I Travel the Open Road - Classic Writings of Journeys Taken around the World. Various
lose, by degrees, their sense of the beautiful and the harmonious, and set forth, in the poverty of their minds, the meanness of their surroundings.
On one account I have again and again blessed the star that guided me to Antwerp,—that is, for the pleasure afforded me by its treasures of art. I have, in times past, fed fat my appetite for the beautiful in the galleries of Italy, and therefore counted but little on the contents of the museum and churches of this ancient city. Do not be frightened, beloved reader; I am not going to launch out into the muddy stream of artistic criticism. I despise most of that which passes current under that dignified name, as heartily as you do. Even the laurels of Mr. Ruskin cannot rob me of a moment's repose. I cannot if I would, nor would I if I could, talk learnedly about pictures. So I can safely promise not to bore you with any "breadth of colouring," and to keep very "shady" about chiaro 'scuro. I only wish to say that he who has never been in Antwerp does not know who Rubens was. He may know that an industrious painter of that name once lived, and painted (as I used to think, judging from most of his works that I had seen elsewhere) a variety of fat, flaxen-haired women; but of Rubens, the great master, the painter of the Crucifixion, and the Descent from the Cross, he is as ignorant as a fourth-form boy in the public schools of Patagonia. It is worth a month of seasick voyaging to see the works of Rubens and Vandyck which Antwerp possesses; and the only regret connected with my visit there has been, that I could not give more days to the study of them than I could hours.
It is but fifteen miles from Antwerp to Mechlin, or Malines, (as the people here, in the depths of their ignorance, insist upon calling it,) and as a representative of a nation whose sole criterion is success, and whose list of the cardinal virtues is headed by Prosperity, I felt that it would be a grievous sin of omission for me not to stop and visit that thriving old town. It did not require much time to walk through its nice, quiet streets, and look at the pictures and wood carvings in its venerable churches. The white-capped and bright-eyed lace-makers sat in windows and doorways, their busy fingers forming fabrics, the sight of which would kindle the fire of covetousness in any female heart. Three hours in Mechlin sufficed to make me about as well acquainted with it as if I had daily waked up its echoes with the creaking of my shoes, until their thick soles were worn out past all hope of tapping. Selecting one of the numerous railways that branch out from Mechlin, like the reins from the hand of a popular circus rider in his favourite "six-horse-act," the "Courier of St. Petersburg," I took a ticket for Brussels, and soon found myself spinning along over these fertile plains, whose joyous verdure I had not sufficient time to appreciate before I found myself in the capital of Belgium.
And what a charming place this city of lace and carpets is! Clean as a parlour, not a speck nor a stain to be seen any where, with less of Dutch stiffness and more of French ease, so that you do not feel so much like an intruder as in most other strange cities. Brussels is a kind of vestibule to Paris; its streets, its shops, its public edifices are all reflections in miniature of those of the French metropolis. It has long seemed to me so natural a preparation for the meridian splendours of Paris, that to go thither in any other way than through Brussels, is as if you should enter a saloon by a back window, rather than through the legitimate front door. In one respect I prefer Brussels to Paris; it is smaller, and your mind takes it all in at once. In the French capital, its very vastness bewilders you. You are in the condition of the gentleman whose wife was so fat that when he wished to embrace her, he was obliged to make two actions of the feat, and use a bit of chalk to insure the proper distribution of his caress. But in Brussels every thing is so harmoniously and compactly combined, that you can enjoy it all at once. How does one's mind treasure up his rambles through these fair streets and gay arcades, his leisurely walks on these spacious boulevards, or under the dense shade of this lovely park, his musings in this fine old church of Ste. Gudule, whose gorgeous windows symbolize the heavenly bow, and whose air of devotion is eloquent of the undying hope which abides within its consecrated precincts! How one looks back years after leaving Brussels, and conjures up, in his memory, its public monuments, from that exceedingly diminutive and peculiar statue near the Hôtel de Ville, which has pursued its useful and ornamental career for so many centuries, to the heroic equestrian figure of Godfrey of Bouillon, in the Place Royale! How vividly does one remember the old Gothic hall, which has remained unchanged during the many years that have passed since the Emperor Charles V. there laid down the burden of his power, and exchanged the throne for the cloister.
One of the most delightful recollections of my term of residence in Brussels, is of a bright summer day, when I made an excursion to the field of Waterloo. Some Englishmen have established a line of coaches for the purpose—real old fashioned coaches, with a driver and a guard, which latter functionary performed Yankee Doodle most admirably on his melodious horn as we rattled out of town. The roadside views cannot have changed much since the night when the pavement shook beneath the heavy artillery and thundering tramp of Wellington's army. The forest of Soignies (or, to use its poetical name, Arden) looked as it might have looked before it was immortalized by a Tacitus and a Shakspeare; and its fresh foliage was "dewy with Nature's tear-drops," over our two coach loads of pleasure-seekers, just as Byron describes it to have been over the "unreturning brave," who passed beneath it forty years ago. Our party was shown over the memorable field by an old English sergeant who was in the battle; a fine bluff old fellow, and a gentleman withal, who, though his head was white, had all the enthusiasm of a young soldier. It was the most interesting trip of the kind that I ever made, far surpassing my expectations, for the ground remains literally in statu quo ante bellum. No commissioners of highways have interfered with its historical boundaries. It remains, for the most part, under cultivation, as it was before it became famous, and the grain grows, perhaps, more luxuriantly for the chivalric blood once shed there. There they are, unchanged, those localities which seem to so many mere inventions of the historian, Mont St. Jean, the farm of La Haye Sainte, the château of Hougoumont, the orchard with its low brick wall, over which the chosen troops of France and England fought hand to hand, and the spot where the last great charge was made, and the spell which held Europe in awe of the name of Napoleon, and made that name his country's watchword, and the synonyme of victory, was broken forever. Perhaps I err in saying forever, for France is certainly not unmindful of that name even now. That showery afternoon, when the great conqueror saw his veterans, against whom scores of battle fields, and all the terrors of a Russian campaign, proved powerless, cut to pieces and dispersed by a superior force, to which the news of coming reënforcements gave new strength and courage,—that very afternoon a boy, without a thought of battles or their consequences, was playing in the quiet grounds of the château of Malmaison. If Napoleon could have looked forward forty years, if he could have foreseen the romantic career of that child, and followed him through thirty years of exile, imprisonment, and discouragement, until he saw him reëstablish the empire which was then overthrown, and place France on a higher pinnacle of power than she ever knew before, how comparatively insignificant would have seemed to him the consequences of that last desperate charge! If he could have seen that it was reserved to his nephew, the grandchild of his divorced but faithful Josephine, to avenge Waterloo by an alliance more fatal to England's prestige than any invasion could be, and that the armies which had that day borne such bloody witness to their unconquerable daring, would forty years later be united to resist the encroachments of the power which first checked him in his career of victory, he would have had something to think of during that gloomy night besides the sad events that had wrought such a fearful change in his condition.
I returned to Brussels in the afternoon, meditating on the scenes I had visited, and repeating the five stanzas of Childe Harold in which Byron has commemorated the battle of Waterloo. In the evening I read, with new pleasure, Thackeray's graphic Waterloo chapter in Vanity Fair, and dreamed all night of falling empires and "garments rolled in blood." And now I turn my face towards Italy.
A chapter from
My Unknown Chum: "Aguecheek", 1930#
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