The travelling-season, which causes thousands of people to leave their homes and hearths, has come round again. Throughout Europe silk strings are being prepared to catch human birds of passage with. Is Frisia—Old Frisia—to lag behind? Impossible! Natural condition as well as population and history give to our province a right to claim a little attention and to be a hostess. We beg to refer to the words of a Frenchman, M. Malte-Brun (quoted by one of the best Frisian authors), the English translation of which words runs as follows: “Eighteen centuries saw the river Rhine change its course, and the Ocean swallow its shores, but the Frisian nation has remained unchanged, and from an historical point of view deserves being taken an interest in by the descendants of the Franks as well as of the Anglo-Saxons and the Scandinavians.”
It is not often to a Frenchman that the author of this guide has to go for his purple patches. He is capable of producing them himself, and there seems also always to be a Frisian poet who has said the right thing. Thus (of Leeuwarden): “It is surrounded by splendid fertile meadows, to all of which, though especially to those lying near the roads to Marssum and Stiens, may be applied the words of the Frisian poet Dr. E. Halbertsma:—
‘Sjen nou dat lân, hwer jy op geane,
Dat ophelle is út gulle sé;
Hwer binne brûsender lânsdouwen,
Oerspriede mei sok hearlik fé?’
(‘Behold the soil you are walking on,
The soil, snatched from the waves;
Where are more luxurious meadows,
Where do you find such cattle?’)
The farmer, living in the midst of this fine natural scenery, is to be envied indeed: if the struggle for life does not weigh too heavily upon him, his must be a life happier than that of thousands of other people. Living and working with his own family and servants attached to Page 247him, he made the right choice when he chose to breed his cattle and improve his grounds to the best of his power. The parlour-windows look out on the fields: the gay sight they grant has its effect on the mood of those inside. The peasant sees and feels the beauty of life, and it makes him thankful, and gives him courage to struggle and to work on, where necessity requires it.”
Family Scene
Jan Steen
From the picture in the Ryks Museum
I gather from the account of Leeuwarden that the justices of that city once knew a crime when they saw one—none quicklier. In 1536, for example, they punished Jan Koekebakken in a twinkling for the dastardly offence of marrying a married woman. This was his sentence:—
We command that the said Jan Koekebakken, prisoner, be conducted by the executioner from the Chancery to Brol-bridge, and that he be put into the pillory there. He shall remain standing there for two hours with a spindle under each arm, and with the letter in which he pledged faith to the said Aucke Sijbrant hanging from his neck. He shall remain for ever within the town of Leeuwarden, under penalty of death if he should leave it.
Done and pronounced at Leeuwarden April 29th, 1536.
But the best part of the guide-book is its rapid notes on the villages around Leeuwarden, to so many of which are curious legends attached. At Marssum, close at hand, was born the English painter of Roman life, Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema. Here also was born the ingenious Eisa Eisinga, who constructed the Franeker planetarium in the intervals of wool-combing. At Menaldum lived Mrs. Van Camstra van Haarsma, a husband-tamer and eccentric, of whom a poet wrote:—
She breaks pipe and glass and mug,
When he speaks as suits a man;
And instead of being cross,
He is gentler than a lamb.
When in fury glow her eyes,
He keeps silent ... isn’t he wise?
When not hen-pecking her husband this powerful lady was rearing wild animals or corresponding with the Princess Caroline.
At Boxum, was fought, on 17th January, 1586, hard by the church, the battle of Boxum, between the Spaniards and the Frisians. The Frisians were defeated, and many of them massacred in the church; but their effort was very brave, and “He also has been to Boxum” is to this day a phrase applied to lads of courage. Another saying, given to loud speakers, is “He has the voice of the Vicar of Boxum,” whose tones in the pulpit were so dulcet as to frighten the birds from the roof, and, I hope, sinners to repentance.
At Jelsum is buried Balthazar Becker, the antagonist of superstition and author of The Enchanted World. Near by was Martena Castle, where Alderman Sjuck van Burmania once kept a crowd of assailants at bay by standing over a barrel of gunpowder with a lighted brand while he offered them the choice of the explosion or a feast. Hence the excellent proverb, “You must either fight or drink, said Sjuck”.
At Berlikum was the castle of Bauck Poppema, a Frisian lady cast in an iron mould, who during her husband’s absence in 1496 defended the stronghold against assailants from Groningen. Less successful than Sjuck, after repelling them thrice she was overpowered and thrown into prison. While there she produced twins, thus proving herself a woman no less than a warrior. “When the people of Holland glorify Kenau,” says the proverb, “the Frisians praise their Bauck.” Kenau we have met: the heroic widow of Haarlem who during the siege led a band of three hundred women and repelled the enemy on the walls again and again. Page 249
Near Roodkerk is a lake called the Boompoel, into which a coach and four containing six inside passengers, all of them professional exorcists, disappeared and was never seen again. The exorcists had come to relieve the village of the ghost of a miser, and we must presume had failed to quiet him. Near Bergum, at Buitenrust farm, is the scene of another tragedy by drowning, for there died Juffer Lysse. This maiden, disregarding too long her father’s dying injunction to build a chapel, was naturally overturned in her carriage and drowned. Ever since has the wood been haunted, while the bind-weed, a haunting flower, is in these parts known as the Juffer Lysse blom.
From these scraps of old lore—all taken from the little Leeuwarden guide—it will be seen that Friesland is rich in romantic traditions and well worthy the attention of any maker of sagas. Page 250
Chapter XVII
Groningen to Zutphen
Fresh tea—Dutch meals—The Doelens—Groningen—Roman Catholic priests—The boys’ penance—Luther and Erasmus—The peat country—Folk lore—Terburg—Thomas à Kempis—Zwolle—The wild girl—Kampen—A hall of justice indeed—An ideal holiday-place—The wiseacres—Urk—Sir Philip Sidney—Zutphen—The scripture class—The wax works—Dutch public morality.
I remember the Doelen at Groningen for several reasons, all of them thoroughly material. (Holland is, however, a material country.) First I would put the very sensible custom of providing every guest who has ordered tea for breakfast with a little tea caddy. At the foot of the table is a boiling urn from which one fills one’s teapot, and is thus assured of tea that is fresh. So simple and reasonable a habit ought to be the rule rather than the exception: but never have I found it elsewhere. This surely is civilisation, I said.
The Doelen was also the only inn in Holland where an inclusive bottle of claret was placed before me on the table; and it was the only inn where I had the opportunity of eating ptarmigan with stewed apricots—a very happy alliance.
Good however as was the Groningen dinner, it was a Sunday dinner at the Leeuwarden Doelen which remains in my memory. This also is a friendly unspoiled northern inn, where the bill of fare is arranged with a nice thought Page 251to the requirements of the Free Frisian. I kept no note of the meal, but I recollect the occurrence at one stage of plovers’ eggs (which the Dutch eat hot, dropping them into cold water for an instant to ensure the easy removal of the shell), and at another, some time later, of duckling with prunes.
The popularity of the name Doelen as a Dutch sign might have a word of explanation. Doelen means target, or shooting saloon; and shooting at the mark was a very common and useful recreation with the Dutch in the sixteenth century. At first the shooting clubs met only to shoot—as in the case of the arquebusiers in Rembrandt’s “Night Watch,” who are painted leaving their Doelen; later they became more social and the accessories of sociability were added; and after a while the accessories of sociability crowded out the shooting altogether, and nothing but an inn with the name Doelen remained of what began as a rifle gallery.
At Groningen, which is a large prosperous town, and the birthplace both of Joseph Israels and H.W. Mesdag, cheese and dairy produce are left behind. We are now in the grain country. Groningen is larger than Leeuwarden—it has nearly seventy thousand inhabitants—and its evening light seemed to me even more beautifully liquid. I sat for a long time in a cafe overlooking the great square, feeding a very greedy and impertinent terrier, and alternately watching an endless game of billiards and the changing hue of the sky as day turned to night and the clean white stars came out. In Holland one can sit very long in cafes: I had dined and left a table of forty Dutchmen just settling down to their wine, at six o’clock, with the whole evening before me.
Groningen takes very good care of itself. It has trams, Page 252excellent shops and buildings, a crowded inland harbour, and a spreading park where once were its fortifications. The mounds in this park were the first hills I had seen since Laren. The church in the market square is immense, with a high tower of bells that kept me awake, but had none of the soothing charm of Long John at Middelburg, whose praises it will soon be my privilege to sound. The only rich thing in the whitewashed vastnesses of the church is the organ, built more than four hundred years ago by Rudolph Agricola of this province. I did not hear it.
At Groningen Roman Catholic priests become noticeable—so different in their stylish coats, square hats and canes, from the blue-chinned kindly slovens that one meets in the Latin countries. (In the train near Nymwegen, however, where the priests wear beavers, I travelled with a humorous old voluptuary who took snuff at every station and was as threadbare as one likes a priest to be.) Looking into the new Roman Catholic church at Groningen I found a little company of restless boys, all eyes, from whom at regular intervals were detached a reluctant and perfunctory couple to do the Stations of the Cross. I came as something like a godsend to those that remained, who had no one to supervise them; and feeling it as a mission I stayed resolutely in the church long after I was tired of it, writing a little and examining the pictures by Hendriex, a modern painter too much after the manner of the Christmas supplement—studied the while by this band of scrutinising penitents. I hope I was as interesting and beguiling as I tried to be. And all the time, exactly opposite the Roman Catholic church, was reposing in the library of the University no less a treasure than the New Testament of Erasmus, with marginal notes by Martin Luther. There it lay, that afternoon, within call, while the weary boys pattered from Page 253one Station of the Cross to another, little recking the part played by their country in sapping the power of the faith they themselves were fostering, and knowing nothing of the ironical contiguity of Luther’s comments.
By leaving Groningen very early in the morning I gained another proof of the impossibility of rising before the Dutch. In England one can easily be the first down in any hotel—save for a sleepy boots or waiter. Not so in Holland. It was so early that I am able to say nothing of the country between Groningen and Meppel, the capital of the peat trade, save that it was peaty: heather and fir trees, shallow lakes and men cutting peat, as far as eye could reach on either side.
Here in the peat country I might quote a very pretty Dutch proverb: “There is no fuel more entertaining than wet wood and frozen peat: the wood sings and the peat listens”. The Dutch have no lack of folk lore, but the casual visitor has not the opportunity of collecting very much. When there is too much salt in the dish they say that the cook is in love. When a three-cornered piece of peat is observed in the fire, a visitor is coming. When bread has large holes in it, the baker is said to have pursued his wife through the loaf. When a wedding morning is rainy, it is because the bride has forgotten to feed the cat.
I tarried awhile at Zwolle on the Yssel (a branch of the Rhine), because at Zwolle was born in 1617 Gerard Terburg, one of the greatest of Dutch painters, of whom I have spoken in the chapter on Amsterdam’s pictures. Of his life we know very little; but he travelled to Spain (where he was knighted and where he learned not a little of use in his art), and also certainly to France, and possibly to England. At Haarlem, where he lived for a while, he worked in Frans Page 254Hals’ studio, and then he settled down at Deventer, a few miles south of Zwolle, married, and became in time Burgomaster of the town. He died at Deventer in 1681. Zwolle has none of his pictures, and does not appear to value his memory. Nor does Deventer. How Terburg looked as Burgomaster of Deventer is seen in his portrait of himself in the Mauritshuis at The Hague. It was not often that the great Dutch painters rose to civic eminence. Rembrandt became a bankrupt, Frans Hals was on the rates, Jan Steen drank all his earnings. Of all Terburg’s great contemporaries Gerard Dou seems to have had most sense of prosperity and position; but his interests were wholly in his art.
Terburg is not the only famous name at Zwolle. It was at the monastery on the Agneteberg, three miles away, that the author of The Imitation of Christ lived for more than sixty years and wrote his deathless book.
I roamed through Zwolle’s streets for some time. It is a bright town, with a more European air than many in Holland, agreeable drives and gardens, where (as at Groningen) were once fortifications, and a very fine old gateway called the Saxenpoort, with four towers and five spires and very pretty window shutters in white and blue. The Groote Kerk is of unusual interest. It is five hundred years old and famous for its very elaborate pulpit—a little cathedral in itself—and an organ. Zwolle also has an ancient church which retains its original religion—the church of Notre Dame, with a crucifix curiously protected by iron bars. I looked into the stadhuis to see a Gothic council room; and smoked meditatively among the stalls of a little flower market, wondering why some of the costumes of Holland are so charming and others so unpleasing. A few dear old women in lace caps were present, Page 255but there were also younger women who had made their pretty heads ugly with their decorations.
At Zwolle M. Havard was disappointed to find no wax figure of the famous wild girl found in the Cranenburg Forest in 1718. She roamed its recesses almost naked for some time, eluding all capture, but was at last taken with nets and conveyed to Zwolle. As she could not be understood, an account of her was circulated widely, and at length a woman in Antwerp who had lost a daughter in 1702 heard of her, and on reaching Zwolle immediately recognised her as her child. The magistrates, accepting the story, handed the girl to her affectionate parent, who at once set about exhibiting her throughout the country at a great profit. The story illustrates either the credulity of magistrates or the practical character of some varieties of maternal love.
Kampen, nearer the mouth of the Yssel, close to Zwolle, is exceedingly well worth visiting. The two towns are very different: Zwolle is patrician, Kampen plebeian; Zwolle suggests wealth and light-heartedness; at Kampen there is a large fishing population and no one seems to be wealthy. Indeed, being without municipal rates, it is, I am told, a refuge of the needy. Any old town that is on a river, and that river a mouth of the Rhine, is good enough for me; but when it is also a treasure house of mediæval architecture one’s cup is full. And Kampen has many treasures: beautiful fourteenth-century gateways, narrow quaint streets, a cheerful isolated campanile, a fine church, and the greater portion of an odd but wholly delightful stadhuis in red brick and white stone, with a gay little crooked bell-tower and statues of great men and great qualities on its facade.
For one possession alone, among many, the stadhuis Page 256must be visited—its halls of justice, veritable paradises of old oak, with a very wonderful fireplace. The halls are really one, divided by a screen; in one half, the council room, sat the judges, in the other the advocates, and, I suppose, the public. The advocates addressed the screen, on the other side of which sat Fate, in the persons of the municipal fathers, enthroned in oak seats of unsurpassed gravity and dignity, amid all the sombre insignia of their office. The chimney-piece is an imposing monument of abstract Justice—no more elaborate one can exist. Solomon is there, directing the distribution of the baby; Faith and Truth, Law, Religion and Charity are there also. Never can a tribunal have had a more appropriate setting than at Kampen. The Rennes judiciaries should have sat there, to lend further ironical point to their decision.
The stadhuis has other possessions interesting to anti-quaries: valuable documents, gold and silver work, the metal and leather squirts through which boiling oil was projected at the enemies of the town; while an iron cage for criminals, similar, I imagine, to that in which Jan of Leyden was exhibited, hangs outside.
Travellers visit Kampen pre-eminently to see the stadhuis chimney-piece and oak, but the whole town is a museum. I wish now that I had arranged to be longer there; but unaware of Kampen’s charms I allowed but a short time both for Zwolle and itself. On my next visit to Holland Kampen shall be my headquarters for some days. Amid the restfulness of mediævalism, the friendliness of the fishing folk and the breezes of the Zuyder Zee, one should do well. A boat from Amsterdam to Kampen sails every morning.
Kampen
Despite its Judgment Hall and its other merits Kampen is the Dutch Gotham. Any foolishly naive speech or action is attributed to Kampen’s wise men. In one story Page 257the fathers of the town place the municipal sundial under cover to protect it from the rays of the sun. In another they meet together to deliberate on the failure of the water pipes and fire engines during a fire, and pass a rule that “on the evening preceding a fire” all hydrants and engines must be overhauled. M. Havard gives also the following instance of Kampen sagacity. A public functionary was explaining the financial state of the town. He asserted that one of the principal profits arose from the tolls exacted on the entrance of goods into the town. “Each gate,” said the ingenious advocate, “has brought in ten million florins this year; that is to say, with seven gates we have gained seventy million florins. This is a most important fact. I therefore propose that the council double the number of gates, and in this way we shall in future considerably augment our funds.” The Irishman who, when asked to buy a stove that would save half his fuel, replied that he would have two and save it all, was of the same school of logic.
From Kampen the island of Urk may be visited: but I have not been there. In 1787, I have read somewhere, the inhabitants of Urk decided to form a club in which to practise military exercises and the use of arms. When the club was formed it had but one member. Hence a Dutch saying—“It is the Urk club”.
Nor did I stay at Deventer, but hastened on to Zutphen with my thoughts straying all the time to the grey walls of Penshurst castle in Kent and its long galleries filled with memories of Sir Philip Sidney—the gentle knight who was a boy there, and who died at Arnheim of a wound which he received in the siege of Zutphen three and a quarter centuries ago.
At Naarden we have seen how terrible was the destroying Page 258power of the Spaniards. It was at Zutphen that they had first given rein to their lust for blood. When Zutphen was taken by Don Frederic in 1572, at the beginning of the war, Motley tells us that “Alva sent orders to his son to leave not a single man alive in the city, and to burn every house to the ground. The Duke’s command was almost literally obeyed. Don Frederic entered Zutphen, and without a moment’s warning put the whole garrison to the sword. The citizens next fell a defenceless prey; some being stabbed in the streets, some hanged on the trees which decorated the city, some stripped stark naked, and turned out into the fields to freeze to death in the wintry night. As the work of death became too fatiguing for the butchers, five hundred innocent burghers were tied two and two, back to back, and drowned like dogs in the river Yssel. A few stragglers who had contrived to elude pursuit at first, were afterwards taken from their hiding-places, and hung upon the gallows by the feet, some of which victims suffered four days and nights of agony before death came to their relief.”
On the day that I was in Zutphen it was the quietest town I had found in all Holland—not excepting Monnickendam between the arrival of the steam-trams. The clean bright streets were empty and still: another massacre almost might just have occurred. I had Zutphen to myself. I could not even find the koster to show me the church; and it was in trying door after door as I walked round it that I came upon the only sign of life in the place. For one handle at last yielding I found myself instantly in a small chapel filled with many young women engaged in a scripture class. The sudden irruption of an embarrassed and I imagine somewhat grotesque foreigner seems to have been exactly what every member of this little congregation Page 259was most desiring, and I never heard a merrier or more spontaneous burst of laughter. I stood not upon the order of my going.
The church is vast and very quiet and restful, with a large plain window of green glass that increases its cool freshness; while the young leaves of a chestnut close to another window add to this effect. The koster coming at last, I was shown the ancient chained library in the chapter house, and he enlarged upon the beauties of a metal font. Wandering out again into this city of silence I found in the square by the church an exhibition of wax works which was to be opened at four o’clock. Making a note to return to it at that hour, I sought the river, where the timber is floated down from the German forests, and lost myself among peat barges and other craft, and walked some miles in and about Zutphen, and a little way down a trickling stream whence the view of the city is very beautiful; and by-and-by found myself by the church and the wax works again, in a town that since my absence had quite filled with bustling people—four o’clock having struck and the Princess of the Day Dream having (I suppose) been kissed. The change was astonishing.
Wax works always make me uncomfortable, and these were no exception; but the good folk of Zutphen found them absorbing. The murderers stood alone, staring with that fixity which only a wax assassin can compass; but for the most part the figures were arranged in groups with dramatic intent. Here was a confessional; there a farewell between lovers; here a wounded Boer meeting his death at the bayonet of an English dastard; there a Queen Eleanor sucking poison from her husband’s arm. A series of illuminated scenes of rapine and disaster might be studied through magnifying glasses. The presence of a Page 260wax bust of Zola was due, I imagine, less to his illustrious career than to the untoward circumstances of his death. The usual Sleeping Beauty heaved her breast punctually in the centre of the tent.
In one point only did the exhibition differ from the wax works of the French and Italian fairs—it was undeviatingly decent. There were no jokes, and no physiological models. But the Dutch, I should conjecture, are not morbid. They have their coarse fun, laugh, and get back to business again. Judged by that new short-cut to a nation’s moral tone, the picture postcard, the Dutch are quite sound. There is a shop in the high-spirited Nes Straat at Amsterdam where a certain pictorial ebullience has play, but I saw none other of the countless be-postcarded windows in all Holland that should cause a serious blush on any cheek; while the Nes Straat specimens were fundamentally sound, Rabelaisian rather than Armand-Sylvestrian, not vicious but merely vulgar. Page 261
Chapter XVIII
Arnheim to Bergen-op-Zoom
Arnheim the Joyous—A wood walk—Tesselschade Visscher and the Chambers of Rhetoric—Epigrams—Poet friends—The nightingale—An Arnheim adventure—Ten years at one book—Dutch and Latin—Dutch and French—A French story—Dutch and English—The English Schole-Master—Master and scholar—A nervous catechism—Avoiding the birch—A riot of courtesy—A bill of lading—Dutch proverbs—The Rhine and its mouths—Nymwegen—Lady Mary Wortley Montagu again—Painted shutters—The Valkhof—Hertogenbosch—Brothers at Bommel—The hero of Breda—Two beautiful tombs—Bergen-op-Zoom—Messrs. Grimston and Red-head—Tholen—The Dutch feminine countenance.
At Arnheim we come to a totally new Holland. The Maliebaan and the park at Utrecht, with their spacious residences, had prepared us a little for Arnheim’s wooded retirement; but not completely. Rotterdam is given to shipping; The Hague makes laws and fashions; Leyden and Utrecht teach; Amsterdam makes money. It is at Arnheim that the retired merchant and the returned colonist set up their home. It is the richest residential city in the country. Arnheim the Joyous was its old name. Arnheim the Comfortable it might now be styled.
It is the least Dutch of Dutch towns: the Rhine brings a bosky beauty to it, German in character and untamed by Dutch restraining hands. The Dutch Switzerland the country hereabout is called. Arnheim recalls Richmond Page 262too, for it has a Richmond Hill—a terrace-road above a shaggy precipice overlooking the river.
I walked in the early morning to Klarenbeck, up and down in a vast wood, and at a point of vantage called the Steenen Tafel looked down on the Rhine valley. Nothing could be less like the Holland of the earlier days of my wanderings—nothing, that is, that was around me, but with the farther bank of the river the flatness instantly begins and continues as far as one can see in the north.
It was a very beautiful morning in May, and as I rested now and then among the resinous pines I was conscious of being traitorous to England in wandering here at all. No one ought to be out of England in April and May. At one point I met a squirrel—just such a nimble short-tempered squirrel as those which scold and hide in the top branches of the fir trees near my own home in Kent—and my sense of guilt increased; but when, on my way back, in a garden near Arnheim I heard a nightingale, the treachery was complete.
And this reminds me that the best poem of the most charming figure in Dutch literature—Tesselschade Visscher—is about the nightingale. The story of this poetess and her friends belongs more properly to Amsterdam, or to Alkmaar, but it may as well be told here while the Arnheim nightingale—the only nightingale that I heard in Holland—is plaining and exulting.
Tesselschade was the daughter of the poet and rhetorician Roemer Visscher. She was born on 25th March, 1594, and earned her curious name from the circumstance that on the same day her father was wrecked off Texel. In honour of his rescue he named his daughter Tesselschade, or Texel wreck, thereby, I think, eternally impairing his right to be considered a true poet. As a matter of fact Page 263he was rather an epigrammatist than a poet, his ambition being to be known as the Dutch Martial. Here is a taste of his Martial manner:—
Jan sorrows—sorrows far too much: ’tis true
A sad affliction hath distressed his life;—
Mourns he that death hath ta’en his children two?
O no! he mourns that death hath left his wife.
I have said that Visscher was a rhetorician. The word perhaps needs a little explanation, for it means more than would appear. In those days rhetoric was a living cult in the Netherlands: Dutchmen and Flemings played at rhetoric with some of the enthusiasm that we keep for cricket and sport. Every town of any importance had its Chamber of Rhetoric. “These Chambers,” says Longfellow in his Poets and Poetry of Europe, “were to Holland, in the fifteenth century, what the Guilds of the Meistersingers were to Germany, and were numerous throughout the Netherlands. Brussels could boast of five; Antwerp of four; Louvain of three; and Ghent, Bruges, Malines, Middelburg, Gouda, Haarlem, and Amsterdam of at least one. Each Chamber had its coat of arms and its standard, and the directors bore the title of Princes and Deans. At times they gave public representations of poetic dialogues and stage-plays, called Spelen van Sinne, or Moralities. Like the Meistersingers, they gave singular titles to their songs and metres. A verse was called a Regel; a strophe, a Clause; and a burden or refrain, a Stockregel. If a half-verse closed as a strophe, it was a Steert, or tail. Tafel-spelen, and Spelen van Sinne, were the titles of the dramatic exhibitions; and the rhymed invitation to these was called a Charte, or Uitroep (outcry). Ketendichten (chain-poems) are short poems in which the last word of each line rhymes with the first of the line following; Scaekberd (checkerbourd), Page 264a poem of sixty-four lines, so rhymed, that in every direction it forms a strophe of eight lines; and Dobbel-steert (double-tail), a poem in which a double rhyme closes each line.1
“The example of Flanders was speedily followed by Zeeland and Holland. In 1430, there was a Chamber at Middelburg; in 1433, at Vlaardingen; in 1434, at Nieuwkerk; and in 1437, at Gouda. Even insignificant Dutch villages had their Chambers. Among others, one was founded in the Lier, in the year 1480. In the remaining provinces they met with less encouragement. They existed, however, at Utrecht, Amersfoort, Leeuwarden, and Hasselt. The purity of the language was completely undermined by the rhyming self-called Rhetoricians, and their abandoned courses brought poetry itself into disrepute. All distinction of genders was nearly abandoned; the original abundance of words ran waste; and that which was left became completely overwhelmed by a torrent of barbarous terms.”
Arnheim
Wagenaer, in his “Description of Amsterdam,” gives a copy of a painter’s bill for work done for a rhetorician’s performance at the play-house in the town of Alkmaar, of which the following is a translation:—
“Imprimis, made for the Clerks a Hell;
Item, the Pavilion of Satan;
Item, two pairs of Devil’s-breeches;
Item, a Shield for the Christian Knight;
Page 265
Item, have painted the Devils whenever they played;
Item, some Arrows and other small matters.
Sum total; worth in all xii. guilders.
“Jaques Mol.
“Paid, October viii., 95 [1495].”
Among the Dutch pictures at the Louvre is an anonymous work representing the Committee of a Chamber of Rhetoric.
Roemer Visscher, the father of the poetess, was a leading rhetorician at Amsterdam, and the president of the Eglantine Chamber of the Brother’s Blossoming in Love (as he and his fellow-rhetoricians called themselves). None the less, he was a sensible and clever man, and he brought up his three daughters very wisely. He did not make them blue stockings, but saw that they acquired comely and useful arts and crafts, and he rendered them unique by teaching them to swim in the canal that ran through his garden. He also was enabled to ensure for them the company of the best poetical intellects of the time—Vondel and Brederoo, Spiegel, Hooft and Huyghens.
Of these the greatest was Joost van den Vondel, a neighbour of Visscher’s in Amsterdam, the author of “Lucifer,” a poem from which it has been suggested that Milton borrowed. Like Izaak Walton Vondel combined haberdashery with literature. Spiegel was a wealthy patron of the arts, and a president, with Visscher, of the Eglantine Chamber with the painfully sentimental name. Constantin Huyghens wrote light verse with intricate metres, and an occasional epigram. Here is one:—
On Peter’s Poetry.
When Peter condescends to write,
His verse deserves to see the light.
If any further you inquire,
I mean—the candle or the fire.
Also a practical statesman, it was to Huyghens that Holland owes the beautiful old road from The Hague to Scheveningen in which Jacob Cats built his house.
Among these friends Anna and Tesselschade grew into cultured women of quick and sympathetic intellect. Both wrote poetry, but Tesselschade’s is superior to her sister’s. Among Anna’s early work were some additions to a new edition of her father’s Zinne-Poppen, one of her poems running thus in the translation by Mr, Edmund Gosse in the very pleasant essay on Tesselschade in his Studies in the Literature of Northern Europe:—
A wife that sings and pipes all day,
And never puts her lute away,
No service to her hand finds she;
Fie, fie! for this is vanity!
But is it not a heavenly sight
To see a woman take delight
With song or string her husband dear,
When daily work is done, to cheer?
Misuse may turn the sweetest sweet
To loathsome wormwood, I repeat;
Yea, wholesome medicine, full of grace,
May prove a poison—out of place.
They who on thoughts eternal rest,
With earthly pleasures may be blest;
Since they know well these shadows gay,
Like wind and smoke, will pass away.
Tesselschade, who was much loved by her poet friends, disappointed them all by marrying a dull sailor of Alkmaar named Albert Krombalgh. Settling down at Alkmaar, she continued her intercourse with her old companions, and some new ones, by letter. Among her new friends were Barlaeus, or Van Baerle, the first Latinist of the day, Page 267and Jacob Cats. When her married life was cut short some few years later, Barlaeus proposed to the young widow; but it was in vain, as she informed him by quoting from Cats these lines:—
When a valvèd shell of ocean
Breaks one side or loses one,
Though you seek with all devotion
You can ne’er the loss atone,
Never make again the edges
Bite together, tooth for tooth,
And, just so, old love alleges
Nought is like the heart’s first troth.
These are Tesselschade’s lines upon the nightingale in Mr. Gosse’s happy translation:—
The Wild Songster.
Praise thou the nightingale,
Who with her joyous tale
Doth make thy heart rejoice,
Whether a singing plume she be, or viewless wingèd voice;
Whose warblings, sweet and clear,
Ravish the listening ear
With joy, as upward float
The throbbing liquid trills of her enchanted throat;
Whose accents pure and ripe
Sound like an organ pipe,
That holdeth divers songs,
And with one tongue alone sings like a score of tongues.
The rise and fall again
In clear and lovely strain
Of her sweet voice and shrill,
Outclamours with its songs the singing springing rill.
A creature whose great praise
Her rarity displays,
Seeing she only lives
A month in all the year to which her song she gives.
But this thing sets the crown
Upon her high renown,
That such a little bird as she
Can harbour such a strength of clamorous harmony.
Arnheim presents after dinner the usual scene of contented movement. The people throng the principal streets, and every one seems happy and placid. The great concert hall, Musis Sacrum, had not yet begun its season when I was there, and the only spectacle which the town could muster was an exhibition of strength by two oversized boys, which I avoided.
At Arnheim, I should relate, an odd thing happened to my companion. When she was there last, in 1894, she had need to obtain linseed for a poultice, and visited a chemist for the purpose. He was an old man, and she found him sitting in the window studying his English grammar. How long his study had lasted I have no notion, but he knew less of our tongue than she of his, and to get the linseed was no easy matter. Ten years passed and recollection of the Arnheim chemist had clean evaporated; but chancing to look up as we walked through the town, the sight of the old chemist seated in his shop-window poring over a book brought the whole incident back to her. We stepped to the window and stole a glance at the volume: it was an English Grammar. He had been studying it ever since the night of the linseed poultice.
It was, we felt, an object-lesson to us, who during the same interval had taken advantage of every opportunity of neglecting the Dutch tongue.
That tongue, however, is not attractive. Even those who have spoken it to most purpose do not always admire it. I find that Kasper van Baerle wrote: “What then do we Netherlanders speak? Words from a foreign tongue: Page 269we are but a collected crowd, of feline origin, driven by a strange fatality to these mouths of the Rhine. Why, since the mighty descendants of Romulus here pitched their tents, choose we not rather the holy language of the Romans!”
We may consider Dutch a harsh tongue, and prefer that all foreigners should learn English; but our dislike of Dutch is as nothing compared with Dutch dislike of French as expressed in some verses by Bilderdyk when the tyranny of Napoleon threatened them:—
Begone, thou bastard-tongue! so base—so broken—
By human jackals and hyenas spoken;
Formed of a race of infidels, and fit
To laugh at truth—and scepticise in wit;
What stammering, snivelling sounds, which scarcely dare,
Bravely through nasal channel meet the ear—
Yet helped by apes’ grimaces—and the devil,
Have ruled the world, and ruled the world for evil!
But French is now the second language that is taught in Dutch schools. German comes first and English third.
The Dutch language often resembles English very closely; sometimes so closely as to be ridiculous. For example, to an English traveller who has been manoeuvring in vain for some time in the effort to get at the value of an article, it comes as a shock comparable only to being run over by a donkey cart to discover that the Dutch for “What is the price?” is “Wat is de prijs?”
The best old Dutch phrase-book is The English Schole-Master, the copy of which that lies before me was printed at Amsterdam by John Houman in the year 1658. I have already quoted a short passage from it, in Chapter II. This is the full title:— Page 270
The English Schole-Master;
or
Certaine rules and helpes, whereby
the natives of the Netherlandes, may
bee, in a short time, taught to
read, understand, and speake
the English tongue.
By the helpe whereof the English also
may be better instructed in the knowledge
of the Dutch tongue, than by any vocabulars,
or other Dutch and English
books, which hitherto they have
had, for that purpose.
There is internal evidence that the book was the work of a Dutchman rather than an Englishman; for the Dutch is better than the English. I quote (omitting the Dutch) part of one of the long dialogues between a master and scholar of which the manual is largely composed. Much of its interest lies in the continual imminence of the rod and the skill of the child in saving the situation:—
M. In the meane time let me aske you one thing more. Have you not in to-day at the holy sermon?
S. I was there.
M. Who are your witnesses?
S. Many of the schoole-fellowes who saw me can witnes it.
M. But some must be produced.
S. I shall produce them when you commaund it.
M. Who did preach?
S. Master N.
M. At what time began he?
S. At seven a clock.
M. Whence did he take his text?
S. Out of the epistle of Paul to the Romanes.
M. In what chapter?
M. Hitherto you have answered well: let us now see what follows. Have you remembred anything?
S. Nothing that I can repeat.
M. Nothing at al? Bethink (your self) a little, and take heed that you bee not disturbed, but bee of good courage.
S. Truly master I can remember nothing.
M. What, not one word?
S. None at all.
M. I am ready to strike you: what profit have you then gotten?
S. I know not, otherwise than that perhaps I have in the mean time abstained from evill.
M. That is some what indeed, if it could but so be that you have kept your self wholy from evill.
S. I have abstained so much as I was able.
M. Graunt that it bee so, yet you have not pleased God, seeing it is written, depart from evill and doe good, but tell mee (I pray thee) for what cause principally did you goe thither?
S. That I might learne something.
M. Why have you not done so?
S. I could not.
M. Could you not, knave? yea you would not, or truly you have not addicted your self to it.
S. I am compelled to confesse it.
M. What compelleth you?
S. My Conscience, which accuseth me before God.
M. You say well: oh that it were from the heart.
S. Truly I speak it from myne heart.
M. It may bee so: but goe to, what was the cause that you have remembred nothing?
S. My negligence: for I attended not diligently.
M. What did you then?
S. Sometimes I slept.
M. So you used to doe: but what did you the rest of the time?
S. I thought on a thousand fooleries, as children are wont to doe.
M. Are you so very a child, that you ought not to be attentive to heare the word of God?
S. If I had bin attentive, I should have profitted something.
M. What have you then meritted?
S. Stripes.
M. You have truly meritted them, and that very many.
S. I ingenuously confess it.
M. But in word only I think. Page 272
S. Yea truly from myne heart.
M. Possibly, but in the meane time prepare to receive stripes.
S. O master forgive it, I beseech you, I confes I have sinned, but not of malice.
M. But such an evill negligence comes very neare wickedness (malice).
S. Truly I strive not against that: but nevertheles I implore your clemencie through Jesus Christ.
M. What will you then doe, if I shall forgive you?
S. I will doe my dutie henceforth, as I hope.
M. You should have added thereto, by God’s helpe: but you care little for that.
S. Yea master, by God’s help, I will hereafter doe my duty.
M. Goe to, I pardon you the fault for your teares: and I forgive it you on this condition, that you bee myndful of your promise.
S. I thank you most Courteous master.
M. You shall bee in very great favour with mee, if you remember your promise.
S. The most good and great God graunt that I may.
M. That is my desire, that hee would graunt it.