place. Twice the normal stature of man it is, and its pedestal is five times as high as one’s head, and the great palette, book, and scrolls are all of more generous proportions than such things actually ever are;—but there seems nothing at all disproportionate in that, considering what he was and what the average man is. The memory of one who could paint a masterpiece in a day, who stood head and shoulders above every living artist of his time, and whose work has inspired and delighted mankind for three hundred years, becomes, like all great objects, positively prodigious from actual proximity. Such is the inevitable attitude towards Rubens when one touches the things he touched, walks the streets of the city where he was born, lived, and lies buried, where he wrought his greatest artistic triumphs, and where his finest work is still preserved and reverenced. The most admired cathedral in the whole of the Netherlands rises out of the fluttering tree-tops of the square, and the greatest treasures it contains are the product of this man’s genius. Every one feels the Rubens influence in the Place Verte; Eugène Fromentin, fresh from his pictorial triumphs of Algerian life, observed in “Les Maîtres d’Autrefois”: “Our imagination becomes excited more than usual when, in the centre of Place Verte, we see the statue of Rubens and further on, the old basilica where are preserved the triptychs which, humanlyspeaking, have consecrated it.” Such are the privileged emotions of the wise and fortunate visitors who pitch their passing tent in this fair and favored nook.

Reflections over Rubens naturally arouse thoughts of the many sons of Flanders who won preëminence in the domain of art. No other city, inexplicable as it is, has, in modern times, seen so large a proportion of its citizens achieve the loftiest heights of fame in this glorious activity; nor has any other honored art so unaffectedly in memorializing their triumphs. In Antwerp there are scores of streets and squares, and even quays, named after its artists. There are also fine statues to Rubens, Van Dyck, David Teniers, Jordaens, Quinten Matsys, and Hendrik Leys, and other memorials to the brothers Van Eyck, to Memling, Wappers, Frans Hals, Van der Heyden, De Keyser, and Verboekhoven. In private and public collections the people have jealously kept possession of the masterpieces of their fellow countrymen. The Royal Museum of Fine Arts, on the Place du Musée, is as much a treasure-house of Flemish art as the Rijks Museum at Amsterdam is of Dutch art. Again Place Verte plumes itself, for just around the corner was born the great Teniers, wizard depicter of tavern life and kermesses, and on one side is that tourists’ delight, the graceful, feathery well-top that Quinten Matsys wrought out of a single piece of iron, before the days when love inspired him to win the most coveted laurels of the painter.

However, art aside, Place Verte has distinctions of its own. Something of interest is always occurring here. Suburban bands hold weekly competitions in its artistic pavilion and the most skillful musicians hold concerts here each evening. The sidewalks then are crowded with chairs and tables, and at the close the people rise and join in the national hymn “La Brabançonne,” with its out-of-date lament to the men of Brabant that “the orange may no longer wave upon the tree of Liberty.” Of an afternoon a regiment may swing through in full regalia, the red, yellow, and black flag snapping in the van, and the band crashing out the ancient war-song “Bergen-op-Zoom.” If to-day were July 21 there would be tremendous enthusiasm and cheering celebrating the Fêtes Nationales in honor of the Revolution of 1830; as well there should, for Belgium is the smallest and one of the most desirable little kingdoms of all Europe, and the national motto, “L’Union fait la Force,” has to be closely adhered to if the Lion of Brabant would stand up under the baiting of his powerful and covetous neighbors.

The passing of a Sister of the Béguinage, in sombre black garb and an extraordinary creation of immaculate white linen on her head, recalls the many things one has read of this interesting and noble order which is peculiarly Belgium’s own. Their neat little settlements are a source of endless admiration to strangers, and quite as fascinating is their beautiful vesper servicewhich bears the pretty name of the “salut des Béguines.” Readers of Laurence Sterne, who should be legion, promptly recall the curious story of “The Fair Béguine” that Trim told Uncle Toby in “Tristram Shandy,” and the valiant Captain’s comment: “They visit and take care of the sick by profession—I had rather, for my own part, they did it out of good nature.”

It is one of the proud distinctions of Place Verte to be at the very portals of Antwerp’s glorious cathedral, the largest, richest, and most beautiful in the Netherlands. From his café chair the visitor watches its great shadow steal over him as the afternoon wanes, while at any moment by merely raising his eyes he may revel in the graceful outlines of its sweep of ambulatory chapels and let the aspiring tips of delicate pinnacles and arches entice his vision to the loftiest point of its one finished and matchless tower. Never was Napoleon so pat in “fitting the scene with the apposite phrase” as when he compared this tower to Mechlin lace. It is delightful to look up above the trees of the Place at the enormous bulk of this tremendous structure, stained and darkened by the vapors of river and canals, study its rich carvings and stained-glass windows centuries old, and note how the blue sky, in patterns of delicate foliation and fragile arch, shines like mosaics through the clustered apertures of the filmy openwork of the lofty tower. A hundred bells drip mellow music from that exquisite belfry every few minutes all day long. Youlisten, perhaps, to detect the impression they gave Thackeray of a new version of the shadow-dance from “Dinorah,” conscious that they are going to haunt you as they did him for days after you have left Antwerp far behind. It is peculiarly appropriate that the Lohengrin Wedding March should be a favorite on the bells of the very cathedral where Lohengrin, according to the story, was married. Indeed, so many and so varied are the clear bell-voices of this greatcarillonthat their music seems, as the neighboring bells of Bruges did to Longfellow,—

“Like the psalms from some old cloister,When the nuns sing in the choir;And the great bell tolled among them,Like the chanting of a friar.”

“Like the psalms from some old cloister,

When the nuns sing in the choir;

And the great bell tolled among them,

Like the chanting of a friar.”

Within this treasure-chest of a cathedral are jewels worthy of such a casket. One goes out of the glare of the afternoon sun into the coolness and scented gloom of its vaulted, many-aisled, and multi-chapeled vastness, and there in the hush of worshipers kneeling in prayer he finds splendid altars that gleam in a profusion of ornaments of silver, gold, and precious stones, glorious rose-windows, carven confessionals and choir stalls, life-like figures in wax clad in silks and crowned in gold, hundreds of masterful paintings, a high altar of extraordinary splendor blazing in costly decorations under a golden canopy supported by silver figures, and, at the centre of the seven aisles, Verbruggen’s far-famedcarved wooden pulpit, realistic in lifelike foliage and birds, and with plump little cherubim floating aloft with the apparently fluttering canopy. As if this were not enough to distinguish any one church, here hang three of the most glorious creations of the hand of man, the masterpieces of Rubens himself. The Assumption alone could have sufficed; what is it, then, to have the tremendous glory of the presence of those greater achievements, The Elevation of the Cross and The Descent from the Cross! One feels he could easily do as did the hero of Gautier’s “Golden Fleece” and carry away forever after a hopeless passion for the beautiful, grief-stricken Magdalen.

The power and appeal of sheer beauty has perhaps never been exampled as in the case of this cathedral. Through all the sackings and pillages of Antwerp the savagery and destructiveness of her foes have stopped here. The most ruthless soldiery could not bring themselves to lay violent hands upon it. One exception stands out in this remarkable experience, and that one was quite sufficient. The fanatical “Iconoclasts,” frenzied against the Church of Rome, fell to a depth of abasement below the worst villains of Spain. Those atrocious, misguided “Iconoclasts”! What a frightful page in Antwerp’s history is the one that recounts the three days of horrors of these frantic and terrible zealots, three hundred and fifty years ago! Schiller, Motley, and Prescott have told the story as few stories have everbeen told. In the calm of this afternoon it is impossible to conceive the uproar and confusion with which these lofty arches then resounded. Fancy a horde of men and boys, lighted by wax tapers in the hands of screaming women of the streets, demolishing the altars and rending and destroying every exquisite decoration and even tearing open the graves and scattering the bones of the dead. Says Motley: “Every statue was hurled from its niche, every picture torn from the wall, every wonderfully painted window shivered to atoms, every ancient monument shattered, every sculptured decoration, however inaccessible in appearance, hurled to the ground. Indefatigably, audaciously,—endowed, as it seemed, with preternatural strength and nimbleness,—these furious Iconoclasts clambered up the dizzy heights, shrieking and chattering like malignant apes, as they tore off in triumph the slowly matured fruit of centuries.”

Not the cathedral alone, but every Catholic temple of Antwerp, and four hundred others in Flanders, were sacked in this sudden revolt against the Papacy. It is said that King Philip, when he heard of it, fell into a paroxysm of frenzy and tore his beard for rage, swearing by the soul of his father that it should cost them dear. How dear it shortly did cost them, both the guilty and the innocent, we are shown in the picture Schiller has drawn of Calvinists’ bodies dangling from the beams of their roofless churches,of “the places of execution filled with corpses, the prisons with condemned victims, the highroads with fugitives.” Such was one of the extraordinary experiences through which this beautiful cathedral passed—one of the maddest, most senseless, and most frightfully punished outbreaks in all history.

In the company of the doves that nest among the pinnacles and arches away up in the cathedral tower, one looks out at this hour on a very considerable portion of the little kingdom—forty miles, they tell you, with a good glass, in any direction. It is a prospect well worth the weary climb. Just below, the tiled and gabled roofs rise and fall all about like a troubled sea. The crooked streets of the old section and the straight ones of the new, and theplacesand parks in verdant spaces here and there have the appearance of some vast topographical map. The gray Scheldt lies like a string of Ghent flax to Antwerp’s bent bow. A wrinkled arc of massive and intricate fortifications wards the rich city from its foes, and just beyond lie numerous tiny villages all with the exact primness of mathematical problems. An unusual country view is spread out on every hand. Canals, numerous as fences and dotted with boats and slowly-moving barges, sear the green fields like pale-blue scars; and white, dusty roads criss-cross with their solemn flanking of tall poplar trees. As if this region were the natural habitat of some strange and monstrous form of animal life, one beholds everywhere asemblance of motion and activity in the gaunt, waving, canvas arms of hundreds of plethoric windmills. Diminutive, trim farms, like little gardens, give the appearance of a general carpeting by Turkish rugs of vivid and diversified design; each has its whitewashed cottage roofed in thatch or tile and set in orchards hedged with box and hawthorn. Fields of corn, wheat, rye, and oats expand in well-kept richness, and in all this profusely cultivated region men, women, boys, and girls toil from the faintest dawn to sunset, and often all night by moonlight, content and even happy in the winning of enough to supply clothing and shelter and the unvarying fare of soup, coffee, and black rye bread. Seaward and northward lie sand dunes, dikes, and polders stretching away to the old morasses where the valiant Morini faced and stopped even Cæsar. Literary people will see in all this country the land of “Quentin Durward,” as that greatest story of Flanders comes to mind, and they will perhaps reflect upon the characteristics of the good burghers of those days, whom Sir Walter thought “fat and irritable,” and will see young Durward defying the ferocious “Wild Boar of Ardennes” in the perilous service of the fair Lady Isabelle, herself a Flemish countess.

To the northwest one sees the gleaming reaches of the Scheldt emptying themselves into the distant sea and, nearer at hand, solemn little Terneuzen where the ships turn into the canal for Ghent—Ghent, the “Manchesterof Belgium,” where old Roland swings in his belfry and calls

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