London was 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 into sight 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, she began 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 the blasÉ mind. 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 long trumpets 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 Eighteenpenny Bath,’ 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 had artists 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 and thinks the 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 turn away, 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.

GEORGE R. SIMS’S BOOKS.

Rogues and Vagabonds. Post 8vo., illustrated boards, 2s.; cloth limp, 2s. 6d.

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The Dagonet Reciter and Reader: being Readings and
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