Do you remember the gorgeous
costumes of our fellow-burghers, and the trappings of their prancing
chargers in those days when life was not plain, but coloured, and
existence was one vast fancy-dress ball? How glad we were to welcome the
Archduke Martinias of Austria, our sovereign elect, or was it Francois
Sonnius, our first Bishop, coming to be installed in our glorious
Cathedral, amid the joyous carillons of its bells! Can you not still see
the Angels hovering over the Virgin, and the Golden Calf,
flower-wreathed, and the Flight into Egypt, on that naive donkey, and
"the Flying Dutchman," tugged by a horse, and the gilded galley rowed in
make-believe by little children in their Sunday clothes, catching crabs
in air, and the incongruous camels bestridden by Arab sheikhs with
African pages, and the Persians on ponies, and the Crusaders in their
fine foolish coats-of-mail, and the gay courtiers, with clanking swords,
and the halberdiers, and the particoloured arquebusiers, and the archers
in green and red, and the spearsmen in sugarloaf hats, and the cherubs
riding on dolphins? Can you not hear the beating of the drum, and the Ave
Maria of the white-robed chorus-boys, and the irrelevant strains of the
Danish national anthem, and the japes of the jester with his cap and
bells? What happy times for butchers and bakers and candlestick-makers
when, instead of working, they could go in processions, bearing aloft the
insignia of their guilds, and when middle-class girls, ignorant of the
New Womanhood, could loll on triumphal cars with roses in their hair! Do
you remember how the topmost divinity smiled to me from her perilous
perch, too high to rouse your jealousy, and how the little cherub that
sat up aloft besprinkled us mischievously with eau de cologne? Ah, shall
we ever again be as happy as we were three hundred years ago? will the
wine be ever as red, the potato salad as appetising, or the cheese (did
they really enjoy Gorgonzola and Camembert in the sixteenth century?) as
delicious as in that ancient Flemish hostelry with its Lutheran motto:
Wie nikt mint Wijn, Wijf en Sangh,
Blijft een Geck sijn Leven langh!
Was it from its inscribed beams that Shelley borrowed his famous lyric
"Love's Philosophy"? for did we not read:
Den Hemel drinckt, en d'Aerde drinckt:
Waerom souden wij niet drinckt?
("Heaven drinks, and earth drinks: why shouldn't we drink?") At any rate
it pleased us to recall the delectable lines:
And the sunlight clasps the earth,
And the moonbeams kiss the sea;
What are all these kissings worth
If thou kiss not me?
But what does it matter what one did three hundred years ago?
Or, what does it matter what one did that dim Arabian night when we set
out with the cavalcade of camels in the marriage procession, and the
bride cowered veiled in her corner of the coach, and the plump mother
smiled archly at us, and the brother and the bridegroom, mounted on Arab
steeds, smacked each other's faces in ceremonial solemnity, exactly like
"the two Macs" in the music-hall? Was it then, or in the nineteenth
century, that we rode the camel together, I on the hindmost peak? "Oh,
the oont, oh, the oont, oh, the gawdforsaken oont!" as the poet of the
barrack-room sings.
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