My Unknown Chum: "Aguecheek". Fairbanks Charles Bullard

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ susceptibilities might approach Flanders without the slightest apprehension of an attack of his weakness. I could not help congratulating myself, though, on having been spared to see the country which was immortalized by the profanity of a great military force.

      We Americans usually consider ourselves up to the times, and are prone to sneer at Russia for being eleven days behind the age; but we do not yet "beat the Dutch" in progress, for they are half an hour in advance, as I found, very soon after landing, that all the church clocks, with a great deal of formality and precision, struck nine, when the hands only pointed to half past eight; and I noted a similar phenomenon while I was taking breakfast an hour after. Antwerp is a beautiful old city, and its quiet streets are very pleasant, after the tumult and roar of London; but – there is one drawback – it is too scrupulously clean. I almost feared to walk about, lest I should unknowingly do some damage; and every door-handle and bell-pull had a most unhospitable polish, which seemed to say with the placards in the Crystal Palace, "Please not to handle." Cleanliness is a great virtue; but when it is carried to such an extent that you cannot find your books and papers which you left carefully arranged yesterday on your table, – when it gets to be a monomania with man or woman, – it becomes a bore. How strangely the first two or three hours in a Dutch town strike a stranger! – the odd, high-gabled houses, the queer head-dresses, (graceful because of their very ungracefulness,) the wooden shoes, and the language, which sounds like English spoken by a toothless person. But one very soon gets accustomed to it. It is like being in an Oriental city, where the great variety of costumes and languages, and the different manners of the people, make up an ensemble which a stranger thinks will be a lasting novelty; but on his second day he finds himself taking about as much notice of a Persian caravan as he would of a Canton Street or Sixth Avenue omnibus.

      I might here indulge in a little harmless enthusiasm about this grand old cathedral of Antwerp. I might talk about the "long-drawn aisle and fretted vault," and give an elaborate description of it, – its enormous dimensions and artistic glories, – if I did not know that any reader who desires such things can find them set down with greater exactness than becomes me, in any of the guide books for Belgium. I spent the greater proportion of my waking hours in Antwerp under the solemn arches of that majestic old church. I wonder, shall we ever see any thing in America to remind us even faintly of the glories of Antwerp, Cologne, Rouen, Amiens, York, or Milan? I fear not. The ages that built those glorious piles thought less of fat dividends than this boastful nineteenth century of ours, and their religion was not the mere one-day-out-of-seven affair that the improved Christianity of to-day is. The architects who conceived and executed those marvels of sublimity never troubled themselves with our popular query, "Will it pay?" any more than Dante interrupted the inspiration of his Paradiso, or Beethoven the linked harmony of his matchless symphonies, with their solicitude about the amount of their copyright. No; their work inspired them, and while it reflected their genius, it imparted to them something of its own divine dignity. Their art became religion, and its laborious processes acts of the most fervent devotion. But we have reformed all that, and now inspiration has to give way to considerations of the greatest number of "sittings," that can possibly be provided, and if the expenses of the sacred enterprise can be lessened by contriving accommodation for shops or storage in the basement, who does not rejoice? There are too many churches nowadays built upon the foundation of the profits, leaving the apostles entirely out of the question.

      But while I lament our want of those wonderful constructions whose very stones seem to have grown consciously into forms of beauty, I must record my satisfaction at the improvement in architectural taste which is visible in most of our cities at home. If we must have banks, and railway stations, and shops, it is some compensation to have them made pleasant to our sight. Buildings are the books that every body unconsciously reads; and if they are a libel on the laws of architecture, they will surely vitiate in time the taste of those who become familiarized to their deformity. Dr. Johnson said, that "if a man's hands were dirty, his thoughts would be dirty"; and it may be declared, with much more reason, that those who are obliged to look, day after day, at ungraceful, mean, and unsubstantial objects, 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! СКАЧАТЬ