The Henson Journals

[403]

Thursday, August 21st, 1913. Brussels.

We spent an hour in driving about Brussels before going to the Gare du Midi and taking the train for Tournai. In 1½ hours we reached that famous & beautiful city. Our first business was to get lunch, & this we accomplished successfully at the Hotel de l'Impératrice, a clean & sufficient establishment, where we were treated very fairly. Then we made our way to the Cathedral, one of the most glorious churches I have seen. The nave has a look of Norwich, the arcades of the triforium (or gallery under the triforium) being as lofty as those of the nave itself. There was a severity of aspect which the elaborately carved capitals of the columns did not affect. Then came the 13th century transepts & choir, exquisitely beautiful & on the grandest scale. I was particularly interested in the appearance of the low nave & loftier choir & transepts because it showed what Westminster Abbey must have looked like when Henry & Edward's Gothic work coexisted with the Confessor's Norman Nave. The 16th century screen parting the Choir from the nave & transepts is splendid, but incongruous. We saw the Treasure of the Cathedral – noble goldsmith's work of the 13th & 15th centuries, rare tapestries, a wealth of copes, & the vestment of S. Thomas of Canterbury. This last article puzzles me: it looks strangely unlike what one expects.

[404]

The western porch was full of 13th, 16th & 17th century statuary & mostly much battered. Both the northern & the Southern portals are elaborately carved. The total effect of the different impressions made on my mind by this astonishing church is not easily brought into a phrase. Certainly I have never seen a medieval building which pleased me more. Both externally & internally the cathedral is magnificent – unlike everything else. Then we hired a carriage, & drove round the City, stopping to look at the more interesting features. We saw thus the fortified bridge, with its towers (Pont des Trous), & the Tower of Henry VIII. A tablet fixed in the wall of a house near S. Brice's Church records that there the Tomb of Childeric was discovered in 1653. We visited the church of St Quentin & that of St Jacque, & admired but did not ascent the noble Belfry. There is an air of alertness in the citizens, an appearance of cleanness in the city, which indicate a desire on the part of Tournai to come into the great world like its neighbours, & get a share of tourist gold. There are a good many old houses which lend dignity to the streets: & everywhere the five towers of the noble cathedral rise on the visitor's vision. We got some indifferent tea in a patisserie shop hard by the station, & then returned to Brussels, where we arrived about 7.15 p.m.

[405]

The French papers give considerable space to an account of Ollivier, whose death at the great age of 88 years is reported this morning. A writer in the Figaro describes him sympathetically as the victim of cruel fortune: but other papers speak of him as a politician whose blunders were of that magnitude which transforms blunders into crimes.

It is stated that a marked feature of the Catholic Congress in Germany has been the prominence of the French tongue. The representatives from Alsace & Lorraine have thus testified their unalterable devotion to France. Instead of Latin which on former occasions was employed for the formal letter to the Pope, French has been used: & what is, perhaps, even more noteworthy the Vatican in acknowledging the letter has used the same language.

There is a fresh parson in the Hôtel demurely clerical. Yesterday an older parson of a more conventional type was here. The holy men look at me 'out of the corners of their eyes', as if uncertain what might be the correct attitude for them to adopt towards a strange creature, grey & lay by day, and at eventide emerging as a canonical (or rather decanal) blackbird: but I don't think either of them has found me out yet.

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