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TITLE: BEAUTIFUL EUROPE - BELGIUM
AUTHOR: JOSEPH E. MORRIS
EBOOK: E01252 (O'Briens Book Cellar)

Beautiful Europe

Belgium

by Joseph E. Morris

I.

It needs, indeed, an effort of the imagination at the moment of
writing to think of Belgium as in any sense a component part of
"Beautiful Europe." The unhappy "cockpit" of the Continent at the
actual hour is again in process of accomplishing its frightful
destiny--no treaty, or "scrap of paper," is potent to preserve
this last, and weakest, of all the nations of Western Europe from
drinking to the dregs the cup of ruin and desolation. Tragic
indeed in the profoundest sense--in the sense of Aristotle--more
tragic than the long ruin of the predestined house of Oedipus--is
this accumulated tragedy of a small and helpless people, whose
sole apparent crime is their stern determination to cling at any
cost to their plighted word of honour. I have been lately glancing
into a little book published about five years ago, in which a view
is taken of the Belgian character that no one could term
indulgent. "It is curious," says the writer in one place, "how few
Belgians, old or young, rich or poor, consider the feelings or
convenience of others. They are intensely selfish, and this is
doubtless caused by the way in which they are brought up." And,
again, in another chapter, he insinuates a doubt as to whether the
Belgians, if ever called on, would even prove good soldiers. "But
whether the people of a neutral State are ever likely to be brave
and self-sacrificing is another thing." Such a writer certainly
does not shrink--as Burke, we know, once shrank--from framing an
indictment against an entire people. Whether Belgium, as a nation,
is self-sacrificing and brave may safely be left to the judgment
of posterity. There is a passage in one of Mr. Lecky's books--I
cannot put my finger on the exact reference--in which he
pronounces that the sins of France, which are many, are forgiven
her, because, like the woman in the Gospels, she has loved much.
It is not our business now, if indeed at any time, to appraise the
sins of Belgium; but surely her love, in anguish, is manifest and
supreme. When we contemplate these firstfruits of German "kultur"-
-this deluge of innocent blood, and this wreckage of ancient
monuments--who can hesitate for a moment to belaud this little
people, which has flung itself thus gallantly, in the spirit of
purest sacrifice, in front of the onward progress of this new and
frightful Juggernaut? Rather one recalls that old persistent
creed, exemplified perhaps in the mysteries, now of the Greek
Adonis, now of Persian Mithras, and now of the Roman priest of the
Nennian lake, that it is only through the gates of sacrifice and
death that the world moves on triumphant to rejuvenation and life.
Is it, in truth, through the blood of a bruised and prostrate
Belgium that the purple hyacinth of a rescued European
civilization will spring presently from the soaked and untilled
soil?

Yet even if German "kultur" in the end sweep wholly into ruin the
long accumulated treasures of Belgian architecture, sculpture, and
painting--if Bruges, which to-day stands still intact, shall to-
morrow be reckoned with Dinant and Louvain--yet it would still be
worth while to set before a few more people this record of
vanished splendour, that they may better appreciate what the world
has lost through lust of brutal ambition, and better be on guard
in the future to protect what wreckage is left. All these
treasures were bequeathed to us--not to Belgium alone, but to the
whole world--by the diligence and zeal of antiquity; and we have
seen this goodly heritage ground in a moment into dust beneath the
heel of an insolent and degraded militancy. Belgium, in very
truth, in guarding the civilization and inheritance of other
nations, has lavishly wrecked her own. "They made me keeper of the
vineyards; but my own vineyard have I not kept."

Luckily, however, it is not yet quite clear that the "work of
waste and ruin" is wholly irreparable. One sees in the illustrated
English papers pictures of the great thirteenth-century churches
at Dixmude, Dinant, and Louvain, made evidently from photographs,
that suggest at least that it is not impossible still to rebuild
the walls of Jerusalem. Dixmude, indeed--I judge from an interior
view--is possibly shattered past hope; but Dinant and St. Pierre,
at Louvain, so far at least as their fabrics are concerned, seem
to lack little but the woodwork of their roofs. It is only a few
years ago since the writer stood in the burnt-out shell of Selby
Abbey; yet the Selby Abbey of to-day, though some ancient fittings
of inestimable value have irreparably perished, is in some ways
not less magnificent, and is certainly more complete, than its
imperfect predecessor. One takes comfort, again, in the thought of
York Minster in the conflagration caused by the single madman
Martin in 1829, and of the collapse of the blazing ceilings in
nave and chancel, whilst the great gallery of painted glass, by
some odd miracle, escaped. Is it too much to hope that this
devil's work of a million madmen at Dixmude or Nieuport may prove
equally incomplete?

In the imperfect sketch that follows I write of the aspect of
Belgium--of its cities, that were formerly the most picturesque in
Europe; of its landscapes, that range from the level fens of
Flanders to the wooded limestone wolds of the Ardennes--as I knew
these, and loved them, in former years, before hell was let loose
in Europe. And perhaps, the picture here presented will in time be
not altogether misrepresentative of the regenerated Belgium that
will certainly some day arise.

II.

It is not merely in its quality of unredeemed and absolute
flatness that the great fen country of Flanders is so strongly
reminiscent of the great fen country of the Holland parts of
Lincolnshire. Each of these vast levels is equally distinguished
by the splendour and conspicuousness of its ancient churches.
Travelling by railway between Nieuport and Dixmude, you have on
every side of you, if the day be clear, a prospect of innumerable
towers and spires, just as you have if you travel by railway
between Spalding and Sleaford, or between Spalding and King's
Lynn. The difference, perhaps, is that the Lincolnshire churches
present finer architectural feature, and are built of stone,
floated down in barges, by dyke or fen, from the famous inland
quarries of Barnack, in Northamptonshire; whilst most of those in
Flanders are built of local brick, though the drums of the piers
and the arches are often of blue limestone. It is remarkable,
certainly, that these soaring spires should thus chiefly rise to
eminence in a setting of dead, flat plain. It may well be, indeed,
as some have suggested, that the character of architecture is
unconsciously determined by the type of surrounding scenery; that
men do not build spires in the midst of mountains to compete with
natural sublimity that they cannot hope to emulate, but are
emboldened to express in stone and mortar their own heavenward
aspirations in countries where Nature seems to express herself in
less spiritual, or at any rate in less ambitious, mood.

As we cross the level prairie between these two little towns of
West Flanders (we hope to visit them presently), a group of lofty
roofs and towers is seen grandly towards the west, dominating the
fenland with hardly less insistency than Boston "Stump," in
Lincolnshire, as seen across Wash and fen. This is the little town
of Furnes, than which one can hardly imagine a quainter place in
Belgium, or one more entirely fitted as a doorway by which to
enter a new land. Coming straight from England by way of Calais
and Dunkirk, the first sight of this ancient Flemish market-place,
with its unbroken lines of old white-brick houses, many of which
have crow-stepped gables; with the two great churches of St.
Nicholas, with its huge square tower, and of St. Walburge, with
its long ridge of lofty roof; and with its Hotel de Ville and
Palais de Justice of about the dawn of the seventeenth century, is
a revelation, in its atmosphere of sleepy evening quiet, to those
who rub their eyes with wonder, and find it hard to credit that
London, "with its unutterable, external hideousness," was actually
left behind them only that very morning, and is actually at
present not two hundred miles distant. Furnes, in short, is an
epitome, and I think a very charming one, of all that is most
characteristic in Flanders; and not the less charming because here
the strong currents of modern life that throb through Ghent and
Antwerp extend only to its threshold in the faintest of dying
ripples, and because you do not need to be told that in its town
hall may still be seen hangings of old Spanish leather, and that
the members of the Inquisition used to meet in the ante-chamber of
the first floor of its Palais de Justice, in order to throw
yourself back in memory to those old days of Lowland greatness
from whose struggles Holland emerged victorious, but into which
Belgium, for the time, sank back oppressed.

Furnes--in Flemish Veurne--is an excellent centre from which to
explore the extreme west point of Belgian Flanders, which is also
the extreme west point of Belgium as a whole. Flanders, be it
always remembered, does not terminate with mere, present-day,
political divisions, but spreads with unbroken character to the
very gateways of Calais and Lille. Hazebrouck, for example, is a
thoroughly Flemish town, though nearly ten miles, in a beeline,
inside the French border--Flemish not merely, like Dunkirk, in the
architecture of its great brick church, but also actually Flemish
in language, and in the names that one reads above its shop doors.
In particular, excursions may be pleasantly made from Furnes--
whose principal inn, the Noble Rose, is again a quaint relic of
the sixteenth century--to the two delightful little market-towns
of Dixmude and Nieuport-Ville: I write, as always, of what was
recently, and of what I have seen myself; to-day they are probably
heaps of smoking ruin, and sanguinary altars to German "kultur."
Nieuport-Ville, so called in distinction from its dull little
watering-place understudy, Nieuport-les-Bains, which lies a couple
of miles to the west of it, among the sand-dunes by the mouth of
the Yser, and is hardly worth a visit unless you want to bathe--
Nieuport-Ville, in addition to its old yellow-brick Halles, or
Cloth Hall, and its early Tour des Templiers, is remarkable for
its possession of a fascinating church, the recent restoration of
which has been altogether conservative and admirable. Standing
here, in this rich and picturesque interior, you realize strongly
the gulf in this direction between Belgium and France, in which
latter country, in these days of ecclesiastical poverty, loving
restoration of the kind here seen is rare, and whose often
neglected village churches seldom, or never, exhibit that wealth
of marble rood-screen and sculptured woodwork--of beaten brass
and hammered iron--that distinguishes Belgian church interiors
from perhaps all others on earth. The church has also some highly
important brasses, another detail, common of course in most
counties of England, that is now never, or hardly ever, found in
France. Chief, perhaps, among these is the curious, circular brass
--I hope it has escaped--with figures of husband, wife, and
children, on a magnificently worked background, that is now
suspended on the northwest pier of the central crossing. Very
Belgian, too, in character is the rood-beam, with its three

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