Scheveningen and Katwyk
The Dutch heaven--Huyghens' road--Sorgh Vliet's
builder--Jacob Cats--Homely wisdom--President Kruger--A
monstrous resort--Giant snails--The black-headed
mannikins--The etiquette of petticoats--Katwyk--The old
Rhine--Noordwyk--Noordwyk-Binnen.
Good Dutchmen when they die go to Scheveningen; but my heaven is
elsewhere. To go thither is, however, no calamity, so long as one
chooses the old road. It is being there that so lowers the spirits. The
Oude Scheveningen Weg is perhaps the pleasantest, and certainly the
shadiest, road in Holland: not one avenue but many, straight as a
line in Euclid. On either side is a spreading wood, among the trees
of which, on the left hand, as one leaves The Hague, is Sorgh Vliet,
once the retreat of old Jacob Cats, lately one of the residences of a
royal Duke, and now sold to a building company. The road dates from
1666, its projector being Constantin Huyghens, poet and statesman,
whose statue may be seen at the half-way halting-place. By the time
this is reached the charm of the road is nearly over: thenceforward
it is all villas and Scheveningen.
But we must pause for a little while at Sorgh Vliet (which has the
same meaning as _Sans Souci_), where two hundred years ago lived
in genial retirement the writer who best represents the shrewd
sagacity of the Dutch character--Jacob Cats, or Vader Cats as he was
affectionately called, the author of the Dutch "Household Bible,"
a huge miscellaneous collection of wise saws and modern instances,
humour and satire, upon all the businesses of life.
Mr. Austin Dobson, who leaves grains of gold on all he touches, has
described in his _Side-Walk Studies_ the huge, illustrated edition
of Cats' Works (Amsterdam, 1655) which is held sacred in all rightly
constituted old-fashioned Dutch households. I have seen it at the
British Museum, and it seems to me to be one of the best picture-books
in the world.
As Mr. Dobson says, the life of old Holland is reproduced in it. "What
would one not give for such an illustrated copy of Shakespeare! In
these pages of Jacob Cats we have the authentic Holland of the
seventeenth century:--its vanes and spires and steep-roofed houses;
its gardens with their geometric tulip-beds, their formally-clipped
alleys and arches, their shining parallelograms of water. Here are
its old-fashioned interiors, with the deep fire-places and queer
andirons, the huge four-posters, the prim portraits on the wall, the
great brass-clamped coffers and carved _armories_ for the ruffs and
starched collars and stiff farthingales of the women. In one picture
you may see the careful housewife mournfully inspecting a moth-eaten
garment which she has just taken from a chest that Wardour Street
might envy; in another she is energetically cuffing the 'foolish
fat scullion,' who has let the spotted Dalmatian coach-dog overturn
the cauldron at the fire. Here an old crone, with her spectacles on,
is cautiously probing the contents of the said cauldron with a fork;
here the mistress of the house is peeling pears; here the plump and
soft-hearted cheese-wife is entertaining an admirer--outside there
are pictures as vivid. Here are the clumsy leather-topped coach with
its masked occupant and stumbling horses; the towed _trekschuit_,
with its merry freight, sliding swiftly through the low-lying
landscape; the windy mole, stretching seaward, with its blown and
flaring beacon-fire. Here again in the street is the toy-shop with
its open front and store of mimic drums and halberds for the martial
little burghers; here are the fruiteress with her stall of grapes
and melons, the rat-catcher with his string of trophies, the fowler
and his clap-net, the furrier with his stock of skins."
In 1860 a number of Van der Venne's best pictures were redrawn by John
Leighton to accompany translations of the fables by Richard Pigot. As
a taste of Cats' quality I quote two of the pieces. Why the pictures
should have been redrawn when they might have been reproduced exactly
is beyond my understanding. This is one poem:--
LIKE MELONS, FRIENDS ARE TO BE FOUND IN PLENTY
OF WHICH NOT EVEN ONE IS GOOD IN TWENTY.
In choosing Friends, it's requisite to use
The self-same care as when we Melons choose:
No one in haste a Melon ever buys,
Nor makes his choice till three or four he tries;
And oft indeed when purchasing this fruit,
Before the buyer can find one to suit,
He's e'en obliged t' examine half a score,
And p'rhaps not find one when his search is o'er.
Be cautious how you choose a friend;
For Friendships that are lightly made,
Have seldom any other end
Than grief to see one's trust betray'd!
And here is another:--
SMOKE IS THE FOOD OF LOVERS.
When Cupid open'd Shop, the Trade he chose
Was just the very one you might suppose.
Love keep a shop?--his trade, Oh! quickly name!
A Dealer in tobacco--Fie for shame!
No less than true, and set aside all joke,
From oldest time he ever dealt in Smoke;
Than Smoke, no other thing he sold, or made;
Smoke all the substance of his stock in trade;
His Capital all Smoke, Smoke all his store,
'Twas nothing else; but Lovers ask no more--
And thousands enter daily at his door!
Hence it was ever, and it e'er will be
The trade most suited to his faculty:--
Fed by the vapours of their heart's desire,
No other food his Votaries require;
For, that they seek--The Favour of the Fair,
Is unsubstantial as the Smoke and air.
From these rhymes, with their home-spun philosophy, one might assume
Cats to have been merely a witty peasant. But he was a man of the
highest culture, a great jurist, twice ambassador to England, where
Charles I. laid his sword on his shoulder and bade him rise Sir Jacob,
a traveller and the friend of the best intellects. From an interesting
article on Dutch poetry in an old _Foreign Quarterly Review_ I take
an account of the aphorist: "Vondel had for his contemporary a man,
of whose popularity we can hardly give an idea, unless we say that
to speak Dutch and to have learnt Cats by heart, are almost the same
thing. Old Father Jacob Cats--(we beg to apologize for his unhappy
name--and know not why, like the rest of his countrymen, he did not
euphonize it into some well-sounding epithet, taken from Greece
or Rome--Elouros, for example, or Felisius; Catsius was ventured
upon by his contemporaries, but the honest grey-beard stuck to his
paternities)--was a man of practical wisdom--great experience--much
travel--considerable learning--and wonderful fluency. He had occupied
high offices of state, and retired a patriarch amidst children and
children's children, to that agreeable retreat which we mentioned
as not far from The Hague, where we have often dreamed his sober
and serious--but withal cheerful and happy, spirit, might still
preside. His moralities are sometimes prolix, and sometimes rather
dull. He often sweeps the bloom away from the imaginative anticipations
of youth--and in that does little service. He will have everything
substantial, useful, permanent. He has no other notion of love than
that it is meant to make good husbands and wives, and to produce
painstaking and obedient children.
"His poetry is rhymed counsel--kind, wise, and good. He calculates
all results, and has no mercy for thoughts, or feelings, or actions,
which leave behind them weariness, regret or misery. His volumes
are a storehouse of prudence and worldly wisdom. For every state
of life he has fit lessons, so nicely dovetailed into rhyme, that
the morality seems made expressly for the language, or the language
for the morality. His thoughts--all running about among the duties
of life--voluntarily move in harmonious numbers, as if to think
and to rhyme were one solitary attribute. For the nurse who wants
a song for her babe--the boy who is tormented by the dread of the
birch--the youth whose beard begins to grow--the lover who desires a
posey for his lady's ring--for the husband--father--grandsire--for
all there is a store--to encourage--to console--and to be grateful
for. The titles of his works are indices to their contents. Among
them are _De Ouderdom_, Old Age; _Buyten Leven_, Out-of-Doors Life;
_Hofgedachten_, Garden Thoughts; _Gedachten op Slapelooze Nachten_,
Thoughts of Sleepless Nights; _Trouwring_, Marriage Ring; _Zelfstrijt_,
Self-struggle, etc. Never was a poet so essentially the poet of the
people. He is always intelligible--always sensible--and, as was well
said of him by Kruijff,
Smiling he teaches truth, and sporting wins to virtue."
When President Kruger died last year the memoirs of him agreed in
fixing upon the Bible as his only reading. But I am certain he knew
Vader Cats by heart too. If ever a master had a faithful pupil, Vader
Cats had one in Oom Paul. The vivid yet homely metaphors and allegories
in which Oom Paul conveyed so many of his thoughts were drawn from the
same source as the emblems of Vader Cats. Both had the Æsopian gift.
We have no one English writer with whom to compare Cats; but a
syndicate formed of Fuller and Burton, Cobbett and Quarles might
produce something akin.
Scheveningen is half squalid town, half monstrous pleasure resort. Upon
its sea ramparts are a series of gigantic buildings, greatest of which
is the Curhaus, where the best music in Holland is to be heard. Its
pier and its promenade are not at the first glimpse unlike Brighton's;
but the vast buildings have no counterpart with us, except perhaps at
Blackpool. What is, however, peculiar to Scheveningen is its expanse of
sand covered with sentry-box wicker chairs. To stand on the pier on a
fine day in the season and look down on these thousands of chairs and
people is to receive an impression of insect-like activity that I think
cannot be equalled. Immovable as they are, the chairs seem to add to
the restlessness of the seething mass. What a visitor from Mars would
make of it is a mystery; but he could hardly fail to connect chair
and occupant. Here, he would say, is surely the abode of giant snails!
On a windy day the chairs must be of great use; but in heat they
seem to me too vertical and too hard. One must, however, either sit
in them or lie upon sand. There is not a pebble on the whole coast:
indeed there is not a pebble in Holland. Life after lying upon sand
can become to some of us a burden almost too difficult to bear;
but the Dutch holiday-maker does not seem to find it so. As for the
children, they are truly in Paradise. There can be no sand better
to dig in than that of Scheveningen; and they dig in it all day. A
favourite game seems to be to surround the parental sentry-boxes with
a fosse. Every family has its castle, and every castle its moat.
I have been twice to Scheveningen, and on each occasion I acquired
beneath its glittering magnitude a sense of depression. That leaven
of tenderness which every collection of human beings must have was
harder to find at Scheveningen than anywhere in Holland--everything
was so ordered, so organised, for pleasure, pleasure at any price,
pleasure almost at the point of the bayonet.
But on the second occasion one little incident saved the day--an
encounter with a strolling bird-fancier who dealt in Black-Headed
Mannikins. Two of these tiny brisk birds, in their Quaker black and
brown, sat upon his cane to attract purchasers. They fluttered to his
finger, perched on his hat, simulated death in the palm of his hand,
and went through other evolutions with the speed of thought and the
bright spontaneous alacrity possible only to a small loyal bird. These,
however, were not for sale: these were decoys; the saleable birds lay,
packed far too close, in little wooden boxes in the man's bag. And
Scheveningen to me means no longer a mile of palaces, no longer a
"hot huddle of humanity" on the sand among myriad sentry-boxes:
its symbol is just two Black-Headed Mannikins.
From the Curhaus it is better to return to the Hague by electric tram
along the new road. Save for passing a field where the fishwives of
Scheveningen in their blue shawls spread and mend their nets, this
road is dull and suburban; but from it, when the light is failing,
a view of Scheveningen's domes and spires may be gained which,
softened and made mysterious by the gloaming, translates the chief
watering-place of Holland into an Eastern city of romance.
The fishwives of Scheveningen, I am told, carry the art of petticoat
wearing to a higher point than any of their sisters. The appearance
of the homing fleet in the offing is a signal for as many as thirty
of these garments to be put on as a mark of welcome to a returning
husband.
Probably no shore anywhere in the world has been so often painted
as that of Scheveningen--ever since the painting of landscape seemed
a worthy pursuit. James Maris' pictures of Scheveningen's wet sand,
grey sea, and huge flat-bottomed ships must run into scores; Mesdag's
too. Perhaps it was the artists that prevailed on the fishermen to wear
crimson knickerbockers--the note of warm colour that the scene demands.
Here, although it is separated from Scheveningen by some miles of sand,
I should like to say something of Katwyk--which is Leyden's marine
resort. A steam-tram carries people thither many times a day. The
rail, when first I travelled upon it, in April, ran through tulips;
in August, when I was there again, the patches of scarlet and orange
had given way to acres of massive purple-green cabbages which, in
the evening light, were vastly more beautiful.
At Rynsburg, one of the villages on the way, dwelt in 1650-51 Benedict
Spinoza, the philosopher, and there he wrote his abridgement of the
Meditations of Descartes, his master in philosophy, who had for a
while lived close by at Endegeest. Spinoza, who was born at Amsterdam
in 1632, died in 1677. His house at Rynsburg, which he shared with a
Colleginat (one of a sect of Remonstrants who had their headquarters
there) is now a Spinoza museum; his statue is at The Hague.
Katwyk-aan-Zee is a compact little pleasure resort with the usual
fantastic childish villas. Its most interesting possession is the
mouth of the Old Rhine, now restricted by a canal and controlled by
locks. There is perhaps no better example of the Dutch power over water
than the contrast between the present narrow canal through which the
river must disembogue and the unprofitable marsh which once spread
here. The locks, which are nearly a hundred years old, were among
the works of the engineer Conrad, whose monument is in Haarlem church.
From the Old Rhine's mouth to Noordwyk is a lonely but very bracing
walk of three miles along the sand, with the dunes on one's right
hand and the sea on one's left. One may meet perhaps a few shell
gatherers, but no one else. We drove before us all the way a white
company consisting of a score of gulls, twice as many tern, two oyster
catchers and one curlew. They rose and settled, rose and settled,
always some thirty yards away, until Noordwyk was reached, when we
left them behind. Never was a Japanese screen so realised as by these
birds against the pearl grey sea and yellow sand.
Katwyk is more cheery than Noordwyk; but Noordwyk has a prettier
street--indeed, in its old part there is no prettier street in Holland
in the light of sunset. As Hastings is to Eastbourne, so is Katwyk to
Noordwyk; Scheveningen is Brighton, Yarmouth, and Blackpool in one. A
very pretty lace cap is worn at Noordwyk by villagers and visitors
alike, to hold the hair against the west wind.
From Noordwyk we walked to Noordwyk-Binnen, the real town, parent
of the seaside resort; and there, at a table at the side of the main
street, by an avenue so leafy as to exclude even glints of the sky,
we sipped something Dutch whose name I could not assimilate, and
waited for the tram for Leyden. It was the greenest tunnel I ever saw.