I cannotswim. It is a humiliating confession to make at the best of times, but the admission at the present moment is an absolutely painful one. I am staying in a place where I am in hourly fear of falling into the water. My present address is Amsterdam, and no one but a native can walk about Amsterdam without an uneasy feeling that sooner or later he will find himself in a canal. There is a canal in front of my door, my bedroom window at the back of the house opens on to a canal, and there is a canal round the corner.
To get to the post-office from my hotel you have to cross fourteen bridges and walk along the side of seven canals. Some of the bridges suddenly go up in the air just as you are about to step on them. This is to let the ships through. It is quite right that ships should pass down the principal streets of Amsterdam, but it is a little annoying to have to wait for a small fleet to go by when you are in a hurry to get home. There is, however, this advantage about the bridge going up suddenly on end ten feet in the air. It makes a wall between you and the water. Now, when you walkalongthe canal instead of going over it there is no wall, and as in the dark the water looks uncommonly like a roadway, and you see gentlemen and ladies sitting at their doorsopposite, you have to keep on remembering where you are, or else you would go to step in the middle of the road out of the way of a crowd or a passing vehicle, and find yourself in an awkward predicament.
A week ago I never thought I should get to Holland. I was afraid I should have to spend the rest of my days at Bingen on the Rhine, waiting for a registered letter. Of all the awful things that can happen to a foreigner in Germany, there is nothing that can compare with the tortures and anxieties to which he is subjected while waiting for a registered letter. According to the law of the land, the postman must, after preliminary inquiries as to your birth, parentage, and habits, deliver the said letter personally to you in the room in which your luggage is, and must further take your receipt for the same in ink, and said receipt must be signed in the presence of the landlord of the hotel at which you are staying, and the said landlord is also required to countersign the document.
These stringent regulations are doubtless very wise precautions, and they can be fulfilled without any great mental or physical suffering, provided, when you are on a journey, you remain in your hotel all day long waiting for the postman. Unfortunately I was not able to do so, and fell a victim to a series of misfortunes probably unprecedented in the history of registered letter addresses.
On the day that I expected my registered letter I made a little excursion from Bingen to Wiesbaden, and returned from Wiesbaden at seven in the evening. As I entered the portals of my hotel the manager, who speaks German to me, stepped forward and informed me that the postman had been there ‘mit einem eingeschriebenen Briefe’ for me. The porter, who is a Swiss, and addresses me in Italian,came up beaming with smiles, and told me that during my absence there had been ‘una lettera raccomandata’ for me. The chambermaid met me on the landing (she is from Alsace, and likes to keep up her French), and whispered confidentially that the postman had ‘une lettre chargée’ for me; and the head waiter, who speaks English on principle, even to the Germans, who can’t understand it, rushed at me when I came downstairs to dinner and exclaimed, ‘Sare, sare, de postmans, he bin here with wretcheder letter for you. He come again seven o’clock to-morrow mornings.’
Now, if there is one thing I abhor and abominate on the Continent it is the custom of the early postman banging at my bedroom door when I am fast asleep. I wake with a start, and wonder where I am. I travel rapidly, and so am one day in France, the next in Holland, the next in Germany, and perhaps the next in Italy. Under these circumstances, when first you open your eyes in a strange bedroom it takes you a few seconds to remember where you are and in what language it is necessary to reply to the person who is rapping, ‘rapping at your chamber door.’ As a rule, I generally start up, and exclaim, ‘Eh, what is it? Who are you? Come in! Entrez! Herein! Entrate!’ and wait for the reply.
Although I was hungry, I was careful to eat sparingly at supper in order to sleep lightly, and I retired to rest early. At six o’clock I rose and dressed myself carefully, got the ink in a safe place, put a new pen in the penholder, spread a clean sheet of blotting-paper on the table, and, assuming a dignified attitude, waited for the postman. He was to come at seven. At 9.15 I had to leave by the express for Cologne,en routefor Amsterdam. I sat at the table patiently till eight; no postman. Then I wentdownstairs, and made inquiries. ‘Ah, the postman—yes,’ exclaimed the porter; ‘he came with your registered letter at seven; but he said you might be asleep, so he wouldn’t disturb. He’ll bring it with the second delivery, at ten.’
The remark that I made to that porter in reply conveyed a mixed feeling of rage and despair boiled down into a single word of four letters, of which the last is superfluous. All my preparations were made to depart from Bingen at 9.15. The postman was then about the town delivering letters. I sent after him in all directions to bid him return at once with my registered letter. Alas! my messengers found him not. I left word that the letter was to be sent on to Poste Restante, Amsterdam, and I went away without it.
At Amsterdam I went to the post-office and asked for my registered letter. ‘There is not one for you,’ was the reply. I fancied I had not given it time perhaps to get there, so I called again the next day. ‘No letter.’ I handed in my passport to show the name. The clerk looked in ‘S’ again. ‘No letter.’ I was in despair. At last an idea struck me. ‘Look in “G,” if you please,’ I said. The clerk looked in ‘G’ and produced my registered letter at once—it had been in ‘G’ for three days.
The gentleman who attends to my correspondence during my absence has a playful habit of running the initials of my front names right into the initial of my surname, and hence the mistake at the post-office. After all I got my registered letter, but it was a week’s hard work to obtain it. My earnest advice to travellers on the Continent is ‘never have a registered letter'; it may detain you in one place for months. If you have notes sent to you, let them be cut in half, and sent in separate envelopes to two addresses—one set of halves to your hotel, and the other to the PosteRestante. Only those who have experience of registered letters on the Continent and postal eccentricities abroad will appreciate the value of my little bit of advice.
Holland is to me one of the most interesting countries in Europe. Apart from the excitement of having to do a bit of Blondin, with the edge of a canal for your tight-rope, at intervals of a few minutes all day long, the Dutch themselves furnish you with never-ending study. I love to see the little Dutch boy of six smoking his clay-pipe or his cigar as he clings to his mamma’s skirts. There is something at once novel and startling in finding a Dutch cheese and a penny bun placed in front of every guest at the breakfast-table. In a land where a public company is a Maatschappij and nearly every house of restauration announces that the thirsty traveller can there obtain ‘tapperij, slitterij, and slemp,’ there is always something to amuse you. I had a wild desire to order ‘slitterij and slemp,’ but I couldn’t make up my mind to try and pronounce them, and I didn’t know what I should get.
Then, again, the names of the streets and the names over the shop-doors are eminently calculated to tie your eye up in a knot. You get puzzled when you turn down Wijk 1 and come to Wijk 2, and cross a canal and find yourself in Wijk 24, and you find some difficulty in telling the waiter that you want your ‘otbijt’ (breakfast), and your politeness is sorely tried by having to say ‘Als’ t’v beleft’ whenever you want to say ‘If you please.’ To come suddenly upon a dog-show and find it called a Rashondententoonstelling, and upon an announcement which reads ‘Rijnspoorwegmaalschappij aan den daartoe aangewesen vertegenwoordiger’ is calculated to stagger one; but, apart from a language which is trying alike to the eye and the tongue,Holland is a delightful place, and the Dutch are a splendid people.
There is a tremendous lot of the English character about the Dutch. Hoogstraat, Rotterdam, on Sunday night might be High Street, Islington, at the same time. The boys yell, the girls scream and rush about, and a dense black crowd surges and shoves up and down and sings and walks arm-in-arm a dozen wide, and generally comports itself with high spirits and low habits. A Dutch crowd is English in its rough unconcern for the delicate shades of etiquette. But individually the Dutch are kind, hospitable, and most courteous to strangers. The key to the Dutch character is given in one of their popular ballads;
‘Wij leven vrij, vij leven blijOp Neerlands dierbren grond;Ontworsteld aan de slavernij,Zijn wij door eendragt groot en vrij;Hier duldt de grond geen dwinglandijWaar vrijheld eeuwen stond.’
‘Wij leven vrij, vij leven blijOp Neerlands dierbren grond;Ontworsteld aan de slavernij,Zijn wij door eendragt groot en vrij;Hier duldt de grond geen dwinglandijWaar vrijheld eeuwen stond.’
‘Wij leven vrij, vij leven blijOp Neerlands dierbren grond;Ontworsteld aan de slavernij,Zijn wij door eendragt groot en vrij;Hier duldt de grond geen dwinglandijWaar vrijheld eeuwen stond.’
Roughly translated, this is what the above means:
‘We live blithe, we live free,On Netherland’s dear shore;Delivered from slavery,We are through concord free and great;The land suffers no tyrannyWhere freedom has subsisted for ages.’
‘We live blithe, we live free,On Netherland’s dear shore;Delivered from slavery,We are through concord free and great;The land suffers no tyrannyWhere freedom has subsisted for ages.’
‘We live blithe, we live free,On Netherland’s dear shore;Delivered from slavery,We are through concord free and great;The land suffers no tyrannyWhere freedom has subsisted for ages.’
And your Dutchman does as he jolly well likes wherever he goes, and he doesn’t care a Rotter, an Amster, or a Schie for anybody.
The Hague! The largest village in the world, the residence of the Court of Holland. It looks quiet as we steam into the station, but the omnibus is soon filled. I arrive at the hotel I have chosen. The landlord bows to the ground; my portmanteau is taken in, and then I am offered a table in the reading-room to sleep upon. ‘No!’ I exclaim, ‘Irequire a bedroom.’ The landlord is desolated; but there is not a bedroom in the hotel. I will go to another. The landlord is desolated again; but all the hotels are full. Do I not know that the great Medical Congress commences to-day, that the town is crammed, and that rooms have been bespoken a month beforehand? I accept the Congress and the situation, and I pass the night on a sofa in the reading-room surrounded by the principal journals of the world.
Before I retired to rest, pillowing my head uponL’Étoile Belgeand using as sheets and blanket and counterpane theTimes, theNew York Herald, theNeue Freie Presse, theGil Bias, and theKolnische Zeitung, I took a stroll through the town. You might have walked on the people’s heads, as the saying is, though it seems to me the people might always urge very reasonable objections to your doing so. I didn’t go very far, because I hate crowds, and because to-morrow I am going to do the Hague ‘thoroughly’ in six hours and a half. But I got as far as a very nice square, covered with trees, very Dutch and very pretty. ‘I will sit down on this nice seat,’ I said to myself, ‘and revel in being so far away from the ordinary routine of English life.’ At that moment a man came up, and thrust a bill into my hand, and on it I read: ‘Heden Avona, Grand Café Chantant. Voor het eerst optreden van de beroemden Mis Maud Haigh en Ada Blanche, het grootste succes van de London Musicall.’
I have made up my mind to go to Scheveningen, the Dutch Brighton, and loll by the sea and watch the Mynheers and their good vrows bathe, and young Holland build castles on the sand. I get as far as the starting-place of the steam tramway, when a huge flaring bill dazzles me, half blinds me, and brings me to attention sharper than thevoice of my officer ever did when I was in the rifle-corps. (That was years ago, when I was a good citizen and wanted to defend my country. My uniform was pepper-and-salt cloth, with scarlet facings, and I am told that I looked very well in it when I had it all on; but that I generally managed to go about with a collar, or a cap, or a pair of boots, or something that was not in keeping with a strictly military get-up. I remember once going out in a hurry with my uniform on, and in a fit of absence of mind putting on a tall chimneypot hat. I met the Duke of Cambridge at the corner of the street, and I shall never forget his face as long as I live. But this is a digression.)
The bill which brought me up to attention so smartly informs me in huge letters that ‘Donderdag 21 Augustus,’ at ‘Zeebad Scheveningen,’ there will be a ‘Groot Zomer-Feest.’ No wonder I start. This very day that I have made up my mind to escape the Congress at the Hague, it is the great summer fête of the season at Scheveningen.
I had a delightful week in Holland. Once again I explored the beauties of Amsterdam, Rotterdam, Scheveningen, and the Hague, and my great regret was that I had not time to accept an invitation given me to visit the pauper colonies of Frederiksoord, Wilhelminaoord, and Wilhelmsoord, where the Dutch have made a most successful attempt to solve one of the great questions of the day. There is very little mendicancy in Holland, and pauperism is dealt with in a rational manner. At these colonies each adult, if able-bodied and willing to work, is provided with a few acres of land, a cow, a pig, and a few sheep, and the majority of the pauper colonists are made (after the first outlay) self-supporting for the rest of their days. There is strict discipline, of course, and theplaces are never allowed to be tempting homes for the vagabond. At Veenhuisen there are also colonies which are more penal in their character. These are for the idle and disorderly and for beggars.
I wonder that the pauper colonies of Holland and the Dutch system of dealing with vagrancy have not attracted more attention, seeing how burning is the question in this country, ‘What shall we do with our poor?’ The subject is well worth study, and an English delegate or two sent to the pauper colonies might return with some valuable information.
The Dutch, like the English, do not possess the genius of outdoor refreshment. The cafés and beer-houses are mostly under cover, and in all but the larger establishments you sit close, and are not over-burthened with light; but the Dutch enjoy themselves, and cling to old customs and old costumes with a conservatism which is part and parcel of the national character. They have had to fight the ocean for every inch of Holland, and they are a brave and a grand people who have triumphed over difficulties which might have caused Hercules to throw up the sponge. Such a people does not wear its heart on its sleeve and frivol and indulge in outward show.
The only thing that can be urged against the Dutch is the excessive cleanliness of the Dutch housewife. She scrubs and cleans and polishes every day and all day. The streets are generally impassable on Saturday afternoon, because every window is being washed with water ejected from an enormous squirt. An army of buckets lines the footpath, an army of housemaids is kneeling scrubbing at the steps for dear life, auxiliaries are polishing up door-handles, and everywhere you hear the swish of the water and the rasp of the besom. You thinkthis cleanliness is charming at first. After about a week of it, when your shins are black and blue from falling over buckets and you have rheumatism all over you from wading knee-deep through rivers of water in the narrow streets, you think you can do with a little less of it.
Londonwas hot, and London was noisy. Everybody was leaving London, but the more the people poured out of it the noisier it seemed to get. Moreover, it was dull. So I said to myself, said I, ‘I’ll get out of it.’
Thus said I to myself, said I, and off I went; and on a hot Saturday afternoon I got into a train at Liverpool Street, and went down to the sea with three Dutchmen and two Belgians; and when for two mortal hours we had been baked and boiled and fried in a compartment that must have been specially heated by a private pipe from the kitchen of his Majesty King Pluto, we arrived at Harwich, and went, ‘all that was left of us,’ on board a vessel; and then the whistle blew, and the anchor was heaved, and the harbour lights grew faint and fainter on our lea, and presently a lovely little breeze sprang up, and we were out on the open sea cleaving the waves, and making the best of our way towards Flanders.
I had a berth in a cabin with four other gentlemen. The berth was excellent, the sheets were sweet and clean as snow, the pillow was soft, and all was there to tempt one to sleep as soundly as the cabin-boy mentioned by our grand William. But, alas! one of the gentlemen in my cabin snored as surely never mortal snored before, and another dreamed dreams,and dreamed them aloud. Now he was pursued by banditti, and vowed that he would only surrender his purse with his life; anon, he was on a precipice, and before being hurled over it, he begged a few minutes’ respite that he might make his will. So much I gathered from his disjointed remarks. Towards two in the morning the will must have been made, and he must have been lying senseless at the foot of the precipice, for he broke the silence of the night no more. But the snoring gentleman snored louder than ever, and I lay and tossed, and grew hot, and longed for daylight, and when daylight came I went on deck and drank in the cool morning air and some hot coffee, and wondered whether at any time the country on both sides of the Scheldt had been rolled so beautifully level by a steam-roller. At half-past nine we were alongside the quay at Antwerp, and the sweet chimes of the cathedral rang out a dulcet welcome that promised rest and repose.
Rest and repose! Alas! it was fête-day at Antwerp. It was ‘festa,’ as they say in Italy, and there was no peace that day for the native or the stranger within the gates. All Antwerp and its wife, or its sweetheart, turned out for the Kermesse. Through the streets in the heat of the day there passed the great procession of the Church. Hundreds of waving banners, thousands of candles, brazen images held aloft, a band, a chorus of mellow voices chanting, and then, under a broad canopy of gold, a sacred symbol to which, as it passed, the mighty crowd reverently bared the head and bowed the knee. A fine sight, a magnificent spectacle! I saw it four times, doubling on it down side-streets as the boys double on the Lord Mayor’s Show. And all the time the vertical rays of the sun poured down on the back of my neck, and I would have given all the circular notes in my pocket for a cabbage-leaf.
All day long the people stopped in the streets and sang songs and drank beer, and at night we had fireworks and ‘a grand harmony,’ and the tramcars were loaded with fifty or sixty people at a time, and only one little horse to draw the lot. Poor horses! how they must dread ‘festa'! The drivers in most countries double their fares, but the horses fare worse than ever. It was midnight before Antwerp settled down into its usual calm, and the noisiest Sunday I have known for years came to an end.
If ever you want to see how closely a church can be made to resemble a theatre, go to Antwerp Cathedral about noon, when the strangers come to see the Rubens pictures, which are covered with green baize curtains during the hours of service lest those who come to worship should get a peep at the paintings for nothing.
About twelve, when the service is over, the poor and the devout are driven out, and the sacristan and the guides swoop down on the foreigners and drive them up into a corner; and then seats are brought, and one fancies one’s self in the stalls or the pit of a theatre, especially when an attendant in uniform comes round and demands a franc from each spectator before the green baize curtain rises on the show.
Many Englishmen, I have no doubt, share with me an antipathy to being ‘guided’ through cathedrals, picture-galleries, and museums on the Continent. But no one should miss the Antwerp pictures. ‘The Descent from the Cross’ makes one forget the flippancy and bad English of the guide. One doffs one’s hat reverently to Peter Paul Rubens, and yields one’s imagination to him without a murmur.
When I entered the ‘sacred edifice’ the famous Rubens pictures were uncovered. A British tourist in a violent red and yellow tweed suit was staring at ‘The Descent from the Cross’ through a pair of race-glasses, while the raucous-voiced and grinning guide, who seems nowadays to be part and parcel of a cathedral, was explaining carefully to him that the fat female was the painter’s wife. I wish I had never known that the well-developed and modern lady who constantly appears in Peter Paul’s pictures was Mrs. Rubens. One can have too much even of this lady, whom I once heard an American irreverently describe as ‘Mrs. R.’ Rubens could no more keep the head of Mrs. R. (would that he had been satisfied with the head!) out of his pictures, than Mr. Dick could keep King Charles’s head out of his memorials, and I can’t help thinking that, had she been a Mrs. Jackson, instead of ‘a model wife,’ it would have been a distinct gain to art.
Irritated by the eternal Mrs. R., the tourist with the race-glasses, and the irreverent comments of the grinning guide, I turned from the Rubens picture, and seeing a crowd in the centre of the building, made my way towards it. I found myself in front of a beautifully-decorated ‘May altar.’ Evidently some ceremony was expected, for on both sides was a densely-packed mob of bareheaded women and girls. I asked what was expected, and someone told me at three o’clock was to take place ‘the benediction of the children.’ Wondering what this might mean, I waited patiently, and my patience was later on rewarded by a touching and beautiful spectacle.
Presently a priest came out of the gloomy recesses of the cathedral, clad in raiment of white and gold, and ascended the altar-steps and waited. Soon afterwards there came from the far corner of the cathedral, by the small entrance door, the faint sound of little children’s voices singing. All that one could hear as the baby chorus rose and fell was ‘Ave Maria.’ Nearer and nearer came the sound, and every head was turned in one direction. Then there came intosight a long procession of baby girls and boys, walking bareheaded, two and two. There were some two hundred children, and not one of them was over seven. The little girls were perfect Rubens babies; chubby-faced and rosy-cheeked, and their fair hair was prettily tied with gay ribbons, pink and blue being the prevailing colours. The little baby-boys had each his right arm tied up with a light blue or pink bow, and every little boy and every little girl carried a candle as an offering to the Virgin. Slowly the sweet procession filed along, the children breaking out from time to time in their little hymn of praise. The procession passed between the crowd of mothers and sisters right up to the altar, and then the good priest took from each little hand the candle it bore aloft and laid it on the altar-steps. All the children passed to the chairs arranged for them, and then the sunshine streamed through the stained-glass windows on their little sea of golden curls, making a picture that will linger in my mind for many a year to come.
After the children had presented their candles, a few lame and sickly little ones were carried up to the altar by their mothers to give theirs. One baby-boy had to be coaxed to let his candle go. He had been playfully beating his nurse with it, after the manner of infants, and when he got to the priest he had succeeded in putting the candle into his mouth. Gently the priest unclosed the little fist, and, patting the baby on the head, took the candle and laid it with the rest, while all the mothers smiled.
The last candle had been given up, the last child had been quietly seated in its chair, and there was a deep silence. Then a little girl of about six—a pretty little mite, with long fair hair, dressed in a red-spotted frock and a white pinafore—was lifted on to a chair in front of the altar, and, raising her little hands, shebegan to speak. The whole proceedings were in Flemish, and the child’s words hardly reached me, as I stood at the edge of the crowd, so I may be wrong in saying that it was a speech—it might have been a prayer. Whatever it was it was intensely dramatic, and yet sweetly simple. Amid the dead silence that reigned in the great cathedral, the little mite spoke for nearly five minutes, using her hands with the grace and skill of a baby Bernhardt. And the mothers—rough working women, coarse of frock, stern of feature, and innocent of headgear most of them—wept. Some of the fathers—artisans and dock-labourers—who had come to see their children take part in the ceremony, tugged at their moustaches for a bit and blew their noses defiantly, and then rubbed their knuckles in their eyes, and at last gave it up as a bad job and let the big tears come. I could see the tears in the good priest’s eyes as he listened to the baby’s speech, and when she sat down, and the women, overcome with emotion, sobbed, I had to yield to the influence of my surroundings, and I bit my lip hard and had a wild struggle with the apple in my throat, and then I had to let the salt drops have their way.
I would give a good deal to be able to paint that scene, to reproduce on canvas that beautiful May altar in Antwerp Cathedral, and the great congregation of fair-haired, blue-eyed Flemish babies, in their simple little frocks and their pretty ribbons, all sitting as still as mice while their little playmate, standing on a chair, lifted her baby hands to heaven and prayed her prayer. I would that I were even an artist in words that I might give you some faint idea of the simple grandeur, the quiet pathos, the gentle beauty of that ‘children’s service’ in the great cathedral. Alas, that glorious privilege is not mine! I am but a journeyman labourer in the great field of literature.I can but bow my head and uncover when the Angelus rings out, and leave you to read upon my face the message that it carries to my soul. I only know that in Antwerp Cathedral that sunny afternoon the message of the children touched me as no words of man have ever touched me yet, and I stole softly away from the flower-laden altar of the Mother of God, and passed out into the busy world with a baby’s voice whispering words of hope and comfort to my doubting and desponding heart.
In the evening the scene was changed. On the Place Verte I was stopped by a mighty procession, headed by a band, and bearing illuminated banners. It was a Liberal manifestation, and five thousand lusty Liberals were yelling, ‘Down with the Jesuit schools!’ Presently, in an opposite direction, came a Catholic demonstration several thousand strong. They also had a band, and a yell, and a battle-cry. I was in the middle of the two processions, and I stopped till they met.
Then the fun began, and the police rushed in, and sticks were whirled about, and feet and fists went busily to work. I had dropped in for a political riot. Heads were broken—thank goodness, not mine. I managed to scramble out of the crowd and get behind a tree. After a good fight the processions separated and marched in different directions, shouting, hooting, cheering, singing. The whole town was in an uproar. The row was deafening. Till long past midnight the rival bands promenaded, and twice again they met and fought, and the sticks came down like a rain of hail. In Antwerp the political feeling is fiercer than in any part of Belgium, and the enmity of Liberals and Catholics leads at times to considerable bloodshed. I followed the Liberals, as they looked the stronger, and I huzzaed and shouted ‘Hear, hear!’ when a stand was made and a speech delivered.
But directly the fighting began I retired to a convenient distance. It was past one in the morning when I withdrew from the battlefield of the Liberals and the Catholics, but the shouts of the rival factions rang in my ears until I fell asleep from sheer exhaustion. I shall have to try Holland. I have heard of a very nice quiet place there where the peaceful Dutch enjoy themselves, and only express their joy in a quiet grunt. I sincerely hope there won’t be a fête or a riot on when I arrive at the next station of my journey in search of a day’s repose.
Enough of Antwerp. I tear myself away from Rubens and Quentin Matsys, from the silver chimes and the little carts drawn by the poor docile dogs; I blush and pass by the shop-window that exhibits ‘Borgia s’amuse,’ and I put my luggage on a fly and drive to the station. I arrive at Antwerp station half an hour before the train starts, and I consume five-and-twenty minutes of that spare time in a process peculiarly Continental, known as registering the baggage. At last I am allowed to pay a fabulous price for the carriage of my portmanteau. I enter the train and I start.
I had said to myself, said I, ‘I will go to Brussels. It is a hot day. There will be no one in the wide, clean streets. I will potter about the Galerie de la Reine; I will climb the Rue Montagne de la Cour, and I will sit on a ten centimes chair in the park, and watch the clean Brussels nurses and the pretty little Brussels babies. I love to contemplate innocence. It rests the jaded eye and improves theblasémind. So to Brussels I went, and when I got out at the station I thought ‘Bedlam’ had broken loose. Thousands of men dressed in the usual fête-day costume of the ‘braves Belges'—all black—were promenading the streets with tickets stuck in their hats. In their hands they had flags and dolls and longtrumpets and Japanese parasols. Shouting and singing and pouring through the streets in lines of twenty arm-in-arm, they carried all before them, and I had to dart into shops, to climb lamp-posts, and to crawl under the tables outside the cafés, or over and over again I should have been borne along by the mighty procession. Once I snatched at a flag and a Japanese umbrella, and thought it would be better to fall in and shout and sing; but I felt that an Englishman might recognise me, and my character would be gone for ever. So I went up a very narrow street, where there was only room for one person at a time, and hid in a doorway and waited till a policeman came by. Then I asked him what was the matter. He told me that to-day was the fifty-fourth anniversary of the National Independence, and all Belgium had gone mad and come to Brussels. That I should have chosen this of all days in the year! I am indeed the victim of a relentless fate—I mean ‘fête.’
In Brussels I went to the Wiertz Museum. Antoine Wiertz, the mad painter, the ‘eccentric genius’ who refused to sell his pictures and flung back to the ‘patrons of art’ their proffered gold at a time that he was almost starving, crying out that gold was the murderer of art, is slowly but surely earning the fame for which he pined during his lifetime. That Wiertz was mad I have not the slightest doubt, but his madness was that to which ‘great genius is oft allied,’ and the world owes much to its madmen. I would a million times rather be mad with Wiertz than sane with some of the gentlemen who cover the walls of the Academy with pictures of ‘Eliza, Wife of Jeremiah Snooks, Esq.,’ ‘A Soldier Buying a Baked Potato,’ ‘The Dying Cabman’s Farewell to his Badge,’ ‘Wandsworth Parish Pump by Moonlight,’ ‘A Roman Lady Taking an EighteenpennyBath,’ or ‘A Greek God Waiting for his Shirt to Come Home from the Wash.’
The story of the life of Wiertz, the mad painter of Brussels, is a romance which belongs to the heroic age. It is a romance which is as startling in these matter-of-fact and money-grubbing days as the Clitheroe case would have been in the days of Eros and Psyche.
Wiertz was born in 1806 in Dinant, on the banks of the Meuse, and he died in 1865 in Brussels. He wanted to be Rubens at fourteen, and he spent his life in trying to be Rubens. He began to paint in a granary, which was so low that as he grew he had to stoop in it to avoid hitting his head against the roof. He starved to paint, and he painted for a long time only to starve. He attracted attention at last, and then he was allowed to paint in empty factories and lofty unused warehouses, because these were the only places where he could put up the huge canvases he sought to cover. His picture of the Greeks and Trojans contending for the body of Patroclus is thirty feet high and twenty feet wide. It is his grandest work, and the one which will live on through the centuries. All through his life he endured the most terrible disappointments, but at last he secured a studio where he could carry out his gigantic ideas. The Government gave it him, and there in a side street in Brussels he lived and painted, and to-day his house and studio form the Wiertz Museum, and there you can see his life-work, for he was true to his convictions to the end, and sold nothing.
In his later years he gave the reins to his fiery, untamed imagination, and it reared up occasionally and eventually bolted with him. Some of the paintings which adorn the museum you would only expect to find in a lunatic asylum where they have hadartists for patients. Many of them are madly horrible, and their horror is heightened by a method of arrangement which is only worthy of the murder department of a waxwork exhibition. And yet the genius of the man is sublime. A hundred years hence he will be world-famous. To-day, outside Belgium he is comparatively little known.
Next to his ‘Patroclus’ his finest works are ‘The Triumph of Christ,’ ‘The Revolt of Hell,’ and ‘The Forge of Vulcan.’ But for one person who goes to admire these magnificent creations, a hundred go to the museum to gaze on the horrible, the grotesque, and the fantastic specimens of his art. One of his pictures, ‘The Thoughts and Visions of a Severed Head,’ is enough to make a nervous man have a fit in the building. I have just read a story in a magazine which professes to be a true account of what a decapitated head saw. The author has probably seen Wiertz’s picture, and worked up the details in connection with hypnotism. The picture shows what the head of a guillotined man sees andthinksthe first moment, the second moment, and the third moment after decapitation. It might with great propriety be called ‘The Nightmare of Jack the Ripper, after eating a whole cold sucking-pig for supper.’
You look through a peephole to see ‘Hunger, Madness, Crime,’ and you behold a remarkably realistic picture of a young mad mother cutting up her baby in order to have it for dinner. The bleeding body is in the mother’s lap; the foot and leg of the child are sticking out of the saucepan which is on the kitchen fire. I have a photograph of this picture hanging in my study now. Every time I look at it, portions of my hair, beard, and moustache turn white.
You look through another peephole, and see your own face, and, by a clever contrivance, all the rest of the picture is ‘Old Nick.’ Startled, you turnaway, and you come upon a mad dog. He is tearing at his chain. You spring back, for you think it is a real dog. It is a madman’s trick, and is painted on the wall, and intended to frighten you. Near it is the picture of a gentleman who has been buried in cholera times. The interment has been ‘a little too previous,’ and you see a living man madly trying to get out of his coffin. But heavy coffins are on one half of his ‘casket,’ and amid the ghastly surroundings of the charnel-house you know he will have to die of slow starvation.
A Belgian lady struggling with a French soldier fires a revolver in his face. The face which you see is pleasantly described in the catalogue as ‘shattered into an indistinguishable mass of agony and horror.’ ‘The Orphans’ is an awful picture of a family of children fighting with the undertaker for their father’s corpse. They don’t want the strange man to take ‘papa’ from them. You turn away with a shudder, and your hair rises on end. A woman opposite you is dragging a shrieking blistered child from a cradle which has caught fire. The flesh seems to peel from the little body as the terrified woman drags it from the flaming bassinette. With your eyeballs starting from their sockets you shriek for somebody to give you an arm to lean on that you may totter out, and then you pause and burst into a roar of laughter. M. Wiertz has had a funny fit, and painted for you the wife who wished for a black-pudding, and the husband who wished that it might stick to the end of her nose.
I need not take you through the catalogue of the master’s mad vagaries and sickening atrocities. Once out in the air and the sunlight again, you gradually forget them; but his noble and heroic works, his idyllic and beautiful works, once seen will never fade from your memory. You have only to look upon his‘Patroclus’ and his ‘Triumph of Christ,’ and you know that you have been in the presence of ‘one of the great ones of the earth'—an artistic giant, a mighty genius, born in an age which has no room for genius that is above the regulation standard.
Wiertz died as he had lived—a disappointed man. His body and mind both gave way at last. He had sworn to rival Rubens, and he came very near the master once; but the fatal taint in his blood overpowered him, and he descended to the ghastly horrors of the charnel-house and the guillotine, and to arranging cannibal mothers and buried-alive bodies as peep-shows. He was raving when he died. In his last delirium he shrieked for his brushes and his palette. ‘Quick! quick!’ he cried; ‘bring them to me. Oh, the picture I shall paint! Oh, I will surpass Raphael!’ And, shrieking out what mighty things he meant to do, he fell back motionless, and passed into the great silence.
The fame he longed for during his life has come, even after his death, but slowly. But it will increase, and it will last. And this is the best way for fame to come to any man who works not for his own little day, but for the long ages the world has yet to know.
THE END.
BILLING AND SONS, PRINTERS, GUILDFORD.
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