Haarlem
Tulip culture--Early speculation--The song of the tulip--Dutch
gardening new and old--A horticultural pilgrimage--The Haarlem
dunes--Gardens without secrets--Zaandvoort--_Through
Noord-Holland_ and its charms--The church of
St. Bavo--Whitewash _v_. Mystery--The true father of the
Reformation--Printing paves the way--The Hout--Laocoön and his
sons--The siege of Haarlem--Dutch fortitude--The real Dutch
courage--The implacable Alva--Broken promises--A tonic for
Philip--The women of Haarlem--A pledge to mothers--The great
organ--Three curious inhabitants--The Teyler Museum--Frans
Hals--A king of abundance--Regent pieces--The secondary
pictures in the Museum--Dirck Hals--Van der Helst--Adrian
Brouwer--Nicolas Berchem--Ruisdael--The lost mastery--Echoes
of the past.
Haarlem being the capital of the tulip country, the time to visit
it is the spring. To travel from Leyden to Haarlem by rail in April
is to pass through floods of colour, reaching their finest quality
about Hillegom. The beds are too formal, too exactly parallel, to be
beautiful, except as sheets of scarlet or yellow; for careless beauty
one must look to the heaps of blossoms piled up in the corners (later
to be used on the beds as a fertiliser), which are always beautiful,
and doubly so when reflected in a canal. From a balloon, in the
flowering season, the tulip gardens must look like patchwork quilts.
Tulip Sunday, which represents the height of the season (corresponding
to Chestnut Sunday at Bushey Park) is about the third Sunday in
April. One should be in Holland then. It is no country for hot weather:
it has no shade, the trains become unbearable, and the canals are
very unpleasant. But in spring it is always fresh.
Tulip cultivation is now a steady humdrum business, very different
from the early days of the fashion for the flower, in the seventeenth
century, when speculators lost their heads over bulbs as thoroughly as
over South-Sea stock in the great Bubble period. Thousands of florins
were given for a single bulb. The bulb, however, did not always change
hands, often serving merely as a gambling basis; it even may not have
existed at all. Among genuine connoisseurs genuine sales would of
course be made, and it is recorded that a "Semper Augustus" bulb was
once bought for 13,000 florins. At last the Government interfered;
gambling was put down; and "Semper Augustus" fell to fifty florins.
It was to Haarlem, it will be remembered, that the fair Frisian
travelled with Cornelius van Baerle's solitary flower in _La Tulipe
Noire_, and won the prize of 100,000 florins offered for a blossom
of pure nigritude by the Horticultural Society of Haarlem. Hence the
addition of the Tulipa Nigra Rosa Baerleensis to the list of desirable
bulbs. Dumas puts into the mouth of Cornelius a very charming song
of the tulip:--
Nous sommes les filles du feu secret,
Du feu qui circule dans les veines de la terre;
Nous sommes les filles de l'aurore et de la rosée,
Nous sommes les filles de l'air,
Nous sommes les filles de l'eau;
Mais nous sommes avant tout les filles du ciel.
The Dutch are now wholly practical. Their reputation as gardeners has
become a commercial one, resting upon the fortunate discovery that the
tulip and the hyacinth thrive in the sandy soil about Haarlem. For
flowers as flowers they seem to me to care little or nothing. Their
cottages have no pretty confusion of blossoms as in our villages. You
never see the cottager at work among his roses; once his necessary
labours are over, he smokes and talks to his neighbours: to grow
flowers for æsthetic reasons were too ornamental, too unproductive
a hobby. Æsthetically the Dutch are dead, or are alive only in the
matter of green paint, which they use with such charming effect on
their houses, their mills and their boats. What is pretty is old--as
indeed is the case in our own country, if we except gardens. Modern
Dutch architecture is without attraction, modern Delft porcelain a
thing to cry over.
If any one would know how an old formal Dutch garden looked, there is
a model one at the back of the Ryks Museum in Amsterdam. But the art
is no more practised. A few circular beds in the lawn, surrounded
by high wire netting--that is for the most part the modern notion
of gardening. In an interesting report of a visit paid to the
Netherlands and France in 1817 by the secretary of the Caledonia
Horticultural Society and some congenial companions, may be read
excellent descriptions of old Dutch gardening, which even then was
a thing of the past. Here is the account of a typical formal garden,
near Utrecht: "The large divisions of the garden are made by tall and
thick hedges of beech, hornbeam, and oak, variously shaped, having
been tied to frames and thus trained, with the aid of the shears, to
the desired form. The smaller divisions are made by hedges of yew and
box, which in thickness and density resemble walls of brick. Grottoes
and fountains are some of the principal ornaments. The grottoes are
adorned with masses of calcareous stuff, corals and shells, some
of them apparently from the East Indies, others natives of our own
seas. The principal grotto is large, and studded with thousands of
crystals and shells. We were told that its construction was the labour
of twelve years. The fountains are of various devices, and though
old, some of them were still capable of being put in action. Frogs
and lizards placed at the edgings of the walks, and spouting water
to the risk of passengers, were not quite so agreeable; and other
figures were still in worse taste.
"There is a long berceau walk of beech, with numerous windows or
openings in the leafy side wall, and many statues and busts, chiefly of
Italian marble, some of them of exquisite workmanship. Several large
urns and vases certainly do honour to the sculptor. The subjects of
the bas-relief ornaments are the histories of Saul and David, and of
Esther and Ahasuerus."
I saw no old Dutch garden in Holland which seemed to me so attractive
as that at Levens in Westmorland.
It is important at Haarlem to take a drive over the dunes--the billowy,
grassy sand hills which stretch between the city and the sea. If it
is in April one can begin the drive by passing among every variety
of tulip and hyacinth, through air made sweet and heavy by these
flowers. Just outside Haarlem the road passes the tiniest deer park
that ever I saw--with a great house, great trees, a lawn and a handful
of deer all packed as close as they can be. Now and then one sees a
stork's nest high on a pole before a house.
On leaving the green and luxuriant flat country a climbing pavé road
winds in and out among the pines on the edge of the dunes; past little
villas, belonging chiefly to Amsterdam business men, each surrounded by
a naked garden with the merest suggestion of a boundary. For the Dutch
do not like walls or hedges. This level open land having no natural
secrecy, it seems as if its inhabitants had decided there should be
no artificial secrecy either. When they sit in their gardens they
like to be seen. An Englishman's first care when he plans a country
estate is not to be overlooked; a Dutchman would cut down every tree
that intervened between his garden chair and the high road.
Fun has often been made of the names which the Dutch merchants give
to their country houses, but they seem to me often to be chosen with
more thought than those of similar villas in our country. Here are
a few specimens: Buiten Gedachten (Beyond Expectation), Ons Genoegen
(Our Contentment), Lust en Rust (Pleasure and Rest), Niet Zoo Quaalyk
(Not so Bad), Myn Genegenhied is Voldaan (My Desire is Satisfied),
Mijn Lust en Leven (My Pleasure and Life), Vriendschap en Gezelschap
(Friendship and Sociability), Vreugde bij Vrede (Joy with Peace), Groot
Genoeg (Large Enough), Buiten Zorg (Without Care). These names at any
rate convey sentiments which we may take to express their owners'
true feelings in their owners' own language; and as such I prefer
them to the "Chatsworths" and "Belle-vues," "Cedars" and "Towers,"
with which the suburbs of London teem. In a small inland street in
Brighton the other day I noticed a "Wave Crest".
The dunes extend for miles: an empty wilderness of sand with the
grey North Sea beyond. From the high points one sees inland not only
Haarlem, just below, but the domes and spires of Amsterdam beyond.
One may return to Haarlem by way of Bloemendaal, a green valley
with shady walks and a good hotel; or extend the drive to Haarlem's
watering-place Zaandvoort, which otherwise can be gained by steam-tram,
and where, says the author of _Through Noord-Holland_, "the billowing
is strong and strengthening". The same author tells us also that
"the ponnies and asses have a separated standing-place, whilst
severe stipulations warrant the bathers for trouble of the animals
and their driver".
Of this book I ought perhaps to say more, for I am greatly indebted
to it. Most of the larger towns of Holland have guides, and for
the most part they are written in good English, albeit of Dutch
extraction; but _Through Noord-Holland_ is an agreeable exception
in that it covers all the ground between Amsterdam and the Helder,
and is constructed in a peculiar sport of Babel. In Dutch it is I
have no doubt an ordinary guide-book; in English it is something far
more precious. The following extract from the preface to the second
edition ought to be quoted before I borrow further from its pages:--
Being completed with the necessary alterations and corrections I
send it into the world for the second time. As it will be published
besides in Dutch also in French and English, the aim of the edition
will surely be favoured, and our poor misappreciated country that
so often is regarded with contempt by our countrymen as well as by
foreigners will soon be an attraction for tourists. For were not it
those large extensive quiet heatheries those rustling green woods and
those quiet low meadows which inspired our great painters to bring
their fascinating landscapes on the cloth? Had not that bloomy sky
and that sunny mysterious light, those soft green meadows with their
multi-coloured flowers, through which the river is streaming as a
silver band, had not all this a quieting influence to the agitated mind
of many of us, did not it give the quiet rest and did not it whisper
to you; here ... here is it good? And for this our country we want
to be a reliable guide by the directions of which we can savely start.
With Zaandvoort we may associate Dirck van Santvoort who painted the
portrait of the curious girl--No. 2133 at the Ryks Museum--reproduced
opposite page 236. Of the painter very little is known. He belongs
to the great period, flourishing in the middle of the seventeenth
century--and that is all. But he had a very cunning hand and an
interesting mind, as the few pictures to his name attest. In the same
room at the Ryks Museum where the portrait hangs is a large group of
ladies and gentlemen, all wearing some of the lace which he dearly
loved to paint. And in one of the recesses of the Gallery of Honour
is a quaint little lady from his delicate brush--No. 2131--well
worth study.
Haarlem's great church, which is dedicated to St. Bavo, is one
of the finest in Holland. All that is needed to make it perfect
is an infusion of that warmth and colour which once it possessed
but of which so few traces have been allowed to remain. The Dutch
Protestants, as I remarked at Utrecht, have shown singular efficiency
in denuding religion of its external graces and charm. There is
no church so beautiful but they would reduce it to bleak and arid
cheerlessness. Place even the cathedral of Chartres in a Dutch
market-place, and it would be a whitewashed desert in a week, while
little shops and houses would be built against its sacred walls. There
is hardly a great church in Holland but has some secular domicile
clinging like a barnacle to its sides.
The attitude of the Dutch to their churches is in fact very much that
of Quakers to their meeting-houses--even to the retention of hats. But
whereas it is reasonable for a Quaker, having made for himself as
plain a rectangular building as he can, to attach no sanctity to it,
there is an incongruity when the same attitude is maintained amid
beautiful Gothic arches. The result is that Dutch churches are more
than chilling. In the simplest English village church one receives
some impression of the friendliness of religion; but in Holland--of
course I speak as a stranger and a foreigner--religion seems to be
a cold if not a repellent thing.
One result is that on looking back over one's travels through
Holland it is almost impossible to disentangle in the memory one
whitewashed church from another. They have a common monotony of
internal aridity: one distinguishes them, if at all, by some accidental
possession--Gouda, for example, by its stained glass; Haarlem by its
organ, and the swinging ships; Delft by the tomb of William the Silent;
Utrecht by the startling absence of an entrance fee.
At Haarlem, as it happens, one is peculiarly able to study cause and
effect in this matter of Protestant bleakness, since there stands
before the door of this wonderful church, once a Roman Catholic
temple, drenched, I doubt not, in mystery and colour, a certain
significant statue.
To Erasmus of Rotterdam is generally given the parentage of the
Reformation. Whatever his motives, Erasmus stands as the forerunner
of Luther. But Erasmus had his forerunner too, the discoverer of
printing. For had not a means of rapidly multiplying and cheapening
books been devised, the people, who were after all the back-bone of
the Reformation, would never have had the opportunity of themselves
reading the Bible--either the Vulgate or Erasmus's New Testament--and
thus seeing for themselves how wide was the gulf fixed between Christ
and the Christians. It was the discovery of this discrepancy which
prepared them to stand by the reformers, and, by supporting them and
urging them on, assist them to victory.
Stimulated by the desire to be level with Rome for his own early
fetters, and desiring also an antagonist worthy of his satirical
powers, Erasmus (or so I think) hit independently upon the need for
a revised Bible. But Luther to a large extent was the outcome of his
times and of popular feeling. A spokesman was needed, and Luther
stepped forward. The inventor of printing made the way possible;
Erasmus showed the way; Luther took it.
Now the honour of inventing printing lies between two claimants,
Laurens Janszoon Coster, of Haarlem (the original of this statue) and
Gutenburg of Mayence. The Dutch like to think that Coster was the man,
and that his secret was sold to Gutenburg by his servant Faust. Be that
as it may--and the weight of evidence is in favour of Gutenburg--it
is interesting as one stands by the statue of Coster under the shadow
of Haarlem's great church to think that this was perhaps the true
parent of that great upheaval, the true pavior of the way.
Whatever Coster's claim to priority may be, he certainly was a printer,
and it is only fitting that Haarlem should possess so fine a library
of early books and MSS. as it does.
Another monument to Coster is to be seen in the Hout, a wood of which
Haarlem is very proud. It has a fine avenue called the Spanjaards
Laan, and is a very pleasant shady place in summer, hardly inferior
to the Bosch at The Hague. "The delightful walks of the Hout," says
the author of _Through Noord-Holland_, "and the caressing song of the
nightingale and other birds, do not only invite the Haarlemmers to it,
but the citizens of the neighbouring towns as well."
On the border of the wood is a pavilion which holds the collections
of Colonial curiosities. In front of the pavilion (I quote again from
_Through Noord-Holland_, which is invaluable), "stands a casting of
Laskson and his sons to a knot, which has been manufactured in the
last centuries before Christ. The original has been digged up at Rome
in 1500." Shade of Lessing!
The cannon-ball embedded in the wall of the church, which the sacristan
shows with so much interest, recalls Haarlem's great siege in 1572--a
siege notable in the history of warfare for the courage and endurance
of the townspeople against terrible odds. The story is worth telling
in full, but I have not space and Motley is very accessible. But I
sketch, with his assistance, its salient features.
The attack began in mid-winter, when Haarlem Mere, a great lake in the
east which has since been drained and poldered, was frozen over. For
some time a dense fog covered it, enabling loads of provisions and
arms to be safely conveyed into the city.
Don Frederic, the son of the Duke of Alva, who commanded the Spanish,
began with a success that augured well, a force of 4,000 men which
marched from Leyden under De la Marck being completely routed. Among
the captives taken by the Spaniards, says Motley, was "a gallant
officer, Baptist Van Trier, for whom De la Marck in vain offered
two thousand crowns and nineteen Spanish prisoners. The proposition
was refused with contempt. Van Trier was hanged upon the gallows
by one leg until he was dead, in return for which barbarity the
nineteen Spaniards were immediately gibbeted by De la Marck. With
this interchange of cruelties the siege may be said to have opened.
"Don Frederic had stationed himself in a position opposite to the
gate of the Cross, which was not very strong, but fortified by a
ravelin. Intending to make a very short siege of it, he established
his batteries immediately, and on the 18th, 19th, and 20th December
directed a furious cannonade against the Cross-gate, the St. John's
gate, and the curtain between the two. Six hundred and eighty shots
were discharged on the first, and nearly as many on each of the two
succeeding days. The walls were much shattered, but men, women,
and children worked night and day within the city, repairing the
breaches as fast as made. They brought bags of sand, blocks of stone,
cart-loads of earth from every quarter, and they stripped the churches
of all their statues, which they threw by heaps into the gaps. They
sought thus a more practical advantage from those sculptured saints
than they could have gained by only imploring their interposition
The fact, however, excited horror among the besiegers. Men who were
daily butchering their fellow-beings, and hanging their prisoners in
cold blood, affected to shudder at the enormity of the offence thus
exercised against graven images.
"After three days' cannonade, the assault was ordered, Don Frederic
only intending a rapid massacre, to crown his achievements at Zutphen
and Naarden. The place, he thought, would fall in a week, and after
another week of sacking, killing, and ravishing, he might sweep on
to 'pastures new' until Holland was overwhelmed. Romero advanced to
the breach, followed by a numerous storming party, but met with a
resistance which astonished the Spaniards. The church bells rang the
alarm throughout the city, and the whole population swarmed to the
walls. The besiegers were encountered not only with sword and musket,
but with every implement which the burghers' hands could find. Heavy
stones, boiling oil, live coals, were hurled upon the heads of the
soldiers; hoops, smeared with pitch and set on fire, were dexterously
thrown upon their necks. Even Spanish courage and Spanish ferocity
were obliged to shrink before the steady determination of a whole
population animated by a single spirit. Romero lost an eye in the
conflict, many officers were killed and wounded, and three or four
hundred soldiers left dead in the breach, while only three or four of
the townsmen lost their lives. The signal of recall was reluctantly
given, and the Spaniards abandoned the assault.
"Don Frederic was now aware that Haarlem would not fall at his feet
at the first sound of his trumpet. It was obvious that a siege must
precede the massacre. He gave orders, therefore, that the ravelin
should be undermined, and doubted not that, with a few days' delay,
the place would be in his hands."
The Prince of Orange then made, from Sassenheim, another attempt to
relieve the town, sending 2,000 men. But a fog falling, they lost
their way and fell into the enemy's hands. "De Koning," says Motley,
"second in command, was among the prisoners. The Spaniards cut off his
head and threw it over the walls into the city, with this inscription:
'This is the head of Captain De Koning, who is on his way with
reinforcements for the good city of Haarlem'. The citizens retorted
with a practical jest, which was still more barbarous. They cut off the
heads of eleven prisoners and put them into a barrel, which they threw
into the Spanish camp. A label upon the barrel contained these words:
'Deliver these ten heads to Duke Alva in payment of his tenpenny tax,
with one additional head for interest'."
Day after day the attack continued and was repulsed. Meanwhile,
unknown to the Spaniards, the besieged burghers were silently
and swiftly building inside the ravelin a solid half-moon shaped
battlement. On the 31st of December, the last day of 1572, the great
assault was made. "The attack was unexpected, but the forty or fifty
sentinels defended the walls while they sounded the alarm. The tocsin
bells tolled, and the citizens, whose sleep was not apt to be heavy
during that perilous winter, soon manned the ramparts again. The
daylight came upon them while the fierce struggle was still at its
height. The besieged, as before, defended themselves with musket
and rapier, with melted pitch, with firebrands, with clubs and
stones. Meantime, after morning prayers in the Spanish camp, the
trumpet for a general assault was sounded. A tremendous onset was made
upon the gate of the Cross, and the ravelin was carried at last. The
Spaniards poured into this fort, so long the object of their attack,
expecting instantly to sweep into the city with sword and fire. As
they mounted its wall they became for the first time aware of the
new and stronger fortification which had been secretly constructed on
the inner side. The reason why the ravelin had been at last conceded
was revealed. The half moon, whose existence they had not suspected,
rose before them bristling with cannon, A sharp fire was instantly
opened upon the besiegers, while at the same instant the ravelin,
which the citizens had undermined, blew up with a severe explosion,
carrying into the air all the soldiers who had just entered it so
triumphantly. This was the turning point. The retreat was sounded, and
the Spaniards fled to their camp, leaving at least three hundred dead
beneath the walls. Thus was a second assault, made by an overwhelming
force and led by the most accomplished generals of Spain, signally
and gloriously repelled by the plain burghers of Haarlem."
Cold and famine now began to assist the Spaniards, and the townsfolk
were reduced to every privation. The Spaniards also suffered and Don
Frederic wished to raise the siege. He suggested this step to his
father, but Alva was made of sterner stuff. He sent from Nymwegen a
grim message: "'Tell Don Frederic,' said Alva, 'that if he be not
decided to continue the siege till the town be taken, I shall no
longer consider him my son, whatever my opinion may formerly have
been. _Should he fall in the siege_, I will myself take the field to
maintain it; and when we have both perished, the Duchess, my wife,
shall come from Spain to do the same.' Such language was unequivocal,
and hostilities were resumed as fiercely as before. The besieged
welcomed them with rapture, and, as usual, made daily the most
desperate sallies. In one outbreak the Haarlemers, under cover of a
thick fog, marched up to the enemy's chief battery, and attempted to
spike the guns before his face. They were all slain at the cannon's
mouth, whither patriotism, not vainglory, had led them, and lay dead
around the battery, with their hammers and spikes in their hands. The
same spirit was daily manifested. As the spring advanced, the kine went
daily out of the gates to their peaceful pasture, notwithstanding all
the turmoil within and around; nor was it possible for the Spaniards
to capture a single one of these creatures, without paying at least
a dozen soldiers as its price. 'These citizens,' wrote Don Frederic,
'do as much as the best soldiers in the world could do.'"
The whole story is too dreadful to be told; but events proved the
implacable old soldier to be right. Month after month passed, assault
after assault was repulsed by the wretched but indomitable burghers;
but time was all on the side of the enemy. On July 12th, after the
frustration again and again of hopes of relief from the Prince of
Orange, whose plans were doomed to failure on every occasion, the city
surrendered on the promise of complete forgiveness by Don Frederic.
The Don, however, was only a subordinate; the Duke of Alva had other
views. He quickly arrived on the scene, and as quickly his presence
made itself felt. "The garrison, during the siege, had been reduced
from four thousand to eighteen hundred. Of these the Germans, six
hundred in number, were, by Alva's order, dismissed, on a pledge
to serve no more against the King. All the rest of the garrison
were immediately butchered, with at least as many citizens.... Five
executioners, with their attendants, were kept constantly at work; and
when at last they were exhausted with fatigue, or perhaps sickened with
horror, three hundred wretches were tied two and two, back to back,
and drowned in the Haarlem Lake. At last, after twenty-three hundred
human creatures had been murdered in cold blood, within a city where
so many thousands had previously perished by violent or by lingering
deaths; the blasphemous farce of a pardon was enacted. Fifty-seven
of the most prominent burghers of the place were, however, excepted
from the act of amnesty, and taken into custody as security for the
future good conduct of the other citizens. Of these hostages some were
soon executed, some died in prison, and all would have been eventually
sacrificed, had not the naval defeat of Bossu soon afterwards enabled
the Prince of Orange to rescue the remaining prisoners. Ten thousand
two hundred and fifty-six shots had been discharged against the walk
during the siege. Twelve thousand of the besieging army had died of
wounds or disease during the seven months and two days between the
investment and the surrender. In the earlier part of August, after
the executions had been satisfactorily accomplished, Don Frederic
made his triumphal entry, and the first chapter in the invasion of
Holland was closed. Such was the memorable siege of Haarlem, an event
in which we are called upon to wonder equally at human capacity to
inflict and to endure misery.
"Philip was lying dangerously ill at the wood of Segovia, when the
happy tidings of the reduction of Haarlem, with its accompanying
butchery, arrived. The account of all this misery, minutely detailed
to him by Alva, acted like magic. The blood of twenty-three hundred
of his fellow-creatures--coldly murdered by his orders, in a single
city--proved for the sanguinary monarch the elixir of life: he drank
and was refreshed. '_The principal medicine which has cured his
Majesty,_' wrote Secretary Cayas from Madrid to Alva, 'is the joy
caused to him by the _good news_ which you have communicated of _the
surrender of Haarlem_.'"
I know nothing of the women of Haarlem to-day, but in the sixteenth
century they were among the bravest and most efficient in the
world, and it was largely their efforts and example which enabled
the city to hold out so long. Motley describes them as a corps of
three hundred fighting women, "all females of respectable character,
armed with sword, musket, and dagger. Their chief, Kenau Hasselaer,
was a widow of distinguished family, and unblemished reputation,
about forty-seven years of age, who, at the head of her amazons,
participated in many of the most fiercely contested actions of the
siege, both within and without the walls. When such a spirit animated
the maids and matrons of the city, it might be expected that the men
would hardly surrender the place without a struggle."
Haarlem still preserves the pretty custom of hanging lace by
the doors of houses which the stork is expected to visit or has
just visited. Its origin was the humanity of the Spanish general,
during this great siege, in receiving a deputation of matrons from
the town and promising protection from his soldiery of all women in
childbed. Every house was to go unharmed upon which a piece of lace
signifying a confinement was displayed. This was a promise with which
the Duke of Alva seems not to have interfered.
The author of _Through Noord-Holland_ thus eloquently describes the
effect of Haarlem's great organ--for long the finest in the world:
"Vibrating rolls the tone through the church-building, followed
by sweet melodies, running through each register of it; now one
hears the sound of trumpets or soft whistling tunes then again piano
music or melancholical hautboy tunes chiming as well is deceivingly
imitated." Free recitals are given on Tuesdays and Thursdays from
one to two. On other days the organist can be persuaded to play for
a fee. Charles Lamb's friend Fell paid a ducat to the organist and
half a crown to the blower, and heard as much as he wanted. He found
the vox humana "the voice of a psalm-singing clerk". Other travellers
have been more fortunate. Ireland tells us that when Handel played
this organ the organist took him either for an angel or a devil.
Among Haarlem's architectural attractions is the very interesting Meat
Market, hard by the great church, one of the most agreeable pieces
of floridity between the Middelburg stadhuis and the Leeuwarden
chancellerie. There is also the fine Amsterdam Gate, on the road
to Amsterdam.
In the Teyler Museum, on the Spaarne, is a poor collection of
modern oil paintings, some good modern water colours and a very fine
collection of drawings by the masters, including several Rembrandts. In
this room one may well plan to spend much time. One of the best Israels
that I saw in Holland is a little water-colour interior that is hung
here. I asked one of the attendants if they had anything by Matthew
Maris, but he denied his existence. James he knew, and William; but
there was no Matthew. "But he is your most distinguished artist,"
I said. It was great heresy and not to be tolerated. To the ordinary
Dutchman art begins with Rembrandt and ends with Israels. This perhaps
is why Matthew Maris has taken refuge in St. John's Wood.
And now we come to Haarlem's chief glory--which is not Coster the
printer, and not the church of Bavo the Saint, and not the tulip
gardens, and not the florid and beautiful Meat Market; but the painter
Frans Hals, whose masterpieces hang in the Town Hall.
I have called Hals the glory of Haarlem, yet he was only an adopted
son, having been born in Antwerp about 1580. But his parents were
true Haarlemers, and Frans was a resident there before he reached
man's estate.
The painter's first marriage was not happy; he was even publicly
reprimanded for cruelty to his wife. In spite of the birth of his
eldest child just thirty-four weeks earlier than the proprieties
require, his second marriage seems to have been fortunate enough. Some
think that we see Mynheer and Myvrouw Hals in the picture--No. 1084
in the Ryks Museum--which is reproduced on the opposite page. If this
jovial and roguish pair are really the painter and his wife, they were
a merry couple. Children they had in abundance; seven sons, five of
whom were painters, and three daughters. Abundance indeed was Hals'
special characteristic; you see it in all his work--vigorous, careless
abundance and power. He lived to be eighty-five or so. Mrs. Hals,
after a married life of fifty years, continued to flourish, with the
assistance of some relief from the town, for a considerable period.
In the Haarlem Museum may be seen a picture of Hals' studio, painted
by Berck Heyde, in 1652, containing portraits of Hals himself, then
about seventy, and several of his old pupils--Wouvermans, Dirck Hals,
his brother, four of his sons, the artist himself and others. Hals
taught also Van der Helst, whose work at times comes nearest to his
own, Verspronk, Terburg and Adrian van Ostade.
To see the work of Hals at his best it is necessary to visit Holland,
for we have but little here. The "Laughing Cavalier" in the Wallace
Collection is perhaps his best picture in a public gallery in
England. But the Haarlem Museum is a temple dedicated to his fame,
and there you may revel in his lusty powers.
The room in which his great groups hang is perhaps in effect more
filled with faces than any in the world. Entering the door one is
immediately beneath the bold and laughing scrutiny of a host of genial
masterful arquebusiers, who make merry on the walls for all time. Such
a riot of vivid portraiture never was! Other men have painted single
heads as well or better: but Hals stands alone in his gusto, his
abundance, his surpassing brio. It is a thousand pities that neither
Lamb nor Hazlitt ever made the journey to Haarlem, because only they
among our writers on art could have brought a commensurate gusto to
the praise of his brush.
I have reproduced one of the groups opposite page 150, but the result
is no more than a memento of the original. It conveys, however,
an impression of the skill in composition by which the group is
made not only a collection of portraits but a picture too. If such
groups there must be, this is the way to paint them. The Dutch in
the seventeenth century had a perfect mania for these commemorative
canvases, and there is not a stadhuis but has one or more. Rembrandt's
"Night Watch" and Hals' Haarlem groups are the greatest; but one
is always surprised by the general level of excellence maintained,
and now and then a lesser man such as Van der Helst climbs very nigh
the rose, as in his "De Schuttersmaaltyd" in the "Night Watch" room
in the Ryks Museum. The Corporation pieces of Jan van Ravesteyn in
the Municipal Museum at The Hague are also exceedingly vivid; while
Jan de Bray's canvases at Haarlem, in direct competition with Hals',
would be very good indeed in the absence of their rivals.
Among other painters who can be studied here is our Utrecht friend Jan
van Scorel, who has a large "Adam and Eve" in the passage and a famous
"Baptism of Christ"; Jan Verspronk of Haarlem, Hals' pupil, who has a
very quiet and effective portrait (No. 210) and a fine rich group of
the lady managers of an orphanage; and Cornelius Cornellessen, also of
Haarlem, painter of an excellent Corporation Banquet. In the collection
are also a very charming little Terburg (No. 194) and a fascinating
unsigned portrait of William III. as a pale and wistful boy.
Haarlem was the mother or instructor of many painters. There is Dirck
Hals, the brother of Frans, who was born there at the end of the
sixteenth century, and painted richly coloured scenes of fashionable
convivial life. He died at Haarlem ten years before Frans. A greater
was Bartholomew van der Helst, who was Hals' most assimilative
pupil. He was born at Haarlem about 1612, and is supposed to have
studied also under Nicolas Elias. His finest large work is undoubtedly
the "Banquet" to which I have just referred, but I always associate
him with his portrait of Gerard Bicker, Landrichter of Muiden, that
splendid tun of a man, No. 1140 in the Gallery of Honour at the Ryks
Museum (see opposite page 86). One of his most beautiful paintings
is a portrait of a woman in our National Gallery, on a screen in the
large Netherlands room: a picture which shows the influence of Elias
not a little, as any one can see who recalls Nos. 897 and 899 in the
Ryks Museum--two very beautiful portraits of a man and his wife.
Haarlem and Oudenarde both claim the birth of Adrian Brouwer, a painter
of Dutch topers. As to his life little is known. Tradition says that
he drank and dissipated his earnings, while his work is evidence that
he knew inn life with some particularity; but his epitaph calls him
"a man of great mind who rejected every splendour of the world and
who despised gain and riches". Brouwer, who was born about 1606,
was put by his mother, a dressmaker at Haarlem, into the studio of
Frans Hals. Hals bullied him, as he bullied his first wife. Escaping
to Amsterdam, Brouwer became a famous painter, his pictures being
acquired, among others, by Rembrandt in his wealthy days, and by
Rubens. He died at Antwerp when only thirty-three. We have nothing
of his in the National Gallery, but he is represented at the Wallace
Collection.
At Haarlem was born also, in 1620, Nicolas Berchem, painter of charming
scenes of broken arches and columns (which he certainly never saw in
his own country), made human and domestic by the presence of people
and cows, and suffused with gentle light. We have five of his pictures
in the National Gallery. Berchem's real name was Van Haarlem. One
day, however, when he was a pupil in Van Goyen's studio, his father
pursued him for some fault. Van Goyen, who was a kindly creature,
as became the father-in-law of Jan Steen, called out to his other
pupils--"Berg hem" (Hide him!) and the phrase stuck, and became his
best-known name. Nicolas married a termagant, but never allowed her
to impair his cheerful disposition.
Haarlem was the birthplace also of Jacob van Ruisdael, greatest of
Dutch landscape painters. He was born about 1620. His idea was to
be a doctor, but Nicolas Berchem induced him to try painting, and we
cannot be too thankful for the change. His landscapes have a deep and
grave beauty: the clouds really seem to be floating across the sky;
the water can almost be heard tumbling over the stones. Ruisdael
did not find his typical scenery in his native land: he travelled in
Germany and Italy, and possibly in Norway; but whenever he painted
a strictly Dutch scene he excelled. He died at Haarlem in 1682; and
one of his most exquisite pictures hangs in the Museum. I do not give
any reproductions of Ruisdael because his work loses so much in the
process. At the National Gallery and at the Wallace Collection he is
well represented.
Walking up and down beneath the laughing confidence of these many
bold faces in the great Hals' room at Haarlem I found myself repeating
Longfellow's lines:--
He has singed the beard of the King of Spain,
And carried away the Dean of Jaen
And sold him in Algiers.
Surely the hero, Simon Danz, was something such a man as Hals
painted. How does the ballad run?--
A DUTCH PICTURE.
Simon Danz has come home again,
From cruising about with his buccaneers;
He has singed the beard of the King of Spain,
And carried away the Dean of Jaen
And sold him in Algiers.
In his house by the Maese, with its roof of tiles
And weathercocks flying aloft in air,
There are silver tankards of antique styles,
Plunder of convent and castle, and piles
Of carpets rich and rare.
In his tulip garden there by the town
Overlooking the sluggish stream,
With his Moorish cap and dressing-gown
The old sea-captain, hale and brown,
Walks in a waking dream.
A smile in his gray mustachio lurks
Whenever he thinks of the King of Spain.
And the listed tulips look like Turks,
And the silent gardener as he works
Is changed to the Dean of Jaen.
The windmills on the outermost
Verge of the landscape in the haze,
To him are towers on the Spanish coast,
With whisker'd sentinels at their post,
Though this is the river Maese.
But when the winter rains begin,
He sits and smokes by the blazing brands,
And old sea-faring men come in,
Goat-bearded, gray, and with double chin,
And rings upon their hands.
They sit there in the shadow and shine
Of the flickering fire of the winter night,
Figures in colour and design
Like those by Rembrandt of the Rhine,
Half darkness and half light.
And they talk of their ventures lost or won,
And their talk is ever and ever the same,
While they drink the red wine of Tarragon,
From the cellars of some Spanish Don,
Or convent set on flame.
Restless at times, with heavy strides
He paces his parlour to and fro;
He is like a ship that at anchor rides,
And swings with the rising and falling tides
And tugs at her anchor-tow.
Voices mysterious far and near,
Sound of the wind and sound of the sea,
Are calling and whispering in his ear,
"Simon Danz! Why stayest thou here?
Come forth and follow me!"
So he thinks he shall take to the sea again,
For one more cruise with his buccaneers;
To singe the beard of the King of Spain,
And capture another Dean of Jaen
And sell him in Algiers.
One thought leads to another. It is impossible also to remain long
in the great Hals' room of the Museum without meditating a little
upon the difference between these arquebusiers and the Dutch of the
present day. Passing among these people, once so mighty and ambitious,
so great in government and colonisation, in seamanship and painting,
and seeing them now so material and self-centred, so bound within
their own small limits, so careless of literature and art, so intent
upon the profits of the day and the pleasures of next Sunday, one has
a vision of what perhaps may be our own lot. For the Dutch are very
near us in kin, and once were nigh as great as we have been. Are we,
in our day of decadence, to shrivel thus? "There but for the grace
of God goes England"--is that a reasonable utterance?
One sees the difference concretely as one passes from these many
Corporation and Regent pieces in the galleries of Holland to the
living Dutchmen of the streets. I saw it particularly at Haarlem
on a streaming wet day, after hurrying from the Museum to the
Café Brinkmann through some inches of water. At a table opposite,
sipping their coffee, were two men strikingly like two of Frans Hals'
arquebusiers. Yet how unlike. For the air of masterful recklessness had
gone, that good-humoured glint of power in the eye was no more. Hals
had painted conquerors, or at any rate warriors for country; these
coffee drinkers were meditating profit and loss. Where once was
authority is now calculation.
I quote a little poem by Mr. Van Lennep of Zeist, near Utrecht,
which shows that the Dutch, whatever their present condition, have
not forgotten:--
The shell, when put to child-like ears,
Yet murmurs of its bygone years,
In echoes of the sea;
The Dutch-born youngster likes the sound,
And ponders o'er its mystic ground
And wondrous memory.
Thus, in Dutch hearts, an echo dwells,
Which, like the ever-mindful shells,
Yet murmurs of the sea:
That sea, of ours in times of yore,
And, when De Ruyter went before,
Our road to victory.