Shopkeeping—to return to Amsterdam—is the Dutch people’s life. An idle rich class they may have, but it does not assert itself. It is hidden away at The Hague or at Arnheim. In Amsterdam every one is busy in one trade or another. There is no Pall Mall, no Rotten Row. There is no Bond Street or Rue de la Paix, for this is a country where money tries to procure money’s worth, a country of essentials. Nor has Holland a Lord’s or an Oval, Epsom Downs or Hurlingham.

Perhaps the quickest way to visualise the differences of nations is to imagine them exchanging countries. If the English were to move to Holland the whole face of the land would immediately be changed. In summer the flat meadows near the towns, now given up to cows and plovers, would be dotted with cricketers; in winter with football-players. Outriggers and canoes, punts and house-boats, would break out on the canals. In the villages such strange phenomena as idle gentlemen in knickerbockers and idle ladies with parasols would suddenly appear.

If the Dutch came to England the converse would happen. The athletic grounds would become pasture land; the dirt of our slums and the gentry of our villages would alike vanish; Westminster Abbey would be whitewashed; and ... But I have said enough.

It must not be thought that the Dutch play no games. As a matter of fact they were playing golf, as old pictures tell, before it had found its way to England at all; and there are now many golf clubs in Holland. The Dutch are excellent also at lawn tennis; and I saw the youth of Franeker very busy in a curious variety of rounders. There are horse-racing meetings and trotting competitions too. But the nation is not naturally athletic or sporting. It does not even walk except on business.

In winter, however, the Dutch are completely transformed. No sooner does the ice bear than the whole people begin to glide, and swirl, and live their lives to the poetry of motion. The canals then become the real streets of Amsterdam. A Dutch lady—a mother and a grandmother—threw up her hands as she told me about the skating parties to the Zuyder Zee. The skate, it seems, is as much the enemy of the chaperon as the bicycle, although its reign is briefer. Upon this subject I am personally ignorant, but I take that gesture of alarm as final.

Amsterdam’s Pictures

That Holland in an expansive mood of satisfaction at her success should have wished to see groups of her gallant arquebusiers and portraits of her eminent burghers is not to be wondered at, and we can understand that respectable painters of such pictures should arise in some force to supply the need—just as wherever in this country at the present day there are cricketers and actresses, there also are photographers. That painters of ordinary merit should be forthcoming is, as I have said, no wonder: the mystery is that masters of technique whose equal has never been before or since should have arisen in such numbers; that in the space of a few years—between say 1590 and 1635—should have been born in a country never before given to the cultivation of the arts Rembrandt and Jan Steen, Vermeer and De Hooch, Van der Helst and Gerard Dou, Fabritius and Maes, Ostade and Van Goyen, Potter and Ruisdael, Terburg and Cuyp. That is the staggering thing.

Another curious circumstance is that by 1700 it was practically all over, and Dutch art had become a convention. The gods had gone. Not until very recently has Holland had any but half gods since.

I have said that the great Dutch painters expressed no idea; and yet this is not perfectly true. They expressed no constructive idea, in the way that a poet or statesman does; but all had this in common, that they were informed by the desire to represent things—intimate and local things—as they are. The great Italians had gone to religion and mythology for their subjects: nearer at hand, in Antwerp, Rubens was pursuing, according to his lights, the same tradition. The great Dutchmen were the first painters to bend their genius exclusively to the honour of their own country, its worthies, its excesses, its domestic virtues, its trivial dailiness. Hals and Rembrandt lavished their power on Dutch arquebusiers and governors of hospitals, Dutch burgomasters and physicians; Ostade and Brouwer saw no indignity in painting Dutch sots as well as Dutch sots could be painted; De Hooch introduced miracles of sunlight into Dutch cottages; Maes painted old Dutch housewives, and Metsu young Dutch housewives, to the life; Vermeer and Terburg immortalised Dutch ladies at their spinets; Albert Cuyp toiled to suffuse Dutch meadows and Dutch cows with a golden glow; Jan Steen glorified the humblest Dutch family scenes; Gerard Dou spent whole weeks upon the fingers of a common Dutch hand. In short, art that so long had been at the service only of the Church and the proud, became suddenly, without losing any of its divinity, a fireside friend. That is what Holland did for painting.

He, Vermeer, has another picture at the Ryks—“De brief” (No. 2528)—which technically is wonderful; but the whole effect is artificial and sophisticated, very different from his best transparent mood.

Any mortification, by the way, which I might suffer from the knowledge that No. 2527 can never be mine is allayed by the knowledge, equally certain, that it can never be any one else’s. Money is powerless here. To the offer of a Rothschild the Government would return as emphatic a negative as to a request from me.

The statement

Nothing graceful, wise, or sainted,—
That is how the Dutchman painted,

is so sweeping as to be untrue. Indeed it is wholly absurd. The truth simply is that one goes to Dutch art for the celebration of fact without mystery or magic. In other words, Dutch painting is painting without poetry; and it is this absence of poetry which makes the romantic Frenchmen appear to be such exotics when one finds them in Holland, and why it is so pleasant in Holland now and then to taste their quality, as one may at the Stedelijk Museum and in the Mesdag Collection at The Hague.

We must not forget, however, that under the French influence certain modern Dutch painters have been quickened to celebrate the fact with poetry. In a little room adjoining the great French room at the Stedelijk Museum will be found some perfect things by living or very recent artists for whom Corot did not work in vain: a mere by James Maris, with a man in a blue coat sitting in a boat; a marsh under a white sky by Matthew Maris; a village scene by the same exquisite craftsman. These three pictures, but especially the last two, are in their way as notable and beautiful as anything by the great names in Dutch art.

It was, by the way, at Burgomaster Six’s house at Elsbroek that Rembrandt’s little etching called “Six’s Bridge” was executed. Rembrandt and his friend had just sat down to dinner when it was discovered that there was no mustard. On a servant being sent to buy or borrow some, Rembrandt made a bet that he would complete an etching of the bridge before the man’s return. The artist won.

Around Amsterdam: South and South-East

The Dutch have several things to learn from the English; and there are certain lessons which we might acquire from them. To them we might impart the uses of the salt-spoon, and ask in return the secret of punctuality on the railways.

The Dutch railways are admirable. The trains come in to the minute and go out to the minute. The officials are intelligent and polite. The carriages are good. Every station has its waiting-room, where you may sit and read, and drink a cup of coffee that is not only hot and fresh but is recognisably the product of the berry. It is impossible to travel in the wrong train. It is very difficult not to get out at the right station. The fares are very reasonable. The stationmasters are the only visible and tangible members of the Dutch aristocracy. The disposition of one’s luggage is very simple when once it has been mastered. The time tables are models of clarity.

Travellers who find the Dutch tendency to closed windows a trial beyond endurance may be interested to know that it is law in Holland that if any passenger wish it the window on the lee side may be open. With the knowledge of this enactment all difficulty should be over—provided that one has sufficient strength of purpose (and acquaintance with the Dutch language) to enforce it.

All this preamble concerning railways is by way of introduction to the statement (hinted at in the first chapter) that if the traveller in Holland likes, he can see a great part of the country by staying at Amsterdam—making the city his headquarters, and every day journeying here and there and back again by train or canal.

A few little neighbouring towns it is practically necessary to visit from Amsterdam; and for the most part, I take it, Leyden and Haarlem are made the object of excursions either from Amsterdam or The Hague, rather than places of sojourn, although both have excellent quiet inns much more to my taste than anything in the largest city. Indeed I found Amsterdam’s hotels exceedingly unsatisfactory; so much so that the next time I go, when the electric railway to Haarlem is open, I am proposing to invert completely the usual process, and, staying at Haarlem, study Amsterdam from there.

A very interesting excursion may be made to Hilversum, returning by the steam-tram through Laren, Naarden and Muiden. The rail runs at first through flat and very verdant meadows, where thousands of cows that supply Amsterdam with milk are grazing; and one notices again the suddenness with which the Dutch city ends and the Dutch country begins. Our English towns have straggling outposts: new houses, scaffold poles, cottages, allotments, all break the transition from city to country; the urban gives place to suburban, and suburban to rural, gradually, every inch being contested. But the Dutch towns—even the great cities—end suddenly; the country begins suddenly.

In England for the most part the cow comes to the milker; but in Holland the milker goes to the cow. His first duty is to bind the animal’s hind legs together, and then he sets his stool at his side and begins. Anton Mauve has often painted the scene—so often that at milking time one looks from the carriage windows at a very gallery of Mauves. I noticed this particularly on an afternoon journey from Amsterdam to Hilversum, between the city and Weesp, where the meadows (cricket grounds manqués) are flat as billiard tables.

The train later runs between great meres, some day perhaps to be reclaimed, and then dashes into country that resembles very closely our Government land about Woking and Bisley—the first sand and firs that we have seen in Holland. It has an odd and unexpected appearance; but as a matter of fact hundreds of square miles of Holland in the south and east have this character; while there are stretches of Dutch heather in which one can feel in Scotland.

Hilversum is the Chislehurst of Holland—a discreet and wealthy suburb, where business men have their villas amid the trees. It is a pleasant spot, excellent from which to explore.

The author of Through Noord-Holland thus describes Laren, which lies a few miles from Hilversum and is reached by tram: “Surrounded by arable land and hilly heathery it is richly provided with picturesque spots; country-seats, villas, ordinary houses and farms are following one another. For those who are searching for rest and calmness is this village very recommendable.” But to say only that is to omit Laren’s principal claim to distinction—its fame as the home of Anton Mauve.

No great painter of nature probably ever adapted less than Mauve. His pictures, oils and water-colours alike, are the real thing, very true, very beautiful, low-toned, always with a touch of wistfulness and melancholy. He found his subjects everywhere, and justified them by the sympathy and truth of his exquisite modest art.

At Laren Mauve’s fame is kept sweet by a little colony of artists, who like to draw their inspiration where the great painter drew his.

North of Laren, on the sea coast, is the fishing village of Huizen, where the women have a neat but very sedate costume. They wear white caps with curved sides that add grace to a pretty cheek. Having, however, the odd fancy that a flat chest is more desirable than a rounded one, they compress their busts into narrow compass, striving as far as possible to preserve vertical lines. At the waist a plethora of petticoats begins, spreading the skirts to inordinate width and emphasising the meagreness above.

The sombre attire of the Huizen women is a contrast to most of the traditional costumes of Holland, which are charming, full of gay colour and happy design. The art of dress seems otherwise to be dead in Holland to-day; In the towns the ordinary conventional dress is dull; and in the country it is without any charm. Holland as a whole, omitting the costumes, cannot be said to have any more knowledge of clothes than we have. It is only by the blue linen jackets of the men in the fields that the situation is saved and the Dutch are proved our superiors. How cool and grateful to the eyes this blue jacket can be all admirers of Mauve’s pictures know.

Naarden’s crowning hour of agony was in 1572, since it had the misfortune to stand in the path of Don Frederic on his way from Zutphen, where not a citizen had been left alive, to Amsterdam. The story of the surrender of the city to Don Romero under the pledge that life and property should be respected, and of the dastardly and fiendish disregard of this pledge by the Spaniards, is the most ghastly in the whole war. From Motley I take the account of the tragedy:—

“On the 22nd of November a company of one hundred troopers was sent to the city gates to demand its surrender. The small garrison which had been left by the Prince was not disposed to resist, but the spirit of the burghers was stouter than their walls. They answered the summons by a declaration that they had thus far held the city for the King and the Prince of Orange, and, with God’s help, would continue so to do. As the horsemen departed with this reply, a lunatic, called Adrian Krankhoeft, mounted the ramparts, and discharged a culverine among them. No man was injured, but the words of defiance, and the shot fired by a madman’s hand, were destined to be fearfully answered.

“Meanwhile, the inhabitants of the place, which was at best far from strong, and ill provided with arms, ammunition, or soldiers, despatched importunate messages to Sonoy, and to other patriot generals nearest to them, soliciting reinforcements. Their messengers came back almost empty-handed. They brought a little powder and a great many promises, but not a single man-at-arms, not a ducat, not a piece of artillery. The most influential commanders, moreover, advised an honourable capitulation, if it were still possible.

“Nearly all the inhabitants of Naarden, soldiers and citizens, were thus destroyed; and now Don Frederic issued peremptory orders that no one, on pain of death, should give lodging or food to any fugitive. He likewise forbade to the dead all that could now be forbidden them—a grave. Three weeks long did these unburied bodies pollute the streets, nor could the few wretched women who still cowered within such houses as had escaped the flames ever move from their lurking-places without treading upon the festering remains of what had been their husbands, their fathers, or their brethren. Such was the express command of him whom the flatterers called the ‘most divine genius ever known’. Shortly afterwards came an order to dismantle the fortifications, which had certainly proved sufficiently feeble in the hour of need, and to raze what was left of the city from the surface of the earth. The work was faithfully accomplished, and for a long time Naarden ceased to exist.”

To Muiderburg, between Naarden and Muiden, I have not been, and therefore with the more readiness quote my indispensable author:—