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A Wanderer in Holland by E. V. Lucas

E >> E. V. Lucas >> A Wanderer in Holland




One only of Peter de Hooch's pictures is reproduced in this book--"The
Store Cupboard". This is partly because there are, I think, better
paintings of his in London than at Amsterdam. At least it seems to
me that his picture in our National Gallery of the waiting maid is
finer than anything by De Hooch in Holland. But in no other work
of his that I know is his simple charm so apparent as in "The Store
Cupboard". This is surely the Christmas supplement carried out to its
highest power--and by its inventor. The thousands of domestic scenes
which have proceeded from this one canvas make the memory reel; and
yet nothing has staled the prototype. It remains a sweet and genuine
and radiant thing. De Hooch had two fetishes--a rich crimson dress
or jacket and an open door. His compatriot Vermeer, whom he sometimes
resembles, was similarly addicted to a note of blue.

No one has managed direct sunlight so well as De Hooch. The light in
his rooms is the light of day. One can almost understand how Rembrandt
and Gerard Dou got their concentrated effects of illumination; but
how this omnipresent radiance streamed from De Hooch's palette is one
of the mysteries. It is as though he did not paint light but found
light on his canvas and painted everything else in its midst.

Rotterdam has some excellent pictures in its Boymans Museum; but they
are, I fancy, overlooked by many visitors. It seems no city in which to
see pictures. It is a city for anything rather than art--a mercantile
centre, a hive of bees, a shipping port of intense activity. And
yet perhaps the quietest little Albert Cuyp in Holland is here, "De
Oude Oostpoort te Rotterdam," a small evening scene, without cattle,
suffused in a golden glow. But all the Cuyps, and there are six,
are good--all inhabited by their own light.

Among the other Boymans treasures which I find I have marked (not
necessarily because they are good--for I am no judge--but because
I liked them) are Ferdinand Bols fine free portrait of Dirck van
der Waeijen, a boy in a yellow coat; Erckhart's "Boaz and Ruth," a
small sombre canvas with a suggestion of Velasquez in it; Hobbema's
"Boomrijk Landschap," one of the few paintings of this artist that
Holland possesses. The English, I might remark, always appreciative
judges of Dutch art, have been particularly assiduous in the pursuit of
Hobbema, with the result that his best work is in our country. Holland
has nothing of his to compare with the "Avenue at Middelharnis,"
one of the gems of our National Gallery. And his feathery trees may
be studied at the Wallace Collection in great comfort.

Other fine landscapes in the Boymans Museum are three by Johan
van Kessel, who was a pupil of Hobbema, one by Jan van der Meer,
one by Koninck, and, by Jacob van Ruisdael, a corafield in the sun
and an Amsterdam canal with white sails upon it. The most notable
head is that by Karel Fabritius; Hendrick Pot's "Het Lokstertje"
is interesting for its large free manner and signs of the influence
of Hals; and Emmanuel de Witte's Amsterdam fishmarket is curiously
modern. But the figure picture which most attracted me was "Portret
van een jongeling," by Jan van Scorel, of whom we shall learn more at
Utrecht. This little portrait, which I reproduce on the opposite page,
is wholly charming and vivid.

The Boymans Museum contains also modern Dutch paintings. Wherever
modern Dutch paintings are to be seen, I look first for the delicate
art of Matthew Maris, and next for Anton Mauve. Here there is no
Matthew Maris, and but one James Maris. There is one Mauve. The modern
Dutch painter for the most part paints the same picture so often. But
Matthew Maris is full of surprises. If a new picture by any of his
contemporaries stood with its face to the wall one would know what
to expect. From Israels, a fisherman's wife; from Mesdag, a grey
stretch of sea; from Bosboom, a superb church interior; from Mauve,
a peasant with sheep or a peasant with a cow; from Weissenbruch, a
stream and a willow; from Breitner, an Amsterdam street; from James
Maris a masterly scene of boats and wet sky. Usually one would have
guessed aright. But with Matthew Maris is no certainty. It may be a
little dainty girl lying on her side and watching butterflies; it may
be a sombre hillside at Montmartre; it may be a girl cooking; it may
be scaffolding in Amsterdam, or a mere at evening, or a baby's head,
or a village street. He has many moods, and he is always distinguished
and subtle.

Rotterdam has a zoological garden which, although inferior to ours,
is far better than that at Amsterdam, while it converts The Hague's Zoo
into a travesty. Last spring the lions were in splendid condition. They
are well housed, but fewer distractions are provided for them than
in Regent's Park. I found myself fascinated by the herons, who were
continually soaring out over the neighbouring houses and returning
like darkening clouds. In England, although the heron is a native, we
rarely seem to see him; while to study him is extremely difficult. In
Holland he is ubiquitous: both wild and tame.

More interesting still was the stork, whose nest is set high on
a pinnacle of the buffalo house. He was building in the leisurely
style of the British working man. He would negligently descend from
the heavens with a stick. This he would lay on the fabric and then
carefully perform his toilet, looking round and down all the time
to see that every one else was busy. Whenever his eye lighted upon
a toddling child or a perambulator it visibly brightened. "My true
work!" he seemed to say; "this nest building is a mere by-path of
industry." After prinking and overlooking, and congratulating himself
thus, for a few minutes, he would stroll off, over the housetops,
for another stick. He was the unquestionable King of the Garden.

Why are there no heronries in the English public parks? And why is
there no stork? The Dutch have a proverb, "Where the stork abides
no mother dies in childbed". Still more, why are there no storks in
France? The author of _Fecondite_ should have imported them.

No Zoo, however well managed, can keep an ourang-outang long, and
therefore one should always study that uncomfortably human creature
whenever the opportunity occurs. I had great fortune at Rotterdam,
for I chanced to be in the ourang-outang's house when his keeper
came in. Entering the enclosure, he romped with him in a score of
diverting ways. They embraced each other, fed each other, teased
each other. The humanness of the creature was frightful. Perhaps our
likeness to ourang-outangs (except for our ridiculously short arms,
inadequate lower jaws and lack of hair) made him similarly uneasy.

Rotterdam, I have read somewhere, was famous at the end of the
eighteenth century for a miser, the richest man in the city. He always
did his own marketing, and once changed his butcher because he weighed
the paper with the meat He bought his milk in farthingsworths, half
of which had to be delivered at his front door and half at the back,
"to gain the little advantage of extra measure". Different travellers
note different things, and William Chambers, the publisher, in his
_Tour in Holland_ in 1839, selected for special notice another type
of Rotterdam resident: "One of the most remarkable men of this [the
merchant] class is Mr. Van Hoboken of Rhoon and Pendrecht, who lives
on one of the havens. This individual began life as a merchant's
porter, and has in process of time attained the highest rank among
the Dutch mercantile aristocracy. He is at present the principal owner
of twenty large ships in the East India trade, each, I was informed,
worth about fourteen thousand pounds, besides a large landed estate,
and much floating wealth of different descriptions. His establishment
is of vast extent, and contains departments for the building of ships
and manufacture of all their necessary equipments. This gentleman,
until lately, was in the habit of giving a splendid fete once a year
to his family and friends, at which was exhibited with modest pride
the porter's truck which he drew at the outset of his career. One
seldom hears of British merchants thus keeping alive the remembrance
of early meanness of circumstances."

At one of Rotterdam's stations I saw the Queen-Mother, a
smiling, maternal lady in a lavender silk dress, carrying a large
bouquet, and saying pretty things to a deputation drawn up on the
platform. Rotterdam had put out its best bunting, and laid six inches
of sand on its roads, to do honour to this kindly royalty. The band
played the tender national anthem, which is always so unlike what one
expects it to be, as her train steamed away, and then all the grave
bearded gentlemen in uniforms and frock coats who had attended her
drove in their open carriages back to the town. Not even the presence
of the mounted guard made it more formal than a family party. Everybody
seemed on the best of friendly terms of equality with everybody else.

Tom Hood, who had it in him to be so good a poet, but living in a
country where art and literature do not count, was permitted to coarsen
his delicate genius in the hunt for bread, wrote one of his comic
poems on Rotterdam. In it are many happy touches of description:--


Before me lie dark waters
In broad canals and deep,
Whereon the silver moonbeams
Sleep, restless in their sleep;
A sort of vulgar Venice
Reminds me where I am;
Yes, yes, you are in England,
And I'm at Rotterdam.

Tall houses with quaint gables,
Where frequent windows shine,
And quays that lead to bridges,
And trees in formal line,
And masts of spicy vessels
From western Surinam,
All tell me you're in England,
But I'm in Rotterdam.


With headquarters at Rotterdam one may make certain small journeys
into the neighbourhood--to Dordrecht by river, to Delft by canal,
to Gouda by canal; or one may take longer voyages, even to Cologne if
one wishes. But I do not recommend it as a city to linger in. Better
than Rotterdam's large hotels are, I think, the smaller, humbler
and more Dutch inns of the less commercial towns. This indeed is the
case all over Holland: the plain Dutch inn of the neighbouring small
town is pleasanter than the large hotels of the city; and, as I have
remarked in the chapter on Amsterdam, the distances are so short,
and the trains so numerous, that one suffers no inconvenience from
staying in the smaller places.

Gouda (pronounced Howda) it is well to visit from Rotterdam, for it
has not enough to repay a sojourn in its midst. It has a Groote Kerk
and a pretty isolated white stadhuis. But Gouda's fame rests on its
stained glass--gigantic representations of myth, history and scripture,
chiefly by the brothers Crabeth. The windows are interesting rather
than beautiful. They lack the richness and mystery which one likes
to find in old stained glass, and the church itself is bare and cold
and unfriendly. Hemmed in by all this coloured glass, so able and
so direct, one sighs for a momentary glimpse of the rose window at
Chartres, or even of the too heavily kaleidoscopic patterns of Brussels
Cathedral. No matter, the Gouda windows in their way are very fine,
and in the sixth, depicting the story of Judith and Holofernes, there
is a very fascinating little Duereresque tower on a rock under siege.

If one is taking Gouda on the way from Rotterdam to Amsterdam,
the surrounding country should not be neglected from the carriage
windows. Holland is rarely so luxuriant as here, and so peacefully
beautiful.




Chapter II

The Dutch in English Literature

Hard things against the Dutch--Andrew Marvell's satire--The
iniquity of living below sea-level--Historic sarcasms--"Invent
a shovel and be a magistrate"--Heterogeneity--Foot warmers--A
champion of the Hollow Land--_The Dutch Drawn to the
Life_--Dutch suspicion--Sir William Temple's opinion--and Sir
Thomas Overbury's--Dr. Johnson's project--Dutch courtesy--Dutch
discourtesy--National manners--A few phrases--The origin of
"Dutch News"--A vindication of Dutch courage.

To say hard things of the Dutch was once a recognised literary
pastime. At the time of our war with Holland no poet of any pretensions
refrained from writing at least one anti-Batavian satire, the classical
example of which is Andrew Marvell's "Character of Holland" (following
Samuel Butler's), a pasquinade that contains enough wit and fancy
and contempt to stock a score of the nation's ordinary assailants. It
begins perfectly:--


HOLLAND, that scarce deserves the name of land,
As but th' off-scouring of the British sand,
And so much earth as was contributed
By English pilots when they heav'd the lead,
Or what by the ocean's slow alluvion fell
Of shipwrackt cockle and the muscle-shell:
This indigested vomit of the sea
Fell to the Dutch by just propriety.
Glad then, as miners who have found the ore
They, with mad labour, fish'd the land to shoar
And div'd as desperately for each piece
Of earth, as if't had been of ambergreece;
Collecting anxiously small loads of clay,
Less than what building swallows bear away;
Or than those pills which sordid beetles roul,
Transfusing into them their dunghil soul.
How did they rivet, with gigantick piles,
Thorough the center their new-catched miles;
And to the stake a struggling country bound,
Where barking waves still bait the forced ground;
Building their wat'ry Babel far more high
To reach the sea, than those to scale the sky!
Yet still his claim the injur'd ocean laid,
And oft at leap-frog ore their steeples plaid:
As if on purpose it on land had come
To show them what's their _mare liberum_.
A daily deluge over them does boyl;
The earth and water play at level-coyl.
The fish oft times the burger dispossest,
And sat, not as a meat, but as a guest,
And oft the Tritons and the sea-nymphs saw
Whole sholes of Dutch serv'd up for Cabillau;
Or, as they over the new level rang'd
For pickled herring, pickled _heeren_ chang'd.
Nature, it seem'd, asham'd of her mistake,
Would throw their land away at duck and drake.


The poor Dutch were never forgiven for living below the sea-level
and gaining their security by magnificent feats of engineering and
persistence. Why the notion of a reclaimed land should have seemed
so comic I cannot understand, but Marvell certainly justified the joke.

Later, Napoleon, who liked to sum up a nation in a phrase, accused
Holland of being nothing but a deposit of German mud, thrown there by
the Rhine: while the Duke of Alva remarked genially that the Dutch
were of all peoples those that lived nighest to hell; but Marvell's
sarcasms are the best. Indeed I doubt if the literature of droll
exaggeration has anything to compare with "The Character of Holland".

The satirist, now thoroughly warmed to his congenial task, continues:--


Therefore Necessity, that first made kings,
Something like government among them brings;
For, as with pygmees, who best kills the crane,
Among the hungry, he that treasures grain,
Among the blind, the one-ey'd blinkard reigns,
So rules among the drowned he that draines:
Not who first sees the rising sun, commands,
But who could first discern the rising lands;
Who best could know to pump an earth so leak,
Him they their Lord, and Country's Father, speak;
To make a bank, was a great plot of State,
Invent a shov'l, and be a magistrate.


So much for the conquest of Neptune, which in another nation were a
laudable enough enterprise. Marvell then passes on to the national
religion and the heterogeneity of Amsterdam:--


'Tis probable Religion, after this,
Came next in order, which they could not miss,
How could the Dutch but be converted, when
Th' Apostles were so many fishermen?
Besides, the waters of themselves did rise,
And, as their land, so them did re-baptize.
Though Herring for their God few voices mist,
And Poor-John to have been th' Evangelist,
Faith, that could never twins conceive before,
Never so fertile, spawn'd upon this shore
More pregnant than their Marg'ret, that laid down
For Hans-in-Kelder of a whole Hans-Town.
Sure when Religion did itself imbark,
And from the East would Westward steer its ark,
It struck, and splitting on this unknown ground,
Each one thence pillag'd the first piece he found:
Hence Amsterdam, Turk-Christian-Pagan-Jew,
Staple of sects, and mint of schisme grew;
That bank of conscience, where not one so strange
Opinion but finds credit, and exchange.
In vain for Catholicks ourselves we bear;
The universal Church is only there.
Nor can civility there want for tillage,
Where wisely for their Court, they chose a village:
How fit a title clothes their governours,
Themselves the hogs, as all their subject bores!
Let it suffice to give their country fame,
That it had one Civilis call'd by name,
Some fifteen hundred and more years ago,
But surely never any that was so.


There is something rather splendid in the attitude of a man who can
take a whole nation as his butt and bend every circumstance to his
purpose of ridicule and attack. Our satirists to-day are contented to
pillory individuals or possibly a sect or clique. Marvell's enjoyment
in his own exuberance and ingenuity is so apparent and infectious
that it matters nothing to us whether he was fair or unfair.

The end is inconclusive, being a happy recollection that he had
omitted any reference to _stoofjes_, the footstools filled with
burning peat which are used to keep the feet warm in church. Such
a custom was of course not less reprehensible than the building of
dykes to keep out the sea. Hence these eight lines, which, however,
would have come better earlier in the poem:--


See but their mermaids, with their tails of fish,
Reeking at church over the chafing-dish!
A vestal turf, enshrin'd in earthen ware,
Fumes through the loopholes of a wooden square;
Each to the temple with these altars tend,
But still does place it at her western end;
While the fat steam of female sacrifice
Fills the priest's nostrils, and puts out his eyes.


Not all the poets, however, abused the Dutch. John Hagthorpe, in his
_England's Exchequer_ in 1625 (written before the war: hence, perhaps,
his kindness) thus addressed the "hollow land":--


Fair Holland, had'st thou England's chalky rocks,
To gird thy watery waist; her healthful mounts,
With tender grass to feed thy nibbling flocks:
Her pleasant groves, and crystalline clear founts,
Most happy should'st thou be by just accounts,
That in thine age so fresh a youth do'st feel
Though flesh of oak, and ribs of brass and steel.

But what hath prudent mother Nature held
From thee--that she might equal shares impart
Unto her other sons--that's not compell'd
To be the guerdons of thy wit and art?
And industry, that brings from every part
Of every thing the fairest and the best,
Like the Arabian bird to build thy nest?

Like the Arabian bird thy nest to build,
With nimble wings thou flyest for Indian sweets,
And incense which the Sabaan forests yield,
And in thy nest the goods of each pole meets,--
Which thy foes hope, shall serve thy funeral rites--
But thou more wise, secur'd by thy deep skill,
Dost build on waves, from fires more safe than hill.


To return to the severer critics--in 1664 was published a little book
called _The Dutch Drawn to the Life_, a hostile work not improbably
written with the intention of exciting English animosity to the point
of war. A great deal was made of the success of the Dutch fisheries
and the mismanagement of our own. The nation was criticised in all
its aspects--"well nigh three millions of men, well-proportioned,
great lovers of our English beer". The following passage on the
drinking capacity of the Dutch would have to be modified to-day:--

By their Excise, which riseth with their charge, the more money
they pay, the more they receive again, in that insensible but
profitable way: what is exhaled up in clouds, falls back again
in showers: what the souldier receives in pay, he payes in
Drink: their very enemies, though they hate the State, yet love
their liquor, and pay excise: the most idle, slothful, and most
improvident, that selleth his blood for drink, and his flesh for
bread, serves at his own charge, for every pay day he payeth his
sutler, and he the common purse.

Here are other strokes assisting to the protraiture "to the life" of
this people: "Their habitations are kept handsomer than their bodies,
and their bodies than their soules".--"The Dutch man's building is
not large, but neat; handsome on the outside, on the inside hung
with pictures and tapestry. He that hath not bread to eat hath a
picture."--"They are seldom deceived, for they will trust nobody. They
may always deceive, for you must trust them, as for instance, if you
travel, to ask a bill of Particulars is to purre in a wasp's nest,
you must pay what they ask as sure as if it were the assessment of
a Subsidy."

But the wittiest and shrewdest of the prose critics of Holland was Owen
Feltham, from whom I quote later. His little book on the Low Countries
is as packed with pointed phrase as a satire by Pope: the first half
of it whimsically destructive, the second half eulogistic. It is
he who charges the Dutch convivial spirits with drinking down the
Evening Starre and drinking up the Morning Starre.

The old literature tells us also that the Dutch were not
always clean. Indeed, their own painters prove this: Ostade
pre-eminently. There are many allusions in Elizabethan and early Stuart
literature to their dirt and rags. In Earle's _Microcosmography_,
for example, a younger brother's last refuge is said to be the Low
Countries, "where rags and linen are no scandal". But better testimony
comes perhaps from _The English Schole-Master_, a seventeenth-century
Dutch-English manual, from which I quote at some length later in this
book. Here is a specimen scrap of dialogue:--


S. May it please you to give me leave to go out?
M. Whither?
S. Home.
M. How is it that you goe so often home?
S. My mother commanded that I and my brother should come to her
this day.
M. For what cause?
S. That our mayd may beat out our clothes.
M. What is that to say? Are you louzie?
S. Yea, very louzie.


Sir William Temple, the patron of Swift, the husband of Dorothy
Osborne, and our ambassador at The Hague--where he talked horticulture,
cured his gout by the remedy known as Moxa, and collected materials
for the leisurely essays and memoirs that were to be written at Moor
Park--knew the Dutch well and wrote of them with much particularity. In
his _Observations upon the United Provinces_ he says this: "Holland
is a country, where the earth is better than the air, and profit more
in request than honour; where there is more sense than wit; more good
nature than good humour, and more wealth than pleasure: where a man
would chuse rather to travel than to live; shall find more things to
observe than desire; and more persons to esteem than to love. But
the same qualities and dispositions do not value a private man and
a state, nor make a conversation agreeable, and a government great:
nor is it unlikely, that some very great King might make but a very
ordinary private gentleman, and some very extraordinary gentleman
might be capable of making but a very mean Prince."

Among other travellers who have summed up the Dutch in a few
phrases is Sir Thomas Overbury, the author of some witty characters,
including that very charming one of a Happy Milk Maid. In 1609 he
thus generalised upon the Netherlander: "Concerning the people: they
are neither much devout, nor much wicked; given all to drink, and
eminently to no other vice; hard in bargaining, but just; surly and
respectless, as in all democracies; thirsty, industrious, and cleanly;
disheartened upon the least ill-success, and insolent upon good;
inventive in manufactures, and cunning in traffick: and generally,
for matter of action, that natural slowness of theirs, suits better
(by reason of the advisedness and perseverance it brings with it)
than the rashness and changeableness of the French and Florentine
wits; and the equality of spirits, which is among them and Switzers,
renders them so fit for a democracy: which kind of government, nations
of more stable wits, being once come to a consistent greatness,
have seldom long endured."

Many Englishmen have travelled in Holland and have set down the record
of their experiences, from Thomas Coryate downwards. But the country
has not been inspiring, and Dutch travels are poor reading. Had
Dr. Johnson lived to accompany Boswell on a projected journey we
should be the richer, but I doubt if any very interesting narrative
would have resulted. One of Johnson's contemporaries, Samuel Ireland,
the engraver, and the father of the fraudulent author of _Vortigern_,
wrote _A Picturesque Tour through Holland, Brabant, and part of
France_, in 1789, while a few years later one of Charles Lamb's
early "drunken companions," Fell, wrote _A Tour through the Batavian
Republic_, 1801; and both of these books yield a few experiences
not without interest. Fell's is the duller. I quote from them now
and again throughout this volume, but I might mention here a few of
their more general observations.

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Various - "Lippincott's Magazine, October 1885"

Various - "Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, May 2, 1917"

Various - "Punch Volume 102, May 28, 1892"

William Stearns Davis - "A Friend of Caesar"