The Painter and His Wife (?)
Frans Hals
From the picture in the Ryks Museum
In the Teyler Museum, on the Spaarne, is a poor collection of modern oil paintings, some good modern water colours and a very fine collection of drawings by the masters, including several Rembrandts. In this room one may well plan to spend much time. One of the best Israels that I saw in Holland is a little water-colour interior that is hung here. I asked one of the attendants if they had anything by Matthew Maris, but he denied his Page 145existence. James he knew, and William; but there was no Matthew. “But he is your most distinguished artist,” I said. It was great heresy and not to be tolerated. To the ordinary Dutchman art begins with Rembrandt and ends with Israels. This perhaps is why Matthew Maris has taken refuge in St. John’s Wood.
And now we come to Haarlem’s chief glory—which is not Coster the printer, and not the church of Bavo the Saint, and not the tulip gardens, and not the florid and beautiful Meat Market; but the painter Frans Hals, whose masterpieces hang in the Town Hall.
I have called Hals the glory of Haarlem, yet he was only an adopted son, having been born in Antwerp about 1580. But his parents were true Haarlemers, and Frans was a resident there before he reached man’s estate.
The painter’s first marriage was not happy; he was even publicly reprimanded for cruelty to his wife. In spite of the birth of his eldest child just thirty-four weeks earlier than the proprieties require, his second marriage seems to have been fortunate enough. Some think that we see Mynheer and Myvrouw Hals in the picture—No. 1084 in the Ryks Museum—which is reproduced on the opposite page. If this jovial and roguish pair are really the painter and his wife, they were a merry couple. Children they had in abundance; seven sons, five of whom were painters, and three daughters. Abundance indeed was Hals’ special characteristic; you see it in all his work—vigorous, careless abundance and power. He lived to be eighty-five or so. Mrs. Hals, after a married life of fifty years, continued to flourish, with the assistance of some relief from the town, for a considerable period.
In the Haarlem Museum may be seen a picture of Hals’ studio, painted by Berck Heyde, in 1652, containing portraits Page 146of Hals himself, then about seventy, and several of his old pupils—Wouvermans, Dirck Hals, his brother, four of his sons, the artist himself and others. Hals taught also Van der Helst, whose work at times comes nearest to his own, Verspronk, Terburg and Adrian van Ostade.
To see the work of Hals at his best it is necessary to visit Holland, for we have but little here. The “Laughing Cavalier” in the Wallace Collection is perhaps his best picture in a public gallery in England. But the Haarlem Museum is a temple dedicated to his fame, and there you may revel in his lusty powers.
The room in which his great groups hang is perhaps in effect more filled with faces than any in the world. Entering the door one is immediately beneath the bold and laughing scrutiny of a host of genial masterful arquebusiers, who make merry on the walls for all time. Such a riot of vivid portraiture never was! Other men have painted single heads as well or better: but Hals stands alone in his gusto, his abundance, his surpassing brio. It is a thousand pities that neither Lamb nor Hazlitt ever made the journey to Haarlem, because only they among our writers on art could have brought a commensurate gusto to the praise of his brush.
I have reproduced one of the groups opposite page 150, but the result is no more than a memento of the original. It conveys, however, an impression of the skill in composition by which the group is made not only a collection of portraits but a picture too. If such groups there must be, this is the way to paint them. The Dutch in the seventeenth century had a perfect mania for these commemorative canvases, and there is not a stadhuis but has one or more. Rembrandt’s “Night Watch” and Hals’ Haarlem groups are the greatest; but one is always surprised Page 147by the general level of excellence maintained, and now and then a lesser man such as Van der Helst climbs very nigh the rose, as in his “De Schuttersmaaltyd” in the “Night Watch” room in the Ryks Museum. The Corporation pieces of Jan van Ravesteyn in the Municipal Museum at The Hague are also exceedingly vivid; while Jan de Bray’s canvases at Haarlem, in direct competition with Hals’, would be very good indeed in the absence of their rivals.
Among other painters who can be studied here is our Utrecht friend Jan van Scorel, who has a large “Adam and Eve” in the passage and a famous “Baptism of Christ”; Jan Verspronk of Haarlem, Hals’ pupil, who has a very quiet and effective portrait (No. 210) and a fine rich group of the lady managers of an orphanage; and Cornelius Cornellessen, also of Haarlem, painter of an excellent Corporation Banquet. In the collection are also a very charming little Terburg (No. 194) and a fascinating unsigned portrait of William III. as a pale and wistful boy.
Haarlem was the mother or instructor of many painters. There is Dirck Hals, the brother of Frans, who was born there at the end of the sixteenth century, and painted richly coloured scenes of fashionable convivial life. He died at Haarlem ten years before Frans. A greater was Bartholomew van der Helst, who was Hals’ most assimilative pupil. He was born at Haarlem about 1612, and is supposed to have studied also under Nicolas Elias. His finest large work is undoubtedly the “Banquet” to which I have just referred, but I always associate him with his portrait of Gerard Bicker, Landrichter of Muiden, that splendid tun of a man, No. 1140 in the Gallery of Honour at the Ryks Museum (see opposite page 86). One of his most beautiful paintings is a portrait of a woman in our Page 148National Gallery, on a screen in the large Netherlands room: a picture which shows the influence of Elias not a little, as any one can see who recalls Nos. 897 and 899 in the Ryks Museum—two very beautiful portraits of a man and his wife.
Haarlem and Oudenarde both claim the birth of Adrian Brouwer, a painter of Dutch topers. As to his life little is known. Tradition says that he drank and dissipated his earnings, while his work is evidence that he knew inn life with some particularity; but his epitaph calls him “a man of great mind who rejected every splendour of the world and who despised gain and riches”. Brouwer, who was born about 1606, was put by his mother, a dressmaker at Haarlem, into the studio of Frans Hals. Hals bullied him, as he bullied his first wife. Escaping to Amsterdam, Brouwer became a famous painter, his pictures being acquired, among others, by Rembrandt in his wealthy days, and by Rubens. He died at Antwerp when only thirty-three. We have nothing of his in the National Gallery, but he is represented at the Wallace Collection.
At Haarlem was born also, in 1620, Nicolas Berchem, painter of charming scenes of broken arches and columns (which he certainly never saw in his own country), made human and domestic by the presence of people and cows, and suffused with gentle light. We have five of his pictures in the National Gallery. Berchem’s real name was Van Haarlem. One day, however, when he was a pupil in Van Goyen’s studio, his father pursued him for some fault. Van Goyen, who was a kindly creature, as became the father-in-law of Jan Steen, called out to his other pupils—“Berg hem” (Hide him!) and the phrase stuck, and became his best-known name. Nicolas married a termagant, but never allowed her to impair his cheerful disposition. Page 149
Haarlem was the birthplace also of Jacob van Ruisdael, greatest of Dutch landscape painters. He was born about 1620. His idea was to be a doctor, but Nicolas Berchem induced him to try painting, and we cannot be too thankful for the change. His landscapes have a deep and grave beauty: the clouds really seem to be floating across the sky; the water can almost be heard tumbling over the stones. Ruisdael did not find his typical scenery in his native land: he travelled in Germany and Italy, and possibly in Norway; but whenever he painted a strictly Dutch scene he excelled. He died at Haarlem in 1682; and one of his most exquisite pictures hangs in the Museum. I do not give any reproductions of Ruisdael because his work loses so much in the process. At the National Gallery and at the Wallace Collection he is well represented.
Walking up and down beneath the laughing confidence of these many bold faces in the great Hals’ room at Haarlem I found myself repeating Longfellow’s lines:—
He has singed the beard of the King of Spain,
And carried away the Dean of Jaen
And sold him in Algiers.
Surely the hero, Simon Danz, was something such a man as Hals painted. How does the ballad run?—
A Dutch Picture.
Simon Danz has come home again,
From cruising about with his buccaneers;
He has singed the beard of the King of Spain,
And carried away the Dean of Jaen
And sold him in Algiers.
In his house by the Maese, with its roof of tiles
And weathercocks flying aloft in air,
There are silver tankards of antique styles,
Plunder of convent and castle, and piles
Of carpets rich and rare.
In his tulip garden there by the town
Overlooking the sluggish stream,
With his Moorish cap and dressing-gown
The old sea-captain, hale and brown,
Walks in a waking dream.
A smile in his gray mustachio lurks
Whenever he thinks of the King of Spain.
And the listed tulips look like Turks,
And the silent gardener as he works
Is changed to the Dean of Jaen.
The windmills on the outermost
Verge of the landscape in the haze,
To him are towers on the Spanish coast,
With whisker’d sentinels at their post,
Though this is the river Maese.
But when the winter rains begin,
He sits and smokes by the blazing brands,
And old sea-faring men come in,
Goat-bearded, gray, and with double chin,
And rings upon their hands.
They sit there in the shadow and shine
Of the flickering fire of the winter night,
Figures in colour and design
Like those by Rembrandt of the Rhine,
Half darkness and half light.
And they talk of their ventures lost or won,
And their talk is ever and ever the same,
While they drink the red wine of Tarragon,
From the cellars of some Spanish Don,
Or convent set on flame.
Restless at times, with heavy strides
He paces his parlour to and fro;
He is like a ship that at anchor rides,
And swings with the rising and falling tides
And tugs at her anchor-tow.
Group of Arquebusiers
Frans Hals From the picture in the Haarlem Museum
Voices mysterious far and near,
Sound of the wind and sound of the sea,
Are calling and whispering in his ear,
“Simon Danz! Why stayest thou here?
Come forth and follow me!”
So he thinks he shall take to the sea again,
For one more cruise with his buccaneers;
To singe the beard of the King of Spain,
And capture another Dean of Jaen
And sell him in Algiers.
One thought leads to another. It is impossible also to remain long in the great Hals’ room of the Museum without meditating a little upon the difference between these arquebusiers and the Dutch of the present day. Passing among these people, once so mighty and ambitious, so great in government and colonisation, in seamanship and painting, and seeing them now so material and self-centred, so bound within their own small limits, so careless of literature and art, so intent upon the profits of the day and the pleasures of next Sunday, one has a vision of what perhaps may be our own lot. For the Dutch are very near us in kin, and once were nigh as great as we have been. Are we, in our day of decadence, to shrivel thus? “There but for the grace of God goes England”—is that a reasonable utterance?
One sees the difference concretely as one passes from these many Corporation and Regent pieces in the galleries of Holland to the living Dutchmen of the streets. I saw it particularly at Haarlem on a streaming wet day, after hurrying from the Museum to the Café Brinkmann through some inches of water. At a table opposite, sipping their coffee, were two men strikingly like two of Frans Hals’ arquebusiers. Yet how unlike. For the air of masterful recklessness had gone, that good-humoured glint Page 152of power in the eye was no more. Hals had painted conquerors, or at any rate warriors for country; these coffee drinkers were meditating profit and loss. Where once was authority is now calculation.
I quote a little poem by Mr. Van Lennep of Zeist, near Utrecht, which shows that the Dutch, whatever their present condition, have not forgotten:—
The shell, when put to child-like ears,
Yet murmurs of its bygone years,
In echoes of the sea;
The Dutch-born youngster likes the sound,
And ponders o’er its mystic ground
And wondrous memory.
Thus, in Dutch hearts, an echo dwells,
Which, like the ever-mindful shells,
Yet murmurs of the sea:
That sea, of ours in times of yore,
And, when De Ruyter went before,
Our road to victory.
Chapter X
Amsterdam
The Venice of the North—The beauty of gravity—No place for George Dyer—The Keizersgracht—Kalverstraat and Warmoes Straat—The Ghetto—Pile-driving—Erasmus’s sarcasm—The new Bourse—Learning the city—Tramway perplexities—The unnecessary guide—The Royal Palace—The New Church—Stained glass—The Old Church—The five carpets—Wedding customs—Dutch wives to-day and in the past—The Begijnenhof—The new religion and the old—The Burgerweesmeisjes—The Eight Orange Blossoms—Dutch music halls—A Dutch Hamlet—The fish market—Rembrandt’s grave—A nation of shopkeepers—Max Havelaar—Mr. Drystubble’s device—Lothario and Betsy—The English in Holland and the Dutch in England—Athleticism—A people on skates—The chaperon’s perplexity—Love on the level.
Amsterdam is notable for two possessions above others: its old canals and its old pictures. Truly has it been called the Venice of the North; but very different is its sombre quietude from the sunny Italian city among the waters. There is a beauty of gaiety and a beauty of gravity; and Amsterdam in its older parts—on the Keizersgracht and the Heerengracht—has the beauty of gravity. In Venice the canal is of course also the street: gondolas and barcas are continually gliding hither and thither; but in the Keizersgracht and the Heerengracht the water is little used. One day, however, I watched a costermonger steering a boat-load of flowers under a bridge, and no words of mine can describe the loveliness of their Page 154reflection. I remember the incident particularly because flowers are not much carried in Holland, and it is very pleasant to have this impression of them—this note of happy gaiety in so dark a setting.
An unprotected roadway runs on either side of the water, which makes the houses beside these canals no place for Charles Lamb’s friend, George Dyer, to visit in. Accidents are not numerous, but a company exists in Amsterdam whose business it is to rescue such odd dippers as horses and carriages by means of elaborate machinery devised for the purpose. Only travellers born under a luckier star than I are privileged to witness such sport.
St. Nicolas Church, Amsterdam
In the main Amsterdam is a city of trade, of hurrying business men, of ceaseless clanging tramcars and crowded streets; but on the Keizersgracht and the Heerengracht you are always certain to find the old essential Dutch gravity and peace. No tide moves the sullen waters of these canals, which are lined with trees that in spring form before the narrow, dark, discreet houses the most delicate green tracery imaginable; and in summer screen them altogether. These houses are for the most part black and brown, with white window frames, and they rise to a great height, culminating in that curious stepped gable (with a crane and pulley in it) which is, to many eyes, the symbol of the city. I know no houses that so keep their secrets. In every one, I doubt not, is furniture worthy of the exterior: old paintings of Dutch gentlemen and gentlewomen, a landscape or two, a girl with a lute and a few tavern scenes; old silver windmills; and plate upon plate of serene blue Delft. (You may see what I mean in the Suasso rooms at the Stedelijk Museum.) I have walked and idled in the Keizersgracht at all times of the day, but have never seen any real signs of life. Mats have Page 155been banged on its doorsteps by clean Dutch maidservants armed with wicker beaters; milk has been brought in huge cans of brass and copper shining like the sun; but of its life proper the gracht has given no sign. Its true life is houseridden, behind those spotless and very beautiful lace curtains, and there it remains.
One of the wittiest of the old writers on Holland (of whom I said something in the second chapter), Owen Feltham the moralist, describes in his Brief Character of the Low Countries an Amsterdam house of the middle of the seventeenth century. Thus:—
When you are entered the house, the first thing you encounter is a Looking-glasse. No question but a true Embleme of politick hospitality; for though it reflect yourself in your own figure, ’tis yet no longer than while you are there before it. When you are gone once, it flatters the next commer, without the least remembrance that you ere were there.
The next are the vessels of the house marshalled about the room like watchmen. All as neat as if you were in a Citizen’s Wife’s Cabinet; for unless it be themselves, they let none of God’s creatures lose any thing of their native beauty.
Their houses, especially in their Cities, are the best eye-beauties of their Country. For cost and sight they far exceed our English, but they want their magnificence. Their lining is yet more rich than their outside; not in hangings, but pictures, which even the poorest are there furnisht with. Not a cobler but has his toyes for ornament. Were the knacks of all their houses set together, there would not be such another Bartholmew-Faire in Europe....
Their beds are no other than land-cabines, high enough to need a ladder or stairs. Up once, you are walled in with Wainscot, and that is good discretion to avoid the trouble of making your will every night; for once falling out else would break your neck perfectly. But if you die in it, this comfort you shall leave your friends, that you dy’d in clean linnen.
Whatsoever their estates be, their houses must be fair. Therefore from Amsterdam they have banisht seacoale, lest it soyl their buildings, of which the statelier sort are sometimes sententious, and in the front carry some conceit of the Owner. As to give you a taste in these.
Christus Adjutor Meus;
Hoc abdicato Perenne Quero;
Hic Medio tuitus Itur.
Every door seems studded with Diamonds. The nails and hinges hold a constant brightnesse, as if rust there was not a quality incident to Iron. Their houses they keep cleaner than their bodies; their bodies than their souls. Goe to one, you shall find the Andirons shut up in net-work. At a second, the Warming-pan muffled in Italian Cutworke. At a third the Sconce clad in Cambrick.
The absence of any lively traffic on the canals, as in Venice, has this compensation, that the surface is left untroubled the more minutely to mirror the houses and trees, and, at night, the tramcars on the bridges. The lights of these cars form the most vivid reflections that I can recollect. But the quiet reproduction of the stately black façades is the more beautiful thing. An added dignity and repose are noticeable. I said just now that one desired to learn the secret of the calm life of these ancient grachts. But the secret of the actual houses of fact is as nothing compared with the secret of those other houses, more sombre, more mysterious, more reserved, that one sees in the water. To penetrate their impressive doors were an achievement, a distinction, indeed! With such a purpose suicide would lose half its terrors.
For the greatest contrast to these black canals, you must seek the Kalverstraat and Warmoes Straat. Kalverstraat, running south from the Dam, is by day filled with shoppers and by night with gossipers. No street in the world can be more consistently busy. Damrak is of course always a scene of life, but Damrak is a thoroughfare—its population moving continually either to or from the station. But those who use the Kalverstraat may be said almost to live in it. To be there is an end in itself. Warmoes Straat, parallel with Damrak on the other side of the Bourse, behind the Bible Hotel, is famous for its gigantic restaurant—the hugest in Europe, I believe—the Krasnapolsky, a palace of bewildering mirrors, and for concert halls and Page 157other accessories of the gayer life. But this book is no place in which to enlarge upon the natural history of Warmoes Straat and its southern continuation, the Nes.
For the principal cafés, as distinguished from restaurants, you must seek the Rembrandt’s Plein, in the midst of which stands the master’s statue. The pavement of this plein on Sunday evening in summer is almost impassable for the tables and chairs that spread over it and the crowds overflowing from Kalverstraat.
But there is still to be mentioned a district of Amsterdam which from the evening of Friday until the evening of Saturday is more populous even than Kalverstraat. This is the Jews’ quarter, which has, I should imagine, more parents and children to the square foot than any residential region in Europe. I struggled through it at sundown one fine Saturday—to say I walked through it would be too misleading—and the impression I gathered of seething vivacity is still with me. These people surely will inherit the earth.
Spinoza was a child of this Ghetto: his birthplace at 41 Waterloo Plein is still shown; and Rembrandt lived at No. 4 Jodenbree Straat for sixteen years.
A large number of the Amsterdam Jews are diamond cutters and polishers. You may see in certain cafés dealers in these stones turning over priceless little heaps of them with the long little finger-nail which they preserve as a scoop.
Amsterdam may be a city builded on the sand; but none the less will it endure. Indeed the sand saves it; for it is in the sand that the wooden piles on which every house rests find their footing, squelching through the black mud to this comparative solidity. Some of the piles are as long as 52 ft., and watching them being driven in, it is impossible Page 158to believe that stability can ever be attained, every blow of the monkey accounting for so very many inches. When one watches pile-driving in England it is difficult to see the effect of each blow; but during the five or fewer minutes that I spent one day on Damrak observing the preparation for the foundations of a new house, the pile must have gone in nearly a foot each time, and it was very near the end of its journey too. In course of years the black brackish mud petrifies not only the piles but the wooden girders that are laid upon them.
Pile-driving on an extensive scale can be a very picturesque sight. Breitner has painted several pile-driving scenes, one of which hangs in the Stedelijk Museum at Amsterdam.
Statistics are always impressive. I have seen somewhere the number of piles which support the new Bourse and the Central Station; but I cannot now find them. The Royal Palace stands on 13,659. Erasmus of Rotterdam made merry quite in the manner of an English humorist over Amsterdam’s wooden foundations. He twitted the inhabitants with living on the tops of trees, like rooks. But as I lay awake from daybreak to a civilised hour for two mornings in the Hotel Weimar at Rotterdam—prevented from sleeping by the pile-driving for the hotel extension—I thought of the apologue of the pot and the kettle.
The Cat’s Dancing Lesson
Jan Steen
From the picture in the Ryks Museum
I referred just now to the new Bourse. When I was at Amsterdam in 1897, the water beside Damrak extended much farther towards the Dam than it does now. Where now is the new Bourse was then shipping. But the new Bourse looks stable enough to-day. As to its architectural charms, opinions differ. My own feeling is that it is not a style that will wear well. For a permanent public building something more classic is probably desirable; Page 159and at Amsterdam, that city of sombre colouring, I would have had darker hues than the red and yellow that have been employed. The site of the old Bourse is now an open space.
It is stated that the kindly custom of allowing the children of Amsterdam the run of the Bourse as a playground for a week every year is some compensation for the suppression of the Kermis, but another story makes the sanction a perpetual reward for an heroic deed against the Spaniards performed by a child in 1622.
My advice to any one visiting Amsterdam is first to study a map of the city—Bædeker gives a very useful one—and thus to begin with a general idea of the lie of the land and the water. With this knowledge, and the assistance of the trams, it should not appear a very bewildering place. The Dam is its heart: a fact the acquisition of which will help very sensibly. All roads in Amsterdam lead to the Dam, and all lead from it. The Dam gives the city its name—Amstel dam, the dam which stops the river Amstel on its course to the Zuyder Zee. It also gives English and American visitors opportunities for facetiousness which I tingle to recall. Every tram sooner or later reaches the Dam: that is another simplifying piece of information. The course of each tram may not be very easily acquired, but with a common destination like this you cannot be carried very far wrong.
One soon learns that the trams stop only at fixed points, and waits accordingly. The next lesson, which is not quite so simple, is that some of these points belong exclusively to trams going one way and some exclusively to trams going the other. If there is one thing calculated to reduce a perplexed foreigner in Amsterdam to rage and despair, it is, after a tiring day among pictures, to hail a half empty Page 160tram at a fixed point, with Tram-halte written on it, and be treated to a pitying smile from the driver as it rushes by. Upon such mortifications is education based; for one then looks again more narrowly at the sign and sees that underneath it is a little arrow pointing in the opposite direction to which one wished to go. One then walks on to the next point, at which the arrow will be pointing homewards, and waits there. Sometimes—O happy moment—a double arrow is found, facing both ways.
It is on the Dam that guides will come and pester you. The guide carries an umbrella and offers to show Amsterdam in such a way as to save you much money. He is quite useless, and the quickest means of getting free is to say that you have come to the city for no other purpose than to pay extravagantly for everything. So stupendous an idea checks even his importunity for a moment, and while he still reels you can escape. The guides outside the Ryks Museum who offer to point out the beauties of the pictures are less persistent. It would seem as if they were aware of the unsoundness of their case. There is no need to reply to these at all.
On the Dam also is the Royal Palace, which once was the stadhuis, but in 1808 (when Amsterdam was the third city of the French Empire) was offered to Louis Napoleon for a residence. Queen Wilhelmina occasionaly stays there, but The Hague holds her true home. The apartments are florid and not very interesting; but if the ascent of the tower is permitted one should certainly make it. It is interesting to have Amsterdam at one’s feet. Only thus can its peculiar position and shape be understood: its old part an almost perfect semicircle, with canal-arcs within arcs, and its northern shore washed by the Y.
Also on the Dam is the New Church, which is to be seen Page 161more for the tomb of De Ruyter than for any architectural graces. The old sea dog, whose dark and determined features confront one in Bol’s canvases again and again in Holland, reposes in full dress on a cannon amid symbols of his victories. Close by, in the Royal Palace, are some of the flags which he wrested from the English. Other admirals also lie there, the Dutch naval commander never having wanted for honour in his own country.
The New Church, where the monarchs of Holland are crowned, has a very large new stained-glass window representing the coronation of Queen Wilhemina—one of the most satisfying new windows that I know, but quite lacking in any religious suggestion. That poet who considered a church the best retreat, because it is good to contemplate God through stained glass, would have fared badly in Holland.
The New Church is new only by comparison with the Old. It was built in 1410, rebuilt in 1452 and 1645. Amsterdam’s Old Church, on the other side of Warmoes Straat, dates from 1300. The visitor to the New Church is handed a brief historical leaflet in exchange for his twenty-five cents, and is left to his own devices; but the Old Church has a koster who takes a pride in showing his lions and who deprecates gifts of money. An elderly, clean-shaved man with a humorous mouth, he might be taken for Holland’s leading comedian. Instead, he displays ecclesiastical treasures, of which in 1904 there were fewer than usual, two of the three fine old windows representing the life of the Virgin being under repair behind a screen. The tombs and monuments are not interesting—admirals of the second rank and such small fry.
It is in the Old Church that most of the weddings of Amsterdam are celebrated. Thursday is the day, for then Page 162the fees are practically nothing; on other days to be married is an expense. The koster deplores the modern materialism which leads so many young men to be satisfied with the civil function; but the little enclosure, like a small arena, in which the church blesses unions, had to me a hardly less business-like appearance than a registry office. The comedian overflows with details. For the covering of the floor, he explains, there are five distinct carpets, ranging in price from five guelders to twenty-five for the hire, according to the means or ostentation of the party. Thursdays are no holiday for the church officials, one couple being hardly united before the horses of the next are pawing the paving stones at the door.
I saw on one Thursday three bridal parties in as many minutes. The happy bride sat on the back seat of the brougham, immediately before her being two mirrors in the shape of a heart supporting a bouquet of white flowers. Contemplating this simple imagery she rattles to the ecclesiastical arena and the sanctities of the five, ten, fifteen, twenty or twenty-five guelder carpet. After, a banquet and jokes.
This is the second banquet, for when the precise preliminaries of a Dutch engagement are settled a betrothal feast is held. Friends are bidden to the wedding by the receipt of a box of sweets and a bottle of wine known as “Bride’s tears”. For the wedding day itself there is a particular brand of wine which contains little grains of gold. The Dutch also have special cake and wine for the celebration of births.
Canal in the Jews’ Quarter, Amsterdam
The position of the Dutch wife is now very much that of the wife in England; but in Holland’s great days she ruled. Something of her quality is to be seen in the stories of Barneveldt’s widow and Grotius’s wife, and the Page 163heroism and address of the widow Kenau Hasselaer during the siege of Haarlem. Davies has an interesting page or two on this subject: “To be master of his own house is an idea which seems never to have occurred to the mind of a genuine Dutchman; nor did he often commence any undertaking, whether public or private, without first consulting the partner of his cares; and it is even said, that some of the statesmen most distinguished for their influence in the affairs of their own country and Europe in general, were accustomed to receive instructions at home to which they ventured not to go counter. But the dominion of these lordly dames, all despotic though it were, was ever exerted for the benefit of those who obeyed. It was the earnest and undaunted spirit of their women, which encouraged the Dutch to dare, and their calm fortitude to endure, the toils, privations, and sufferings of the first years of the war of independence against Spain; it was their activity and thrift in the management of their private incomes, that supplied them with the means of defraying an amount of national expenditure wholly unexampled in history; and to their influence is to be ascribed above all, the decorum of manners, and the purity of morals, for which the society of Holland has at all times been remarkable. But though they preserved their virtue and modesty uncontaminated amid the general corruption, they were no longer able to maintain their sway. The habit which the Dutch youth had acquired, among other foreign customs, of seeking amusement abroad, rendered them less dependent for happiness on the comforts of a married life; while, accustomed to the more dazzling allurements of the women of France and Italy, they were apt to overlook or despise the quiet and unobtrusive beauties of those of their own country. Whether they did not better consult their own dignity in Page 164emancipating themselves from this subjection may be a question; but the fact, that the decline of the republic and of the female sex went hand in hand, is indubitable.”
To return to Amsterdam’s sights, the church which I remember with most pleasure is the English Reformed Church, which many visitors never succeed in finding at all, but to which I was taken by a Dutch lady who knew my tastes. You seek the Spui, where the electric trams start for Haarlem, and enter a very small doorway on the north side. It seems to lead to a private house, but instead you find yourself in a very beautiful little enclosure of old and quaint buildings, exquisitely kept, each with a screen of pollarded chestnuts before it; in the midst of which is a toy white church with a gay little spire that might have wandered out of a fairy tale. The enclosure is called The Begijnenhof, or Court of the Begijnen, a little sisterhood named after St. Begga, daughter of Pipinus, Duke of Brabant,—a saint who lived at the end of the seventh century and whose day in the Roman Catholic Calendar is December 17.
The church was originally the church of these nuns, but when the old religion was overthrown in Amsterdam, in 1578, it was taken from them, although they were allowed—as happily they still are—to retain possession of the court around it.
In 1607 the church passed into the possession of a settlement of Scotch weavers who had been invited to Amsterdam by the merchants, and who had made it a condition of acceptance that they should have a conventicle of their own. It is now a resort of English church-going visitors on Sunday.
Most of Holland’s churches—as of England’s—once belonged Page 165to Rome, and it is impossible to forget their ancient ownership; but I remember no other case where the new religion is practised, as in the Begijnenhof, in the heart of the enemy’s camp. In the very midst of the homes of the quiet sweet Begijnen sisters are the voices of the usurping Reformers heard in prayer and praise.
One little concession, however, was made by the appropriators of the chapel. Until as recently as 1865 a special part of the building the original Roman consecration of which had not been nullified was retained by the sisterhood in which to bury their dead. The ceremony was very impressive. Twelve of the nuns carried their dead companion three times round the court before entering the church. But all that is over, and now they must seek burial elsewhere, without their borders.
One may leave the Begijnenhof by the other passage into Kalverstraat, and walking up that busy street towards the Dam, turn down the St. Lucien Steeg, on the left, to another of Amsterdam’s homes of ancient peace—the municipal orphanage, which was once the Convent of St. Lucien. The Dutch are exceedingly kind to their poor, and the orphanages and almshouses (Oudemannen and Oudevrouwen houses as they are called) are very numerous. The Municipal Orphanage of Amsterdam is among the most interesting; and it is to this refuge that the girls and boys belong whom one sees so often in the streets of the city in curious parti-coloured costume—red and black vertically divided. The Amsterdamsche burgerweesmeisjes, as the girls are called, make in procession a very pretty and impressive sight—with their white tippets and caps above their dresses of black and red.
This reminds me that one of the most agreeable performances that I saw in any of the Dutch music halls (which Page 166are not good, and which are rendered very tedious to English people by reason of the interminable interval called the Pause in the middle of the evening), was a series of folk songs and dances by eight girls known as the Orange Blossoms, dressed in different traditional costumes of the north and south—Friesland, Marken, and Zeeland. They were quite charming. They sang and danced very prettily, as housewives, as fisher girls, but particularly as Amsterdamsche burgerweesmeisjes.
In the music halls both at Amsterdam and Rotterdam I listened to comic singers inexorably endowed with too many songs apiece; but I saw also some of those amazing feats of acrobatic skill and exhibitions of clean strength which alone should cause people to encourage these places of entertainment, where the standard of excellence in such displays is now so high. I did not go to the theatre in Holland. My Dutch was too elementary for that. My predecessor Ireland, however, did so, and saw an amusing piece of literalness introduced into Hamlet. In the impassioned scene, he tells us, between the prince and his mother, “when the hero starts at the imagined appearance of his father, his wig, by means of a concealed spring, jumped from ‘the seat of his distracted brain,’ and left poor Hamlet as bare as a Dutch willow in winter.”
The Oude Kerk has very beautiful bells, but Amsterdam is no place in which to hear such sweet sounds. The little towns for bells. Near the church is the New Market, with the very charming old weigh-house with little extinguisher spires called the St. Anthonysveeg. Here the fish market is held; and the fish market of a city like Amsterdam should certainly be visited. The Old Market is on the western side of the Dam, under the western church. “It is said,” remarks the author of Through Page 167Noord-Holland, “that Rembrandt has been buried in this church, though his grave has never been found.”
Napoleon’s sarcasm upon the English—that they were a nation of shopkeepers—never seemed to me very shrewd: but in Holland one realises that if any nation is to be thus signally stigmatised it is not the English. As a matter of fact we are very indifferent shopkeepers. We lack several of the needful qualities: we lack foresight, the sense of order and organised industry, and the strength of mind to resist the temptations following upon a great coup. A nation of shopkeepers would not go back on the shop so completely as we do. No nation that is essentially snobbish can be accurately summed up as a nation of shopkeepers. The French for all their distracting gifts of art and mockery are better shopkeepers than we, largely because they are more sensibly contented. They take short views and live each day more fully. But the Dutch are better still; the Dutch are truly a nation of shopkeepers.1
If one would see the Amsterdam merchant as the satirist sees him, the locus classicus is Multatuli’s famous novel Max Havelaar, where he stands delightfully nude in the person of Mr. Drystubble, head of the firm of Last and Co., Coffee-brokers, No. 37 Laurier Canal. Max Havelaar was published in the early sixties to draw attention to certain scandals in Dutch colonial administration, and it has lived on, and will live, by reason of a curious blend of vivacity and intensity. Here is a little piece of Mr. Drystubble’s mind:—
Business is slack on the Coffee Exchange. The Spring Auction will make it right again. Don’t suppose, however, that we have nothing Page 168to do. At Busselinck and Waterman’s trade is slacker still. It is a strange world this: one gets a deal of experience by frequenting the Exchange for twenty years. Only fancy that they have tried—I mean Busselinck and Waterman—to do me out of the custom of Ludwig Stern. As I do not know whether you are familiar with the Exchange, I will tell you that Stern is an eminent coffee-merchant in Hamburg, who always employed Last and Co. Quite accidentally I found that out—I mean that bungling business of Busselinck and Waterman. They had offered to reduce the brokerage by one-fourth per cent. They are low fellows—nothing else. And now look what I have done to stop them. Any one in my place would perhaps have written to Ludwig Stern, “that we too would diminish the brokerage, and that we hoped for consideration on account of the long services of Last and Co.”
I have calculated that our firm, during the last fifty years, has gained four hundred thousand guilders by Stern. Our connexion dates from the beginning of the continental system, when we smuggled Colonial produce and such like things from Heligoland. No, I won’t reduce the brokerage.
I went to the Polen coffee-house, ordered pen and paper, and wrote:—
“That because of the many honoured commissions received from North Germany, our business transactions had been extended”—(it is the simple truth)—“and that this necessitated an augmentation of our staff”—(it is the truth: no more than yesterday evening our bookkeeper was in the office after eleven o’clock to look for his spectacles);—“that, above all things, we were in want of respectable, educated young men to conduct the German correspondence. That, certainly, there were many young Germans in Amsterdam, who possessed the requisite qualifications, but that a respectable firm”—(it is the very truth),—“seeing the frivolity and immorality of young men, and the daily increasing number of adventurers, and with an eye to the necessity of making correctness of conduct go hand in hand with correctness in the execution of orders”—(it is the truth, I observe, and nothing but the truth),—“that such a firm—I mean Last and Co., coffee-brokers, 37 Laurier Canal—could not be anxious enough in engaging new hands.”
All that is the simple truth, reader. Do you know that the young German who always stood at the Exchange, near the seventeenth pillar, has eloped with the daughter of Busselinck and Waterman? Our Mary, like her, will be thirteen years old in September.
“That I had the honour to hear from Mr. Saffeler”—(Saffeler travels for Stern)—“that the honoured head of the firm, Ludwig Stern, had a son, Mr. Ernest Stern, who wished for employment for some time in a Dutch house.
“That I, mindful of this”—(here I referred again to the immorality of Page 169employés, and also the history of that daughter of Busselinck and Waterman; it won’t do any harm to tell it)—“that I, mindful of this, wished, with all my heart, to offer Mr. Ernest Stern the German correspondence of our firm.”
From delicacy I avoided all allusion to honorarium or salary; yet I said:—
“That if Mr. Ernest Stern would like to stay with us, at 37 Laurier Canal, my wife would care for him as a mother, and have his linen mended in the house”—(that is the very truth, for Mary sews and knits very well),—and in conclusion I said, “that we were a religious family.”
The last sentence may do good, for the Sterns are Lutherans. I posted that letter. You understand that old Mr. Stern could not very well give his custom to Busselinck and Waterman, if his son were in our office.
When Max Havelaar gets to Java the narrative is less satisfactory, so tangential does it become, but there are enough passages in the manner of that which I have quoted to keep one happy, and to show how entertaining a satirist of his own countrymen at home “Multatuli” (whose real name was Edward Douwes Dekker) might have been had he been possessed by no grievance.
The book, which is very well worth reading, belongs to the literature of humanity and protest. Its author had to suffer much acrimonious attack, and was probably called a Little Hollander, but the fragment from an unpublished play which he placed as a motto to his book shows him to have lacked no satirical power to meet the enemy:—