‘My son,’ said the wisest of modern men—whose name, of course, it were
malicious to mention, and foolish also, the object being to promulgate
charity, not to excite rancour—‘My son, if you would go through life
easily, I can give you no better rule of conduct than this: _Never wear
a brown hat in Friesland_.’
Now, though this piece of counsel may sound as hieroglyphical and
mysterious as the well known precept by _Mr. Malaprop_ administered to
his offspring, when the latter was about to quit home, ‘Evil
communication is worth two in the bush,’ it is nevertheless susceptible
of the clearest and most explicit interpretation. Though the fruits of
particular and personal experience, it may be applied to every man who
wears a hat under the sun, the moon, the seven stars, or the Seven
Dials! let alone the Seven United Provinces!
The Brown Hat whence this saying sprung, was merely a hat of common
quality and uncommon comfort; soft to the head, not stiff; a screen for
eyes from the sun; a thing taking no place among the traveller’s
luggage—claiming no package of its own, and thus offering no
wrangling-stock to those most tiresome of Jacks among all
Jacks-in-office—to wit, Custom-house officers. It was a hat which the
_Hatto_ of hats must have accredited as the very perfection of a quiet,
middle-aged traveller’s _vade mecum_; something dull-looking, it is
true, for those whose thoughts are ‘wide-awake;’ something vulgar, for
any one troubled by aristocratic fancies as to his covering, and who
loves not to be confounded with his butterman; but withal a hat to be
defended by every man of sense, to be clung to by every creature capable
of headaches; a hat one could be bumped about in during a day of sixteen
hours, in carriage, cart, or third-class railway vehicle; a hat one
could lie in bed in for nightcap, or sit upon for cushion; a kindly,
comforting, unobtrusive hat—brown, because it was of the felt’s natural
colour, pliant as a piece of silk, submissive to wind, impervious to
rain. What can we say more? A castor, as the Pilgrim’s _Pollux_ put it,
‘fit to be buried in.’
Yet such was the hat, and none other, which—save your nerves be of
granite, your cheeks of brass, and your patience the patience of a
beaver—you are hereby solemnly warned not to wear in Friesland. In
London, when you please and where you please, but not in Meppel, and not
in Zwolle, and not in Sneek, and, most of all, not in the market-place
at Leenwarden. As wisely might you have tried to walk down a
village-street, in Lancashire, on Lifting-Monday (thirty years ago),
thinking to escape from the obliging maids and jolly wives, who lurked
behind their doors, bent on tossing every passing male in a kitchen
chair, as have hoped for ten seconds of peace,—supposing that in
Friesland (two autumns since) you took your walks abroad wearing a Brown
Hat!
It will be, peradventure, imagined by those who are not strong in their
geography, or who have not studied the Book of Dresses, or who entertain
little curiosity concerning one of the most noticeable and original
districts in Europe,—that these touchy Friesland folk themselves don or
doff nothing worth an Englishman turning his head to admire; carry aloft
what all the well-bred world carries,—and therefore cannot afford to let
any one thrive, save under the shadow of the ‘regulation beaver,’ to
which all polite Europe subscribes. Yet the case happens to be, that if
there be a land in which perpetual wonderment could make the traveller
wry-necked, that land is North Holland. Hong-Kong can hardly be
stranger, either in its composition or its maintenance. _So Sci_ herself
(in Mr. Sealy’s capital Chinese tale) did not boast a head-tire more
‘express and surprising,’ than the gentlewomen of all ages, through
whose active decision and passive contempt the Brown Hat had to run the
gauntlet.
Let us see if we can sketch this—though by no means catholically sure,
that some stratum of use or ornament, may not have been overlooked in
our specification. First, it is conceived that the hair upon the head of
the Frieslander, must be cut as close as though subject to the
pumpkin-shell barbarity of the pilgrim-fathers, when their scissors were
intent on shearing off love-locks. Upon this closely cropped poll, comes
first a knitted cap (Mrs. Loudon, perhaps, can tell whether there be an
aristocratic or established stitch formula for its knitting), over that
a silk scull cap. These tightly put on, the serious business of the
head-gear begins. The victim is next hooped, bound, lined, circled and
otherwise clasped up within gilt metal—various in its cut, provided it
only fits close, ‘as some one said,’ for headaches, to throb against.
The mistress of _Keetje_, the maid, is fond of having her kettle-cap
made of gilt silver, sometimes—if she be of old family—of pure gold; and
you will see her in the market-place, wearing, in addition to this
precious piece of trepanning, a metal tiara, such as Grecian Queens wear
upon the stage, stuck over with coarse jewels; nay, more, dangling at
the sides of her face, a pair of inconceivable gilt pendants, at a
distance looking like bunches of queer keys, or that minikin household
furniture our English ladies now choose to suspend from their girdles.
But this is not all. At the extreme angles of her forehead, _Keetje’s_
mistress—if a person of high fashion—must stick in two little square
plots or tufts of frizzled silk, to pass for curls. This done, she may
put on her cap of the finest lace, with its deep border or flap behind,
fashioned like the brim of the dustman’s hat, but from the costly
daintiness of its material, and the creamy whiteness of the throat it
lies against, somewhat more picturesque. Finally, if _Keetje’s_ mistress
be a Friesland _Miss Flamborough_ of ‘first water’—a lady who knows the
world, and has a spirit superior to old-fashioned prejudices—she must
have by way of crown, all to her four caps (one of precious metals), a
straw bonnet, a huge, heavy, coal-scuttle, festooned with loops and
streamers of gaudy ribbon, and thriftily guarded at the edge with a hem
or barrier of stout and gaudy printed chintz. Thus canopied are the
comely wives and widows (maidens, possibly dispensing with the bonnet),
who shrieked, clapped their hands, and, with every other possible
demonstration of offence, pursued the wearer of the Brown Hat in
Friesland.
On the habiliments of the male moiety of society, tediousness forbids
that we should expatiate; the less, as something will thus be left to be
treated on a future day, when the grave question of apparel may be more
solemnly entered upon. Enough for the moment, to say that it suits the
singularities of this critical land: a land in which a Swimming Lion is
the ensign, and of which His Majesty Topsy-Turvy might be sovereign; a
land in which there is hardly a crooked horizontal line to be found,
save among the sand-hills; a land in which, with all its neatness’ care,
scarce a building, be it church or market-house, palace or exchange, can
be prevailed upon to stand perpendicular; a land in which for air you
breathe extract of juniper, turf, tobacco, and stagnant waters, mixed; a
land in which people eat cheese with their tea, and where a child that
plucks a nest runs great danger of being whipped as an enemy to Church
and State—guilty of trying to let in the republican ocean; a land where
full-grown babies set up clockwork gentlemen and _papier mâche_ swans,
by way of animating their garden, and the weedy ponds in the same; a
land where full-grown men undertake and complete some of the most
magnificent enterprises which science can contrive for industry to carry
out; a land of teeming plenty and of high prices; a land of bad
digestions and beautiful complexions. No, the men of this land—the
shippers of Dordrecht, the potters of Delft, the gardeners of Broet, and
the dairy farmers of Harlingen, decked out for fair or frolic—must be
to-day left with all their uncouth and indescribable finery,
undescribable, it may be, for some future parable.
But as if in the above there had not been indicated enough of what yet
new and strange for Pilgrim to observe and to tolerate, and to smile at,
with English supercilious civility in this country, the very names of
places, even (as a descendant of Dr. Dilworth inadequately remarked),
‘are neither Christian nor becoming.’ One might bring one’s mind to bear
to be jeered at or stared at, in a land resounding with pompous and
euphonious words—by the Wissihiccon, for instance, or on the
Mississippi, or at Canandaigna, or among the Inscoraras, or when bound
for Passamaquoddy. Even the prize-scold at Billingsgate was silenced and
rendered meek by being called a _Chrononhotonthologos_.—There’s much in
four syllables! But in Friesland the traveller is handed over from
Workum to Higtum, and from Higtum to Midlum; thence perhaps to Boxum,
and from Boxum to Hallum, Dokkum, Kollum, &c., &c., &c.; going through
the whole alphabet of these ‘make-believe’ names, the very study of
which on the map is enough to make properly-brought-up persons
disdainful and critical! Yet, so far from feeling any proper sense of
their own position; so far from the slightest shame or shrinking; so far
from one single deprecatory ‘_Pray don’t make game of us! We are decent
folk after all, and well to do in the world, though some of us do come
from Sueek!_’—these are the people, so lost to every sense of the
ridiculous at home, as to tumble, towzle, and in every other conceivable
and contemptuous mode maltreat the useful, comfortable, authentic, and
in every respect unobtrusively defensible Brown Hat aforesaid! Did its
wearer stop before a shop-window to look wistfully at one of those
stupendous jars of pickles, which with a dozen of hard eggs for each
guest, form so prominent a feature of the Dutchman’s merry-making
suppers; his coat-tails were sure to be pulled by some grinning child,
broader than long, and in facture closely resembling Mr. Staunton’s
broadly-based new chessman. Did he lean over a gate to admire some
magnificent bird, the brilliant cleanlinesss of which on the green
carpet, gives us a new idea of the beauty of ox or cow, a head would be
picked up from the dyke-side; with a liberal emission of casual slang,
and as likely as not, a stone would have been thrown—did Holland contain
a single stone for a _David’s_ sling to utter. Did he adventure along
the Wall of Zwolle on a glowing autumn evening, or meekly take the
second best place on the _treckschuit_ which was to waft him down the
canal from Groningen to Delfzel (a water-path in its way, as peculiar
and contradictory of all received principles as any railroad ever
carried over house-tops at the Minories, or through the great
pleasure-gardens and greenhouses of a _Sir Timothy Dod_), it was always
one and the same story—one and the same contempt—one and the same
experience. Simple laughed with a most disconcerting and noisy
sincerity; and Gentle stuffed their handkerchiefs into their mouths—held
both their own sides and poked their neighbours. ‘Driving Cloud’ or
other of the Ojibbeway Indians if let loose in Clare-Market, would
hardly have been made to feel his conspicuousness more signally than our
traveller. There was neither privacy, place, nor pity, for the Brown Hat
in Friesland.
Therefore, the wisest of these in advising his son, may have meant to
say to him, ‘Never throw your oddity in the teeth of other men’s
oddities.’ You cannot expect immunity for your own whims, if you force
them upon other people’s whims. Never expect that your ‘_ism_’ will find
quarter among their ‘_isms_;’ or (to put the adage otherwise) he may
have desired to recommend a reading backwards of the old maxim—worn
threadbare, rather by trampling upon, than by carrying about, to
wit—‘Live, and let live.’
If then you would live a quiet life in Friesland, NEVER WEAR A BROWN
HAT!