that has subordinated honest workmanship to cheap and shoddy
productiveness, and has sacrificed the workman to machinery.
Certainly no one who visits Antwerp can afford to overlook it; but
probably most people will first bend their steps towards the more
popular shrine of the great cathedral. Here I confess myself utter
heretic: to call this church, as I have seen it called, "one of
the grandest in Europe," seems to me pure Philistinism--the cult
of the merely big and obvious, to the disregard of delicacy and
beauty. Big it is assuredly, and superficially astonishing; but
anything more barn-like architecturally, or spiritually
unexalting, I can hardly call to memory. Outside it lacks entirely
all shadow of homogeneity; the absence of a central tower, felt
perhaps even in the great cathedrals of Picardy and the Ile de
France, just as it is felt in Westminster and in Beverley Minster,
is here actually accentuated by the hideous little cupola--I
hardly know how properly to call it--that squats, as though in
derision, above the crossing; whilst even the natural meeting and
intersection at this point of high roofs, which in itself would
rise to dignity, is wantonly neglected to make way for this
monstrosity. The church, in fact, looks, when viewed externally,
more like four separate churches than one; and when we step
inside, with all the best will in the world to make the best of
it, it is hard to find, much to admire, and anything at all to
love, in these acres of dismally whitewashed walls, and long,
feeble lines of arcades without capitals. The inherent vice of
Belgian architecture--its lack of really beautiful detail, and
its fussy superfluity of pinnacle and panelling--seems to me here
to culminate. Belgium has really beautiful churches--not merely of
the thirteenth century, when building was lovely everywhere, but
later buildings, like Mons, and St. Pierre at Louvain; but Antwerp