University of Virginia Library

III.

We must look closely into the formation of Belgium[23] in order to comprehend the rise of the school
which bears the name of Rubens. Previous to the
War of Independence the Southern provinces seemed
to tend to the Reformation as well as the provinces
of the North. In 1566 bands of iconoclasts had
devastated the cathedrals of Antwerp, Ghent and
Tournay, and broken everywhere, in the churches
and the abbeys, all images and ornaments deemed
idolatrous. In the environs of Ghent thousands of
armed Calvinists flocked to the preachings of Hermann
Stricker. Crowds gathered around the stake,
sang psalms, sometimes stoned the executioners and
set the condemned free. Death penalties had to be
enacted in order to suppress the satires of the belle-lettre
academies, and when the Duke of Alba began

his massacres the whole country rushed to arms.
The resistance, however, was not the same in the
South as in the North; in the South the Germanic
race, the independent and Protestant race, was not
pure; the Walloons, a mixed population speaking
French, constituted one half of the inhabitants.
The soil, moreover, being richer, and living easier,
there was less energy and greater sensuality; man
was less resolved to suffer and more inclined to
enjoy. Finally, almost all the Walloons, besides the
families of the great, being attached to court sentiment
through a court life, were Catholic. Hence it
is that the Southern provinces did not contend with
the indomitable stubbornness of the Northern provinces.
There is nothing in them like the sieges of
Maestricht, Harlem, Alkmaar and Leyden, where
women enlisted, fought, and were slaughtered in
the breach. After the taking of Antwerp by the
Duke of Parma the ten provinces returned to their
allegiance, and began apart a new existence. The
most spirited citizens and the most fervent Calvinists
had perished in battle and on the scaffold, or had
fled to the North in the seven free provinces. The
belle-lettre academies exiled themselves there in a
body. On the termination of the Duke of Alva's
administration it was estimated that sixty thousand
families had emigrated; after the capture of Ghent
eleven thousand more departed, and after the capitulation
of Antwerp four thousand weavers betook
themselves to London. Antwerp lost the half of
its inhabitants, and Ghent and Bruges two-thirds;
whole streets were empty; in the principal street of
Ghent a couple of horses cropped the grass. A
mighty surgical operation had relieved the nation
of what the Spaniards called its bad blood; at all
events that which remained was the most quiescent.
There is a great substratum of docility in the
Germanic races; think of the German regiments
exported to America and sold there to die by their
petty absolute princes: the sovereign once accepted,
they are faithful to him; with guaranteed rights
he seems legitimate; they are inclined to respect
the established order of things. The continued constraint,
moreover, of irremediable necessity produces
its effect; man accommodates himself to things
when he is satisfied that he cannot change them
certain portions of his character which cannot be
developed languish, and others expand the more.
There are moments in the history of a nation when
it bears some resemblance to Christ taken to the
top of a high mountain by Satan, and there bid
to choose between a heroic and a common life;
here the tempter is Philip II., with his armies and
executioners; the people of the North and the
South, both subject to the same trial, decide differently
according to the petty diversities of their
composition and character. The choice made these
diversities grow, and are exaggerated by the effects
of the situation they themselves have produced.
Both people being two almost indeterminate varieties
of one species become two distinct species. It
is with moral types as with organic types; they
issue at the beginning from a common origin, but as
they complete their development they grow wider
apart and are thus formed through their divergencies.
The Southern provinces henceforth become
Belgium. The dominant trait is the craving for
peace and comfort, the disposition to take life on the
jovial and pleasant side, in brief, the sentiment of
Teniers. In fact, even in a dilapidated cabin or in
a bare tavern on a wooden bench a man may laugh,
sing, smoke a good pipe and swallow deep draughts
of beer; it is not disagreeable to attend mass as
a fine ceremony, nor to recount one's sins to an
accommodating Jesuit. After the capture of Antwerp,
Philip II. is delighted to hear that communions
have become more and more frequent. Convents
are founded twenty at a time. "It is a matter
worthy of remark," says a contemporary, "that
since the happy advent of the archdukes more new
establishments have arisen than in two hundred
years and before that"—Franciscans, reformed Carmelites,
friars of St. Francis de Paule, Carmelites,
annunciada, and especially the Jesuits; the latter in
fact bring with them a new Christianity, the most
appropriate to the state of the country, and which
seems manufactured purposely to contrast with that
of the Protestants. Be docile in mind and in heart,
and all the rest is tolerance and indulgence; in this
connection see the portraits of the day, and among
others, the gay fellow who was confessor to Rubens.
Casuistry is shaped to and serves for difficult cases;
under its empire there is scope enough for all current
peccadilloes. Worship, moreover, is exempt
from prudery, and winds up by being amusing. To
this epoch belongs the worldly and sensualistic
internal decoration of the grave and venerable
cathedral, the multiplied and contorted ornaments—
flames, lyres, trinkets and scrolls, the veneerings of
veined marbles, altars resembling theatre façades,
and the quaint diverting pulpits overlaid with a menagerie
of carved birds and brutes. As respects the
new churches, the outside suits the inside. That
of the Jesuits, built in Antwerp at the beginning of
the seventeenth century, is instructive, it being a
saloon filled with étagères. Its thirty-six ceilings
were executed by Rubens, and it is curious to see
here as elsewhere an ascetic and mystic faith accept
as edifying subjects the most blooming and the
most exposed nudities, buxom Magdalens, plump St.
Sebastians and Madonnas whom the negro magi are
devouring with all the lust of their eyes, a display
of flesh and fabrics unequalled by the Florentine
carnival in luxurious temptation and in triumphant
sensuality.

Meanwhile the altered political situation contributes
to the transformation of the intellectual world.
The old despotism becomes relaxed; to the rigors
of the Duke of Alva succeeds the liberal policy of
the Duke of Parma. After an amputation, a man
who has bled profusely must be restored by soothing
and strengthening treatment; hence it is that, after
the pacification of Ghent, the Spaniards let their terrible
edicts against heresy lie dormant. Executions
are at an end. The latest martyr is a poor sewing
woman, buried alive in 1597. In the following century
Jordaens, with his wife and her family, become
Protestants without being annoyed, and even without
losing any of his commissions. The archdukes
permit towns and corporations to govern themselves
according to ancient usages, to collect imposts and
attend to their own business; when they desire
to have Breughel de Velours relieved of military
duty or of exactions, they make their appeal to the
commune. The government becomes regular, semiliberal,
and almost national; Spanish extortions, razzias,
and brutalities disappear. At length, in order
to keep possession of the country, Philip II. is compelled

to let it remain Flemish, and exist as a separate
state. In 1599 he detaches it from Spain, and cedes
it in full possession to Albert and Isabella. "The
Spaniards never did a better thing," writes the
French ambassador; "it would be impossible to keep
the country without giving it this new system, as it
was ripe for revolution." The States-General meet
in 1600, and decide for reforms. We see in Guiccardini,
and other travellers, that the old constitution
arises almost intact out of the rubbish under
which it had been buried by military violence. "At
Bruges," M. de Monconys writes in 1653, "each trade
has a house in common, where those of the profession
meet to transact the business of the community,
or for recreation; and all the trades are distributed
into four divisions, under the control of four burgomasters,
who have charge of the keys of the city,
the Governor exercising no jurisdiction or power
over any but the military force." The archdukes
are wise and solicitous of the public welfare. In
1609 they make peace with Holland; in 1611 their
perpetual edict completes the restoration of the country.
They either are or render themselves powerful;
Isabella, with her own hand, strikes down, on
the Place de Sablon, the bird which sanctifies the
cross-bowman's pledge; Albert attends at Louvain
the lectures of Justus Lepsius. They love, cherish,
and attach themselves to famous artists—Otto Venius,
Rubens, Teniers, and Breughel de Velours.
The belle-lettre institutions flourish again, and the
universities are favored; in the Catholic world, under
the Jesuits and often by their side, is a kind of
intellectual renaissance; a number of theologians,
controversialists, casuists, erudites, geographers, physicians,
and even historians, arise—Mercator, Ortelius,
Van Helmont, Jansenius, Lepsius, all of whom
are Flemings of this epoch. The "Description of
Flanders," by Sander, a vast work completed after
so many trials, is a monument of national zeal and
patriotic pride. If, in turn, we wish to form an idea
of the state of the country, take one of the tranquil
and fallen cities to-day like Bruges. Sir Dudley
Carleton, passing through Antwerp in 1616, finds it
a handsome place, although nearly empty; he may
have seen no more than "forty persons in the entire
street," not a carriage, not a horseman, not a cus
tomer in the shops; but the houses are well maintained,
everything being clean and cared for: the
peasant has rebuilt his burnt cabin and is at work
in the field; the housewife is attending to her duties;
security has returned, and is about to be followed
by plenty; there are shooting matches, processions,
fairs and magnificent entries of princes; people are
getting back to old comforts beyond which they do
not aspire; religion is left to the Church, and government
to the princes: here, as at Venice, the
course of events has brought man down to the quest
of enjoyment—the effort to obtain it being the more
strenuous in proportion to the strong contrast with
their previous misery.

And, in truth, what a contrast! It is necessary
to have read the details of the war in order to appreciate
it. Fifty thousand martys had perished
under Charles V., eighteen thousand persons had
been executed by the Duke of Alva, and the revolted
country had maintained the war for thirteen
years. The Spaniards had reconquered the large
cities only by famine after protracted sieges. In
the beginning Antwerp was sacked for three days;

seven thousand of her citizens were slain, and five
hundred houses were burnt. The soldier lived on
the country, and we see him in the engravings of
the day plundering and robbing dwellings, torturing
the husband, violating the wife, and bearing away
chests and furniture in carts. When his pay was
withheld too long he took up his quarters in a town,
and this led to a republic of brigands; under an
eletto of their own choice they ravaged the environs
at their convenience. Karl Van Mander, the historian
of the painters, on returning one day to his
village, found his house pillaged along with the
rest; the soldiers had even taken the bed and bedclothes
of his old sick father. Karl was driven out
naked, and they were already fixing a rope to his
neck to hang him when he was saved by a cavalier
whom he had known in Italy. Another time, as he
was on the road with his wife and an infant child,
they took his money, baggage and clothes, his wife's
and those of the infant; the mother could only
secure a small petticoat, the infant a tattered net,
and Karl an old worn-out piece of cloth in which
he wrapped himself up, and in which guise he
reached Bruges. Under this regime a country
ceases to exist; soldiers themselves finally die of
starvation; the Duke of Parma writes to Philip II.
that if he fails to send relief the army is lost, "for
nobody can live without eating." On emerging
from such calamities, peace seems a paradise; it is
not merely the good at which man rejoices, but the
better, and here the better is stupendous. A man
can now sleep in his own bed, store up provisions,
enjoy the fruits of his labor, travel about and assemble
and converse with his fellows without fear;
he has a home, a country and a future. All the
ordinary occurrences of life get to be interesting
and attractive; he revives, and for the first time
seems to live. It is circumstances like these out of
which always springs a spontaneous literature and
an original art. The great crisis through which the
nation has passed serves to remove the monotonous
varnish with which tradition and custom have overspread
things. We find out what man is; we seize
on the fundamental points of his renewed and transformed
nature; we see its depth, its secret instincts,
the master forces which denote his race and are
about to control his history; half a century later
and we see them no more, because during a half
century they have been constantly visible. In the
meantime, however, the new order of things becomes
complete; the mind confronts it like Adam
on his first awakening; it is only later that conceptions
get to be over-refined and weakened; they
are now broad and simple. Man is qualified for this
through his birth in a crumbling society and an
education in the midst of veritable tragedies; like
Victor Hugo and George Sand, the child Rubens, in
exile, alongside of his imprisoned father, hears, in
his home and all around him, the roar of tempest
and of wreck. After an active generation which
has suffered and created, comes the poetic generation
which writes, paints or models. It expresses
and amplifies the energies and desires of a society
founded by its fathers. Hence it is that Flemish
art proceeds to glorify in heroic types the sensual
instincts, the grand and gross joyousness, the rude
energy of surrounding mortals, and to find in the
alehouse of Teniers the Olympus of Rubens.

Among these painters there is one who seems to

efface the rest; indeed no name in the history of art
is greater, and there are only three or four as great.
But Rubens is not an isolated genius, the number
as well as the resemblance of surrounding talents
showing that the efflorescence of which he is the
most beautiful emanation is the product of his
time and people. Before him there was Adam Van
Noort, his master,[24] and the master of Jordaens;
around him are his contemporaries, educated in other
studios, and whose invention is as spontaneous as his
own—Jordaens, Crayer, Gerard Zeghers, Rombouts,
Abraham Janssens, and Van Roose; after him come
his pupils—Van Thulden, Diepenbecke, Van den
Hoeck, Corneille Schut, Boyermans, Van Dyck, the
greatest of all, and Van Oost of Bruges; alongside
of him are the great animal, flower and still-life
painters—Snyders, John Fyt, the Jesuit Seghers, and
an entire school of famous engravers—Soutman, Vorsterman,
Bolswert, Pontius and Vischer; the same
sap fructifies all these branches, the lesser as well as
the greater, while we must add, again, the pervading
sympathies and the national admiration. It is
plain that an art like this is not the effect of one accidental
cause but of a general development, and of
this we have full assurance when, considering the
work itself, we remark the concordances which
assimilate it with its milieu.

On the one side it resumes or follows the traditions
of Italy, and is seen at a glance to be pagan
and Catholic. It is supported by churches and convents;
it represents Biblical and evangelical scenes;
the subject is edifying; and the engraver deliberately
places at the bottom of his engravings pious
maxims and moral problems. And yet, in fact,
there is nothing Christian about it but its name; all
mystic or ascetic sentiment is banished; its Madonnas,
martyrs and confessors, its Christs and apostles
are superb florid bodies restricted to the life of
the flesh; its paradise is an Olympus of well-fed
Flemish deities revelling in muscular activity; they
are large, vigorous, plump and content, and make a
jovial and magnificent display as in a national festi
val or at a princely entry. The Church, it is true,
ptizes this last flower of the old mythology with

becoming forms, but it is only baptism, and this
is frequently wanting. Apollos, Jupiters, Castors,
Pollux and Venus, all the ancient divinities, revive
under their veritable names in the palaces of the
kings and the great which they decorate. This is
owing to religion, here as in Italy, consisting of
rites. Rubens goes to mass every morning, and presents
a picture in order to obtain indulgences; after
which he falls back upon his own poetic feeling for
natural life and, in the same style, paints a lusty
Magdalen and a plump Siren; under the Catholic
varnish the heart and the intellect, all social ways
and observances are pagan. On the other side, this
art is truly Flemish; everything issues from and
centres on a mother idea which is new and national;
it is harmonious, spontaneous and original; in this
respect it contrasts with the foregoing which is only
a discordant imitation. From Greece to Florence,
from Florence to Venice, from Venice to Antwerp,
every step of the passage can be traced. The conception
of man and of life goes on decreasing in
nobleness and increasing in breadth. Rubens is to
Titian what Titian was to Raphael, and Raphael to
Phidias. Never did artistic sympathy clasp nature
in such an open and universal embrace. Ancient
boundaries, already often extended, seem removed
purposely to expose an infinite career. There is no
respect for historic proprieties; he groups together
allegoric with real figures, and cardinals with a
naked Mercury. There is no deference to the moral
order; he fills the ideal heaven of mythology and
of the gospel with coarse or mischievous characters;
a Magdalen resembling a nurse, and a Ceres
whispering some pleasant gossip in her neighbor's
ear. There is no dread of exciting physical sensibility;
he pushes the horrible to extremes, athwart
all the tortures for the punishment of the flesh and
all the contortions of howling agony. There is no
fear of offending moral delicacy; his Minerva is a
shrew who can fight, his Judith a butcher's wife
familiar with blood, and his Paris a jocose expert
and a dainty amateur. To translate into words the
ideas vociferously proclaimed by his Suzannas, his
Magdalens, his St. Sebastians, his Graces and his
Sirens, in all his kermesses, divine and human, ideal
or real, Christian or pagan, would require the terms
of Rabelais. Through him all the animal instincts
of human nature appear on the stage; those which
had been excluded as gross he reproduces as true,
and in him as in nature they encounter the others.
Nothing is wanting but the pure and the noble; the
whole of human nature is in his grasp, save the
loftiest heights. Hence it is that his creativeness
is the vastest we have seen, comprehending as it
does all types, Italian cardinals, Roman emperors,
contemporary citizens, peasants and cowherds, along
with the innumerable diversities stamped on humanity
by the play of natural forces and which more
than fifteen hundred pictures did not suffice to
exhaust.

For the same reason, in the representation of the
body, he comprehended more profoundly than any
one the essential characteristic of organic life; he
surpasses in this the Venetians, as they surpass the
Florentines; he feels still better than they that flesh
is a changeable substance in a constant state of
renewal; and such, more than any other, is the
Flemish body, lympathic, sanguine and voracious,
more fluid, more rapidly tending to accretion and

waste than those whose dry fibre and radical temper
ance preserve permanent tissues. Hence it is that
nobody has depicted its contrasts in stronger relief,
nor as visibly shown the decay and bloom of life—at
one time the dull flabby corpse, a genuine clinical
mass, empty of blood and substance, livid, blue and
mottled through suffering, a clot of blood on the
mouth, the eye glassy and the feet and hands clayish,
swollen and deformed because death seized them
first; at another the freshness of living carnations,
the handsome, blooming and smiling athlete, the
mellow suppleness of a yielding torso in the form of
a well-fed adolescent, the soft rosy cheeks and placid
candor of a girl whose blood was never quickened
or eyes bedimmed by thought, flocks of dimpled
cherubs and merry cupids, the delicacy, the folds,
the exquisite melting rosiness of infantile skin, seemingly
the petal of a flower moistened with dew and
impregnated with morning light. In like manner in
the representation of soul and action he appreciated
more keenly than any one the essential feature of
animal and moral life, that is to say the instantaneous
movement which it is the aim of the plastic arts to
seize on the wing. In this again he surpasses the Venetians
as they surpassed the Florentines. Nobody
has endowed figures with such spirit, with a gesture
so impulsive, with an impetuosity so abandoned and
furious, such an universal commotion and tempest
of swollen and writhing muscles in one single effort.
His personages speak; their repose itself is suspended
on the verge of action; we feel what they have
just accomplished and what they are about to do.
The present with them is impregnated with the past
and big with the future; not only the whole face but
the entire attitude conspires to manifest the flowing
stream of their thought, feeling and complete being;
we hear the inward utterance of their emotion; we
might repeat the words to which they give expression.
The most fleeting and most subtle shades of
sentiment belong to Rubens; in this respect he is a
treasure for novelist and psychologist; he took note
of the passing refinements of moral expression as well
as of the soft volume of sanguine flesh; no one has
gone beyond him in knowledge of the living organism
and of the animal man. Endowed with this sentiment
and skill he was capable, in conformity with
the aspirations and needs of his restored nation, of
amplifying the forces he found around and within
himself, all that underlie, preserve and manifest the
overflow and triumph of existence; on the one hand
gigantic joints, herculean shapes and shoulders, red
and colossal muscles, bearded and truculent heads,
over-nourished bodies teeming with succulence, the
luxurious display of white and rosy flesh; on the
other, the rude instincts which impel human nature
to seek food, drink, strife and pleasure, the savage
fury of the combatant, the enormity of the big-bellied
Silenus, the sensual joviality of the Faun, the
abandonment of that lovely creature without conscience
and "fat with sin," the boldness, the energy,
the broad joyousness, the native goodness, the organic
serenity of the national type. He heightens
these effects again through their composition and
the accessories with which he surrounds them—magnificence
of lustrous silks, embroidered simarres and
golden brocades, groups of naked figures, modern
costumes and antique draperies, an inexhaustible
accumulation of arms, standards, colonnades, Venetian
stairways, temples, canopies, ships, animals, and
ever novel and imposing scenery, as if outside of
ordinary nature he possessed the key of a thousand
times richer nature, whereon his magician's hand
could forever draw without the freedom of his imagination
ending in confusion, but on the contrary
with a jet so vigorous and a prodigality so national
that his most complicated productions seem like the
irresistible outflow of a surfeited brain. Like an
Indian deity at leisure he relieves his fecundity by
reating worlds, and from the matchless folds and
ues of his tossed simarres to the snowy whites of
his flesh, or the pale silkiness of his blonde tresses,
there is no tone in any of his canvasses which does
not appear there purposely to afford him delight.

There is only one Rubens in Flanders, as there
is only one Shakespeare in England. Great as the
others are, they are deficient in some one element of
his genius. Crayer has not his audacity nor his
excess; he paints beauty calm,[25] sympathetic and
content along with requisite effects of bright and
mellow color. Jordaens has not his regal grandeur

and his heroic poetic feeling; he paints with vinous
color stunted colossi, crowded groups and turbulent
plebeians. Van Dyck has not, like him, the love of
power and of life for life itself; more refined, more
chivalric, born with a sensitive and even melancholy
nature, elegiac in his sacred subjects, aristocratic
in his portraits, he depicts with less glowing
and more sympathetic color noble, tender and
charming figures whose generous and delicate souls
are filled with sweet and sad emotions unknown to
his master.[26] His works are the first indication of
the coming change. After 1660 he is already promment.
The generation whose energy and aspirations
had inspired the grand picturesque revery,
faded away man by man; Crayer and Jordaens
alone, by merely living, kept art up for twenty years.
The nation, reviving for a moment, falls backward;
its renaissance never perfects itself. The archducal
sovereigns, through whom it had become an independent
state, ended in 1633; it reverts back to a Spanish
province under a governor sent from Madrid. The
treaty of 1648 closes the Scheldt to it, and completes
the ruin of her commerce. Louis XIV. dismembers
her, and on three occasions deprives her of portions
of her territory. Four successive wars trample over
her for thirty years; friends and enemies, Spaniards,
French, English and Hollanders live upon her; the
treaties of 1715 convert the Dutch into her purveyors
and tax-gatherers. At this moment, become Austrian,
she refuses the subsidy; but the elders of the
states are imprisoned, and the chief one, Anneessens,
dies on the scaffold; this is the last and a feeble
echo of the mighty voice of Van Artevelde. Henceforth
the country subsides into a simple province in
which people keep soul and body together and only
care to live. At the same time, and through a reaction,
the national imagination declines. The school
of Rubens degenerates; with Beyermans, Van Herp,
John Erasmus Quellin, the second Van Oost, Deyster
and John Van Orley we see originality and
energy disappearing; coloring grows weak or becomes
affected; attenuated types incline to prettiness;
expression is either sentimental or mawkish;
the personages occupying the great canvas, instead of
filling it are dispersed, the intervals being supplied
with architecture; the vein is exhausted; painting
is mere routine or a mannered imitation of the
Italian school. Many betake themselves to foreign
countries. Philippe de Champagne is director of the
Academy of the Fine Arts at Paris and becomes
French in mind and country; still more, a spiritualist
and Jansenist, a conscientious and skilful painter of
grave and thoughtful spirit. Gerard de Lairesse
becomes a disciple of the Italians—a classic, academic
and erudite painter of costume and historic
and mythologic resemblances. The logical reason
assumes empire in the arts, having already obtained
it in social matters. Two pictures in the Musée of
Ghent equally display the change in painting and
the change in society. Both represent princely
entrêes, one in 1666 and the other in 1717. The
first, of a beautiful ruddy tone, shows the last of the
men of the grand epoch, their cavalier air, their
powerful frame, their capacity for physical endeavor,
their rich decorative costumes, their horses with
with flowing manes—here nobles related to Van
Dyck's seigniors, and there pikemen in buff and
cuirass kindred to the soldiers of Wallestein—in
short, the last remains of the heroic and picturesque
age. The second, cold and pale in tone, shows
highly refined, softened, Frenchified beings—gentlemen
clever at salutation, women of fashion conscious
of their appearance, in brief, the imported
drawing-room system and foreign modes of demeanor.
During the fifty years separating the
former from the latter both the national art and
the national spirit vanished.